Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  In her first few days in Flushing, Karen found a job working in a sign-making shop that abutted Flushing’s Botanical Gardens. She had called a few stores in advance, and no one had wanted to hire her. So she went to Flushing’s center and walked into shops to ask if they were hiring. She walked the length of Main Street and spotted a sign for a print shop, with an arrow pointing toward the basement. She made her way down the steps and pushed open the glass door. She had experience with graphic design, she told the owner of the print shop, bending the truth only slightly. He couldn’t pay her much, the owner told her, but she could start the next day.

  Karen spent her first two years in New York working in that print shop, ironing logos and lettering onto T-shirts, one after the other, over and over. Every once in a while, she would use the computer and design a banner herself, but for the most part, her boss did the creative work or people brought in their own files. The money was bad, but she could not afford to risk any time unemployed. She saved every penny she made, paying back her auntie in installments. She washed her three outfits—one for each season—in a basin at night and took care not to break the single pair of glasses she had brought with her.

  For months, Karen told herself stories about how she might return to China. She spun out scenarios about paying off her debt, making some money, then traveling home to the life that had been waiting for her. And then one night during her first Chinese New Year holiday in New York, her phone buzzed, and her boyfriend’s face popped up, with a short little message next to it. Karen doesn’t remember how it started, but it was something innocuous like “Are you there?” or even just the character for hai, an approximation of the English. She is also unclear about whether she saw the breakup coming. She remembers feeling shocked and heartbroken. Afterward her tears came louder, less self-aware, more exhausted. They became a necessary preamble to sleep. Her roommates did not complain about the disturbance. Every young person ended up crying at some point.

  Karen at least understood the subtext of the breakup. Her boyfriend had lasted for nearly six months before going home for Spring Festival. His family wanted him to settle down and start a family. So they had put pressure on him, and he had not stood up to it. Whatever he felt for her—the vision of their future together—it had been strong enough for only six months and one holiday’s worth of separation.

  Karen cried every night, but she also erased every trace of her boyfriend from her phone. She deleted his number, blocked him on all her apps, and removed him from her contacts on QQ. She gave herself no room for any moments of weakness. It didn’t matter anymore whether coming to the United States had been the right decision. It had happened. It was the only decision. Karen would not plead with her old life.

  12

  Paper Sons

  契约儿子 / Qìyuē Érzi

  JUNE 2015–JANUARY 2016

  When Little Yan heard that she had been granted asylum, the rock of tension she had been holding somewhere behind her eyes softened. She didn’t think women needed to dwell on things as men did. She felt confident in her ability to compartmentalize. But morning after morning she had been waking up to a single thought: she wanted to see her son.

  It was common, in Flushing, for a family to leave their children behind in China for some years while they focused on making money. But that didn’t make it easier. It had been eighteen months since Little Yan left her son behind in her parents’ village. In call after call, they told her he was difficult to handle, which made her worry.

  “Your parents don’t know how to discipline a boy!” Zhuang told her unhelpfully.

  “He’s only two!” Little Yan kept repeating. “He can’t be that bad.” But she didn’t know, because she didn’t know her son anymore.

  Now that they had asylum, they could finally apply for Kaizhi to come over. But this gave rise to a new worry: how would he get here? Little Yan did not want him to travel with someone she did not know, and she did not want to be a stranger to her son when he arrived.

  Zhuang told her he had been thinking: she was not the democracy activist in the family. She would not be in danger if she traveled back to China. Zhuang thought that after they applied for their son’s travel permit, Little Yan could return to China. She could spend a month with her son, get to know him in the only village he could remember, with her parents nearby. And then she could ease his transition to New York, serving as his bridge from one world to the other. It was a plan designed to put Little Yan’s fears to rest, and she agreed without hesitation.

  If the plan worked, if Little Yan went to China and brought their son back to the United States, Zhuang wanted to make a home for them. He had been working hard as a driving instructor, booking five or six lessons in a day, speeding from one pickup to the next, skipping meals when he had to. With the cost of car insurance and gasoline, his profits were slim; he relied on tips and a packed schedule. He thought he might have found the right job to sustain him and provide for his family. He was hopeful, again, that life was moving forward.

  From the moment he gave her the option to return home, Little Yan had the trip planned out in her mind. But she was still her mother’s daughter, still cautious and tactical. Even before their asylum letters arrived, she had decided on a career change. One of her colleagues at a nail salon had told her about a nursing school that, for five hundred dollars, would certify you to work as a home health aide. In Flushing, a home health aide was only slightly more respectable than a worker in a low-end nail salon—there was something distasteful about working in other people’s homes. Zhuang would have preferred that she get a job as a secretary, where she could spend her days dressed nicely and sitting at a desk. Little Yan told him he was unrealistic. Her English was not good enough, she had no experience, and no one would ever hire her.

  Zhuang complained about the cost of the nursing school, but he did not stop her. She took a six-week class, and for another small fee, an agency associated with the school placed her with a family not too far away. The job was not as difficult or competitive as a nail salon. She was paid over the table (the agency was responsible for handling payroll), and Little Yan didn’t get headaches after long days of breathing in fumes. Her employers were an elderly couple from Hong Kong—Zhuang would hardly worry about their possible bad influence. The pay was not good—Little Yan took home around fourteen hundred dollars her first month—but it was enough to make do.

  It took a few weeks for the pair’s official asylum letters to arrive, and before they could schedule another meeting with their lawyer, they needed to collect a list of documents for Kaizhi’s application: birth certificates, residency booklets, immunization records, and passports. Once they gathered them and friends helped translate, they set up a meeting for early fall. Little Yan dressed nicely in a pink cardigan, put on lipstick, and hooked a leather backpack over her slim shoulders. They arrived fifteen minutes early so Zhuang could stop at the Starbucks and buy coffees to hand out.

  The lawyer’s office was in the back of the floor, past a sea of cubicles. Their lawyer led them back to his office, still cluttered with files, and pulled up the forms they would need on a computer screen. Zhuang handed over the coffee he had brought and looked on attentively. Little Yan considered the separate case files lining the wall, each one thicker than her fist. She was already exhausted by the turns her own life had taken. Her lawyer, she thought, must have had a hard time keeping it all in his head. She wondered how many times he had filled out those forms. He was busy making a valiant effort at her son’s Chinese name, saying “Kaizhi-zee” when the name, pronounced properly, sounds like “Kai-jur.”

  Little Yan waited patiently as they went through the application to bring Kaizhi over. They went over her parents’ address five or six times—there was no house number, only a street corner, and it didn’t fit properly in the form. They listed phone numbers and e-mail addresses (her parents didn’t have one), and they photo
copied Kaizhi’s passport and his vaccination records. Little Yan waited nearly an hour before asking what she wanted to ask. She looked at Zhuang, to see if he would raise the question, then spoke up: “Can I go back and visit my son?” She waited patiently for a translation. “Can I apply for a travel permit?” She had looked it up—she knew which form she would need and how long it usually took.

  The gravity of the moment had escaped the lawyer, and he held his hand up distractedly, staring at a blank that the computer wasn’t letting him fill in properly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said quickly.

  Little Yan pressed her lips together and looked across the desk. “If I can’t go back, how will our son travel to the United States?” She looked at Zhuang.

  “It will be no problem for Little Yan to travel back to China,” Zhuang cut in reassuringly. “All the problems are my problems. She won’t have any trouble.”

  “No, no, no,” the lawyer said. “I would not advise that she go back. It will look bad, going back to a country that you just got asylum from.” He was still distracted by the forms, moving through them as fast as he could. “You should have a family member accompany him.” This, he said, was what many immigrants did.

  Zhuang and Little Yan exchanged glances. “We don’t have a family member who could take him, I don’t think.” None of her family members had ever traveled on an airplane. They would have to get a visa and a passport. They would be terrified. Little Yan didn’t think it would be possible.

  “Well, if you don’t have anyone to take him, maybe we can reach an arrangement with an airline,” their lawyer answered, rolling his chair back from his computer screen with a half-sigh.

  “The airline?!” Little Yan’s eyes widened with alarm. She was speaking to Zhuang now. Her voice, usually even and calm, practiced at avoiding conflict, was expanding its range. “He’s only two and a half!” she said. “He’s too young to travel alone. Would they even let him? He’ll be scared.” Even if he didn’t travel until he was three, she repeated, it was too young. She looked at her lawyer, her eyebrows knit together. The month-long visit home, the gentle transition that she had planned for Kaizhi, was falling apart. She had been so excited about the proposition, and so sure that things would work out now that they had asylum.

  The pitch of her voice finally captured the lawyer’s attention. He rolled his chair closer to his clients. He looked at Little Yan and said more gently, “You don’t have anyone who could accompany him?”

  She shook her head, looked at her hands, and blinked angrily.

  “I don’t think you should go back,” he repeated. “It might be okay, but if it catches the attention of an immigration officer on a bad day, they might make it an issue. It looks bad for someone to apply to travel back to the country they were granted asylum from right after they were granted asylum.”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Look,” her lawyer said. “Here’s what we can do. Even after Kaizhi gets approval to come to the United States, it will take some time to process. He will have to visit the consulate in Guangzhou for an interview. He will have to get his travel documents in order. Let’s wait until he gets permission to come and then think about getting you permission for travel.”

  Little Yan and Zhuang nodded in unison, Zhuang giving her a water-eyed, apologetic smile. He had been so sure of this plan. He had intended to send her back and heft all the pressures of making a living onto his own shoulders. In China, he had mobilized an entire village with a few sheets of paper; in the United States, it didn’t seem to matter how many forms he filled out, it was impossible to put plans into action. In the lawyer’s office, going over the last few details of Kaizhi’s papers, it took Zhuang a few moments to recover himself.

  Their lawyer finished the forms, his tone still gentle and unhurried. When he finally closed his computer Zhuang managed to smile again. “Drink your coffee!” he admonished. “It will make you strong.” The lawyer grinned back and pretended to flex a muscle. He walked the two of them out through the maze of cubicles. “It shouldn’t take too much time,” he said, shaking their hands warmly at the door, handing them a packet of papers about their benefits as asylees. “We’ll be in touch. And congratulations on your asylum.”

  Zhuang doubted that first part. On the elevator ride down to street level, he turned to Little Yan, who was holding her elbows. “It will probably take a little while to get done,” he said. “If we have green cards by then, we can travel wherever we want. We can go to Hong Kong together and pick up Kaizhi.”

  Little Yan nodded. She walked down the sidewalk in her favorite pair of platform heels. She looked at the magazine kiosk they were passing as if it interested her greatly. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. There were too many twists and too many opportunities to get her hopes up. Zhuang could change course in the middle of a conversation and feel like he had always been headed that way anyway. Little Yan needed more time.

  * * *

  • • •

  The marital peace that had returned with their asylum was disrupted by the news that Little Yan would not be traveling to China. Zhuang was still giving driving lessons, but some days were busier than others. In the winter, he complained, nobody wanted to sign up for lessons. When he sent money back to Wukan to help a cousin fund a wedding, he and Little Yan argued about finances again, which made him chafe at the money they were sending to Little Yan’s village. The more his pride was hurt, the more he felt that a man’s children belonged with his own family. And the more they fought, the more hostile Little Yan’s parents were to Zhuang. He didn’t want Kaizhi’s maternal grandparents badmouthing him to his son.

  Zhuang decided he wanted to send Kaizhi back to Wukan. “The food in Wukan is better,” he argued. Kaizhi would eat fresh fish every day. He told Little Yan that his father would do well as a grandfather.

  “I don’t know why you think that,” she said sharply. “Did he do such a great job with his family?” She did not have to say, outright, that one of Zhuang’s brothers had been crippled and the other was addicted to drugs. It was in the tone of her voice, which Zhuang ignored.

  “He doesn’t consider that his grandchildren are his to do whatever he wants with,” Zhuang explained. “He treats them better.” At the same time, Zhuang’s father was tough and wouldn’t let Kaizhi get away with being naughty.

  Little Yan disagreed. Both families were poor, a poor farmer was different from a poor fisherman with a tendency to gamble away his money. “Have you seen his parents’ house?” Little Yan whispered to me later. “It looks like it would blow over in a strong wind.”

  In the end, though, she agreed. She couldn’t argue with Zhuang about everything. “It’s like beating your head against a wall,” she said. Her parents took Kaizhi to stay with Zhuang’s parents. But sending Kaizhi to Wukan would give rise to other complications. For the first time since Zhuang left the United States, his father had influence again. After a few months of looking after Kaizhi, he asked Zhuang for about thirty thousand dollars to build himself a house, something suitable for a man with a son in the United States. Zhuang tried to tell him that he didn’t have the money, but his father didn’t believe him. Everyone who went to the United States had money, Zhuang Songkun said. What kind of thankless child would refuse his father—who raised him and who was raising his child, who had spent his life breaking his back pulling crabs out of the bay—the consolation of a comfortable home in which to live out his old age?

  When Zhuang refused to pay, his father threatened to borrow money in Zhuang’s name.

  “I can’t call people and tell them not to lend him anything,” Zhuang explained to me. “And I can’t pay them back if he takes out a loan.” He finally sent his father a little money, chipping away the last of their savings.

  With Kaizhi in Wukan, Little Yan couldn’t talk with her son over video chat. They talked on the phone occ
asionally, but mostly she got updates through the filter of Zhuang’s parents. “They tell me that Kaizhi is really naughty,” she said. “He was so good when he was a baby. I don’t know what happened to make him change.” She comforted herself that it was just a phase. Kaizhi was three; kids were more difficult at three. Kaizhi had been a wonderful baby.

  Zhuang had promised Little Yan that he would keep working at the driving school for six months, but she could see him getting restless by the end of the summer. Their most recent sublet room had turned out to be a bust. The woman who yelled at them on the day they arrived had persisted, and they eventually learned that she had cause. The woman who had rented them the room had cheated them: she had been subletting from the woman downstairs, who had forbade her from renting the room to anyone else. She had charged Zhuang and Little Yan more than she was paying herself, then disappeared. “This is a terrible environment!” Zhuang told Little Yan one evening.

  Two days later he located another room even farther out, in a tiny Tudor-style house in a neighborhood called Fresh Meadows. It would be their fifth home since arriving in New York a year and a half before. Little Yan would have to wait for a bus to take her to the 7 train, which would take her to her job, just a few stops west in another neighborhood of Queens. But the room was spacious and had two sets of windows—enough to get a cross breeze in the summer. The backyard was a snarl of watermelon vines that the landlady cultivated.

  The new house was also the most family-friendly place they had lived. Across from Zhuang and Little Yan, the landlord’s young son and daughter shared a room, doing their homework, arguing, and playing games. The landlord, a man from Fujian, spent nights working in a Japanese restaurant, doing tricks over a big grill in the middle of the restaurant, chopping up noodles and setting onions on fire for effect. During the day he drove a fancy black SUV for a local car service. He owned a home but worked three jobs and rented all but two of the rooms to make ends meet. “I respect him!” Zhuang said. “He’s really been successful in New York!”