PATRIOT NUMBER ONE

American Dreams in Chinatown

By Lauren Hilgers

325 pp. Crown. $27.

“Most immigrants, Chinese and otherwise,” one such transplant tells Lauren Hilgers, “come to the end of their lives telling two stories, one set in their country of origin, and one set in the United States.” In “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown,” Hilgers tells the story of a Chinese immigrant couple through dual narratives of departure and arrival. In the first, Zhuang Liehong, a 30-year-old fisherman’s son and tea shop owner, and his wife, Little Yan, come to Flushing, Queens, in 2014. The second, related largely in flashbacks, recounts Zhuang’s campaign to expose illegal government land sales in his native village of Wukan on the coast of southern China, an effort that spawned demonstrations and drew international news media attention. These two threads unspool in parallel. It’s a canny strategy that heightens both dramas — one a fight against the Chinese Communist Party, the other against equally implacable American institutions like the United States immigration services, the English language and the New York real-estate market.

Hilgers, a longtime China-based journalist who met Zhuang while reporting on the unrest in Wukan, is a gifted writer and reporter whose talent for observation shines through the book’s opening chapters. Zhuang, she writes, is “meticulous about his appearance but always slightly out of style. His crooked teeth gave away a childhood spent in poverty, but he was not self-conscious about them. … He smiled relentlessly in the face of danger or embarrassment.” Flushing, for newcomers, is full of face-losing opportunities: They are constantly scolded — for jumping off a city bus before their stop, tipping too little, wearing the wrong shoes to driving class and lacking a credit history. Little Yan finds work at a nail salon for $50 a day, but Zhuang holds out for a higher position that befits his status, one that he can boast about to his friends back home. He obsessively monitors the protests in Wukan, networks with journalists and contemplates writing a book. Little Yan isn’t always impressed. “Women can’t dwell on injustice or past humiliations,” she muses. “Women aren’t allowed the same amount of outrage.”

As they navigate their new home, we get fascinating glimpses of Flushing Chinatown’s subcultures: the English classes and driving schools, the nail salons and industrial-scale dim sum palaces, the underground banks and immigration lawyers and asylum scams. It’s a world whose residents cannot read a map but navigate the city by Chinese grocery stores. Who knew that the Woodbury Common outlet mall in upstate New York was the center of a thriving transnational business in smuggled polo shirts? Or that many Chinatown churchgoers fake their faith in order to help their political asylum applications? Hilgers’s deep reporting and relationships grant her access to a world that is almost completely unknown to outsiders.

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But just as she prepares readers to plunge down this rabbit hole with her, she shifts her focus to a narrow circle of activists. These include Tang Yuanjun, a veteran dissident who heads one of Flushing’s Chinese Democracy Party branches, and other outspoken critics of the regime. Zhuang is pulled into their orbit, joining protests and political meetings. He flits from one job to another without finding steady work, waiting on the results of his asylum application while living off his wife’s salary and their savings. In the last quarter of the book, a violent crackdown in Wukan endangers his family there and turns him into a full-fledged activist in exile — finally, a position befitting his status.