Zhuang did not, at first, like Yang Semao. The older man was too sure of himself, too controlling, too ready to tell Zhuang what to do. The petitioning had, up to this point, been an adventure. Zhuang had been a respected leader, alongside Hong Ruichao. Then Yang arrived with his own ideas, his own lofty rhetoric about democracy, and inserted himself at the top of the protest hierarchy. The movement had grown. It didn’t belong only to Zhuang and his friends anymore. It was difficult to sit back and let someone else take the lead.
Yang, however, was more focused than Zhuang. He quit his job and sold off his stake in his company to help organize the young petitioners. He was concerned about the land grabs, but focused mainly on democracy. He thought the problems that Wukan faced could be solved only by a local election. He pushed the group of young protesters to expand their message. And he pushed their plans for protest forward. Yang didn’t put much stock in petitioning. Democracy required people on the street.
For the first Wukan protest, the group kept their expectations modest. They were edging toward a line they could not precisely locate, moving from creating a nuisance to organizing real and dangerous dissent. They planned to gather a few hundred people in the village and march to the golden-domed government offices in Lufeng. They would show the local government that they were not giving up, then return home. Zhuang posted flyers anonymously in the days before the protest was scheduled. Yang bought a ream of paper that everyone could sign to express their support for the petitioners. The protest was a departure, Zhuang knew, but an exciting one. And then, on September 21, 2011, three thousand people showed up.
The organizers watched as the crowd filed into the square in front of the village temple. They improvised. People shouted through bullhorns and told the crowd where they were marching. They poured down past the temple onto the main road, talkative and disorderly, slogans about land coming and going, picking up in one spot and then dying down, only to be taken up somewhere farther down the line.
The flow of marchers broke against the government gates, and an official told them to go talk to their village head if they were unhappy. “I don’t know anything about it!” the man said.
So the crowd marched back and found the deputy village chief already in an argument with Yang Semao. “Give back our land!” they shouted.
The official pretended not to know what they were talking about. He got flustered and red in the face. “We didn’t sell the land! If you want to go smash the Hetai Industrial Park, I don’t care. Go smash it!”
Three thousand villagers took a collective breath and then followed the instructions of their village councilman. They ran back down the road and jumped onto their scooters and motorcycles. They smashed the temporary housing for the construction workers. They smashed the construction equipment. They went to a pig farm and a restaurant owned by a rich villager and smashed those. They overturned cars. Police drove in from Lufeng, and villagers overturned their cars. Some of the rioters were detained and held inside a police station located in the middle of the village, as a crowd grew outside. Some of the original Hot Blooded Youth members fled the village, afraid they would be punished.
Zhuang Liehong had known it was out of control from the moment thousands of people showed up in the square. He was elated and overwhelmed. He yelled directions at the rioters, telling everyone he met that they could smash things, but they couldn’t steal. One villager grabbed a wine bottle out of a cabinet and, grinning at Zhuang, chugged most of it, then smashed the bottle on the floor.
4
In Queens
皇后区 / Huánghòu Qū
WINTER 2014
Flushing, Queens, lies at the end of the number 7 train, under the shadow of a giant metal globe that someone, in 1964, named the Unisphere. It was mounted atop a rehabilitated ash heap, a trash pile so notorious that it was the likely inspiration for the “Valley of Ashes” described in The Great Gatsby, lying along the road from West Egg to New York City. The Unisphere was the crowning structure of the 1964 World’s Fair. Lights were placed to indicate capital cities, and circles of steel around it represented orbiting satellites, an intended tribute to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe, in an expanding universe.”
Three hundred years before the World’s Fair, Flushing was a small Dutch settlement nestled on the forested banks of the East River. It became, in 1657, a haven for the Quakers who had been banned by the last acting director-general of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant. (He banished them, initially, to Rhode Island, but the Quakers circled back.) From their new home, the group released the first declaration of religious freedom penned in the United States. In what came to be known as the Flushing Remonstrance, the Quakers condemned “hatred, war, and bondage.” The laws of love, peace, and liberty extended to everyone, they wrote, including “Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sonnes of Adam.”
Flushing, in the centuries that followed the Quaker agitation, had been reinvented as a horticultural center full of orchards and nurseries, then was transformed once again by the enormous ash heap on the edge of the neighborhood. The ash heap, in turn, was transformed to make way for the 1939 World’s Fair, and then, in 1946, the park served as the temporary headquarters of the newly formed United Nations.
Neither the ash nor the nurseries lent themselves, particularly, to the formation of a Chinese community. The UN, on the other hand, did. Taiwanese diplomats made their homes in the neighborhood. And over time, that handful of anchor families attracted other immigrants from Taiwan—people who were more likely to speak English than they were Cantonese and who, as a consequence, felt unwelcome in Manhattan’s Chinatown. For the most part, these early immigrants were educated. They had money or the means to make it. They invested in real estate and opened restaurants. When immigrants came from other parts of China—places where they spoke Mandarin rather than Cantonese or Fujianese—Queens beckoned. By 2014 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated there were more than two hundred thousand Chinese people living in the borough.
From where I lived in Brooklyn, it took over an hour on trains and buses to get to Flushing. Zhuang and Little Yan would have to switch trains twice or start out on a bus. They would have to decipher a maze of signs that could confuse even English-speaking newcomers. Zhuang grinned at me in the morning, apologetically. “We are such an annoyance,” he said, tiptoeing toward our bathroom. “But if you show us once, we can do it by ourselves next time!”
Zhuang had not arrived in the United States preoccupied with making money. He did not obsess over exchange rates and changing dollars to yuan. He had the luxury of arriving free of debt, having never met a human trafficker. These were advantages over other working-class Chinese immigrants, many of whom had paid tens of thousands of dollars to get a visa. On the other hand, Zhuang knew nothing about the United States. He knew no one who had done what he was attempting to do. New immigrants tend to follow roads traveled by family members or friends who came before them. Zhuang was busy forging his own way.
One of the most useful suggestions offered by the women at the Chinese-run laundry around the corner from my house was that I go buy a Mandarin-language newspaper. The manager threw out a few names while eating her lunch, her eyes darting back and forth from the Qing Dynasty drama she was watching on her phone. “You could try the Singtao Daily,” she said. “Or the World Journal.”
So a few days before Zhuang’s arrival, I made a visit to one of the pharmacies on Mott Street in Manhattan. The neighborhood was in the full flush of its Lunar New Year celebrations, and the streets were covered in glitter. “You can’t set off actual fireworks in New York,” the shopkeeper said woefully. “In China, every street is full of explosions!”
I held on to the papers for a few days and brought them out to Zhuang and Little Yan on their first morning. When they avoided the bagels I had brought for breakfast, I served them tea instead, and Little Yan crouched over her cup and f
lipped through the sections of the two papers. She moved past articles welcoming the Year of the Horse; skipped over photos of Taiwanese-American business leaders gathered, clapping, in a middle school auditorium; and thumbed through to the classifieds in the back. There were ads for all three of the most popular Chinese neighborhoods: Sunset Park, Manhattan, and Queens. There were listings for jobs, vocational schools, real estate agents, and lawyers specializing in immigration. In the real estate section for Flushing, she moved slowly, borrowing a pen so she could carefully underline some of the listings.
The advertisements in the two newspapers offered a quick survey of life in the neighborhood. There were hostels, called family hotels, where beds ran from ten dollars a night to about thirty. The hostels were stuffed into apartment buildings, some separating rooms with curtains, the cheaper ones stacking bunks toward the ceiling. There were men-only hostels and ones that charged slightly extra for shared rooms that boasted the luxury of an attached bathroom. The private rooms—rented by the month rather than by the night—were in shared apartments or houses. Here shared bathrooms and kitchens were almost a given, and rents went up closer to the heart of the neighborhood.
Zhuang looked over his wife’s shoulder at the listings. “Six hundred dollars?” he said, pointing at a listing she had circled. “And look, it has a shared bathroom.” A married couple, Zhuang thought, should always have their own bathroom. It was part of being a respectable adult. “Especially,” he said, “for six hundred U.S. dollars every month.”
Zhuang had arrived in New York with a figure in his head. He hoped to pay about four hundred dollars a month and save some of the money he had brought with him. After the plane tickets, the hotels, and the meals, he had a little under twenty thousand dollars left from his Wukan land sale. But he wasn’t sure he could get a job. They would need to buy things to set up their new home. They would have to eat and live. He wanted to make his small fortune last.
With just the tourist visas he and Little Yan were carrying in their passports, Zhuang imagined the path to becoming an official resident would take some time. Meanwhile he had a list of things he wanted to accomplish. He saw no point in sitting around and looking at the newspaper, avoiding the cold. “We will go to Flushing,” he said, “and we will walk around until we find a real estate office. I want to open a bank account and then find a cell phone…then an apartment…then a green card.” He was sorry they couldn’t find their way themselves, but he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to read the subway signs. He would learn English soon, he promised.
By the time we left the house that morning, Zhuang and Little Yan were starving. They had barely eaten dinner and had shunned the bagels. We wandered out into the icy midmorning, Zhuang and Little Yan wearing tennis shoes, making their way carefully on the ice. We turned off a side street onto Nostrand Avenue, and I jokingly pointed out a Japanese restaurant called Sakura Tokyo that, I had recently discovered, was run by a Chinese family. Virtually no Chinese immigrants lived in my neighborhood, but the more I paid attention, the more Chinese businesses I discovered near our home. There was the laundry, two takeout restaurants, a 99-cent store, and a fish market. Chinese bosses drove vans in every morning from Flushing and Sunset Park, depositing their employees or working themselves, in the kitchen or behind the cash register.
Zhuang paused under the paper lanterns hanging outside Sakura Tokyo. He laughed half-heartedly and exchanged looks with his wife.
Little Yan turned. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, aiming the question at me, the only one of the three of us who had eaten breakfast. “You should at least have a little something.”
They pulled open the door to the restaurant, passing a window plastered with sushi dishes. The menu was loosely Japanese, and photos of noodles, rice bowls, and sashimi platters decorated the walls. Three tables were squeezed into the front room; a young woman and an older man in a white paper hat staffed a little counter toward the back. Cooks clanged pans in a back kitchen, occasionally visible through the Japanese curtain that covered the doorway. A deliveryman separated boxes of food into plastic bags on a foldout table along the back wall.
Zhuang looked at the photos on the wall, walked straight up to the young woman at the counter, and grinned. “Good morning!” he said. It couldn’t be common for two Chinese people to wander in on this particular street in Brooklyn. “What do you have that suits the Chinese palate?” he asked. “I don’t want anything too warming.” His throat had been hurting, and he was pretty sure he needed to adjust his diet to accommodate the cold weather and the sudden lack of tea. The woman behind the counter suggested noodles. Zhuang and Little Yan each ordered a bowl and settled into one of the tables in the tiny dining space. Zhuang ate his noodles and refilled a tiny plastic cup of barley tea over and over. “Your tea is excellent!” he complimented the waitress. (“They were very happy when I said that,” he said, once we finished up and left the restaurant.) He and Little Yan were very happy with the noodles. For the rest of the week, they would eat all their meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—at Sakura Tokyo.
The second stop, on the walk to the subway, was the laundromat. Little Yan was interested in seeing the inside of one—she couldn’t imagine what they looked like. We walked in to meet the small army of laundry-folders. “These are your friends?” the manager asked me. She told them about the room her sister had to rent. The woman was from Fujian, a coastal province in China that had experienced an exodus in the 1990s: entire villages emptied out as people spent fortunes to find their way to the United States. The apartment the manager was offering was in Sunset Park, an immigrant neighborhood dominated by Fujianese. It had a shared bathroom and kitchen and was renting for five hundred dollars.
“We are going to Flushing today,” Zhuang said, worried that the woman was trying to cheat them. “I think we want to live in Flushing.”
The woman nodded and took them around the laundromat, explaining how to work the machines.
Little Yan peered curiously at the women folding clothes. She asked about work. “Here you make about a thousand dollars a month,” the woman told them. “If you don’t have papers and you don’t speak English, that’s about what you make.” Little Yan followed up with a question about how the machines worked, but Zhuang narrowed his eyes. “Well, we don’t need to look for jobs now,” he said. “We should probably be on our way.” The laundry ladies were not family, he explained—they were not from Wukan. It could be dangerous to take them at their word. Zhuang did not want to be a gullible villager in the big city.
* * *
• • •
New York City has the largest Chinese population of any city in the United States. Immigrants from China make up the second-largest (after immigrants from the Dominican Republic) and fastest-growing immigrant group. The city has no single Chinatown. If you take the term in its most expansive sense—designating an enclave of Chinese immigrants—there are several. In each neighborhood the working class built upon the ones that came before it. Manhattan’s Chinatown came first, settled by immigrants from southern China. Nearly a century later, after immigration restrictions had been imposed and then loosened, people from Fujian came en masse, thousands of people traversing the globe on airplanes and rickety boats to sneak over borders and onto New York’s beaches and docks.
When, in the 1990s, the influx of Fujianese found Manhattan too crowded, they moved along the N train into the Brooklyn neighborhood called Sunset Park. They kept their ties to Manhattan through dollar vans and easy train access, traveling back to the old neighborhood to look for jobs and visit lawyers.
Zhuang had learned Cantonese when he moved to Shenzhen, and Little Yan had learned it in school. They could have, had Zhuang chosen to, fit in on the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where the dialect of Hong Kong and southern China still dominates. His local dialect is not far from the language spoken by the Fujianese—he could have made a home for hi
mself in Brooklyn alongside the immigrants from around Fuzhou. But Zhuang had heard about Flushing: the neighborhood in Queens had developed a reputation as the best landing spot for the truly rootless.
That morning the three of us wandered onto the platform at the Nostrand Avenue A/C subway stop, and Zhuang cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. Little Yan and I found two seats together, and Zhuang settled down across from us. The arrangement didn’t last long. Whenever Zhuang got a seat, five minutes later he would offer it to someone else. He stood up for an elderly man and then a woman weighed down with shopping bags. Somewhere under the East River, he jumped up when a woman wrapped in three coats and toting a baby wandered down the length of the subway car, asking for money. He gestured gallantly toward the empty seat as she pushed her cardboard sign toward him. They looked at each other, both confused, and the woman scurried off the train at the next stop. Zhuang crossed the subway car, bewildered.
Little Yan discreetly pointed out all the different hair colors in evidence on the train. She had never, she admitted, met a black person before. There was an African community in Guangzhou, she explained, but she had never spent much time there. When Little Yan thought about it, she hadn’t met that many white people, either. “How would I talk to them anyway?” she said, shrugging. She paused for a moment, then returned to the topic of clean clothes.
If you take the term Chinatown in its strictest sense rather than its most inclusive, Flushing is no Chinatown at all. The word occupies a particular place in U.S. history and has an attending folklore. America’s Chinatowns were built on the opening and closing of doors, the mix of opportunity and xenophobia that greeted Chinese immigrants to the United States. In the popular imagination of many Americans, their neighborhoods were mythologized as impoverished and densely packed, cut off from the rest of the United States, places with a history of smoky alleyways, criminal networks, and opium dens. (A 1903 guide to eating chop suey in the New York Times went so far as to interview a policeman about the safety of eating at Chinese-run restaurants.) Today’s Chinatowns are at once immigrant enclaves and tourist destinations, with entrances marked by shiny red pagoda-topped arches.
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