Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Now when she looks back, Karen can imagine a shadow life, one in which she is pregnant by the time she is twenty-three or twenty-four, just as her mother had been. She would have worked hard during the days and let her mother-in-law watch her children. She would have eaten dinner with his family every night. Her days would have stretched out in front of her, uniform and expected. It wouldn’t have been an easy life, by any means, but it would not have been a bad one. And she had been happy with the future she imagined. It was her mother who was not.

  Karen, true to her word, spent days considering the United States. She tried to imagine blond people speaking English and living in big houses with green lawns, but she didn’t like the idea. All Karen’s friends were in China. Her family was in China. And her boyfriend disapproved. She resolved to tell her mother no.

  It didn’t work. Her mother persisted. She scolded and cajoled. Karen would finish a phone call with her one day and find herself having the exact same conversation again the next. Her mother never said a word about Beijing, never mentioned her own shadow life, but it hung over their phone calls all the same. Generation after generation of women would have babies young and work into old age, the pattern spinning out and repeating itself over and over. “Sometimes you have to stop and listen to your elders,” Karen says. “Even if your own instinct is to say, no, no, no.”

  * * *

  • • •

  At the end of the twentieth century, Chinese immigration picked up speed. The wave that would pave the way for Karen, Little Yan, and Zhuang was built in equal parts on U.S. immigration policy and on changing realities in China. In 1965, after years of exclusion, the United States finally changed its immigration policy. The new quota system limited immigration based on nationality, not ethnicity, and it provided two paths into the United States: family reunification or professional preference. Students from Taiwan and Hong Kong trickled in and attended universities. Flushing’s modest Chinese population grew. By the 1980s, the decades of slow, cautious immigration to the United States were over. The Chinese economy was opening up, and people who had been trapped by restrictive residency systems could move from province to province. They were no longer stuck on their farms or in their fisheries. People could acquire travel documents and earn money. And they could, once again, pool their resources and send family members out over the ocean.

  In addition to an increasing number of Chinese immigrants who arrived and lived legally, old Chinese networks of people-moving reestablished themselves in the 1980s, frequently piggybacking on channels run by human traffickers in Mexico or Canada. Chinese agents called snakeheads kept other routes entirely in Chinese hands, transporting people cheaply on rickety boats that could spend months in international waters. The path to New York was indirect, depending on the availability of boats and safe houses in other countries. Some emigrants waited months in apartments in Thailand or Russia before they received the fraudulent passports they would travel on. Once they landed in the United States, they were instructed to rip up their documents and tell immigration agents that they were there to apply for asylum. Others spent months on boats or moved from city to city on airplanes, making stops in Africa, South America, or parts of Europe, finally approaching the U.S. coastline at night.

  This new network was focused on the cities and villages in Fujian Province, a few hours’ drive north of Wukan, on the coast closest to Taiwan. Around the city of Fuzhou, entire villages emptied out. And once one village was gone, and the path toward immigration had been established, other villages followed. Most of the former inhabitants went to the United States, but some villagers followed other routes, moving to Japan, Italy, or Canada.

  Karen was lucky and unlucky at once. Her visa came easily. Her mother paid an agency 100,000 yuan, about $16,000, to help her obtain a student visa. The agency followed the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. It provided Karen with a document that cleared her to study in an expensive English-language school in Ohio. She received some coaching from an agent on what to say in her interview, and a letter from the school appeared with her name on it. She held out hope that the visa would not get issued, so she could stay with her boyfriend and her friends and so the decision to remain in China would not be her own. But the visa arrived, the money was paid, and Karen was issued a plane ticket.

  The money her family collected represented a small fortune in Henan, in a year when the average family income in China was around 14,000 yuan, or $2,083. The family borrowed from some distant relatives already living in the United States, scraping together enough to send Karen over with a little bit of cash in her pocket. Once she was in the United States, Karen was expected to start working, paying down the debt the trip had incurred. No one in her family had seen 100,000 yuan all at once before. Still, they had no idea how expensive life in the United States would be. No one had any idea where Ohio was. And they had only the testimony of their friends to go on that the agency wouldn’t kidnap Karen or take her money and then leave her friendless in an airport somewhere.

  The cost of passage to the United States varies widely depending on geography, age, and luck. Karen’s cost only a fraction of what some pay. In Fujian, where huge numbers of people left for the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. visas were more difficult to obtain. Visa officers were more suspicious of travelers coming from Fujian, more willing to turn down applications, and human traffickers in the region could charge as much as eighty thousand dollars for their services. In the 1990s, it was not unusual for an immigrant from Fujian to make a months-long journey by boat. But after boats repeatedly proved uncomfortable and dangerous, they slowly fell out of fashion. In 1993 a boat called the Golden Venture sank in very public fashion off a Far Rockaway beach in New York, and a report issued by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1996 described repurposed fishing boats as “in danger of sinking,” their human cargo “packed into hot, poorly ventilated, and confined spaces.” Today Fujianese are more likely to travel first to Mexico or Canada and to make their way secretly over the border.

  For hopeful working-class immigrants from other parts of China—from Henan or Guangdong, for example—the options are cheaper and more obtainable. Some, like Zhuang and Little Yan, manage the feat of arriving and staying in the United States by simply joining a tour group. Others pay agencies to help with their applications. Older people will apply for tourist visas, making their case with false documents, provided by their agent, that attest to the applicant’s steady employment or property holdings in China. Younger people will apply for student visas, enrolling in schools in cities or towns scattered across the Midwest, many of them switching their plane tickets after the fact and flying straight to New York.

  Karen was not one of them. She was neither savvy nor well informed enough to skip Ohio. She had a three-month visa and a ticket to Columbus International Airport. She left China as summer was drawing to a close, the peaches her grandfather picked sweet from the spike in summer heat. In Ohio, the day of her arrival was hot and clear, the sky blue with big clouds hanging low and heavy. Karen wandered out of the baggage claim holding a bag stuffed with three outfits and a backpack containing a new laptop computer—she had promised her boyfriend that they would chat online every day. Another student had been on the airplane with her, unknown and sitting in some other row, and they found themselves wandering in parallel, looking for a man holding up a sign in Chinese. They didn’t say much. They didn’t chatter on the walk to the van that the man was driving, and they didn’t talk much on the highway. Karen watched scrubby green trees speed by the windows, the blur dipping down over the pointed roofs of the occasional low-slung warehouse. She wondered where the people were. Cities in America, she thought, were emptier than the Chinese countryside.

  The school Karen had enrolled in consisted of a block of classrooms in a nondescript high-rise. The Chinese students were housed in a nearby set of apartments that had been turned into dorms and Karen arrived to a room fur
nished with three little metal-frame beds and three desks, a comforter folded at the foot of her bed. Her roommates, Karen would find, had flown in just days before. She can barely remember what her classmates looked like, she was so occupied with chatting to her boyfriend back home.

  In China, Karen had prided herself on her friendships. She had close friends from as far back as middle school, women who, unlike Karen, were brave and opinionated—hardly ever quiet. In their company, Karen might even imagine that she had a wild side. She was not convinced that the United States had anything better to offer in terms of people.

  Her arrival in the United States had been even more disorienting than Little Yan’s. She was alone and in debt. Little Yan might have been limited by Zhuang’s expectations, and by his pride, but he had provided a safe center in Flushing. Karen had a total of two acquaintances in the country. She had the relative on Long Island—the woman her mother admired so much had contributed a good deal to the cost of getting Karen to the United States. And there was a girl her own age somewhere in New York.

  Karen had met the younger girl through the agency in China. She called herself Isobel and had arrived at the office in Henan in full makeup and heels. It was not a good first impression; she was too dressed up and too aloof. When the agency made the two girls exchange contact information, Karen had promptly forgotten it. She didn’t care about Isobel. And once she was in the United States, she didn’t care much about her classmates.

  Karen made the walk to school every day and tried to keep up with her studies. But she learned nothing. She barely talked. She spent two months pretending her situation in Ohio was temporary, messaging her boyfriend at night and lamenting her decision to come to the United States. She was earning no money, and the days on her student visa were running down uselessly. She complained to her mother and thought about coming home. But she still owed her auntie (a term used in parts of China for any distant relative around your mother’s age) 100,000 yuan. And she still had her mother’s full, hopeful heart to consider.

  So Karen decided to leave school and do what everyone had expected of her in the first place. She phoned the woman she called Auntie, borrowed one last sum of money, and booked her ticket to New York.

  * * *

  • • •

  This auntie, whom Karen had never met, had kindly offered to let Karen stay with her. This was not uncommon; in China people went out of their way even for distant relatives. If Karen’s family members had visitors, they would squeeze together in beds. They would stack on top of one another to make guests feel comfortable. If they had food to eat, they would be happy to offer it to anyone who happened to stop by.

  There was another side to this politeness, however, and as Karen knew, family life was not uncomplicated. Keeping up appearances might mean someone said yes as a stopgap, when their real meaning was no. She assumed she knew an uncomplicated yes from a false one. But now she found that something had recently gone askew with her sense of propriety, or else something had gone wrong with her relative during her years in the United States. Her auntie looked wealthy, but she was specific about money from the moment Karen got into the car. She informed Karen even as they left the airport that she would be expected to pay rent. Then she leaned around from the front seat and warned Karen that she should be careful in New York. “You don’t know anything about this place,” she said. “People will take advantage! Don’t go outside without me.”

  The auntie had moved to the United States nearly two decades before Karen. She had opened her own takeout restaurant, divorced her husband, and dated an Italian man. They all lived together—the auntie, her children, the Italian man, and his—in a big house on Long Island. To Karen, driving in from the airport, the neighborhood looked rich. The house had a yard where the children could play. It had multiple bedrooms and floors.

  Karen’s auntie had a plan for her: she would stay in the house in Long Island indefinitely and work off the money she owed. She would work as a maid and a babysitter, and her monthly rent would be added to the debt and taken out of the opaque, unspecified salary that she would be earning. When she arrived at the house, the older woman took her passport and told her it was for safekeeping. Maybe, Karen thought, her relative had just become American. Maybe the preoccupation with money, the cold reception, and the suspicious looks were part of a more dangerous world.

  Karen still had the look of a student. She still pushed her glasses up her nose when she was nervous. A renegade pimple or two would still pop up on her cheeks when she felt stressed. But she also had some of the hard edges that her mother had hoped to instill. She found them in Long Island, when she went into the room she would be sharing with her auntie’s son, flipped open her computer, and found a message she had been ignoring on QQ. It was from Isobel, writing from Flushing, a neighborhood that Karen knew to be somewhere in New York. Karen had felt her passport slip out of her fingers with alarm. She knew enough to see that her auntie was trying to take advantage of her. She knew enough to get out of that house as fast as she could.

  Karen replied to Isobel, and she was lucky again. Isobel, despite her makeup and high heels, answered her message warmly. She assured Karen that Flushing was safe and that Karen’s auntie was exaggerating the dangers of the city. She even offered Karen a place to sleep while she figured things out. “Everybody does it,” she texted. She sent Karen an address. Isobel was Karen’s first friend in the United States

  After just a few days in Long Island, Karen Googled how to get to Flushing. She told her aunt she was going to meet a friend and walked to a bus stop, the correct change already in her hand. As she got closer to Main Street, she noticed jet-black heads on the sidewalks and realized she could understand more of the people who boarded the bus, talking to their friends. Flushing was loud and crowded and overwhelming, but at least Karen knew how to ask directions.

  That week in Flushing, Isobel saved Karen. She knew someone who was looking for a roommate in the building where she lived. She knew where the cheap food stalls were in the food courts—the Shanghainese place that would give you a deep-fried cube of rice for a dollar, the cafeterias that would stretch five dollars into an enormous meal. She walked Karen up and down the sidewalks and introduced her to friends. She showed her the newspapers and the classified sections and left her alone to find a job. Karen still owed her auntie money, but with a job, she could pay the woman back on her own terms.

  After nearly a week Karen took the bus back to Long Island. Her belongings were already stashed in her new shared room in the shared apartment off Main Street. She walked up to her auntie and told her she needed her passport back. The older woman sighed, acting as if Karen had misunderstood, and handed over the document. It would have been a loss of face, Karen later explained to me, for the woman to admit she had been trying to take advantage of a young relative. So they parted, still pretending that the woman was a benefactress and that Karen was grateful.

  * * *

  • • •

  In Flushing, LIBI advertisements were everywhere—on banners hanging on lights along Main Street and posters in the cars on the 7 train. The school, founded on Long Island in the 1970s, had moved its headquarters in 2008, having discovered a lucrative opportunity in Flushing. By the time Karen and Little Yan enrolled, the hallways were filled with Chinese immigrants. LIBI was headquartered in a narrow office building off Main Street, the lobby entrance unattended and located between a regularly shut garage door and a pharmacy, across from a Paris Baguette. During class breaks, some of the younger students would stock up on sticky pastries, mounds of bread somewhere between a Chinese sweet bun and a real croissant.

  The classrooms at LIBI were, for the most part, windowless. The hallways, two on each floor extending from the elevator bank to the front of the building, were painted blue and decorated haphazardly with scheduling announcements, signs about student IDs, and a handful of airbrushed drawings of sports car
s. Before enrolling, Karen met with an administrator who explained what the school offered. In Long Island, LIBI had become well known for its program in court stenography, but in Queens, students could choose from programs in accounting, hospitality, office technology, and homeland security. Very few LIBI students, the woman explained, had to take out loans to cover the tuition, partially because many of them qualified for federal financial aid and partially due to the low cost of tuition. Karen filled out the forms for financial aid and put down the initial two thousand dollars for her first semester of ESL classes. At the end of the semester, she would choose her specialty. On the evening of the first class session, Karen walked into a windowless room and picked a seat just behind Little Yan. By the end of the semester, the pair had become friends.

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen does not like to discuss her first year in the United States. Little Yan had the flexibility to quit her jobs and look for new work, but Karen was terrified of failing to pay off her debt. She worked long shifts that stretched from ten to twelve hours, trying to fill daily quotas. She walked home along Main Street, barely daring to buy food. She cried quietly at night, her head smashed into her pillow, or under her pillow, or facing the wall. She was sharing a room and didn’t want to disturb her roommates. She cried because she was lonely and because money was impossible to keep in her pocket. She was beginning to realize the change was permanent. She cried while texting her friends, pretending not to be as unhappy as she felt. She cried after she hung up the phone with her mother.