SINGAPORE: In Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, there can be found a guest house catering almost exclusively for Chinese travellers.
Last December, when it also accommodated a film crew from CNA, the usual suspects were rather concerned.
“As soon as we checked in and the people in the guest house knew that we were journalists, … people were tense. They’re like, ‘Why are there journalists here?’” recalled senior producer Jonathan Chia.
The Chinese guests were on edge because of what they were doing: migrating to the United States illegally.
It was not long before shouting ensued. “Don’t sabotage us! Please understand our concerns,” implored one migrant, who did not want his face to be filmed.
CNA correspondent Wei Du assured him of that. Unflustered, she had an ace up her sleeve: She had told Chia, on his trip from Singapore to Quito, to get barbecued sliced pork, or bak kwa, as gifts.
CNA senior producer Jonathan Chia thought his colleague’s bak kwa idea was “ingenious”.
“As soon as I brought out the bak kwa, … it was like we were their long-lost family and friends,” recounted Chia. “Immediately, people opened up.”
On the first night, Du got four people on board as profiles for the three-part series, Walk The Line.
“It’s not (that) people are easy to ‘buy off’. But people appreciate a little bit of warmth and generosity from a stranger,” she said.
For the Chinese migrants, warmth and generosity were rare commodities on their journey. And for the CNA crew, finding profiles for their documentary was not the biggest challenge.
“I never experienced danger in any of my previous … productions,” said Chia. But never before had he followed migrants crossing borders illegally, hoping to find a better life in the US.
Chia appearing in front of the camera to help viewers understand what went on behind the scenes.
And now it is the CNA crew who open up on what it took to make Walk The Line in the face of all the challenges.
The idea for the documentary came to Du when she started seeing videos — on Chinese video app platforms — of Chinese people crossing “what appears to be a dense tropical jungle”, alongside a “vast number” of South Americans.
That was around mid- to late 2022, when China’s pandemic restrictions, including lockdowns, had accelerated the socio-economic pressures on its people.
Today, the Chinese are the fastest-growing group of illegal migrants at the US’ southern border. And they start off as far south as Ecuador because it is the closest country to the US with visa-free entry for Chinese passport holders.
Police officers patrolling a metro station in Quito, Ecuador, in January. (Photo: Rodrigo Buendia/AFP)
“When I thought about South America, … Narcos from Netflix came to mind,” said Chia, referring to the drama series on the continent’s drug cartels.
Owing to the risks involved in following the Chinese migrants, CNA engaged a security firm.
Accompanying the crew on the whole trip was Adnan Nazar, a medic in the British Army for 11 years who completed four tours of duty, in Bosnia and Kosovo and twice in Iraq as a platoon commander.
“The decision was made that I’d come in at the very beginning, starting with pre-deployment training (in Singapore), teaching the team a little bit about jungle survival, how to manage yourself, what kit … to take,” he said.
Chia found the training “a bit overwhelming” at first. “He was talking about things like, what to do if you get kidnapped,” Chia recounted. “I’m just like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’”
WATCH: Behind the scenes of Walk The Line — Into Narcos territory to film Chinese migrants (7:51)
The crew included director of photography N Shanmuga Sundaram and sound recordist Muhammad Faddly, both of whom could not resist going on, in Shanmuga’s words, “an adventure of a lifetime”.
Or as Du said: “There are people who run towards the fire and the people who run away from it. … All of us chose to do what we do. We’re the type of people who’d run towards it.”
The team’s first stop, however, was not Ecuador but San Diego in the US, near the Mexican border.
The first time Shanmuga saw the border wall, he found it “really intimidating”. “It was about 20, 30 feet high,” he described. “You’ll see miles and miles of wall — then there’ll be a small gap.”
People were squeezing through the gap right in front of the crew. “To our surprise, it was pretty easy for them,” said Faddly. “Just walk through it, and you’ve made it, you’re in the US now.”
The migrants just had to walk around the United States border wall in Jacumba, California.
The border was where the crew first heard the Chinese migrants tell their stories before they were processed by the US Border Patrol.
The sight of the migrants being searched, photographed and handcuffed got Du, who comes from Chongqing, feeling “very emotional” afterwards. “Was this humiliation really worth it?” she wondered.
“That goes to challenge … what I thought I’d know about my country and my people. What has to happen for these people to be here, to be willing to go through this?”
She had a similar kind of feeling in Quito when talking to one of the migrant profiles, dubbed Chubby Chef, who used to have his own business in China but lost 200,000 yuan (S$37,000) in two years.
WATCH PART 1: From China to US — The illegal trek Chinese migrants are making to America (46:05)
He told her he could cook or drive trucks in the US and would be happy earning US$10,000 (S$13,500) a month.
“That was why he was making the trip,” said Du. “It does give you this unsettling feeling that a lot of them were getting into something they didn’t understand (and) would later come to regret.”
Her team followed the profiles by car from Quito to Pasto, one of Colombia’s oldest cities, where they prepared to fly north to the city of Monteria.
While transiting through Bogota airport, the crew met a family of three from Chengdu, who were called Mum, Dad and Lucy in the series.
“They’re quite different from the other migrants,” said Du. "They’re extremely warm, chatty, outgoing people. You don’t get a lot of these people in China. And … they have this beautiful relationship between the two parents.
“Gradually, they took over the show — they became our main profiles, and they really just carried it all the way.”
Dad opened up to CNA correspondent Wei Du in no time.
After the flight, the crew took a bus to the town of Necocli, the jumping-off point for the migrants’ entry to the Darien Gap.
The Darien Gap, a dense, paramilitary-controlled jungle separating Colombia from Panama, is one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes.
And before crossing the jungle, the migrants needed to buy things like portable stoves, tents, tarpaulin, hiking boots and sulphur powder to put around their tents to ward off snakes.
The crew were “constantly on the move” as the migrants did their shopping. “For me, I had to carry my boom,” said Faddly. “And we were definitely attracting attention.”
CNA’s Walk The Line crew filming in Necocli, Colombia.
With smugglers taking groups of migrants through the jungle, Necocli’s economy was being “built on the trafficking of migrants”, said Nazar. “It’s a lot of money brought into that area. And they’re very sensitive (about) having their operations exposed.
“We’d be walking through an area. You’d see (men) … looking at us, pointing, sending feedback (by phone) to whoever their bosses are.”
The crew stopped at one point. “We had a little chat and said, ‘We’ve got to lower our profile. We’re standing out,’” he recounted.
“We had to distance ourselves from the families as well, in the sense that we were jeopardising their opportunity to get transport.”
Already, the crew’s chances of following the migrants were slim.
WATCH PART 2: Cross the wall or die trying — Chinese migrants inch towards American dream (46:16)
Their fixer, who had access to the Darien Gap, said his contact had told him that “the guy who (ran) the area … (didn’t) want to see any journalist” in the jungle. “It was a bit of a shock,” recalled Du.
Nonetheless, she got the fixer to meet the jungle commander to see if her team would “stand a chance” of crossing the jungle. After three days waiting for permission, they were told the paramilitary had turned them away.
The team made plans to fly to Panama City instead, then drive down to Panama’s south-east Darien province, hoping to catch the migrants exiting the Darien Gap.
Having lost touch with the migrants, however, Du was about to give up hope when Dad phoned her. His family would be arriving by boat in Puerto Limon, a village up-river from the Darien Gap, the next day.
Migrants exiting the Darien Gap on the Chucunaque river.
So the team were prepared. Chia was in a boat on the river to film them, and he remembered it being “one of the most surreal experiences”.
“Suddenly, I heard ‘Xie Feng Hong! Xie Feng Hong!’ — which is my Chinese name. And the last time I heard that name was in secondary school,” he said. “I zoomed in, and it was the profile (family).”
Looking back, Du said the reunion with the family and seeing that they were all safe was an “exhilarating moment”.
“That was the first time we saw them after about a week. And I was worried about how they were coping, whether they were healthy,” she said. “But the first thing they said … was, ‘Wei, we brought your sunglasses.’
“It just speaks volumes about the type of people they are. … They radiate kindness and love and try to really take care of other people.”
Mum hugging Du after arriving in the village of Puerto Limon.
The sunglasses now sit on a shelf in her home, with a little tag: “Survivor of the Darien Gap”.
But much as she was amazed by the migrants’ resilience, she found herself in a “slightly odd” situation. “We didn’t want them to either die in an accident or get mugged … or worse,” she said.
It was “emotionally difficult”, she added, to keep those aspects in balance.
The migrants were taken to Panama’s border with Costa Rica. From there, they took buses across four Central American states. The crew flew to the south of Mexico to wait for them.
WATCH PART 3: Can these Chinese asylum seekers reach their ‘American Dream’? (46:59)
Meantime, Du had an interview in the city of Tapachula with a smuggler who “would take you from southern Mexico to wherever you want to be in the United States for US$9,000”.
Before the meeting at a hotel, Nazar gave the team advice on security. For starters, he told Du to “try and stick to the script and questions to discuss”.
Then there was the matter of what code word to use “if we need to go — which means stop what you’re doing, we’re leaving, no more questions”. They agreed on “guacamole” but, ultimately, did not have to use the word.
From Tapachula, the crew flew to the Mexican border town of Tijuana.
“It was a domestic flight, but there was passport control. And (the officers) were just pulling everybody with a Chinese passport (aside),” recounted Du, who has got a Hong Kong passport, with the Chinese national emblem on it.
“Then, of course, they looked at our passports with the visa stamps. They had to let us go. … As we were making our way across the room, everybody’s like, ‘Which smuggler did you use? How much money did you pay?’”
Earlier on their journey, Faddly and Shanmuga had also been held up, for nearly two hours, at the border crossing between Ecuador and Colombia.
“Firstly, (the border guards) had issues with our names. Then they brought (in) superiors and other immigration officers,” recounted Shanmuga. Both men’s thumbprints were taken, and irises were scanned, before they could cross the border.
“Pretty intense,” remarked Faddly, for whom this project was an “eye-opening” experience. “Despite a lack of … rest, we still managed to do our thing as a team.”
Shanmuga, too, was full of praise for their “fantastic” crew, who were “team players”.
As for Chia, he shares Du’s sentiments on the migrants’ resilience as they made their journey. “It made a lot of my problems that I face in my everyday life feel so insignificant,” he said.
This behind-the-scenes episode of Walk The Line will be broadcast tonight at 9 p.m. SG/HK.
Continue reading...
Last December, when it also accommodated a film crew from CNA, the usual suspects were rather concerned.
“As soon as we checked in and the people in the guest house knew that we were journalists, … people were tense. They’re like, ‘Why are there journalists here?’” recalled senior producer Jonathan Chia.
The Chinese guests were on edge because of what they were doing: migrating to the United States illegally.
It was not long before shouting ensued. “Don’t sabotage us! Please understand our concerns,” implored one migrant, who did not want his face to be filmed.
CNA correspondent Wei Du assured him of that. Unflustered, she had an ace up her sleeve: She had told Chia, on his trip from Singapore to Quito, to get barbecued sliced pork, or bak kwa, as gifts.
CNA senior producer Jonathan Chia thought his colleague’s bak kwa idea was “ingenious”.
“As soon as I brought out the bak kwa, … it was like we were their long-lost family and friends,” recounted Chia. “Immediately, people opened up.”
On the first night, Du got four people on board as profiles for the three-part series, Walk The Line.
“It’s not (that) people are easy to ‘buy off’. But people appreciate a little bit of warmth and generosity from a stranger,” she said.
For the Chinese migrants, warmth and generosity were rare commodities on their journey. And for the CNA crew, finding profiles for their documentary was not the biggest challenge.
“I never experienced danger in any of my previous … productions,” said Chia. But never before had he followed migrants crossing borders illegally, hoping to find a better life in the US.
Chia appearing in front of the camera to help viewers understand what went on behind the scenes.
And now it is the CNA crew who open up on what it took to make Walk The Line in the face of all the challenges.
FROM INCEPTION TO PLANNING
The idea for the documentary came to Du when she started seeing videos — on Chinese video app platforms — of Chinese people crossing “what appears to be a dense tropical jungle”, alongside a “vast number” of South Americans.
That was around mid- to late 2022, when China’s pandemic restrictions, including lockdowns, had accelerated the socio-economic pressures on its people.
Today, the Chinese are the fastest-growing group of illegal migrants at the US’ southern border. And they start off as far south as Ecuador because it is the closest country to the US with visa-free entry for Chinese passport holders.
Police officers patrolling a metro station in Quito, Ecuador, in January. (Photo: Rodrigo Buendia/AFP)
“When I thought about South America, … Narcos from Netflix came to mind,” said Chia, referring to the drama series on the continent’s drug cartels.
Owing to the risks involved in following the Chinese migrants, CNA engaged a security firm.
Accompanying the crew on the whole trip was Adnan Nazar, a medic in the British Army for 11 years who completed four tours of duty, in Bosnia and Kosovo and twice in Iraq as a platoon commander.
“The decision was made that I’d come in at the very beginning, starting with pre-deployment training (in Singapore), teaching the team a little bit about jungle survival, how to manage yourself, what kit … to take,” he said.
Chia found the training “a bit overwhelming” at first. “He was talking about things like, what to do if you get kidnapped,” Chia recounted. “I’m just like, ‘What am I getting myself into?’”
WATCH: Behind the scenes of Walk The Line — Into Narcos territory to film Chinese migrants (7:51)
The crew included director of photography N Shanmuga Sundaram and sound recordist Muhammad Faddly, both of whom could not resist going on, in Shanmuga’s words, “an adventure of a lifetime”.
Or as Du said: “There are people who run towards the fire and the people who run away from it. … All of us chose to do what we do. We’re the type of people who’d run towards it.”
FIRST CONTACT
The team’s first stop, however, was not Ecuador but San Diego in the US, near the Mexican border.
The first time Shanmuga saw the border wall, he found it “really intimidating”. “It was about 20, 30 feet high,” he described. “You’ll see miles and miles of wall — then there’ll be a small gap.”
People were squeezing through the gap right in front of the crew. “To our surprise, it was pretty easy for them,” said Faddly. “Just walk through it, and you’ve made it, you’re in the US now.”
The migrants just had to walk around the United States border wall in Jacumba, California.
The border was where the crew first heard the Chinese migrants tell their stories before they were processed by the US Border Patrol.
The sight of the migrants being searched, photographed and handcuffed got Du, who comes from Chongqing, feeling “very emotional” afterwards. “Was this humiliation really worth it?” she wondered.
“That goes to challenge … what I thought I’d know about my country and my people. What has to happen for these people to be here, to be willing to go through this?”
She had a similar kind of feeling in Quito when talking to one of the migrant profiles, dubbed Chubby Chef, who used to have his own business in China but lost 200,000 yuan (S$37,000) in two years.
WATCH PART 1: From China to US — The illegal trek Chinese migrants are making to America (46:05)
He told her he could cook or drive trucks in the US and would be happy earning US$10,000 (S$13,500) a month.
“That was why he was making the trip,” said Du. “It does give you this unsettling feeling that a lot of them were getting into something they didn’t understand (and) would later come to regret.”
Her team followed the profiles by car from Quito to Pasto, one of Colombia’s oldest cities, where they prepared to fly north to the city of Monteria.
While transiting through Bogota airport, the crew met a family of three from Chengdu, who were called Mum, Dad and Lucy in the series.
“They’re quite different from the other migrants,” said Du. "They’re extremely warm, chatty, outgoing people. You don’t get a lot of these people in China. And … they have this beautiful relationship between the two parents.
“Gradually, they took over the show — they became our main profiles, and they really just carried it all the way.”
Dad opened up to CNA correspondent Wei Du in no time.
DRAWING ATTENTION
After the flight, the crew took a bus to the town of Necocli, the jumping-off point for the migrants’ entry to the Darien Gap.
The Darien Gap, a dense, paramilitary-controlled jungle separating Colombia from Panama, is one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes.
And before crossing the jungle, the migrants needed to buy things like portable stoves, tents, tarpaulin, hiking boots and sulphur powder to put around their tents to ward off snakes.
The crew were “constantly on the move” as the migrants did their shopping. “For me, I had to carry my boom,” said Faddly. “And we were definitely attracting attention.”
CNA’s Walk The Line crew filming in Necocli, Colombia.
With smugglers taking groups of migrants through the jungle, Necocli’s economy was being “built on the trafficking of migrants”, said Nazar. “It’s a lot of money brought into that area. And they’re very sensitive (about) having their operations exposed.
“We’d be walking through an area. You’d see (men) … looking at us, pointing, sending feedback (by phone) to whoever their bosses are.”
The crew stopped at one point. “We had a little chat and said, ‘We’ve got to lower our profile. We’re standing out,’” he recounted.
“We had to distance ourselves from the families as well, in the sense that we were jeopardising their opportunity to get transport.”
Already, the crew’s chances of following the migrants were slim.
WATCH PART 2: Cross the wall or die trying — Chinese migrants inch towards American dream (46:16)
Their fixer, who had access to the Darien Gap, said his contact had told him that “the guy who (ran) the area … (didn’t) want to see any journalist” in the jungle. “It was a bit of a shock,” recalled Du.
Nonetheless, she got the fixer to meet the jungle commander to see if her team would “stand a chance” of crossing the jungle. After three days waiting for permission, they were told the paramilitary had turned them away.
PLAN B, AND A REUNION
The team made plans to fly to Panama City instead, then drive down to Panama’s south-east Darien province, hoping to catch the migrants exiting the Darien Gap.
Having lost touch with the migrants, however, Du was about to give up hope when Dad phoned her. His family would be arriving by boat in Puerto Limon, a village up-river from the Darien Gap, the next day.
Migrants exiting the Darien Gap on the Chucunaque river.
So the team were prepared. Chia was in a boat on the river to film them, and he remembered it being “one of the most surreal experiences”.
“Suddenly, I heard ‘Xie Feng Hong! Xie Feng Hong!’ — which is my Chinese name. And the last time I heard that name was in secondary school,” he said. “I zoomed in, and it was the profile (family).”
Looking back, Du said the reunion with the family and seeing that they were all safe was an “exhilarating moment”.
“That was the first time we saw them after about a week. And I was worried about how they were coping, whether they were healthy,” she said. “But the first thing they said … was, ‘Wei, we brought your sunglasses.’
“It just speaks volumes about the type of people they are. … They radiate kindness and love and try to really take care of other people.”
Mum hugging Du after arriving in the village of Puerto Limon.
The sunglasses now sit on a shelf in her home, with a little tag: “Survivor of the Darien Gap”.
But much as she was amazed by the migrants’ resilience, she found herself in a “slightly odd” situation. “We didn’t want them to either die in an accident or get mugged … or worse,” she said.
It was “emotionally difficult”, she added, to keep those aspects in balance.
THE FINAL LEG
The migrants were taken to Panama’s border with Costa Rica. From there, they took buses across four Central American states. The crew flew to the south of Mexico to wait for them.
WATCH PART 3: Can these Chinese asylum seekers reach their ‘American Dream’? (46:59)
Meantime, Du had an interview in the city of Tapachula with a smuggler who “would take you from southern Mexico to wherever you want to be in the United States for US$9,000”.
Before the meeting at a hotel, Nazar gave the team advice on security. For starters, he told Du to “try and stick to the script and questions to discuss”.
Then there was the matter of what code word to use “if we need to go — which means stop what you’re doing, we’re leaving, no more questions”. They agreed on “guacamole” but, ultimately, did not have to use the word.
From Tapachula, the crew flew to the Mexican border town of Tijuana.
“It was a domestic flight, but there was passport control. And (the officers) were just pulling everybody with a Chinese passport (aside),” recounted Du, who has got a Hong Kong passport, with the Chinese national emblem on it.
“Then, of course, they looked at our passports with the visa stamps. They had to let us go. … As we were making our way across the room, everybody’s like, ‘Which smuggler did you use? How much money did you pay?’”
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Earlier on their journey, Faddly and Shanmuga had also been held up, for nearly two hours, at the border crossing between Ecuador and Colombia.
“Firstly, (the border guards) had issues with our names. Then they brought (in) superiors and other immigration officers,” recounted Shanmuga. Both men’s thumbprints were taken, and irises were scanned, before they could cross the border.
“Pretty intense,” remarked Faddly, for whom this project was an “eye-opening” experience. “Despite a lack of … rest, we still managed to do our thing as a team.”
Shanmuga, too, was full of praise for their “fantastic” crew, who were “team players”.
As for Chia, he shares Du’s sentiments on the migrants’ resilience as they made their journey. “It made a lot of my problems that I face in my everyday life feel so insignificant,” he said.
This behind-the-scenes episode of Walk The Line will be broadcast tonight at 9 p.m. SG/HK.
Continue reading...