The old man balked. “If the team members can live up to these requirements, they can work for the United Nations!”
Zhuang, Old Lin said, was overestimating village resources. These were fishermen, not highly trained police officers. And Zhuang’s cousin would not leave his position quietly. “Things need to be realized gradually—step by step,” Old Lin said. “Zhuang Liehong just wants everything to happen immediately.” He advised slow, careful consideration. Zhuang wanted action.
Zhuang attacked all his tasks with the same swashbuckling energy. He could not photograph the trash, so he made an enemy out of the bus companies that left a trail of litter along their path through the village. The buses picked up villagers by the side of the road and delivered them to Lufeng and other neighboring cities. One of the other council members proposed that they pay a fee for operating in Wukan. When the companies refused, Zhuang took the matter into his own hands. He led his security team out into the streets and began blocking buses. In retaliation, the bus services decided to skip Wukan, take an alternative route, and force villagers to walk a long way if they wanted a ride. Villagers were upset.
“There are a lot of trivial things that occupy a village committee,” explained Zhuang’s co–council member, a woman who had discovered a talent for the minutiae of bureaucracy. Zhuang had no patience for the slow, repetitive work. He was an unpredictable colleague. Everything with Zhuang, people complained, was a fight.
* * *
• • •
Little Yan arrived in Wukan in late December, not long after Zhuang had been released from detention. She had been glad when Zhuang called her before anyone else—before his parents, she liked to remind herself, who must have been worried. She presumed the rocky days of protest were behind her husband-to-be. She closed her shop in Foshan, left her sister in their shared apartment, and came to settle in Wukan.
The village took Little Yan by surprise. She had never spent much time there while she and Zhuang were dating. She had not realized what a peculiar place it was. Married women stayed home but could crack jokes that were just as dirty as any man’s. People weren’t polite, they were direct. Villagers were openly nosy and did not hesitate to offer their opinion. And they made Little Yan uncomfortable.
The money Zhuang was making as a village committee member was negligible—a spare few thousand yuan each month. So while he was crafting his plans and waging a small-time war with the bus companies, Little Yan looked for work. Her options were slim. Most of the villagers worked on fishing boats or ran their own small businesses—hair salons, tea shops, restaurants, and mahjong parlors. One morning she wandered down the main strip and into the pink complex of the Haiyun Holiday Hotel and found that they were hiring. She started work within days, welcoming rich businessmen from around Guangdong Province, people there to invest in the surrounding area or to take in the scenery. In their Mercedes and BMWs, they would cut past the village, drive down a lane of abandoned two-story buildings that were intended to house a shopping strip, and pull up in front of the hotel. The hotel, Zhuang said, was part of the problem. Little Yan worked there three months before he made her stop. He may have been a bad bureaucrat, but he had a handle on what constituted a conflict of interest. “People will use you to pressure me,” he told her. Plus, in Wukan, respectable men could support their wives at home, and Zhuang, finally, was a respectable man.
* * *
• • •
It was Old Lin who was tasked with managing the question of Wukan’s land. In his second-floor office, he stacked his desk with papers and stuck metal filing cabinets in the corners. He put out a tea set for visiting officials and folded himself up in his chair, trying to sort through a mountain of paper, adjusting his glasses and running his hands through his frizzy hair. Old Lin had envisioned a year or so of getting things in order, of setting up his filing system and paving the way for a village that followed China’s laws and functioned like a well-run factory.
But none of the documents he was given made any sense. Maps of the village were inconclusive, and Lufeng officials kept changing what was legal. “I’m old,” he told visitors to his office, his feet tucked under him so his knees practically hit his chin, his plastic slippers still on the floor. “Sometimes I think the earth will still rotate if I’m not around.” He was now sixty-eight. He considered stepping down only a few months in but worried how the village would fare without him.
There was no official map of Wukan. No one had taken the time to approve the boundaries of the village’s residential or farmland, because everyone had simply known what belonged to who. And then there was the land that had been illegally taken. The map of Wukan that was initially drawn up by the township officials was of a village with a total of about 9,000 mu of land, or some 1,483 acres, a fraction of the size Old Lin knew the village to be. When he protested, they revised the map and Wukan clocked in at 21,000 mu, or 3,459 acres. Still, the land on the negotiating table was much smaller than the land Wukan had started out with in the 1990s.
In addition to land, Wukan’s money had disappeared. If Xue Chang, the old council leader, had amassed any fortunes by way of the Wukan Port Industrial Development Company, it was long gone and inaccessible. Officials from Lufeng City—the men complicit in years of corruption—were in charge of the council’s budget. If Old Lin needed a few thousand yuan to pay the salaries of the town’s trash collectors, he had to put it into a budget and submit it. Even his own salary came from above. And the villagers were impatient for results. They, like Old Lin, had expected to wait a matter of months before they started to see their land returned to them. Old Lin felt he was getting squeezed from both sides. “There is a conflict,” he said, “between being reasonable and being legal.”
Zhuang first tried to quit the village committee during the summer—only months after his election—when he felt unfairly blamed for the bus incident. He finally did quit in October, following the first meeting of the village representative assembly—a group of about a hundred villagers also elected earlier in the year, intended to give the entire village a say in Wukan’s most pressing matters. The representatives were technically required to vote on any decision involving village land, and the discussion at the meeting focused on two strips of land straddling the road. Villagers asked the council to distribute the land to the villagers and let them use it as they wanted. Yang Semao, who was heading the meeting, admitted the option was not on the table. He spent a few hours getting yelled at. “They were like a pack of wild horses—I couldn’t control them,” he reported back afterward. “They started yelling at me the moment the meeting opened.” This kind of thing, he supposed, is going to happen in a democracy. The villagers had been suppressed for so long; now they wanted to speak up about everything.
Zhuang didn’t see things in such a positive light. He saw the Lufeng government clamping down—the slow creep of corruption and authoritarianism returning. When Zhuang suggested releasing regular reports to the villagers on land, he was rejected. He decided to release a letter announcing his resignation. “The village committee is not the right platform for me,” he wrote. “I still believe that I am a child of Wukan, and I still stand with the masses to work together toward Wukan’s new paradise.” Privately, he thought that the village committee was like a house balanced on weakening stilts—one well-placed blow could send the whole thing tumbling down.
* * *
• • •
By the time the village erupted in protests, Wukan was no longer stuck in abject poverty. Enough money was coming in from family members working in the cities that no one went hungry and no one lived on the street. Villagers who came back with money built new houses so fast, they no longer fit along paved roads. (Yang Semao’s house was reachable only by wending through a maze of new construction off a gravel road, an empty lot occupied by a legion of bullfrogs, and an alleyway.) Some villagers, however, were being priced out. They live
d in run-down houses forced to accommodate several generations. Newly married couples could not move into homes of their own—they had to rent or squeeze in with someone’s parents. The remaining village land was, according to law, communally owned, but with the success of the protests, the villagers wanted that land for their own private use—measured and meted out to individuals. The party officials in Lufeng, Old Lin found, would never agree to it.
The items on the negotiating table were more limited than he could have imagined. Over the first year of negotiations, the Lufeng government offered two mediocre parcels of land. One was an undeveloped spit that protected Wukan Bay. The other was being rented by a wealthy villager and run as a pig farm. This was scheduled to be returned to the villagers in April 2013, and the day of the farm’s handover was expected to be triumphant. The villagers had yet to determine what they would do with the land, but it was the only thing Old Lin had to show for his year of leadership.
On the day of the handover, the villagers set out to the pig farm in a happy parade of scooters to see what they were getting back. When the gates were opened, they rushed in to find a rutted road, smashed windows, uprooted trees, and rubble everywhere. The family leasing the land had destroyed everything as they left—ripping up roads, demolishing buildings, and crushing plants with heavy machinery. No one had realized what was happening because the gates had still been locked. Now a group of angry villagers decided to block a road in protest. (“It worked once,” explained Zhuang. “And it’s the only thing they know how to do.”) There was a standoff, protesters were carted off by police, and a crowd at the village committee building hounded Old Lin until his hoarse, wavering voice nearly gave out. He shouted at the crowd that, once and for all, he was quitting. No one could convince him otherwise. His threats, however, were hollow. Quitting wasn’t an option.
It was after the incident at the pig farm that Zhuang started considering his escape routes. The village could not block roads again. Every day from his vantage point in the tea shop, he watched the village and observed paranoia building among his friends. People were sure their phones were being monitored. Hong Ruichao hadn’t felt comfortable traveling outside Wukan since Xue Jinbo’s death. Zhuang worried about Little Yan and their newborn son. His moment of heroism had passed; he had run out of plans to help his village. So he started planning something else entirely.
14
The Moon Represents My Heart
月亮代表我的心 / Yuèliang Dàibiăo Wŏ de Xīn
SPRING–SUMMER 2016
According to Tang Yuanjun, most immigrants, Chinese and otherwise, come to the end of their lives telling two stories: one set in their country of origin, and one set in the United States. Nearly always one story dominates. Tang’s story, of the first kind, is recounted in vivid detail. The story is so familiar, so well-worn with retelling, that it takes over his body as his tells it. He executes well-timed hand gestures and dramatic pauses, the most painful parts—of abusive prison guards, hunger strikes, and detentions—delivered with a pleasant expression on his face, sometimes even a smile, as if he is trying to reassure his audience that he is okay, that he survived it.
When Tang arrives at the moment when he walks out into the sunlight at JFK airport, however, and first sets foot in the United States, his stories grow fragmented and diffuse. He is less willing to volunteer details. The people in his office are less interested. Years pass in single sentences, wiped away with brief references to jobs and apartments. “I edited an online magazine,” he told me when we first met, waving his hand over his early years in the United States. (The “online magazine” that Tang mentioned was actually Minzhu Luntan, or Democracy Forum, an influential publication among China’s democracy activsts.) “Then I worked in a restaurant. Then I delivered food on a bicycle. In the United States, you have to work. You have to be realistic.”
If engaging with life in Flushing was difficult for the majority of Chinese immigrants, the pro-democracy activists who made up Tang’s supporters and friends struggled more than most. The min yun, a shorthand term used frequently in Flushing for China’s pro-democracy activists (from the words minzhu, meaning “democracy,” and yundong, meaning “campaign”), taken as a whole, were a stubborn group of people: Tiananmen Square activists, China Democracy Party members, human rights defenders, and grassroots organizers. They might have had comfortable lives had they ignored government corruption or stopped agitating for democracy. The simple fact of being in the United States did not often shake their resolve; their interests and obsessions were firmly planted in China. Their bodies were in New York, but their thoughts were elsewhere.
* * *
• • •
For the min yun in Flushing, the unreality of living in the United States meant that they celebrated life milestones—a birth, a marriage, the arrival of a relative—with relish. These moments pulled Tang and his friends back, grounding them in Flushing with the consolation that, exiles though they might be, they were not alone. Tang Yuanjun might have subsisted forever on this arrangement—no one was more determined to keep protesting; to keep his inner life grounded in China. But then two things happened to plant his feet more firmly on American ground. His daughter arrived in New York on a student visa. And Tang fell in love.
Tang’s daughter came to New York City in the late 2000s, despite the objections of her mother, his ex-wife. Tang’s wife had divorced him while he was in prison—she had lost her job because of his political activities, and she didn’t want to lose the life she had carved out for herself and her daughter during the years he was away. And she didn’t want her daughter to follow in his footsteps and find herself barred from ever returning home. Eventually, however, Tang’s daughter convinced her that the education she would get in the United States would be worth the risk. It was an opportunity to reconnect with her father. Even after she graduated from university and then law school, Tang’s daughter would continue sharing an apartment with her father.
By the time his daughter arrived in the United States, Tang had already met his second wife, an American woman named Jen, while wrapping cabbage and pork dumplings at a dinner party. She had brown hair and an easy, slow-moving smile that put Tang at ease. He had been invited to the party by a mutual acquaintance, another exiled democracy activist, and their host had introduced Tang in a single sentence. “He’s a northeasterner,” she told Jen, pinpointing Tang’s origins in China. “He’s a dongbei ren.”
Jen spoke Mandarin fluently. She had been fascinated with China for nearly two decades. She wasn’t the type of person who needed shared friends or events to make conversation; she had a talent for finding common ground. At the dinner party where they met, Tang set to work making enormous, northeastern-style dumplings. Jen could have eaten three of them and called it a meal. She watched Tang from across the table, serious and quiet, and wondered what was on his mind. By the end of the meal, he was telling his stories, and Jen was listening, rapt.
That night Tang invited her out to dinner. It was not an official date—Jen thought he wanted her to teach him English—but Tang was hard not to like, ferrying her through Flushing in an ancient Subaru station wagon. He had worked in an automotive factory in China—Tang could build car parts—but had never learned to drive one until he took classes in the United States. He had found that he loved driving and drove Jen around like a teenager, fast and ebullient. He liked the freedom of driving, he told her, the ability it gave him to explore, to look at the scenery in his own, self-contained traveling space. A friend of his, knowing his enthusiasm, had given him the old car as a gift. The windows stuck, and everything rattled.
Not long after Jen and Tang met, he agreed to drive a group from New York to Princeton, New Jersey, with Jen in the front passenger seat. She noticed, while on the New Jersey Turnpike, that the hood of the car had come loose and was threatening to fly up, hit the windshield, and, she guessed, kill them all. Tang stopped the
car and secured everything with a piece of rope.
Later, on a trip to visit a cousin in Tennessee, Tang was driving too fast on a highway in Virginia, singing old Chinese pop songs at the top of his lungs. The wheels began to rattle, the car swerved, and Tang spun out of control. When the police arrived at the scene, he had them call Jen to translate. That was the end of the Subaru station wagon. Jen boarded a Chinatown bus to Tennessee to see Tang and make certain he was okay. She sat too far in the back of the bus, near the bathroom, and spent hours fighting nausea and anxiety, worrying about Tang. She was in love.
She helped pull his story in the United States into focus. He would never say that she opened the country up for him completely—he was too old and too set in his ways for that—but being with her was like looking at the country through a clear window. He saw what it had to offer.
They married in 2012 but stayed in different cities. Jen had a job in Washington, D.C., that she was committed to, and Tang did not want to leave his life in Flushing. The arrangement was comfortable—they could see each other every weekend, in lives suspended somewhere between China and the United States—and during the weekdays be wholly committed to their jobs. She respected his long hours at the China Democracy Party office. He was humble about his work—he was not looking for accolades and did not kid himself about heroism. She marveled that he did not seem jaded or angry about his experiences in China. No traumas of his past popped up in his behavior; he just wanted to continue his work. He said it was because he had been through so much in prison, it was hard to get angry over trivial things. But she knew of other min yun. Not everyone came out the other side with their equilibrium intact.
On the weekends, the couple resumed their life together. Jen took Tang to museum exhibits, and they visited Mount Vernon. They sat at home together while she tried to explain the jokes in New Yorker cartoons. Tang gamely went along to plays and performances—both of them still remember a particular production of Romeo and Juliet because Tang made it through the whole thing without falling asleep. He met her parents in New Jersey and did his best to make up for the conversations they couldn’t have by cooking meals. He still felt the pull of China; politics aside, he worried about his parents and disabled brother, who were growing older and who had long suffered for their association with him. But the tug was not constant. Tang may not have accepted the United States as his home, but it was the next best option. He had built a family and a community around himself. In the gaps between protests and political debates, they were all finding ways to live in the United States.
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