Human Traffic

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Sometimes journalists can only describe, not explain. Certainly that was the case when the tattered freight ship the Golden Venture beached itself on New York's Rockaway peninsula in June 1993, disgorging from its fetid hold a cargo of 286 undocumented Chinese, ten of whom died while struggling to swim to shore. The national reaction was one of shock--at the time there was little public awareness that Chinese were sneaking into the country in this manner, in such numbers and at such expense: $30,000, it was soon revealed, was the starting price of the squalid passage. Passengers in this rust bucket had lived below decks for months without sanitation or adequate food, and been subject to harassment by representatives of the "snakeheads," or smugglers, who set the whole thing up. But who the snakeheads were; why it was happening now; why the nighttime landing, inside New York City, within miles of the Statue of Liberty, was so brazen--all cried out for explanation.

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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I knew about smuggling over the Mexican border from crossings I'd made for my book Coyotes. So when The New York Times Magazine assigned me to write a follow-up to all the news stories--the sort of now-take-a-deep-breath-and-try-to-explain exercise that can only be done well after the fact--I figured I could come through with the goods. I visited Golden Venture detainees in prison in Pennsylvania, talked with recent immigrants from China, fixers in Chinatown and Chinese-American professors, and got everything I could out of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service. After a couple of months I had a fine collection of puzzle pieces--but only hunches about how they fit together. Those who knew weren't talking yet. Lacking the big picture about the Golden Venture, I wrote instead of the state of political asylum (see below) and waited for the day when the explanations would come.

Well, sixteen years later, that day is here. In Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream we finally have a satisfying, comprehensive account of the Golden Venture debacle and its place in the larger story of people smuggling and US immigration policy. In fact, it is not only satisfying; it is excellent. Keefe, a contributor to Slate and The New Yorker with one previous book to his name (Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping), has done an immense amount of research around the globe; if the Golden Venture beaching was the tip of an iceberg, then here, finally, is the iceberg.

Our enlightenment begins with context: most of the migrants came from Fujian Province in southeastern China. This was known soon after the Golden Venture grounded, but Keefe tells us about the place (poor, mountainous, situated on the coast across the strait from Taiwan) and about precedents for "this peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages seem to relocate en masse to another country within a short span of time"--in New York City they include Calabrians relocating to Mulberry Street in Little Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. Such regional migrations can take on a momentum of their own; Keefe writes, enlighteningly, that they are driven not simply by poverty but, once under way, by the disparities in income between families related to emigrants (who receive remittances allowing them to live large) and families who are not.

He also describes the pull factors, which included not simply the perennial economic opportunities of the Golden Mountain, as the United States is known in China, but the declaration by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that the United States stood by those whose childbearing rights were trampled by oppressive governments. Bush's executive order made this, if not a matter of law, a clear statement of his preferences, and Chinese had no difficulty reading the tea leaves.

Keefe's main narrative strand is the tale of Cheng Chui Ping, also known as Sister Ping, a Fujianese who immigrated legally in 1981. During an interview for her visa, Cheng Chui Ping had expressed a desire to work as a domestic servant. But it seems that was never in the cards. Not long after her arrival, she responded to the burgeoning demand for passage from her homeland by establishing a smuggling operation out of her variety store in New York's Chinatown. (She also ran a money transfer business by undercutting the fees charged by the huge Bank of China, which had a branch right across the street from her shop.) She arranged for Chinese to be smuggled over the border with Mexico, and over the border with Canada, too. The Coast Guard stopped a boat heading to Florida from the Bahamas that was carrying twelve undocumented Fujianese. When authorities checked the phone records of the man who leased it, they found he had made one call to New York City on the day of the voyage--to Sister Ping's variety store. Not that she actually guided clients herself; it seems that in most cases, Sister Ping instead was more like a general contractor. She would oversee an operation, handling the money, guaranteeing the result and, with her husband, supervising subcontractors who managed the logistics of transport.

Other criminals in the Chinatown underworld were jealous of her success. One of them was a young man named Ah Kay, the head of a Chinatown gang known as the Fuk Ching. Ah Kay, famous for his brutality in shaking down restaurant owners and other businesspeople, twice in the 1980s tried to rob Sister Ping, whom he figured had a lot of cash squirreled in her residence from the money transfer business. Both times her children were held at gunpoint while Ah Kay's men searched for money. The first time they netted only $1,000; the second, they scored $20,000 from her refrigerator.

Despite this history, business came first for Sister Ping. In September 1992, she had a boat off the coast of Boston loaded with more than 100 illegal migrants who needed to be brought to shore. Ah Kay had provided this "offloading" service to other snakeheads, but he had a different history with Sister Ping. When she approached him for help, according to courtroom testimony, he hastened to apologize for the armed robberies. "Sorry, Sister Ping," he said. "Everyone has their past." She replied, "That's what happened in the past. We're talking business now." In exchange for $750,000, Ah Kay sent a deputy on a fishing boat 200 miles out to Sister Ping's boat. The immigrants were deposited quietly on a wharf in New Bedford, Massachusetts, shortly after midnight: mission accomplished.

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They would work together again on the Golden Venture, but this time the collaboration was very different. A third smuggler, Weng Yu Hui, who had himself been brought into the United States by Sister Ping in 1984, was the snakehead in chief behind an aging ship, the Najd II, which left Bangkok for the United States with 240 passengers in July 1992. The vessel ran aground briefly in Malaysia, then developed engine trouble en route to the island of Mauritius, where its Australian captain abandoned ship. Finally, in October, it limped into the port of Mombasa, Kenya, and went no further.

Trying to salvage the enterprise, Weng Yu Hui met with, among others, Ah Kay, who agreed to put up the money for the new boat. Weng also spoke with Sister Ping, assuring her that space would be saved on the boat for twenty clients of hers who happened also to be stuck in Mombasa. She still owed Ah Kay $300,000 for the offloading in New Bedford, and wired it to the people who would purchase a replacement craft.

Among the many interesting revelations of The Snakehead is that the US government knew that a cargo of undocumented Chinese was headed here from Mombasa months before they arrived. Soon after the Najd II docked in Mombasa, Keefe writes, "representatives from Mombasa's Missions to Seamen contacted the small US consulate in the city and explained the situation." Months later, an INS agent based in Kenya alerted American officials that the Najd II had been emptied and a different boat full of Chinese, the Gold Future, was possibly headed for the United States via the Cape of Good Hope. He had the right idea but the wrong ship; American intelligence reports at the time were full of partial and conflicting information.

"Ironically enough," writes Keefe, "the officials could have gained a much better understanding of the situation if they had simply consulted the newspaper." On April 4, 1993, the South China Morning Post correctly reported that "a ship carrying hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants is on its way to the United States." Keefe writes, "The Hong Kong-based newspaper exhibited no confusion about the names of the ships or the sequence of events, and explained that the immigrants were now bound for the United States 'aboard a Honduran-registered fishing trawler MV Golden Venture.'"

Unfortunately, the ship's arrival in the United States would not go as smoothly as the arrival of the vessel that had unloaded at New Bedford in 1992. Ah Kay, though a major investor in the trip, had had to go into hiding in the meantime because of strife with another gang. Nobody could be found to offload the passengers; while the smugglers looked, the Golden Venture waited. And the Coast Guard, Keefe reports, noticed: a surveillance plane spotted the ship southeast of Nantucket the morning of June 4, 1993, and reported it as DIW (dead in the water)--in other words, not moving. It "was quite close to shore, and as it approached New York its course took it on a trajectory that ran directly perpendicular to the shipping lanes in the area--a dangerous move, and one that might have attracted some notice," he writes, adding that, as the boat sailed slowly toward Rockaway the next evening, "the Coast Guard dispatched boats to intercept it. But they couldn't find it." (Unfortunately, Keefe is unable to offer further information about why this would be.)

Other disturbing revelations abound. Government officials had Sister Ping and her husband in custody long before the Golden Venture disaster, in connection with smuggling schemes including an incident near Niagara Falls in which four people died. But apparently they figured Sister Ping and her husband for bit players; he never went to prison, and she served only a four-month sentence. Well before the Golden Venture grounded, an INS employee, Joe Occhipinti, had perceived the scope of the smuggling from China and proposed that a multi-agency task force be formed to take it on; the suggestion was never acted upon. Ah Kay, the Fuk Ching gang leader responsible for several murders and untold other violence, became a government witness against Sister Ping and others and in exchange was quietly released from prison. (He is now under witness protection.) And even though there was an active warrant out for his arrest, Sister Ping's husband was naturalized in 1996.

Americans are sadly accustomed to bureaucratic incompetence regarding most matters involving immigration. Ultimately more worrying, however, is our national ambivalence about new citizens; it's hard to find a better example of this than President George H.W. Bush's actions with regard to immigration and China. Following the Tiananmen Square uprising, Bush was clearly tortured. He wanted to show American disapproval while preserving a working relationship with the Chinese. He halted sales of military equipment to the People's Liberation Army, for example, but rejected the idea of broad economic sanctions. He also wanted to protect dissidents, such as the Beijing astrophysicist who sought refuge at the US Embassy during the crackdown, and it was in connection with this that he issued the fateful executive decree. First, said Bush, any Chinese citizen who was in the United States before the crackdown should not be forcibly removed by immigration agents. Keefe, noting that the directive effectively offered safe haven to 80,000 Chinese students, calls it "a kind of founding document for the Fujianese community in America."

A second part of the order, writes Keefe, "would unwittingly facilitate the snakehead trade and set the stage for an epic influx of undocumented Chinese." This was Section 4, where Bush directed officials to provide for "enhanced consideration" under immigration laws for people "who express a fear of persecution upon return to their country related to that country's policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization." In Keefe's words, "the breadth of the provision led to the de facto result that any fertile Chinese person, whether a parent or not, suddenly became a potential political refugee in the United States." It was an "unambiguous invitation," and the effects were unmistakable: "in 1992 political asylum was granted to roughly 85 percent of the undocumented Chinese immigrants who requested it, a rate almost three times higher than for immigrants from other countries. 'The Fujianese thank two people,' a Chinatown real estate broker who emigrated in the 1980s observed. 'One is Cheng Chui Ping [Sister Ping]. And one is George Bush the father.'"

Keefe consulted an impressive array of sources in piecing together this book. Many were in law enforcement--agents of the FBI and the immigration service seem to have been especially forthcoming. Where others were not, Keefe dug deeper. His source notes reveal that many details of the scene from that horrific night on Rockaway Beach come from Keefe's Freedom of Information Act requests for the reports of first responders, such as agents of the US Park Service Police. Outside law enforcement, Keefe spoke to attorneys, White House staffers and all kinds of people in New York's Chinatown. In York, Pennsylvania, where many of the migrants spent more than three years in prison, he spoke with volunteer lawyers and a committee of advocates for the men in prison. And he interviewed many of the migrants, including one, Sean Chen, who left Fujian with snakeheads in 1991; traveled overland through Burma to Thailand; languished in Bangkok until July 1992, when he boarded the Najd II; languished in Mombasa until April 1993, when he boarded the Golden Venture; and then languished in York until President Bill Clinton ordered him and all other Golden Venture detainees freed on Valentine's Day 1997.

Sister Ping's life, however, was moving in the opposite direction. In 2006 she was convicted of smuggling-related crimes and sentenced by then-judge Michael Mukasey to thirty-five years in prison. (When Keefe wrote her there asking for an interview, she replied, "What's in it for me?")

Keefe's book ends with his visit to the man who was head of the regional immigration service office in New York at the time of the Golden Venture landing, the man who decided that, instead of releasing the migrants pending disposition of their cases in immigration court, as was the common practice, he would detain them indefinitely. I remember thinking at the time how heartless William Slattery was and, with his inflammatory pronouncements, how nasty. But with a fairness that's characteristic of his approach, Keefe explains some of Slattery's thinking. There was a snakehead boom under way; Chinese asylum seekers were arriving by the boatload. At the top of his agency there was a vacuum: Bill Clinton had been in office only six months, and his nominee for INS commissioner, Doris Meissner, had not yet been confirmed. Slattery tells Keefe that no higher-up told him to detain the migrants, but nor did they say not to. Washington, in Slattery's mind, was "terrified, paralyzed by its own indecision." The brazen landing inside New York City "was a final, unmistakable fuck you from the smugglers to the United States government, and Slattery took it personally." "I led. Washington followed," he brags to Keefe.

Slattery's anger probably reflected that of many; snakeheads like Sister Ping were clearly out to exploit the good will of the United States. Now retired in Florida, Slattery "to this day...is skeptical about the asylum claims of the passengers aboard the Golden Venture," writes Keefe, and once you have in hand this larger picture, it's hard not to share that skepticism. Or to agree with Slattery's current, pragmatic position that, having been here so long, the Golden Venture passengers should of course be allowed to stay.

The immigration official is not the only player in this tale that has found its final resting place in Florida. After being auctioned off by the US Marshals in 1993 (and repainted, and renamed the United Caribbean), the former Golden Venture carried cargo for a while before the new owner abandoned it in the Miami River. Keefe reports that eventually local authorities decided to sink the ship and turn it into an artificial reef for divers. That's its final act, out in the Boca Raton Inlet. I think no one was sad to see it go.

About Ted Conover

Ted Conover is a writer in residence at NYU. His new book, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, is forthcoming from Knopf

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Museum Review - Museum of Chinese in America Reopens, Designed by Maya Lin - NYTimes.com

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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

“Iron Chink” proclaims the raised words on a cast-iron sign, once mounted on a fish-processing machine. In the early 1900s in Seattle the machine had been invented to replace Chinese laborers, who presumably were constructed of weaker mettle.

Now, of course, its casual slur inspires some shock. It is a companion piece to another object, a cap-gun toy from the 1880s, when the “Chinese Question” (as objections to Chinese immigration was called) turned violent: pull the trigger, and a suited gentleman kicks a braided Chinese man in the rear, setting off the miniature explosion.

As you walk through the Museum of Chinese in America, which is reopening in Chinatown on Tuesday in a warm and inviting new space designed by Maya Lin, you can’t see these objects and not be aware of the kinds of challenges these immigrants once faced. Such artifacts also reflect the expanded ambitions of the museum itself: it began as a community institution almost 30 years ago, dedicated to preserving and commemorating the history of Chinatown, but with this $8.1 million transformation it now has a 14,000-square-foot space and national ambitions.

Its goal is to explore the experience of Chinese immigration and the evolution of Chinese communities in the United States, to account for a people’s struggles and triumphs and honor their artistic achievements. One of its galleries is now showing works of four Chinese-American artists.

With these ambitions the institution is joining an ever-lengthening roster of American museums of identity. All of them — whether they deal with Latino-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Nordic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans or African-Americans — are celebrations of hyphenated existence.

And the strange thing is how similar the arcs of their stories are: they recount how after a long period of suffering, prejudice and hatred, a group has carved a distinctive place in the history of the United States, its once scorned identity now a source of strength. Many of these museums also serve as anchors for the community and as educational centers, recounting political morality tales and honoring a shared history. That is certainly the case here as well.

Ms. Lin designed the institution’s main exhibition space to surround a bare-bricked, sky-lighted central area between the two connected buildings that constitute the museum. The central atrium, with a staircase leading down to a floor of offices and classrooms, invokes both a traditional Chinese courtyard and a rough-edged shared urban habitat that recalls yards or alleys over which neighbors shared stories, sometimes leaning out of windows.

The main gallery rooms even have windows looking out over the bricked space, only here each window also functions as a screen on which videos and photographs are projected as autobiographical histories are recounted. The galleries (with exhibition design by Matter Architectural Practice and mgmt. design) are intimate and make it seem as if you were passing through the rooms of a modest home. They lead chronologically from the 19th-century history of China’s encounters with the West to lives of contemporary Chinese-Americans told on a wall of video screens.

This core exhibition, “With a Single Step: Stories in the Making of America,” was created by the historian John Kuo Wei Tchen, a co-founder of the museum, along with Cynthia Ai-fen Lee. It depends less on artifacts like the cap gun or the display of irons used by once-familiar Chinese laundry establishments than on the arc of the narrative.

One side of some galleries tells of struggle and hardship, showing images of the riots that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, in which unskilled Chinese immigrants were barred. Also on display are the crib sheets an aspiring immigrant once studied to convince officials at Angel Island (the San Francisco counterpart to Ellis Island) that he was more than a “paper son” whose false documents affirmed a connection to someone already in America.

The most fascinating galleries are compressed displays of how the image of Chinese-Americans was shaped into stereotypes in early 20th-century culture, ranging from Fu Manchu’s villainy to chop suey’s homogenized exoticism. The position of Chinese-Americans became still more complicated when China was an ally during World War II, a Communist enemy in the 1950s and a warily watched trading partner and political rival in the 1980s and ’90s.

The other side of the main galleries contains illuminated panels with brief biographies of individuals who transcended all these obstacles. There is Dr. Faith Sai So Leong (born 1880), for example, who became the first female Chinese dentist in America; Du Lee (born 1879), who organized the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in 1915 “to combat anti-Chinese sentiments”; and Yan Phou Lee (born 1861), who became the first Chinese student elected to Phi Beta Kappa and gave the commencement address when he graduated from Yale in 1887. And, of course, more contemporary Chinese-Americans are here as well, including Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the architect I. M. Pei and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

But despite the museum’s considerable achievement it also harbors a tension that reveals some of the problems with the identity archetype. Like some other identity museums celebrating ethnic groups and communities, this one can too easily slip into the “we,” making it seem as if it were an internal account rather than a public statement. Each gallery includes a poem by Mr. Tchen and a narrative highlighting identity issues.

“Years of floods and droughts push our sons and fathers to leave ancient homes,” we are told of the 19th-century emigrations. “We find work and opportunity, but we also find many enslaved and dispossessed,” we read. “Writers like Jack London call us ‘heathens’ and say we can never become real Americans,” another display says.

And as a kind of haunting theme there is the question: “So are ‘we’ to be included in their sacred ‘We the People’? Or not?”

This approach tends to accent the hardened formula of the identity narrative (and overshadows the museum’s ability to explore more fully the nature of Chinese culture and immigration). Typically, in this account, triumph is reserved for the very end, with the 1960s as a turning point: the civil-rights movement is hailed for weakening the hold of prejudice and loosening the fetters of xenophobia. It is as if identity itself becomes the source of salvation. It may have begun as the instigation for oppression but it ends as a force for liberation. One gallery here contains posters and publications from that era that emphasizes these themes.

There is no question that the ’60s political movements had an effect on the status of all minorities; the identity narrative itself was shaped in that era. But aspects of this exhibition, particularly autobiographical statements that can be read, listened to or watched, reveal that model’s limits.

While the actual texts of some of these accounts are constructed from historical information by contemporary Chinese-American writers, including David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen and Ha Jin, the nuances they introduce are important. A 19th-century laborer, Ah Quin, speaks of working in Alaska as a cook for miners, sending home $30 every few months. Another 19th-century figure, Wong Chin Foo, makes it clear just how old certain political movements are: “When the Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 with even more restrictions on the Chinese here, I helped form ‘The Chinese Equal Rights League.’ Through our efforts, we managed to persuade some congressmen to consider our proposals to grant us the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

And later in the exhibition there are brief written accounts by more recent immigrants, like Sam Wong, whose wandering first took him to Vietnam and Cambodia before “the U.S. welcomed me.”

In these voices, and others, we can hear the mixture of prospects and obstacles that Chinese immigrants encountered. This must have been true even in the worst of times: Chinese laborers sought to come here even after it was clear that nothing like paradise was in store. Many must have recognized degrees of restriction and opportunity and risked their lives to minimize one and maximize the other.

This is an aspect of the history that was once emphasized in older stories of American immigration, demonstrating how opportunities trumped hardships and possibility triumphed over prejudice. There is no point in returning to that model’s glossy idealism, which too easily elided over injustices and failings.

But the first-person stories here suggest that the dominant identity model has its own form of exaggeration, heightening trauma and minimizing promise. The hope is that over time this will be amended (and not just in this museum) with a fuller understanding of both sides of a hyphenated identity.

The Museum of Chinese in America opens to the public Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.; 215 Centre Street, near Grand Street, Chinatown; (212) 619-4785 or mocanyc.org.

Steven Chu, A Political Scientist

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD / Beijing

"What the U.S. and China do over the next decade," declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize – winning physicist who is leading President Obama's push for a clean-energy economy, "will determine the fate of the world."

Chu had gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the "MIT of China," to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change. In his nerdy professor style and referring to "Milankovitch cycles" and the "albedo effect" as well as melting glaciers and rising seas, Chu methodically explained that the science is clear, that we're boiling the planet — but also that science can save us, that we can innovate our way to sustainability. He acknowledged that the developed nations that made the mess can't tell the developing world not to develop, but he also warned that China is on track to emit more carbon in the next three decades than the U.S. has emitted in its history; that business as usual would intensify floods, droughts and heat waves in both countries; that greenhouse gases respect no borders. This earth, he concluded, is the only one we've got; it would be illogical and immoral to fry it. "Science has unambiguously shown that we're altering the destiny of our planet," he said. "Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?" (Read "The Global Warming Survival Guide.")

It was a tough message to deliver to the Chinese — basically, "Do as we say, not as we did" — but it's hard to imagine a more credible messenger. It's not just that Chu is a Chinese American whose parents both graduated from Tsinghua before attending the real MIT or that he's the most qualified leader ever at the Department of Energy (DOE) — which is a bit like being the most likable character ever on NYC Prep. It's also that Chu is the kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers. "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people. In China, it's scholars," Chu told me during his trip to Beijing. "Here, Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Britney Spears."

That's one reason Chu's message doesn't resonate all that well with Americans. They ranked global warming last in a national survey of 20 top priorities; in a global poll, only 44% of them wanted action to be taken on the issue, vs. 94% of Chinese. Most Republican leaders flatly reject prevailing climate science, while many Democrats from coal, oil and farm states are equally protective of the fossil-fuel status quo. This is why the American Clean Energy and Security Act — a far-reaching Democratic bill that would cap carbon emissions — has been marketed to a confused public on the basis of issues that poll far better: gas prices, foreign oil and green jobs. It narrowly passed the House, but it's in trouble in the Senate, and the President, while supportive, is now preoccupied with health care. (Read "Getting Your Slice of the Cap-and-Trade Pie.")

Anyway, Americans usually don't pay much attention to Energy Secretaries, who tend to be political loyalists with little energy expertise; President Ronald Reagan once appointed a dentist to the job. Since its founding during the last energy crisis, in 1977, the DOE has become a bloated backwater of the military-industrial complex, primarily responsible for safeguarding nuclear weapons and cleaning up nuclear waste and generally ignored between security breaches at its nuclear labs. But now there's a new energy crisis, and the appointment of a global-warming Paul Revere who's also a green-tech Albert Einstein has signaled Obama's desire to put the E back in DOE, to have a first-tier brain reinvent a second-tier agency, to keep his Inaugural Address pledge to "restore science to its rightful place." With Obama publicly committed to an economic transformation designed to slash U.S. carbon emissions 80% by 2050, Chu will be America's first Clean-Energy Secretary — a job that's part green evangelism, part venture capitalism and part politics.

He's perfect for parts one and two. The fate of the world, in Chu's calculation, hinges on part three.

Watch an interview with Chu.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

Mr. Outside
The Bush Administration generally followed a "Drill, baby, drill" approach to energy and a "What, me worry?" approach to climate change. Obama promised the opposite on both counts.

For the Obama Administration, change begins with the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency, pursued through mandates and incentives to get vehicles to use less fuel and get appliances, buildings and factories to use less power. It's also pushing investment in wind, solar and other renewables, along with a smarter grid to exploit them. At the same time, Obama wants massive increases in federal energy research and development, plus a cap-and-trade regime that would accelerate private-sector advances by putting a price on carbon. The overall goal is to reduce emissions as well as U.S. dependence on foreign petro-thugs and a pesky vulnerability to volatile gas prices. To Republican critics, it's a radical scheme to destroy jobs and raid wallets, cooked up by élitists like Chu, who was once quoted calling U.S. gas prices too low. But Obama's message is that saving the planet makes economic sense. "We're trying to communicate that climate change is very, very serious, but hey, by the way, this is an incredible economic opportunity," Chu said. (Watch a video on vanishing salt marshes.)

Chu is becoming the public face of this agenda, sounding the alarm about emissions while preaching the good news of a new Industrial Revolution — to Americans and Chinese, through Facebook and PowerPoint. If White House energy czar Carol Browner is the little-seen Ms. Inside, Chu is Mr. Outside, mixing plain English with arcane data to make the case for twisty lightbulbs, white roofs, geothermal heat pumps, electric cars, advanced research and carbon-pricing. He sounds like Al Gore but with unimpeachable scientific credentials, a nonpartisan aura and a rumpled charm. At 61, he still radiates boyish impatience as well as boyish enthusiasm, with a megawatt smile that appears without warning.

Chu is also becoming the chief financier for the U.S. clean-energy sector, retooling a sclerotic department to shell out about $39 billion worth of short-term stimulus projects — nearly 150% of its normal annual budget — while reorienting its long-term research and development toward artificial photosynthesis, advanced batteries and other technologies he envisions as low-emissions "game changers." Chu plays up his geeky image — he gave Jon Stewart a Nerds of America Society T shirt on-air — but he's no ivory-tower ingenue. "Energy," he says, "is all about money." He cut his teeth in the entrepreneurial culture of Bell Labs and spent the rest of his career around Silicon Valley; he's served on the boards of a battery company, a semiconductor firm and two biotech start-ups. In his last job, he shook up the bureaucracy of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to tackle real-world energy problems, while becoming a leading expert on energy innovation. "He's brilliant, and he understands the full breadth of the energy portfolio," says Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "There's no precedent for that."

But Obama's ambitious plans will ultimately depend on politics, and most scientists are about as adept at Beltway Kabuki as most politicians are at freezing atoms. Chu has already created a miniflap by telling reporters it wasn't his job to badger OPEC about oil prices, and he has struggled to explain why he once called coal a "nightmare." Several of his scientific initiatives have stalled on Capitol Hill, victims of lackluster salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden responded to Chu's seemingly innocuous comments about energy efficiency by publicly chastising him for straying off message. "He won a Nobel Prize," Biden told the crowd. "I got elected seven times."

Chu does have an inconvenient habit of speaking his mind. At Tsinghua, he told audience members they ought to limit their driving to the weekends, a nonstarter in U.S. politics if ever there was one. In our interview, he suggested that Americans should get over their need for gas-guzzling speed ("Believe me, 0 to 60 [m.p.h.] in 8.5 sec. is fine") and meat-heavy diets ("We really don't need 12-oz. steaks every day") before he realized he was making energy transformation sound like a bummer — and abruptly changed the subject. "I don't want to deliver too many messages," Chu said, more to himself than to me. "I need to focus on 'Let's not let this incredible opportunity slip away.'"

See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.

See pictures of the world's most polluted places.

A Real-World Scientist
When Chu was a second-grader in a Long Island, New York, suburb, his father told him, Don't get married until after you get your Ph.D. It was that kind of family; even an aunt whose feet were bound when she was a girl in China became a chemistry professor in the U.S. "It was always assumed that all of us would be science professors," Chu recalled. He has two brothers and four cousins in the U.S., all with doctorates. When I asked how many advanced degrees they have, he asked if a law degree counts as advanced.

As a boy, he diverted his lunch money into parts for homemade rockets. But he says he was a mere A-minus student, an "academic black sheep" — at least compared with older brother Gilbert, a straight-A valedictorian who studied physics at Princeton and is now a biochemistry professor at Stanford. After quitting school for a while in ninth grade — "I was tired of competing with Gilbert" — he didn't make the Ivy League, so he settled for the University of Rochester. His father once told him he'd never succeed in physics. "What he meant was, compared to Gilbert," recalls younger brother Morgan, a high school dropout who still earned four advanced degrees by the time he was 25 and is now a renowned litigator. (Read "Energy Secretary: Steven Chu.")

It's easy to see how Chu ended up as a workaholic. At times, he hinted at an emotional price, mentioning offhandedly that a son from a previous marriage quit school and was "trying to find himself." But Chu found his niche in the lab, building state-of-the-art lasers from spare parts to tinker with quarks and "high-Z hydrogen-like ions," preferring the rigor of experiments that either worked or didn't to abstract theoretical physics. At Bell Labs, he spent phone-monopoly money playing with electron spectrometers, gamma rays, polymers and other gee-whiz stuff few of us can understand; he once accidentally discovered an important pulse-propagation effect. But even his most obscure technical work had practical applications; his Nobel-winning breakthrough — supercooling atoms into "optical molasses" — inspired improvements in GPS data and oil exploration. "He's a real-world scientist," says physicist Carl Wieman, who won a separate Nobel using techniques that Chu pioneered. "He's very, very intense, and he's very, very good at solving problems."

After winning his Nobel while at Stanford in 1997, Chu gradually concluded that global warming was the biggest problem facing mankind and decided to change fields to help solve it. He admired the Nobel laureates whose discoveries sparked the agricultural Green Revolution that averted a global hunger crisis, and he couldn't justify fiddling with molecules when a new Green Revolution was needed to avert a climate crisis. LBNL scientist Art Rosenfeld, Chu's mentor on energy issues, can relate: he was once a star particle physicist, the last student of Enrico Fermi's, but during the crisis of the 1970s, he reinvented himself as an energy-efficiency pioneer — and ended up developing much of the technology behind green buildings and those curlicued compact fluorescent lightbulbs. "The stakes are so high and the opportunities so vast," Rosenfeld explains.

Chu took over LBNL in 2004 and immediately refocused the lab on researching commercially viable solutions to big energy problems. He set up two bioenergy institutes — one funded by a controversial $500 million grant he secured from British Petroleum — and spearheaded a major project to investigate solar energy. "Steve is a visionary, and he really galvanized the lab with his vision," says Paul Alivisatos, who was Chu's deputy there. But some scientists bristled at Chu's demand for dramatic scientific breakthroughs — brand-new ways to store energy, sequester carbon or fuel cars — as opposed to incremental engineering improvements. "Chu likes flashy, sexy technological fixes that attract a lot of attention. He gets bored when they aren't nano-this or bio-that," says University of Texas engineering professor Tad Patzek, who left the Berkeley Lab after clashing with him.

Environmentalists are generally ecstatic about Chu, but at a time when coal plants and heavily subsidized corn ethanol are creating huge environmental problems, some question his enthusiasm for "clean coal" and "third-generation biofuels," which do not yet exist, as well as his support for new nuclear power, which has become wildly expensive. They recall President George W. Bush talking up future technological miracles as an alternative to present-day action, and they want Chu to focus on proven technologies that can help boost efficiency and conservation to reduce energy demand now, plus on renewables to create zero-emissions supply.

Read "Clean Energy: U.S. Lags in Research and Development."

See pictures of the effects of global warming.

In fact, Chu is already an efficiency nut. His California house was so well insulated, it barely needed air conditioning, and he's now weatherizing his D.C. home. He's pushing 24 new appliance standards that languished under Bush; at Tsinghua, he explained that existing efficiency rules for U.S. refrigerators alone save more energy than the controversial Three Gorges Dam in China's Hubei province will produce. He's especially obsessed with promoting white roofs and light-colored pavement, constantly citing Rosenfeld's calculation that having them throughout the U.S. would save as much carbon as taking every car off the roads for 11 years.

But Chu is thinking far ahead, and he doesn't see existing technologies producing an 80% cut in emissions. At a recent appearance with Obama, he said the U.S. needs to be like Wayne Gretzky: not just chasing the puck but positioning itself where the puck is going to end up. "Very cool metaphor," the President said.

Does Science Matter?
In China, I watched Chu tour the headquarters of a company called ENN — the name is a hybrid of energy and innovation — that was founded as a tiny gas supplier in 1989 by a cabdriver with $200 in his pocket and has expanded into a clean-energy conglomerate with more than 24,000 employees. Chu peppered his hosts with technical questions as he checked out a sleek factory churning out superefficient solar panels, a greenhouse where genetically engineered algae were excreting fuel, a prototype for a coal-gasification plant in Inner Mongolia and a research lab with 300 scientists. It felt like an only-in-America business story, except we were in Langfang, just outside Beijing.

My notebook quickly filled up with scribbles like "nanostructure??" and "Chu recommends polymer" and "don't think Hazel O'Leary got this briefing." Chu's only simple question — aside from "Will this explode?" — was "What percentage of your profit goes to science?" About 15% to 25%, the CEO explained. "That's very good," Chu said with a sigh. The entire visit reminded Chu of the futuristic spirit he loved at Bell Labs. "This was a power company, but it had the flavor of a high-tech company," he told me later. "They're looking at the long view." In short, they're Wayne Gretzky — and Chu is obviously worried that we're not, that we've lost our ability to focus on long-term problems.

The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won't accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they're preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they're developing more-advanced transmission lines. They're still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They're making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world's largest producer of renewables by 2010. "Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions," Chu said. "Some U.S. policymakers still don't think this is a problem." (Read "One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.")

In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are "almost comical," that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious, almost plaintive: "You know, it's totally irresponsible. You're not supposed to make up the facts."

Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner's opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It's tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu's plan to create eight "Bell lablets" to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He's trying to make DOE's bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote about "the fierce urgency of now" — one of Obama's favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There's still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won't tolerate.

The Chinese don't seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he's a big fan of democracy. "We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves," he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: "Let's be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people."

See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.

See TIME's special report on the environment.

Friends and Family Look Forward to Detained Journalists' Return

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4 -- One woman approached China's border with North Korea as a seasoned foreign correspondent, the other as a sharp editor who was on her first trip abroad in her new role as a producer.

Laura Ling, 32, one of the two American journalists released by North Korea on Tuesday after five months in captivity, had reported from Sri Lanka, Iran, Brazil, Pakistan and Eastern Europe, among other places.

"She knows her way around the world," said Morgan Wandell, who supervised Ling at San Francisco-based Current TV after working with her at another startup, the Channel One news outlet that is broadcast into classrooms. "And she's a smart, prepared journalist. One of the things I take a little bit of issue with, she's not a cavalier risk-taker at all. She's very smart, and while she's curious and ambitious, she knows her limits, and she's certainly not a cowboy."

Euna Lee, 36, had been a standout editor at Current TV, the cable and Web network co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, and was breaking into producing via the route that had worked for Ling a decade earlier: hard work backed by language skills and cultural knowledge that could add immense value to a story that demanded discretion and delicacy. The women had traveled to the Chinese border with North Korea, where they were preparing a report about North Korean refugees.

"It was unfortunately her first assignment," said Annika Mandel, who was hired as a writer-producer at Current in 2005, about the same time Lee came on as a video editor, the person who ties reports together.

"She was the editor we all wanted to work with," said Mandel, who now works for a health insurer. "I knew that if I worked with her, my work was going to be 10 times better than if I was going to do it myself. She brought a really critical, creative eye to things."

Friends said they expected the women to arrive in Los Angeles on Wednesday on the plane carrying former president Bill Clinton, who arranged their release Tuesday during a trip to Pyongyang.

"We are counting the seconds to hold Laura and Euna in our arms," said a statement from their families, whose united effort to free the women displayed the qualities -- discipline, determination and devotion -- that friends said marked the captives' lives.

"We especially want to thank President Bill Clinton for taking on such an arduous mission and Vice President Al Gore for his tireless efforts to bring Laura and Euna home," the statement said. "We must also thank all the people who have supported our families through this ordeal, it has meant the world to us."

Gore and Current co-founder Joel Hyatt released a statement through the network Tuesday night, saying they were "overjoyed" at the women's release. "Our hearts go out to them -- and to their families -- for persevering through this horrible experience," they added.

In Los Angeles, Lee will reunite with her husband, actor Michael Saldate, and their daughter, Hanna, 4. Lee's parents live in Seoul, the South Korean capital, where she grew up. She has two sisters in the United States, where she attended college.

"She has a little bit of an accent," Mandel said.

Ling will see her husband, Iain Clayton, a British-born investment banker who has said that he wrote her a letter every day of the five months she was captive. Wandell said the two met in college on a concert date that went so well that Ling purposely left her ID in his borrowed jacket "so she had an excuse for contacting him."

"We have been together for 12 years and this is the longest I've gone without hearing her voice," Clayton wrote on a blog for CNN's "Larry King Live." Many family members appeared on that program in late May when they judged that going public might help the women. After North Korea sentenced the women to 12 years of hard labor, the families largely withdrew again, following the advice of experts including Gore.

"There was a strategy for a long time to keep things sort of low-key," Mandel said. "They didn't want to make them any more marketable as detainees than they already were."

Ling grew up in the Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks. Her father, a second-generation Chinese American, was a military contractor; her mother was born in Taiwan. At Del Campo High School, her sister, Lisa, was on her way to success as a TV journalist on a program, "Scratch," that went national, said Jim Jordan, who taught Laura Ling honors English her junior year.

Lisa Ling went on to National Geographic, "Oprah" and "The View," but, Jordan said, "I wouldn't say Laura was in her shadow." Friends and relatives describe the sisters as best friends.

"Laura was always just really secure," said Angie Wang, a cousin. "She knew who she was."

The sisters helped each other. When Gotham Chopra, a producer at Channel One, was preparing to travel to China for a story in 1999, he told Lisa that he needed an interpreter. She recommended Laura, fresh from UCLA and fluent in Mandarin. By trip's end, Channel One had offered her a full-time job.

On the trip to the North Korean border, Lee was following the same path into producing. Fluent in the refugees' language, "her Korean would be very helpful," Mandel said. Plus, she was a good listener.

"If you're ever having a problem, you can go to Euna and just vent, and she validates your feelings and helps you get through a hard time." Mandel said.

"She's a devoted worker and a devoted family person and just a sweet soul. A very sweet soul."