Chapter 20: The Stowaway
In the dead of night, it seems that only the sound of waves can be heard outside the coastline.
It has a golden beach and is a tourist attraction on the west coast of the United States. On a hot summer day, men and women in attractive swimsuits frolic on the beach, making for a beautiful sight. However, it is the off-season for tourism, and the few tourists who will be full of enthusiasm during the day have already fallen asleep in the hotel beds.
It's a pity that on the long coastline there are not only golden beaches and the laughter of people, especially at night.
In the thick of the night, a small cargo ship avoids the densely populated harbor and sneaks up on the receding tide to a remote dock. The lights on the ship were dim, and a man came out of the dock, sneakily touching forward, and the flashlight flashed at the approaching cargo ship, and a light on the ship flashed a few times as agreed.
The ship docked. The captain jumped to the dock with two or three crew members, and the people who came to connect also came out of the shadows, and the truck they had prepared was parked not far away. After a few pleasantries, the captain motioned to the crew who remained on board to open the hold.
"Hurry up, hurry up ......" Under the whispered threat of the crew, the weak and mentally exhausted "goods" staggered out. It is not difficult to identify them as Latinos from their faces, people who boarded this dilapidated ship with various purposes related to survival and wealth, and smuggled them to the richest country in the world at the risk of their lives. Some of these young men and women probably did not expect to face such a "welcome ceremony" when they stepped into the United States for the first time, and their eyes were full of confusion and apprehension.
Suddenly, a terrible whistle sounded, and with the dazzling searchlights from both sides of the pier, two speedboats quickly approached the stowaway, and a helicopter also roared from behind the pier. The smugglers, the crew and the stowaways were momentarily stunned when they heard rough English shouts coming from the sea and in the air: "We are the Coast Guard, you are surrounded, lay down your arms......"
The gang didn't actually have a few guns, and the Coast Guard easily took them down and escorted them away. The smugglers were also detained and awaiting delivery to the Immigration Department for coordinated disposal.
This was not a large-scale operation, and there was no official disclosure on whether it was related to the crackdown on a major snakehead, so the media coverage was largely superficial. Even locals were quick to dismiss the news, allowing their eyes and ears to be overwhelmed by the new flood of information.
It was only when the immigration officers were doing a medical examination of the smugglers that they found that a young girl was two months pregnant. I don't want this beautiful 16-year-old girl to know nothing about it, and after getting the test results, she heard the bad news and hugged her head and cried. With the help of psychological counselors, the immigration bureau finally learned from her that she could not pay the high fare before getting on the smuggling boat, and the smuggler who coveted her appearance "followed the temptation" and taught her to pay with her body every day. In this way, from three months before boarding until entering the United States, she was repeatedly ravaged by the head of the snake, the captain and the crew. They regarded her as a free prostitute, and frequently used her delicate body to vent their desires on the vast ocean, during lonely voyages.
As an illegal immigrant, the girl has no idea where to go. Her body had been devastated inhumanely, and her gynecological illness had been greatly aggravated by the lack of timely medical treatment at sea, and her relatives in her homeland had been murdered by local drug lords, and no one she knew in the United States was a stranger to her. Fortunately, a local non-governmental Latinos rescue agency learned of her plight and contacted the immigration officials who handled the smugglers. They were willing to take the girl into temporary custody and take her to the hospital for systematic treatment. According to the assumption of the head of the aid agency, even if she has to be repatriated in the end, it will not be until she gives birth to the child.
Time flies, at first, everything is going well, after the hospital treatment and the careful care of the rescue staff, the girl's body gradually recovered, but no one can be sure whether the wounds in her heart can be healed. Eight months after arriving in the United States, she gave birth. Looking at the adorable mixed-race baby girl she gave birth, the medical staff who delivered the baby were all sorry for the child, who had just come into the world as a carrier of HIV and a hereditary liver disease.
For the rescuers who temporarily took care of the girl, the original idea was realized, and how to place them became an unavoidable issue. Half a year ago, however, the company that financed the bailout was hit hard by the economic crisis, its assets shrank sharply, and the financial resources available to support it became weaker and weaker. It is inevitable that civil society organizations will encounter such a dilemma, without money, they cannot do any good deeds, and this organization needs to help more than the mother and daughter of illegal immigrants. Whether to repatriate them, or to find a way to get them to settle in the United States, and what to do with the children if they repatriate their mothers? If they knew the mother's attitude towards her daughter, I am afraid that their brows would be wrinkled even more.
Soon after experiencing the natural pleasure of being a new mother, the anger and resentment that had long haunted her heart quietly shifted to her infant daughter. She had told the nurse that the child was too easy to remind her of all the torture and abuse before and after boarding the smuggling boat, of the ugly, horrible faces, and even to hear their gasps. And among the villains who squatted in prison, I don't know which one with venereal disease was the father of the child. This creature himself may have spent the rest of his life in prison, but he left the most terrible calamity for her and the years to come of the life he had forcibly created in her. In her eyes, her daughter is the crystallization of her suffering.
A week after the birth of the girl, the mother and daughter of the illegal immigrants were transferred to a smaller community hospital in a Latin American immigrant colony for continued care. One night, the moon was shining. The mother suddenly became ill and was taken to the emergency room.
In a community hospital where there are fewer patients and medical staff on site, the nursery area is a quiet area. Including the little angel who was plagued by misfortune and disease, the young babies curled up in the cradle-like nursery bed, immersed in sweet dreams, not feeling the shadow of the glass door shaking.
My mother's illness was severe, and it took three days to recover after resuscitation. When she opened her eyes on the fourth day, the first thing the nurse told her was that her daughter's liver disease had worsened three days earlier and she had died. Since there was no place to store her body in the hospital, she had been buried.
When she heard that she had left her for good in the blink of an eye after less than two weeks of birth and that she had passed on her resentment, a sense of remorse hit her mother's heart, and she began to cry bitterly again. When the staff of the rescue agency received the news, they shamefully found that they could not tell whether it was sadness or relief.