“She doesn’t listen!” he told one of his visitors, a woman who had translated during his asylum preparations. “Aiya, she doesn’t understand anything! She’s impossible to teach.”
“When you yell at me, you make me nervous!” Little Yan told him. “And then I make more mistakes!”
“I’ve taught other people,” he said. “It’s not so hard to understand! You don’t pay attention!”
The lessons did nothing to stop old arguments from coming up again, and Zhuang did his best to put his wife in her place. When at dinner their former translator turned to chat with Little Yan about Chinese politics, he interrupted their conversation. “Don’t listen to her!” he said. “She doesn’t know anything!”
The old arguments were, in fact, growing more heated. Zhuang, in his idleness, was worrying about Little Yan’s working conditions again and the bad attitude they were giving her. She came home with stories he didn’t like. Her boss had been dating one of the girls working for him, and then, one day, his wife had shown up from China. Little Yan would rarely tell Zhuang directly, but on occasion she would let the details slip. At the same dinner, Little Yan had launched into the latest gossip. “She doesn’t know, and nobody dares to tell her!” Little Yan giggled. “And the girlfriend, she keeps trying to make friends! She says she’s teaching the woman about the business!”
The stories cut Zhuang deeply. He worried that his wife would follow in the footsteps of her co-workers, treating her marriage as lightly as they did theirs. When they argued now, she questioned his ability to take care of her and his son. He complained that she was selfish, unable to think of anything but money. The possibility of divorce, a shameful thing in Wukan Village, hung over the little room where they had just moved.
* * *
• • •
When Zhuang called me in early June—his second summer in New York—he invited me to meet him at the East Buffet and mentioned that he had found a new job. He had paid two hundred dollars to get an extra brake installed, pasted a second rearview mirror onto his windshield, and taped a yellow piece of paper to his back window that read STUDENT DRIVER. He had gotten certification as a driving instructor and found a job with a company called Union Driving School. The school was matching him with students, at twenty-six dollars for each hour-and-a-half lesson. He still had to pay for his own gas, and his students were scattered enough that he had to allow at least a half hour between each lesson, but he thought he could make decent money this way. “I had six students yesterday,” he told me over the phone. “Six is too many, though, you barely get time to eat lunch.” Five, he explained, was ideal.
When we made a date for lunch, I asked him whether Little Yan would have the day off. “I haven’t talked to her in three days,” he said. “We’ve been fighting.”
He picked me up at a little playground he had initially discovered on Google Maps. He eased into the conversation, talking first about his new job. Most of his students, he explained, were people who had been in the country for some time. Maybe they were looking to move out of the city or start a new job. “If you live in New York without a car,” he explained, “there are lots of inconveniences.”
He was proud of his mastery of the vocabulary. “Parallel parking!” he recited to me on the way to the restaurant. “Pull in here!” His lessons started out in the busy, narrow streets around Flushing center—there was no gentle initiation in a parking lot. He was a stickler for keeping his students’ hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel, and he made sure all his students used their turn signal and looked both ways at every stop. He did not like sudden stops or jerky driving. He took all the rules very seriously.
By the time I met him by the playground that summer, Zhuang had worked himself up to blaming Little Yan for almost everything. He hinted at their problems at lunch and then invited me back to tea at his apartment. We walked past the suspicious landlady and into their latest room, much smaller than the last. He set two stools out around his little table and tried to explain. He was worried that Little Yan was getting harassed at her job, that her boss was flirting. It was embarrassing to have her working at a place with people like that. He had raised the idea, again, of the two of them working together, but she had resisted. It made him suspicious. “I know she is texting with someone else!” he told me. “I see her hiding it from me.” As for the job, “she says it’s about the money, but she just wants the freedom to do whatever she wants.” She’s naïve, he said. If it hadn’t been for him, someone would have already taken advantage of her.
He leaned over his electric kettle and wiped his bad eye with a tissue. “It is like I am not a man here,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You don’t understand—even my wife no longer respects me. She doesn’t listen to me. I am afraid to say out loud what I am thinking!” His wife was supposed to be the one person who stood with him when things were difficult. He should be able to trust her not to disavow him as his family had, back when he was living on the streets in Shenzhen. She was supposed to remember who he was when he was at his best. “I don’t want to fight with her, so I have stopped talking to her,” he told me. Little Yan, for her part, had returned the silent treatment. She didn’t want to argue about quitting her job again.
There were only two ways Zhuang could imagine resolving their problems. “Either we go back to China, or we get a divorce,” he told me. If he went back, he ran the risk of being thrown in jail, he said, “but sometimes I think jail might be better than this. At least in jail, I would be a man.” He shrugged and turned toward the window, looking miserable. He couldn’t grin his way through it. It had been nearly a year since his asylum interview and more than a year since he had arrived sure that the United States would recognize his worth.
He heaved a sigh, looked down into the empty maw of his electric kettle, and decided to go to the kitchen for more water. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this.” And then, just as he disappeared, my phone buzzed with an e-mail. It was from Zhuang’s lawyer, copied to me.
“Asylum APPROVED,” it read, and then included the date. And that was all there was to it. I stared at the message as Zhuang came back in and sat down across from me. I handed the phone to him and started to explain.
Zhuang understood before I had finished my sentence. He leaped off his stool, sloshing the kettle water. “Oh!” he said, frozen on his feet. “Shake my hand!!” He looked left, and then right, then out the window, then back again. “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette!!” He scrolled through his phone and called both his interpreters. “Hello! I just wanted to tell you that I got asylum!! Yes! Yes! I just heard now!” He tried to call his friends in China, but no one was answering. He called an old restaurant co-worker, someone he hadn’t seen in months. When he looked up at me, his grin was plastered back across his face.
Zhuang’s contact in Congress had come through. She had put in a request to the CECC in April, and the congressman who had been in charge the year Zhuang was interviewed—Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey—had signed his name to a letter of support. The sudden reality of the letter took Zhuang’s lawyer by surprise, but he seized the opportunity, coordinating with them to send a second letter inquiring after the status of the case. And then, Zhuang had assumed, the letter had disappeared into the maze of immigration offices that had, up until now, seemed to have swallowed all his documents, all his applications, evidence, and testimony, and never spit it out again.
“It was the letter!” he told me joyously. “I knew that the letter would help! Aiya, I should have insisted on it earlier!” He sat on his stool, then stood up again, then sat again. He rubbed his hands along the sides of his jeans, unable to keep still. This was the confirmation of everything he had believed. Zhuang was important enough to grab the attention of Congress! And Congress had made a difference! The man of Wukan was no longer just in New York; he was of New York. “Thank you,
America!” he said in English, to the air. He looked at his phone for a second, then leaned forward in his chair, slowly.
“Do you think you might text Little Yan and tell her?” he said.
* * *
• • •
That night, after hearing about the asylum case, Little Yan returned home and started talking to her husband again. She agreed to quit her job. Their new status changed things. The couple still argued, but they had begun having conversations about their future together in Flushing. Zhuang was feeling like a man again. And as a man, he would make plans for his family. “Go to school!” he told Little Yan. “I wish I was good at studying, but we both know I’m not.”
The schedule would be hectic. Little Yan would be exhausted. But she saw the logic of Zhuang’s thinking. Certifications were Zhuang’s specialty—taking tests, amassing IDs—but some were more suited to Little Yan. She would have to take English classes first, and courses would take time. But all of a sudden, she had time. And eventually, if the classes led her to a job working in an office or behind a counter somewhere, Zhuang would feel that she was safely in a respectable environment. She would not have to spend her days breathing in the fumes of a nail salon. She could make more money, and Zhuang would not lose face among his friends back in China. And her family would be proud. An office job was respectable.
“You can learn!” Zhuang told Little Yan. “You can study English. We need to invest in our future!”
11
Fortress Besieged
围城 / Wéichéng
2013–2015
It would be years before Karen Xie learned Little Yan’s real name, and when she did, she would have a difficult time remembering it. To her, Little Yan would always be Angel, the name she used to introduce herself at the Long Island Business Institute (LIBI), the vocational school where they had both enrolled. Karen was eight years younger than Little Yan and had arrived in the United States six months earlier. She was talkative and friendly, with rectangular glasses that she pushed up her nose when she was nervous. Karen worked in a print shop on Main Street. Little Yan was working as a home health aide but told everyone in class that she worked the front counter of a Chinese restaurant.
In some ways Karen was Little Yan’s opposite: she had come to the United States alone, without the support or hindrance of a husband, and in possession of a university degree. Born in 1991, she was part of a generation that came of age alongside China’s economic miracle. She was not a villager; she had grown up on the outskirts of a city of six million in Henan Province, a place where a university education was a realistic goal for women and men alike. While Little Yan was selling shoes in Foshan, waiting for Zhuang to get out of jail, Karen had been studying computer design.
Whatever the differences in their ages or family histories, Karen and Little Yan met on equal footing. They shuttled between ESL classes with names like “Life Skills” and “Aspects of Communication,” remaining at LIBI until ten p.m. most weeknights. Students brought in tea eggs and little plastic-wrapped cakes and ate them together during breaks. They passed their homework back and forth, checking answers. In shaky English, they introduced themselves to their classmates over and over again. Little Yan and Karen found they had the exact same schedule, and they began to talk.
* * *
• • •
When Karen was a university student in Henan Province, she had come across one of China’s most famous novels, first published in 1947, Fortress Besieged. The book had been recommended by her college boyfriend, a skinny, studious upperclassman with glasses that nearly matched her own. It opens with a boat trip: the student Fang Hongjian returns home after years of study abroad. Fang is carrying a fake diploma that he had purchased from an American con man, expecting that no one in his hometown would know the difference. Returning to China, he hoped, would be as natural as water evaporating and then raining back down, making a splash as it returns to the ocean.
Karen had found the book funny. She laughed at Fang’s guilelessness and his bumbling attempts to gain wealth and recognition. He lies constantly, aping sophistication by criticizing everyone he meets. He leans heavily on the cachet of his time abroad but often misreads social cues and is at sea in a mix of cultures and class divisions.
By the time Karen met Little Yan, she had reevaluated the book’s dark humor, seeing similarities between Fang’s life and her own. Her friends dealt in half-truths to make themselves feel more comfortable, and she in turn lied to her roommates about her immigration status and to her friends about the salary she would be earning in a new job. She saw herself buffeted by forces in both China and the United States, pushed along in life by friends and family members. By the time she had a green card and the money to go back and visit her parents in Henan, Donald Trump was president, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be allowed back in.
The fortress in the book’s title was a metaphor for marriage, more attractive from the outside than from the inside. Karen’s fortress, however, was New York. Everyone on the outside was trying to get in, while she had spent her first year in the city desperate to find a way out.
* * *
• • •
Karen had come to the United States when Zhuang was still considering travel by boat. While he was weighing the viability of Guam, she had reserved a place at a language school in Ohio. Her mother had put her on the plane in Henan Province—her hilarious, outgoing, and fashionable mother who by rights should have been making the trip herself. All the women in Karen’s family were better suited to an adventure in a strange country. Karen was quiet and plain. She was not bawdy or tough like her mother or grandmother. Her younger brother better reflected their charm and wit. Karen didn’t like to wear makeup or fuss about clothes. She worried sometimes that her head was too large to be attractive. She sat on the plane, heading toward Ohio, surfing through movies and feeling dismayed by the turn her life had just taken.
Henan is a dusty, landlocked place with a dense population, bisected by the silt-filled, changeable coil of the Yellow River. Karen and her mother had lived with her maternal grandparents, tucked in a low-slung old house on the outskirts of a midsize city. In the winters her grandfather wandered the streets selling sticks of candied fruit, a treat called tanghulu. He harvested the fruits himself, little red berries that grew on hawthorn trees, and dipped them in sugar. In the summers, he sold peaches. If he came back with leftovers, he would slip Karen a treat to tide her through her studies.
Karen’s grandfather is a kind presence in her memory, but it was her mother who, despite their differences, shaped her. Her mother was not relentlessly practical like Little Yan’s. She had an expansive imagination. She had raised Karen on stories about her one adventure: a trip she had made to Beijing in the late 1970s. The worst of the Cultural Revolution had passed, and the country was making its first few steps toward normalcy, reopening universities and reviving industry. Karen’s mother had boarded one of the old slow trains that cut north through Henan into Hebei Province and up toward Beijing. She had sat up alert and imagining her life in China’s capital city. She found it bustling and full of young people. Karen’s mother was ambitious, and she wanted to stay in Beijing indefinitely, but her parents called her back. She was the eldest of five children, and they needed her help at home. By the time she was twenty-three, Karen’s mother was pregnant. She would never say she regretted it—her missed chance at a different life—but she told it as a cautionary tale, one that Karen never completely understood.
* * *
• • •
The call came through while Karen was at work, sitting at a computer in the storefront graphic design business where she was employed shortly after graduating from college. Her mother was on the line, chattering to her about a family friend she had just run into, and about the friend’s child who had traveled to the United States and stayed there. It was safe, she said, and people were friendly.
Her friend had bragged about the opportunities in the United States and the money her kid sent back. Karen’s mother had asked, and the friend had recommended an agency that placed students in U.S. schools. It would cost money, but Karen’s mother would find a way to raise it. It would be a great opportunity for Karen to have a new and different life. Her mother was not giving her an option, really, but Karen told her that she would think about it.
“The dream,” Karen told me later, “was my mother’s.” Her mother had a relative living in Long Island—the two rarely talked, but Karen’s mother had heard about the woman’s accomplishments. In the United States, you were able to act boldly, to take any opportunity. You were free of family obligations, free to take risks and jump the class divides that seemed so insurmountable in China. In China, Karen’s mother worked hard every day and still lived in the same house with her parents. There were no opportunities, just daily responsibilities. New York represented everything Karen’s mother had ever desired.
Karen, on the other hand, thought of the United States as just another place, one where people happened to have bigger noses. She had learned much of what she knew about the country through a hit television series called Prison Break, in which eight hard-boiled convicts escape from a prison called Fox River. She wasn’t so naïve as to assume Prison Break was an accurate representation of American life, but she hadn’t bothered to give it much thought.
Karen suspected that the timing of her mother’s suggestion had to do with her dislike of Karen’s boyfriend. She had met him during her freshman year of college, and they had been together ever since. He was three years older and a good fit for her, smart and decent. They were both quiet people, and he was eager to get married. After graduating, Karen moved to his hometown, where she got a job at the same company as him and where they talked about opening a graphic design shop of their own. Her mother complained it was too far away—two hours by car.
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