Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  A short-haired woman appeared in the midst of the suitcases. “He was good!” she said, stepping in front of the little boy. “He slept most of the way.” Kaizhi was leaning against a concrete pole.

  Zhuang came threading through the crowd—“Aiya! Why did no one tell me!?”—and walked a direct line toward his son. He crouched down in front of him, and Kaizhi disappeared around the pole, hugging it. “Kaizhi!” said Zhuang. “Hello! I am your baba.” He held out a hand, and Kaizhi retreated, working his way back toward the woman from the plane. He knew her better than anyone. She was the only person he wanted to touch.

  Zhuang put a gentle hand on his son’s back, crab-walking around the pole to keep up with him. “That’s your mama,” he said, gesturing toward Little Yan. “We’re going to take you home with us.” Zhuang switched to his local dialect, the language Kaizhi would have been speaking with his grandfather in Wukan. He grabbed the hem of Kaizhi’s sweatshirt, keeping in contact as his son reached for the hand of the woman from Wenzhou.

  “Is this all your stuff?” Zhuang asked the woman, suddenly polite. “We’ll help you carry it all. You must be hungry. We will take you out to eat.”

  It was a half-hearted invitation, which the woman turned down. Zhuang took hold of two of her suitcases and Little Yan took a third, leaving the woman free to hold Kaizhi’s hand. Little Yan opened an umbrella, protecting Kaizhi from the summer sun. They piled into an elevator in the car park, taking it up to the top level. Kaizhi slipped his hand out of the Wenzhou woman’s and folded in on himself, caving in until he was almost sitting on the parking lot ground. He did not want to get into Zhuang’s car.

  * * *

  • • •

  The first noise Kaizhi made in the United States was a little hmm of interest when Little Yan handed him a tiny stuffed monkey after he’d settled into his carseat. He had kept up his resistance silently, trying not to allow the straps of the carseat around his arms with stiff elbows. When he finally sat down, hugging the stuffed animal, Little Yan dabbed at his eyes. It didn’t matter that he was unresponsive. He had gotten on the plane, and the plane had not fallen out of the sky. She could dab at his eyes if she needed to.

  Kaizhi’s eyes drooped on the ride back to the Tudor-style house in Fresh Meadows, but every time it looked like he might fall asleep, he jerked himself awake. Zhuang dropped off the woman from Wenzhou and offered, again, to buy her lunch. The family drove home. The house was, for the moment, empty of everyone but Zhuang and his new family. He made tea and texted his friends in China the good news. He poured some water for Kaizhi and then made a show of drinking it, slurping it down and wiping his mouth after each sip with a long, sloppy ahhh. Kaizhi smiled. Zhuang pulled out the two radio-controlled cars that he had purchased and crashed one into his toe. “Aiya!” he yelped in mock pain.

  Kaizhi sat on a child-size red chair, clutching his stuffed animal, smiling shyly at the cars. Little Yan crouched next to him and showed him how the remote control worked while Zhuang poured the tea. Kaizhi moved from the chair to the ground. He grabbed one of the cars and looked at the bottom, examining how it worked, and everyone around him grinned.

  “What kind of car is this?” asked Zhuang, holding up a tiny van.

  “A breadbox car!” Kaizhi said.

  Zhuang beamed at him. “See!” he said. “In two days we won’t seem like strangers!”

  17

  Services

  服务 / Fúwù

  SUMMER–FALL 2016

  In the foyer of the Chinese congregation at the Korean Presbyterian Church, volunteers had established a streamlined process to welcome newcomers. When Karen arrived on a Sunday in late summer, two women handed her a nametag and an information sheet to fill out. She wrote down her name, birth date, and contact information. And then they were allowed to enter the chapel, a beautiful walnut-colored space with a sweeping, curved ceiling that was covered in slats of dark wood. The women pointed Karen to a handful of rows toward the back that were reserved for first-timers. The pews were almost all full.

  During her three years in Flushing, Karen had made friends. One of her closest, a woman from her English class whom Karen had taken to calling her older sister—jiejie—had advised her to come visit the church. It was, the woman said, a good place to meet people. Karen’s friend had met her own fiancé at a church, and barely a year after she had arrived in the States, the pair were engaged to be married and were buying an apartment in Flushing. Karen took a day off from her nail salon side job and went to church.

  Karen had taken stock of her new community and amassed a mental list of places that were complicated socially. The nail salon was complicated. People there were in competition for customers and guarded themselves closely. The print shop had been unfriendly, as was the office job she worked. Even the room where Karen lived was complex—her roommate was constantly measuring their successes and failures against each other. Karen believed in God but thought about church largely in terms of building a community. She could learn about the Bible, listen to the pastor’s sermons, and could trust the people around her.

  The Korean Presbyterian Church of Queens offered a ready-made community for immigrant believers. There were Wednesday-night socials, live music on weekends, and a big lunch on Sundays. People joined the choir or performed at evening events. People who felt lonely during the week could attend Bible studies—contemplative social events where competition and envy were actively discouraged.

  On Karen’s first day, as the pews filled up and the songs and the sermon got under way, some of the newcomers listened with rapt attention, muttering amen after everything the pastor said. Others fell asleep, exhausted from whatever work they did during the week.

  The pastor was in his forties and nicely dressed. He made jokes about his young children and threw references to world affairs into his sermons. He talked critically about Uganda’s crackdown on gay men. He invented parables that were both absurd and meaningful. In one, a man was harassed by a comical demon who would show up on his doorstep and bang on the door. The man gave Jesus a room in his house to help deter the demon, but to no avail. When the demon showed up, Jesus stayed in his room. Finally the man thought to offer up his whole house, and Jesus went down and answered the door. “He threw the door open, boom!” the pastor said. “And the demon said, ‘Aiyaaaaa! I didn’t know this house belonged to you!’ ”

  Every week the pastor warned his congregation to be wary of charlatans, the demons at their own doors. “Even in our own congregation, there are people who would use the name of Jesus to cheat other people,” he said. They targeted immigrants. They came to churches to preach their own versions of Christianity and to rope unsuspecting congregants into their own cultlike religions.

  One church, the pastor reported, had discovered that a full thirty people in its congregation were actually agents of a cult. A gasp spread through the pews. “Be vigilant!’ he said. He put a photo onto a projector identifying two cult publications that had come to his attention. “If you see anyone trying to sell you these books,” he told the congregation, “don’t believe them. Avoid these people.” One of them was titled The Savior Has Already Returned on a White Cloud.

  * * *

  • • •

  During her first year in the United States, Karen had attended church services at the behest of her asylum lawyer, to help strengthen her case. Back in China, her mother and grandmother would occasionally attend a house church, a loose group of worshippers that was technically illegal in China; Karen’s home province had a large population of such Christians worshipping outside state-sanctioned churches, putting themselves at risk of a crackdown. So Karen’s lawyer advised her to claim religious persecution, and he prescribed regular church attendance to prove her devotion and her faith.

  Flushing had a huge selection of churches to choose from, most of which offered certificates of attendance to help along their c
ongregants’ asylum cases. Some church groups met in office buildings, storefronts, and conference rooms. Older congregations met in impressive church buildings. There were Korean churches, American churches, and Chinese churches. It was difficult, for someone with little experience of organized religion, to choose. Karen had asked a colleague for a recommendation and ended up in a regular room with fluorescent lights and metal chairs. The pastor preached with a mean streak that surprised Karen. He condemned greedy people. He talked of the dangers of homosexuality and warned people against participating in Halloween. He railed against the ills of society.

  When Karen switched churches, again on a recommendation, she found herself in another big conference room. The plump Chinese preacher worked himself into a lather, his face reddening, his voice growing pitchy. Then with no warning, the man leaped out of Mandarin into some other language. At the time, she guessed it was Italian. She wondered what happened. And then someone explained to her that the man had been inspired by God. He was speaking in tongues. A few weeks later the church invited another pastor, a white man, to come and talk to the congregation. He worked up to the same lather, speaking quickly in English, but instead of switching languages, he invited sick people up to the front of the room. He would heal them, he said, by putting his hands on them. To Karen, sitting in the back of the room, the performance was a relief. It wasn’t just Chinese people who were afflicted by this brand of insanity.

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen’s lawyer had advised her well. During her first year in the United States, she was granted asylum, on the basis of her first interview. She told no one about it aside from Isobel and her mother. To everyone else who struggled through court dates and defensive asylum meetings, Karen pretended she had the same complaints. It was the same muted response she would give to receiving her green card just over a year later.

  A chill set in around Flushing that summer—people were waiting longer to hear about their asylum cases, waiting longer for interviews and court dates. Karen’s roommate was struggling through her own asylum case. The courts were backed up, people said, because a flood of undocumented children had come up from Honduras the year before. There were more asylum applications now, people said. More competition. Longer waits. Yang Maosheng, waiting for his own interview date, spent his free afternoons at Tang Yuanjun’s office, complaining about people he felt didn’t deserve their asylum status. “They’re making it hard for the rest of us,” he complained.

  Karen had been happy for Little Yan when Kaizhi arrived. She understood that pressure came with an expanded family, but she couldn’t see far beyond the picture of daily companionship that came with a husband and child. She still did not have a boyfriend. What she had, in the meantime, was the security of her green card. She was growing bolder and more hopeful. The classes at LIBI were taking too long, and although she considered trying to transfer to another school, she couldn’t afford it. She needed something more expedient, something that might break up the grind of her days, moving from work to school and then to work again. In a move worthy of Zhuang himself, she decided to quit her weekday job, again, and enroll in hospitality classes. She was going to become a hotel maid.

  It might not have been as glamorous as managing the books in a medical office, or graduating from a four-year American college, but Karen had heard that working in a hotel paid off. Another acquaintance told her about unionization. “Work at a union hotel,” she told Karen. “Not a Chinese hotel.” So Karen gave notice at the online company, where she earned a steady ten dollars an hour, and enrolled in hospitality classes at a school walking distance from the narrow LIBI high-rise. She would study the hospitality industry by day and attend her LIBI classes at night. On weekends, she worked at the nail salon.

  The hospitality school where Karen enrolled was run by the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), a nonprofit organization formed after the 1965 immigration reform, and it was cheap, for a run of six weeks. It was a risk to go six weeks without work, but the rewards were potentially enormous. Hotels in Manhattan operated outside the immigrant networks prevalent in Flushing. She wouldn’t be competing with the thousands of young recent immigrants like herself. The class offered an opportunity to work outside the places where she spoke Mandarin all day to Chinese customers. It could be a window into the rest of the United States, the kind of opportunity that few new immigrants in Flushing would have or would dare to take.

  Almost all the people in Karen’s class at the CPC were from southern China. They spoke Cantonese when they were together, and nearly everyone spoke English with more confidence than Karen. One petite man claimed to be adept at feng shui. He read Karen’s palm and told her that her professional life would be very fulfilling. She should take care of her health, though. One of the other men told the class that his hobby (they were required to have a hobby as part of their interview prep) was watching movies. Karen recounted the conversation to me:

  “What is your favorite movie?” asked the teacher.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What was the most recent movie you’ve seen?” asked the teacher.

  “I forget,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “When was the last time you watched a movie?”

  “Last week.”

  “What movie was it?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  That man, Karen predicted, was going to struggle in an interview.

  Karen learned which hotels were the most desirable, how hotels operated, and the types of positions they most frequently needed filled. She dreamed of getting a job at a five-star hotel in Manhattan, then working up to a position at the front desk. She imagined simple advantages, like health insurance.

  The hardest part of Karen’s class, by far, was preparing for job interviews that would be conducted in English. She worried that her spoken English was not good enough—that she couldn’t recall words fast enough to get them out of her mouth. She was improving, speaking English, not Mandarin, whenever she had a choice. But she was still nervous in public. She rolled her expanding vocabulary around in her mouth as if the words were sucking all the moisture off her tongue.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Little Yan heard about Karen’s new classes, she did not, for a moment, consider them an option for herself. Her schedule was so full and cleaning rooms all day would be physically exhausting. Little Yan did not think she was well suited to that kind of manual labor. Zhuang, also, would never agree to let his wife work as a maid. That kind of work had a glow of impropriety—work performed, literally, in a bedroom. It could be dangerous. Little Yan would never be able to tell her family what she did to make money. Karen was younger, she said. It didn’t matter as much to her.

  A month into the hospitality class, mock interviews began. The mock interviews would show the instructors how prepared the students were, which was vital to their employment chances, as the school had to maintain a reputation for sending out qualified candidates.

  To help students prepare, the teachers gave them a worksheet with twenty different questions. Karen spent days agonizing over her answers. The questions ranged from broad personal statements to details about how the student would travel to work every day. “What would you do if treated unfairly by a supervisor?” read one question. “How do you feel about workplace gossip?” Karen kept her answers diplomatic.

  The most important question on the worksheet, her teacher had informed them, was the first. It was a topic that confounded Karen: “Tell us about yourself.” She wrote, “I am a proactive person,” as her first sentence, but when she practiced it, rolling the English consonants in her mouth in front of the mirror, she kept saying, “I am a positive person.” So it stuck.

  “I used to work in customer service,” she recited in the bathroom, “but I am looking for a different opportunity.”

  “I kno
w housekeeping is a physical job, but I am young and I play tennis.”

  “I would someday like to work as a manager.”

  The tennis bit she added for color. For the interview prep, Karen had tried to invent hobbies that she might pursue. She thought about joining a dance troupe at a local community center but found herself surrounded by old ladies, so she had taken up tennis. To be honest, she was just learning to play. She had been to the court near her apartment only once or twice.

  Karen wrote out all her answers on the worksheet and turned it in to the instructor, who in turn marked it up with red pen. Then she rewrote her answers, molding them to what people might want to hear. She wanted to be seen as ambitious but not aggressive. She memorized almost all her answers.

  The quality of the hotel her instructor recommended her for would be a measure of how well she had done in the mock interview. So the first hotel that they suggested to her, a small extended-stay hotel on the Upper East Side, made her feel hopeful. She waited for the hotel to schedule an interview, but the appointment was never made. Her teacher suggested another hotel. It seemed promising if only because it was also in Manhattan.

  The second hotel hadn’t opened yet and was looking to hire an entire staff. Seven of Karen’s classmates, three other women and four men, were scheduled to interview for jobs there. They splurged on outfits. Karen purchased a white shirt and a black blazer that she wore over a skirt. She imagined a kind of audition scenario with a panel of experts staring her down. She did not sleep the night before. “I have not been this nervous,” she told me, “since I took the gaokao.” She was referring to the enormous three-day college entrance exam that, in China, students spend years preparing for—a test expected to determine the course of the rest of their lives.