Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Inevitably, Chen Tai would round one of the tables with her two-tiered cart and shout with surprise, “Hey, Little Zhuang, you’ve come!” She offered her customers a selection of turnip cakes, egg custards, and sweet buns, her voice gurgling and breaking like an adolescent boy’s. She would push her cart back and forth, slipping Zhuang some free buns if she could, stopping to pick up turnip cakes and wheeling toward the back.

  Zhuang had found the first place in Flushing where he felt truly comfortable. Anyone who came through Flushing now was invited to the banquet hall. He brought in the interpreters who had helped him with his asylum case and the journalism student he still kept in touch with. When a German reporter he knew, Yang Xifan, came through New York on holiday, she brought a friend—a dissident with a perpetually moody look on his face. Yao Cheng placed spectacles on the tip of his nose when he needed to read something, and he had a knack for exaggeration. “I thank the United States for taking me in!” he told Zhuang. “But I am not planning on staying in the United States forever.” Yao Cheng was waiting for the regime change he thought was inevitable.

  Yao Cheng had worked, he said, for the Chinese military. He had been disavowed and thrown in prison after following orders and stealing the plans for a military helicopter from Russia. The veracity of his backstory was hard to confirm, but later in his life Yao Cheng had worked with Chai Ling, a leader in the Tiananmen Square movement, rescuing girls who had been kidnapped (to be sold as brides) or abandoned. He provided assistance to the abandoned girls, sometimes placing them with guardians, and he did his best to reunite girls who had been kidnapped with their families. He was outspoken and passionate. The existence of kidnapped children in China was a sensitive issue. All this had landed him in jail a second time, and then a third.

  Zhuang welcomed the man into the neighborhood with a basket full of chicken feet as Yao Cheng launched into a story about the coming collapse of the Chinese government. Zhuang wasn’t sure what to make of the man. A journalist he respected had introduced them, but Zhuang worried the man’s exaggerations were a sign of instability. Eventually, over the following year, Zhuang’s judgment would soften. Yao Cheng was to become the first fellow immigrant whom Zhuang really trusted.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the aftermath of his immigration interview, Zhuang knew that he could not put off finding a job any longer. He was just starting to understand Flushing, trying to adjust to the limits his lack of education and English would impose on his life here. “If I had known that someday I would be moving to the United States, I would have kept studying,” he said. “It wasn’t that I was a bad student. I liked studying! It was just that in China, it didn’t matter. Going to school would have been a waste of my time.” He cycled through a series of short-lived jobs at Chinese restaurants, busing tables and frying food in the kitchens. It was thankless work, and the meager salary he brought home offered little consolation. Little Yan moved from one nail salon to the next, complaining that the fumes gave her headaches.

  Every two weeks, almost on the dot, Zhuang would send me an e-mail asking about their asylum case. He knew someone would contact him if a decision had been made, but his patience ran out again and again. I would call his lawyer, and then, after the next disappointing answer, Zhuang would hold his breath as long as he could, waiting to hear. Two weeks later he would find himself at his wit’s end. He stayed up late, adding music to a series of photos and videos he had taken on a summer trip to Coney Island with Little Yan. He would send it to his friends.

  Zhuang waited the exact number of days he had before he and Little Yan could apply for work permits, then asked me to contact his lawyer. He had been assigned a new lawyer at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a man whose office walls were occupied almost entirely with bookcases of asylum cases in manila folders. Zhuang arrived at his first meeting with a tray full of coffee from Starbucks. The man clipped his and Little Yan’s passport-size photos onto their applications and spoke with gravity. The immigration offices, he warned, seemed more backed up than usual. It was good they were applying for work permits, because it might take months, maybe even a year, before their case was processed.

  Zhuang was prepared for this news, and he had come up with a plan. As soon as the lawyer started talking about further delays, Zhuang suggested that he contact the Congressional Executive Committee on China (CECC)—the group he had traveled to Washington months earlier to connect with. “I can ask a member of Congress to write a letter!” he said. He wasn’t sure who would write it or how it would be submitted, but he was confident he could get it done. He had sat in a room with a researcher and told his story; although he couldn’t read it, parts of Zhuang’s testimony had been included in the annual report the CECC distributes publicly. Surely they could instruct the immigration bureau to speed up the process. “They can tell them that everything I’ve said is true!” Zhuang said. “What do you think?”

  The new lawyer looked at his client with narrowed eyes, sizing him up. “Let’s wait,” the man said. If, in fact, a letter was really possible, it was a delicate matter. If it was sent by the wrong person or arrived at the wrong time, it might cause Zhuang’s case to get pulled temporarily from the queue of waiting cases. It could delay it further. “He thinks a letter would make things slower?” Zhuang asked. “Aiya.” He looked to Little Yan, who was still clutching her purse in her lap. They returned to Queens to do more waiting.

  November slid into December and then the New Year. Zhuang and Little Yan celebrated the anniversary of their arrival in the United States with no word on their asylum case. She kept working, doing her best not to think about their immigration status. He spent every day thinking about it, pouring every last ounce of his optimism into the waiting. The friends he had made came in waves, visiting often, then not at all. Zhuang tossed cigarettes at the men, as he had done in China. He grinned relentlessly.

  At night, when he called home, his friends and family offered him respect. He was sending money back to his family, and everyone assumed he was working in a restaurant. According to Zhuang, even if he told them how difficult life was in New York, they wouldn’t have believed him. They didn’t understand that his feet were still not planted firmly on the ground. He had clung to regulations as a protest leader in China; he had collected piles of evidence for his asylum case; and now he had nothing. He had no documents or laws to tie him to the country where he was living. There was no official proof that he even existed in New York City.

  8

  Wukan! Wukan! A Death

  死亡 / Sĭwáng

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 2011

  When the rioting started in Wukan, and villagers took turns breaking windows and shouting at the police, a little family-run restaurant had pulled the shutter down on its storefront. A heavy-browed man named Xue Jinbo closed shop for the day and went to join the protests. He made his way to the square where people were gathering and marched with them to the Lufeng government headquarters. He grabbed a bullhorn from someone in the crowd and shouted into it. “Return Wukan’s land!” he shouted. “Justice for Wukan!”

  Brother Xue might not have recognized Zhuang, but Zhuang knew him. He had eaten at the man’s family-run restaurant. In Zhuang’s worst years, when he barely had enough money to get by, he would go to the Xue family restaurant and enjoy generous portions of spareribs and cured meat. Xue’s wife would ladle large mounds of rice onto Zhuang’s plate, offering it to him for free.

  At one time, before the protests and the scandals, before Zhuang had even imagined a life outside China, Brother Xue had been a model of everything Wukan, and Zhuang, might have been. Xue had a reputation for generosity and openness. He ran his restaurant out of the first floor of his three-story home, and he made villagers of all stripes feel welcome. He was like Zhuang—if his friends were in trouble, he would give them his last penny. He listened to people’s problems and did his best to help. He loved his
family. He loved his village. And Wukan loved him. Some village elders, Zhuang explained, had required convincing before they joined the Hot Blooded Youth. But Xue had been different. “We did not have to go find Xue Jinbo,” Zhuang told me. “Xue Jinbo came and found us.”

  On the first day of the protests, after Xue and Zhuang had joined in yelling slogans at government buildings, a handful of protesters had been detained and taken to the local police station. Other villagers had gathered outside and demanded their release. By the evening, the husks of overturned police cars sat abandoned in the road. The next day the rioting continued. Schoolchildren walked out of their classes and ransacked the three-story village council building. They smashed chairs and desks and threw ripped-up papers out the windows like confetti. The wrecked police cars from the previous day still sat in the streets like overturned bugs. The streets were littered with broken glass. By the third day, when things had calmed down, the world looked different. People were out in the open, talking about their land. Xue Jinbo approached Zhuang. “I knew you were petitioning!” he said. “I would have helped, but I had no idea how to join up with you young people.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Not everyone was so enthusiastic. In addition to Brother Xue, the Hot Blooded Youth had sought out a man named Lin Zulian, who everyone called Old Lin. The young protest leaders had marched right to Old Lin’s door and asked him for help. He professed reluctance—Old Lin was sixty-seven and, having made his fortune, had recently returned to the village to start a quiet retirement—but he was one of Wukan’s most upstanding villagers. He was the closest thing that Wukan had to an aging scholar: a successful businessman with a rattling voice, glasses, and hair that curled up from his forehead in a thin, gravity-defying frizz. He told them that he was too old and too tired, that they thought too much of him. But after a few minutes of pleading and flattery, Old Lin agreed to help. He joined Yang Semao and Brother Xue at the head of the movement Zhuang had started.

  There were signs, in the days after the protest, that Wukan was the extraordinary village Zhuang had envisioned. Zhang Jianxing had posted photos of the riot online, first on his own QQ account and then, after being blocked by online censors, using the accounts of his friends. He posted videos on a site called Weibo, which functions similarly to Twitter, and amassed thousands of followers nearly overnight. By the second day, a handful of journalists from Hong Kong found their way to Wukan. The attention had helped, Zhuang thought. In a village just hours away from Wukan, riot police had arrived at the scene of local protests, throwing punches and canisters of tear gas and jailing protesters. Wukan had not been similarly cowed, and violence had been kept to a minimum.

  Their demands, too, had not been ignored. Wukan had stood together until the officials in Lufeng City had been forced to offer them a solution: they were welcome to appoint a council of thirteen people to negotiate for the return of Wukan’s land. The village selected its champions: Yang Semao was chosen, along with Hong Ruichao, Brother Xue, and ten others. The Lufeng government, Zhuang was sure, would be impressed. His little revolution had been successful, and the village waited for the negotiations to begin. Lufeng, however, intended to keep them waiting. The officials under the golden dome sent no word.

  The second official protest of Wukan Village was held on November 21. It was orderly and somber. Even the march was organized—each villager assigned a place in line. Old Lin was adamant that this march would be by the book, just a little gesture to remind everyone that the villagers were still there. They would not sit and wait forever. Zhuang and his friend used Weibo to inform the world about the protest. He documented the march and set it to music. The weather was good, the marchers waved the red flag of the People’s Republic of China. People talked about holding village elections and insisted they weren’t challenging the government. They were just asking for everyone to follow the law. According to Yang Semao, it was so well organized that the Lufeng government was scared. “They saw a dangerous future in the forty-five hundred people marching in line,” he told people, later. “They couldn’t solve the problems we wanted them to solve, so they decided to crack down.”

  In China, it was always difficult to tell when a line had been crossed. The Wukan riot had made news: photos had circulated on social media, newspapers in Hong Kong had run stories. The event was big enough that someone in China’s central government might have noticed, but even then there was no hard and fast rule on how Beijing reacted to protests. Protests that were nationalistic in bent—riots protesting Japanese war crimes or American imperialism—were tolerated. Protests that targeted local governments in discrete matters—against planned-for power plants or instances of local corruption—were often resolved peacefully. In other instances, however, leaders in Beijing would allow local governments to crush protesters ruthlessly.

  The line was blurred even in daily life. People in Wukan operated in the same semilegal gray areas that allowed the village land to be sold out from under them. They were smugglers, gamblers, and ticket scalpers. Many of the villagers were everyday small-scale lawbreakers, their businesses unofficial, their homes erected without permits. When Zhuang started petitioning, he knew the danger, in theory. But he had been doing it for three years with no reprisal. And over three years, he had invented himself as fearless and outspoken. He had no intention of stopping.

  The day Xue Jinbo was kidnapped, the negotiating team finally received word that they would be meeting with government officials from Lufeng. He had attended a village meeting earlier that morning and was scheduled to meet with officials in the afternoon. He invited Zhuang’s friend Hong Ruichao and one other representative to eat at the People’s Cafeteria, a three-story restaurant a few blocks from the ocean. They sat inside while the restaurant’s parking lot filled up with unmarked cars. The people who got out of them were wearing street clothes. They walked up the steps, into the restaurant, and grabbed all three men. Everyone in the village was confused about who the kidnappers were. The men accused Brother Xue of collaborating with a foreign power and organizing an illegal gathering. They dragged the three villagers out of the restaurant, stuffed them into a car, and drove off.

  It is not uncommon, in China, for a local government to outsource violence to plainclothes thugs. In Beijing, the business of crushing dissent has got so big that the system of black jails that ensnared Ma Yongtian does brisk business, running off money provided by local governments trying to prevent petitioners from registering their complaints. Local thugs might monitor a dissident under house arrest. Or as in Wukan, they might be sent into an unruly village to deliver troublemakers to a jail in another town. The Lufeng government may not have wanted to risk another mob outside the local police station.

  By the time Xue Jinbo and Hong Ruichao were taken, Zhuang had been arrested himself. He and Little Yan had left Wukan to attend a wedding and were staying at a friend’s house when, in the early hours of the morning, the police arrived at the door. They twisted Zhuang’s arm and dragged him into the precinct, where they strapped him into a chair and left him in a freezing-cold room. The first thing the interrogators did, Zhuang remembers, was attempt to have him sign a piece of paper confessing to selling fake cigarettes. He refused. When they asked his name, he said, “You have my ID card—why don’t you go and look!”

  * * *

  • • •

  In retrospect, Zhuang had been fortunate. When a group of police speaking his local dialect showed up, he suspected they had been sent from Lufeng. If they had been in Wukan rather than Shunde, with the Shunde police around them, Zhuang felt sure they would have beaten him up. As it was, they could only interrogate him. And when Zhuang refused to sign their papers, he was transferred to a Guangzhou prison where he was treated gently. Every few days he would be interrogated, but otherwise no one bothered him. The meals included meat and eggs.

  In the two months of organizing that had occurred since
the first protest, Wukan’s villagers had developed a protocol for emergencies. They would announce a crisis by banging on family gongs that had been in the village for generations. This would alert people that an emergency meeting would be held in the village square. With Zhuang gone from the village and three other village leaders kidnapped, it was up to Yang Semao to act. He had noticed the number of police cars in the village increasing. He suspected that something would go wrong with their negotiating meetings. “Coming events,” he said, “always cast shadows before them.”

  Yang told people to stop what they were doing. He warned them the kidnappers would come back to take more village leaders. He guessed that the thugs were targeting the entire thirteen-person negotiating team. Brother Xue and his companions had simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time—a restaurant off Wukan’s largest road, and with a parking lot, was easy to drive in and out of quickly. As if to prove Yang right, local television stations broadcast news of the warrants issued for the three people who had been taken from the restaurant, for Zhuang, and for Yang himself. If the outside world was dangerous, Wukan Village had always been safe. So they set up some makeshift barricades with felled tree trunks, stones, and gathered branches. Teams set up checkpoints at all the possible entrances to the village and required identification of anyone on the road. No one who wasn’t a Wukan resident could get into the village.