Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
The Empire of Sister Ping
By Richard Bernstein
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday, 414 pp., $27.50
The headquarters of what was once the global people-smuggling operation of Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping, who is serving thirty-five years at a federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut, is now the Yung Sun seafood restaurant at 47 East Broadway in Manhattan, serving the specialties of China's Fujian province, from which most of the people in this part of Lower Manhattan's Chinatown have come in the past thirty or so years. You hardly see a non-Chinese person on East Broadway, a busy commercial street in what might be called Greater Chinatown, which is just across the Bowery from the mostly Cantonese-speaking Chinatown that draws most tourists.
Review, 3402 words
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