MORE PRAISE FOR PATRIOT NUMBER ONE
“Lauren Hilgers’s Patriot Number One tells a great story spanning China and America, shedding light on the most complex and tangled relationship between any two nations in the world. It’s a great yarn.”
—JOHN POMFRET, author of Chinese Lessons and The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom
“Patriot Number One is an intricate and engaging dual portrait of the struggles of New York Chinese working-class immigrants and the struggles of China’s village democracy. Its carefully rendered scenes offer a rare depth to worlds we know mostly from headlines.”
—JENNIFER 8. LEE, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
“The humanity, sly humor, and drama of Patriot Number One make it a delight to read. Its intertwined China-and-America narrative is revealing about both countries. This joins the list of books that easily convey larger messages through a vivid focus on the particular.”
—JAMES FALLOWS, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China and Our Towns
“Patriot Number One brilliantly captures the bittersweet combination of joy, sorrow, and transformation of Chinese immigrants in New York City. Lauren Hilgers’s vibrant, compassionate writing transports readers to the gritty streets and vertiginous world of the recently arrived, enabling you to see America with a set of new eyes.”
—ROB SCHMITZ, author of Street of Eternal Happiness; Shanghai correspondent, NPR
“Patriot Number One is a page-turning tale of the sub-world of exiled Chinese dissidents in American society. While Chinese immigration dates back generations, Lauren Hilgers has tapped into the more recent wave of Chinese political exiles and asylum seekers—and she astutely tracks their various struggles adjusting to life in America. A fascinating read.”
—DAVID SHAMBAUGH, author of China Goes Global; professor of political science, George Washington University
“ In Patriot Number One, Lauren Hilgers expertly weaves history and current events into a compelling human narrative, writing with clarity and compassion about how the outsized dreams of immigrants can collide with an indifferent world. True patriotism, this book shows us, means demanding better of the place that you love.”
—LAUREN MARKHAM, author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life
“Lauren Hilgers captures with poignancy and humor the courage of immigrants who reach for the American dream. As we follow the tale of Zhuang and his wife, Little Yan, we stumble along with them, suffering the indignities of those new to this culture and language, buoyed by their successes. The result is a touching and insightful portrait of modern Chinese immigrants and their community.”
—JEAN KWOK, author of Girl in Translation
Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Hilgers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780451496133
Ebook ISBN 9780451496157
Cover design by Michael Morris
Cover photograph by Juni Xu
v5.2
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FOR KAIZHI, AND FOR JUNE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Escape
逃逸 / Táoyì
Chapter 2: A Fisherman’s Son
渔夫的儿子 / Yúfū de Érzi
Chapter 3: Wukan! Wukan! Revolution
革命 / Gémìng
Chapter 4: In Queens
皇后区 / Huánghòu Qū
Chapter 5: Work
工作 / Gōngzuò
Chapter 6: The Chairman
主席 / Zhŭxí
Chapter 7: Sanctuary
避难所 / Bìnànsuŏ
Chapter 8: Wukan! Wukan! A Death
死亡 / Sĭwáng
Chapter 9: Little Yan
小燕 / Xiăo Yàn
Chapter 10: Brewing Tea
泡茶 / Pào Chá
Chapter 11: Fortress Besieged
围城 / Wéichéng
Chapter 12: Paper Sons
契约儿子 / Qìyuē Érzi
Chapter 13: Wukan! Wukan! Land and Committee
土地和村委会 / Tŭdi hé Cūnwĕihuì
Chapter 14: The Moon Represents My Heart
月亮代表我的心 / Yuèliang Dàibiăo Wŏ de Xīn
Chapter 15: Personal Shopping
代购 / Dàigōu
Chapter 16: Strangers
陌生人 / Mòshēngrén
Chapter 17: Services
服务 / Fúwù
Chapter 18: Wukan! Wukan! Rule of Law
法治 / Făzhì
Chapter 19: A Man of Wukan
乌坎人 / Wūkăn Rén
Chapter 20: Dissent
异议 / Yìyì
Chapter 21: Politics
政治 / Zhèngzhì
Chapter 22: Labors
劳动 / Láodong
Chapter 23: Blocking Traffic
拦车 / Lánchē
Chapter 24: Simplicity
单纯 / Dānchún
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
1
Escape
逃逸 / Táoyì
MARCH 2013–FEBRUARY 2014
Zhuang Liehong had made three plans to get from his village in China to New York. In the first, the American embassy would simply send someone to pick him up. He envisioned a midnight escape—cars waiting in the shadows along the uneven, trash-filled fields on the outskirts of his village. He felt sure, when he considered the plan, that the Americans would be sympathetic to his situation. He was a lover of democracy trapped in a corrupt corner of Guangdong Province. If the plan were to work, it would have to be secret. His friends would wake the next morning to find him vanished. By the time the news spread, he would be on a plane, heading toward a new life.
In a second plan, Zhuang would flee by sea. He had learned that Guam, a mere two thousand miles from the Guangdong coastline, was U.S. territory. This plan made it closer to execution: he went to work on a friend’s fishing boat in Wukan Bay in preparation—ten grueling hours on a wooden plank boat, fully exposed to the sun—and purchased slightly too much fuel each time, stockpiling it slowly, so no one would notice. He planned to buy two motors. “Just in case one died,” he said. “I would use one some of the time and then switch them. Sometimes I would use them both, and vrrrmm!” He would wait until the two months of the year when the intervening stretch of ocean was at its calmest, the swells low and rolling, the water undisturbed by typhoons. Then he would take a tiny boat out into the expanse of the South China Sea. He estimated the trip would take about ten days. He could make it, if he had to.
Zhuang was a man of Wukan Village, a proud former village leader on the ragged outskirts of Guangdong Province’s manufacturing boom. He was on the verge of thirty, stocky and compact, meticulous about his appearance but always slightly out of style. His crooked teeth gave away a childhood spent in poverty, but he was not self-co
nscious about them. He grinned while greeting people on the street, pouring tea in his tea shop, or singing at the local KTV. He smiled relentlessly in the face of danger or embarrassment. He suffered from the occasional lapse in reading social cues and fought it with volume, warmth, and a strong handshake.
During the summer of 2013, paranoia overtook Zhuang’s home village, and he recognized the feeling of trouble on the horizon. The shadowy forces of the county-level government—people he had rebelled against a few years before—were returning to Wukan. His friends were sure that their phones had been tapped by local security forces, the lackeys of corrupt officials. A propaganda official had taken up residence in a local school. Zhuang took the extra precaution of hiding his cell phone in the back of his tea shop whenever he discussed politics. He had heard rumors that government spies could turn them on remotely and listen in.
There was a time when Zhuang had run headlong into political turmoil. He had led protests, helped spark at least one riot, and argued with police interrogators over cigarettes. He had seen his friends kidnapped by thugs and his village invaded, and he had mourned a friend who died in police custody. But now Zhuang had a wife and a son. Now he understood the consequences of protest and revolution. He did not want to end up in jail, fearing for his life, worrying about his family. So he made plans and counterplans. He schemed while sitting in his tea shop, a storefront business he had opened along the smaller of the two main arteries that ran through his village. He pulled up the storefront barrier and sat behind sliding glass doors, watching the rain hit the metal awnings that shaded the shops, and the sun return to bake the scoured concrete of the lane. Zhuang first opened the shop in late 2012, when it was nice out and the political pressure more remote. He left the glass doors open to the street and blasted Michael Jackson. He brewed pot after pot of tea, serving it to his friends, who threw around cigarettes before they sat down on the pleather-encased stools Zhuang had placed around a monstrous wooden desk.
Later, the more worried Zhuang grew, the more likely it was you’d find the store shuttered. Eventually, as the pressure increased, he gave up the business entirely and planned in his tiny apartment, still serving tea to passing friends, watching his son struggle to maintain a wobbly sit, and doing his best to put his schemes into action.
Zhuang would subsequently tell people that, as he thought it over in his shop, he considered many possible destinations. An increasing number of Chinese emigrants were choosing Australia as a new home. Germany, he had heard, was welcoming. But the interest was passing. The moment he decided to leave Wukan Village, he thought of the United States. It had an allure no other country could match. It was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own. He had to whisper when he said it: America. He had heard its asylum policies were favorable, and he understood it to be a wealthy country that took care of its citizens. Work would be easy to find there. People would be friendly. Some might even know his name. He imagined a warm welcome from Western democracy advocates. He thought of returning to Wukan years later, a success. He envisioned himself on a boat passing Liberty Island, a little windblown and visibly, palpably free.
At the tail end of his plan, the point at which it trailed off into a haze of hard work, success, and prosperity, was Flushing, Queens. Zhuang had carried out his scheming largely online, and had been wise enough to realize that New York City was too large a place to approach uninformed. He had skimmed through online discussion boards and squinted his one nearsighted eye at photographs. Manhattan’s Chinatown, he decided, would be too dense and urban for his village sensibilities, and in the center of the city, real estate would most likely be expensive. Flushing, on the other hand, had become the destination of choice for most working-class immigrants from Mainland China. He looked up photos and saw a clutter of signs in Mandarin. He saw restaurants, driving schools, supermarkets, and even a sign for the Democratic Party of China. He made up his mind that this, at least temporarily, would be his destination in the United States.
Flushing, as far as Zhuang understood it, was a new, more modern kind of Chinatown. It was dominated by the working class, the result of an influx of new immigrants from new parts of China—inland and northern provinces that had little history of exploration or emigration overseas. Flushing wasn’t controlled by the family-based patronage systems that had once ruled Manhattan’s Chinatown or by the human smugglers who had brought in tens of thousands of Fujianese in the 1990s. It was a neighborhood where people would speak Zhuang’s language and the food would suit his palate. There would be opportunities for work and a community of activists who would respect him. He would make friends, explore the neighborhood, and plan his next steps from there.
Zhuang had no family in the United States. He spoke no English and had never graduated from middle school. But he did not worry that he might get lost in a crowd of new arrivals or have to struggle to find work. After all, he had the advantage of being at least a little famous. Journalists had been coming to his village since 2011, when he had helped catalyze a particularly explosive protest. He had given interviews and appeared on Chinese-language television. He would wait until he got to the United States to contact the journalists he knew and make a statement, but he imagined it would create quite an impression—a man of Wukan in New York City.
* * *
• • •
Zhuang’s third plan, the one that would finally bring him to New York, was the simplest and least flamboyant: he would acquire two tourist visas to the United States, one for himself and the other for his wife, Little Yan. This plan had none of the daring of a maritime or midnight escape. Its difficulties were largely bureaucratic. Zhuang had to hope that the local office would ignore his history of troublemaking and issue him a passport, and that the nearest U.S. consulate would grant them the visas. Then he and Little Yan would have to find a place to keep their infant son, Kaizhi, safe. And then the pair would join a tour group. Their exit from China would be led by a distracted young woman hoisting a tiny stuffed bear on a pole, bobbing through the crowds in one of Shenzhen’s ferry ports.
If Zhuang had taken a boat, he would have traveled alone—it would have been too dangerous for Little Yan to come with him. Once he decided to go by air, however, he felt they should travel as a couple. He presented the plan to his wife one night, sitting on the long wooden bench that passed for a sofa in most Wukan homes. Baby Kaizhi was asleep on their metal-framed bed. He had just started to crawl, military style, around their one-room apartment during the day, bent on exploring the small concrete courtyard. Kaizhi regarded the outside world with great seriousness. He grabbed leaves and looked at Little Yan before shoving them into his mouth. He rarely cried. He slept well. Little Yan could watch him all day long and not feel bored. She did not want to leave China.
Little Yan had known Zhuang for three years, and for three years she had stood in flattering relief to her husband. She was quiet and petite; pretty, but with a slight underbite that made her shy about smiling. She had grown up in a village in Guangxi Province, one even smaller and less prosperous than Wukan. She allowed Zhuang an air of worldliness. He could drive the conversation while she happily cooked for his friends and took care of their son. She didn’t make too many demands or spend too much money. And she appreciated his dogged sense of right and wrong. He was honest, which was more than Little Yan could say for a lot of the men she had met in Guangdong Province.
When Zhuang described his plan, Little Yan had concerns that came in quick succession, neatly pricking holes in his confidence. He had been prepared for some questions—he had thought carefully about what to do with their son—but she was persistent. She asked why she and Kaizhi couldn’t follow him to the United States after he got settled. She wondered how hard it would be to get by in an English-speaking country with an English vocabulary that was almost nonexistent. She had studied the language in high school but could barely remember a word. She wanted
him to delay so she could take classes.
Little Yan had come to understand that the more stung Zhuang felt, the quicker and louder he was with his defenses. “You don’t understand at all!” he told her. He did not want the local government to suspect the couple were planning to run, he said. He worried that any delay could put him in further danger. And she was dense if she didn’t think he was in danger. He felt sure that, the moment he gave them an excuse, local officials would send goons to arrest him. And his fiery nature would eventually give them an excuse.
Zhuang was more careful when he talked about Kaizhi. It was natural, he thought, that Little Yan would worry about their son—she would always be connected to him. But the affection between two grown people might not survive across an ocean. Kaizhi could stay with Little Yan’s parents, who would take good care of their grandson, he told her, but no one could help the two of them keep up their relationship when they were separated. It could take him years to get a green card. They would find a Chinese neighborhood, he would look for work on a fishing boat, and she could study English. Kaizhi would come as soon as they could bring him over.
“Suan le ba,” she said, mid-discussion. It doesn’t matter.
It was a terrible choice—between her husband and her son—but she did not blame Zhuang for forcing it. He made his points, and she accepted them. If he could make the escape happen, Little Yan would go with him.
Escape to America had to be undertaken in steps, each with the potential to derail the entire undertaking. Zhuang was so nervous about applying for a passport that he tested the waters by first applying for a permit to visit Hong Kong. It came in a little blue booklet that said Travel Permit on the front. He then took a ferry from Shenzhen into Kowloon and wandered the streets for a few nervous days. He met with a handful of journalists he knew from his days as a protest leader and told them about his plan. He asked them to help him keep a low profile—Zhuang had gotten the travel documents, he guessed, because local officials were too busy to monitor him, and he didn’t want to give them a reason to start paying attention. He talked loudly on the phone about his vacation plans, in case someone was listening in.
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