by Rob Schmitz
But on this day in late May, the skies over Shanghai were blue, the air crisp, and a warm breeze blew through the window of my eleventh-floor office. I stood at my window, watching old men fly kites in the sculpture park below. On the other end of the phone line, Weiqi was in a vacant conference room overlooking central Hong Kong, opting to watch the approaching storm instead of the markets. We were both playing hooky.
Weiqi talked about wedding preparations. His fiancée was from Yunnan, in China’s rural southwest. She had met Weiqi while completing her master’s at Cornell. They would marry in the fall, and Weiqi’s mother had taken a hiatus from her petitioning to help out. The ceremony was planned for the Xijiao Guesthouse, a luxurious state-owned hotel where China’s leaders stayed whenever they visited Shanghai. It seemed an odd choice for the son of a woman who was in and out of prison for protesting China’s leaders, but Weiqi didn’t think this way. Contradictions like this were everywhere in China, and he was too busy planning his wedding to notice.
He was also trying to hold on to his job. China’s economic growth had cooled, a bear market had emerged, and there were layoffs throughout Hong Kong’s investment banking sector.
Outside my window, students in white jumpsuits and red handkerchiefs tied around their necks burst from the doors of the school below my building. Groups of them walked toward the park to steal some playtime before another night of homework. High above them, a flock of homing pigeons flew in the afternoon sun, flying this way and that, all changing course whenever the ones in the lead felt the instinct to do so. They stuck close together, none of them straying from what appeared to be a random flight pattern.
“You report on China’s economy. What do you think will happen?” Weiqi asked.
I got this question wherever I traveled in China. This was one of the most perplexing economies in the world to figure out, yet the inquiry was a logical one: I was a foreign journalist and I was free to travel around China to investigate the matter, unlike most local journalists. The question always made me feel like I had performed terribly at my job. It was unanswerable. “The more I learn about China’s economy, the less I feel I really know,” I told him. “A big part of the economy is off the books, so it’s impossible to know what’s really going on. All I can go on is the anecdotal evidence I see from my reporting trips.”
“And what has that shown you?” asked Weiqi.
“There’s more money in China than ever, but much of that money has gone to build wasteful projects that probably won’t ever serve anybody,” I said.
“That’s what I’m seeing, too,” Weiqi told me.
He had noticed a surge of investors moving their wealth out of China. “People say that if your money is in Mainland China, then it’s not real money,” he told me. “If you’re living inside a system that doesn’t respect personal property, then it’s never certain your money is actually yours.”
Weiqi had spent a lot of time thinking about property. His father had died for it, his mother devoted her life to fighting for it, and he had spent years in one of America’s finest universities studying its impact on the flow of capital. After all this time, he concluded that the Party’s respect for personal property would ultimately determine whether it succeeds or fails. “Once a government shows respect for personal property, then it gives itself a chance to build wealthy, powerful groups of people who won’t fear for their safety,” Weiqi explained. “After a period of time, these groups will become relatively reasonable and they’ll learn to compromise with each other in terms of setting up the new rules for a better country.”
If that were to happen, Weiqi predicted, then people might someday have the right to truly own their own land in China, instead of leasing it from what had become the biggest landlord in the world.
And while he had learned not to place too much faith in any one leader of his country, Weiqi was more encouraged by President Xi Jinping than of anyone else who had come before him. “When you grow up in a senior official’s family, you’re educated well and the chances are higher that you’ve become a reasonable person,” he said. “His ‘Chinese Dream’ is an ambition to bring China to a better place, and that’s great, but I don’t think the power of a single person can change China’s path at this stage. It really takes time, because, to be honest, it’s not just his country.”
Weiqi had plans to someday return to Shanghai. “I hate Hong Kong,” he confessed; “it’s a messed-up city.
“Most people here are miserable; they can’t even afford to own property. Shanghai has a lot of problems, too, but I’m still willing to live there, despite all that’s happened to my family. I’ve already been through a lot. I’m no longer scared.”
A warm breeze blew through my window. Outside, children ran after one another through the park below. I could hear their distant giggles from the eleventh floor. Above the trees, the sky was clear, and the pigeons’ afternoon flight was over. They had instinctually followed one another back to their cages down one of the lanes behind the park. While they were away, their master had cleaned their pens and filled their cups with seed. I imagined them hungrily pecking at their dinner, filling their stomachs, content to be back home.
FOR FIVE YEARS, Wang Xuesong’s American existence was neatly contained within a three-mile radius of the Flushing library. His world would soon expand. He would celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday by earning the equivalent of a high school diploma. Then, maybe a job that would pull him away from Queens. “I’m already going all the way to Manhattan for job training,” Wang told me with a confident smile.
Wang seemed more interested than ever in the world beyond Flushing. It was autumn of 2014, and I was visiting New York again. I was staying with my brother’s family in New Jersey, and I took the train into the city. Wang asked me how long it had taken, and whether I had run into any trouble on my journey. He asked a lot of questions about New Jersey. What was it like? Were the houses big? Did you see wild animals out there? Did any Chinese live there? He had only heard of the place. To a man who had never strayed beyond New York City, the Garden State sounded wild and exotic.
Wang’s unemployment benefits package included government-subsidized job training. For the next two years, he would venture into Manhattan once a week for classes in office management. “I suppose it’ll help me qualify to work at a front desk in a clinic or a hospital,” he surmised. “Or maybe at a law firm downtown or something like that.”
He sounded like a high school senior who had just begun to ponder the mysteries of the labor market. The last time I had seen him, half a year ago, he had taken an exam with his heart set on becoming a repair technician for the MTA. “I failed,” he told me without a hint of sadness in his voice. “My English wasn’t good enough.”
In the meantime, he had applied for part-time sales jobs at the Gap and at a duty-free shop at JFK Airport, but he hadn’t heard back from either.
Though Wang was beginning to venture out a little, he still insisted on meeting at the same bench we sat at last time, inside the window of the Flushing library. It was a late-autumn morning, and the leaves on the trees had begun to change colors. The street across from us was lined with shop fronts in Chinese characters: “Cuijiang City Supermarket,” “Bright Star Number One Beauty Salon,” “Peaceful Good Health Pharmacy,” and so on. Its foreignness reminded me of what the Street of Eternal Happiness was beginning to look like back in Shanghai, as more Western restaurants and cafés were opting to advertise themselves in English. Wang wore a cream-colored button-down shirt with a paisley pattern tucked into black dress pants. “These are your letters,” I said, handing him a plastic bag full of papers that sagged with the weight of a bowling ball.
Over the summer he had given the matter of the letters some thought, and when I called him from Shanghai to let him know I’d be in town again, he had mustered up the courage to ask, “W-w-would you mind making copies of them for me?”
“Wah!” he said, lifting the bag. “I didn’t know the
re were so many of them! This must have been very troublesome for you, carrying these all the way from Shanghai and then on your train trip from New Jersey!”
“Meiyou,” I replied, using the catchall Chinese word for “no.”
Wang reached into the bag and pulled out the stack, flipping through them. He stopped when he saw a letter written by his mother. She had etched “1960” at the top of the page. She was thirty-four years old. Wang was just two. “I remember my sisters telling me about this,” he said, pausing to read the rest of the letter. “The government had t-t-taken our home and we had to pay rent on it. They charged us 8.5 yuan a month. That was only a dollar, but my mother couldn’t even afford to pay that. Sh-she was raising six children—we were all so young.”
He placed the letter on his lap. “After a few months, o-o-officials from the housing department showed up. They told us if we didn’t pay, they’d send us to Gansu province. They promised there’d be jobs and houses there. Of course they were lying. My m-m-mother knew of people in the neighborhood who had g-g-gone to Gansu and ended up b-begging to survive before they escaped and made it back to Shanghai. My mother cried. She t-t-told the man she couldn’t do that to her children. They finally left us alone. Otherwise, we all would have ended up in G-g-gansu,” said Wang, his gaze lost in his mother’s handwriting. “The famine was t-t-terrible in Gansu—people were eating grass and tree bark and worse. So many people starved to death there. We p-p-probably would’ve died there, too.”
The province was among the mountains and high desert of China’s northwest. In a three-year period, more than a million people had starved there. Reports of cannibalism weren’t unusual among those who had survived.
I imagined Liu, crying in the doorway of her quiet lane in Shanghai, her children wondering about the strange man who had made their mother so sad. I pictured the official, deciding whether to go through with sending this woman and her children off to die in the countryside for being late on their rent. What had made him change his mind? Was it pity? Was it late in the afternoon of a long day and had he been too tired to complete the paperwork? Whatever it was, his split-second decision was the reason Wang and I were sitting here talking fifty-five years later, in a library on the other side of the world.
The fates of others had been decided that day, too. I asked Wang about his sisters. Big Sister, Sister Two, and Sister Four lived with their families in New York; their children were in college. Baby Sister—Wang’s sister who had been given away—had divorced and remarried. She had retired early and moved to Vancouver with her husband and daughter. “She was very good at business and made a lot of money. My older sisters are all doing well, too. They all own their own homes. In comparison, I’m the worst!” he said with a chuckle. “Here I am, nearly sixty years old, and still learning English!”
Wang felt he should have tried to study English when he had been young, but he admitted it would have been difficult, since school had often been canceled for political rallies when he was a teenager and English had been considered a language of the capitalist class. “English should become a universal language for the world,” Wang told me. “Much of the world already speaks it, and just imagine if everyone in the world all spoke the same language? So many international problems boil down to poor communication. There must be a solution.”
When he had arrived at his new home, all of his friends were Chinese. Five years later, he had befriended classmates from Russia, India, and Cuba. They often shared stories of their home countries, and had chatted about the world’s problems. “I have a business idea that probably seems a bit immature,” Wang admitted. “I’d like to start a dating company. My goal would be to introduce people from different countries to each other. I think it’d be better if someday everyone belongs to the same race and speaks the same language. There wouldn’t be any differences. Everyone would be equal.”
Wang sounded energized by the spirit of New York City. “However long that takes, what kind of government do you think people will have?” I asked him.
“Some of my friends here think the Chinese political system is more efficient,” Wang told me. “Nothing needs to be dragged on. One person can make a decision instead of a good idea being stalled by bickering from opposing parties.”
Wang paused to give the question more thought. “But if that one decision-maker isn’t good, or he doesn’t have enough knowledge about running a country and he makes bad decisions, then we’re all done,” he said. “I think a political system like the one in the United States is superior.”
Wang hadn’t voted yet. Becoming an American citizen would mean giving up his Chinese citizenship. Once he did that, he’d lose the property rights to his family’s home on the Street of Eternal Happiness.
Wang wrinkled his forehead in thought. “But I need to deal with this problem,” he said. “After all, one can only live in one place at a time. Once I’ve made the decision to call America my home, I suppose I’ll sell the old one.”
Home was calling. Wang had news for me, and he let it slip toward the end of our conversation on that autumn morning: “I just got married,” he told me softly. “My wife is in Guangdong. She hopes to come here next year for good.”
Wang looked embarrassed. He had always taken his filial duties seriously, and in a household without a father, he understood his role as his family’s only son. He had spent his life looking after his mother, taking on the duties of the husband she had lost. But his mother’s blank stares these past few years had taught him he was slowly losing his companion.
It was an arranged marriage. A friend of Wang’s had introduced the woman to him, and after months of chatting online, he had flown to the southern province of Guangdong to meet her. A few days later, the two had married in her hometown. She was a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée from the countryside. “She’s nineteen years younger than me!” he said, laughing. “She’s applying for a U.S. visa now.”
“Does she speak English?”
“Not really,” Wang said. “She can start out here working as a nurse. She speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, so that will help her get a job.”
In Flushing, speaking two Chinese languages was more useful than a command of English, and Wang’s unemployment and welfare benefits were more than enough for them to get by. “Do you have a picture of her?” I asked.
Wang couldn’t afford a smartphone, so he kept a few photos inside his wallet. He looked inside and realized he’d forgotten her photo. “I don’t have it here. Anyhow, she’s not very good-looking,” he said happily.
He seemed particularly pleased by this last point. Like many Chinese pairings, it was a marriage of convenience. The woman was from a poor region in northern Guangdong, and Wang knew his U.S. residency was the primary reason she would agree to marry someone nearly two decades her senior—if she were too pretty, Wang reasoned, he would constantly worry about her leaving him for someone else once she made it to New York.
“Do you want to have children?” I asked him.
Wang smiled. “That’s our wish,” he said, looking outside at the clear blue sky over New York City.
Wang carefully returned the copies of his parents’ letters to the plastic bag, unzipped his black duffel bag, and packed it neatly alongside his high school textbooks. Class was about to start. His friends were trickling into the library; they waved to us before descending the stairs to the classrooms below. On the other side of the planet, his wife was preparing for the journey of her life. Wang stood up and smiled. “Everyone needs a family,” he said, shaking my hand to say goodbye. “You can’t always be alone.”
In the ten years CK had been away from Hunan, his family had never asked him to come home. Then one morning in the winter of 2014, he got a phone call. “Grandma had a stroke,” his father told him. “Half her body’s paralyzed. We need you back home.”
CK’s father was feeding Grandma three times a day, pushing her wheelchair outside for air in the afternoons, and stumbling out of bed twice a night to
carry her to the bathroom. He could leave her side only for an hour or so each time. Meanwhile, his own health problems were mounting. He had suffered a minor heart attack and he was scheduled for surgery. CK was summoned home for a month to take care of Grandma.
CK could manage the accordion business by phone. 2nd Floor Your Sandwich was another story. His partner, Max, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant and was headed back to his hometown to marry. “You’re on your own,” he had told CK.
The father-to-be would become a minority shareholder, and CK would take over day-to-day operations. With months of hard work ahead, CK knew this might be the last time he would see his grandmother. He packed his suitcase full of books about esoteric Tibetan Buddhism, tossed in a few changes of clothing, boarded a high-speed train, and rode 750 miles to Hunan.
It was a respite from the temptations of the city. Since we’d journeyed to see his master together, he’d made several more pilgrimages to the temple, and CK seemed healthier and much happier. After closing his shop for the day, he’d been accustomed to heading out for drinks with friends, but lately he preferred to go home to meditate before bedtime.
“Born for faith, Fight for faith, Die for faith,” proclaimed his WeChat profile. Posts that once chronicled night after night of partying now displayed photos of him and his brothers-in-learning building extensions to his master’s temple. “We’re installing 1080 Sakayami statues inside the upper roof,” read one post. “If anyone wants to leave a virtuous gift for us, it’s RMB500 per statue. Your honorable name will be carved on the lotus seat of each statue. May Buddha preserve you!”
GRANDMA WAS NINETY years old. CK had heard her tell stories about her privileged childhood. She was the daughter of a banker and the family chauffeur would escort her to a private girls’ school each day. After she graduated, she married a literature professor. She was twenty-five years old when the Communists took China, seized her family’s assets, and slapped the label of “landlord class” onto her family. The Red Guards assigned her family a new label several years later: “counterrevolutionary.” As a young man, CK’s grandfather had been recruited as a soldier for the Kuomintang, who had seized control of his hometown, and fought the Communists.