Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  JUNE 2017

  On an overcast Saturday in June, Little Yan and Karen wandered around the sea lion enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, Kaizhi leaning on the glass, watching the animals swim back and forth.

  “Kaizhi, do you still think the zoo is scary?” Little Yan asked, laughing. On the subway ride into the city, which had taken forty-five minutes longer than it should have because of a train mixup, Kaizhi had complained that he didn’t like zoos. He both wanted, and did not at all want, to see a lion. Little Yan smiled. These were the only lions at the Central Park Zoo.

  In the weeks since Zhuang returned from Florida in April, Little Yan had discovered she was pregnant. By now her belly was already showing, a barely noticeable swell under her black dress. She was past the worst of it, she told Karen. For the first three months, she had struggled with morning sickness that lasted most of the day. Her appetite had been off, and she had struggled to find food that didn’t make her nauseated. But she was happier than she had been in over a year.

  Zhuang had asked her to stop working. “I have taken all the pressure of our life,” she said. “And I have handed it over to him.”

  Zhuang had been thrilled by the news. He hoped for a girl, so his family would be complete and balanced. He was determined to overcome the prejudices he had grown up with—girls could be just as successful as boys. “I am not going to tell them what they should do with their lives,” Zhuang said. He expected that Kaizhi and his new baby would go to a university somewhere in the United States. He didn’t care if they made money or picked high-powered careers. He would not push Kaizhi to become an accountant or a lawyer. “I just want him to be happy,” he said.

  Zhuang did not expect his children to move back to China. “As long as they go back once a year,” he said, “for Tomb Sweeping Festival.” He didn’t want to ask anything of his children except that they tend to the graves of their ancestors.

  Zhuang took on all the pressure that Little Yan had handed him with energy that, until recently, he had reserved for his activism. Driving was respectable, and he could set his own hours. And his life in Flushing had grown branches. He met Yao Cheng for lunch, organized protests, and gave interviews. The more people he met, the more invitations he received to tell his story. He worked on improving his stutter and kept his speeches simple—he wasn’t an educated man, but he knew every detail of Wukan’s story. He had practiced telling it over and over, minimizing his own role, telling the story of the village as a whole.

  Zhuang had changed since his days as Patriot Number One. He wasn’t speaking to his fellow villagers anymore; he was speaking for them. He could drive a car all night if he had to—he was still Zhuang Liehong.

  To maintain all these different parts of his life, Zhuang kept a packed schedule. In his first weeks as a driver, he would frequently recount, over lunch, his latest day of driving. He had driven down to Long Island, up to Brooklyn, out to LaGuardia. He learned all the bridges and the highways, the rhythms of traffic and driving fares. On weekends he would drive all night, always offering his passengers gum. During the week, he did his best to drive every day, disrupting his schedule for protests and meetings with his activist friends, getting back behind the wheel afterward.

  Zhuang complained that he couldn’t make real money until he somehow managed to buy a more expensive vehicle, one that fulfilled all the qualifications for Uber’s black car service, but he had buckled down. As he became more familiar with the work, he stopped telling stories about his daily routes. The fares from Long Island were reduced. The work became more of a grind, and he accepted it. “The only people who take Uber are Americans,” he told Yao Cheng one day over lunch. “Chinese people all take Chinese car services.”

  “That’s fine,” said Yao Cheng. “Chinese people never tip. Americans are more generous.” Yao Cheng had developed a theory. Westerners in general were always saying whatever came into their head. They had no filter. They were too trusting. He called them danchun, a word that lands somewhere in between “unsophisticated” and “simple.”

  Zhuang gave some thought to Yao Cheng’s assessment. Chinese people, he said, were always thinking about status. They would think carefully about consequences before speaking their mind. They were suspicious of other people’s motives.

  Zhuang decided he would like his children to be more American—able to speak their mind whenever they wanted. “I don’t think this is innocence,” Zhuang said. “I think it’s freedom.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As Zhuang’s community in Flushing grew, Wukan was increasingly closed off to him. He could not call anyone in the village for fear that their phones were tapped. No one wanted to talk to him anyway. Old Lin received a jail sentence of three years, the same length that his father had received. Lin’s twenty-one-year-old grandson had been detained right after the old man, then released. The villagers suspected the charges levied against the younger man were invented in order to pressure Old Lin’s confession. Whatever the reason for the detention, Old Lin’s grandson confessed that he felt responsible. Zhuang followed him on social media, where Lin’s grandson posted updates on his two suicide attempts. The 2012 Wukan election, so triumphant and hopeful, had swept Old Lin up. No matter how hard the old man had tried to compromise—to do things legally, slowly, and systematically—he was in conflict with the officials above him. His term as village chief had destroyed his life and scattered his family.

  Zhuang, from the outside, felt helpless. “I’m worried that there is not much I can do,” he said of the grandson. “I can’t call him without causing trouble.” Even if he could get in contact with the boy, Zhuang couldn’t offer much hope. He could not give anyone in Wukan a way out. He could barely help his own mother and brother, who continued to get regular visits from security forces. His father was still serving out his three-year sentence. The road that he and Little Yan had taken to New York—the passport and the tourist visa—had been closed after them. Officials in Lufeng had started monitoring the villagers, making it difficult for them to get passports.

  In the September 2016 crackdown, Zhang Jianxing, the rakish young man in the peacoat, had been detained by a police unit that his older brother had recently joined. From rumors that Zhuang heard, Jianxing hadn’t been put in jail. He had been taken for show, for his own protection, and was living somewhere outside the village.

  One family from Wukan—people Zhuang had been acquainted with—managed to escape to Thailand and contacted Zhuang as soon as they could. They were hiding out from the Thai government, worried the local police would send them back to China. They wanted Zhuang to help them get a visa to the United States. It wouldn’t change the situation in Wukan, but the family’s predicament gave Zhuang an opportunity to do more than just protest on the street. He threw himself into trying to contact the U.S. embassy in Thailand. He recruited other activists in New York to help. “He’s so optimistic,” one young woman commented. “You meet other dissidents who are so depressed. They can’t take themselves out of all the bad things that have happened.” Zhuang, she said, managed to smile through everything.

  Zhuang’s status among the New York dissidents was another source of relief for Little Yan. He did not lean on her so heavily. The pair were still convinced that they were mismatched as a couple—they did not spend much time together, even now—but they were settling into roles that made them both comfortable. Zhuang left Little Yan to cook, clean, and take care of Kaizhi. He had found friends, and respect outside their tiny home.

  A year had passed since Little Yan first suggested that Zhuang drive for Uber, and his disdain had melted away. Finally he had embraced the idea as if it were his own. He did not always drive as many hours as she hoped he would, but his new work was secure enough that she could relax, at least temporarily. She was happy to be pregnant with a second child. She had enjoyed tending to Kaizhi when he was an infant. The break from
work meant that she was sleeping again. She had time to make her hair look nice before she left the house. She had, happily, rearranged her classes at LIBI so that she went three days a week, all during the day, while Kaizhi was in day care.

  There were still some things to worry about—the pregnancy had come faster than she had expected, and the baby might arrive before she had finished her courses at LIBI. Kaizhi had been born early, and she expected her second child would follow the same pattern. “It seems like a waste that I’ve gone all this way and still won’t finish,” she said. Eventually she might go back to class and find the office job she had envisioned, but for now Little Yan had carved out her corner of New York. It was isolated—she rarely saw people outside her classes at LIBI and hardly ever left Flushing—but it was comfortable.

  Little Yan’s life was not, she felt, particularly exceptional. She had gone from her village in Guangxi to Guangzhou on her own. She had married a dissident and fled to New York. She had jumped into unfamiliar vans, worked long hours at unforgiving jobs, and kept her family afloat. She insisted that she was a regular person who had come to the United States. And finally, after three years of work and uncertainty, her days were quiet but full. She felt at home.

  * * *

  • • •

  As Little Yan grew more comfortable in her basement apartment, and Zhuang continued rediscovering himself as an activist, Tang Yuanjun was still struggling with his life in the United States. His landlord had raised the rent in his office. It was too expensive for Tang to keep on his own, so he reached a compromise. One of his party members offered to help him split the space with a temporary wall to create an extra office. Tang would rent it out and squeeze the folding table into what was left. He had to find other places to store some of his posters and banners, but he kept the poster of Abe Lincoln just behind his little metal-framed desk, the quote “When I do good, I feel good” hanging above his head when he turned to greet people. The party member with the drywall helped create a common area that he could use for his Tuesday meetings. And then Tang put out an ad in the local papers for a reasonable-size office in a good location.

  A few months before he learned that his rent would be increased, his teeth had started causing him more pain than usual. “When I was growing up, we didn’t really brush our teeth,” he explained. And during China’s Cultural Revolution, Tang had joined the “sent-down youth”—millions of young people who had followed Mao’s injunction to travel to the countryside and learn from rural farmers—and suffered from malnourishment. His time in prison probably hadn’t helped, either. Whatever the cause of the holes in his smile, Tang felt self-conscious about them. He had a set of false teeth made but wasn’t comfortable with them. He was far from his family, experiencing pain that was rooted in his past life in China, and still struggling to keep his movement afloat. It was discouraging.

  A year earlier Tang had been quick to tell people that he thought it unlikely he would see China again in his lifetime. Now he modified his answer. “Change can happen fast,” he said. “That’s why the voice of dissidents living outside China should continue to be loud.” Sometimes he let himself think that things in China were improving. They were better, certainly, than during the 1970s. “During Mao’s time, you didn’t even have sham trials. People just had their throats cut.” Maybe, he thought, China would change just enough that he could go home. “Sometimes we can’t see the real situation,” he said hopefully. “If there’s a change in China, perhaps it’s not a complete change, but if the struggle has hope…” He trailed off, then sighed. “This is an individual question. I just don’t know what the next step should be.” He worried about his elderly parents and his parapalegic brother who had recently fallen ill again. Thoughts of his family in China kept him up at night.

  Tang had built a life in the United States. His daughter was here. He loved his wife. But he had spent all his time—over fifteen years—living in a Chinese neighborhood. He had not learned any English, despite some early aspirations. Nothing seemed to be getting any easier.

  Tang was considering the decades that he had left and wondering where his home was. His daughter, the lawyer, was happy in New York. “She’s not shedding any tears for China,” he said. But she was younger; she spoke English. Her boyfriend had recently arrived from China and had upset the comfort Tang had established at home, living with his daughter during the week when he was in Flushing. The boyfriend was more conservative, much like Tang’s ex-wife. When Tang’s daughter considered a career as a prosecutor or legal aid lawyer, her boyfriend discouraged it.

  “How is the world like this?” Tang wondered out loud, in his newly compact office. “I have always been focused on changing China. It’s a place where they use violence to suppress their own people. How has a country like this gotten so powerful?”

  All this was weighing on Tang’s mind the day a compact immigrant wandered into his office, inquiring about the office rental. He hoped to set up a practice in Chinese medicine. Tang poured the man tea and asked him how long he had been in New York. It didn’t take long before Tang was telling the man his own escape story, pausing at the same punch lines, recounting his face-down with the fisherman who had transported him toward Taiwan. “I said, ‘Stand back! I have a gun!’ ” Tang recounted, shoving his hand in his pocket to show how he had playacted.

  When the man admitted he didn’t know what happened in 1989 at Tiananmen Square, Tang groaned. “They don’t teach people the truth about our history,” he said.

  The pair shook hands on the deal, and Tang smiled. He invited the man to a China Democracy Party meeting. “There are lots of people coming in and out—they might be potential clients,” Tang told him. “And maybe you could learn something about China’s real history.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few weeks before she met Little Yan at the Central Park Zoo, Karen had come to the conclusion that she needed more space for her things, so she moved to a new apartment. It was two minutes from Tang’s office, not far from the Flushing Library, and she had one roommate rather than two. Her life in New York was still expanding. Her English was getting better. Her mother, in Henan, told her things would only get better from here. Karen was careful not to advertise her good fortune to Little Yan; she did not talk much about her job or mention her boyfriend, although Little Yan knew she had met someone. She asked, instead, about the classes at LIBI. Little Yan was one of the only students she knew who hadn’t dropped out.

  The classes were getting more difficult, Little Yan told her. One of the teachers had left and tried to start her own ESL program. “I am studying more now, and it’s still hard to understand,” Little Yan said. A few teachers, Karen knew, would meander through their lessons in English, leaving half the class behind at the first new vocabulary word they encountered. Zhuang had been adamant that Little Yan should complain, but she had quietly ignored him.

  Two weekends before Karen met Little Yan at the zoo, Jack had taken her to the Bronx Zoo, where she worried that the polar bears were suffering from the heat. The month before that, she had gone hiking with Jack and his school friends on a mountain in Upstate New York. “He takes me somewhere every month,” she said quietly, trying not to show off. She grinned despite herself. She pulled up a photo on her phone from April, when Jack had taken her to Washington, D.C., to see the cherry blossoms. “We’ve gone so many places!” she said.

  Jack was, as far as she could tell, a perfect companion in the United States. He spoke fluent English but was Chinese. He loved to travel, but his home was in Flushing. His job was comfortable. He was a model of success—at home in both worlds at once. And Karen was learning, she said, that people are people, no matter where they come from. Some were good, and some were bad. The better her English got, and the bolder she became, the easier it was for her to see a future in which she was at home in the world like her boyfriend. She still worked hard as a maid. Joining
the union had not eliminated her overtime hours, but her abusive supervisor had been fired, along with the person overseeing the supervisor. The union had come in, done interviews, and made it happen. Karen was busy, but she was happy.

  At the zoo, Little Yan chattered about the animals and her son. Karen didn’t have to worry about sparing her feelings—Little Yan was not envious. Now that she slept more and worried less, she had become talkative. She was more patient with her son. She laughed when he finally found a tiger to look at, but Kaizhi was disappointed. “It’s asleep!” he said. She smiled when he was too shy to answer any of Karen’s questions.

  The three of them completed the circuit through the zoo, then wandered over to the petting zoo. In one enclosure, a large black and white pig was standing just close enough to a showerhead spraying water that it was catching a mist. Karen said the pig looked comfortable. “Kaizhi, do you remember the pigs at your grandmother’s house?” Little Yan asked. Kaizhi shook his head and wandered over to the goats.

  “He doesn’t remember anything about my mother’s house,” Little Yan said. “He remembers his grandfather’s house still.” She wondered if he would eventually forget the months he had spent in Wukan as well. She smiled at the pig. “We used to give our pigs showers, too!” she told Karen, who had never kept pigs. “A happy pig gets fatter faster!” Little Yan laughed. “I don’t think we raised pigs like this one. Maybe once we had one that was black and white.” Every Lunar New Year, she said, they would slaughter one of their pigs. “For a week or two, the whole house would be covered in pork and grease!” The pigs at the zoo were lucky. They would stay fat and comfortable.

  Little Yan watched Kaizhi climb onto a web of rope set out for the children, a giant plastic spider hanging overhead. He was still shy, she said, but he was getting better.

  Karen thought it was cute. She and Jack had talked about having children, but she didn’t think it would happen soon. “I really worry about it,” she said.