A Journey of Desperation and Hope : Immigration: For a 19-year-old fleeing China, 70 days of thirst, filth and brutal treatment by ruthless smugglers was a small price to pay for a chance at freedom.

There were 70 days of unbearable thirst, days spent crammed in the filthy hull of a ship. Then came the terror of an emergency appendectomy in a foreign hospital, and more lonely days holed up in a Monterey Park motel, living on white bread and wondering whether this journey would lead to anything but more fear and pain.

But when the ruthless whirlwind finally deposited Yuen in the clandestine care of the Los Angeles Chinese community, the 19-year-old illegal immigrant from China’s Fujian province sized up his situation, and labeled it freedom.

“Since I’m now arrived in the United States, I’m feeling much better,” said Yuen, who asked that his family name not be used. “I think the United States will be more humanitarian. I feel it’s more safe and civilized here.”

Timing was everything. The boat carrying Yuen and 191 other immigrants slipped unnoticed into Mexican waters June 25, a week before the U.S. Coast Guard began tracking three smuggling vessels off the coast of Baja California.

The 658 immigrants overflowing those boats now face a return trip to China, after the Mexican government agreed Wednesday to bring them ashore and promptly repatriate them. Yuen, meanwhile, was planning a trip in the other direction, to New York City.

Since the fall of 1991, authorities have confirmed the landing of at least 14 smuggling vessels in the United States and have apprehended more than 2,300 passengers, the vast majority from Fujian, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Numerous U.S.-bound boats have landed in nations from Japan to Haiti.

Yuen’s story affords a peek into the desperate frustration of the young men and women fleeing Fujian province, and their unswerving belief in the United States as a humane place that grants opportunity to all who seek it.

For Yuen’s family, the loss of their house at the hands of police proved the final inducement to contact a “snakehead,” as smugglers of Chinese immigrants are known, and send their only son on a fugitive journey to join his uncle in New York City, he said. There, they reasoned, he could soon amass enough wealth to rescue them all.

Yuen, who had dreams of becoming a civil engineer, tried for several years to get into high school. Twice he passed the highly competitive entrance exam and earned a place on the school’s list, and twice he was booted from the list by someone with government connections, he said.

After Yuen sued one of the young men who took his place, police tried to jail him, and demolished the small house where he lived with his parents and 25-year-old sister in Si Tseng, a village two hours’ drive from the Fujian capital of Fuzhou, Yuen recalled.

“We became homeless, and stayed with family and friends here and there,” Yuen said, speaking through a translator. “Then we all agreed I would go. We were all worried and very sad, but it seems that it’s the only choice for me.”

Amassing the $1,000 down payment for Yuen’s trip involved selling the family’s four-acre rice field and borrowing the rest from friends and relatives, he added.

“My uncle wrote from New York and discouraged me. He heard terrible stories about how people who were smuggled had suffered,” Yuen said, his young face pocked with fading acne. “But I had to make this choice.”

Smugglers told Yuen’s family that the total cost of the journey would be $5,000, with the $4,000 balance to be paid upon arrival in New York. New clothes and accommodations would also be provided, they were assured.

All those promises would prove false.

On April 18th, Yuen said goodby to his family, taking with him only two sets of clothes, three packages of dried noodles, flu medicine and a tube of skin ointment.

For nearly a month, the boat hovered on the open sea in Chinese waters, waiting for a group of 50 who were running behind schedule.

Then they set off, 192 men and women, most of them in their 20s, crammed into the dank hull. While at times the smugglers allowed them above deck to urinate, most days they merely passed a bucket around.

Days were filled with the pervasive stench of human waste, and most passengers became seasick. About a third came down with more serious ailments, such as flu and high fevers, Yuen said.

“There was never enough to eat. We got only dry rice and, every few days, cold processed vegetables,” Yuen recalled. “Sometimes we couldn’t even have a small sip of water the entire day. When we couldn’t take it any more, they would bring down a small bucket (of water), and we had to buy it with U.S. dollars.”

The going rate: $10 for about a quart. Ten dollars could also buy a small tin of vegetables, although when the journey ended, smugglers took all the passengers’ money anyway, he said. Those who tried to hide cash in their clothing were severely beaten, Yuen said.

During the 70 days at sea, guards regularly called the women up to their quarters, one at a time, Yuen recounted. “We never knew exactly what happened, but they always came down crying, with their clothing disheveled. Some of them attempted suicide.”

The lack of fresh water drove other passengers to thoughts of suicide, Yuen said, and many scrawled farewell letters for the other passengers to send to their parents.

“They planned to jump out,” Yuen said. “But the guards prevented those people from going above deck.”

When they arrived off the Mexican coast June 25, smaller Mexican vessels took over, ferrying the immigrants to shore, where Mexican smugglers drove them in groups of 60 toward the border, he recounted.

There, they were split into truckloads of 20 and taken to the foot of some rugged border hills. In the dark early morning hours, they hiked with their Mexican guides into the mountains of southern San Diego County, where Yuen felt the first abdominal pangs that would later double him over in pain.

Chinese smugglers took over again on the U.S. side, and drove their charges to an unfurnished two-story house somewhere in the Los Angeles area. There, several Chinese men who Yuen said spoke often on cellular phones kept close watch on the group, and instructed them to call relatives in New York City to demand payment of the balance of their fees.

The cost of the journey, however, had increased considerably. The smugglers told Yuen he owed them $29,000, not $4,000.

In Yuen’s seven days at the house, about 10 of the 60 immigrants being held there received airline tickets and a change of clothes as their families came through with cash, he said. But Yuen’s uncle, who Yuen believes owns some type of business in New York City, told him to tell the smugglers he could not come up with the money.

He never had the chance to tell them, and he does not know what would have become of him if he had. By July 2, his appendix was so inflamed he could neither stand nor eat. One smuggler, who at first accused him of faking, finally brought him to Alhambra Community Hospital, where Yuen underwent surgery.

Four days later, a doctor signed a release form for Yuen, said hospital spokeswoman Iris Lai, but the young man clearly had nowhere to turn.

“By the sixth day, he still had no idea where to go. He could not give us anybody to contact. All the names and information we had (from the smuggler), we could not verify,” Lai said. “We could not just drop him off at the entrance of the door.”

The hospital swallowed the medical bill and, in an unprecedented move, paid to put Yuen up in a motel for seven days, Lai said.

Yuen said a hospital employee gave him $40 cash and drove him to the motel, in Monterey Park. There, he hid behind the closed door for four days, leaving only to buy bread at a nearby store.

After four days, a Chinese community activist, who asked not to be identified, heard about Yuen’s plight and came to assist him.

Yuen said he does not plan to live with his uncle in New York City because smugglers already know his uncle’s name and address.

“I would only bring trouble to him,” Yuen said.

Even if he is forced to pay off his $29,000 debt, Yuen remains optimistic. Soon, he hopes, he will be able to bring his parents and sister to join him.

“I would do it again,” he said. “I feel I had no choice.”