Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Karen had spent more than a year living on ramen noodles and washing her clothes at night in the bathroom sink. She had logged countless hours in the basement print shop, pressing logos onto thousands of shirts and banners. She had been terrified of losing the work. Now, however, she had fully paid off her debt. She asked her boss if she could work part time, to make studying for her LIBI classes easier. When he looked angry, she revised her request to a single day off. She walked away from the frenzied printing shop, assuring her boss that she would be back. Two days later, instead of returning, she started looking for another job. She scrolled through online ads for anything that would force her to speak English.

  If Little Yan had had time to think, her aspirations might have mirrored her classmate’s. But thinking about her quality of life would have been a waste of time. She was exhausted from months of night classes. On weekdays, she worked full time before her first class began at six p.m. Every cent she made was spent on their rent and essentials. When the money was not enough, she watched the numbers in their savings account go down, every dollar an extra weight on her shoulders. Every time Zhuang made money, she felt, he spent it on more frivolous things. He had recently recruited one of his admirers, a graduate student from Guangxi Province, to help him buy an expensive camera. He needed it, he told her, for a new business venture.

  Little Yan had suggested that Zhuang look into driving for Uber, joining the many immigrants who had signed on with the company. Their landlord in the Tudor-style house had been driving for Uber as well as a Chinese limo company. Zhuang liked the man but admitted he could not work like that. “I want to have a life,” he said. He told Little Yan she just didn’t understand. “I don’t speak English,” he snapped at her. “How am I going to talk to people?” He listed the expenses that would go into becoming a driver—he would have to buy a new car and pay for a license.

  “Your thinking is too simple!” he told his wife.

  * * *

  • • •

  On a bright day in late April at the East Buffet, Zhuang was sitting with me at a table by the window, his nose buried in his phone, when Chen Tai rolled by in her little red apron and cap. “Little Zhuang, are you working?” she hollered, her voice gurgling. When he told her yes, she beamed. “It’s so hard for us in this country. We work and work and work, and what are we? We’re still poor.”

  Zhuang nodded, smiling across at me sheepishly. His new job, he had just explained, was getting off the ground. He had started a new venture he felt sure would work out. He just needed the patronage of a few wealthy people back in China.

  He had decided to start doing daigou, or personal shopping, joining the thousands of Chinese immigrants in the United States buying luxury goods locally and selling them in China. The idea had come to him late in the winter, while he was working for an upscale karaoke parlor, parking Maseratis and Lamborghinis. He made a few trips to the Woodbury Outlet Mall in the New York suburbs and photographed the purses and shoes he saw there. He had been to the outlet mall before with Little Yan, to buy the North Face vest he prized and the high heels and purses Little Yan sent back to her sisters. The stuff at Woodbury Outlet Mall was part of the mythology of American living. You sent it back, and people assumed you were rich like the rest of the population. This job would feed the disconnect between his life in the United States and the story he told back home.

  Daigou was an industry only a few years old, made possible by the arrival of smartphones. People would buy high-end purses and shirts at outlet malls for a fraction of their cost in China and advertise them on their social media, then ship over whatever their friends had ordered. It was, on the one hand, smuggling. They were avoiding Chinese taxes and taking advantage of disparities in global pricing. On the other hand, daigou existed in a legal gray area. Chinese people had long made a sport out of dodging the country’s high import taxes, and as far as anyone knew, they were breaking no U.S. laws by sending back a handful of luxury items every month.

  Before that day in the East Buffet, the only people who had seen Zhuang’s outlet mall photos were his friends. A few days earlier, however, one of his acquaintances had added his name to a chat group full of wealthy factory bosses around Shenzhen. Just before Chen Tai rolled her cart up to the table, the first factory boss call came in. As a waiter slipped a white teapot onto the table in front of Zhuang, he hunched over his phone, listening to a message. The deep voice was slurring slightly—it was two a.m. in China. “I think I would like some polo shirts,” it said, and asked what size shirts were available.

  Zhuang jumped to record a response message: he would have to check the stores. He had previously photographed some large polo shirts, and now he sent them over. “Not like that, not like that,” the man replied. “I want some other ones.” He was looking for shirts made to resemble soccer jerseys, with white stripes down the sleeves. The pair of them went back and forth for nearly an hour. By the time Chen Tai came by, Zhuang had sold three shirts and a pair of shoes. The man was still undecided on an expensive watch.

  “I am working!” Zhuang said, grinning.

  * * *

  • • •

  Chen Tai had come to Zhuang’s table to gossip. Her daughter had gotten pregnant soon after her wedding, and the older woman had stopped looking after her relative’s child for a while so she could look after her grandson. She found a photo on her phone of the baby taking a bath. She zoomed in on the baby’s face and held it up for everyone to see. “There he is!” she beamed at Zhuang. “He’s a little fatty.” She moved the photo down the baby’s body with a little flourish. “And there’s his little penis!” she told Zhuang, full of pride. “He’s a very good baby.”

  Then Chen Tai asked, “How is your wife?” She knew a little about their struggles. The walls were thin in Chen Tai’s apartment.

  “She’s fine,” Zhuang said. “Studying to work in a doctor’s office.”

  She asked after Zhuang’s son. “What is his zodiac sign?” When Zhuang told her—his son had been born in the year of the snake—she assured him that Kaizhi would be a smart, resourceful son. She rummaged in her cart and came up with two sesame buns on a plate. They were for good luck. “If you believe it’s true, then it’s true!” she said of the zodiac. “If you don’t believe it, it’s not.”

  “The Fujianese know a lot about this stuff!” said a woman from another cart, passing by.

  “I know a guy who had two kids, a tiger and a dragon,” Chen Tai told Zhuang. “That’s really bad.” The sons fought so often, the guy got sick. Chen Tai was a sheep, and her husband was a snake. She had known another guy who was a sheep, and he had married a tiger. “He never would have married her, had he known!”

  Zhuang was a pig, a sign known for diligence, honesty, and generosity. It would help in business, if you believed in that kind of thing. He wasn’t superstitious, but he was hopeful. The wealthy man who had made those first orders expanded his requirements on a nightly basis, spending upward of two thousand dollars. Little Yan could imagine what he looked like, his feet up on a desk, bottle of baijiu, a Chinese liquor made of sorghum, nearby. “He’s got little feet,” she declared. “But he wears really large shirts.” He was short and fat, she had decided. He had too much money and not enough to do.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Zhuang started his new business, there were hundreds of groups on WeChat discussing discounting practices and compiling guides to outlet malls. Zhuang could use the app to negotiate with customers and to look for discounts. He could even use it to get paid: one feature of Zhuang’s account, conspicuously absent from the English version of WeChat, was a service called Red Envelope, intended to facilitate the transfer of money from friends and family members, like VenMo or PayPal. Money transferred through WeChat would show up in a Chinese account, in yuan. Zhuang would accept a payment, and as soon as it arrived, he would buy whatever the cus
tomer wanted. He would take a small percentage off the top—it varied according to no specific formula—then send it to the customer in China. Shipping centers already dotted Main Street, and they happily accepted the increased business from immigrants selling daigou. The system was so convenient that by 2014, one consulting company estimated that the market value of daigou purchases ran as high as $7.6 billion.

  The money transferred to Zhuang, however, landed only in a Chinese bank account. The WeChat groups that Zhuang joined helped him get his money from China to the United States. People who were traveling back to China might offer to exchange their dollars for yuan. Zhuang would transfer money, via WeChat, into their Chinese accounts, and they would hand him cash. Other times the exchange was not so straightforward. Zhuang answered an ad placed in one of the groups, from a man looking to exchange yuan for dollars. He met the man who had placed the advertisement in the backseat of a car parked on the street. He transferred the yuan into an account via Red Envelope, the man handed him a wad of cash, and Zhuang left, the two having barely exchanged a word.

  Meanwhile Zhuang was enjoying his new visibility. Friends and friends of friends might buy from him, or they might not. but they would all see a photo of him well dressed in the middle of the outlet mall, looking like he was doing well. One of Zhuang’s old flames—the woman he had taken, with her friend, on a weekend-long date to the ocean, and who had never contacted him afterward—got in touch to tell him that she really regretted blowing him off.

  Zhuang threw himself into daigou for two months straight. Little Yan looked on with skepticism but let him try. He linked up with friends in China who could spread the word about his reliability and the quality of his goods. His WeChat groups provided advice on where to look for the best deals and notices when a client was searching for a specific model of shoe or shirt. He drove to Woodbury at least once a week. Through WeChat, he arranged to fill his car with a passenger or two who could help with some of the tolls on the highway. He collected coupons and tried to charm the salespeople with his tiny arsenal of English niceties.

  He also collected credit cards that would give him discounts at specific stores. Selling daigou had the added benefit, he explained, of improving his credit score. He was cautious about using them, though. He had heard that people in the United States frequently ran up credit card bills that they could not pay back. Zhuang knew how to spend money, but he was not quite sure how people spent money that they didn’t actually have.

  Polo shirts were popular, and Adidas shoes. Some of the people who sold daigou specialized in American vitamins and supplements. They joined cheap bulk grocers like Costco and took home huge supplies of vitamin B1, protein powders, and supplements that were said to encourage weight loss. Zhuang stayed away from this side of the business; he preferred the panache of clothing. On a spring day, after his most reliable customer put in a new order for a different polo shirt, Zhuang stopped in on a department store off Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. He walked confidently toward the back, where the elevators were. Ornate and brass, they had an old dial mounted above their doors showing the cars moving up and down. Zhuang headed to the top floor. He rifled through the racks and then walked up to the saleswoman watching over that section.

  “Today. Coupon?” he asked hopefully, holding up a shirt.

  The woman, taller than Zhuang and wearing bright red lipstick, smiled in recognition. “I’ll look for you, honey,” she said.

  Zhuang grinned back at her. “Sorry, my English is bad.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said. “I didn’t speak any when I got here, either. You gotta study, that’s it.”

  Zhuang smiled. “Oh!” he said, halfway grasping her meaning.

  “I spoke French,” she said. “French and Arabic. But no English.”

  Zhuang nodded in sympathy. “English,” he said, “is very difficult.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang told Little Yan that she had to wait just a bit while he built up his clientele. In his first month, he came out a measly few hundred dollars ahead—he had purchased the new iPhone and bought an E-ZPass for his frequent trips to the mall—and he was just figuring it all out. By the end of his second month, he had earned a full two thousand dollars. And that, he assured her, was only the beginning. “Once I’m really established, I’ll be making around ten thousand dollars a month.” That was what the most successful people made. And it wasn’t that hard, he assured his wife. He just needed time.

  “He’s working hard,” Little Yan said to Karen, sitting in her office chair over a class break. But she admitted it wasn’t secure. Women could not live on expected future successes, she thought. They had no choice. She and Karen were grounded in the reality of their days.

  Karen had found a second job at a website that connected American customers to cheap factories in China, offering discount prices on everything from iPad-like tablet computers to furniture and clothing. It was cheap and efficient and frequently befuddling for the American customers who stumbled onto the site not understanding where they had ended up. Karen would answer their calls, take their orders, and listen to their complaints. Sometimes a customer would dismiss her out of hand the moment they heard her accent. “Can I talk to someone who speaks English?” they would ask. And she would hand off the phone to someone else.

  Karen quickly realized that her salary—ten dollars an hour—was just enough to cover her expenses. Before taxes, she was making four hundred dollars a week. She did not want to revisit the feeling she had had at the print shop, that she had no other options, that she could never quit. “I want to start working on the weekends,” she told her roommate. “I think I want to paint nails.”

  “You won’t make any money at it at first,” her roommate warned. She told Karen to go online and pick a salon, but only stay there a month. She could get trained, and then get out. “It’s not worth staying at the first place that hires you.” Karen’s roommate had a better nose for this kind of thing than she did, the ruthlessness of a couple of years working in salons.

  Starting work at a nail salon in your third year in the United States might seem like a step backward, but it was common for a student to use her weekends to make a little extra money. And Karen was a student now. During her university days in Henan, she had taken her classes for granted, and she had barely noticed them in Ohio, but in Flushing school had significance. Being a student meant you were not stranded in a menial job with bad pay and no other options. It meant you were moving toward something else.

  The first salon that hired Karen was in northern Brooklyn. On her first day, she walked in trying to exude the kind of toughness she had seen in her roommate. She would bide her time, see how the shop was run, and decide whether to stay. It was dark in the shop, similar to the long, unlit storefront where Little Yan had spent her first summer. The boss, a woman, had been running the place for years. She could be friendly when she wanted, but for the most part she wore a dour look of world-weariness.

  “You pay fifty dollars up front,” she told Karen, “for training.”

  Karen looked the woman in the face. “Could I give you the money in the afternoon?”

  The dour look washed over the woman’s face. “Fine,” she said. “You learn by watching. So you can watch.”

  The three women who had shared the van with Karen took their places behind a row of desks and set out tools. Each woman cleaned her area, set out towels, and organized the nail clippers and sponges in her plastic cart. Little sterilizing units sat behind them, with a tray on top cluttered with implements.

  After about an hour and a handful of clients, the store owner walked over to Karen. “You pay the fifty dollars now,” she said, “or you can find your own way home.” The woman’s face had hardened.

  Karen barely knew where she was. She hadn’t seen any buses passing by. It wasn’t much of a choice. Karen hand
ed over the fifty dollars she had brought with her. She worked there a month, learning to clip off cuticles and lay on an unblemished coat of paint.

  Then her roommate recommended a job in a salon in the suburbs north of the city, where people might tip more and the pay would be better. Karen did not get her fifty dollars back when she left the place in Brooklyn.

  The new salon was more relaxed, with regular customers and a steady stream of tourists, but it was no place to make friends. The women there were assigned customers through a pen-and-paper notebook system. As soon as a salon worker finished with a customer, she was supposed to put her name in the book, getting in line. Some of the women, however, had come up with ways to cheat the system and sneak to the top of the line, writing their names down before they finished or skipping the line altogether. In slow moments, some would rush to the front of the store when they recognized the person coming in as a good tipper. Karen told herself that the other women needed the money more than she did.

  * * *

  • • •

  In Karen’s shared room off Main Street, there was more than enough heartbreak to go around in the spring of 2016. A new roommate, only a teenager, spent her days burrowed in her bedsheets, crying over the stepmother who had driven her out of the house. The girl was waiting to turn eighteen so she could start working, relying on the money her biological mother was sending from China. Karen’s older roommate, the nail salon worker, had broken up with a longtime boyfriend. Families, in Karen’s corner of Flushing, were fragmented things.

  The older roommate had been with her boyfriend for nearly as long as she had been in the States. They had met at her first job in her first nail salon. Both of them were divorced and had left families behind in China. Then out of the blue, the man announced that he was bringing his son to the United States so he could get an American-style education. It was decided that the child couldn’t live in New York without his mother. The boyfriend insisted that he couldn’t split up the family. His son and ex-wife would both move in with him. And he was going to try to make a go of it with his ex-wife. They were planning on spending some time together, he said, and then, if all went well, remarrying.