Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Zhuang did not have to wait that long. Through a chain of connections that crisscrossed two universities and someone’s ex-girlfriend, I was put in contact with a lawyer named Alexandra Goncalves-Pena, working at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). She spoke no Mandarin—Zhuang would need a translator at all his meetings—but she agreed to represent him at no cost. The rest, he said, he could figure out.

  For his first meeting, Zhuang would have to make his way to Manhattan on the subway, walk past a handful of Chinese restaurants and a Starbucks, sign in on the ground floor, and buzz at the entrance to the office. He called and told me not to worry—he knew the subway better now. He and Little Yan could make it on their own. For the first couple of meetings, the two of them would wait in the lobby of the building for their interpreter before approaching the doorman and going up.

  Goncalves-Pena opened the door to the HIAS offices and grinned. She was taller than Zhuang, with unruly hair, and she had an artful, disarming way of chattering only when there was space to fill. She listened to the story of Wukan Village, rapt and unhurried. In her office, Zhuang answered every question at the length he felt it deserved. He was brimming with names and dates. He had gone over the details so many times that they came to mind faster than he could speak them; he stuttered trying to get them all out.

  Zhuang held out the hope that, once their asylum case was settled, opportunities would finally open up for him—he had to be more employable once he had papers and a Social Security number. He befriended anyone who was willing to work on his case. Sophie, the woman who had introduced him to Tang Yuanjun, helped him recruit people to translate his documents, and Zhuang invited them all to tea. When Sophie gave him the number of a woman working at the Congressional Executive Commission on China, Zhuang leaped at the opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., and booked a ticket on a Chinatown bus. He paused for a photograph in the lobby of Congress. He was welcomed into an office and told his story while a researcher took notes. He kept the phone number of everyone he met.

  Zhuang’s case file grew thick with the documents he provided. He handed over pictures, petitions, and news articles. He waited patiently for everything to be translated and filed. He explained that Lufeng bureaucrats had changed his birth date, and his lawyer offered to change it back—to give him a start in the United States that was entirely based on fact. Zhuang was skeptical. He’d grown comfortable with the wrong date on his passport.

  It was June by the time Zhuang and Little Yan were scheduled to get fingerprinted in preparation for their asylum interview. They struggled to understand the directions of the security officer at the door, and were nearly kicked out of the waiting room for using their cell phones. The office initially turned him away because of the mix-up with his birth date. He had to return the next day, his lawyer in tow. Any bureaucratic delay could require months of sorting out. Nothing was simple.

  In its annual data, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security distinguishes between “defensive” and “affirmative” asylees. More than half of the successful asylum cases from China are defensive. In these cases, applicants who were denied asylum in their first interview are given a court date where they are expected to defend their claims in front of a judge. Getting asylum this way, according to Tang, can take nearly three years. Members of his Democracy Party spend years attending protests, documenting their actions in order to convince a judge of their dedication to democracy. People cry in their hearings, whether the news they’re getting is good or bad. Tang thinks it’s because they have caught the American dream like one catches a cold—it spreads from family member to family member and passes through the air vents during the plane ride over.

  To pass an initial interview and avoid the years of court hearings, an asylum seeker must follow a few rules of thumb: Look your interviewer in the eye. Answer quickly, even when you’re not sure of your answer. Never look at your lawyer or your translator for help. Look confident. None of these were a problem for Zhuang. Instead, he talked too much. In the weeks leading up to the interview, when he and Little Yan met at the HIAS to prep, he answered every mock question at length. He talked excitedly about the people he knew in the village. He grimaced when he mentioned the village chief, while his interpreter looked on helplessly.

  Finally Little Yan kicked him under the table.

  “What!” he said. “I’m just telling them what they asked.”

  “They only asked you for a yes or no,” said Little Yan. “They can’t translate that quickly.”

  “Okay,” said Goncalves-Pena, who was overseeing the exercise. “Why don’t we have your translator hold up her hand when she needs you to stop?”

  The woman nodded in appreciation.

  “Oh,” said Zhuang, switching into his unsteady English. “I’m sorry.”

  When Zhuang plunged back in, answering the next question, the interpreter’s hand flew up, and Zhuang gave a grunt of surprise.

  * * *

  • • •

  Nationwide, more Chinese people apply for and attain asylum every year than any other group. Every year Chinese asylees outnumber those from the next three nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Egypt) combined. For a working-class Chinese immigrant with no existing family in the United States, asylum is one of the only pathways to citizenship. And yet for the most part, Chinese asylum seekers have avoided New York’s ecosystem of legal aid services; Zhuang and Little Yan’s path was rare. Spanish, Arabic, and French speakers are common at aid organizations, but when I began inquiring on behalf of Zhuang, I found very few pro bono lawyers available who spoke Mandarin. Chinese immigrants, instead, had created a network of their own. In Flushing, the signs cluttering the sidewalk included multiple offices for immigration lawyers. People exchanged their lawyers’ phone numbers while lingering around employment offices or waiting for customers in nail salons.

  Asylum claims from China are so successful, in large part, because of the specific types of persecution Chinese citizens face. To be granted asylum in the United States, an individual must prove that he or she faces persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The persecution must have been carried out by government forces or else involve violence the government is unable to prevent. Immigrants fleeing gang violence in Honduras or El Salvador are hard-pressed to fulfill all these requirements—it is difficult to prove that the violence is targeted and that governments are doing nothing to prevent it. In Chinese asylum cases, however, the government is typically behind the persecution.

  In Flushing, three types of asylum cases dominate. They center on China’s limited religious freedom, its one-child policy, and its intolerance for political dissent. Immigrants who have converted to Christianity tell stories of unsanctioned churches raided by officials. Women asylees might face forcible abortions if they try to have a second child. And then, like Zhuang, some dissidents are not free to express their political beliefs.

  While asylum claims in Flushing tend to meet all the required criteria, stay long in Flushing, and you will begin to hear near-identical stories told over and over again. Lawyers in Chinatown have a reputation for manufacturing or embellishing on their clients’ stories. Democracy Parties are not the only enablers: churches in Flushing offer slips of paper that confirm an immigrant’s weekly attendance. In 2012 an FBI raid on lawyers in Manhattan’s Chinatown merited the headline “Asylum Fraud in Chinatown: An Industry of Lies.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang imagined his case would move quickly. He had documented everything so well and was speaking honestly. There were no embellishments for him to memorize or outright fabrications to fret over. The interview was scheduled for both Zhuang and Little Yan at once, but Zhuang would be taking the lead. The office was in Long Island, and the pair caught the train early in the morning. They met their lawyer and their interpreter and went into the building together, movin
g through security. Zhuang and Little Yan had been warned they might have to wait a long time, but the interview started quickly. The interviewer, if not friendly, was not combative. Zhuang answered questions about his village. She asked about the protests, the beatings, and his fear of future violence. He paused for his interpreter and tried his best not to stutter. He looked his interviewer in the eye. He covered every detail he could remember. He spoke for two full hours before the asylum officer closed the file and shook his hand. She told them that she thought the case was well documented.

  There was, however, a wrinkle in Zhuang’s case. Because he had been interviewed by a number of international media outlets, it would require an extra layer of review. He fell into an uncomfortable middle ground: he was not famous enough to receive special, expedited treatment but was notable enough that the U.S. Immigration Bureau needed to make sure it wasn’t stepping into any larger international disputes. The interviewer didn’t offer Zhuang or Little Yan a time frame, but Zhuang understood that any delay might expand incalculably, lost in a shuffle of papers in New York, Washington, and Texas. Goncalves-Pena optimistically estimated the review would last three months. If it ran longer than that, she explained, Zhuang and Little Yan would be allowed to apply for a work permit while they waited, a stopgap that everyone in Flushing called the A5 card.

  For months, Zhuang had been marking time by his asylum interview. He felt frozen on the threshold of the city, waiting for it to open up to him. He had told Little Yan not to worry about money. They had argued at night until she turned over on their hard, thin mattress, facing the wall and willing herself to fall asleep. Then the interview came and went. It took Zhuang and Little Yan a few days to realize what had happened. When they walked out into the summer morning, they had felt triumphant. He would find work soon. They would apply together to bring their son over. Their rocky transition period would be over.

  In the days that followed, however, Zhuang realized that he had not received the welcome he had hoped for. He had not been commended for his bravery or recognized for the sacrifices he had made. The interviewer had been polite but distant. And then the decision had been delayed. His son would remain in China; his life would remain the same. He woke up in the morning on the same mattress as always, the clutter of Little Yan’s things stored in two stacked plastic crates near the head of the bed. Zhuang showered and made his way from the house down an uneven sidewalk. He cut behind a defunct Korean karaoke bar, hopped over the spot where the concrete crumbled into a puddle, and then crossed a parking lot toward the McDonald’s, where he could order a hamburger and a coffee like any real American. And he could sit at one of the plastic tables just past the counter and consider his situation.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the spirit of making the best of his reality, Zhuang decided to look for a new apartment—something cheaper and closer to the center of Flushing. Most of the available housing was informal: rooms rented without contracts, bunk beds stacked in the living rooms of small apartments, single-family houses split to accommodate four or five families. The Flushing housing market was not the stuff of commission-seeking rental agents or online photo galleries. There were two unofficial housing markets near Flushing’s center. One was located alongside a glass wall just outside a bubble tea shop, the other along one wall of a local supermarket. Here people could pay a small fee and pin up a handwritten note describing what they offered and how much it cost. For many people subletting rooms in their apartments, the process of advertising on a supermarket wall was more navigable than trying to set up an ad on one of the Mandarin-language websites.

  It was early fall when Zhuang decided to hunt for an apartment. He visited the supermarket and gazed up at the wall of papers, some scrawled quickly in pen, others written out attractively in different-colored markers. He wondered how he was supposed to tell a good landlord from a bad one. He had started to get the feeling that everyone in Flushing was out to take advantage of him.

  He was busy looking at the advertisements when a squat, gravel-voiced woman sidled up next to him. He didn’t see her until she growled up at him, loud and up front: “Hey, are you looking for a room?”

  Zhuang jumped and looked down. He was.

  Chen Tai was a stack of spheres, round-faced and round-bellied. She did not pay anyone a fee to advertise her room. She did not like to give out her phone number. Instead, she lingered near the wall, pretending to be picking out fruit, until she saw someone she liked. Then she led them down the street and showed them the room for rent—a run-down but spacious bedroom with a little window and a closet. The rest of the apartment was a jumble of temporary walls that she had erected to carve the living and dining rooms into three additional bedrooms. The only common area was the dark entryway outside the kitchen, just large enough for the square card table that Chen Tai had stuck in the corner. She puttered around the apartment, opening doors so Zhuang could see everything. He stuck his head into the bathroom, where Chen Tai kept a bucket and a mop and clothes hung above the bathtub. He turned on the water in the galley kitchen. He went home feeling optimistic.

  On that first visit, Chen Tai had explained to him that there were two other people living in the little temporary bedrooms—Chen Tai’s own daughter, and a man everyone called Uncle. There was a child in the apartment as well, a boy who slept in the section of the living room Chen Tai had reinvented as her own bedroom. He was the son of some relatives who were working outside New York City, and Chen Tai had agreed to take care of him in their absence. She picked him up from school and made sure he did his homework. At night they shared the makeshift room. His parents paid her a small fee for the favor but not enough to make her rich. “I have been here for years, and we’re still poor,” she told Zhuang. “This is a good country, but it’s a hard one.” She told him to forget about himself and think about his children.

  The apartment was not luxurious, but the bedroom that Zhuang and Little Yan occupied was larger, even, than the place they had rented in Wukan. They purchased one new table, and then another. They filled the closet up with their clothes. Zhuang liked his new landlady, who called him “Little Zhuang.” She was quick to point out that she had very little education but no shortage of opinions. She kept to herself most of the time, but she liked to offer wisdom on poverty and hard work, her rasping voice filling up the tiny common area of the apartment. She wasn’t too different from some of Zhuang’s aunts back in Wukan.

  Chen Tai worked pushing a dim sum cart at a banquet hall not far from her apartment. She bustled out in the morning, her back straight and her stocky legs moving in a clipped, rapid stride, heading to the East Buffet. Dim sum is traditionally a morning and afternoon meal, and service at the East Buffet ended by three. She could work the lunch rush, change in the bathroom, and leave in time to pick up her charge from school. She invited Zhuang to stop by sometime—if she could, she would slip him a few extra egg tarts.

  * * *

  • • •

  There were few community spaces in Flushing. Old men hung out in a park off Maple Avenue, playing cards. Students and older aunties filled up the seats in the Flushing Library, but Zhuang was no scholar. He did not like to gamble. He had invited his handful of friends into his small room and served them tea on a makeshift tea table he had constructed, with a pink plastic bowl and a flat sieve laid across the top, pouring hot water and brewing the tea the traditional Chinese way. But compared to the village, it was a lonely way to socialize. Zhuang liked the feeling of community; he liked a little commotion, a little background noise. And then he found the East Buffet.

  The complex where Chen Tai worked did not serve the best dim sum courses in New York or arguably even in Flushing. The skins on the steamed shrimp dumplings were not the delicate, paper-thin wrapping that a diner might expect from a top chef in Hong Kong. The menu was, however, comprehensive. Taken in its entirety, the business operated on two floors.
The first was cramped and humid, with an LED sign in the entryway that scrolled the characters 欢迎, or “welcome,” over and over again in orange lights. The front doors opened next to a cafeteria-style takeout counter, offering four dishes and a soup to customers in Styrofoam boxes. A small à la carte restaurant, sticky and expensive, was tucked in the back. These were the low-rent alternatives to the main attraction, the banquet hall, which could be found up a sweeping, curved staircase. Zhuang called it simply a “teahouse.”

  Dim sum, in many ways, is the antithesis of American Chinese food. It is difficult to make and meticulously presented. Most dim sum restaurants offer a long list of dumplings, steamed buns, rolls of shrimp and meat, cakes, congee, and more. The kitchen in the East Buffet was massive, stretching the length of the banquet hall, half-filled with the cooks who tackled the buns, soups, and dumplings that would replenish the cart. Other cooks, the ones who took orders for individual dishes, cooked whole fish or fried up noodles and rice in massive woks, tossing the contents with two hands, the muscles in their shoulders tightening against their white chef’s coats.

  Zhuang loved the banquet hall as soon as he saw it. The East Buffet was decorated with just enough flourish to suggest opulence, but the dumplings were priced well. The servers spoke Cantonese, and so did Zhuang. He brought his own tea leaves and asked the servers to brew it for him. He understood the rhythm and the culture of the teahouse—the long mornings of drinking tea and eating snacks; the bustle of a cavernous hall filled with people pushing carts and customers plucking steamed dumplings out of communal baskets. Zhuang liked to sit by the windows, whose edges were draped in gold fabric, and chat amicably with the servers. He would order a selection of bamboo baskets and insist on pouring the tea for everyone. Against a far wall, waiters were constantly changing a backdrop for nighttime weddings, taking down a flowered heart and putting up a giant gold character for “happiness.”