Michael Lin is a hard-working guy. The 37-year-old lives in the Lower Mainland, but on this day is reached up in 100 Mile House, preparing to log five acres to make way for a self-storage business he’s opening.
That’s in addition to the tourism-related enterprise he launched four years ago. And that’s in addition to his other company, Port Coquitlam’s Stonehenge Marble and Granite. He says 12- or 13-hour days are typical. Days off are rare.
In short, Lin is living the dream — the dream he had when, as a desperately poor 17-year-old, he fled China, only to be abandoned on a remote Haida Gwaii beach by gun-waving people smugglers.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Summer of the Migrants, when the arrival of four ghost ships crammed with 599 Chinese caused at uproar on Vancouver Island.
It was one of the biggest stories of the decade, made headlines across Canada — and has been the subject of debate ever since.
Authorities apprehended the first boat off Gold River on July 20, 1999. The second, Lin’s vessel, came in early August. By Sept. 8, two more had been intercepted off Vancouver Island.
By May 21, 2001, when the saga was finally over, 330 migrants had been deported and three dozen allowed to stay in Canada. Most of the rest simply melted away, pressured by the smugglers into finding their way to low-wage jobs in the underground economies of New York, San Francisco or some other big U.S. city where the newcomers could, eventually, earn enough to pay off their passage.
Our provincial and federal governments ended up doing a lot of soul-searching over their handling of the migrants. Islanders and other Canadians were left to reflect on their own reactions, which ranged from open-armed generosity to angry xenophobia, or at least alarm at the sudden appearance of entire boatloads of people who were seen as trying to sneak past the queue to the Canadian gravy train.
That latter perspective still frustrates those who advocated for the migrants. It wasn’t greed that drove the Fujianese here, they argue. It was desperation. It’s hard for plump, safe, comfortable Canadians to appreciate the kind of grinding poverty and oppressive conditions faced by people such as Lin. That they would agree to the smugglers’ fee — $30,000 US, a huge amount in the rural parts of Fujian province, where villagers were lucky to scrape together $1,000 a year — showed how bleak their lives, their futures, were there.
That’s why, even after Canada deported them to China, some of the migrants fought their way back to this side of the ocean. Do you recall the little seven-year-old girl whose photo appeared on the front page of the Times Colonist in August 1999? She’s in New York City now. The 12-year-old boy with whom she shared a Port Moody foster home, and who was deported on the same day, managed to return, too. He’s married, has two kids and runs a Chinese buffet in Nebraska.
Remember how harrowing those ocean journeys were, too. By the time Lin jumped into the surf at Haida Gwaii, he was starving and weakened by thirst after spending close to two months sardined in the hold of a rustbucket ship with more than 130 others. They got one meal a day, one bottle of water a week. The body of a woman who died during the clandestine crossing was dumped in the ocean. “It was terrible,” Lin says. “It was really, really tough.”
But what else could he do but make the journey, he asks. In Fujian he was just another mouth to feed in a house with no food. “I just wanted to help my family.”
- Jack Knox, Times Colonist
