by Jason Wilson
His words reminded me of a sad story about one of his fellow political prisoners. Wen (as I’ll call him) was sentenced to 20 years on charges of “organizing and leading a counter-revolutionary group.” During his first 11 years behind bars, his mother died and his wife divorced him, and he was allowed to see his only child, a girl, just once. In a moment of despair, Wen signed an admission of guilt, in the hopes of having his sentence reduced. After the news of what he’d done spread, a dramatic change in attitudes occurred: inmates made snide remarks, while jailers gave Wen spoiled food and picked on him. He eventually received a reduction of four years, but he was no longer considered a man of honor. His hair swiftly turned white.
In order to persuade Jianguo to stop writing “dangerous articles,” Officer Liu had talked about the prospect of another long sentence. “Look, it’s been exactly nine years since you finished your nine years in prison,” Liu had told him. “If you get another nine years, it wouldn’t be a nice way to live out your old age, would it? Think about your daughter, your grandchildren.” With a small flexing of the wrist, the line suddenly drew taut.
Jianguo has been divorced twice, and Huiyi, his only child, moved to America many years ago. In Orlando, she got her first job, at Disney World, and eventually, with her husband, started two small companies, in real estate and rental management. The companies now have dozens of employees. Huiyi and her husband have a daughter and a son. Jianguo speaks about the family’s immigrant success with parental pride, impressed by their entrepreneurial pluck. He cherishes the annual reunion when his daughter and son-in-law arrive from Florida with their two healthy, bounding children. But, despite Huiyi’s repeated invitations, Jianguo won’t leave China; he fears that he would be forbidden to return.
Others have made a different choice: there has been a growing exodus of dissidents and activists from China, including some of Jianguo’s old Democracy Party comrades, spurred in large part by constant harassment. Economic uncertainties, heightened now by the US-China trade war, are making many affluent Chinese jittery. Some have already decamped or hedged their bets by transferring capital and setting up a second base abroad. In liberal WeChat groups, the mood swings between bravado, defeatist humor, and gloom; rumors about collapsed trade talks are often accompanied by whispered warnings of a coming storm.
Recently, stirred by news of more departures, Jianguo posted an unusually emotional piece, expounding on the nature of patriotism. In his view, it arises from a deep love of the land and the people, not necessarily of the state or the ruling regime. He understands those friends who have decided to leave and wishes them the best for a new life in a freer country. He even appreciates a motto widely quoted in his circles: “Wherever there’s freedom, there is my homeland.” But that’s not his motto. “I’ll never leave,” he wrote. He’ll never leave, and he’ll never quit.
That’s what he concluded after a careful consideration of Officer Liu’s warning. “In the end, my mind is clear and at rest, as always,” Jianguo said. He has told me repeatedly that he is prepared to return to prison at any time, for any number of years. My own mind is not at rest; at the moment, I’m all too conscious of the Chinese government’s habit of jailing activists around Christmas, a down period for the media and the diplomatic services. Since Xi came to power, a number of Jianguo’s Democracy Party comrades have been sent back to prison, and their sentences are heavy. At 65, Qin Yongmin, a widely admired activist and the founder of the party’s Hubei branch, is serving a sentence of 13 years. It is his fourth; he has already spent 26 years behind bars. In July 2017, Liu Xiaobo, the long-imprisoned Nobel laureate, died of liver cancer during his fourth prison term, set for 11 years. The dissident community, mourning Liu’s death, took note of the cool responses of many Western governments.
Jianguo views these developments soberly. He has long since shed any illusions of fast social change or enduring media attention. “If I’m sentenced for another nine years, or twelve or thirteen years,” he told me calmly, “I’ll just forget about the outside world and focus on my life inside prison. Family and loved ones—well, those thoughts will be there for a while. It will take time. I’ll read some books, play some Go, get on with my cellmates. I’ll try to make the best out of each day. I’ll think about nothing else, nobody else.” I was at once chilled and comforted by his resolve. The words floated back to me: Your brother looks like a Buddha now.
On November 6, when I was in New York, Jianguo texted me about the midterm elections and made me promise to inform him of the results as soon as I heard. He was going to a dinner the following evening with some Beijing intellectuals, and everyone was keen to hear the latest news. Twelve hours later, when I forwarded the first posted results to his WeChat account, a message flashed on my phone’s screen, informing me that the account I’d directed the message to had been blocked, and that “no information can reach the destination.” For the fifth time, the censors had shut Jianguo’s account down.
A day later, he opened a new account, with the name “BeijingZhaJianguo6,” but a line had been crossed. After five shutdowns, as the police had warned him, he was blocked from large online groups. This is how all Chinese companies, including giants like Alibaba and WeChat’s owner, Tencent, defer to the police state. Savvy Chinese internet users, with or without the aid of a VPN, employ all sorts of techniques to break through the Great Firewall, and Jianguo has definitely learned a few tricks to evade the censors. But lately the situation has deteriorated. On certain days, even after all the camouflaging maneuvers, a fresh opinion piece of his would vanish mysteriously, with no error message. Neither the sender nor the recipients would even know that something had gone amiss unless they checked with one another.
This is bei hexie, “to be harmonized,” a form of virtual erasure. Bent on transforming the global internet into a Chinese intranet, official censors have made deft and extensive use of the method. You may know about Vice President Mike Pence’s recent speech on the Trump administration’s China policy, viewed by many as a declaration of a new cold war. But in China very few saw the actual text; it was met with swift bei hexie. The current arms race between the censors and the censored in China can be summed up in an old proverb: The monk grows taller by an inch, but the monster grows taller by a foot.
Now Jianguo has been shut out of all large online groups. “I’m forced to post my articles less often,” he announced in a recent post. He’s decided to write longer pieces and send them to smaller groups, in the hope that members will repost them in larger groups. “But I trust that all free voices cannot be blocked. Even if all the roosters are silenced, the dawn shall still come.”
Contributors’ Notes
Stephen Benz has published two books of travel essays, Guatemalan Journey and Green Dreams: Travels in Central America, as well as work in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. Topographies, a collection of essays and journalism, is forthcoming in 2019. For more, visit stephenconnelybenz.com.
Maddy Crowell is a freelance writer based in New York City. She has previously lived in and written from India, Cambodia, Morocco, and Ghana. She holds an MA in politics from Columbia Journalism School.
David Fettling’s writing focuses on the places where people of different countries and cultures meet. He has spent the past three years living in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. His first book is Encounters with Asian Decolonisation.
Alice Gregory is a correspondent for GQ and a contributing editor at T. She writes regularly for publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times and is at work on her first book.
A veteran food and travel writer, Matt Gross has had stories published in the New York Times (where he formerly wrote the Frugal Traveler column, 2006–2010), Bon Appétit, Saveur, Food & Wine, Airbnb Magazine, Afar, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other outlets. His latest project, Hot Pursuit, is a documentary video series that traces how chile peppers spread around the world over the past 500 yea
rs. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean American writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, and Pacific Standard. In Open Country, her forthcoming memoir about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, explores what it means to move through America and the world as a black woman.
Peter Hessler was sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, and after completing his service, he stayed in the country as a writer. He eventually became the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, as well as a contributing writer for National Geographic. In 2011, he moved with his family to Cairo, where he studied Arabic and covered the Egyptian Arab Spring. His book about this experience, The Buried, was published in May 2019. He currently lives with his family in Chengdu, China.
Cameron Hewitt was born in Denver, grew up in central Ohio, and settled in Seattle in 2000. Since then, he has spent three months each year in Europe, contributing to guidebooks, tours, radio and television shows, and other media for Rick Steves’ Europe, where he serves as content manager. Cameron married his high school sweetheart (and favorite travel partner), Shawna, and enjoys taking pictures, trying new restaurants, and planning his next trip. He blogs about his travels at https://blog.ricksteves.com/cameron.
Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the California Sunday Magazine. She won the Livingston Award for national reporting and the NYU Reporting Award, and has been a finalist for a PEN America Literary Award and the Livingston Award for international reporting. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2015 and 2019), Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger and Heartbreak from the Atavist Magazine, and New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists. She lives in Seattle.
Saki Knafo is the host of Conviction, a podcast from Gimlet Media about a crusading private detective in the South Bronx. His travel pieces about the Arctic, Johannesburg, and Iraq have appeared in Men’s Journal, Travel + Leisure, and GQ.
Lucas Loredo was born and raised in Austin, Texas. His work has been published in the Oxford American, the Masters Review, The Rumpus, and the Washington Square Review, among others, and profiled by Time Out New York, Juxtapoz, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been twice named a finalist for The Best American Short Stories. He recently earned his MFA at the Michener Center for Writers in his hometown.
Alex MacGregor is an Atlanta-based port and railroad consultant, an avid traveler, and an amateur geographer. He focuses on the intersection between the natural, social, and political landscapes, and scours the world for overlooked places. His favorite countries are Haiti and Mexico.
Jeff MacGregor is writer-at-large for Smithsonian. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Sunday Money and has written for the New York Times and Sports Illustrated. This is his first appearance in The Best American Travel Writing.
Lauren Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, which won a Northern California Book Award, a California Book Award Silver Medal, and a Ridenhour Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in outlets such as Guernica, Freeman’s, Orion, Harper’s Magazine, Longreads, the New Republic, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. In addition to writing, she has spent nearly 15 years working with immigrant and refugee youth in her home state of California.
Ben Mauk is a writer based in Berlin. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for feature writing. In 2019, he received the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism. He cofounded and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.
Outside Magazine correspondent Devon O’Neil grew up on St. John in the US Virgin Islands before trading the sea for snow and settling in Breckenridge, Colorado, after college. A former newspaperman and staff writer at ESPN.com, O’Neil’s work also appears often in Men’s Journal, Bike, and Ski and has been a notable selection in The Best American Sports Writing. He moonlights as a hutmaster for a system of backcountry cabins above 11,000 feet.
Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2005. From 2000 to 2005, he was the deputy editor of The Talk of the Town, to which he regularly contributes. He has also written features on subjects ranging from sports talk radio to internet dating to the World Economic Forum in Davos to a mountain climber attacked by Sherpas on Mount Everest. Before coming to the magazine, he was a reporter and senior editor at the New York Observer.
Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
Shannon Sims is a quadrilingual lawyer turned journalist. Originally from the Gulf Coast, she has reported independently from Brazil for nearly a decade for publications including the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Washington Post, and Pacific Standard. When not writing about Brazil, she likes to write on two other beats: women breaking boundaries and the legal implications of climate change. She is a former fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, through which she reported for two years on stakeholder management of Brazil’s forests, and of the International Women’s Media Foundation, which supported her 2018 reporting on everything from farmworkers’ legal rights along the Texas-Mexico border to Rwandan fisherwomen and Zanzibar’s women’s soccer team. She splits her time between New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, or anywhere there’s Carnival.
Noah Sneider is a California-born, Moscow-based writer and documentarist. He is the Moscow correspondent for The Economist. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, the New Republic, 1843 Magazine, Slate, The Believer, and elsewhere.
William T. Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central and has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and a Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.
Jason Wilson is the author of Godforsaken Grapes, Boozehound, and, most recently, The Cider Revival. He has been the series editor of The Best American Travel Writing since 2000.
Jessica Yen is a Chinese American author whose work explores the intersection of memory, family, culture, language, identity, and history. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Oregon Humanities, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction. By day, she writes grants for safety-net clinics and edits manuscripts for academics seeking to address health inequities.
Jianying Zha is a Chinese American writer, journalist, and cultural commentator in both English and Chinese. She is the author of Tide Players, China Pop, and several books of nonfiction and fiction in Chinese, including The Eighties, an award-winning cultural retrospective of the 1980s in China. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, Dushu, and Wanxiang. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, she has been a regular commentator on current events on Chinese television and worked for many years at the India China Institute in New York City. Born and raised in Beijing, educated in China and the US, she lives in Beijing and New York.
Notable Travel Writing of 2018
Selected by Jason Wilson
Sivani Babu
Ice Bear. Hidden Compass, August 8.
Rosecrans Baldwin
Above and Beyond. Travel + Leisure, March.
Mark Binelli
Salty Tooth. New York Times Magazine, October 28.
Bliss Broyard
Tourists Taking Pictures. The Believer, February/March.
Frank Bures
Uncharted Waters. Southwest, May.
W. Hodding Carter
Up the Creek (And Over
the Dams, and Across the Ponds and Down This Other River, and, OK, Maybe a Few Miles in a U-Haul). Outside Magazine, July.
Kyle Chayka
The World Is Your Office. New York Times Magazine, February 11.
Doug Bock Clark
Down by the River. Men’s Journal, March.
Eve Conant
An Appetite for Russia. National Geographic Traveler, June/July.
Wes Enzinna
King of the Ride. New York Times Magazine, March 25.
Max Falkowitz
Dim Sum Is Dead, Long Live Dim Sum. Airbnb Magazine, Fall.
Jeff Gordinier
In the Kingdom of Fire and Ice. Esquire, Winter.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
The Saga Continues. Airbnb Magazine, Winter.
Peter Gwin
From Sea to Sand. Far & Away, Spring.
Annelise Jolley
Trick of the Light. Hidden Compass, November 8.
Laine Kaplan-Levenson
The Same Mountaintop. Oxford American, Spring.
William Lychack
The Lady and the Monk. American Scholar, Autumn.
Clayton Maxwell
