Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  In Little Yan’s classes, she studied languages and the basics of child care. Her teachers warned female students to stick to themselves. They were advised not to meet with men they had encountered on the Internet or to waste too much time on their phones. Little Yan was taught how to listen to her future bosses, how to clean up efficiently, and what kinds of games to play with young children. During the week, she slept in a dorm with other women.

  Little Yan’s most serious courses were language courses. She worked on English and Cantonese. Everyone in her school knew that the best jobs were in Guangdong Province, and Little Yan would leave Guangxi able to have simple conversations in Guangzhou’s dialect.

  At the end of the year, Little Yan boarded a bus with a handful of other graduates. It drove her out of the mountains toward China’s coastline. When the bus arrived on the streets of Guangzhou—a city of some eleven million, nearly five times bigger than the most populous city in Little Yan’s home province—it made no big impression on her. It was noisy and dusty. Her parents had given her three hundred yuan for a bus ticket in case she didn’t like the city, but she didn’t anticipate using it. She felt ambivalent about leaving her village and her home life. She did not spend her evenings worrying about her family reputation or imagining a triumphant return home, wealthy and successful. She would not have the time to miss home, anyway. She was planning to spend most of her time working.

  Her first job was at a preschool in an outer district of Guangzhou, where the buildings were still low-slung and banyan trees hung heavily over the street. She spent twelve-hour days chasing the four or five children she was charged with supervising. She prepared their meals, played games, and learned more Cantonese. The children helped her. When she didn’t know a word, one little boy in particular would explain. He knew the Cantonese slang for “boss.” Little Yan learned. At night, after sending home the latest group of children, she and the other teachers would push aside the tables and chairs and sleep on the floor.

  In the early 2000s, a job at a preschool was not hard to come by. When people grew tired at one job, they would leave. They would go home for Spring Festival and spend a week or two lounging, eating their mothers’ cooking, then head back to Guangzhou. There were newspaper advertisements and recommendations from friends. There was the reliable knowledge that some other preschool teacher had also gone home for Spring Festival, leaving a vacant position in her wake.

  There wasn’t much Little Yan needed in Guangzhou. Even though she had no bedroom, she kept herself neat. All the teachers did their washing on the weekends and hung their bras on lines strung up in the bathrooms. Little Yan liked to dress nicely, if she could, and on her occasional day off, she would go out with the other teachers and spend a little money on clothes. She bought approximations of Western luxury brands and shoes that boosted her height by several inches. The shoes, in the end, weren’t that useful. In the classrooms, she mainly wore rubber slippers. Little Yan bought herself a cell phone and put in all her contacts: her friends from school, her sisters, her parents, the other teachers she had met. Connections were useful, they kept her from feeling lonely, but she knew she was transient. She didn’t take her friendships too seriously—she already had six sisters to keep up with—but she made them easily. She had learned from a big family to keep her opinions largely to herself. She could gossip without offending anyone. She could disagree with someone and still consider them a friend. She threatened no one and made no one uncomfortable. It was her particular talent.

  Despite the stereotypes prevailing in her Guangxi village, unmarried daughters, according to Little Yan, are a more reliable financial resource than sons. Most of her salary she sent home. If she didn’t go home at Spring Festival, she sent gifts. Men, on the other hand, had love to think about. Little Yan was learning the basics of Guangzhou courtship. You always went on dates with a friend, and the men were required to pay. They were required to buy gifts and provide dinner. The most attractive man had a car, or at least a motorcycle. He had to be saving. He had to offer some promise of a future home. A man who sent all his money back to his family would never find himself a girlfriend.

  Little Yan did not date much in those early days in Guangzhou. She chatted online a bit—meeting people through QQ or playing popular games that had her keeping a little virtual farm. She chatted about nothing, mostly, and rarely met anyone in person. In those early years, she heeded her teacher’s advice and did not look to meet men online. She was taught to be wary. Most of the men in Guangzhou were suspect, looking to have fun but not make a commitment. Village values did not apply.

  After two years, Little Yan grew tired of her first job. With four or five children to look after, she was exhausted. She didn’t want to sleep in the classroom anymore. She had kept up with job opportunities by cell phone, reaching out to friends and former colleagues who had moved away. One of the jobs she heard about, in a city just sixteen miles outside Guangzhou called Foshan, sounded easier than the one she had. The school matched a single teacher to only one or two children, so she would not have to run around as much. The pay was good. She packed up her belongings, got on a bus, and went.

  By the time she met Zhuang Liehong, three years later, she wasn’t teaching at all anymore. One of her phone acquaintances had called her one day and asked if she wanted to open a shoe shop. She knew of a place, she said, in Foshan, where they could open two shops nearly side by side. Little Yan’s friend showed her where to purchase her shoes—wholesalers gave them good deals in Sanyuanli Market, a packed five-story free-for-all in Guangzhou. She took what she bought back to Foshan and stacked the shoes wherever she could fit them. It was not a beautiful store. The single aisle was barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other. She sold shoes during the day, and at night, she unfolded a cot in the back of the shop and fell asleep looking up at the jungle of boxes tucked in every corner, stacked in impossible towers always threatening to fall down.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Little Yan met Zhuang Liehong, he was already Patriot Number One. The kid who had slept on park benches and sneaked into his aunt’s apartment for showers had repurposed himself as a village hero. He had made friends on QQ and in Shunde. The shop owners who purchased cigarettes and other goods through him thought he was reliable. He invited people to his apartment for hotpot—communal meals over a tub of spicy, bubbling soup broth. He lived a double life through his alias. Little Yan thought he was honest and brave, even if Wukan Village was not her fight.

  The pair met on a service called True Marriage. Zhuang had set up a number of dating profiles. He had filled his account up with fifty yuan and sent out a bunch of canned messages, at two yuan (about thirty cents) each, until it ran out. Little Yan spent some evenings managing her own online accounts and sent him back her own rote message—nice to meet you—although this service was free for women. Two weeks later Zhuang was on his scooter, heading toward her shop in Foshan.

  Zhuang didn’t think he could marry a girl from Wukan. They were just as bull-headed as he was. And for the most part, women from Wukan knew his family’s reputation. Most parents would not have wanted to match their daughters with someone from Zhuang Songkun’s family.

  Zhuang was not good-looking, but he was reliable and honest. And by the time he met Little Yan, he had been living in Shunde for a few years and had a good job delivering supplies to local corner stores. Marriage decisions in Wukan Village were often made quickly; there are few reasons to delay. To wait, particularly for a woman, is to risk aging out of the popular dating pool, and having children early makes it easier to enlist the help of grandparents who might otherwise grow too old and frail.

  Before Little Yan, each one of Zhuang’s near misses looms large in his imagination. He was rejected on two notable occasions. A year after joining his friend’s business, he branched out on his own, running his own delivery service. One of his cl
ients, a woman named Yu Huang, was very close to his own age. She was from Zhuang’s home county but had married a man from Sichuan Province. He made a handful of deliveries to the shop Yu Huang ran, when one day she stopped him before he left, waving him over to the concrete steps that led to her store.

  “Hey, brother Zhuang!” she shouted as he wandered toward her. “Are you married?”

  “Not yet!” he shouted back. He suspected she was setting him up for a joke, so he grinned.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No!”

  “How’s your work going?”

  “Not bad,” said Zhuang. He was earning a little more than a thousand yuan every month, about $150. It was respectable.

  Yu Huang must have thought so, because the next thing she did was make him a proposition. “I’ve got a friend I want to introduce you to,” she said. She had a little sister who was working in a factory not far off. “When she gets a break and comes to Shunde, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Okay!” Zhuang said. If it was a real offer, he would take it. But he wouldn’t get his hopes up. He had never gotten an offer like this before. He rode away on his motorcycle, heading to make another delivery, still not sure whether Yu Huang had been making a joke.

  About a week later a call came. “Brother Zhuang! Come to my shop tonight!” Yu Huang shouted. Zhuang put on new clothes and got onto his motorcycle. He drove to her shop and found a pretty, neatly dressed younger woman waiting for him on the dusty sidewalk outside. He swung his leg over the scooter and walked up and introduced himself. He spoke in Mandarin.

  Yu Huang’s little sister quickly turned to her sister. “He has buckteeth!” she said in her home dialect, no one realizing that Zhuang could understand. Zhuang stood to the side, pretending he didn’t hear.

  “What do his looks have to do with anything?” Yu Huang answered. “Looks don’t matter! It’s what is in his heart that counts! He’s honest. He’s a good person.”

  Zhuang took Yu Huang’s little sister out to dinner and then shopping. He spent more than three hundred yuan on a coat for his date—overdoing it a little. Three hundred yuan was more than he would have spent over several weeks of living in the park in Shenzhen. He spent more money than he would have if his teeth had been straight, or if he hadn’t spent the last few years halfway homeless. And then he drove her back to the corner store. He knew she wouldn’t call him, but he told himself he was better off. He didn’t have too many requirements for a wife, he thought. He wanted someone who was good-looking, loyal, and nice. Someone who would respect him.

  Although Zhuang didn’t find a wife quickly, he was a reliable businessman now. His dogged petitioning had earned him respect from other villagers. His status was changing. He met another woman online and took her and a friend on a weekend getaway to the beach, but nothing came of it. He met the woman who worked at the print shop where he first learned to use a computer, but she was from Sichuan Province, which he suspected contributed to her bad temper. And she was unfaithful.

  When he drove his scooter to Foshan and saw Little Yan for the first time, he was surprised at his good fortune. She was beautiful. And quiet. And she didn’t look twice at his crooked teeth. He was sincere and enthusiastic. He took her out to dinner. He went out of his way to buy her things. And as the pressure built in Wukan, she saw him as he hoped she would: he was fighting for what was right. When he explained the situation, the stolen land and corrupt officials, she nodded in sympathy.

  Little Yan was surprised by Zhuang, as well. His personality was so forceful and unguarded. She had no interest in protesting—she had long made it a point to avoid conflict—but she respected his resolve. He knew so much more about the situation than she did, she would later say. It was his area of expertise, and she trusted his judgment. And on top of all that, he was honest. He was the opposite of what she had come to expect from a Guangdong suitor.

  Little Yan was twenty-six when she met Zhuang, old enough that her parents might start wondering what she was doing with her life. Still, she was not as eager to get married as Zhuang. She was happy to get to know him and to get swept up in his life. She met his friends in Shunde, and he included her in plans to open up a clothing shop. She wasn’t a romantic; she had never expected to hit it rich or marry a movie star. She liked the idea of settling down in Zhuang’s village, having children, and living quietly.

  The night Zhuang was arrested in Shunde, Little Yan watched the police twist his arm behind his back and force his head down. Two visions of her life were laid out in front of her: Zhuang would be released, or he would not. Little Yan was her mother’s daughter. For two weeks she went about her days selling shoes as if her life hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change, wondering what would happen. And then when Zhuang got out of prison, he called her before anyone else. He called her before he called his parents. Little Yan knew her shoe shop days were over: she was going to marry Zhuang Liehong.

  The couple took their engagement photos not long after that, along with Hong Ruichao and his fiancée. The four of them dressed up in rented finery and climbed out onto rocks on Wukan Bay. In one photo, Little Yan poses in a white dress, pretending to play a white violin. In another, the four friends are walking down the beach, barefoot, grinning at the camera. Little Yan was practical, but she was happy to be marrying a hero. She was not immune to the triumph that coursed through Wukan Village. She believed, with the rest of the village, that they had accomplished the impossible. Zhuang Liehong had an unconquerable spirit and a warm heart, and Little Yan loved him.

  Little Yan didn’t feel that she fit in Wukan Village, but she didn’t mind. The people in the village were blunt and opinionated. They hadn’t learned, as she had learned, to eat bitter, and to do it quietly. They spoke before they thought. She befriended Hong Ruichao’s wife, the woman who had promised to wait forever for his return from jail, and their husbands both ran for election when, in January 2012, the village set up ballot boxes in the elementary school courtyard. Little Yan thought she might go back to Foshan eventually and open the clothing shop she and Zhuang had been planning before the Wukan revolution. In March, however, Zhuang was elected to the Wukan Village Council. By the end of the year, both Little Yan and Hong Ruichao’s wife were pregnant.

  While Zhuang was struggling with his new position, Little Yan let pregnancy take over her tiny frame. She took long walks and ate carefully. She decided, against trends in China, to give birth naturally. She wanted to nurse her baby for at least a few months rather than move to milk powder. The couple bribed a doctor to tell them the sex of their baby—a practice that is illegal in China—and Little Yan went into labor early, on one of her walks. She made her way back home, and Zhuang rushed her to the hospital in Lufeng. On May 8, 2013, she gave birth to a calm, blinking baby boy. Little Yan loved him more than she could have anticipated. She had always been her mother’s daughter, pragmatic and ingrained with a work ethic born in scarcity. But now that Kaizhi was in the world, Little Yan wanted nothing more than to stay home and take care of him. So that was what she would do, for now.

  10

  Brewing Tea

  泡茶 / Pào Chá

  JANUARY–JUNE 2015

  In January, nearly a year after they arrived in the United States, work permits arrived in the mail for Zhuang and Little Yan. Zhuang pounced on the letters. He saved the envelope and the papers and put the card in a thick plastic sleeve. It was a sturdy card, with his photo printed, his birth date and his address right there. It was heavy enough to serve as an anchor, or at least the first stable foot planted on the ground. To work legally, Zhuang needed a Social Security number, so his next step was a trip to the Social Security office (or rather two—he had schemed to avoid lengthy wait times by going to an office farther out on Long Island, where he learned that as a resident of Queens, he could only apply for his card in Queens). Once he had that card in hand, tucked safely i
n with his asylum documents, he applied for every other kind of card he could think of. He opened new bank accounts. He studied to take his driver’s exam and enrolled Little Yan in classes. “Someday,” he said, “we are going to live somewhere that you can’t just walk everywhere.”

  Zhuang was brimming with pride when he passed his written driving test, in Chinese, on his first try. He added a driver’s license to his collection. “Little Yan will need a little more practice, I think,” he said. “She’s not as quick a study as me!” For the most part, she agreed. On the first day of her own driving class, the instructor scolded her for wearing high heels, saying, “It is dangerous to drive in high heels!” She came home and looked at her closet. If she couldn’t wear high heels, she didn’t have much to go on. The next class she opted to wear her house slippers and got scolded again. She would have to go out and buy driving shoes.

  Zhuang applied for Medicaid cards for the both of them, then insurance cards on top of that. He sat in the Flushing Library for three hours waiting for his appointment to get a New York City ID. As Zhuang’s collection grew, he would take out his cards and spread them on the folding table they had placed in the corner of their room. Zhuang would blow cigarette smoke into a little fan he had set up in the window, to avoid stinking up the apartment, and list them, each one a little affirmation of all the decisions he had made. “I have so many IDs,” he would tell visitors proudly.

  * * *

  • • •

  While Zhuang was collecting IDs, Little Yan’s list of regrets was growing. Her parents complained, on their phone calls, that their grandson was poorly behaved. He didn’t listen to them. She worried that her son would become set in his ways before she had the chance to meet him again. She worried that asylum would never come and she would remain a stranger to her only child. During the days, when she was busy, it was easier for her not to think about him. During their occasional video calls, he looked like a child from her village, a little bowl cut mushrooming off his head in a style reminiscent of Kim Jong-un, the plump new leader of North Korea.