* * *
• • •
Zhuang returned to the protest area outside the UN every day he could while the General Assembly was still meeting. The days that he dedicated to protests were days that Little Yan had to stay home from work. The family she was working for was, for the most part, flexible about it. If he was gone for just a few hours, sometimes they would let her take Kaizhi with her. It was one more instance in which she employed the video of trains, endless trains. “I’m worried that we are showing him too many videos,” she said to me. “But I don’t know what we can do about it.” She felt she was being run ragged, and yet she didn’t begrudge Zhuang the days of protest. She understood it was something he had to do. One of the good things about her husband, she said, was that his heart was big. He couldn’t stand by when his friends were suffering.
Even with the loan from family in China, Little Yan was struggling to keep her head above water financially. They did their best to keep their expenses down, but Kaizhi needed winter clothing, and the pair were too proud to accept donations or buy secondhand. Little Yan was still bringing home fourteen hundred dollars in a good month, when the family she worked for asked her to come every working day. When they took vacation, she didn’t work, and she didn’t get paid.
On weekends, she tried to take Kai out on walks. When she could, she picked him up after work and took him for a ride on the subway. He sat on his knees on the plastic seat next to her, face pressed against the window, pointing out the lights and cars. “School bus!” he said, pointing. “Another school bus!” There was no playground near their house, no community of mothers and kids. A subway ride was the best she could do.
Zhuang, on the other hand, spent the month both crushed and elated. He felt responsible for his whole village and thrilled by his return to activism. He had, in his first two years, collected a small number of people he could rely on. His former landlord, the one in the Tudor-style house, was happy to help him in small matters that required a better grasp of English. A few of his former classmates at the Flushing Library still kept in touch. And his reputation was growing with a small group of activists—the regulars at Tang’s office all knew him, and his name was spreading outside the city to groups of dissidents in Washington, Los Angeles, and Seattle. He was beginning to sound like Tang—he did not have to agree with every opinion his friends had. It was pointless to hold everyone he met to an impossible moral standard. People could be more than one thing at once. Yao Cheng could exaggerate when he talked about his life and, at the same time, be a loyal friend.
The acquaintance who put Zhuang’s newfound openness to the test was surnamed Sun—the same Sun who had contacted Zhuang with his phone number over Facebook. Sun was a sensitive man in his forties, with thin wire-rimmed glasses that matched his narrow frame. He said he had joined the New Citizens Movement—a group founded by the legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong to promote civic engagement and government accountability—in China and fled when the group’s leaders had been caught up in a political crackdown. In China, Sun had also run what he called an “immigration agency” that helped Chinese citizens acquire U.S. visas. He advised them on passing interviews and helped them understand what kind of evidence they needed. Sometimes, he told Zhuang, people would have to organize a trip to Korea or Thailand first, just to show that they had traveled as tourists in the past.
Sun was struggling with his new life in New York. His wife would not work, and Sun was too sensitive for the stress of working in a kitchen or on a construction team. He was interested in renewing his immigration business and was on the lookout for families who might host Chinese middle-school students coming to study in the United States, or people with citizenship who might be willing to participate in a green card marriage. Sun brought up his schemes guilelessly, in front of people he had just met. (“You could make lots of money if you were willing to divorce your husband,” he told me, proposing to broker a green card marriage.) Zhuang didn’t agree with his business ideas, but Sun came to his protests and was a dedicated supporter of Wukan. “He’s complicated,” Zhuang said. Everyone was.
Sun helped Zhuang try to find lawyers in China who were willing to take on the criminal charges that were being levied against Wukan villagers. It didn’t do much good. The lawyers they did find weren’t allowed to meet with their prospective clients. Some were openly intimidated. “Right now, law in China is purely theoretical,” one lawyer told Sun. But Sun was full of alternative ideas and eager to help. Sun, Zhuang, and Yao Cheng would gather in Zhuang’s basement apartment, Sun refusing to drink tea because his constitution couldn’t handle the caffeine, coming up with plans for future protests and discussing the potential fall of the Chinese government. They debated whether it would happen in five years, ten, or twenty. And then Sun or Yao Cheng would lean back in his chair and sigh. “Aiya,” they would say. “The Communist Party is too awful.”
* * *
• • •
The morning after Zhuang’s first protest at the UN, he got a call from the Lufeng government. “Is this Zhuang Liehong?” a voice asked. When he said yes, he heard a few muffled noises, and then his father got on the phone. “Zhuang Liehong,” his father said. “If you act this way, you will hurt your family. While you’re outside China, be careful not to be influenced by certain people. Don’t engage in certain activities. Don’t let anyone use you.”
Zhuang paused, then asked his father if he was being treated well. “These comrades are good to me,” said Zhuang Songkun. He had a bed and enough to eat.
“How can you say they’re treating you well?” Zhuang responded. “If they were treating you well, they wouldn’t have arrested you for no reason!” Then the call ended.
Zhuang went back to the UN on the second day of the General Assembly meeting. Yao Cheng came with him. In public at least, Zhuang was not going to dwell on the difficulties his family was facing. His mother was left at home with his disabled older brother. People were afraid to even visit their ramshackle house. But it was good, Zhuang told Yao Cheng, that the authorities had called him and put his father on the phone. It meant his own protests were having an impact. “They’re scared of you!” Yao Cheng said approvingly.
“I told them not to call me again,” Zhuang said. “It won’t make a difference!” The more they tried to bully him, the more determined he was. He wrote about the phone call on his Facebook page and invited journalists to interview him about it. “I have been low key for a long time, and now I regret it!” he wrote. “Before my son came to the United States, I refused to be interviewed by some members of the media—I apologize for it!”
He spent the rest of the week protesting at the UN. Every time he went in, he thanked the NYPD monitoring the area and offered them bottles of water. On one day, while he was stringing up his banner, two dueling groups of Senegalese protesters filed in on either side of him, each in its own barricaded section. He stood for photographs while the Senegalese beat drums, played music, and shouted over his head with a megaphone. “I’m not sure,” he said, “whether this kind of protest is really appropriate.”
For the most part, all the interviews that Zhuang gave during that week in September were conducted in Mandarin and printed in Chinese. On the fourth day, a reporter from Voice of America asked him questions about his village. Yao Cheng had tried to coach him in advance. He told Zhuang not to get nervous and to try to speak slowly. Zhuang had a habit of stuttering when he had something important to say. They planned what he might say about his father. He tried to take Yao Cheng’s advice, speaking slowly and carefully. He tried to appear calm. When the reporter asked if he had spoken to his father since the arrest, Zhuang faltered. “No,” he said, then corrected himself. “I mean, not until a few days ago.”
It did not matter if Americans knew about his protests specifically. Reports published in Mandarin were just as effective at getting the attention of the local officials in Guan
gdong Province. Reporters from Hong Kong and Taiwan were more likely to know about Wukan and to care about the dwindling prospects of a single Chinese village. When a reporter from Radio Free Asia asked if the phone call from Zhuang’s father would change his thinking about protest, Zhuang responded with typical bravado. “Of course not! Am I stupid? Look what they’ve done to Wukan!”
Even in private, Zhuang rarely let his guard down when talking about his father. He would shake his head and lament the situation in simple terms, then move on to more practical matters. “I worry about my mother and my brother,” he would say. “Meibanfa.” There was nothing he could do about it.
21
Politics
政治 / Zhèngzhì
NOVEMBER 2016–APRIL 2017
There were days when Little Yan attributed her arguments with Zhuang to a condition of all masculinity. Men could live on protest alone and not worry about how they would eat. Now that Zhuang had befriended Flushing’s democracy activists, her theory was bolstered: many of the male activists in Flushing were financially dependent on the women in their lives. There wasn’t much money in protest. Tang put funds from China Democracy Party membership back into running the office and sent money to help the wives and children of jailed activists. He took odd jobs when he needed extra cash to support himself, and was thankful that he had an understanding wife and daughter. The leader of another China Democracy Party, a prominent dissident named Wang Juntao, spent much of his time in Flushing while his wife supported the family in New Jersey. He might have been an academic, but he had chosen a life of protest. “We have to be honest about it,” laughed Yang Maosheng, whose wife had been absent from Tang’s office since the wedding—the hours she worked were too onerous. “Most of us are being supported by our wives.”
Other days Little Yan was more critical of Zhuang’s shortcomings. After he had given up on selling daigou and warmed to Little Yan’s suggestion that he look into driving for Uber, it became clear that the new job would require training and money. He had to attend a course and pass a test to get a TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) license. And then they would have to take some of the money they had borrowed from relatives and put it toward a car.
Zhuang dutifully attended classes in Brooklyn when he wasn’t protesting. He needed to finish twenty-four hours of class time covering map reading, customer relations, and local geography. He would have to pass an exam testing his knowledge of the city, and then he would have to take a short defensive driving class. For his final application, he would need to have a car already. He went to a Chinese-run car dealership and, with some of their borrowed money as a down payment, purchased a silver Nissan SUV. He came equipped with the good credit score he had spent the last year building up. When the man on the car lot tried to demand a 20 percent down payment, Zhuang threatened to walk off the lot. He knew now how these things worked.
Zhuang estimated the ongoing costs—the insurance, the car payments, gas, and the percentage that Uber would take off every transaction. He expected to be able to drive every night. Little Yan worried that he would not work the hours it would take to cover all their growing expenses. She tried, however, to be generous. They were mismatched in so many ways, she said to me, but Zhuang had a big heart—he could not ignore his village. And besides, politics were starting to infiltrate all their lives.
* * *
• • •
In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an outpouring of Chinese-language articles circulated over WeChat, posted by Web-savvy Chinese-American Trump supporters. One popular source called itself the Chinese Voice of America, or CVA, and offered alarmist, typically false takes on the issues and candidates. Stories warned of terrorism and unchecked immigration. One of the waiters at the East Buffet, himself an immigrant and asylee, posted an article entitled “Why Is This American Election So Important?” Largely, it concluded, because Hillary Clinton was likely to open the floodgates of immigration, allowing dangers outside U.S. borders to enter. CVA posted original pieces and articles translated from similar-minded American websites. One article circulating over WeChat urged people to vote for Clinton if they wanted their taxes to go up and the country to be taken over by ISIS. Another warned that progressives were banning the consumption of pork, out of deference to the eating preferences of Muslim Americans.
It was a strange sensation, for Zhuang and Little Yan, to open their social media accounts and read political rants. In China, political conversation on WeChat is tracked and censored. If a WeChat post in China gets more than five thousand views, its originator can be charged with defamation and sentenced to seven years in prison. But when it came to the 2016 election in the United States, political rants and misinformation spread quickly. People like Zhuang didn’t have the ability to read English or listen to the presidential debates, so they often took the WeChat stories at face value. In China, censors used the phenomenon of “fake news” as proof of their value. The owner of WeChat, the CEO of an umbrella company called Tencent Media, made comments following the November 8 election, lauding WeChat’s valuable efforts to curb fake news in China—implying that online censorship and monitoring carried out by the Chinese government was warranted and necessary.
For the most part, the immigrants whom Zhuang and Little Yan met in Flushing were not yet citizens. If they were, their English was often bad and their schedules were as packed as those of their newer immigrant counterparts. Few voted. Across the United States, Asian Americans have a long record of avoiding political participation. In 2012 less than half of the Asian Americans eligible to vote went to the polls.
There had been signs, however, that the Chinese community in Flushing was starting to take more interest in American politics. In 2012 Flushing had helped elect Grace Meng to the House of Representatives—one of twelve Asian American congresspeople in the 435-person body. Thousands had participated in the protests after Peter Liang was convicted of manslaughter. And in 2016 people in Flushing were paying attention.
In Tang Yuanjun’s office, U.S. politics filtered regularly into the conversations around his folding table. People voiced concern about Clinton’s unsecured e-mail server. They wondered if it was bad to have a second Clinton take over the White House. No one knew what, exactly, to make of Donald Trump.
Even Little Yan was forming an opinion. “Look, I have only been in the United States for a short time,” she explained to me. “My opinions have all been influenced by the people around me.” Everyone in Flushing, she assured me, supported Clinton. The people who didn’t were just afraid of new immigration. “There aren’t many of them,” she said. They were just particularly noisy on WeChat. At one of her nail salon jobs, she had befriended two longtime immigrants, women who had lived in the United States for ten years or more, “and they support Hillary Clinton.” Political conversations also happened in her classes at LIBI. One of her professors complained about the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare,” Little Yan translated) but still did not support Trump. Another professor joked that any Trump supporters might as well get up and leave his class now, because he was about to disparage the presidential candidate. “Everybody thinks he’s a little too crazy,” Little Yan explained. “For me, I think Obama has been a very good president, and Hillary is part of Obama’s group. She’ll do things like Obama has done. So I support her.”
There was no question in Little Yan’s mind that a woman could do the job required. Hillary Clinton had worked in government before, and her husband had been president. “Maybe some leaders won’t want to listen to what she’s saying,” Little Yan said. But if she won, Hillary Clinton would be the president of the United States, and everyone would have to listen.
* * *
• • •
While Donald Trump was preparing to take office, Zhuang, Sun, and Yao Cheng were coming up with new campaigns to bring attention to Wukan. They brought their protest banners and pictures to Fifth
Avenue, outside Trump Tower, with a new message: DEAR MR. TRUMP, PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA. They took up part of the sidewalk just past a man who was selling comic books that incorporated Donald Trump’s victory with well-known books like The Wizard of Oz, with Hillary Clinton repurposed as the Wicked Witch. “They’re great Christmas presents!” said the man selling them.
Zhuang and Sun and a handful of others sat on the sidewalk for half an hour before the police came and politely herded them to a designated protest area. People walked by and looked at their posters. Some inquired politely about the human rights situation in China. An older man in what looked like a tan fishing vest asked sincerely about the situation with foot binding. “Why don’t you go protest in China?” someone yelled at them. “Why do we have to pay attention to your problems?” A woman in a floor-length fur coat walked up and posed for a photograph raising two middle fingers at the Trump building. Another woman, holding a tourist map of the subway system, threw her hands up and shouted, “We love you, Donald!”
Zhuang’s political world was expanding one step at a time. The more time he spent with Yao Cheng, the more he paid attention to other villages and cities in China—the crackdown on human rights lawyers, the kidnapping of the booksellers. Tang invited Zhuang to speak at democracy meetings in Flushing, and Zhuang spent time in Tang’s office, discussing politics in China and sometimes the United States.
Zhuang came to respect Tang Yuanjun. They had different approaches to protest and life. Zhuang was younger and quick to anger, while Tang was more likely to move slowly. Tang, however, had supported Zhuang’s protests with advice and supplies, and sometimes his own party members had attended protests. Tang had modeled a way to accept immigrants from all walks of life, with different aims and ways of expressing themselves, all the while maintaining his own ideas and integrity. Now whenever Zhuang planned a protest or launched an online campaign, he would talk it over with Ma Yongtian, Yang Maosheng, and other dissidents who gathered at Tang’s headquarters.
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