* * *
• • •
Little Yan saw less of Karen after she left the medical office program and switched to classes focusing on the hospitality industry, then started at the hotel. Then after Christmas, Karen decided to take a semester off, to make room for her new job and personal life. She turned into one of the statistics that drive down LIBI’s graduation rates.
Little Yan, however, was as determined as ever to finish her classes. Zhuang didn’t want her to quit. It was important to keep thinking about the future, he said. He had just got his license to drive for Uber. He had stocked his car with sticks of gum to offer his passengers. He would drive when he could. “He likes to remind me that he supported me going to school,” Little Yan said to me. “Okay, fine. But he didn’t support me financially.”
“Little Yan,” Zhuang reflected to me one day, at another East Buffet lunch, “is easy to please.” She wanted a simple life. She didn’t want to go to the beach. She didn’t want to fight for freedom. She wanted to be comfortable. She didn’t want to worry too much or work too hard. “It’s a good thing, and it’s a bad thing,” he said. “She likes quiet. She never wants to go out. And I am some of both—I want to go out sometimes. I want to enjoy myself.” They were, he admitted, opposites.
Little Yan still sighed when she discussed her relationship with Zhuang. They didn’t sleep enough. They worried about money. All their energy and patience were spent by the time they got home. The silver lining was that for the first time Little Yan felt that they were both working toward something. Zhuang’s agreement to start driving for Uber placated her. It was the first of his schemes that she really believed in. When they filed their 2017 tax return, Zhuang found that they were getting nearly five thousand dollars in refunds from Little Yan’s last year of work. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to ease the pressure Little Yan had been feeling. Little Yan agreed with Zhuang’s assessment—she didn’t need much. She didn’t want flowers or luxury. She just wanted to sleep well.
In his first week of driving for Uber, Zhuang tested the limits of his English and found he could muddle through. “I’m sorry!” he told his passengers. “My English is no good!” Then he offered them gum. He drove people from Queens to Brooklyn, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and back. He jumped out of the car and opened doors. He grinned his best grin. And his reviews were, largely, glowing. “We love Liehong!” one passenger wrote, even spelling his name right. “Great driver! He even opened my door!” wrote someone else. In another review, a passenger who had clearly been drunk praised Zhuang for being tolerant.
But making money as a driver was almost as difficult as making money as a local Chinese cook. As he was a new driver, Uber took 25 percent off the top of all his fares. If Zhuang worked a ten- or twelve-hour day, after the fees taken out by Uber, he could come home with two hundred dollars. Taking gas and the cost of maintaining his car into account, he made less. He joined other car services with slightly better driving rates—Lyft, Juno, and Gett—but Uber did the most business.
Zhuang blamed his difficulties, in part, on the fact that he had made a mistake in purchasing his car: it did not qualify for Uber Black. He had selected his car carefully for its luxury and price point, but he had not realized the specificity of what Uber considered a black car. Zhuang was forced to drive for UberX, a service that commanded significantly lower fares. Almost as soon as he started driving, much to Little Yan’s annoyance, he started wondering how he might manage to upgrade his car.
Relying on driving for his living, Zhuang realized, could also be precarious. He was a careful driver. He pulled into intersections slowly, judged distances with caution, and rarely drove over the speed limit. A ticket could lower the rating of an Uber driver. Too many, and a driver risked being removed from the service entirely. For that reason, drivers in Flushing went to great lengths to get their tickets dismissed. They hired lawyers and lost more money. Zhuang smiled at his passengers, opened doors, handed out gum—worried that his investment would not pay off.
Zhuang had poured too much money into his new car to see this venture, too, fail. And like Little Yan, he was ready to feel stable. He wanted to provide for Kaizhi. He was planning to arrange surgeries for both himself and his son to fix their blocked tear ducts. He needed to send money home to help his mother and brother, who were struggling without Zhuang’s father. Zhuang had found himself again among the dissidents of Flushing. He felt like a man again. And a man needed to work.
* * *
• • •
Barely a week into driving his new car, Zhuang received a letter from Geico informing him that the insurance on his first car, the little two-door he had bought secondhand, had lapsed. Zhuang was mystified—he had set up an automatic payment when he opened the account. It turned out that Geico had erroneously disconnected Zhuang’s bank account from his insurance payments, and when they notified Zhuang, he hadn’t been able to read the letters they sent. When he called Geico to remedy the problem, the company told him that because his insurance had lapsed, the cheapest rate they could give him was double what he had been paying before.
Zhuang lived in a flood of letters that he could barely make out. He signed up for health insurance, car insurance, bank accounts, and credit cards with assistance from local offices. He paid his taxes with the help of local accountants. Sometimes he sent me photographs of letters that looked urgent, asking me for a translation. But after that, Zhuang was on his own, attempting to decipher the letters he thought were important and letting others slide. He was doing his best.
In Tang’s office, the problem with letters was common. A little mistake could cascade into a huge problem, a fine, and impenetrable layers of bureaucracy. One member went in for a medical checkup, and when his insurance made a mistake, he received a bill for six hundred dollars that he couldn’t read. Another filed his taxes incorrectly and received a letter telling him his fines ran up to 50 percent of his original tax bill. People would show up in Tang’s office and spread their mail out on his folding table, asking for help translating or advice on how to respond. It was like making your way through a fog: obstacles would appear without warning, outlined but not complete.
The confusion of negotiating life in the United States was easier to bear with company. In the world of min yun, Zhuang and Yao Cheng had become a unit. Yao Cheng accompanied Zhuang on almost all his trips, and the pair puzzled their way through train stations and traffic signs in tandem. They went to Washington together. They attended democracy conferences and frequented Tang’s office together.
Since the New Year, Sun had become controversial. Other exiles from the New Citizens Movement had questioned the extent of his activism while in China. And though Zhuang had been content to consider his friend’s half-baked business ideas an area separated from his activism, the two had recently started to overlap. Sun had proposed that Zhuang join him in opening their own democracy office, this one directly connected to immigration lawyers, sharing in the fees that the lawyers charged. Zhuang had refused. Sun had then proposed that Zhuang accept money from a Chinese person hoping to apply for asylum, in exchange for falsely testifying that the person was an activist from Wukan. Zhuang refused.
Sun presented almost all his schemes as innocent business propositions. He spoke in a tone that suggested that he hadn’t for a moment considered his plans’ ethical or legal implications. But as time went on, Sun used Wukan’s name more often as if the cause were his own. He started a WhatsApp group, called American Visa Sharing Group, and put a photo of a man holding up a GO TO WUKAN! poster in the profile—a poster from the awareness campaign Zhuang, Yao Cheng, and Sun had conceived together.
“I’m not going to do anything dramatic,” Zhuang said. “But I don’t think I can be associated with him anymore.” The more Sun leaned on Wukan, the more Zhuang’s reputation was at stake.
* * *
• • •
O
ne afternoon in late March, the folding table in Tang’s office was filled with activists, and Tang put a video up on the television screen at the front of the room. “Have I told you about the last time she blocked Xi Jinping’s car?” Tang asked. Half the people in the room nodded, including Ma Yongtian. “There’s a video on YouTube!”
As the video ran, people in the office continued chatting, sipping the tea that Tang had brewed. Someone had filmed Ma and a group of protesters from across the street, standing on a corner somewhere in Washington, when a string of black cars pulled out of a drive, turning right. There was a scuffle, and then suddenly she was being dragged belly down across the road. “Aiya, there she is!” someone exclaimed. Sitting now in Tang’s office, Ma smiled at the memory. She was hoping she might soon repeat the performance.
In the same month that Zhuang was negotiating his new insurance rate and trying to rein in Sun, the min yun community in New York got some electrifying news. Xi Jinping, China’s president, would be making a short trip to the United States. He would not stop in Washington, D.C., but would go directly to Palm Beach, Florida, to meet Donald Trump in his geographically named private club, Mar-a-Lago. None of the reports confirmed an exact date, but anyone who had been paying attention could guess that the trip would be made toward the end of the first week of April.
The news reached the community in early March, when Zhuang was in Las Vegas at a democracy conference. He had been invited to make a speech, and the organizers had paid his way—the farthest Zhuang had traveled since his arrival in New York. As soon as they heard, all the activists at the conference began planning their trips to Florida. Some protesters bought plane tickets in bulk. People would fly in from California and Seattle. They would drive from New York. Everyone in New York with a car had their seats filled quickly. No one in Flushing had much money, but most were willing to do whatever they could to make it to Mar-a-Lago.
The schedule for the official visit was announced not quite two weeks in advance. Xi Jinping would arrive on April 6 and stay overnight. Zhuang reserved a place in a car with Yao Cheng and Ma Yongtian. He would bring his posters and his loudspeaker. He planned to make a Chinese flag out of red cloth and burn it.
Then, sitting in Tang’s office, Yang Maosheng asked a question that threw this plan into disarray. “How long does it take to get to Florida?” he asked.
Zhuang said, “I heard it takes about fifteen hours.”
“What?” said Ma. “It takes at least twenty-four, and that’s if you don’t stop and eat!”
Ma told them she had to leave on the weekend. “I need to be there early to take a look at the area.” There was, she said, an art to her vocation. When Li Keqiang came to New York, they had planted spies around the outside of the hotel, and one in the lobby, to monitor when he might be coming and going. This time Ma needed to know the streets where Xi Jinping and his convoy would be traveling. She wanted to be sure, when she picked her moment, that she had a good chance of success. She was taking her son and a handful of accomplices. One couldn’t just throw oneself in front of a head of state without doing some prior reconnaissance.
Zhuang realized that his ride to Florida had just fallen through—he couldn’t leave as early as Ma was planning. The surgery to unblock Kaizhi’s two tear ducts would take place in New York the day before Xi Jinping’s visit. He had to attend—he was not going to abandon his son. And he was not going to reschedule the surgery: he was concerned that Trump would pass a law that canceled his Medicaid. If he and Kaizhi did not get surgery soon, they would never be able to afford it.
“Aiya,” he said. “If I have to buy a plane ticket, I guess I will buy a plane ticket.” He booked his flight later that day.
* * *
• • •
The dedication that Zhuang and the other activists felt in Tang’s office had been hardened by the fruitlessness of protest in China. In Florida, the protesters would get only seconds, barely a flash of wheels and tinted windows, but it was the closest anyone in the world could get to Xi Jinping. It was Zhuang’s responsibility to take his village’s grievances and put them in the Chinese president’s path. Flushing’s democracy activists would not let Xi Jinping forget that there was simmering anger in China, that he could not limit people’s freedoms and escape unscathed. “He doesn’t want to be bothered with us for even a second,” Yang Maosheng explained. “So the best we can do is make him see us just for a second.”
In the weeks leading up to Xi Jinping’s visit, Zhuang did his best to keep his sanity. He could have handled the daily pressures of driving for Uber, dealing with insurance bills, and worrying about Kaizhi’s surgery. It was Wukan that threatened to crush him under its weight. His father had been sentenced to three years in jail, and his mother had signed the mysterious paper presented to her by the police. The village itself was quiet, with no journalists getting in or out. No friends were willing to contact Zhuang. But that didn’t mean the phone calls had stopped.
The call Zhuang had gotten from his father in September—the first one made from jail, following Zhuang’s first rainy day of protest in New York—had not been the last. He had been receiving regular warnings from his father and then his mother, in calls that were almost always overseen by some police officer or prison official in China. They ebbed and flowed, following a script that accused Zhuang of being overly influenced by foreigners, of betraying his family by his actions. And then in early 2017, as the Year of the Rooster got under way, the threats became more pointed. Zhuang, his mother said, was risking his own safety. Just because he was in the United States didn’t make him unreachable. Someone might hurt him. She even used, in one conversation, the word assassinate.
Zhuang stopped answering phone calls coming from China. It was better for him to place a call to his mother at an unexpected time, hopeful that no security officer or official—whoever was getting her to place the threatening calls—would be there to overhear the conversation. The Lufeng government was mistaken if it thought it could stop Zhuang from protesting.
The number of calls increased in March, when Zhuang was on his way to Las Vegas. They reached a peak when Xi Jinping’s Palm Beach plans became clear, unidentified calls coming in on both his phones. Zhuang ignored them.
23
Blocking Traffic
拦车 / Lánchē
APRIL 2017
The day Xi Jinping flew into Palm Beach International Airport was clear and hot. He arrived a few hours after Donald Trump, who had recently been given the go-ahead to use a heliport at Mar-a-Lago and who generally helicoptered over from the airport, not risking the drive. Usually when the president visited, he arrived on a Friday, and everyone at the airport was prepared. This time, however, it was a Thursday and in the middle of spring break season, when college students and families flood airports all over Florida. The cavalcade of motorcycles and police cars came and went as quickly as possible, blocking streets and shutting down traffic, but airport personnel still sighed and threw up their hands while they explained to travelers that everyone was going to have to wait.
To save money, Zhuang had gotten a connecting flight through Atlanta, where he touched down and found his gate without incident. Then he watched the board as his plane was delayed later and later. Then it was canceled altogether. There might have been an announcement helping stranded passengers find hotel rooms, but Zhuang didn’t understand. He was too nervous about missing his flight to stray far. He spent most of Wednesday night trying to sleep on a row of airport seats, shoving his feet under an armrest as best he could, praying that his morning flight would not be delayed.
Zhuang caught an early morning flight and arrived in Florida with time to spare. But by the time he got to Palm Beach, he had barely slept at all. Yao Cheng came to pick him up—he had hitched a ride with another activist driving down from New York, and the pair moved through Palm Beach together, picking people up and depositing them
at protest sites. The activists were all nervous about staking their territory outside Xi Jinping’s hotel. Protesting a visiting head of state was a waiting game that began with arriving before the streets were shut down.
The democracy activists were only a small part of the crowd that arrived to greet Xi Jinping. The Falun Gong had started setting up before Zhuang got there, stringing up their banners and organizing group meditation by the side of the road. The hotel, called the Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa, had blocked off its parking lots a few days earlier, stacking one concrete traffic barrier on top of another so that the protesters couldn’t even see inside. Everyone had staked out their space hours in advance. They started shouting long before Xi Jinping’s convoy was scheduled to arrive.
Zhuang carved out a spot for himself in the grass along the road, in front of a row of palm trees not so different from the ones you might find in Wukan, their leaves splayed out behind him. Behind him he strung up the new sign he had made: a professional-looking banner featuring the faces of Wukan’s arrested villagers across from the looming black and white face of the party secretary of Guangdong. He hung his homemade Chinese flag beside it, with a picture of a gun taped across its front. He spread the rest of the posters and banners he had made over the last seven months on the grass. In his hand he held one of the early posters, the one that simply said, in handwritten black letters, FREE WUKAN.
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