As Dutch and British courts try suspects for the manslaughter of 58 illegal Chinese immigrants last June, Calum MacLeod meets the families chasing snakehead shadows. FUJIAN, China -- Winter days are quiet for the people of Lianfeng, a small village on a finger of land poking into the East China Sea. Their terraced fields still await the spring planting of rice, sweet potatoes and peanuts. But on one slope, the earth has recently been broken. Dusty with chalk from the simple tombstone, a middle-age woman named Chen Suiying weeps at the grave of her son, buried on Jan. 19 this year. And again on Jan. 20.
When the farmer's wife accuses local police of collaborating with the human traffickers, or "snakeheads," who killed her son, few of her neighbors dispute the truth of her charge. But in China many truths are safer left unsaid. Enraged by her candor, police prevented Chen from viewing her son at his burial. So the next day, she dug up his corpse.
"He looked like his photo," Chen recalls, "except a tooth had come through his lip, and his face was black. I guess the blood had gone to his head." She dressed his naked body in a black suit, and reburied him in a cedar-wood coffin. "The Chinese government wants to bury the issue," she adds bitterly, "just like the bodies in the ground, so this 'problem' is resolved."