Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  For the most part, Flushing’s democracy activists decided to oppose Trump. They made jokes about him and in general took the new president in stride. He might still be helpful to their core purpose. They were encouraged when Trump took a phone call with Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen—the first call between a sitting president in Taiwan and an American president or president-elect since 1979. Trump, some thought, would stand up to China. He wouldn’t be bullied.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Zhuang told everyone. “In the United States, there are checks and balances.”

  Tang Yuanjun tended to agree. Nothing the United States could throw at him would be as bad as what he had experienced in China. People in the United States could protest if they disagreed. Someone leaning back in his chair on the far end of the folding table cracked a sunflower seed, then pointed out that Trump was a businessman. “He has millions of dollars,” the man said. “He’s not dumb.”

  Sun, while not a supporter, was fascinated by the new president. He liked Trump’s brash, outlandish style. “With Trump, you know he is not very refined or educated,” he observed unprompted. “Xi Jinping is worse because he pretends to be very educated but really isn’t.” At least with Trump, you knew. And Sun admired the man’s wealth.

  “Most people don’t drive into Manhattan, right?” Sun asked Zhuang one day, walking from Zhuang’s parked car toward Tang’s office.

  “That’s right,” Zhuang said. “Not if you want to park and stay there. It’s easier to take the subway than to find a parking space.”

  “I bet Trump drives in Manhattan,” Sun mused. “I bet he has all the parking spaces he needs, since he owns that whole building.”

  “Well,” Zhuang answered, “he’s president. I don’t think they let him take the subway.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In January, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Sun, Zhuang, and Yao Cheng gathered around one of the circular tables at the East Buffet. Kaizhi was crouched in a chair beside them, gazing intently at the most recent train video. Yao Cheng was looking down at his phone over the rims of his glasses. Sun had, for once, agreed to drink some tea.

  The latest events in Wukan, all three agreed, were grim. A handful of new arrests had been made. Zhuang’s mother had been forced to sign documents that she could not read. “Wukan is like a big prison,” Zhuang wrote in his latest piece for a website called China Change. On the positive side, they said, the local government seemed to be feeling pressured by all the interviews and social media. “They wouldn’t be harassing people in the village if they didn’t feel nervous,” Yao Cheng said. The trio had plans to meet, the next day, with the Dalai Lama’s representative in D.C. “He’s very powerful,” Yao Cheng, who had arranged the meetup, assured everyone. “He can get us a meeting with the U.S. Congress. He can even talk to the president.”

  Today the three men had come together to help Zhuang author a petition calling for the release of arrested Wukan villagers. They had posted it, hopefully, on WeChat and amassed four hundred signatures in a week or so. It wasn’t many, Zhuang said. The government kept taking their posts off WeChat. “I put it up one night, then woke up and it had been deleted,” said Sun, pushing up his glasses. “Zhuang put it up, and it was gone by the next morning. As long as we don’t post anything about Wukan, it’s no problem. But as soon as something goes up with Wukan in it, they erase it.”

  “We probably have a dedicated WeChat censor,” said Sun.

  Zhuang laughed. “More like a team! The Wukan censorship team!”

  Sun focused on the shrimp roll in front of him and sipped tea. Then he brought up an idea. “Almost everyone in the United States…goes to see a psychiatrist, right?” He looked around the table for a friendly indication. “I can’t sleep. I wake up and start thinking. I think about work. I think about Wukan. I think about money. And I can’t go back to sleep. What do you think a psychiatrist does?”

  Zhuang answered quickly and kindly. “It’s not a big deal in the United States!” he said. “In China they think something’s wrong with you. But here people go if they’re feeling bad.”

  “Do you think it would help me?” Sun asked.

  “It might,” said Zhuang.

  “What?” Yao Cheng piped in, peering at the younger man over his glasses. “If you feel pressure, you’re making yourself feel pressure!” Yao Cheng didn’t feel pressure, he huffed at Sun. “I don’t have a job right now, I don’t have money, but I have enough to eat.”

  Sun smiled at the older man. Yao Cheng didn’t have a family to take care of. Sun slipped a piece of pork into his mouth. “You already have asylum,” he said to Yao Cheng. “Everything is so expensive.”

  Zhuang explained that his asylum had taken nearly a year.

  “It’s not expensive!” Yao Cheng shot back. “You don’t have to have a lawyer! We have a group that supports people applying for asylum, and everyone has gotten through!” Chai Ling, he said, had helped a number of people.

  Sun grimaced. He did not have the luxury of a connection with Chai Ling.

  Just then Little Yan arrived at the restaurant. She slipped up behind her son and ran a finger across his cheek. She had started a new job, working at an adult day care center. It was not as exhausting as her previous job, and the days started early so she could leave around one or two in the afternoon. That allowed her to come and take care of Kaizhi before her classes.

  “Oh, hello!” said Sun. “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes, you should eat!” Zhuang pushed food toward her. He was planning on paying for lunch.

  Little Yan told everyone she had eaten at work and was there to pick up Kaizhi and take him home.

  Kaizhi was set to start going to day care the next week. He had been opposed to the idea until they went to see the place, a school not far from their apartment. He saw children playing in the yard of a small house, speaking Mandarin, and disappeared into the melee. He didn’t want to leave. Kaizhi, Little Yan felt, was ready to be with other children. He was getting bored being cooped up all day and asked to be quiet while Zhuang and his friends debated the best way to pressure the Lufeng government. She would take him outside to play when she could, but she was not a three-year-old. All she could do was take videos of him, help him build a snowman, and admonish him to not throw snow at passing cars.

  Kaizhi was getting more confident by the day. When he first arrived in New York, he had barely been able to speak, but now he sounded like a small adult. “If I tell you I’m full, it means I’m full!” he told his father at lunch. As everyone left, Kaizhi stopped at the restaurant doors, ready to let everyone else go ahead of him. “Go ahead, go ahead,” he said. “You are walking slowly, and I am going to wait and run really fast.” He waited, then put his arms back and his head forward, charging down the crowded sidewalk. Little Yan trotted after him unsteadily on her platform heels—the nice ones that she was wearing to work at her new job.

  “Can you get off work at one tomorrow?” Zhuang asked her.

  “No,” she said. “The insurance company is coming to do an inspection. The boss wants everyone there all day.”

  She hoped Zhuang would start working in earnest once he didn’t have to deal with Kaizhi all day. “Who knows?” she said to me. “He’s so busy with other things right now.” The two bargained and decided that Zhuang could drop Kaizhi off at Little Yan’s work before heading out to meet the Tibetan dignitary.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang had more to juggle now than ever before, but he threw himself into it all. He gave interviews and wrote articles for Mandarin-language websites run by democracy advocates. Zhuang and Yao Cheng traveled to Washington to talk to researchers at the Congressional Executive Committee on China. They protested in front of the White House, Kaizhi rolling a yellow plastic dump truck around the sidewalk in front of them. They wrote
open letters to China’s government and to the media.

  In December, Zhuang’s father, along with nine other villagers, was convicted of crimes that included, according to the Haifeng People’s Court website, “unlawful assembly,” “disseminating false information,” and “disturbing public transport.” Zhuang Songkun was sentenced to three years in prison, and his son filmed his own reaction. “I think it is obvious that the government is trying to suppress any dissent,” he said. After all, his father had been sentenced to more jail time than Yang Semao, who had been convicted of corruption. Zhuang intended to have family members file an appeal, but Zhuang Songkun was moved to a different prison without notice. The appeal was never accepted.

  In conversations with Yao Cheng and Sun, the trio kept returning to what was legal and what was not. It was clearly illegal for the Chinese government to prevent Zhuang Songkun from meeting with his lawyer. It was illegal to coerce people into signing documents they couldn’t read. Recently people Zhuang had contacted in the village had been called in for a chat with the local security bureau. One person, Zhuang had heard, had been hit in the head and the stomach with the butt of a machine gun when the police came to detain him. “That’s illegal,” Yao Cheng pointed out. It was all illegal. Talking about the right and wrong of it, however, didn’t matter much. Conversations, if Zhuang wasn’t careful, could turn into long recitations of abuses of government power. Yao Cheng could spend half an hour just listing the beatings he had suffered in prison. When that happened, one of them would rein the conversation back in. Zhuang would nod, looking more and more like Tang Yuanjun. It was no use dwelling on the heartbreak.

  Sun, for his part, had come up with the latest protest slogan: “Go to Wukan!” It would encourage activists to visit the village and publicize the ongoing police crackdown. In Tang’s office, he explained his thinking. “It is simple,” he said. “People will remember it.” A political slogan had to be catchy.

  “You can learn something from Trump,” Sun said. Say what you would about the president-elect, but he knew how to write a slogan. Sun pumped his fist into the air and shouted his rhetorical inspiration in Zhuang’s direction, in English: “Make America Great Again!!”

  Zhuang looked up from his phone. “Make America what again?”

  * * *

  • • •

  In late January, with the inauguration past and Chinese New Year approaching, Zhuang started driving for Uber. It was their first New Year in the United States with Kaizhi, and the first one since Zhuang had returned to activism. Every year since Zhuang and Little Yan came to the United States, the pair had celebrated with a new group of people. They had spent their very first Spring Festival in the United States with their tour group. Their second, they had eaten alone. For their third, in the Tudor-style house, Little Yan had set up a hotpot in the middle of their bedroom. A small group of graduate students from China—who had contacted Zhuang out of interest in his role in the Wukan protests—had come to visit and eat.

  Two thousand seventeen was the first year the holiday felt like a family event. Kaizhi drove his toy trains in circles around everyone’s feet. Little Yan cooked, and friends brought red envelopes full of money to give to Kaizhi, per Chinese tradition. Although she hadn’t been working at the adult day care center for long, Little Yan’s new boss gave her a hundred-dollar bonus. Yao Cheng and Sun came over for dinner and opened an expensive bottle of Chinese liquor, a brand of baijiu called Mao Tai. They toasted each other and talked politics, their faces turning red in the steam of the hotpot. It was a New Year with a purpose. Zhuang had many faults, and he admitted them—he was not particularly well educated or clever. But he was stubborn. He would keep protesting—and planning, and scheming, and doing his best to make ends meet—until there was no need to protest anymore.

  22

  Labors

  劳动 / Láodong

  NOVEMBER 2016–APRIL 2017

  Karen began working as a maid just before the 2016 election. She heard about it from friends, who had different opinions, but was too tired to take note. The hotel was understaffed, so she worked overtime at least three nights a week. The wheels of her cart hummed in the empty hallways while she raced to finish her tasks for the day. Her supervisor was constantly on edge, losing her temper over the pace of her cleaners and ending a long day with an angry tirade. For the maids and housemen, it was bad enough to be working so frantically with little time off. But no matter how hard they worked, only so many days a week could pass before a mishap left them running behind schedule.

  On average, Karen was required to clean sixteen hotel rooms in an eight-hour shift: to clean the bathroom, vacuum the floors, change the sheets and pillowcases, empty the trash, and disinfect all the surfaces. But to do it all in half an hour was nearly impossible. Even if she did manage, she had no time to organize her trolley at the start of her shift and to clean up at the end. In her second month on the job, she slammed her thumb into a piece of furniture. Her thumb swelled up, and she spent days worrying that it was broken, that she would be unable to do her job and, as a consequence, would be fired.

  The hardest shifts, however, were made just tolerable by the fact that Jack, the guitar-playing immigrant whom Karen’s friend had liked for her, had started talking. Jack was from Shanghai. He had come over to the United States with his parents when he was a teenager, and his English was nearly perfect. He was stocky and fun-loving, organizing outings with friends and playing the guitar on weekends. “I never expected to be with someone like him,” Karen said. Her boyfriend in China had been quiet, reserved and studious.

  After their first meeting, when Jack ignored Karen, she had stood there for a few moments, then walked away. Karen brushed off the moment—she had learned to sail past awkward social interactions—and didn’t think much more about him. It was her friend who reconnected the pair. She had been aiming to introduce Karen to Jack for over a month. The man with the ponytail, the one that had gone out of his way to be nice to Karen when she showed up and sat in the first-timers section of the Korean Presbyterian Church, had not actually had a girlfriend. He had inquired about Karen. And Karen’s friend had deflected him. Jack, she thought, was a better match.

  The second time Karen met Jack, it was a formal setup. She met his parents and shook their hands, under the watchful eye of her surrogate sister. Jack had not been aloof, and Karen had been more herself. She told him about her life in Flushing and laughed at his jokes. He was more at home in New York than she was. He drove a car and knew the city outside Flushing. He took Karen out to a restaurant along Main Street serving hearty food from northern China and then arranged a date at the top of the Empire State Building. Karen liked his family. And Jack’s whole family loved her.

  On Karen’s long days—the ones that required hours of overtime, sometimes spilling out until two in the morning—Jack would drive into Manhattan to pick her up. He would take her back to her apartment in Flushing or, if it was early enough, back to his parents’ apartment for a meal. In a matter of weeks, Karen started feeling like she had a family again. They celebrated Christmas together. In advance of Spring Festival, Jack and Karen made an electronic card that they sent to friends—photos of the two of them doctored with a Spring Festival filter that gave them red lips and huge eyes, bordered by a red paper cutout. On Chinese New Year, Karen would have to work during the day, but after her shift she had a family meal to attend.

  Karen would have liked to travel back to Henan and introduce her boyfriend to her family, but she was worried about traveling on a green card. Just over a month earlier, the first executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries had gone into effect, ensnaring even green card holders. “It’s not like Trump loves China,” Karen said. “Even if you have a green card, it doesn’t seem safe.” She finally had gained the earliest outlines of a life in the United States, and she didn’t want to risk it on an ill-timed trip b
ack home. Karen’s boyfriend had supported Trump in the election, having kept up with the same barrage of WeChat articles as everyone else, but he had lately changed his mind. And Karen, all of a sudden, started paying attention to politics. Trump, she said, seemed like bad news for immigrants and for hotel workers. “He seems a little…unpredictable,” she said.

  The simple fact that she was no longer working in Flushing or Manhattan’s Chinatown made her life more expansive, as she had hoped. Working as a hotel maid was educational. There were only eight other Chinese immigrants working at her hotel—every person from her class in Flushing who had interviewed at the hotel had been hired. The majority of Karen’s co-workers, however, were from South America. They communicated with Karen in their only shared language: English.

  Karen talked to new people every day. “I’m a little bolder now,” she told me. Before coming to work in the hotel, she had been afraid to talk to people who were not Chinese. When speaking Mandarin, she still called Americans “foreigners.” Now she used her English more and cared less when she made mistakes.

  A few months after she started work, the Hotel Trades Council—New York’s hotel workers’ union—came to her hotel. Late in the winter of 2017, Karen joined and, almost immediately, noticed a difference. She and her co-workers paid their dues, got their ID cards, and learned about their rights. Her supervisor no longer dared to yell at them as she had at first. When she did, Karen and her co-workers felt free to complain. The management promised to hire more staff to cover the two hundred open rooms. And although Karen was still expected to clean sixteen rooms in a shift, only a few of them were checkouts; before, the majority of the rooms had required extensive cleaning in preparation for the next guest. It was exhausting, but most weeks it was possible. A few months after joining the union, Karen attended a meeting to announce the Hotel Trades Council’s endorsement of New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio in his run for reelection. She was one of the only Asian faces there. She forwarded me a photo over WeChat. Bill de Blasio, she commented, was very tall.