Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  * * *

  • • •

  Kaizhi spent his first four days in New York in the warm bustle of his parents’ welcome. They took Kleenexes and wiped his eyes clear over and over. They took him shopping for new clothes and bought him another toy car. On his first night, Kaizhi had proved unable to stay in his chair at a celebratory dinner. He danced, arms dangling at his side, on the sticky floor of the East Buffet’s downstairs restaurant, wild-eyed with sensory overload.

  Zhuang scolded Little Yan for feeding him a patty of shrimp all at once. “It’s too much!” he said, while Kaizhi looked up at him, one cheek puffed out with half-chewed fish. “Aiya! What are you doing? Don’t you know you should cut it up first?” As if to prove his point, a few pieces of shrimp erupted out of Kaizhi’s mouth, sticking to his chin for a moment and then falling to the floor.

  Little Yan looked at her husband impassively. “Why don’t you cut it up, then?”

  Kaizhi slept on the hard mattress with his parents. Every night, for the first few days, after settling in under the covers, he would roll toward the wall and make tiny gasping noises, like an injured animal. Kaizhi was trying his best to be brave, Little Yan said. He didn’t want them to know that he was terrified. He would finally fall asleep on the verge of tears.

  Zhuang had many early thoughts on what Kaizhi should eat and which parks he should play in. He would joke his way into his son’s heart, pretending the cars that crashed into his toes had injured him gravely. He would speak about himself in the third person. “Eat this food that your baba has gotten you!” or “If Kaizhi doesn’t behave, Baba and Mama will go to the store without him!”

  Little Yan was quieter. She played with Kaizhi, letting him take photos of her with her cell phone, watching him roll around on the bed until he dissolved into a fit of giggles. At the start, she couldn’t understand everything Kaizhi said. He spoke a mix of Mandarin and the local dialect from Zhuang’s village. On his second morning, she made him rice congee, and Kaizhi, who had barely touched his food after the shrimp patty exploded from his mouth, slurped it up. He was starting to trust her. He grew louder and more opinionated. In the bath one morning, not a week after he arrived, he looked up at Little Yan and told her he liked her. But he didn’t call them Baba and Mama yet.

  Little Yan’s schedule started off forgiving. She had four days to help Kaizhi adjust, then had her nights free for the next two weeks—her school was on a break between semesters. Kaizhi would fall asleep in his carseat while Zhuang drove to pick her up from her job at five. At home, Little Yan would cook and keep an eye on her son, while Zhuang glued himself to his phone, trying to keep his daigou business afloat and follow what was happening in Wukan. Little Yan kept tabs on local restaurants that offered discounts on certain nights of the week, planning for when Zhuang would have to take over. “He’s not going to cook,” she said. It didn’t matter whether her husband was ready to take Kaizhi on from seven to ten every evening. He didn’t have a choice.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang wanted to be a doting father, but a son was more disrupting than he could have imagined. Kaizhi still did not like to eat much, and Zhuang bargained and wheedled and threatened to little effect. “Yum!” he said at lunch one day, stuffing a dumpling into his mouth at the East Buffet. “Look, Kaizhi! Baba has ordered some really tasty dumplings! Oh, so fresh!” Kaizhi eyed him suspiciously, standing up next to his chair and staring toward some of the other people in the restaurant. Zhuang had just purchased a new toy train on the street. Kaizhi couldn’t stop peering at it through its plastic packaging. Zhuang called the server over and asked him to take the train to the front desk so Kaizhi wouldn’t be so distracted. “I have to do it,” he told Kaizhi. “You have to eat.” His son’s eyes welled up with real tears.

  “He’s sometimes very naughty,” Zhuang said to me. “But you can’t always give him what he wants. You have to teach him. But even now, looking at him, it’s really hard to watch him cry.”

  At home in the Tudor-style cottage in Fresh Meadows, Zhuang and Little Yan’s bedroom door faced that of their landlord’s two children, who soon discovered Kaizhi and wanted to play with him—a new roommate who had arrived complete with remote control cars. The girl, a gangly twelve-year-old, would slip into Zhuang’s room in the afternoons, after her summer classes let out. She spoke to Zhuang in rapid English and called him John. She renamed his son, calling him Kai. Zhuang had become an exhausted wrangler of two, sometimes three, children.

  “Oh my god!” the landlord’s daughter shouted one afternoon in August, driving one of the remote control cars. “I’m stuck! John my car is stuck! John!” Kaizhi was half-lying on the floor, examining another car that lit up and played club music while it drove itself in circles.

  “He’s too smart for me!” she hollered. “Kai doesn’t want to let me play with his car so he turns it off.”

  “John! John!” she said. “I think the car is broken.” She tried to drive the car into his closet. “I’m going to park it!”

  “Please don’t drive it into the closet,” Zhuang said in Chinese. “Just keep it in the room.”

  “But I’m parking it!” the girl said in English.

  Zhuang looked blank. “You are going to have to teach me English,” he said. “How do you say ‘turn everything off’ in English?” he asked. “Can we please turn everything off?”

  “Okay, okay,” said the girl.

  In addition to stealing the toy cars, the landlord’s daughter had an altruistic reason for coming into Zhuang’s room: she wanted to help Kaizhi learn English. She had been born in the United States but spent her early childhood with her grandmother in China. English was the biggest gift she could think to offer. She had noticed a number of new kids in her summer school classes who had just been brought over from their grandparents’ houses in China. Their English was bad. “I think they are just going to school so their mothers can work,” she said derisively. “I don’t want to say anything bad about anyone, but I think they got brought over now so they can go to school here.” Whatever the case, it was an embarrassment to show up to summer school at twelve unable to speak English. The girl was heading into seventh grade now and was observant of the social hierarchy. The kids in her classes whose families had come over decades or generations ago would ask her where she had been born, and she suspected it was meant to embarrass her.

  “Hey, John!” she said after switching off the toy cars. “Can we watch the cartoon? The one with two beavers and a bald guy?”

  Zhuang sighed. He pulled up the Chinese cartoon that Kaizhi liked, an updated Elmer Fudd rip-off in which a bald hunter tries to outsmart two bears.

  “I think they’re otters,” said the girl.

  Zhuang wasn’t sure the program offered much in the way of education. In fact, he worried it might teach Kaizhi undesirable behavior, as the hunter and the two bears were constantly yelling and hitting each other. But it was the one thing Kaizhi liked to watch; he had been a fan in Wukan. The only quiet moments Zhuang got were thanks to that bald hunter and his bears.

  * * *

  • • •

  For all its drawbacks—the distance from town, the impromptu child care—Zhuang and Little Yan liked the Tudor-style house. Staying there, however, would be difficult. The people who rented the basement apartment were already complaining about the noise—the little thumps of Kaizhi’s feet racing back and forth and the rumble of his two miniature construction trucks, the yellow front-end loader and the dump truck. At night, when he was always full of energy, Kaizhi’s parents followed him around shushing him: No jumping, no rolling your cars on the floor, no gymnastics on the bed. Even Zhuang’s landlord, the tolerant man from Fujian, looked nervous when Kaizhi tumbled out of Zhuang’s single room, all loose arms and legs, to check on his mom in the kitchen.

  Zhuang was already counting the days before Kai
zhi could attend preschool. He had to be four for the free public option, and Kaizhi had just turned three in May. So Zhuang had nearly ten months in which to tend him. The for-profit day care services around the neighborhood charged about eight hundred dollars a month. If Zhuang could guarantee making that much money with his daigou business, he would certainly put Kaizhi in day care. But he would have to wait until Kaizhi got his Social Security card. He wanted to get Kaizhi’s eyes seen to by an American doctor. Until then it would be hard to run his business. He still went to Woodbury on the weekends, but the summer made it increasingly difficult to turn a profit. Some of the wealthy bosses he knew were taking vacations in Europe or the United States, where they planned on picking up their own branded jeans and handbags. And following the crackdown in Wukan, friends there who were once happy to place orders with Zhuang were now otherwise occupied or nervous about keeping in contact with an old activist.

  By the time August turned into September, Zhuang admitted to himself that his business was not going to be the success he had once hoped. He and his family were eligible, a year after receiving asylum, to apply for their green cards—for which, Zhuang found out, they would have to pay a fee of more than a thousand dollars each. They could not live on Little Yan’s fourteen hundred dollars a month. They had finally run through the money Zhuang had brought from China in 2014. For once, Zhuang gave in to Little Yan’s vision of the future: he would buy a new car and get his taxi and limo license. In the meantime, Zhuang and Little Yan, two and a half years after they arrived debt-free, needed to borrow money from their families in China.

  It was only a matter of a few thousand dollars, but it let the pressure out of their lives almost instantaneously. Zhuang started looking for a new apartment, a large place with two or three rooms. With the extra money, he could afford to put down a larger deposit, and then he could sublease the additional rooms and take the bite out of his own monthly rent. In the end, it would save him money.

  Zhuang found a basement apartment in a generic brick house a few minutes’ drive from the heart of Flushing. It would make Little Yan’s commute easier, and Kaizhi would have free rein over the shared spaces. The apartment was chilly and covered in white tile, but it didn’t matter. It was Zhuang’s domain. He put his tea table out in the common space—with a proper tea tray on it. Kaizhi drove his trucks in and out of the bedroom, down a little hall, and into the kitchen. He nursed a budding obsession with trains, watching a video of different locomotive engines roll, fast and slow, over tracks. He could watch the train video for half an hour and not get bored.

  Zhuang put an advertisement online for the two extra rooms in his basement, then used a lesson he had learned from Chen Tai: he surveilled the wall of advertisements near Main Street, looking for upstanding tenants. The smaller room he rented out to a Chinese woman who worked in Florida but wanted a place to stay and keep her stuff when she came to New York. The other he let to a young woman, not much younger than Karen, who had just arrived in New York and was looking for a job. Eventually this younger tenant would invite another woman to share her room. They were polite and spent most of their time working, so nothing bothered Zhuang. Even with Kaizhi running back and forth and Zhuang’s inviting tea setup, everyone kept to themselves.

  The only drawback to the new apartment was that in the move, Kaizhi had lost his only two friends. Zhuang tried to get his son to play with other children in Flushing playgrounds, but he stayed close to Zhuang’s feet, driving his toys in a tight circle. Zhuang sighed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Throughout all this, the villagers in Wukan kept marching. And every few days Zhuang would post their photos on Facebook, noting the number of days they had been marching. In August they hit seventy and kept going. They sent Zhuang photos of themselves, their numbers reduced, but still impressive. He applauded their efforts from afar. If it was harder to find time to post now that Kaizhi was here, he had also grown bolder with his son out of harm’s way. He used both of his phones (his collection of devices had proliferated when he started selling daigou), moving from WeChat to WhatsApp (another chat service) to Facebook, tailoring his use to each application. He used a third application, a South Korean messaging service, to chat with me and a handful of other people. He would incorporate a fourth by the end of the year—a program called Signal that was becoming more popular with activists wanting to protect their data.

  Those evenings of posting photos and swapping phones were all it took for Zhuang to suddenly, after two years, make activist friends in Flushing. Yao Cheng, the man Zhuang had first met in the East Buffet—the bespectacled, outspoken friend of the German journalist, who had done jail time for drawing attention to the problem of child abductions in China—got back in touch and offered his support. Another man, Sun, appeared on Facebook early on in the protests of 2016 and commented on one of Zhuang’s posts. “I support Wukan,” he wrote. “I’m in Flushing.” He left his phone number. At first, Zhuang ignored it. He had other things on his mind.

  Zhuang had not been back to Tang Yuanjun’s office. The Peter Liang protest was the only time he had dipped his toe into the waters of activism in the United States. He knew nothing about the min yun who threw themselves at the cars of visiting Chinese leaders. Nor did he know that talk of Wukan had slipped back into Tang’s meetings. He was still just a man of Wukan, following its events with concern and excitement. And then a second wave of crackdowns hit the village.

  The daily marches had continued for eighty-three days before the Lufeng authorities got fed up. On September 5, village protesters received a letter from the Lufeng authorities warning them to stop their participation in illegal protests within five days. If they stopped, the letter informed them, no further investigation or action would be taken against them. On the seventh, pink notices were pasted up on the walls of the village, offering to distribute residential land. (“To this day, the lawbreakers who stole Wukan’s land haven’t returned an inch, how can they distribute any land?” Zhuang asked on Facebook. “Hong Ruichao, Yang Semao, and Lin Zulian didn’t fall into this bribery trap for residential land….They did it to reclaim communal land and to establish an autonomous village democracy.”) Protesters kept marching but hid their faces in the photographs they sent Zhuang.

  And then, on the night of September 12, two days after the deadline, the police invaded the village again. They went house to house, breaking down doors, throwing people onto the ground and detaining them. On the morning of the thirteenth, riot police moved in small units through the village, shuffling pods protected by their shields. They shot rubber bullets and tear gas at the villagers who came out to protest. The villagers ran into the street throwing chunks of concrete and tossed bricks out their windows. They picked up canisters of tear gas and threw them back. Old ladies put on scooter helmets and got down on their knees to try to block the police on their way through the alleyways.

  The photos they sent Zhuang were bloody and frightening. He tried to post them on Facebook when, suddenly, his account was suspended. Twenty-four hours later Facebook asked him to verify his account and reopened it. Zhuang blamed it on hackers from China. The police and the villagers kept fighting, and the arrests continued. People were arrested just for walking the street.

  Zhuang started posting photos of his WeChat conversations with the names blocked out. “They’re not letting us go,” one reads. “I don’t know why.”

  “Has everyone been beaten up?”

  “Most people.”

  In the first two days, the police came for Zhuang’s father. They burst into Zhuang Songkun’s house at night and threw him onto the ground. When Zhuang’s mother tried to hand her husband some clothes to take with him, the police pushed her back into a metal bedframe. They dragged the old man out, leaving Zhuang’s mother and his older, disabled brother in the house. They left her with a piece of paper that said NOTICE OF DETENTION across the top.


  Overnight, Zhuang’s role in the Wukan protests transformed. He did not talk about his father in those first few days. He did not dwell on his family’s situation. He didn’t give himself time. Later he would explain that this was not the first time he had suffered hardship. It was not the first time his family had splintered. And he knew he was not the only one suffering. For all his dreaming, Zhuang was firm during a crisis.

  Instead, Zhuang returned to what he knew. He set Kaizhi down in front of his favorite video and called the handful of journalists he still knew in Hong Kong. He told them what was happening in the village. He gave directions to the Al Jazeera filmmakers, who hoped to sneak around the police blockades and report from the village. The police, however, had done a thorough job of blocking the roads. The Lufeng government offered a three-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could lead them to the journalists hiding out in the village. Security forces raided more houses and beat up a group of journalists from Hong Kong. After four years of relying on the media to publicize their struggle and pressure the government, the old Wukan tactics failed. Lufeng had grown bolder. And Zhuang was the only person from Wukan who still felt able to speak out. His son was here—Kaizhi was his responsibility now. The family needed money. But Zhuang had already let the United States diminish him. If he didn’t do something now, he would not be able to call himself a man.

  20

  Dissent

  异议 / Yìyì

  FALL 2016

  Zhuang was not sure how to protest in the United States. He was proud of the media connections he had kept up, but he did not have a village to try to galvanize. New York was enormous and indifferent. Zhuang might write a pamphlet, but he wasn’t sure who would read it. He could go stand outside the Chinese consulate and talk to the people who were standing in line for visas, but he wanted to have an impact. For the first time in the United States, Patriot Number One did not want to go it alone. He was brimming with too much information and too many questions. His father had been arrested, the situation in the village had grown worse than he could ever have imagined, and he wanted to do something active to help. He made a plan to visit the only person he knew with experience protesting China’s government from New York.