Dreams of democracy

Two years ago I wrote about Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong province that in 2011 launched a protest over corrupt officials’ land grabs. The protest led to a rare success: The government allowed Wukan residents to elect their own village-level leaders. Yet that experiment ended in 2016, when officials arrested a local elected official, Lin Zuluan, on trumped-up corruption charges.

Journalist Lauren Hilgers first visited Wukan in 2012 during the aftermath of the protest, and befriended protest leader Zhuang Liehong. Two years later, Zhuang and his wife Little Yan arrived at Hilgers’ doorstep in Brooklyn: Fearing a crackdown, they had sold their house, left their son with his grandparents, flown to the United States with a tour group, and decided to stay and apply for asylum.

Zhuang’s journey from protesting in the streets of Wukan to creating a new life in the Chinese neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, is the topic of Hilgers’ fascinating new book, Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown, named after Zhuang’s online alias. Beyond Zhuang, it offers a look at the Wukan protests, the U.S. immigration system, the immigrant experience, and the small, plucky group of activists fighting for Chinese human rights while living in the United States.

When Zhuang realized he had to leave China, there was only one place he wanted to go: America. “It was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own,” Hilgers writes. “He had to whisper when he said it: America.” He feared retribution for standing up to authorities—a reasonable worry as the Chinese government rounded up village leaders after he left—and imagined moving to a new land that would welcome him with open arms. The people would be friendly and the jobs plentiful, he thought.

The reality was quite different. Zhuang and Little Yan had some money saved up, but they couldn’t speak English and didn’t have any family in the United States. Zhuang had never graduated from middle school. It took a year and a half before their asylum was approved and their son could join them in the United States. To make ends meet, Little Yan found work at nail salons while taking English classes. The idealistic Zhuang had a more difficult time keeping a job and instead dreamed up various moneymaking schemes, whether opening a tea shop or buying luxury handbags in America and selling them to customers back in China.

Yet Zhuang’s attention remained focused on the ongoing turmoil in his hometown of Wukan. As a second round of protests began in 2016 following Lin’s arrest, Zhuang began advocating for his friends, posting cell phone videos and photos on Facebook and contacting journalists. Zhuang’s activism brought him in contact with Flushing’s Chinese Democracy Parties, a ragtag group of dissidents who gather to discuss and protest a variety of causes.

The head of the group, Tang Yuanjun, spent eight years in a Chinese prison for his role in organizing the Chinese Democracy Party. He acknowledges that some Chinese immigrants attend his meetings only to help their asylum cases, but hopes they also learn about democracy while they’re there. He told Hilgers he’s optimistic that one day he’ll return to China again. “Change can happen fast,” he said. “That’s why the voice of dissidents living outside China should continue to be loud.”