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The lost children After a mysterious journey halfway around the world, a group of smuggled Chinese teenagers sits in limbo in Canada JAN WONG
Windsor, Ont. -- For four Chinese teens, March is actually the cruellest month. Gao Jianying turned 16 on March 8. He Shoumei turned 16 on Sunday. Chen Daozhong and Lian Yong both turn 16 on Thursday. But this is no sweet 16. As soon as the last two blow out the candles on their birthday cakes, all four will be shipped off to jail. "I'm afraid," said Lian Yong, whose name means Brave. "I'm terrified, too," agreed Chen Daozhong, whose name means Bell. His eyes filled with tears as he twisted his fingers and talked of his fears of being beaten by inmates. At the moment, Brave, Bell and four girls, age 14 to 16, are under virtual house arrest. Yet perhaps these teens are lucky. Social workers believe they were rescued in the nick of time from well-organized U.S. pedophile rings. If true, they are the newest -- and saddest -- twist in an unending flow of illegal Chinese migration. The teens, who are at a Windsor group home for young offenders, were caught in early January trying to cross into the United States. They are among the first unaccompanied Chinese minors from Fujian Province alleged to have entered Canada illegally, trafficked by people-smugglers known in Chinese as she tou, or snakeheads. These snakeheads typically cover up-front costs, a package worth $20,000 to $50,000, which includes false documents, transportation and safe houses, not to mention round-the-clock escorts. In exclusive interviews, the teens said they came to North America believing they would attend school. Their illegal status makes that improbable. What's more, they are so small it's hard to imagine that the snakeheads intended them for restaurants and sweatshops, common destinations for illegal migrants. That leaves the sex trade. Southeast Asian countries have cracked down
on tourists seeking sex with children. To help pedophiles avoid jet lag
and perhaps a prolonged vacation in a foreign jail, minors are now being
taken to North America, child-advocacy groups say. "Someone has paid a lot of money for their transport. You can assume somebody is waiting for them, and it's not to bring them to school," said Jean-François Noël, legal adviser to the International Bureau of Children's Rights in Montreal. "The parents might owe money. They will close their eyes as to what their children are doing." Street children here can be victimized as prostitutes, but their experiences harden them into 14 going on 40. Pedophiles, of course, seek innocence. And these Chinese teens are breathtakingly so, compared with many Canadian teens. Several are only four feet and change. Only one has reached the acne stage. And judging from their shocked response to questions about sex, they are probably virgins, something snakeheads would value. In post-arrest interviews with Children's Aid, the teens said they hadn't been molested or raped by their handlers. Deflowering, after all, would only devalue them as sex-trade commodities. Over a lunch of takeout Chinese food, the teens gasped en masse and hid their burning faces when told that social workers suspect they might have ended up in a prostitution ring. Asked if they knew how babies are made, five ducked simultaneously. Only Brave kept his head high. And only he and Bell knew what a condom was. To understand how these naifs ended up in Canada, consider the typical Chinese orphanage, where 95 per cent of unwanted babies are female. Families will also sell daughters, against their will, for a pittance to impoverished peasants who have no other way to obtain wives. In feudal culture, boys are desirable and girls are disposable, and parents are willing to pay fines to get what they want. Shoumei's baby sister, for instance, was given away to strangers at birth. But her parents kept her younger brother, who was born a year later. Another teen, Zheng Jindong, whose name means East, is 14, the youngest of the detained teens. Yet in her family, she was chosen to go with the snakeheads while her 20-year-old brother stayed safely home. Technically, Children's Aid should be in charge. And technically, the overriding authority should be the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees to "combat the illicit transfer" of children abroad and protect them from "all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse." But Ottawa interprets the Immigration Act as superseding both the UN convention and Children's Aid. That's partly because many previous illegals who claimed refugee status and were released never showed up for their hearings. It's also partly to protect them from falling back into the hands of the snakeheads. Thus, the six teens -- who are claiming refugee status -- cannot attend school while they await the outcome of their cases, which could take a year or more. And while the Young Offenders Act allows Canadian juveniles to remain in the group homes where they began their sentences even after passing their 16th birthdays, immigration laws force the Chinese teens into jails for tougher youths, facilities with uniforms and guards. "The girls may be okay, but the boys will be lambs," said Sungee John, a Windsor community worker, who bought the teens a Chinese-English dictionary. The home, which has never had refugee claimants before, has decided to group the four who are turning 16 together for the transfer. Even in the relatively benign setting of Windsor's Renaissance Home, where the staffers hug them and feed them rice -- albeit Uncle Ben's -- the Chinese teens seem especially vulnerable. They live with teens who are in for such crimes as burglary and assault. Bell and Brave, for instance, share a room with a 14-year-old in for smashing windows. "He socks me on the head with a pillow while I'm sleeping," said Bell, who is 5 foot 4. "I punch him back. He's about my height." Despite his bravado, Bell didn't smile until recently. Staffers say he cried for half an hour after his first phone call home. Chen Xi, whose name means Hope, is a sprite -- just 4 foot 10 and 94 pounds. Last Sunday evening, she sat in the den, next to a muscle-bound Canadian who playfully bopped her on the head, then settled beside her to benchpress a barbell. When Hope turns 16 on May 3, she, too, will be shipped off to jail, leaving only East. The teens have some inkling of what's in store. Gao Jianying, whose name means Oriole, was still 15 when she spent five nights in January in an adult prison -- until the Department of Immigration realized its error. Oriole said inmates threw water at her. Another Chinese girl, also mistakenly assumed to be over 18, was kicked and punched in the common room. "We had to cry softly," said Oriole, picking at the fuzz of her hand-me-down Tweety Bird sweater. "Otherwise they'd curse us." Among the English phrases she learned in jail: "Fuck you." The teens' English vocabulary, aside from newly acquired swear words, is limited to simple phrases. When Renaissance staff asked what they liked to eat, they drew a picture of a pig. The teens speak both a Fuzhou dialect and Mandarin, the official Chinese dialect. In wide-ranging interviews in Mandarin over two days, they described the individual journeys that took them from their villages in coastal Fujian province to this Windsor group home. Oriole, East and Shoumei, whose name means Beauty, said they flew together to Toronto, by way of Hong Kong and Vancouver. In Vancouver, they stayed with people they did not know, then flew to Toronto. A day later they were taken to Chatham to meet a van driven by natives, who took them to the border. They were arrested around 1 a.m. on Jan. 5 near Walpole Island, a five-minute ferry ride from the U.S. border. Bell, Brave and Hope said they flew separately to Toronto in late January. On Feb. 2, they were arrested in a van at the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor with Detroit. Six other illegals in the van were also detained. The teens all say coming here was their parents' idea. "In the countryside, if your parents tell you to do something, you do it," Oriole said. In accordance with traditional Chinese respect for elders, they also addressed the snakeheads as "uncle," "auntie" or "teacher." The teens spoke only when spoken to. And they obeyed the snakeheads implicitly. The teens contend they do not know how much money changed hands, if any, or what promises were made. Telephone interviews this week with three of their families in Fujian indicate that the parents are either venal, naive or unusually stupid. Even when asked if they had any questions about their child's predicament, they only wanted to know whether the teen would be allowed to stay. Beauty's father, a 41-year-old construction worker named He Wanbin, couldn't remember when she had left home. He wasn't worried, he said, even though his daughter has never written or called home. "Why should I worry? She can do what she wants. Canada is a good place to study English." A "friend," he added, had offered to take Beauty to Canada, all expenses paid. "I didn't pay anything. The friend paid for all the costs of the journey." East's mother, a peasant named Chen Cuijuan, answered the phone, but passed it to her son, Zheng Yu, 20. When asked why the family had allowed East to go abroad alone, he conferred with his mother, then said, "I can't answer this question." When asked how much they had paid, he conferred again, then said, "I don't know." Oriole's mother, a peasant named Gao Xiuyu, wouldn't answer when asked who had paid for the trip. When asked if Oriole had come alone, or with others her age, she hung up. The Chinese teens could go home tomorrow. They face possible detention, if China feels international pressure at that moment to control illegal migration. Or their parents could be fined. But with the help of legal-aid lawyers, the teens are applying for refugee status. After lunch in the group home, they groped for the magic formula that would allow them to stay. They all insisted, for instance, they weren't trying to slip into the United States. And after two teens elicited interest for saying their fathers worked as cooks in the United States, two others belatedly claimed their fathers were also there, also working as cooks. When the teens first arrived at Renaissance Home, they received a flurry of telephone calls from a person or persons speaking Chinese, perhaps snakeheads. A Chinese woman who said she was a relative was told by one of the teens' lawyers that she must appear at a hearing. He never heard from her again. The calls have also stopped. Someone, though, has coached them on human-rights soft spots: coercive population control and religious freedom. In interviews, Bell claimed, improbably, that as one of three teenaged children in his family, he feared beatings by Communist Party zealots. Brave claimed to be persecuted, again unlikely, for burning incense at his ancestors' graves. The girls claimed, without much conviction, to be persecuted Christians. Asked who was Jesus's mother, Beauty answered: "St. Mary." Asked the tricky theological question of who was Jesus's father, she and the other girls drew a blank. They conferred, giggled in embarrassment and hid their faces behind their sleeves. As the first illegal migrants housed at Renaissance Home, the teens could escape simply by pushing open the door of the split-level six-bedroom home. Instead, like teenagers everywhere, they pass their days eating, sleeping-in and watching television. In two and three months of detention, they've gone out once for a snowball fight. And only Hope and Oriole say they have also gone out -- once -- for a walk, in part because a staffer must accompany them. Asked if she should go back to parents who entrusted her to strangers, East was tongue-tied. Asked how she felt now, she ducked her head. "Now," she said sadly, "I've been arrested." HE SHOUMEI (Beauty)Age: Turned 16 on Sunday ZHENG JINDONG (East)Age: 14 (born June 17, 1985) Siblings: Brother, 20. GAO JIANYING (Oriole)Age: Turned 16 on March 8 CHEN DAOZHONG (Bell)Age: 15 (turns 16 on Thursday) LIAN YONG (Brave)Age: 15 (turns 16 on Thursday) CHEN XI (Hope)Age: 15 (turns 16 on May 3) |
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