Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen took the subway and showed up early. She sat across the street from the building and looked at the newly constructed facade. The hotel was in Midtown, not far from the East River, between a parking garage and a three-story stone house that looked like it was doing its best to hold back the tide of high-rises pressing around it. The exposed section of the hotel’s exterior glinted in the sun, as if the whole thing had been encased in stainless steel; other parts of the building were still covered in green scaffolding. A sign instructed pedestrians to PLEASE USE THE WALKWAY. Karen decided she liked it.

  She walked into the lobby and gave her name. A tall, fat American man led her into a side office, and she sat down in a hallway next to her classmates. One of the women next to her spoke perfect English. Karen felt sure she would find a job as a receptionist. Her favorite companion, however, was a second-generation immigrant who had given up a job as an accountant. It was too stressful, he said, and the expectations of his parents were too crushing, so he was going to school to be a houseman. The pay was decent, and the work was concrete and physical. You didn’t take it home with you. He just wanted to work and live.

  Karen watched her classmates enter and exit a door. Then a small, skinny man came out and called her name. He led her into the spare, undecorated room and indicated for her to sit at a small desk, then took a seat next to another, larger man across from her. The room was not what Karen had expected. Like everything in New York, it was gritty and transitional, not staid and formal as she had imagined.

  The small, skinny man cleared his throat and started the interview. “So,” he said, adjusting his position in his chair, “tell me about yourself.”

  Karen launched into her best paragraph. “I am a positive person!” she said. She recited her sentences, her interest in tennis, and her hope to someday become a manager. She did not smile or pause for breath. “I know that this job is physically demanding,” she said. She attacked the multisyllabic words with determination. “I am excited about this opportunity.” After she finished reciting her lines, she looked up across the desk at the skinny man, his expression one of mild surprise. Karen smiled, then nodded just a bit. She had finished.

  “Well, okay!” said the man. “Let me tell you about the hotel.” She nodded again, barely hearing what he said. The hotel maids would use carts to move from room to room, he explained. They carried phones with intercoms, in case anything dangerous happened.

  She asked her prepared questions, then ran out of them, and the interview ended. She had talked too quickly. The whole thing had taken all of five minutes. The large man told Karen she would hear about the job by Friday, and the small, skinny man gave her his card.

  She wandered back out through the lobby and texted the classmates who had gone in before her. The former accountant had been in for the same five minutes and answered the same question. Everyone was shocked by the brevity.

  Karen stopped at a Starbucks to meet her classmates, giddy with worry. They took photographs to commemorate the day, all in their best professional clothes. And then she walked to the subway and took the train back to Flushing—a forty-five-minute trip—for her LIBI class. Before it started, she sat down at the Paris Baguette across the street, eating nothing and turning the man’s card over in her hands. A group of teenagers, dressed nicely in brand-name clothing and Nike shoes, were leaning over a tray of pastries. “Maybe I should e-mail him?” she asked no one, rhetorically. Her instructors had mentioned that at some point after the interview, she could send an e-mail. She tapped out a message on her iPhone: she was eager, she said, to “join your team.” She smiled as she sent it off. It was a good e-mail. Not everyone would think to e-mail. And then she leaned back into her chair at the Paris Baguette, took a deep breath, and pushed her old glasses up her nose. “If I don’t get this job, it will be okay,” she said, and grinned. “I am a very positive person!”

  * * *

  • • •

  Karen had made her first trip to the Korean Presbyterian Church of Queens on a Sunday in late summer, near the end of her hospitality class. She had developed a two-pronged approach to improving her situation in Flushing. The classes were for her career. The church was for the rest of her life.

  The Korean Presbyterian Church of Queens had real pews rather than plastic chairs, with little wooden tables attached to the back of each row that could be flipped down and used to support a Bible. Its services opened with a group of well-dressed girls singing into microphones, a portly younger man behind them strumming on a guitar. They sang songs about God’s love with their eyes closed, one hand on their chest, the other uplifted.

  Toward the end of her first service, the pastor asked all the new attendees to rise when he called out their names. The chapel launched into an enthusiastic welcome song, and afterward they gathered Karen and the rest of them in an adjacent room to offer party favors and to take their pictures. As a newcomer, she received a set of food vouchers for the lunch served downstairs. Everyone encouraged her to join.

  The moment she walked out of the little room across from the chapel, Karen’s friend grabbed her. She had joined the congregation months before, and then the church choir, along with her fiancé. She was planning a wedding in the chapel. She led Karen down to the church basement, into a mint-green, windowless room, where a crowd had gathered for a brief Bible study and then lunch.

  The friend introduced Karen to a young man sporting a ponytail, who showed Karen around. He was solicitous and kind. “He’s not the one I want you to meet,” Karen’s friend whispered. “He has a girlfriend already, I think.” Karen’s friend had someone else in mind for her.

  Some people at the church weren’t interested in meeting Karen—they just wanted to listen to the sermons and go home. Others came only for the money and their asylum cases. But some were friendly and eager, and many of them were single men just the right age. In the mint-green basement, with her food vouchers in hand, Karen felt hopeful.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Friday after Karen’s interview at the hotel, she got a phone call telling her they were making her an offer. She would be paid eighteen dollars an hour to clean rooms—a salary beyond Karen’s wildest dreams. The offer e-mail came the next Monday, and Karen was so happy it gave her a stomachache. When she told her old roommate, she lied about how much money she would be making, cutting it down to fourteen. “Oh, well then,” said the roommate. “That’s a very good salary, but I don’t see what the big deal is all about.”

  There was a catch to the job, however. Karen would have to wait a month before the hotel opened. She would have to extend her period of unemployment. She could do it if she was careful, she thought. She would keep working weekends at the nail salon and look for any other temporary work. She decided to redouble her effort in her classes at LIBI. She would teach herself to use Adobe Premiere, a video editing program. She would play tennis. When her classes ended in early September, she kept herself busy in the cheapest ways possible.

  After a week or two, however, Karen found herself sitting on her bed, watching movies, feeling depressed. She took a weekend off at the nail salon and went to church. She tried to go to whatever functions she could, but her evening classes frequently interfered. One night she went to a music concert, where a man named Jack was playing guitar. He was the one her friend had had in mind for her. A stocky, boisterous young man, he worked as an accountant but would have liked to be a musician. Karen’s friend, however, was not there to introduce the two, and Jack barely said two words to her. He was busy and surrounded by friends.

  By the end of the month, Karen was going stir-crazy. And then the hotel e-mailed to tell her that her start date had been delayed. The next week it was delayed again. Finally, Karen got an e-mail assuring her that she would be starting her job on October 31. She would have to stretch her savings as far as
they would go. By the time she at last started training—cleaning empty rooms, tucking in bedsheets, and folding towels just right—she was completely broke.

  18

  Wukan! Wukan! Rule of Law

  法治 / Făzhì

  MARCH 2014

  After Zhuang retired from the village committee, it had taken him more than a year to perfect his escape plan and go to New York. During that time, things in the village deteriorated. Old Lin, Zhuang complained, was too weak. The old man had been slow to stand up to the corrupt officials in Lufeng City. In 2012, when the council started negotiations for the return of the pig farm land, Old Lin had accepted the two small parcels as a gesture of goodwill, then stopped informing the villagers on how talks with Lufeng were proceeding. He had brought the pig farm protest on himself.

  In the spring of 2013, shortly after the city security forces broke up the blockade at the pig farm, I was drinking tea with Zhuang unaware that a corruption scandal had erupted behind the scenes. “There are things I cannot talk about,” Old Lin had told me, a few weeks after accepting the written confessions of two council members, Yang Semao and Hong Ruichao.

  The scandal that ensnared Yang Semao and Hong could be traced back to the rubble-filled doorstep of Zhang Jianxing, the young member of the Hot Blooded Youth who had helped Zhuang early on. Jianxing had become, through the years of protest, interviews, and online activism, a media darling. He had gotten over his acne and had adopted a rakish, brooding persona, wearing a black peacoat for interviews and carefully managing his hair, long on the top and shaved on the sides. He perfected the art of stylish cigarette lighting

  After the protests, Jianxing began running a photography and camera equipment shop across from the village vegetable market. A wealthy villager had approached him and offered to help bankroll the project. Jianxing didn’t know him well, but he accepted the funds. The man seemed genuinely interested in the business. A few months later the wealthy villager asked for an introduction to Hong Ruichao.

  A few months after that, about a year after the 2012 election, a water project came up for bidding, and the wealthy villager asked Hong Ruichao to deliver bribes to the council. “The plan is to start with Hong Ruichao,” the wealthy man told an associate on a 2013 phone call that was, mysteriously, recorded and then leaked to villagers a year later, in 2014. “He’s the window into the other council members.”

  When Zhuang heard about the scandal, he thought the scheme was obvious—the wealthy villager was creating a scandal for the benefit of the corrupt officials in Lufeng. If Hong and the other council members accepted the bribes, Lufeng could use the scandal to discredit the people involved. They could threaten criminal charges if any council member decided to oppose them.

  As bribery schemes go, the one that took down Hong Ruichao and Yang Semao was haphazard and poorly executed. Hong took the wads of cash he had been given to a handful of council members and discussed what to do. Old Lin turned down the offer on the spot, but Hong and Yang took the money into their possession and conferred, then both decided to return it. Whether the Lufeng government had orchestrated it or not, the officials overseeing Wukan soon found out about the exchange of cash and used it to their advantage.

  Lufeng gave everyone in Wukan’s village council who was involved in the bribery scheme the opportunity to submit a written confession. “In order to model the behavior that village chief Lin advocates—I made an appointment…in March and gave back the 30,000 yuan,” Hong Ruichao wrote in his. He had offered Yang and Old Lin each ten thousand. “The other reason I did this was because I couldn’t help Zhu Dakui [the wealthy villager] with what he was asking me to do.” It was early summer 2013, and all three of the men admitted what they had done and wrote down confessions, and everyone kept the affair quiet. It stayed that way until a few weeks after Zhuang had landed in New York, when Yang Semao was led out of the village committee office in handcuffs.

  * * *

  • • •

  The crackdown that Zhuang foresaw after the pig farm protest was slow to arrive. Right before he fled, after nearly nine months of planning, the people he shared his plans with scoffed at his paranoia. He was abandoning the village, they scolded, and taking the cowardly way out. Things in the village would not get so bad as he predicted, they said. Yang Semao and Hong Ruichao plowed ahead with a plan to hold another meeting of the larger village representative assembly. They wanted to discuss the next election, set for some time in March, and to hold the Lufeng officials to account for blocking the return of stolen village land. “Land is the farmer’s life, and elections are the farmer’s soul,” Yang told me.

  It was the threat of making the officials accountable, Zhuang thinks, that got the pair detained. Yang had known Lufeng was holding the corruption scandal over his head, but after nearly a year, he had been hopeful that it had passed. He was still the same elfin, energetic man who insisted on jogging every morning along Wukan’s dusty roads.

  They came for Yang Semao during the workday. They entered his first-floor office, where the door was nearly always open to allow in the breeze, placed him in handcuffs, and led him away. “I thought that was a little theatrical,” Yang said, later. “Leading me out of there in front of everyone—they could have just asked me to go to Lufeng myself.”

  They released Yang, temporarily, after twenty-four hours. Then a summons arrived for Hong Ruichao. Hong, still young and bold at twenty-nine, turned himself in. His family waited for him to come out. His wife tended to his infant son in his father’s little concrete house. His sister spent impatient days at the village salon that she had opened. But Hong never came out.

  * * *

  • • •

  In March 2014, soon after Zhuang’s arrival in New York, I made my way back to Wukan Village without him. It was a week after the detention of Yang and Hong. The second election they had anticipated had been scheduled for early March. Whoever was elected to the village committee would serve an extended term—a full five years. But with Yang preoccupied and Hong gone, I went instead to Jianxing’s photography shop.

  The day I arrived, I had heard rumors that foreigners were being detained and kicked out of the village, so I waited until it was dark and made my way into the village. Jianxing’s shop had a row of floor-to-ceiling windows facing out toward the vegetable market. He had pulled the tan shades down, the lights of a television flashing out around the corners. When I knocked, he peered around a shade and then ushered me inside and into a back room, shaken enough that he had forgotten to be stylish. There were rumors that more arrests would be made. Jianxing had not been directly involved, but he had been privy to the details of the corruption scandal and witnessed Hong’s deliberations over the thirty thousand yuan. Hong’s disappearance had made him jittery. Every time someone walked into the shop, Jianxing paused to listen before opening the door. “Stay back here,” he said. “Someone is looking for me.”

  He left me in the room to contemplate the jumble of electronics equipment, the bookcases, the fake machine gun, and the decals he had pasted on the wall—a treble clef and two inspirational quotes about having a simple lifestyle. “We have a simple lifestyle and only one passion,” said one. “Simple lifestyle changes are all that you need to feel better,” said the other.

  When Jianxing came back in, he told me he had made a mistake when he decided not to run in the first election. “I think I was a very important factor,” he said, leaning forward on a little bed, his elbows on his knees and his combat boots planted firmly on the floor. “I think, had I been on the village committee, we would not have ended up with this terrible result.”

  The night before Wukan’s second election, it poured rain. The village turned the dark gray color of wet concrete. Pools formed in empty lots, rivers coursed down alleyways, and the rolling croak of bullfrogs grew so loud that they competed with the thunder.

  Old Lin, after two years of pointing out his ad
vanced age and fantasizing about retirement, was at home, preparing to run again for village chief. “There are some things that I have left unfinished!” he told a group of journalists who had stumbled in out of the rain.

  His house was a new tile construction sitting in a freshly paved alleyway that ran toward the local school where elections were being held. To gain entrance to his home, visitors were required to stand outside two gigantic metal doors and look up into a security camera aimed at the stoop. There was no doorbell, and the rain made it impossible to hear anyone knocking. Old Lin’s wife was in charge of opening the doors, scurrying through a small uncovered courtyard that was being pelted with rain. She ferried people back inside to where Old Lin was sitting.

  Erect in his chair, wearing a soft brown leather jacket, he emphasized his thoughts with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. He leaned forward, opening his eyes wide, when he felt his point was particularly important. While he talked, his wife poured tea. “I haven’t even eaten dinner yet!” he announced, smiling wildly. “Make us some food!!” His wife looked shocked, and everyone declined politely.

  “The law doesn’t always work quickly,” Lin said regarding the yearlong lead-up to Hong Ruichao’s arrest. “Isn’t that true? But we have to obey the law, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense. Isn’t that true?” He had been tempted by bribes, he said, but had withstood it. Money had entered into Hong Ruichao’s hands illegally, so Hong Ruichao had broken a law. “It doesn’t matter if they gave it back or not, the money was in their hands. It’s illegal, and we must let the law decide.”

  The old village committee had never been jailed for stealing Wukan’s land. Officials in Lufeng, the same officials who had jailed Hong, had never been censured for their role in the land sales. But Old Lin was content to make his argument absent of that part of the story. He was adhering to the party line.