Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  Yao Cheng stayed with Zhuang for a time, then wandered off. The other activists had scattered to street corners along the road that Xi Jinping’s convoy would be taking. Yang Maosheng had paired off with an activist from Henan Province, helping him write democracy slogans on his arms and chest. The man was a hopeful convoy blocker and planned to tear off his shirt as he ran into traffic. No one knew where Ma Yongtian was. Zhuang was alone.

  Then a line of tour buses drove up and disgorged crowds of Chinese people in matching red T-shirts and baseball caps. They swelled onto the sides of the roads, blocking Zhuang’s carefully prepared display. Across the street, a group rolled out a banner that said WELCOME. A handful of people waved Chinese flags in front of Zhuang’s face. When asked, most of the supporters would claim they were U.S. citizens living in Florida.

  For the most part, they were lackadaisical. Most had thrown on the red T-shirts over their street clothes. Half of the men near Zhuang were smoking cigarettes and looking bored.

  A few of them, however, were there to argue. An older woman in sunglasses, with a black scarf around her head, told Zhuang he should get a job. She asked him where he was born, reminding him that he wasn’t really American. He had forgotten, she was suggesting, that he was Chinese.

  Zhuang lost his temper. “How much money are you getting to come here?” he yelled at her. “Do you dare say it?! You don’t dare! I am Zhuang Liehong! I am from Wukan Village! No one paid me to be here!”

  With his phone, he started filming the crowd of people around him. Some hid their faces behind red binders that they were carrying or put on sunglasses. Some tried to knock the phone out of his hands. He, in turn, spewed a string of harsh words into his amplifier, yelling at the woman, yelling at the apathetic smoking men and the WELCOME sign across the street.

  These people had blithely sold their souls. They were fakes, he yelled. And even if someone hadn’t paid them to be there, they were unthinkingly destroying the lives of people like him. Zhuang had not asked to be born in Wukan; he had not asked for his land to be stolen and his friends thrown in jail. He could have been in Shunde, still driving his motorcycle, still drinking tea in the warm, open air. Instead he had ended up in Florida, holding a sign.

  It didn’t matter that Yao Cheng had disappeared and the other min yun had scattered: Zhuang had years of humiliation and injustice to fuel him. He would keep yelling until his voice gave out.

  * * *

  • • •

  The town of Palm Beach is clustered along the northern half of a sixteen-mile barrier island occupied almost entirely by hotels and luxurious estates. The rest of Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, sits on the mainland, across Lake Worth Lagoon, where real estate is cheaper and hotels less ostentatious. In West Palm Beach, the roads are wider and the city is crisscrossed by highways. The beachfront gives way to a hot, low-slung stretch of urban sprawl.

  Palm Beach is connected to West Palm Beach by a few scattered bridges. The length of the island is traversed by Florida State Road A1A, a thoroughfare that stretches all the way down to Miami. In Palm Beach, A1A shrinks to two lanes and is marked by signs for South Ocean Boulevard. The road takes on a meandering, tropical feel, moving from one side of the island to the other. And on the weekend of Xi Jinping’s visit, drivers came to a dead halt as they neared Mar-a-Lago, turned back by a sheriff’s deputy who advised everyone to go to the nearest bridge and cross into West Palm Beach.

  The setup of the bridges, the long barrier island, and the town made it easier to predict the roads that Xi Jinping would be using. There was the bridge closest to Mar-a-Lago, and a bridge that deposited cars directly outside the Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa.

  Finally Xi Jinping’s convoy sped by in a swirl of motorcycles and flashing lights. Stern-looking Palm Beach police standing along the roadsides told everyone to stay back. In a flash, barely fifteen seconds, the line of black suburbans moved past the concrete barriers. A ripple of noise moved through the crowd—chants and screams—then died down again.

  Yang Maosheng and his friend had waited on opposing corners of the road for the cars to arrive. Yang was there to film the action, if there was any. The dissident from Henan unbuttoned his shirt and walked toward the road, but a policeman blocked him. Another two policemen walked toward him from different directions. “Aiya,” he said later, debriefing at his motel. “There was no way for me to run into the street. It was really a loss of face.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The protesters who had scattered and separated throughout the day reconvened in the lounge of the Rodeway Inn, sunburnt and exhausted. The motel was conveniently located only a few blocks away from Palm Beach International Airport, next to an IHOP, its roadside sign wrapped in a plastic tarp suggesting the motel had recently changed franchises. A handful of warty Muscovy ducks wandered the parking lot, looking for scraps.

  The lounge at the Rodeway Inn was surrounded by windows and, on the afternoon of April 7, entirely filled with chattering dissidents, charging their phones, eating out of Styrofoam boxes, and resting their heads on tabletops. Two fake leather couches sat on the side of the room closest to the hotel carport, and Zhuang collapsed on one of them, leaning his head back and falling asleep. He had spent the night before in the airport and the night before that worrying about Kaizhi’s surgery, which had not succeeded in completely unblocking the three-year-old’s tear ducts.

  Yang Maosheng settled in next to him and gave him a poke. “Hey, do you want to go sleep in my room?”

  Zhuang shook his head no. “I have a room,” he said. Yao Cheng and another friend were already napping in it for the afternoon.

  At the other end of the lounge, the leader of Flushing’s other prominent China Democracy Party, Wang Juntao, occupied a chair near a little round table, and the rest of the protesters had formed a semicircle around him. Wang Juntao had gone to the protest in basketball shorts and a Nike baseball cap. His forearms were burned red. “If the Communist Party falls,” whispered the man with the writing on his chest, “Wang Juntao might be the one to take over.”

  Wang Juntao was recounting the events of the day to the people around him. “There were four or five people arrested,” he said. Two had already been released. “We should thank them. They’ve helped us have a good outcome to our protest.” He was going to go, with one of his party members, to try to find the remaining activists.

  On the fake leather couches toward the back, an argument broke out about who the Xi Jinping supporters really were. “The Chinese consulate was paying their way!” one activist claimed. It was difficult to believe that regular Chinese Americans, with unblocked access to the Internet at their fingertips, would go out of their way to welcome the Chinese president. Some members of the welcome party had stood directly in front of the dissidents, intentionally preventing Xi Jinping from seeing them. Those people, someone argued, must have acted on instructions from the Chinese government.

  “Xi Jinping doesn’t want to see us! He doesn’t even want to look at us for five seconds from the car,” someone said.

  On the adjacent couch, Zhuang had woken up and was talking about the possibility of burning the flag he had made the next day.

  “Do you think Xi Jinping is looking at you?” someone asked him. “He has a lot of things to do—there are so many people protesting. Do you think he’s in the car saying, ‘Hmmm, let me look and see who’s here protesting’?”

  Zhuang shook his head, without an answer.

  While they argued, someone in the hotel turned the overhead television to MSNBC, where Hardball host Chris Matthews was opining that the summit between Xi Jinping and President Trump almost seemed like a sideshow, particularly compared to the recent crisis in Syria. The show broadcast a clip of Trump and his family sitting with the Chinese president at a long, narrow table in a room filled with candelabras and draperies. Xi and his wife were sandwiched betwee
n Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “It looks like Versailles in that room!” Matthews guffawed. “It’s all mirrors and gold gilded.”

  Zhuang was leaning forward off the brown coach in midargument, and Matthews wondering what Trump would do when he needed someone to pass the salt, when the group of activists who had gone to the local jail walked back in to the lounge area, an older protester in their midst. Everyone in the room jumped up from their seats, shouting questions. “Where is Ma Yongtian?” someone yelled.

  “We don’t know!” came the answer. “They’re holding her somewhere else.”

  The older man they had retrieved from jail sat down at a table, and everyone clustered around him, eager to find out what had happened. He pulled out his phone to show a video. “Ma Yongtian was successful,” he said. “She blocked the convoy.”

  He turned his phone sideways, and the image of an empty four-lane road filled the screen, a few policemen standing beside their motorcycles by the side of the road. A bank of motorcycles passes through, followed by a group of black suburbans. Then from out of nowhere, a portly Chinese man—Ma’s son—sprints out over the sidewalk, past the waiting cop, through two empty lanes, and into the center of the speeding vehicles. The drivers jerk the cars around him, never slowing down. And then the camera shifts to Ma, a little farther down the road, running with less speed than her son but making the same beeline toward the middle of the road. A policeman chases her, and Ma swerves, the man nearly falling in his attempt to change course. He catches up to her and hits her twice, pulling out a white baton, slamming her head to the ground with it and holding her there for a few moments. Then another policeman runs over and grabs her, carrying her inelegantly by her elbow, her hands already in handcuffs, to the side of the road. Whatever happens next is lost in the blur of the phone getting knocked to the ground.

  The crowd around the older man took in the video and let out a brief sigh of awe before grabbing the phone and sending the video around. “Wah, Ma Yongtian,” somebody said. “She’s not afraid of anything!”

  “Did they knock you down?” someone asked the old dissident.

  “It was nothing,” he said, calmly leaning back in his chair. He’d been in prison for years in China. He wasn’t bothered by a few hours in a Florida police station.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night the protesters all went out to a Chinese restaurant and occupied a back room. Zhuang took responsibility for ordering and serving the tea. There was little alcohol in the room, but the success of Ma Yongtian buoyed everyone’s spirits. People chattered about the day and wondered where she was being held. And then Zhuang put music on his phone and led everyone in a rendition of a famous 1980s protest song, “Nothing to My Name,” by the Chinese rock legend Cui Jian. He stood and started belting out the lyrics with gusto, in his gravelly smoker’s voice: “I want to give you my dreams / and my freedom / But you always laugh at me / for having nothing.” Everyone joined in, tapping their plates with their chopsticks, laughing with Zhuang as he pushed through all the lyrics, waving a toothpick in the air.

  The next morning, when Zhuang woke up, Donald Trump had bombed Syria, and there was one last protest to stage before everyone would head home. Zhuang climbed into a car with Yao Cheng, who was discussing the types of missiles the United States had launched.

  The group gathered at the base of the bridge that led to the barrier island and Mar-a-Lago. They waited for hours for Xi Jinping’s convoys, joined by Free Tibet protesters and a handful of flag-waving pro-China counterprotesters. Yang Maosheng got into a screaming match with an older pro-China woman who told him to “roll out of here.” The police came with dogs and tipped over traffic barrels, letting them sniff for bombs.

  In the background, a group of plainclothes police had gathered. “We usually blend in a little better,” said one, a tall Caucasian man in jeans. “But there’s no chance of that today.” Another pair of men in Harley-Davidson shirts soon arrived, hanging back and observing. “They’re not with our department,” said the tall policeman. Not long after that a tiny Chinese man with a backpack walked through the crowd, tailed closely by a tall, thickly muscled man in a shiny purple shirt with a white wire curling out from an earpiece. “Who’s that guy, do you think?” the undercover police officer asked his partner.

  The protesters lingered for hours, watching the police check traffic barrels with the bomb-sniffing dog. They walked up and down the sidewalk, addressing most of their protests to the officers. Things dragged on until Zhuang decided to burn his Chinese flag. The police watched suspiciously as Yang Maosheng poured lighter fluid from a water bottle. “Wait, what is that?” said a policeman. “Look, I don’t care what you do to that flag, but you can’t set it on fire!”

  A group of police gathered to douse the flag in water, and a woman with a braid sprouting from the top of her head took the microphone that Zhuang had brought. “Look, the police are helping us destroy the flag of the Communist Party of China!” she announced. “They are getting it wet!”

  Zhuang quickly switched strategies, thanked the police, and invited everyone to come over and stomp on the wet flag.

  The collection of plainclothes officers increased as the hours went by. A group of plainclothes Chinese men arrived in the parking lot, taking photos of the protesters. When one protester, in turn, walked up to take a photo of the men, they emptied their water bottle onto his shirt, feigning a punch and laughing when the man shrank back. One of the men, the most dapper, started up a conversation with a reporter from Radio Free Asia. “I don’t understand your organization. Every country has problems,” he said. “But all you report is bad news. There were Tibetans here to welcome Xi Jinping. They love Xi Jinping, but the media just hides it. They don’t report it.

  “This,” he said, his face serious, “is fake news!”

  * * *

  • • •

  Xi Jinping drove by again, and a shout rippled through the crowd on the side of the road. The pressure of the undercover officers of all types was too great—no one managed to run into the road. Afterward everyone dispersed. They rolled up their banners and tossed their posters into the backs of cars. “Maybe it’s better when they have official meetings in small towns,” someone observed. “They’re not used to it, so it’s a bigger story in the news.”

  The group retreated to the Rodeway Inn lounge, lingering after the noon checkout. The television news was dominated by the bombing in Syria. People ordered food from IHOP, plugged in their phones, and tried to determine how they would get to the airport.

  As people milled around the lounge, a car pulled into the parking lot. Its door slid open, and out popped Ma Yongtian, looking fresh and triumphant, her wrist in a brace. Her son trailed close behind, a little more disheveled, a cast on his wrist suggesting a more serious injury. She strode into the check-in area, paused at the top of the stairs for a moment of adoration, then descended into the sunken lounge.

  Zhuang jumped up with everyone else to shake her good hand. “Xinku le,” he said. “So much hardship.”

  Ma smiled in acknowledgment, then brushed it off.

  “Are you hurt?” someone asked.

  “This? This is nothing!” Ma said. “They took us to the hospital. It isn’t broken.”

  Someone pointed to a scrape that ran down one of Ma’s cheeks. “It looked like they beat you,” they said, referring to a policeman in the video.

  “Oh, it wasn’t bad,” she said. “Every time he hit me, he hit me in the butt. Luckily, my butt is very well padded!!” Ma pulled down the edge of her pants a little to show off the bruises. The worst part was when they carried her, their arms hooked under her elbows, her weight hanging on the place where her wrists were bound together. Everything else had gone as expected. They had been treated well by the police.

  Ma listened to a few more questions, then announced that she had to s
tart the drive back to New York. It was a brief victory lap before returning to reality.

  She left, and a handful of protesters piled into another car to try to catch Xi Jinping as he left Mar-a-Lago and headed to the airport. Zhuang, Yang Maosheng, and a handful of other activists were still in the lounge when someone walked in to tell them that police had blocked off the road outside. “Do you think Xi Jinping is going to drive by the hotel?” someone asked. The handful of stragglers gathered together whatever posters they had left and walked out into the sun, down past the IHOP, and clustered in the shadow of the Rodeway Inn sign. The six-lane road was empty, and the group squinted in one direction—toward the highway where the police were lined up—and then in the other, where a stoplight was running through its lights without purpose. Overhead, a handful of helicopters buzzed.

  “He must be coming this way,” said Yang Maosheng. Somewhere far off, there was a siren.

  They stood by the road, shading their eyes, when the first in a pack of police motorcycles appeared, about two hundred yards away, turning at the empty stoplight. “Wait!” said someone. “Is he going that way?!” Someone ran toward the intersection, waving a sign. Yang Maosheng waved his arms above his head, shouting as if he were stranded on an island and Xi Jinping were a rescue vessel about to pass him by. The rest of the protesters ran out into the road, yelling into the empty street, their voices lost in the rumble of the black suburbans as they rolled through, still far off.

  “Oh, whatever,” said Yang Maosheng, already walking back toward the motel. “He’s gone. Chinese people are the world’s most pitiable.” They had waited in the sun, again, just for a chance to yell into the wind.

  24

  Simplicity

  单纯 / Dānchún