Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Zhuang, unlike his mother, was born excitable. He had a talent for mischief and ran unsupervised through the village while it was light outside and sometimes again well after dark. He trapped bullfrogs and climbed trees. He enlisted friends to help steal sweet potatoes from other people’s gardens and cook them in barrels. (A stolen sweet potato, they observed, tasted much better than any other kind.) In other boys, a talent for pranks and petty theft might have evolved into something criminal. But Zhuang had an acute sense of right and wrong, a sense of injustice that welled up inside him and made him speak up. He felt it when other boys taunted his second brother, who had a dragging limp and a foggy, good-natured mind, the result, his mother said, of a childhood illness. Zhuang would never be entirely sure what had happened—it was another thing that no one saw much use in talking about—but he spent his childhood outyelling bullies. Zhuang was small, but he could be loud.

  Zhuang’s sharpest memories are of the family’s nameless yellow dog—a scruffy, gangly mutt. He would call it home by leaning out the front door and shouting over and over, “Dogdogdogdog!” He had purchased the yellow dog from a neighbor for a few yuan and, along with his eldest brother, had taken the puppy to the local dump. It was customary, in Wukan, to wipe a puppy’s butt with a handful of garbage. The ritual was intended to leave the dog with a lifelong preference for cleanliness and an aversion to leaving home in favor of the trash heap. The animal grew up to be unusually loyal and smart. The only times it went back to the trash heap was when the pigs found their way out of the front courtyard. Fear of losing the pigs weighed heavily on Zhuang’s mother, and sensing her distress, the dog would track the pigs to where they were eating rubbish and lead them back, dragging one by its ear while the other came trotting after.

  Zhuang was only six when he left his dog behind in the village, but he remembers the day with clarity. His father loaded him onto a scooter, squeezed in with their belongings and his middle brother. He remembers setting out down the main road through the village, humid air in his face, and turning around to see his yellow dog loping after them. Zhuang’s father was moving the family to a port town a few hours away, a place where he could find better work. The dog kept up with the scooter through the slower village streets, but as soon as they turned onto a larger road, it fell behind. It chased them past the boundaries of the village. It ran hard, tongue hanging out, until it finally gave up and sat down by the side of the road. Zhuang watched the dog disappear behind them. His father had asked a family friend to look after it, but the dog ended up getting shuffled from home to home. A few years later the dog returned to one of the village dumps and ate rat poison.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Zhuang was born, Deng Xiaoping had launched the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. He offered cheap land and favorable tax treatment to foreign investors willing to put money into the new zone—at the time still just a cluster of villages on the edge of Hong Kong. And he offered the rest of China a chance to apply for temporary residency. He was giving people the freedom to move. It was 1989 when Zhuang’s father left Wukan. Compared to a lot of the other villagers, Zhuang Songkun had gotten the message rather late.

  The move was Zhuang’s earliest introduction to transience. China’s strict residency rules left him unable to attend school in the port town where his father had moved. So he was shuffled closer to home, moving from family member to family friend. He stayed with relatives in surrounding villages for months at a time, then moved back with his parents, then back to Wukan. He was just seven and already part of what people in China were calling “the floating population.” He had been raised to never quite belong anywhere besides his home village, yet he was never there for long.

  After Zhuang’s first year of school ended uncomfortably, with him unhappy in the care of an uncle, his parents sent him to his mother’s home village, a place called Shangchen. Zhuang remembers stripping to his underwear on the banks of the little river that ran through his grandparents’ village. He would wade into the shallow water with his grandfather, their backs tan and bare, the water going up to his waist at its deepest, the older man bending down to sweep his net back and forth. They would fill buckets with little fish and lug them back together, Zhuang scurrying after the old man, working hard to carry a load with his spindly arms. His grandmother would cook the fish up for dinner, and they would share it with neighbors. Zhuang would run out and buy his grandfather cigarettes. One pack, he still remembers, cost seven and a half yuan—a luxury no one would have considered a decade earlier.

  Even with his grandmother and grandfather watching after him, Zhuang worried about money. In the summer, he earned pocket money gathering cicadas, climbing trees that were dangerously close to the pools of night soil that farmers kept for fertilizer. He could sell the bugs to people who ground them up and ate them. Near the end of his time in Shangchen, he fell out of a tree and nearly drowned in one of the waiting pools of shit. When he arrived back home, stinking and breathless, his grandmother was furious.

  Zhuang loved his grandparents’ village, but he loved Wukan more. He loved the open-air dentist’s office along the central road and the noodle shops that served bowls half filled with fresh seafood. He loved the stubborn, bickering villagers who filled the streets in the afternoon, squatting on their haunches or sitting on plastic stools while they gambled, the clang of dice hitting the rim of metal bowls.

  People of ambition, however, did not stay in Wukan. By the time Zhuang was old enough to understand, he knew he would have to become his own person. He did not want to share his father’s reputation. He did not want to be limited to a life of pulling up crabs in the bay. He wanted to be respected.

  * * *

  • • •

  For Wukan, like most of the rest of China, opportunity required travel. China’s economic miracle was engineered to be lopsided. The cities that Deng Xiaoping opened to foreign investment boomed while others fell behind. City residents benefited from better schools, better healthcare, and higher incomes. Reforms allowed them to sell their government-issued housing, buy apartments in new high-rises, and start a booming real estate sector. And while all this was happening, rural China stayed poor. On average, a Chinese farmer in the late 1990s died nearly six years earlier than his urban counterpart. Rural children were and are far less likely to go to college. And Zhuang was part of this rural underclass.

  Getting from Wukan to Shenzhen required obtaining a special travel permit, and nearly without exception, every able-bodied boy in the village got it by the time he was sixteen. As a general rule, the earlier someone left the village for Shenzhen, the more successful they were. The earliest migrants had applied for jobs in factories before anyone else got there. They became managers and supervisors. They sent money back to the village and built impressive homes, all variations on the same floor plan. A Wukan man with money would build a three-story concrete and tile home with a large front courtyard. He would shut himself off from the rest of the village with a large concrete wall and a gleaming, polished steel door.

  It did not take long, however, for Shenzhen to fill up with migrants from all across China. Wukan villagers found themselves in competition with people from places that were poorer and more remote. The available pool of factory workers grew so large that people from the village, for the most part, did not bother. Instead, they set up side businesses in Shenzhen. They opened corner stores and stalls in local fish markets, feeding the tide of workers from other villages and provinces. As time went on and the streets grew saturated with similar shops, more and more villagers looked to their neighbors for connections and guidance. The most common venture for a Wukan villager in the big city became the storefront clothing shop.

  Zhuang grew up barely aware of the United States. America loomed somewhere past the shipping crates at the port where his father found work. Instead, he thought about Shenzhen and Guangdong.

  By th
e time he was sixteen, most of Zhuang’s friends had left for the city. He imagined the skyscrapers and highways and the money to be made. He had moved around so much that he had not yet finished middle school and could not imagine a world in which more education would benefit him or his family. No one in Wukan made it much past high school, and if Zhuang fell further behind, he would be embarrassingly old for the classroom. He would have to keep paying school fees. He worried that he had been a drain on everyone for too long—a burden on every cousin, friend, and family member who had taken him in.

  In Wukan Zhuang’s options were severely limited. His family had no land and no boat to take out in the bay. The only way for him to make money was to go to work on someone else’s boat. The only respectable thing for him to do was to follow all the young people who had already left the village to look for ways to make money.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang’s move to Shenzhen did not go as smoothly as planned. Every Wukan villager there relied on his village network to find a job, but Zhuang’s network had collapsed before he even left. The trouble began when his eldest brother moved to Shenzhen and got a job at a clothing shop owned by another Wukan villager. He struggled to balance his work with a developing heroin habit. At one point he complained to his father, Zhuang Songkun, that his boss was mistreating him. He was not paying him the agreed amount, not giving him the respect he was due. It was, in fact, disrespectful to the whole family, he said—a terrible loss of face.

  Zhuang Songkun, his temper smoldering, made the trip to Shenzhen. On the afternoon he showed up at the little storefront, he screamed at the shopowner in their local dialect. He flung his arms, pointing wildly. When the shopkeeper didn’t agree with his complaints, Zhuang Songkun tried to pull down the metal grate in front of the store. The pair struggled, yanking the grate up and down, shoving each other in the street. By the time Zhuang Songkun stalked off, his family’s reputation for troublemaking had solidified.

  Zhuang wanted to escape his father. He wanted to be a new man. But his father cast a long shadow.

  Back in Wukan, Zhuang bought new clothes and packed a few essentials. He spoke his goodbyes with such gravity that you would have thought he never expected to see his friends again. He longed to be an adult and return home unrecognizable. He caught a midsize bus at an unmarked spot on the side of the road, a place where people swarmed on with woven plastic bags. Sometimes it seemed as though the buses didn’t so much stop as get caught in some sticky gravitational force, the driver impatiently letting the wheels roll forward toward the city.

  Zhuang wanted to move to Shenzhen officially—not for a night of gambling in the low-slung fringes of the city center. He had applied for a permit to live there temporarily and appealed to an uncle with a small clothing shop. Zhuang imagined he would help out in the shop for a couple of months or, if that wasn’t possible, look for work with another relative. He had grown sensitive to soliciting help from his extended family, but he hoped that in a month or two he would become a seasoned entrepreneur, ready to strike out on his own. After he made it, he planned to be so generous, it would embarrass anyone who had ever begrudged him a bowl of rice.

  With his uncle on the bus to supervise, Zhuang stayed glued to the bus window as the farmland gave way abruptly. Dusty white and tan high-rises clustered around elevated highways, each covered in a grid of windows and tiny balconies. Mirrored glass towers varied the skyline. Zhuang thought Shenzhen was beautiful.

  When he got off the bus, Zhuang beamed at his uncle. He was already in the habit of trying to shift reality with the force of his own optimism. He grinned his lopsided grin when they reached his hosts’ apartment, a handful of cramped tile rooms atop the family-run shop, and received a lukewarm reception. He was stuffed into a room with one of their three children and offered no invitation to join the family meal. Zhuang smiled at his hosts when they equivocated about his job prospects. He acted confident as long as he could—to the point that his optimism started to slip into the territory of delusion.

  Out in the world, people from Wukan were generally willing to trust only other people from Wukan. If they were feeling expansive, they might include people from the surrounding county in their circle of friends. People outside these boundaries, it was understood, were predatory. It was easy to be cheated by someone whose customs you did not know. Zhuang learned this lesson when he was still a child and his father recruited him to travel to the outskirts of Shenzhen during Spring Festival. Every year Zhuang helped run a night of gambling, quietly monitoring some fixed dice at a table of people playing Fish Prawn Crab. He operated a little machine that shuffled the dice, rigged with magnets so that he could change the outcome. No one ever suspected the kid hovering over the gambling tables was helping cheat them out of their money.

  No one wanted to give another son of Zhuang Songkun a job. He slunk from relative to relative offering to help out at fish markets or to work as a security guard. Few of his relatives told him no directly. Instead they hemmed and hawed and skirted the issue. One man, with a business selling fish, told Zhuang he would contact him first when there was space for a new hire. A few days later Zhuang learned the man had hired another cousin from Wukan. Zhuang went home after a few weeks. He joined his father on a fishing boat and spent his nights in a shed behind his family’s rented house.

  The next few years of Zhuang’s life passed in a fog of work and humiliation. When the job with his father became too tense, he would get back on the bus to Shenzhen. It was a matter of which hell he preferred. In the city, he made a slim profit hawking train tickets at the station, catching a few hours’ sleep in a local park before the police kicked him awake. When he grew too dirty to stand it, he would stop by an aunt’s apartment and shower, ashamed of how bad he smelled. He sometimes fell asleep there, his head down on a little desk she kept in the apartment. His aunt was the only person in his extended family who helped him in his worst moments.

  Zhuang had seen the worst of his village, but he still loved it. He longed to win the respect of the family members who had rejected him—the people who had resented looking after him as a child, who refused him work as a teenager, and who had bullied his middle brother. He vowed not to be like them. His heart was big. He would be accepting of everyone, no matter their circumstances. He was determined to love his fellow villagers, but he would remain wary of the people around him. He held his moral sensibility—his determination to stand up to injustice—around him like armor.

  In Wukan, in order to escape from his father, Zhuang took a more dangerous job, on a boat that took him out into the choppy open ocean. He did it alone. He spent long, hot days setting crab traps and singing at the top of his lungs. He lay on the floor of the boat, looking up at the sky. When he was out on the bay, he thought, at least he didn’t have to deal with the demands of his family and the judgment of other villagers. It was a kind of freedom.

  Zhuang’s teenage years were his worst. He would say, looking back on them, that spending months sleeping in a park gave him perspective. He would never be as tired or as dirty as he was then. Life would never be as humiliating. But he was young then. He had no reputation. He had nothing to lose.

  By the time Zhuang reached his twenties, some of his school friends were coming into their own, and he no longer needed to rely on his father’s generation for work. He worked for a few months as a security guard at a factory, living in a tent. And then finally he found an opportunity in a nearby city called Shunde. A friend had started a small business selling cigarettes and booze to local shops. He invited Zhuang to buy his own scooter and help make deliveries. Within a year, Zhuang was running his own delivery business, making enough money to send some home and rent his own apartment. He made friends. He found a girlfriend and hosted people for tea. In Shunde, he began to turn his life around. And then, unexpectedly and without a great deal of forethought, Zhuang Liehong started a revolution.
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  Wukan! Wukan! Revolution

  革命 / Gémìng

  2008–SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

  On the night that Zhuang became Patriot Number One, the skies over Wukan Village were unusually clear. It was April 4, 2009, the night before Tomb Sweeping Festival, and the village houses were packed with family members come home to pay respect to their ancestors, the streets quiet following an evening of homecomings and big family meals. Zhuang had arrived from Shunde with a stack of papers so tall that, if placed on the ground, it nearly reached his knees. He had made thousands of copies of a letter entitled “Open Letter to the People of Wukan: We Are Not the Slaves of a Conquered Village.” “It doesn’t matter what generation you are in, or what place, you cannot avoid corrupt officials!” he had written. “Over ten thousand mu of collective land has gone missing!” He signed off with a pseudonym: Patriot Number One.

  Zhuang had arrived with only the bare outline of a plan. He borrowed an electric scooter from a friend and waited until three in the morning to slink out of his father’s ramshackle house. He wedged the papers between his legs and began a slow circuit of the village. He grabbed fistfuls of his open letter and let the breeze take them out of his hand. At first he went quietly and cautiously, keeping the headlight turned off, but as he wound his way through the village, he grew bolder. He tossed stacks of papers at doorways. He scattered the letter outside the village temple and around the police station. He buzzed through the alleys and drove through village squares. He had written, in the letter, about the sweet, freeing breath of Wukan air, and he felt it on his scooter. He raced out onto a larger road, past a string of fancy new seafood restaurants. He whipped around the contours of a single, out-of-place traffic roundabout. And then he hit a rock.