Patriot Number One

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Patriot Number One Page 20

by Lauren Hilgers


  * * *

  • • •

  Early in the summer of 2016, Yang Maosheng walked through the heavy beige door leading to Tang Yuanjun’s office. He was not a dissident exactly. He hadn’t spent time in jail or been chased by local security. He had come to the United States out of curiosity: he wanted to meet with activists and discuss democracy freely. He wanted to see what a protest movement looked like in a country that allowed protest.

  At first Yang Maosheng did not, for a number of reasons, appear a likely candidate for an immigrant romance. He was in his forties, a longtime bachelor. He had the tan, rough-handed look of a manual laborer and spoke with a thick, slurring accent common to his hometown of Chongqing, a sprawling municipality in southwestern China. He was not a particularly smooth talker, being blunt and quick to anger. “They should ask me how to solve the Tibetan question!” he told a group gathered in Tang’s office. “I could solve it for them! You just let the Tibetans do what they want!”

  He prided himself on being perfectly capable of forming his own opinions. He had grown up poor in a rural part of Chongqing and, like Zhuang, had left home when he was still a teenager. He found work as a coal miner, but after a few months on the job, he saw a mine collapse. He did not want to spend his life breathing in coal dust, waiting to be killed in a mining accident. He moved to Shenzhen and started working construction, building tunnels, roads, and subway stations, eventually becoming a site foreman. His life in Shenzhen wasn’t terrible. But then he went online and discovered democracy.

  Yang Maosheng booked his ticket to the United States in the first days of 2016, not intending to overstay his six-month visa. He had scheduled the trip to coincide with a conference on Chinese democracy that was being held in Las Vegas. He was not going to be bowled over by anyone’s résumé, but he wanted to be in the same room with some of China’s most famous dissidents. He wanted to hear what they had to say, breathe the same air, then decide what to do with his life. He planned to fly to New York afterward, spend a few months working off the price of the trip, then head home. Yang Maosheng had made similar trips before, traveling to Thailand to meet with a small exile community there. He had visited other parts of China to support protests that had nothing to do with his life in Shenzhen. (“He’s like me,” Zhuang would say, after the two became friends. “He can’t ignore it when things are unfair.”) He had always gone home afterward.

  In New York, Yang Maosheng arrived looking for whatever work he could get. He rented a cheap bed in a hostel and spent his mornings in a park on Maple Street, waiting for foremen in need of day laborers to drive up. On his first day, he dressed too nicely, and no one offered him a job. “I didn’t think about it!” he said in retrospect. “No one is going to hire you to do construction if you’re wearing a clean shirt!” On his off days, he went to Tang’s office. He attended meetings and got into arguments. He sat at the long folding table, drank tea, and talked to whoever else happened to be there.

  The longer Yang Maosheng was in New York, the more he worried about returning home. Two things made him hesitate. The first was that while on a trip to Thailand, he had met with a bookseller famous for publishing long, salacious biographies of the Chinese elite. In early 2016 the man had reportedly been “disappeared” from his home. It later became clear that the bookseller had been kidnapped by agents from Beijing, transported to China, and placed in criminal detention. Now Yang Maosheng, in the United States, worried that the Chinese government had been watching when he visited Thailand. If he returned to China, he might get caught up in the investigation of the bookseller.

  The second thing pressing Yang Maosheng to stay was a happier one. She was a round-faced woman from Hangzhou, alone in New York and older, like Yang Maosheng. Her name was Little Li.

  * * *

  • • •

  Despite his bullishness, Yang Maosheng had earned the respect of some of the more outspoken dissidents who came through Tang’s office looking for company, tea, and some of Tang’s cooking. Ma Yongtian took a sisterly interest in him. He had the right kind of temperament for activism, she thought. He was angry, but he was a good man.

  Yang Maosheng met his future wife at one of Tang’s Tuesday meetings. He sat close to the window as the room filled up. Tang went through the details of some recently detained dissidents quickly, then apologized—he would have to go downtown and testify in a member’s asylum defense. The person in question had been denied once, and this was his appeal. “He’s attended lots of actions,” Tang said before he left. “Sometimes it comes down to luck.” He shrugged on his suit jacket, clipped his phone in his belt, and left the group in his office to sort themselves out. A few settled in around the folding table, while others took leaflets to hand out along Main Street.

  Yang Maosheng was sitting across from a woman who adjusted her glasses on her moon-shaped face firmly while she talked. In the background, a nervous man from Tianjin translated random words of their conversation into English and shouted them out. “People are scared to speak their minds,” said the woman. “Terrified!” echoed the man from Tianjin. “It’s harder and harder to get good information,” said Yang Maosheng. “Lies!” said the man. Everyone looked at him and let it go.

  Little Li had seen Yang Maosheng’s name online before. She thought he was too combative. But as they sat across from each other that day, complaining about the difficulties of surviving in China, something happened. Little Li admired his passion. And Yang Maosheng liked how straightforward she was: honest, he thought. Sitting across from each other, they formed a two-person echo chamber. But they were shy. Instead of asking to see Little Li again, a few days later Yang Maosheng approached Ma Yongtian. “He asked me to help him with a ‘personal matter’!” Ma Yongtian laughed later. “I said, ‘You’ve come to the right person! Tell me all about it!’ ”

  Ma Yongtian proposed a dinner date, and both agreed. Once romance was officially introduced, they moved quickly: within a week, Little Li and Yang Maosheng were strolling down the streets of Flushing hand in hand. She thought he was reliable and earnest. He was convinced she was one of the smartest people he knew. They were both too old to be blushing; they slipped into their roles quickly and calmly, as if they had been holding hands for years.

  * * *

  • • •

  Around the same time Yang Maosheng arrived in New York, something happened in the city that got the attention of the min yun and almost every Chinese immigrant in Flushing. In late 2015, a New York police officer, Peter Liang, fired his gun into a stairwell in Brooklyn and killed unarmed twenty-eight-year-old Akai Gurley. It was one of a flood of high-profile instances in which police officers killed unarmed black men. It was the only case, however, to involve a Chinese policeman. In February 2016 Liang was convicted of manslaughter.

  Before this episode, Zhuang had spent little time thinking about politics in his new home. (In his self-enforced isolation from other activists, he barely took note of anything happening outside Wukan.) New York was not the utopia he had imagined, and he had grown accustomed to seeing homeless people begging along Main Street. He sighed at the bureaucracy he encountered trying to apply for asylum and for his green card. But he did not worry about the leaders in Washington, D.C. For the most part, he was content to call the United States a democracy and leave it at that.

  When the news hit WeChat, Zhuang discovered that Peter Liang was the only officer in a decade to be indicted for an on-duty shooting. It was a tragedy, Zhuang admitted, but why was Liang the first to be convicted? Where was the policemen’s union? “It was a mistake,” he told me over dumplings at the East Buffet. “Other police are killing people on purpose.” He struggled to find the right words to explain. The United States was expected to treat everyone fairly, he said. “Maybe he should be in jail, but then, if he goes to jail, other police officers should go to jail.”

  In the spring of 2016, Zhuang attended a protest, o
rganized over WeChat by a network of Chinese Americans, in support of Peter Liang. He went out of curiosity as much as solidarity. There were parallels, he felt, between Liang’s case and his own experience. No one had cared about Zhuang when he first arrived in New York. No one had respected him. And many people in the United States, he worried, did not care about or respect Chinese people. It was difficult to explain this to his family and friends back in Wukan. The reality, he felt, was something that only other immigrants could understand.

  * * *

  • • •

  For the occasion of Little Li’s wedding to Yang Maosheng, held just over a month after their romance began, a small crowd gathered in Tang Yuanjun’s office. They ate peanut butter candies and cracked sunflower seeds. A young China Democracy Party member arrived with a makeup kit and dabbed at the corners of Yang Maosheng’s eyes with concealer. The woman, who worked at a watch store in JFK airport, selling expensive wrist-wear to Chinese tourists, was telling Little Li about a stampede she had witnessed in the terminal. There had been a false alarm about a shooter in the building—she was still feeling a little shaky. Little Li nodded in sympathy, then flashed a grin at Yang Maosheng. “You’re getting almost as much makeup as me,” she giggled.

  At the folding table, an older man who called himself Edmond was introducing Ma Yongtian to everyone who walked in. “This is Ma Yongtian!” he said. “She introduced the two of them!” People might recognize Auntie Ma, Edmond continued, from the video of her blocking Xi Jinping’s car in Washington. Ma Yongtian nodded gravely. “They are evil,” she said of the Chinese government, addressing the room. “First they turn off the water and the heat. Then sometimes the developer hires thugs to come beat you up. Sometimes they just set your house on fire.” Ma Yongtian was ready to die for her cause, she explained. She would happily sacrifice herself if she could wipe out the injustice in the world. The makeup artist nodded in agreement as she swiped concealer on Yang Maosheng’s cheeks.

  Yang Maosheng had reserved the upstairs room of a Qingdao restaurant not far from Tang’s office, and the group walked over together, Tang rolling his computer and an amplifier on the kind of folding dolly that older women used to transport groceries. The couple had selected a man named Gao—a narrow, older man with long wrinkles running down his cheeks and tracing the corners of his mouth—to emcee the wedding. He was often put in charge of the China Democracy Party’s more personal events: he wore red shirts for weddings and celebrations and white shirts for funerals. For Little Li and Yang Maosheng, he had put on a red-and-white-striped shirt and affixed a shiny royal blue tie to it with a golden pin. He walked ahead of the group, gleeful at the occasion, waving his long arms as he chattered.

  The upstairs space at the restaurant was small and reachable by a narrow, open stairway. Gao placed his glasses low on his nose and evaluated the place, tut-tutting as he went. A handful of tables had been set out in front of a row of red pleather benches. Toward the back a split curtain did a poor job of hiding the hallway to the bathrooms, which offered a natural starting point for the procession of bride and groom. Gao posed Little Li and Yang Maosheng in a stiff marching position, rigidly holding hands. Little Li was instructed to stretch her free arm out to the side and arrange her fingers daintily, as if she were holding a cup of tea. Yang Maosheng grinned self-consciously and let his other hand dangle during their first rehearsal walk from the bathroom curtain to the center of the room.

  “Your hand! Your hand!” Gao admonished him. “You must keep it behind your back!” He demanded a repeat. “First,” he said, waving his hands wildly, palms flat, “you will walk this way. Dee-ta dee-ta dee. And then you will turn! Dee-ta dee-ta dum. And then walk! And turn! And face forward!”

  “He’s an artist,” Edmond whispered about Gao. “He can play the piano.”

  With each practice round, Gao out in front of the couple waving his hands like a conductor, the hilarity around the tables grew. A young man—an aspiring playwright—mimed conducting his own orchestra. “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh,” admonished a small, ancient-looking man with puffy eyes who had spent nine years in a Beijing jail in the 1980s.

  “It’s like they’re little children!” shouted Ma Yongtian.

  “I thought we were starting?” Tang wrestled with the music. “Are we starting?”

  Gao declared that the wedding would start. People shifted their bags around and set up their phones and cameras. Edmond joked that an acupuncturist named Chen looked like a North Korean deputy. “Hey!” he said to me. “Did you hear about the North Korean ambassador? He defected to South Korea!”

  “Stop talking about politics!” Tang called out from where he was setting up his computer. “It’s a wedding!”

  “Play the music!” Gao called to Tang Yuanjun, who smilingly put on a wedding march. Another China Democracy Party member pulled rose petals out of a pink plastic bag and flung them in the air as the couple processed. When they reached the front, Gao addressed the room. “Welcome to the bride and groom!” he said, mostly addressing the tiny video camera on the tripod. “Little Li is from Hangzhou,” he observed, “and Yang Maosheng is from Sichuan.”

  “Chongqing!” called out the old man.

  “Ah, yes, Chongqing. We are all far from home.” Gao called the priest up onstage, who brought out his Bible and took the pair of them through the usual vows. They swore to support each other through sickness and health, rich or poor, happy or sad. And then Yang Maosheng pulled two little red boxes out of his jacket pocket, and they held the two rings up for a picture, then shuffled them onto each other’s fingers. “You can play a little music,” urged Gao, and Tang turned the volume up on the computer, pumping a hit song from the late 1970s through the speaker he had lugged over, called “The Moon Represents My Heart.” “You ask how deep my love is,” the song begins. “My passion is steadfast, my love unchanging.”

  A parade of guests stood up to speak. Tang had attended a total of forty-four weddings, he said, and this was the sincerest. Ma Yongtian explained that she had tried to play matchmaker before, but this was the first time it had worked (“Start a business!” Edmond yelled from the table). Edmond said he had rarely met a young person with such an interest in Chinese traditional culture as Little Li. “If you ever have a fight, it’ll be Yang Maosheng’s fault!” he added.

  Gao got up again and spoke to the compact camera. “We are all overseas,” he said. “We don’t have our families here. But look around! We have a special kind of brotherhood. We are one big family, and Little Li is our sister. We will take care of your children! And they have found some happiness!” Yang Maosheng and Little Li were already wiping their eyes.

  “Yang Maosheng, would you like to leave a message for your parents?” he asked, gesturing toward a camera that had been set up on a tripod.

  Yang stood forward, clutching Little Li’s hand, wiping tears from his face and blurting out a stuttering, abrupt “Thank you so much for your years of support.” Little Li told her father, long dead, that she was sorry he couldn’t see her happiest day. She told her mother to take care of herself. Yang Maosheng draped himself over her shoulders in an awkward, supportive hug.

  Gao ended things with a flourish. “Don’t forget the promises you made here tonight!” he said with a wave of his hands, an odd sweeping gesture as if to include the two dinner tables in the promises. And then he pulled out a ball of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil, opened it, and stuck it into Yang’s mouth. “Welcome!” he said in English, urging Little Li to bite off half of it. “To your sweet sweet sweet home!!”

  15

  Personal Shopping

  代购 / Dàigōu

  SPRING 2016

  Little Yan and Karen, squeezed between the computer tables at LIBI, would not have considered themselves particularly entrepreneurial. They both liked to picture themselves, sometime in the future, neatly dressed and sitting behind a desk at a doctor’s o
ffice. Little Yan believed she would have been perfectly happy raising children in Wukan, and Karen had felt content working in the company her college boyfriend had chosen for the both of them in Henan. But then they had come to the United States. They’d grown resourceful.

  By the time Karen signed up for her second semester at LIBI, she had recovered from her breakup. She could talk about her former boyfriend magnanimously. He was a good person, she said. He just couldn’t withstand the pressure of separation. She didn’t blame him. She had, however, in her year of loneliness, decided on two things she would need in life to be content. She would need a family—she couldn’t help looking at Little Yan with some envy, a husband to go home to, and a child coming over soon. But that was hard to control and could come later. Now Karen was determined to focus on her career. She never again wanted to feel as desperate as she had in her first year in the United States. She wanted to make enough of her own money to feel comfortable.

 

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