Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Flushing, however, offers little to the curious tourist. Its restaurants and groceries cater to a largely Chinese clientele. Its streets are expansive compared to the compact ones in Manhattan; its storefronts and apartment buildings quickly give way to rows of brick houses. Its Chinese population has grown during the years of smartphones and widely available Internet. Chinese-language websites aimed at the immigrant community advertise job openings and offer local news. People can join interest groups on WeChat, a phone application that started as a messaging service and expanded. (In China, WeChat users can pay bills, find doctors, and search the Internet.) And yet Flushing’s immigrant economy—its underground banks, dollar buses, and packed housing—is a variation on a theme established a century ago. Zhuang Liehong was entering a community still shaped by a history of isolation and self-sufficiency. Flushing was both new and old, and Zhuang, fleeing the political forces at work in his village and expecting to make a success of an alien life in a new place, was the same.

  * * *

  • • •

  Flushing’s Main Street cuts a curving north–south path, running from the last narrow drops of Flushing Bay. It moves past Flushing Meadows and the Queens Botanical Garden before continuing into other neighborhoods, finally joining the Van Wyck Expressway. A few blocks from the street’s origin point, the number 7 train comes to a stop at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue, dropping off commuters heading home from Manhattan in the center of the Chinese district. The daily pedestrian traffic here is second only to that of Times Square.

  The day we traveled to Flushing for the first time, Main Street was a mess of slush and mud. Puddles had gathered at street corners, some still enough to trick people into judging them patches of ice before they plunged a foot in. Despite the booby traps, the sidewalks were dense with people moving at different paces, weaving in and out, sometimes slipping, dodging into gaps that could scarcely be considered human-size. Strollers encased in plastic bubbles spun past elderly people handing out flyers. Parking attendants struggled against the flow, wearing orange vests and warm hats pulled down over their ears. They spread their arms and held out their palms, in fat gloves, to pause the flow of people just long enough to let cars in and out of an underground lot.

  As soon as we got off the subway, Zhuang dove into the crowd, winding among people with his face tilted up toward the shop signs. He took in the clutter of advertisements for driving schools, hair salons, lawyers, Internet cafés, and restaurants but found none announcing a real estate agency. His ears turned red in the frigid sunlight. (When I suggested he buy a hat, he worried that it would mess up his hair.) We walked past a shop selling hot soymilk and steamed buns, then threaded under some scaffolding.

  Just as we came out into the sun, Zhuang stopped walking and looked thrilled. “Aha!” he shouted. “I have walked these streets many times before!!”

  Little Yan raised her eyebrows. “He’s joking,” she said, unsure of herself. “He’s never been here before.”

  “No!” Zhuang said. “I have strolled these streets before…on Google!” He erupted in giggles. “I’ll take you on a short tour!” He wheeled around and started walking back the way we came. Flushing’s Main Street is shadowed by the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, and the sidewalk traffic is broken up, somewhat, by the clean lines of the Flushing branch of the Queens Library. Just past the library, a man sat shivering inside a kiosk, surrounded by pictures of bloody faces and calm-looking people sitting cross-legged. The kiosk, a sign proclaimed, was run by the Center for Quitting the Communist Party.

  As we walked, the smoke from a Chinese barbecue cart followed us, sticking to everyone’s winter clothing. Zhuang turned left. “See, there is the teahouse!” he said, pointing out a store selling loose tea leaves on one side and bubble tea on the other. “Down here we will find the offices of the China Democracy Party.” We turned onto another side street, and there they were, but he walked past them, having decided, for now, not to go in. “I have to be careful about getting caught up in someone else’s political agenda,” he explained. Another turn, and he saw a park that he had walked through on Google. “Yes, I remember this little park!”

  Zhuang and Little Yan walked back to Main Street and eased into the strolling pace on the sidewalk, reading all the signs they could without coming to a complete halt. Zhuang finally stopped in front of a storefront selling Chinese medicine. Dried mushrooms and herbs sat out in boxes, but he wanted something specific for his sore throat. He threaded his way into the white-tiled shop. He sought out a man in a white apron, explained his symptoms, and walked out with a small box of pills. We headed south, having yet to find a real estate office.

  Then we saw a sign hanging above an open doorway that said 888 REAL ESTATE.

  Zhuang led the way, full of confidence, climbing the dimly lit, narrow stairs until he reached the locked glass door of an empty-looking office. He located a doorbell and pressed it, drawing out a man in a gray suit. The man unlocked the door and opened it halfway. “Hello?” he said.

  “We’re looking to rent an apartment,” Zhuang told him.

  The man nodded and let us in. He took us past some cubicles into a conference room and left us there to find our seats.

  A well-dressed Chinese woman in bright red lipstick and a bouffant hairdo walked in smiling, handed out business cards, and shook everyone’s hand. “Now, you’re looking for an apartment,” she started.

  “Yes!” said Zhuang, grinning. “We would like something in this neighborhood, not too far from the center.”

  “Great! I’ve got something you can rent for fifteen hundred,” she fired back, opening a file and shuffling through some papers.

  Zhuang gave me a glance from across the table, allowing the briefest flicker of alarm. The woman had him at a disadvantage. He turned back to her, his grin waning a bit. “We’re looking for something cheaper,” he said.

  The woman tut-tutted, and her hands came to rest atop her folder, no longer shuffling. “I’ve got a basement for eight hundred.”

  He looked over at me again, pained. He had put effort into acting confident and at home on Flushing’s freezing streets, but now he was losing his footing. “I was thinking of finding something below six hundred dollars,” he said carefully, raising the estimate he had given that morning by 50 percent. “Do you have anything at around that price?”

  The woman slammed her folder shut. “No way! You want something that cheap, you have to get away from Chinese people. If you want a cheap apartment, go somewhere in Queens with only white people. Chinese people drive up prices. We don’t offer anything that cheap!” She stood up and ended the meeting, smiling through her lipstick and pushing us back past the cubicles and out the door. “If you want anything more expensive, come back and see me!” The door clicked and locked behind us.

  On the stairs, Zhuang lost his grin. The woman hadn’t been very friendly, he complained. Was it because she had seen he was with a foreigner and assumed he had money?

  Little Yan laughed. “You can’t call her a foreigner!” she said. “Aren’t we the foreigners now?”

  Zhuang stepped back out onto the sidewalk and stuffed his hands into his pockets. His mood had changed, and he didn’t feel like taking us on a tour anymore. He walked past another grocery store and came to a stop outside a kiosk selling SIM cards. An older man had stuffed himself into the tiny kiosk, his winter coat wide enough to brush the wall behind him. Zhuang channeled all his residual embarrassment into a barrage of officious-sounding questions. Twenty-five-dollar SIM cards were available with unlimited international calling, but Zhuang would have to change his phone number every month. For slightly more money, he could keep the same number. He deliberated, hemming and hawing.

  Little Yan looked through a table of gloves and tights set out on the sidewalk. “I don’t think I need a card,” she said. “We’re always together anyway.”

  Z
huang settled on the twenty-five-dollar card, slipped it into his pocket, and asked the man the best way to find an apartment. “Go look in the newspaper,” the man said.

  That day’s issue of the World Journal had the same list of cheap rooms, shared bedrooms, and family hostels. Some requested women or men only. Most had shared bathrooms and kitchens. Zhuang carried the paper under his arm into a little dim sum shop filled with a sparse after-lunch crowd of elderly men, most of them sitting alone, drinking tea, and staring at newspapers.

  Zhuang ordered more steamed dumplings than he could possibly eat and looked over the classifieds with Little Yan. They circled some of the ads in pen, starring any that did not mention a shared bathroom. The list they came away with was not long. With a new U.S. SIM card in his phone, Zhuang called the advertisers in quick succession, asking about rents and bathrooms and when he could look at the room. Half the advertisements he had circled had shared bathrooms after all. Most of the others were already rented. One was really just a bed in a shared room.

  Finally Zhuang reached a landlord who seemed agreeable. The room had its own bathroom and a shared kitchen, the landlord explained. But if Zhuang wanted to rent it, he needed to come over as soon as possible. Zhuang said he would come right away. He scribbled the details onto a torn slip of paper and hung up beaming. The room sounded promising. He was whittling down his to-do list. The day was improving.

  We took two buses—first the wrong bus and then the right one—to get to the address he had written down. The sidewalks had been shoveled only partially, the lane between snowbanks only wide enough for us to walk single file. Zhuang led the way toward a white clapboard house that was slightly dingy, packed tightly into a block of similarly dingy clapboard and brick houses—the Flushing approximation of suburbia. It boasted two stories perched above a garage that sank below street level. The driveway, slick with snow and ice, sloped down from the street at a steep angle, flattening out just before it met the permanently closed garage doors.

  Zhuang climbed gingerly up the slippery porch steps and peered into the front window. Inside, a skinny Chinese kid with spiked hair and plastic slippers was painting the walls in the vacated room. Zhuang rapped on the window and, when the kid, no older than twenty, opened the door, offered a firm, vigorous handshake. The kid waved us in. The last tenant, he explained, had gone back to China for Spring Festival. “I don’t know if he’ll come back,” he said. “If he does, he’ll rent another room somewhere.”

  The room for rent was little more than a hundred square feet, with a door that opened into a narrow hallway and a small kitchen. It was empty and paint-speckled but had its own bathroom and a big window that kept it from feeling musty. The windows offered a view out over the front porch toward the street, catching the top of the driveway. The garage, the young landlord explained, was used as an office. The inside door leading there was kept permanently locked.

  The little house had been split into two by the family’s patriarch, an immigrant from Fujian who had saved money for years to buy it. He had placed his two sons in charge of managing it. The upstairs was for the family—a spare five hundred or so square feet. The two downstairs rooms, each big enough for a mattress and a small desk, were for rent. The young man in the plastic slippers, along with his brother, placed advertisements, managed tenants, and made the occasional gesture toward keeping things clean.

  The room being painted was far more expensive than Zhuang had hoped—seven hundred dollars a month—but he decided that a private bathroom was worth the extra expense. He looked around with a carefully impassive expression on his face. He ventured into the bathroom and asked if the faucets worked. “You can try them if you like,” the kid said.

  In the kitchen, Zhuang opened all the cabinets and tested the sink. The only communal space in the little downstairs, it curled around the locked door leading to the garage. A card table stood in the corner, dusty and unused. Zhuang scuffed his feet on a little welcome mat set outside the second bedroom door. “It’s a girl,” the kid offered. “She’s quiet.”

  Zhuang peered into the refrigerator, which had been separated into sections, each of the crispers divided into two. He pointed at a little toaster oven and swept his finger over to the stove. “Can we use these?” The kid nodded.

  The room came close to meeting Zhuang’s standards, but there was no furniture. He had not been expecting this. In China, most rentals come with a bed at the very least. “It’s very clean,” said Little Yan, nodding at the walls. Zhuang grunted in agreement, then beckoned her over to a corner. “It’s expensive,” he stage-whispered, “and we would have to buy our own furniture.”

  “I could take you to a furniture place,” said the kid. “It’s not too far.”

  “Is it cheap?” asked Zhuang.

  “I don’t know…depends on what you consider cheap.”

  “Do you think you could help us pay for the furniture?” Zhuang countered. “We just got here yesterday, and seven hundred dollars is already very expensive.” He waited a beat and then changed tactics. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Fujian,” said the kid.

  “We are from right near there!” said Zhuang. “We are all one big family! Shake my hand!”

  The kid shook his hand and looked sideways. “We can’t help pay for furniture,” he said.

  After a day of feeling unsure of himself, and with a small audience now observing him, Zhuang was in the mood to be decisive. “We’ll take it!” he announced to the room.

  The kid looked unsurprised. “Okay,” he said, with no celebration. “You’ll have to put down some money now.” And they wouldn’t be able to move in for another week while he finished painting. Zhuang agreed to a two-hundred-dollar payment, and the kid told Zhuang he could come by and pick up the keys at the end of the week. He could move in whatever furniture he had after that.

  The young landlord scurried down to the garage and came back with a pen and a piece of college-ruled paper. He wrote out a receipt, reserving the room and noting the payment. Little Yan pulled a wallet out of her purse and handed it to Zhuang. He counted out the amount in twenty-dollar bills.

  He left the house grinning, having ended his first day triumphant. He felt he had been exacting and held to his standards. He wasn’t going to get hoodwinked by the United States. He wasn’t going to take everything new at face value or act impressed by everything he saw.

  We headed back to Brooklyn and, on the way, stopped in a corner store. “I want to check the price of instant noodles,” Zhuang told me. He ran into the store and scrutinized every variation of instant noodle in the shop, asking what meat was in which container. “Can you ask him the price?” Zhuang said to me, pointing to the Yemeni man who runs the store. “Can you ask him if he has any beef jerky?”

  I did, and the Yemeni man pointed to a display near the register. Zhuang peered at his options. “Can you ask him if he has any beef jerky that’s a bit thinner?”

  Over the next few weeks, as Zhuang settled in to New York, he began to contact the journalists and academics he knew from his days as a protest leader. He announced his arrival and his intention to apply for asylum. Reuters dispatched a photographer to document him standing in the snow, frowning at the sidewalk. In an interview with Radio Free Asia, Zhuang predicted that a crackdown would follow a coming village election in Wukan. “There were many signs that I would be the target of political persecution if I didn’t leave,” he said. And during the Wukan protests in 2011, according to an interview with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, Zhuang had learned an important lesson: “The biggest fortune in life is not health but freedom.”

  5

  Work

  工作 / Gōngzuò

  WINTER–SUMMER 2014

  A month after they moved to Flushing, Little Yan asked Zhuang to wake up early and walk her to a nearby street corner. She had gotten a job at a nail sal
on over the phone and was expected to start that morning. Her new employer was planning to pick her up by the side of the road. Little Yan had never painted a nail in her life. She had no idea where she was going and only a vague idea where she was. She had never learned to read a map. When the boss asked her where she lived, Little Yan had answered, “Flushing, Queens. I’m not sure what street.”

  When Zhuang and Little Yan settled into their single-room apartment, with a single hard mattress, a single set of sheets, and a little pasteboard desk where Zhuang set up his computer, he had admonished her not to worry about money. They weren’t like other immigrants, he told her. They weren’t desperate. They still had money left over from Zhuang’s land sale, and they had Zhuang’s network.

  He was still busy calling the various journalists and academics he had met in Wukan, updating them on his whereabouts and mining them for introductions to friends in New York. Zhuang’s process was habitual. In Shenzhen, people from Wukan relied on a network of family and friends to help them settle. In New York, Zhuang was attempting to build a support network from scratch, and he was sure an opportunity would come up sooner or later. It might take some time, but there were more important things in life than finding a job.

  Little Yan had, for the first few weeks, listened to her husband’s advice. She did her best to put aside her practical concerns about building a new life. Instead, she and Zhuang did everything together. They learned how to take the bus that ran in a straight line down Flushing’s Main Street. They purchased a few items of furniture and went to the grocery store to buy noodles. They carried their clothes through the snow to the laundromat and looked up English-language classes online. At night they called Little Yan’s parents and asked for updates on their son.