Tang Yuanjun, over the years, had grown careful about taking on the cause of every new immigrant who arrived in Flushing. Every time a Chinese leader made his way into the United States, he traveled to Washington, and he attended all the democracy conferences. He did what he could, but the need was bottomless. “I can’t support everyone’s protest,” he explained. But Tang was connected to the new dissidents coming in. His meetings attracted a regular crowd. He also knew how to make a protest poster. So Zhuang called him and arranged to meet him the next day.
Zhuang arrived with Kaizhi in tow, ready to play a train video on one of his two cell phones. Kaizhi’s obsession with trains was full-blown after a month and a half in New York. He walked down the street imitating the blast of a train’s horn, the ding ding of a crossing. His favorite video, a half-hour montage of different trains blowing past stations and crossings, kept him quiet when Zhuang needed to talk to adults. Zhuang and Little Yan had no one they could leave Kaizhi with when they needed to go to the bank or meet with the agent who could get Kaizhi’s health insurance in order, so it was business as usual that Zhuang had brought him.
In Tang’s office, Kaizhi wiggled in his seat, complaining whenever the Internet stalled and the trains stopped moving. Zhuang showed Tang Yuanjun some of the videos he had put up on YouTube after arriving in the United States. Tang was impressed. “The opening of this one is really well done,” he said, pointing to the credits of a film titled Wukan! Wukan! III, the final installment of a trilogy that Zhuang had finished in 2014. Tang himself had considered working as a video editor to make money on the side.
“I thought I would make some signs,” said Zhuang. “I want to say ‘Wukan Village blames the party secretary Hu Chunhua!’ I want to point the finger at him.” Hu Chunhua had taken over the leadership of Guangdong Province after Wang Yang, the man responsible for resolving the 2011 crisis in the village. The security forces in the village were too numerous, Zhuang argued, for them to have been sent without approval from the provincial party secretary himself.
Tang told Zhuang that he was in luck—China’s premier, Li Keqiang, would be arriving in New York to attend the UN General Assembly the next week. Zhuang could go protest at the United Nations, and if that wasn’t enough, he could go over to the Chinese consulate and stand outside.
“You are only one person,” Tang said, leaning toward a stack of small protest signs that he had amassed over the years. “So you might just want to take two or three small signs and hold them up.” He pulled out two small posters, each one showing a China Democracy Party member who was still in jail in China. “You could hold them up like this.” He put an arm around the two small posters and balanced them at his sides. Zhuang looked pensively at the posters. He was imagining something bigger.
“Do you have any banners?”
“I do,” said Tang. “But they might be difficult to hold up.” The wind along the sidewalk near the Chinese consulate could be particularly blustery, he explained. “It is right on the water.” Tang didn’t think he could lend Zhuang any protesters. Most people at the China Democracy Party took off work only on Tuesdays so they could attend the regularly scheduled meetings. “Aiya,” said Zhuang, “I had so many Facebook followers, I’m sure some of them would have come. But my Facebook account has been closed down.
“Maybe I could tie one end of the banner to something. I would like a banner anyway.”
Tang’s banners were stored, rolled up, next to an office window, behind a whiteboard he sometimes pulled out for meetings. “We just use old ones and put paper signs on top of them,” he explained, rolling a banner along the surface of the office floor.
“Who wrote these characters?” Zhuang asked. “Did you write them?”
Tang nodded.
“Aiya, they are too good-looking. Would you help me write the characters for my banner?”
Tang nodded again, pleased. “Of course, of course! You will need something like ten characters. If there are too few, they will be too big and people can’t read them. If there are too many, people won’t bother to read.”
Zhuang nodded and shuffled through Tang’s stack of cardboard squares, wondering what to put on them. “I will need some photos of the police in the village,” he said.
“And some photos that show the extent of the violence,” Tang piped in. Those typically got more attention.
“My father was also taken.” Zhuang dropped the information as if it were a detail he had almost forgotten. “Should I also include a photo of him?”
“I don’t think so. You don’t want people to think you’re protesting just because it’s a personal matter.” Tang thought it would be better if Zhuang seemed like he was protesting for all of Wukan.
Zhuang nodded.
“What kind of detention is your father being held under?” asked Tang.
“Xingshi,” said Zhuang. Criminal detention.
“Oh,” said Tang. “They won’t let him out anytime soon. That usually takes at least thirty days before sentencing.”
Kai climbed into his father’s lap and complained that the train video on the phone was stalled. “It’s not there anymore!” he said. “It’s gone!”
Zhuang shushed him.
* * *
• • •
Now more than two thousand people were following Zhuang on Facebook. People were supporting him in the comments, clicking “like” and leaving behind emojis of crying faces. But he knew that comments on his posts would not translate directly into bodies at a protest. Tang had helped Zhuang prepare the materials he would need, but it was Yao Cheng who accompanied him to the United Nations Headquarters during the UN General Assembly. It would tie Zhuang to an event that was already newsworthy and put him on the street where China’s premier, Li Keqiang, would be passing on the way to and from his meetings. A man on the street with a sign on a random day might seem desperate. A man outside the UN General Assembly was a man with a purpose.
When Zhuang first met Yao Cheng, during that early lunch at the East Buffet, the older activist had talked a big game about raising an army to resist the Communist Party of China. Zhuang had not been sure what to make of him, with his glasses balanced moodily on the tip of his nose, his tales of a past in China’s military and of the multiple jail sentences he had served in before escaping to the United States. It hadn’t been Zhuang’s practice then to accept advice from other immigrants, much less other dissidents. But now that he had resigned himself to needing help, he was keeping a more open mind.
Yao Cheng, for his part, saw himself in Zhuang. He treated the younger man as an equal, but Yao also felt he had things to teach. He could help Zhuang see how Wukan was connected to the rest of China—how various protests were interconnected. He could help Zhuang with public speaking. He could serve as a bridge between Zhuang and other Chinese dissidents in New York. Yao Cheng credited his own education to Chai Ling, the Tiananmen Square protest leader who had recruited him to help rescue kidnapped girls. Chai Ling’s associates in Hong Kong had given him history lessons, and they had taught him how to present himself. Yao Cheng decided to offer the same kind of support to Zhuang. And Zhuang, although he did not believe every word Yao Cheng said, was moved by the older man’s support for Wukan. “He doesn’t have another, hidden motive,” Zhuang told me. “He just wants to help Wukan.” Yao Cheng became a near permanent presence by Zhuang’s side.
On Zhuang’s first day of open protest in the United States, September 19, he and Yao Cheng left Flushing early on the 7 train. The two dissidents had met outside the Main Street station, in the rain, clutching the plastic handles of their cheap bodega umbrellas. They were worried that it might take them some time to find a good spot outside UN Headquarters. Neither of them spent much time in Manhattan, and they knew very little about the UN building itself. They just needed a place to unfurl the banner that Tang had helped Zhuang create.
It was actually an old banner, repurposed with printer paper taped to its surface. Tang had painted a single character on each square of paper with a thick brush. “Protesting the Guangdong Party Secretary Hu Chunhua’s Oppression of Wukan People!” it read. “Release Wukan’s Arrested Villagers!” Zhuang had blown up bloody photos of the villagers who had been beaten or hit with rubber bullets, along with a photo of the party secretary he was blaming for the crackdown. Zhuang and Yao Cheng had decided to hold Hu Chunhua’s picture upside down. “It doesn’t have any particular meaning,” Zhuang explained. “We’re just doing it to be disrespectful.”
The pair arrived at the United Nations so early that the police barricades had yet to be erected. They wandered around the corner from 42nd Street and photographed themselves in front of the main building. They walked over to the designated media area and handed out some flyers telling the story of the Wukan Village crackdown. Zhuang had written the account himself. He had asked me to do a quick translation of what he had written and printed out two versions—one in Mandarin, the other in English.
Most of the journalists behind the metal barricades took the pamphlet, gave it a glance, and stuffed it into a pocket. One or two reporters offered Zhuang their cards. Then a news anchor from China’s CCTV saw what they were doing and walked over, her hair perfect, her makeup camera-ready, her eyes narrowed. The woman shouted at them in rapid Mandarin. “What are you doing? You can’t come in here!” she said. “Get out!” She threatened to call security and have them removed.
Zhuang told her she couldn’t treat them like that. “This isn’t China!” he said. But the pair headed off anyway. They needed a place to set up their banner.
* * *
• • •
The designated protest area for the UN General Assembly had been set up to the north of the building itself. A long park along the last block of 47th Street had been cordoned off with metal traffic barriers, leaving rows of wet benches and trees. The area gave protesters access to a short half-block of street where official cars might pass. For the most part, however, whoever gathered faced an empty road, the media area just visible to the south of them.
When Zhuang and Yao Cheng got there, a group of Falun Gong protesters—a Chinese spiritual movement that had faced a crackdown in the late 1990s, its practitioners imprisoned and tortured—had already clustered under the awning of Dag’s Restaurant, a free-standing food kiosk named after the UN’s second secretary general. Just past Dag’s, where East 47th Street dead-ends into UN Plaza, the police had set out additional barriers, dingy blue wooden fences that would serve to separate protesters into groups. Later, on the second day of the General Assembly, supporters of the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi would yell at Sisi protesters through loudspeakers, and vice versa, jeering at each other over the heads of a confused, quiet group of Falun Gong.
Zhuang and Yao Cheng marched up holding their plastic bags and umbrellas and picked a row just behind the Falun Gong, who were taking a meditation break to pray. Almost all wore matching yellow rain jackets. They had strung up professional-looking banners across the barriers for anyone to see. FALUN GONG IS GOOD! one read. The group was silent, the rain pattering on their umbrellas and signs. Some were holding a hand up to their lips. Zhuang and Yao Cheng settled in quietly, unsure how to approach their neighbors.
As they unfurled their banner and looked for a place to hang it, two Falun Gong members walked over hesitantly. Zhuang and Yao Cheng were gracious, but Zhuang fended off their offers to help. He was opening himself up to other democracy activists, but his mistrust of other movements was hard to shake. He gave off an air of slightly superior benevolence. When an old woman told Zhuang that he should contact them (“We have our own newspaper,” she told him) to promote his cause, he smiled. “I’m not going to go to them,” he said. “If they’re interested, they can write about it.”
The success of this protest, Zhuang had decided, was as much about the photos he would post to social media as it was about getting Li Keqiang’s attention. Even if they did attract his notice, he was under no delusion that China’s premier, second only to the president, Xi Jinping, would care about one man holding up a banner by the side of the road. Zhuang rolled out his banner, held up his photos, and Yao Cheng photographed him looking determined. They tried different angles to get the text of the banner into one photo. They held up Hu Chunhua’s headshot, turning him upside down and staring straight at the camera. They did their best to include a view of the UN building. And then the pair took a break and stood for a few minutes, cell phones in hand, both of them posting the photos to Facebook.
“I just got a message from my friend,” Yao Cheng informed Zhuang, talking about Ma Yongtian. “Li Keqiang is at the Waldorf Astoria. We should go over there and take a photo.” Zhuang agreed. They packed up their materials and headed out of the protest area, politely thanking the NYPD as they went. Yao Cheng pulled his phone out of his fanny pack and consulted a map. “This way,” he said, and started walking.
Zhuang offered him a cigarette. The pair moved slowly, smoking and recounting their successes. People dressed for a day at the office, some with UN lanyards hanging off their necks, found their way around them. “No one else got inside!” Zhuang said, referring to their time in the media tent. “And that CCTV anchor! What does she think the security guards are going to do?”
“You’re exactly right!” said Yao Cheng. “Those TV anchors are too corrupt. They think everywhere is like China. Everyone else there was very happy to take your pamphlet.” He consulted his phone again. “I don’t have her phone number,” he said, of Ma Yongtian. She was in Manhattan, stalking the Chinese premier, hoping to block his car. “I can only send her messages over Facebook.” They walked a few blocks too far, then circled back toward the Waldorf Astoria. “It’s where all the Chinese leaders stay,” Yao Cheng said. “It’s excessive.”
The rain was letting up when Zhuang and Yao Cheng passed a group of Chinese men in matching blue rain ponchos. They had clustered on a street corner, some older with glasses, others young and severe-looking. They looked off into the middle distance and sipped coffee.
“Did you see that?” asked Zhuang after he had passed them. “They looked at me, and I just looked right back at them!”
Together the pair walked to the next corner and found that New York police had cordoned off the block leading to the hotel entrance. As they considered their next move, seven of the men they had just passed came to a halt a few feet behind them, doing their best to look as casual as possible for seven men occupying the sidewalk in matching blue rain ponchos. Zhuang glanced back and tapped Yao Cheng. Most of the men were holding umbrellas. One had a visible earpiece. An older one, in glasses, looked on impassively, still sipping at his cup of coffee.
“Uh-oh!” said Yao Cheng, then waved a hand. “Ignore them.”
But Zhuang could not. He turned and addressed them. “I am Zhuang Liehong!” he said to them. “I am from Wukan! You can follow me if you want! All I have ever done is spoken the truth!”
“Don’t bother with them.” Yao sucked on a cigarette and took a few steps away. “They’re not worth talking to.”
Zhuang looked as if he were going to follow his friend’s advice, then thought better of it. “I am a Wukan villager! Why is the government oppressing Wukan people? They are too corrupt, too terrible!”
One of the men in glasses sneered at him. Another group member stepped forward. “You can talk if you want, but you don’t have to make a scene,” he said calmly.
“Okay, I will talk to you!” said Zhuang. “I am from Wukan Village. Do you know what is happening there?”
The man pulled back the hood of his poncho and ran his hand over his mostly shaved head. A small patch of long hair sprayed up at the top of his forehead, clumped together by the rain. He didn’t mean to answer.
“Here!” Zhuang Liehong said, r
ifling through one of his plastic bags. He pulled out his open letter and tried to hand it over. The man didn’t move. “Here!” Zhuang said again. “You said you would listen, so take this. I’m not afraid of you!”
At this point Yao Cheng seemed to forget his earlier dismissal and walked back over. “The Communist Party is a bunch of criminals!” he said. “It killed its own people at Tiananmen Square!”
One of the blue ponchos laughed. “How do you know what happened at Tiananmen Square?” he asked.“Were you there?”
Yao Cheng spluttered. “It’s worthless even talking to them!” he said to Zhuang.
Another man joined in. “You people, you’ve betrayed your father.”
“You’ve betrayed your own people!” Zhuang shot back. (“What is he trying to say?” Zhuang asked later. “That the Communist Party is my father?”)
Yao Cheng waved Zhuang away from the blue raincoats, who trailed after them down the sidewalk, continuing to feign nonchalance. “Do they think they can intimidate us?” Zhuang asked. “This is the United States, it’s not like they can beat you up here.”
“You should be very careful,” Yao Cheng said in a low voice, sticking out his lower lip and raising his eyebrows. “Even in the United States, the Chinese government can make people disappear!”
“Aiya,” said Zhuang.
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