Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  So after her three months were up, she quit and went back to stay in the little apartment with Zhuang. It would take her months to find another job.

  6

  The Chairman

  主席 / Zhŭxí

  WINTER 2014

  During the unusually cold winter that welcomed Little Yan and Zhuang to New York, a man named Tang Yuanjun was spending the coldest days in his Flushing office, improving his hot-plate cooking, gluing together a small library of posters, and struggling to make peace with the sense of futility that had ebbed and flowed throughout his time in exile. Tang was the chairman of one of Flushing’s Chinese Democracy Parties, the stable center of a swirl of longtime dissidents and newly arrived immigrants—the paranoid, the outspoken, the nervous, and the resigned. Tang listened to them all with the same series of nods and murmurs, settling people’s fears and letting their expectations lower slowly, as painlessly as possible. “There is a saying that applies to life in the United States,” Tang said. “In the first year you speak brave, bold words. In the second, nonsense. By the third, you have nothing to say at all.”

  Tang’s office is located just half a block off Main Street, in a six-story glass and steel building grungy with neglect. He rents a space on the second floor, above a cheap restaurant and an express mail center. He leaves his door slightly ajar whenever he is in and keeps a carafe of tea on a foldout table. Activists and members come and go, drinking tea, talking politics, and trading gossip. After lunch, it is not uncommon to find an old dissident or two asleep at the table, wedged into a folding chair. Between working long hours, keeping in touch with family in China, and living in close quarters with other immigrants, it can be difficult, for an immigrant in Flushing, to find the time to sleep.

  Tang is in his late fifties, with gray hair that sweeps across a wide forehead. He has grown distinguished during his time as chairman. In winter, he wears a long black coat that makes him look like a visiting dignitary. He uses his heavy-lidded eyes to great effect, lowering and raising them as he listens to the new people who file in and out of his headquarters. He dresses neatly, in slacks and a button-down shirt, and still wears a cell phone in a carrier strapped to his belt, in the style of China’s small-town power brokers: a magnetic clasp lets him snap the phone in and out with every call. He has heard enough stories of persecution and nodded his head to enough half-baked plans for revolution (to make the China Democracy Party relevant! to contact the press! to pressure the government!) for a few lifetimes.

  In the bathroom of his office, Tang stores a mattress that he sleeps on occasionally. When incredulous visitors wonder why he doesn’t live in the office full time to save money, he explains that it is against the rules. “It’s an office building,” he says repeatedly. Nonetheless, in an armoire near the door, he keeps cooking supplies and bottles of Lao Ganma spices. In the bathroom, he stashes a hot plate that makes its appearance on a folding chair just before a meal. No one formally taught him how to cook, but he developed considerable skill on his own, perfecting the dishes he knew from China in the isolation of the neighborhood. People sometimes stop by just to pick up little jars of whatever Tang is serving.

  * * *

  • • •

  In 1998 in China, the founders of the China Democracy Party signed their founding document and applied for legal status. “All political power can come only from the public,” their declaration read. “The government is the servant of the public and not the one that controls it.” By the end of the year, seven of the party’s founders were in prison and their supporters, people like Tang, were being kept under close surveillance. The China Democracy Party, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, had been “nipped in the bud.”

  When Tang first opened his New York office, however, he found that China Democracy Parties had proliferated in Flushing. There were eleven located in the neighborhood—all of them separately allying themselves with the original. Now he estimates the number to be closer to eight; he has lost track. Democracy Parties are tucked into basements or above restaurants, or they share space with employment agencies. Party headquarters open their offices once a week for a matter of hours; Tang’s office stays open late into the night.

  Upon his arrival, Tang had been shocked that there were so many offices for the China Democracy Party. It was as if the first, the one he had belonged to before he left China, the one that the Chinese government had banned, had traveled to Queens and exploded.

  Then someone had asked Tang if he owned the idea of democracy. “Is it yours, or does it belong to everyone?” He conceded the point. There was no reason to insist that the first party was the only one or even the best one. So he rented an office and started holding weekly meetings. Every Tuesday he talked about China’s history and read the biographies of activists still in jail to a crowd of people sitting in folding chairs. On the final Tuesday of every month, he led his group to the corner of 42nd Street and Twelfth Avenue, across from the Chinese consulate. Tang’s party planted itself there, to serve as a reminder that dissent still existed.

  In 2014 Tang’s protests faced frigid winter weather. The wind came up the Hudson River from the sea, whistling through the moorage of a retired World War II aircraft carrier—the Intrepid—just past 42nd Street. It would bend around the corner of 12th Avenue and force its way through sweaters, coats, and mittens. Protesters took turns holding up the banners, letting their hands thaw, then freeze, then thaw again. Tang would speak into a megaphone, and every once in a while the crowd would pick up a political chant, their voices carried off by the wind. Snow piled up on the sidewalks, and people stomped their feet against the cold.

  The Monday before each scheduled protest, he would get a reliable flurry of phone calls from his members asking if he was canceling. Tang felt compelled to keep going—many of his members worked outside New York City. They traveled here in buses, rented a room for the night or took up floor space in a friend’s apartment, specifically so they could attend the protest. They needed to take photos to support their asylum claims. It was not Tang’s job to search for their motives; his job was to protest and to educate, to promote democracy.

  In the winter of 2014, Tang’s group was protesting the most recently detained pro-democracy activists, holding up posters outside the Chinese consulate, and listing their names during the educational meetings in his office. Tang makes a point of keeping his protests up to date. In 2011 he had talked about the Wukan protests. Now, three years later, Tang had a long list of new names and photos to hold up outside of the consulate. There were human rights lawyers like Xu Zhiyong, with his round head and buzz cut, and democracy activists like Liu Ping, a woman steel worker who had tried to run for office as an independent candidate. These pictures joined the ranks of people that Tang had been supporting for years: people like Liu Xianbin, who had been jailed after Tiananmen in 1989, again after organizing the China Democracy Party in 1998, and then a third time in 2010; or Zhu Yufu, another China Democracy Party founder, who had been imprisoned in 1999, 2007, and 2011. The founders of the China Democracy Party had a habit of getting arrested nearly as soon as they were released from jail.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the mid-1800s, two Opium Wars and ripples of violence and unrest plagued China’s final, flagging imperial dynasty. The warlords who ruled much of China invaded cities and slaughtered civilians. In 1850 religious fanatics staged a revolution so powerful that the followers of a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus occupied most of southern China for more than a decade.

  Men fled China, going wherever there was work. They traveled to Peru to harvest the bird guano that was a popular and expensive fertilizer in Europe. They found their way to Cuba and worked on sugar plantations. In America they became refugees and coolies, a cheap labor solution in the aftermath of the Civil War. Drawn to San Francisco by the Gold Rush, they took over gold claims that other miners
had abandoned, in locations where the work was particularly hard or the gold scarce.

  Most of the laborers fleeing China paid for their journey to the United States by way of a credit-ticket system. Agents would pay for their passage to California, later to be reimbursed with interest. A network of Chinese middlemen recruited immigrants from China for big U.S. companies. In San Francisco, family-based associations opened halfway houses close to the port, offering new arrivals a place to sleep, eat, and bathe. In exchange, the clan organizations required immigrants pay a fee before leaving town. Deals were made with shipping companies to ensure that any laborer who had yet to pay down the debt he had incurred for passage to the United States would not be allowed return passage to China.

  Chinese immigrants were welcome in the United States as long as the economy was booming and their labor was needed. They went to work for larger mine owners, diverting streams to wear away the gold-bearing gravel, shifting through the sand and metal left in sluice boxes, working backbreaking hours for a fraction of the price of other laborers. Chinese immigrants, one San Francisco mayor commented, were well suited to the climate in northern California. They became preferred over recently freed slaves or Irish immigrants. “John,” an article in the New York Times argued, using a common English name for a Chinese immigrant, “is a better addition to our society than Paddy.”

  As Chinese laborers—the miners, railway workers, and factory employees—spread throughout the United States, attendant communities of Chinese entrepreneurs followed. They built their own social support systems and established their own businesses. Chinese markets, laundries, and physicians served the community in San Francisco. Grocery stores opened in places like Evanston, Wyoming, and Ogden, Utah. Roast duck arrived in New Orleans in 1871. Chinese fishermen supplied U.S. fish markets and exported delicacies like abalone back to China. Other immigrants imported silk, tea, and porcelain to sell to Americans.

  The networks the new immigrants built were complex and quasi-governmental. The same family organizations that opened halfway houses for recently arrived immigrants became centers of business—offering loans, settling disputes, and contracting with employers. They splintered and re-formed through internal conflicts that sometimes turned violent. One influential family-run organization, the Ning Yun Benevolent Association, got its start when a group of members defected from a larger, older company, instigating a bloody fight in front of a theater in San Francisco’s Chinatown. That parent company further split when arguments broke out over leadership succession. Chinatowns were, from the start, self-governing, insular, and competitive.

  Once the railways were built and the Gold Rush cooled, a wave of anti-Chinese feeling swept through the country and ignited into violence in California. Newspapers ran political cartoons that pictured the new arrivals as dirty, morally depraved, and threatening. In one cartoon, a Chinese man stands over a swooning white woman, a knife in his teeth, gun in his hand, his long braid whipping behind him. The caption reads “The Yellow Terror in all his Glory.” In 1877 a protest in San Francisco turned into a two-day riot targeting Chinese businesses. The mob attacked laundries, stoned a Chinese church, set fire to a lumber mill, and left at least three men dead. The city’s public safety bureau had to send out what it called a “pickaxe brigade” to stem the violence.

  In 1882 the United States decided, for the first time in its history, to place a blanket ban on a single ethnic group. The Chinese Exclusion Act put into place a ten-year moratorium on any new working-class immigration from China. It denied naturalization for any Chinese person already living in the United States and required anyone leaving the United States with the intention of returning to obtain a “certificate of return.” In 1888 another measure would cancel all the certificates of return, stranding nearly twenty thousand people.

  The act had the desired effect. The rush of immigration slowed to a trickle. More laws followed, restricting whom Chinese immigrants could marry and where they could work. These limits initiated a tradition of slipping through loopholes, pushing people to use all the means they had to arrive and stay in the United States. After the Exclusion Act was passed, some immigrants paid agents to sneak them over borders with Canada and Mexico. Others exploited policies that granted citizenship to those born in the United States and allowed those citizens to sponsor the immigration of family members.

  The loopholes in the Exclusion Act became easier to exploit in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when a huge fire destroyed most of the city’s public documents. An industry in falsified birth certificates sprang to life. Chinese men with citizenship would claim that their wives had given birth in China, almost always to a son, opening up a space to sponsor a new family member. In reality, there was no new baby, and the immigrants with citizenship would sell the opportunity they had created to a hopeful immigrant.

  The new arrivals were infamous; they were called China’s “paper sons”—families built by immigration application, not by blood. Immigration agents in San Francisco became deeply suspicious. They grilled new arrivals on the precise details of their ancestry (or purported ancestry), the local geography of their claimed home village, and even the direction the windows faced in their childhood home.

  The discrimination that led to the Exclusion Act also pushed the Chinese into ethnic enclaves, and the first real Chinatowns were born. People retreated into industries that would keep them out of competition with white laborers, in restaurants, laundries, and Chinese groceries. For many, the racism they faced in the United States, the restrictive laws and widespread discrimination, were not enough to deter them. The pull of the American dream—the thought they could change their fate and make something out of nothing—was too great.

  * * *

  • • •

  The dissidents who made up Tang’s cohort were occupied with the same dream, for different reasons. “Of course, everyone wants to come to the United States,” Tang says. “Even corrupt officials want to send their children to school here.” Chinese dissidents first arrived in large numbers after the 1989 crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. At first, fleeing students escaped on their own or were spirited over Chinese borders by networks of sympathizers—Hong Kong’s Operation Yellowbird, for example, sent fishermen to transport demonstrators by sea, smuggling more than four hundred people. American universities welcomed fleeing students. Chinese exiles already in the United States formed NGOs and started organizations aimed at helping bring democracy activists over, lobbying the government to welcome the student activists and provide them shelter from the persecution they faced in China.

  As a result of their efforts, tens of thousands of Chinese students—those already studying in the United States and reluctant to return—and activists were allowed to stay. Prominent Tiananmen Square leaders like Wang Dan, Chai Ling, and Wu’er Kaixi attempted to piece together new lives, attending U.S. universities and doing their best to continue their activism. A Chinese proverb was passed around to try to make sense of their situation: the Tiananmen activists had “gained the sky but lost the earth.”

  If these dissidents were the predecessors of later activists like Zhuang, they set an uneven example of how to build a new life outside of China. Many left after seeing their friends injured or shot down at Tiananmen. Some had suffered torture in jail. Once in the United States, all exiled dissidents had to make their own decisions about the sacrifices they were going to make—whether and how they would go on protesting the Chinese government. Some started websites so they could keep publishing their ideas. Others started China-focused nonprofits or became leaders in human rights organizations. Wu’er Kaixi moved to Taiwan. Another famous activist, Li Lu, went into finance. Others moved to South Korea or Thailand, and a few sneaked over the border back into China.

  Tang Yuanjun was at once part of the events of 1989 and set apart from them. He was older than most of the students protesting at the square—old
enough that his education had been derailed by the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and ’70s, when schools were shut down and students encouraged to denounce their teachers. By the spring of 1989, he was working as an engineer at an automotive factory six hundred miles away from the capital city. Tang, however, had a long-standing interest in democracy and political reform. He had been running discussion groups in his spare time, and when the protests started in Tiananmen Square, he organized three different marches in his hometown, leading thousands of people in a protest supporting the students in Beijing. When the crackdown came, he was detained and sentenced to twenty years in jail.

  Tang served eight of those twenty years before he was released. He suffered beatings and went on hunger strikes. When he got out, he found himself newly irrelevant, stuck in the past while everyone else had moved on. His wife, who had suffered for having a dissident husband, had divorced him while he was still in prison. Most of his friends cared little about the idealism that had sat static in Tang while he spent time in prison. The year after he was released, he joined a group trying to register branches of the China Democracy Party in municipalities throughout China. It was all legal, Tang argues, still frustrated by the technicalities. He was in the right and not just morally: strictly speaking, eight different parties are operating in China in addition to the Communist Party of China (CPC). The eight parties, however, cannot field candidates for public office, and all are financed by the CPC. The technicalities did not matter; the Communist Party began detaining the democracy leaders the day after they attempted to register their political party.