THE six-year-old boy tightly holds his mother’s hand as they cross the open field by the sea. Below is the small town where they live. By the time they reach the grave they have a commanding view of the ocean, the sunlight bouncing off the waters where the South China Sea meets the East China Sea. Tears begin to prick in the young woman’s eyes. The boy knows that his mum is upset but is too young to grasp how his dad came to die.
She learnt the news with a knock on the door at 5am one day. It was her mother-in-law, who said that she had just taken a call from England, a call from her husband, Guo Bin Long.
“My mother-in-law told me that Guo was in danger,” says Yu Hui Long. “She said that he was screaming, saying water was reaching to his neck. He asked her to pray for him. She shouted, ‘hello, hello’. Then there was no more sound. Then she came over to wake me up. It was not clear to me what had happened. I thought he had been arrested.”
The truth was that her husband was one of 23 Chinese cockle pickers who died after being trapped in the rising tides off Morecambe Bay on February 5, 2004. Guo could not swim. His only chance of survival was the pay-as-you-go mobile phone he clutched above the waters. He rang his best friend on the beach, crying for half an hour. Then he rang the emergency services and tried in broken English to raise the alarm. A harrowing recording is the last we know of Guo. His voice is muffled by wind and rain but the last words of a drowning man are clear enough. “Sinking water, sinking water. Many, many sinking water.” The police operator continually asks where he is. At one point, Guo swallows water mid-sentence as he pathetically repeats the same words, the only way he can express what is going on: “Many many sinking water.” He made one more call, to his mother in China. It was his last.
It was February 14, 2003, when Guo embarked on the venture that would end his life. Yu Hui Long says: “I packed for him and sewed the holes in his clothes. I was crying and he cried too. He went downstairs, bowed his head and wept. He dared not turn his head to look at me, afraid that I would see him crying. His nephew drove him out, heading for the mountain. I wanted to go with him but he wouldn’t allow it. So I just waited at home for his call.” Guo had secretly paid an advance deposit to a people trafficker. He told his wife about the plans once it was too late to change them. “He said the Snakehead had warned him not to talk to anybody about the preparations, even me,” says Yu Hui. “I asked him not to go. He said that all the documents were ready, and if he didn’t go we would lose the money.”
It was desperation that drove Guo to the Snakeheads, or people-smuggling gangs. A series of business blunders had left him and the family deep in debt. Originally a farm labourer, Guo started a brick factory only to see the market collapse and his business fail. In an attempt to retrieve his money Guo opened a petrol station, but with similar results — only this time he dragged his relations down as well. “He borrowed money from my father. My father also borrowed other people’s money,” says his wife sadly.
In Fujian province, a part of rural China where the average annual wage is about £500, Guo had built up a debt of nearly £10,000. He had no chance of repaying the cash. However, he could raise the money to pay the traffickers, even though their demands would push Guo much farther into debt. Many young people in his town had taken a similar route, returning to Fujian with bank accounts swollen with foreign money and building large houses with the profits.
The Snakehead gangs operate rather like sinister travel agents, arranging visas and tickets as well as false passports. The mechanics of organising such a dangerous trip can be curiously prosaic: when the BBC tracked down one Snakehead agent, she turned out to be an old woman living in a nearby town. However, the doors that she opened for Guo took him into an entirely malign world, one where his life would continually be in danger, where he would sometimes be treated little better than an animal as he was clandestinely transported around the world.
Guo’s wife fought to the end to prevent him from going — “he rang from the airport in Beijing and I asked him again not to leave”. But Guo was now under the control of Snakehead agents and, as such, was a valuable commodity. At each stage of the journey the Snakeheads would ask for — and get — another tranche of cash.
The first big payout was made in Paris. Photos sent home show him laughing in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. They were enough to convince his wife to hand over £8,000 of borrowed money to the Snakeheads. In reality, Guo spent most of his time in Paris confined to a tiny flat with dozens of other illegal Chinese immigrants. The Snakeheads stole his reserve of $700 (£400) he had put by for emergencies, and his mobile phone. In five months, Yu Hui heard from her husband only twice.
Guo wanted to push on to England, where he believed that he would find work among the Chinese community. The Snakeheads twice bungled an attempt to get him across the Channel. They finally succeeded in July 2003. This meant that his wife could look forward to another visit from the gang, which extorted a further £10,000 from her. “My father borrowed some money. My father-in-law borrowed some. His brothers and sisters borrowed some more. They all handed it to me and I passed it on, ” says Yu Hui, who was obliged to do the deal with her husband on the end of the phone as the money changed hands.
The sums guaranteed Guo nothing more than the freedom to wander the streets. The man who had left behind a loving wife and family was now an illegal immigrant sleeping rough. He had just enough to feed himself and make the occasional pitiful call. “He couldn’t find a job and so he sat on the roadside crying,” his wife said. “One day, a man came up and asked him in Mandarin if he would like to work by the seaside. He was so happy that he followed the man there and then.”
But Guo was again filtering out the bad news about his life as a cockle picker. The three-bedroom flat above a shop in Liverpool would have been rather nice if Guo had not been sharing it with 30 other Chinese illegal workers. Most of them slept on the floor. Meals were eaten standing up. The pressure on bathrooms and toilets led to indescribable living conditions. If Guo got any sleep at all, it was often broken, as cockling expeditions might start in the middle of the night. Morecambe’ s famous cockle beds were two hours away, and the workers travelled in overcrowded, ramshackle minibuses. Neighbours said that the back doors were rammed shut, leaving the Chinese workers squashed inside like sardines. As well as being dangerously overcrowded the vans stank of rotting cockles and frequently broke down as they went up the M6.
