Patriot Number One

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by Lauren Hilgers


  When he went back to his village, he applied for two passports. He stood in line for over an hour, and when he was face to face with the agent, the man barely looked at his name. He purchased two suitcases in his-and-hers pink and black and hid them, just in case. He researched the weather in New York, and Little Yan invested in leggings that were nearly an inch thick with padding. They bought impossibly puffy coats, the volume-to-warmth ratio as high as might be expected in a region where winter bottoms out around fifty degrees Fahrenheit. In with his clothes, Zhuang stuck a little clay teapot, some small cups, and a plastic bag full of tea leaves. Other necessities would be easy to come by in New York. There would be time for everything once they arrived.

  * * *

  • • •

  I did not set out to befriend Zhuang Liehong. When we first met, I was visiting his village to research a magazine story about the Wukan Village protests, the mini-revolution that Zhuang had helped lead. I was on my way to the village council office, a salmon pink affair on the eastern side of the village, when I passed his tea shop. The doors were wide open, and music was pouring out. It was otherwise a hot, sleepy day, and I paused at the noise. Zhuang’s head popped around the expanse of his wooden desk, a cigarette hanging loosely from his lips, and he waved me inside. In no time, my cell phone was hidden in back, and I was sitting on a pleather stool, sipping tea out of a thimble-size cup and listening to Zhuang chatter in rapid Mandarin, giving his account of the previous two years. “I always knew I wasn’t suited for government,” he told me right away, adopting a more serious air while he selected a video to play on his computer and blast over his speakers. He haphazardly settled on a video in French that appeared to be about Marie Curie.

  “Have you ever watched the Chinese period dramas on TV?” he asked me, half-shouting over the sound of a French man speaking in a semimonotone. Zhuang was referring to a genre of Chinese television that imagined China’s imperial past as full of poisoners, wise old men, and young martial arts masters, usually just coming into their own. In that narrative, he explained, he was like the young heroes. “I am more a swordsman!” he shouted. “I’ve never had the patience to be a village head.” As a member of the village council, Zhuang had been in charge of village security and trash disposal.

  Zhuang had made friends with reporters from Hong Kong and Germany. He had done interviews with the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post, Reuters, Radio Free Asia, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Le Monde, and others. He kept the phone numbers of students who visited the village and sat down with him in his tea shop. And he was persistent in his hospitality. I visited the village a handful of times over the next year and always, at one point or another, ended up with Zhuang. He invited me to eat fresh shrimp in his one-room apartment, the adjacent concrete courtyard half covered in debris from the construction that was constantly going on in the village. I held his baby and chatted with Little Yan as she cooked in their tiny kitchen—a structure added to the outside of the building as an afterthought. I drank endless small cups of tea. And then I moved from Shanghai, where I had been living for six years, to New York. We had kept in touch only sporadically. But then Zhuang’s plans solidified. He had many journalist friends to choose from in Hong Kong. He knew filmmakers in Beijing and foreign correspondents in Shanghai. But as he got closer to his date of departure, he realized that I was the only person he knew in the United States.

  I was living in Brooklyn when two photos arrived over a messaging app that Zhuang used. They had been sent with no explanation. One photo showed Zhuang and Little Yan standing by a beach. Little Yan was scowling into the wind, the face she makes to hide her underbite. She was wearing a fake Chanel sweater with fake pearl buttons, and Zhuang was standing beside her, grinning widely in one of his best button-down shirts. In the second photo, Zhuang was posed, indoors, next to a red Harley-Davidson, still wearing the button-down shirt, still grinning. They could have been in a mall anywhere in the world, but he looked thrilled to be there.

  I might have dismissed the photos as a mistake, but the next day Zhuang followed up with a phone call. It came from a strange number, and his voice crackled and echoed over the connection. He could have been calling from another world. “We are in Hawaii! We might be seeing you in New York soon!” He laughed. “Someone is letting me borrow their phone! I will contact you later!” He suggested we use Skype for our next call, then hung up. I was too slow to pick up on it at the time, but Zhuang was giving me advance notice, indirect and polite, that he was on his way to my doorstep.

  Zhuang had, in fact, told me about his plans when I saw him in Wukan, but I had not taken him seriously. He had popped out of his tea shop and asked me to meet him in secret, later, at his friend’s house to discuss the first of his escape plans. Our phones were hidden, and we sat, conspiratorially, in the corner of a room packed with metal bunk beds. We whispered while Zhuang’s friend splayed out beside us, playing games on her phone. Zhuang balanced a stack of papers on his knees. “I have all the evidence in order,” he told me. “I just need someone to help me contact the U.S. consulate.”

  I shook my head. It was unrealistic. At the time, I thought I was letting him down gently. But I was making the same mistake that the corrupt village government had made two years earlier, just before the Wukan protests erupted: I was telling myself that Zhuang was all talk.

  To get to the United States, Zhuang had decided a group tour would provide a good cover and help with a visa. Most agencies required their customers to leave a large deposit, thus guaranteeing their return to China, but he had found a place that offered to waive the requirement. He borrowed a friend’s motorcycle and drove three hours to the outskirts of the city, where a girl in street clothes met him outside a storefront plastered with travel posters. He perused travel brochures with exaggerated interest. He made a show out of considering which trip would suit him, then held out the brochure he decided he liked. “For a honeymoon!” he said, grinning. The trip he selected would take them through Hawaii and California, ending in Las Vegas. The woman took down his information and a small payment. A few weeks later an agent met him at the U.S. consulate and walked him through his visa interview. Zhuang had been prepared to act excited about his vacation, but it wasn’t necessary. The visa was approved in what seemed like no time at all.

  In the few weeks before Zhuang and Little Yan left, he deposited his wife and son in Guangxi Province with Little Yan’s parents and went back to the village to quietly sell a modest plot of land he had purchased a few years earlier. Land values in Wukan had been skyrocketing, and he was paid nearly thirty thousand dollars. The money would be enough to cover the cost of the tour and leave a reasonable amount for the months they would spend in the United States before he could find a job. He bought multiple new cell phones and SIM cards. When he took the bus to Shenzhen, he told his uncle to drop his suitcases off at the station, concealed in large plastic sacks, and spoke loudly on the phone about helping out a friend with some packages. He did everything he could to maintain plausible deniability.

  Zhuang and Little Yan decided to make the most of the tour they had purchased, keeping up the charade until the last minute. If the pair deviated from the brochure’s itinerary, Zhuang felt sure it would alert someone back home and possibly derail their plans. They followed the tour guide out of Shenzhen to the Hong Kong International Airport. They entered the United States, ironically, at a stop in Guam, then continued on to Hawaii. The tour operator ensured that every restaurant they visited offered Chinese food. Every stop involved at least one shopping trip, so when Zhuang took his first photos in the United States, some were set against the backdrop of a mall.

  Zhuang and Little Yan were traveling with two wealthy factory bosses and their wives, a pair of teachers, and a couple planning on visiting their son in the United States. He and Little Yan were the poorest couple on the trip, but they tried to keep up. They shuttled through Honolulu, Sa
n Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas so quickly that they would wake up and have to remind themselves which city they were in. They withdrew piles of cash at every opportunity. Zhuang suspected the teachers and the couple visiting their son of motives similar to his own.

  As Zhuang and Little Yan’s tour group made its way to the West Coast, I received a few more phone calls and messages from Zhuang, all initially telegraphic: “We’re in San Francisco!” “We’re in Los Angeles!” As they traveled from Los Angeles to San Diego, his messages became more pointed.

  “Can you help us find a place to stay in New York?” he asked in a Skype message. “You are the only person we know in the city.”

  By the time Zhuang’s intent became clear, I had laid no groundwork, gained no helpful knowledge. I had spent six years in China and was doing my best, nearly two years into my life back in New York, not to cling to my experience as an expatriate. The only Chinese people I knew in Brooklyn ran the cavernous local laundry. Every day a handful of immigrant women wheeled around baskets full of clothes, folding them perfectly while standing at a long table surrounded by machines. An overflowing laundry bag would be returned so neatly packed that it was barely half the size. After a week of messages from Zhuang, I went to the laundry and asked the folding women for advice.

  “Are they coming with papers?” a woman from Fujian Province, with a ponytail that reached halfway down her back, asked. “Do they have family?” She offered to call her sister about a place to stay, then flagged me down a few days later with word of an apartment. It would cost five hundred dollars a month and had a shared bathroom and kitchen. “It’s a good deal,” she assured me. I tried to contact Zhuang over Skype, but the offer came out sounding miserly. So I wrote back and gave him my own address. He sent back an outsize yellow emoji—a giant thumbs-up.

  Little Yan spent the trip watching the other tourists. She had a feeling of being swept along, moving from place to place without effort, with no control over where she ended up. She stuffed all the dollars they withdrew into her pink pleather purse, preparing for Las Vegas, where they planned to jump ship. Once there, they spent a day touring and then caught a taxi to the Las Vegas airport. They had been practicing the words they would need for the occasion. Little Yan’s pronunciation was better, but when the time came, it was Zhuang who gave the driver directions, overpronouncing his consonants and adding a stutter to the center of the word—“Air-hah-por-tah.” They exited the taxi, smiling and pointing to determine how much money they owed, then walked in and squinted at the unreadable signs. Zhuang walked up to the closest airline desk and pronounced the second piece of vocabulary they had practiced in preparation for the day: “New York.”

  It took them what seemed like hours to communicate their destination. The people behind the desk spoke, at first, in complete sentences. Then single words. One of them ran off to find someone able to speak Mandarin. Finally they handed a phone over the counter, with someone who could translate on the other line. All the money Little Yan and Zhuang had stashed into her purse would not be enough for two tickets, so the attendant pointed out a nearby ATM.

  That night Zhuang told the tour guide that he and Little Yan would be staying in the United States for some extra holiday travel. The guide made them sign a form explaining that the cost of their return ticket would not be refunded and asked when they planned to return to China. Zhuang made something up. The next afternoon they joined the tour bus to the airport and said goodbye to everyone in the entry hall. Then they set off on their own, wandering the building and holding up their tickets for strangers to read, following pointing fingers until they found their gate.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang Liehong and Little Yan showed up at my apartment in Brooklyn in the middle of a snowstorm. Their flight had been delayed, and it was well past ten p.m. when a yellow cab crunched over the salt that had been spread on the road and stopped under a streetlight. I could see Zhuang from the window, stepping out of the car with false confidence, his huge coat pulled over a button-down shirt. He waved dollar bills at the cabbie, saying thank you over and over. He surveyed the sidewalk, and the snowdrifts piled up between parked cars, with his hands on his hips, his eyes scanning left and right nervously, a grin fixed on his face. Zhuang gets more blustery the more out of place he feels.

  My husband and I hurried to the door and helped them haul their suitcases over the snowbanks at the edge of the sidewalk. Zhuang shook my hand vigorously and introduced himself to my husband, who had lived in Shanghai with me and was busy acting like their arrival was the most natural thing in the world. Zhuang rolled his suitcases into our spare room and disappeared into our bathroom to fix his flattened hair. Little Yan picked at the pasta I had made for dinner and apologized, explaining that they just weren’t used to Western food. She sat carefully on the sofa, keeping herself as compact as her enormous puffy jacket allowed, until they went into the bedroom to sleep.

  The next morning Zhuang occupied the bathroom for forty-five minutes, turning on and off various faucets and emerging, finally, with his hair carefully spiked and his pant legs rolled up. Little Yan had joined me on the couch and had been quietly flipping through some Chinese-language newspapers I had purchased. We watched Zhuang back across the living room, toting a bag of toiletries that he had taken from a hotel during their travels. Little Yan smiled. “Before I got married, I assumed women were the ones who spent all their time in the bathroom,” she said. “Then I met Liehong.”

  Zhuang looked around the apartment quietly, avoiding the bagels and lox I had naïvely put out for breakfast. “Why do you have so many knives?” he asked, peering into the small kitchen. “We’ve never needed more than one knife.” Little Yan wondered about the absence of a washing machine. When I explained that we used a laundromat, she wondered how much clothing Americans must own, to go a week or two between washings. In Wukan she had done laundry almost every day, cleaning the sweat off the handful of outfits they owned. Zhuang went outside to smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk, in jeans and tennis shoes and without his puffy coat. He tested the piles of snow with his foot. It was twenty-three degrees, and he had never seen snow before. “It’s not cold!” he said upon coming back inside. “I really didn’t think it was too cold. I was expecting much worse!”

  2

  A Fisherman’s Son

  渔夫的儿子 / Yúfū de Érzi

  1983–2009

  Before Zhuang saw snow, before he boarded the boat to the Statue of Liberty, before he took pictures of himself next to the Wall Street bull, he had been a part-time crab fisherman in Wukan, a dusty village outpost along the coast of southern China. He had been born there in 1983, sometime in September or October—the office responsible for issuing identification in his hometown regularly entered dates incorrectly, out of either laziness or the hope that people would return to correct the mistake, offering bribes tucked into red envelopes. His mother had given birth at home, in a two-room house with a tile roof and dirt floors that the family was renting. It was dark and earthy inside, stained with smoke from the stove where Zhuang’s mother prepared meals. They put the new baby in the bedroom with them and their middle son. Zhuang’s eldest brother and his older sister slept in the main room. Outside, two pigs rooted in an entry courtyard, watched over by a yellow dog that came and went.

  Zhuang arrived in the village on the threshold of China’s economic opening. Wukan was close enough to the booming manufacturing center in Shenzhen that you could smell the coal-charged changes in the air. It was far enough away, however, that people in the village felt sidelined. Zhuang was destined, by virtue of the time and place of his birth, to be a migrant. He just did not expect to travel so far.

  Zhuang was the third son of a fisherman with a quick temper. Zhuang Songkun drank and gambled and yelled at his wife when things went wrong. His skin was leathery and tan from pulling up crabs in the sun, his brow
heavy and his mouth wide, stretched across the bottom half of his face in a set grimace. In a poor village, the family was poorer than most.

  Zhuang Songkun, like most fishermen in Wukan, ran a side business smuggling goods in from Hong Kong. Unlike most fishermen, Songkun also had a reputation as a bad business partner and a dishonest man. Even among family—hundreds of people in Wukan shared the last name Zhuang—Songkun was a man to avoid.

  Zhuang’s mother, on the other hand, barely registers as a presence in his memory. She worried about the pigs getting loose and her sons coming home by nightfall. She did everything—cleaning the family’s clothes, cooking meals, descaling fish—slowly, as though moving underwater. She quietly endured her husband’s moods and swings of fortune. Thinking back, Zhuang has trouble ascribing much of an inner life to his mother. He suspects she was at least a little bit stupid. Whether it was fair or not, from the moment he was born, Zhuang ranked above her in the family hierarchy. She was made to work and suffer. There wasn’t much use in talking about it.

  When Zhuang thinks about his home village, he prefers to remember it as it was in his childhood. Wukan had been truly rural, filled with orchards, gardens, and ramshackle fisheries. It was cooler then—shaded by groves of trees that would eventually give way to new construction. Children played and swam not far from their houses during the day while their parents farmed or went fishing. When it rained, unpaved alleys filled with puddles of unpredictable depth, and the croaking of bullfrogs echoed off the surrounding houses, a racket that could go on most of the night. At the center of the village, a nest of old houses were connected by narrow streets and punctuated by little rocky courtyards. Wukan had one main square and one good-size temple—a place where traveling troupes would stage Chinese operas or project black and white films on outdoor screens. A handful of other small temples were hidden among the houses, many of them barely more than heavy iron tubs set out for burning incense. Summers were hot and humid, and winters mild.

 

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