Contemporary Authors

• Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown Crown (New York, NY), 2018

1. Patriot number one : American dreams in Chinatown https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043609 Hilgers, Lauren, author. Patriot number one : American dreams in Chinatown / Lauren Hilgers. First edition. New York : Crown Publishers, [2018] pages cm E184.C5 H55 2018 ISBN: 97804514961339780451496140 (ebook)

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/540901/patriot-number-one-by-lauren-hilgers/9780451496133/

  About Lauren Hilgers

  LAUREN HILGERS lived in Shanghai, China for six years. Her articles have appeared in Harper’s, Wired, Businessweek, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York with her husband and their daughter.

  Author Q&A

  A Conversation with Lauren Hilgers, author of
  PATRIOT NUMBER ONE: American Dreams in Chinatown
  (Crown; March 20, 2018)

  Q) You first met the protagonist of your book, Zhuang Liehong, in China in 2012, while you were reporting a story about political unrest in Wukan village. What were your first impressions of him? Did you stay in touch with him?
  A) When I met Zhuang, he had only recently opened a teashop, and music was pouring out onto the street. I had seen his name in earlier reports on the unrest in the village, but Zhuang noticed me before I realized who he was. He called out as I was walking by, inviting me to come in and sit. The mood in the village on that visit was subdued. Zhuang’s former colleagues on the village committee were, upon first meeting me, businesslike and serious. Zhuang, in contrast, was exuberant from the start. He told the story of the village uprising with obvious enjoyment. He was charming, warm, and wanted to make sure my reporting in the village went smoothly. At the same time, I wasn’t sure how seriously I should take his stories. Early on I suspected Zhuang was grandstanding. I underestimated him.

  Q) Two years later, Zhuang and his wife Little Yan showed up on your doorstep in Manhattan with almost no warning. What was your reaction?
  A) Some months before he showed up, Zhuang told me that he anticipated another crackdown on the village and explained his plan to flee to the United States. I was skeptical, but I would eventually realize that underneath Zhuang’s big grin was a fiercely determined individual. Later, when he and Little Yan called from their tour of California, my husband and I never questioned whether or not to let them stay with us, but we suspected they would not feel comfortable in our Brooklyn neighborhood. We spent the last few days before their arrival frantically trying to familiarize ourselves with the Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking neighborhoods around New York City.

  Q) In PATRIOT NUMBER ONE you shed a humanizing light on the challenges Flushing’s immigrants face in making a sustainable life. What were some of the biggest obstacles or surprises Zhuang and Little Yan encountered when they first arrived? How did things change over the course of their first year in the United States?
  A) Zhuang had been so preoccupied with planning how he would travel to New York that he had not given much thought to the specifics of living and working there. Both he and Little Yan had vague ideas—that it would be nicer, cleaner, and easier than living in China. Zhuang, to some degree, expected a warm welcome from activists and academics who were interested in China. He did not expect to get a green card overnight, but the lengthy delays in his asylum case came as a shock. He had anticipated life in New York would be expensive and budgeted $400 a month for a place to live—far more money than he had ever spent on housing. He quickly realized that $400 would not get him much. Life in Flushing was isolating and sometimes humiliating. It was harder than either of them had imagined.

  Q) People may be surprised to learn that Asian immigrants make up the fastest-growing immigrant population in the United States, outnumbering newcomers from Mexico and Central America. What does the national conversation about immigration get wrong, overlook, or exclude about the Chinese experience?
  A) When we grapple with the ways immigration is changing our national identity, Asians are frequently left out of the conversation. And when we do talk about Asian immigrants, we almost always focus on those who are highly educated and well off when, in fact, the story is much more complicated. Many immigrants from China are working-class. When compared with the rest of the foreign-born population in the United States, they are less likely to be proficient in English. They bring with them their own set of traditions, ambitions, and challenges.
  Chinese immigration also has a long history in this country, which echoes in the debates we’re having today. When immigration reached historic heights in the late 1800s, a large part of the ensuing backlash was focused on the Chinese. Political comics depicted Chinese immigrants as rapists and thieves. Chinese laborers were the targets of violent attacks. Chinese-owned shops were vandalized. The fears we see expressed today are the same, although the groups targeted may differ. Chinese immigrants have been leaving their imprint on the United States since the nineteenth century, and will continue to do so. Their stories are American stories, and it’s important that they are told.

  Q) In what sense are Zhuang and Little Yan “typical” or less typical of Chinese immigrants? Why did you decide their story was one you needed to tell?
  A) Zhuang and Little Yan, like so many in Flushing, are ambitious and hardworking, but limited by their immigration status and their lack of proficiency in English. Without the support of their families and villages, they struggled with isolation, and the pressure of their daily life took a toll on their relationship. On the other hand, Zhuang and Little Yan stood out from those around them. They arrived in the United States with no family network. Zhuang did not see his arrival in the United States as an economic opportunity, but a political one. He also arrived unburdened by debt, which allowed him to be more selective in the jobs he decided to take. Zhuang was always determined to build a life for himself rather than a bank account. His drive to live life in the United States on his own terms, however, left Little Yan shouldering most of the burden of maintaining their everyday lives.

  Q) Though this is in many ways an American story, several chapters take place in Wukan, Zhuang’s home village in Southern China, where he began a protest movement before fleeing state persecution. What has been the legacy of the Wukan protests, and what is the political situation there today? Did Zhuang accomplish anything with his activism?
  A) Zhuang helped spark the protests in Wukan using the online alias Patriot Number One, and he has been dedicated to his village ever since. While the protests were focused, initially, on local corruption and the private sale of communally owned village land, Wukan became a symbol of grassroots democracy. It was a glimmer of hope for a future in which one person, and one village, could stand up for their rights and effect change. The promise of those early victories, however, turned out to be elusive. Zhuang fled to the United States and many of his friends ended up in jail. Still, Zhuang will always consider Wukan his true home. As one of his friends in Wukan told me, “His body is in the United States, but his heart is here.”

  Q) Has Zhuang continued his political activism since arriving in the United States?
  A) One of the most difficult things about coming to the United States for Zhuang was the loss of identity. He had spent his life trying to build a good reputation among his fellow villagers and he had, over time, succeeded. By helping to organize the Wukan protests he achieved something that most Chinese considered impossible. Once he was in Flushing, however, none of that mattered. There were other activists, but they were interested in their own causes. Zhuang was the only man from his village living in New York. During his first two years in the United States, Zhuang did not participate in activism. It was difficult to determine how, from his new home in the United States, he could be useful to his friends and family back in the village. Over time, however, the situation in Wukan grew worse. His friends were jailed, and Zhuang felt compelled to raise his voice. He tells people that he is the only person left from Wukan who is able to speak freely.

  Q) Another character in your book, a political exile named Tang Yuanjun, believes that “most immigrants, Chinese and otherwise, come to the end of their lives with two stories to tell: one set in their country of origin, and one for the United States.” To what extent do the two worlds come together for Zhuang and Little Yan?
  A) Tang Yuanjun is an astute observer of the people around him. While many of the Chinese immigrants I met sought to distinguish themselves from their neighbors, Tang had a talent for finding the common threads between the farmers, petitioners, and famous activists who came through his door. Zhuang and Little Yan dealt with their two stories—the rupture in their lives—differently. Zhuang, like Tang, will likely always consider China his home. Over his four years in the U.S., he has built a community around himself in Flushing, but it does not compare, in his estimation, to the companionship of life in the village. Little Yan, on the other hand, spent her childhood knowing that she would leave home for work and, eventually, marriage. She had already given up her life in Guangxi Province for one in Guangdong. Moving to the United States marked an enormous change in her life, but it was more easily integrated into the story she had been telling herself since birth. Little Yan had long been prepared to exchange one reality for another.

  Q) Another compelling character is Karen, one of Little Yan’s friends from night school, who came to America mainly because her mother insisted. Why was it important to include Karen’s story in the book?
  A) Little Yan met Karen about a year and a half after she had arrived in the United States, after signing up for night classes in English as a second language. The two women were different in many ways , but they shared a practicality about their situation in New York. Neither woman had made the decision to leave for the United States on her own; each had been driven by the dreams of family members. And yet both of them were determined not to dwell on the past and to carve a new life out for themselves in Flushing. No one I spoke with saw the challenges of leaving one life for another so clearly as Karen, who lost all her safety nets during her first few years in America.: The boyfriend who’d stayed in China broke up with her, and her relatives in the United States attempted to coerce her into indentured servitude. Rather than give up, Karen came up with a list of things that she would need in order to feel happy and safe and she has pursued them single-mindedly.

  Q) Where are Zhuang and Little Yan now? Do they feel they’ve made inroads towards achieving their American dream?
  A) Zhuang and Little Yan are still in Flushing, eagerly anticipating the birth of their second child. Their four-year-old son Kaizhi has enrolled in preschool and has an expanding English vocabulary, and an obsession with dinosaurs, that is a source of great pride for his parents. They continue to live on a shoestring, the family all sleeping in one bed, and Zhuang’s activism still gives rise to worries about his physical safety. They are still waiting to receive their green cards. On the other hand, the extreme pressure of their first years in the United States has lifted. They have friends in the city who respect Zhuang and understand the history of Wukan. Zhuang is able to provide for his family—he has traded in his car for a larger vehicle that qualifies for Uber Black—and Little Yan feels comfortable enough to stay home and rest during the last months of her pregnancy. For years the two of them felt that their arrival in the U.S. had not marked a fresh start, but rather a bottoming-out—a blind alley where all their ideas and dreams met insurmountable obstacles. Now, finally, they are starting to anticipate the future.

QUOTED: "This excellent book makes a powerful argument for why the U.S. should always remain a place of sanctuary, benefiting immensely from those who arrive from other shores."

Hilgers, Lauren: PATRIOT NUMBER ONE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hilgers, Lauren PATRIOT NUMBER ONE Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-0-451-49613-3
Affecting portrait of a Chinese dissident who found a home among like-minded democrats in faraway New York.
Journalist Hilgers, who has covered China for the New Yorker and Businessweek, among other publications, met Zhuang Liehong in his home village on the southern coast of China. There, in 2011, as she reported, villagers had rebelled against corrupt officials, who had returned to power with a vengeance, backed by a brutal police force. "A proud former village leader on the ragged outskirts of Guangdong Province's manufacturing boom," Zhuang knew he had to get out while he could, and he weighed three plans to escape, including finding a boat to take him to the American territory of Guam. He settled on an expensive solution, signing himself and his wife, Little Yan, up for a tour of the United States that they then overstayed, making their way to Flushing, where, in time, they encountered other dissidents, notably the Tiananmen Square protest leader Tang Yuanjun. Hilgers closely chronicles Zhuang's travails, among them the struggle to attain legal residency against the backdrop of an immigration regime that worried about offending China and seemed reluctant to house so public a figure, even if his renown had not spread widely in his adopted country. Finally, thanks to the pragmatic Little Yan, he found suitable work--and, thanks to Tang, continued his anti-corruption campaign in New York, protesting at Trump Tower, where an unimpressed Trump supporter yelled at him, "why do we have to pay attention to your problems?" Hilgers answers that question with admirable attention to narrative detail, giving a nuanced portrait of a vibrant working-class immigrant neighborhood comprising a "community of activists" who have lent dissidents like Tang and Zhuang their support.
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This excellent book makes a powerful argument for why the U.S. should always remain a place of sanctuary, benefiting immensely from those who arrive from other shores.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hilgers, Lauren: PATRIOT NUMBER ONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461513/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=7ecf7b20. Accessed 25 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461513

QUOTED: "a vibrant portrait of Flushing's Chinese diaspora built around fine-grained character studies drawn with equal parts empathy and humor."

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Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown
Publishers Weekly.
265.2 (Jan. 8, 2018): p55+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown
Lauren Hilgers. Crown, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-0-451-49613-3
A battle for freedom segues into a struggle for survival in this clear-eyed, humane look at modern immigration. Journalist Hilgers, who lived in Shanghai for six years, spotlights the journey of Zhuang Liehong, who made powerful enemies in the Chinese village of Wukan when he organized protests against corrupt officials. Fearing arrest and dazzled by visions of American freedom and abundance, he and his wife Little Yan left their infant son in 2014 and fled on a tourist visa, ending up in the Chinese immigrant neighborhood of Flushing in New York City. Zhuang and Yan eventually get asylum and working documents, and their scramble for overpriced, overcrowded rooms and low-wage employment (in nail salons, restaurants, and the like) mirrors the experiences of many in New York. Instead of trying to make this an immigration horror story, Hilgers foregrounds the way the husband and wife adjust to their new home: Yan, pragmatically focused on mundane jobs and financial security, grows increasingly exasperated with the dreamer Zhuang's fizzled business plans and his sense that political activism marks him for greater things. Hilgers's narrative intercuts between the dramatic rebellion in Wukan and a vibrant portrait of Flushing's Chinese diaspora built around fine-grained character studies drawn with equal parts empathy and humor. The result is a quintessentially American story of exile and renewal. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown." Publishers Weekly, 8 Jan. 2018, p. 55+.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524503018
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QUOTED: "perceptive and thought-provoking."
"Hilgers is a thoughtful chronicler with an eye for telling details about the Wutan uprising, the revealing upbringing of Zhuang and Little Yan, and their complicated, sometimes-tense marriage."

4 of 7 5/24/18, 11:56 PM

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'Patriot Number One: American
Dreams in Chinatown' expertly
reveals a hidden immigrant world
Randy Dotinga
The Christian Science Monitor.
(Mar. 21, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Randy Dotinga
On their first day in New York City, the young couple from China ignored the bagels and lox set out before them, marveled at the very idea of a laundromat and wondered why anyone would possibly need more than one knife in the kitchen. Then the husband and wife - one bold and blustery, the other quiet and shy - set about making a new American life like tens of millions of immigrants before them.
But Zhuang and "Little Yan" Liehong are anything but typical newcomers. Back home in China, Zhuang had risked his life by transforming himself into a high-profile political protester who'd led a "mini-revolution." He's certain he'll become a runaway American success story as the US bends to his high profile and confident will.
Events then unfold under the gaze of a sharp-eyed and sympathetic journalist named Lauren Hilgers. It's she who provides the lessons in American cutlery, cuisine, and clothes-cleaning when the Liehongs arrive in the Big Apple on a secret mission to seek asylum. And it's she who expertly reveals a hidden immigrant world in the perceptive and thought-provoking new book Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown.
The Chinatown in the title isn't one you're likely to have heard of. It's not in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles but instead in Flushing, an unfortunately named neighborhood in the sprawling borough of Queens. It's become the "destination of choice" for most working-class immigrants from mainland China, and Zhuang thinks he'll have the best chances of success there.
He has reason to be sure of himself. He helped turn the little Chinese village of Wukan into a global symbol of the tens of thousands of Chinese protests each year over land grabs by local authorities. Zhuang helped lead the outcry, first as an anonymous online poster named "Patriot Number One."
As a 2012 Christian Science Monitor editorial noted, the Wukan protesters made "a clear link
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between land rights and individual freedom." Chinese leaders granted them some concessions but also cracked down by imprisoning their critics and worse.
Zhuang eventually decided he'd had enough and wanted to leave. No nation beat the US in his mind, "a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own. He had to whisper when he said it: America."
The US wouldn't just welcome him, he believed, but he'd easily find work. All he'd have to do would be to leave his young son in China, get to the US with Little Yan on a tourist visa, run away from their tour, and find a home and asylum with the help of a certain friendly foreign correspondent he knew in New York. And so the pair showed up on the doorstep of Hilgers and her husband.
Hilgers is a thoughtful chronicler with an eye for telling details about the Wutan uprising, the revealing upbringing of Zhuang and Little Yan, and their complicated, sometimes-tense marriage. She also vividly tells readers about the challenges facing immigrants, from bus stops that must be memorized to disagreements over gender roles (Zhuang doesn't want Little Yan to get a job unless he can work with her).
Many dissidents like Zhuang are obsessed with life back home: "Their bodies were in New York, but their thoughts were elsewhere." But they have to be more than just physically present in America, especially when many face mystifying hassles when government, tax, and insurance bureaucracies make mistakes and fail to fix them. "It was," Hilgers writes, "like making your way through a fog: Obstacles would appear without warning, outlined but not complete."
Hilgers also brings in intriguing characters like the veteran dissident who'd organized marches supporting the Tiananmen Square protests, tried to register a democracy party, and served eight years behind bars in China. In 2001, he swam from a boat to Taiwan, where a soldier demanded to know what he was doing there. Defecting, he said. The reply: "Swim back!"
In the US, he promotes Chinese democracy and help dissidents and other immigrants reduce their overly optimistic American expectations "as painlessly as possible."
But the cautions don't stick. Immigrants cry in their asylum court hearings whether the news is good or bad, their emotions so high because, the democracy activist says, they catch the American dream on the way over from China as if it flows through the air vents on airplanes. (As Hilgers notes, more Chinese people seek and get asylum in the US than any other nationality.)
Ultimately, "Patriot Number One" is an eye-opener. It's startling but heartening to realize how much of a beacon the US still is to the rest of the world when so many Americans of different stripes feel our nation is deeply flawed and our rights too limited.
A friend of Zhuang says talking without a filter can be seen back home in China as a sign that someone is simple and too trusting. But Zhuang wants his kids to open their mouths and speak their minds. "I don't think this is innocence," he says. "I think it's freedom."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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Dotinga, Randy. "'Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown' expertly reveals a hidden immigrant world." Christian Science Monitor, 21 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531832873/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=38c90a35. Accessed 25 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531832873
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"Hilgers, Lauren: PATRIOT NUMBER ONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461513/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7ecf7b20. Accessed 25 May 2018. "Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown." Publishers Weekly, 8 Jan. 2018, p. 55+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524503018/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2b58c41d. Accessed 25 May 2018. Dotinga, Randy. "'Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown' expertly reveals a hidden immigrant world." Christian Science Monitor, 21 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531832873/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=38c90a35. Accessed 25 May 2018.

• Asian Review of Books
  Patriot Number One
  Word count: 1426

  Susan Blumberg-Kason 23 May 2018 Non-Fiction, Reviews
  “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown” by Lauren Hilgers
  chinatown

  Immigration reform’s prominence in global news doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. It’s an especially heated topic in the United States when immigrants aren’t filling such sought-after professions as nuclear engineers and information technology experts. Regardless of one’s position on immigration, however, it’s surely in everyone’s best interest for all immigrants to succeed in their new homes. And one of the most effective paths to success is having a solid support system—ie, a family—in a new land. Lauren Hilgers’s recently-published book, Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown, addresses this topic and couldn’t have come out at a more pertinent time.

  Hilgers didn’t set out to write a book about immigration and was more interested—as a Shanghai-based reporter—in protests some years back in Wukan, Guangdong province. Citizens there became aware of land grabs by the local government, which in turn sold the farmers’ land to developers. While still based in Shanghai, Hilgers traveled to Wukan to write an article about the demonstrations and the protesters who dared to stand up to the government. There she met Zhuang Liehong, one of the activist leaders. Online he called himself Patriot Number One. Hilgers not only found enough material for an article; this book materialized from her time in Wukan and later after she repatriated to New York.

  When Hilgers had been living in New York for a couple years, she received a phone call from Zhuang Liehong. He and his wife, nicknamed Little Yan, were in Hawaii on a Chinese package tour. The next thing Hilgers knew, they were at her front doorstep. Zhuang and Little Yan left the tour when it reached Las Vegas, explaining to their guide that they wanted to spend a little more time in the US before heading back to China. But the couple didn’t return home and thereby defected to the US, leaving their toddler son, Kaizhi, back in China with his maternal grandparents in Guangxi province. What follows is a brave story of immigration and identity in a new land, namely Flushing, Queens. The democracy movement in China becomes a side story.

  In many immigrant families, it’s the wife and mother that becomes the backbone of the family.

  Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown, Lauren Hilgers (Penguin RandomHouse, March 2018)
  Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown, Lauren Hilgers (Penguin RandomHouse, March 2018)

  Patriot Number One is less a China book than a case study and a reminder that immigration succeeds when one is surrounded by family. Zhuang and Little Yan settled in Flushing after learning about its large Chinese population which reduced the need to speak English, in which neither of them was very proficient. It was also possible to find jobs in Flushing that didn’t require much English, so they could start earning money to bring little Kaizhi to join them in the US. There they found inexpensive accommodations, either one room in a house or an apartment with a shared bathroom, kitchen, and other common living space.

  Regardless of the circumstances, immigrants require some sort of a residency visa. Zhuang and Little Yan lucked out in a way. Since Zhuang was involved in the Wukan protests—resulting in the death of one colleague during imprisonment (Zhuang himself was arrested and jailed for a short period of time)—the couple learned after they arrived in the US that they likely qualified to apply for asylum. It seemed the quickest and surest way to stay in the US rather than trying to find a job that would sponsor their work visas, which would be particularly difficult because they didn’t work in hot fields like engineering and IT.

  But when it came to uniting their family—namely bringing Kaizhi to America—they weren’t so lucky. While the couple waited for their asylum case to be processed, they were not allowed to leave the US to visit or bring Kaizhi back to New York. And even after their applications were approved, they still couldn’t go fetch Kaizhi. Unfamiliar with US immigration law, Zhuang and Little Yan were surprised when their lawyer informed them it would look bad if they asked for asylum to protect them from injustices in China, only to return there a couple years later.

  Things started looking up when some friends told them about another Chinese immigrant’s impending trip back to Southern China for a short visit. Zhuang and Little Yan saw this stranger’s trip an opportunity to reunite with their son. They offered to pay her to bring Kaizhi across the Pacific to New York.

  In many immigrant families, it’s the wife and mother that becomes the backbone of the family and Hilgers’s book demonstrates this very clearly. While Zhuang often loafed around a Chinese democracy office in Flushing, shooting the breeze with his friends, Little Yan was the one that toiled long hours in noxious nail salons and exhausting home health care work, cleaning up after an old Cantonese couple. Zhuang, on the other hand, found a welcoming community in Flushing that organized protests online and arranged demonstrations in front of the United Nations. For much of the couple’s early years in New York, Zhuang didn’t bring in any money from his Chinese democracy “work”. Zhuang’s background was ironically what allowed the couple to obtain asylum in the US while Little Yan was the one keeping the family afloat there.

  Hilgers goes deeper into this dynamic of hard-working wives and slacker fathers and shows that it was common among the Chinese activists in Flushing: most of the wives supported their husbands. While withholding judgement, Hilgers explained that Zhuang felt that his manhood was at stake when it came to accepting certain jobs. Despite not having the equivalent of a US high-school degree, Zhuang felt he was above manual labor. Little Yan, however, seemed to have little choice. She either worked (and went to a business institute at night to earn a certificate that would give her qualifications to work in a medical office) to make money for her family or they would go without food or shelter. Zhuang later found work in a field occupied by many middle class Americans that kept him busy and earned some money for his family, although Little Yan still brought in most of the couple’s income.

  Although the bulk of the book follows the stories of Zhuang, Little Yan, and Kaizhi, Hilgers also introduced friends of the couple, namely Karen Xie, a classmate of Little Yan’s at the Long Island Business Institute who worked during the day as a hotel maid in the Manhattan, a job that wasn’t easy to obtain due to the stiff competition during the application process. Karen met and started to date a Chinese-American man, who took her on trips to areas outside New York City. Hilgers used Karen as an example of a single immigrant who worked hard and built a new family in the US. Compared to Karen, Little Yan and Zhuang had fewer worries because they had a greater support system in each other when they first arrived in the US and later with Kaizhi after he joined them in Flushing.

  Mr Tang was another supporting character. An activist in Queens, Tang introduced Zhuang to demonstrations in New York and elsewhere in the US. One of the more memorable protests took place in Mar-a-Lago when Xi Jinping visited Donald Trump. Although these side stories are fascinating and show another slice of immigrant life in Flushing, sometimes they felt like distractions from Zhuang’s and Little Yan’s story.

  One or two case studies don’t allow one to draw conclusions about immigration policy, but books like Hilgers’s show the determination and resilience of new immigrants. And like with so many immigrant stories, while the women are often in the background, they are usually the ones holding their families together. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how differently these immigrant stories would turn out if it weren’t for the unity of the family.

  Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong.

• Daily Texan
  http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/03/20/patriot-number-one-provides-a-lacking-look-at-realities-of-immigration
  Word count: 719

  QUOTED: "Every included detail is interesting and beautifully written, but the story lacks cohesion. The reader is given an overload of information without knowing what to look for—there is no end goal other to inform, making Patriot Number One a difficult read. Overall, Patriot Number One includes many great pieces of a story but hinders reader engagement through its structure."

  'Patriot Number One' provides a lacking look at realities of immigration
  Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crown Publishing Group
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  Published on March 20, 2018 at 11:52 pm
  Last update on March 20, 2018 at 11:56 pm
  By Collyn Burke

  Overfilled with factual information, “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown” lacks a cohesive story.

  In “Patriot Number One,” journalist Lauren Hilgers tracks the life of Zhuang Liehong and his wife, Little Yan, two Chinese immigrants attempting to create a new life in America. Zhuang and his wife fled to America to escape persecution after Zhuang helped instigate what would later be known as the Siege of Wukan.

  Through Zhuang and Little Yan’s life, Hilgers paints an intimate portrait of the struggles of being a modern day immigrant in the United States. As Hilgers recounts how Zhuang and his wife arrived with little money and no friends, she exposes the reader to the dim reality of life trying to work while undocumented, providing brief excerpts with statistics on sex work in Chinatowns and mistreatment in nail salons. Throughout the story, Hilgers also weaves in brief looks into the lives of other immigrants and the history of Chinese immigrants as a whole.

  While Hilgers provides an abundance of knowledge on life as an immigrant, democratic uprisings in China and how one seeks asylum in the U.S, the sheer amount of information contained within the 336 pages of the book becomes overwhelming, and the book reads more like an incredibly long article than it does a narrative. While every detail of Hilgers’ research is thoughtful and necessary, it is presented in such a frank way that it lacks flow with the main story. “Patriot Number One” would have been better off had Hilgers breathed more life into the story of Zhuang and Little Yan and allowed their story to present the facts of immigrant lives. Instead of reading as a compelling story, the book reads as a collection of research notes and flashes of a story, ultimately lacking coherence.

  While what we get of Zhuang and Little Yan’s life feels brief, the parts that are there are beautiful and heartbreakingly honest. Perhaps it is because Hilgers writes Zhuang and Little Yan so well that everything else falls short. Hilgers manages to capture the two so well and without dramatic embellishment that they completely carry the book. The intimacy she has with these two people gives the reader the most honest picture of modern day immigrants one can achieve without being an immigrant themselves.

  Another pitfall of “Patriot Number One” is that it attempts to follow too many stories, and in doing so, tells them all poorly. In addition to Zhuang and Little Yan, Hilgers touches briefly on the lives of other Chinese immigrants whose paths cross with the couple. These stories, while interesting, detract from our main story and ultimately don’t add much.

  Hilgers also finds herself diving into lengthy stories about village dynamics in China, the history of Chinese immigration and the Tiananmen Square protests. Each of these anecdotes are well-researched and intriguing, but they are inserted with little regard for organization.

  Every included detail is interesting and beautifully written, but the story lacks cohesion. The reader is given an overload of information without knowing what to look for — there is no end goal other to inform, making “Patriot Number One” a difficult read. Overall, “Patriot Number One” includes many great pieces of a story but hinders reader engagement through its structure. Had Hilgers focused solely on the journey of Zhuang and Little Yan and allowed their lives to tell the story the book would have been a knockout, but unfortunately for the reader, she did not.

  Page Count: 336
  Score: 2.5/5

• San Francisco Chronicle
  https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Patriot-Number-One-American-Dreams-in-12791247.php
  Word count: 743

  QUOTED: "Patriot Number One tells a powerful human story about America and the world in 2018."

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  ‘Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown,’ by Lauren Hilgers

  By Stephen Phillips
  March 29, 2018 Updated: March 30, 2018 3:18pm
  Lauren Hilgers Photo: Erich Hehn
  Photo: Erich Hehn
  Lauren Hilgers

  Tang Yuanjun, a subject in Lauren Hilgers’ superb account of Chinese immigrants in America, remarks that immigrants typically bisect their biographies into life before and after arrival in the United States. In Tang’s case, the former observes a heroic arc: democratic activism, imprisonment and abuse by the Chinese authorities, then a dramatic swim to safe harbor in Taiwan and eventual passage to America. The latter he treats as mere coda to this escape to freedom.
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  “Patriot Number One” traces the folkways of new Chinese immigrants through the braided stories of ex-teahouse proprietor Zhuang Liehong; his day care teacher wife Little Yan; Tang, an elder statesman among expat Chinese dissidents; and Karen Xie, a vessel for her mother’s thwarted ambition. They’re resourceful and hardscrabble — in flight from their past yet gripped by it. Their stories embrace aspiration and striving but also wrenching dislocation, and the colossal indifference of the receiving society to the drama of the immigrant.

  Unable, initially at least, to speak English, they’re often confined to a sub-economy — nail salons and restaurants — eked out by previous Chinese immigrants as a refuge from racism. Their terminus point is Flushing, N.Y., different from the traditional touristic Chinatown as a strictly functional community but, in its hermetic self-containment, a creature of the same forces.

  Stealing the show is Zhuang, irrepressible, quixotic, an endlessly scheming operator who finds his calling in activism — rallying opposition to a corrupt land grab in his village.

  Zhuang’s struggle in America is to get over himself — to relinquish unrealistic hopes and a determination to cast his own shadow. Eventually, he knuckles down to driving an Uber and finds community among his fellow activists.

  Hilgers captures the small poignant moments of the immigrant experience.

  “We’ll take it!” exclaims Zhuang after viewing a cramped rental — his and Little Yan’s first independent living quarters. But his exuberance washes over the landlord’s son for whom they’re just two more rent-paying warm bodies.

  “Patriot Number One” tells a powerful human story about America and the world in 2018.

  Stephen Phillips’ writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.

  Patriot Number One

  American Dreams in Chinatown

  By Lauren Hilgers

  (Crown; 324 pages; $27)

• Truth Dig
  https://www.truthdig.com/articles/losing-not-just-one-world-but-two/
  Word count: 1976

  QUOTED: "a wondrously compelling work, imbued with an innate empathy and curiosity."
  "Hilgers sometimes seems a step too removed from her own narrative. She can feel at times like an invisible presence, and we long to hear more about what drives her."

  Losing Not Just One World, but Two
  Penguin Random House

  “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown”

  “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown from Crown”
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  A book by Lauren Hilgers

  Reviewed by Elaine Margolin

  Upon first glance at Lauren Hilgers’ life as a poet from Austin, Texas, who fled to New York as a young woman, she seems an unlikely candidate to immerse herself in the troubled lives of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Flushing, New York. But Hilgers, best known for her poetry, has written “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown,” a wondrously compelling work, imbued with an innate empathy and curiosity. She left for Shanghai in 2006 where she worked as a journalist for six years, writing stories about the political scandals in Beijing. She eventually made it to Wukan province, where enraged rural villagers were protesting local corruption and land grabs that had made their already difficult lives more desperate.

  The protesters in the streets were catching the attention of the world press, and carrying placards that pleaded for democratic reform. Zhuang Liehong, the protagonist of “Patriot Number One,” was one of the protesters. He realized what was happening in 2008, when he saw an online advertisement offering Wukan’s real estate for sale. The advertisement claimed, falsely, that each of Wukan’s villagers had received the equivalent of 10,000 U.S. dollars in exchange for their land. Further research uncovered that the village chief had been selling off land since the 1990s. He knew that no one in Wukan had received a cent, and opened an anonymous instant messaging account on QQ to inform his fellow villagers of his findings. He dubbed himself “Patriot Number One.” The response was overwhelming. Soon Zhuang and others had organized and were taking to the streets—something intolerable to the Chinese government. Hilgers reveals the ruthless measures taken by the Communist government to squash dissent. Local governments or hired thugs were often allowed to silence any opposition before it became an embarrassment. Many of Zhuang’s close friends and fellow protesters were arrested, beaten and imprisoned for several years. One died under mysterious circumstances in prison. Zhuang was arrested for 21 days but mysteriously released, perhaps by mistake. But he knew his fate was in serious jeopardy. He had to escape, along with his wife Little Yan, and their infant son. He spent days inside his tea shop with the windows shuttered, thinking of how to get out.

  Around this time, Zhuang met Hilgers while she was reporting in Wukan. He sought her counsel in his shop. She didn’t believe he would ever be allowed to leave China. But she was moved by his plight.

  When he somehow managed to secure permission to go to America on a tour group, he knew he would break away and escape into the underground world of undocumented immigrants in New York. He convinced his wife that she should join him, persuading her to leave their child with her parents until they could find a way to bring him over too. She reluctantly agreed. In New York, he called Hilgers and asked for her help. She agreed.

  Zhuang’s plan, once he reached New York, was to apply for political asylum, and find sanctuary in Flushing, where over 200,000 Chinese residents lived, believing it was “the best landing spot for the truly rootless.” He was already nourishing glorious fantasies of reinventing himself in America, where he believed opportunities he had not yet dreamed about would be open to him. Hilgers describes his initial optimism: “He felt sure, when he considered the plan, that the Americans would be sympathetic to his situation. He was a lover of democracy trapped in a corrupt corner of Guangdong Province.” He knew from the moment he planned his escape that America would have to be his destination: “It had an allure no other country could match. It was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own. He had to whisper it when he said it: America. He had heard its asylum policies there were favorable, and he understood it to be a wealthy country that took care of its citizens. Work would be easy to find there. People would be friendly. Some might even know his name. He imagined a warm welcome from Western democracy advocates. He thought of returning to Wukan later, a success. He envisioned himself on a boat passing Liberty Island, a little windblown and visibly, palpably free.”

  But the reality of America was heartbreaking. He was a 30-year-old Chinese man who had not even graduated junior high school. He knew almost no English. Even with Hilgers’ engaged help in finding work, housing and filing the paperwork needed to secure his green card and political asylum as well as apply for his son’s release from China, it was quickly evident to Zhuang that the fantasy he envisioned was just that. He struggled to hold on to jobs as a Chinese deliveryman, a taxi driver, and a driving teacher, and floundered at finding suitable housing for him and his wife. He moved frequently, irritated to be living in a dingy single room with loud neighbors and a shared kitchen and bathroom. He remained obsessed with Wukan, spending hours online each day searching for news. His marriage became increasingly strained. His wife found steady work in a nail salon but came home each day nauseated from the fumes. The couple stopped talking to each other.

  Zhuang eventually connected with Chinese pro-democracy activists in Flushing, and befriended another dissident named Tang Yuanjun. Tang ran an office that served as a meeting place to make plans for future, largely futile, dissent. Hilgers explains Zhuang’s mindset and the attitude of his peers:

  If engaging with life in Flushing was difficult for the majority of Chinese immigrants, the pro-democracy activists who made up Tang’s supporters and friends struggled more than most. Some had left after watching fellow students and innocent bystanders die in Tiananmen Square or after suffering mistreatment in prison. Others had escaped, fearing for their lives, and had been granted asylum. The min yun, a shorthand term used frequently in Flushing for China’s pro-democracy activists [from the words minzhu, meaning ‘democracy,’ and yundong, meaning ‘campaign’], taken as a whole, were a stubborn group of people: Tiananmen Square activists, China Democracy Party members, human rights defenders, and grassroots organizers. They might have had comfortable lives had they ignored government corruption or stopped agitating for democracy. The simple fact of being in the United States did not often shake their resolve; their interests and obsessions were firmly planted in China. Their bodies were in New York, but their thoughts were elsewhere.

  Zhuang’s aching sense of dislocation comes from losing not just one world, but two. His wife, Little Yan, had a different temperament. She missed China, her family, and her son greatly. Hilgers believes, “If Little Yan shared Zhuang’s sense of predestination—that she would live a different life, somewhere far away from home—she felt none of his pride of origin. She didn’t grow up wanting to impress anyone. She felt no drive to rebel against the realities of her life: rebellion wouldn’t get her far anyway. There had never been any question that her mother and father would make all her most important decisions.” Little Yan found her husband’s behavior in America infuriating. He seemed to her just a fumbling man who couldn’t find steady work.

  Even when Zhuang and Little Yan finally receive political asylum and are reunited with their son in New York, the essential problems of survival persisted. Zhuang, like many Asians and Asian-Americans, felt invisible in America, and fantasized about his heroic days back home, when life felt meaningful to him. Hilgers explains that during those years, “Zhuang felt as if he had found his purpose. The protesters looked to him for instruction, volunteering to help him gather evidence of land grabs. …”

  “Patriot Number One” startles the reader with its brutal revelations about China’s restrictions and mechanisms of repression. But it ignores the country’s historical context. This is a nation still reeling from the aftereffects of Mao’s madness, which has only in recent decades come to light. When I was in college in the late 1970s, I took a course called “Communism and China.” My professor assigned Mao’s Red Book and pontificated enthusiastically on the glorious revolution taking place in China. We were taught how the masses had been put in control of their society and allowed to make the necessary changes to help their country thrive. There were many class discussions on the wondrousness of the collective spirit and the concept of self-criticism that the Chinese citizenry took part in regularly as part of their attempt to create a perfect world. I recall being impressed, and it was only years later, when the truth was revealed about Mao and the Cultural Revolution, that I was forced to reassess all I had been taught.

  The current President Xi of China was a victim of Mao’s regime. Xi’s father had been one of Mao’s top commanders. But when Mao purged his elite lieutenants, a teenage Xi was thrust onto the streets. His father was tortured and imprisoned for many years. His sister committed suicide. Xi survived. He was sent to a rural province to be reeducated, and lived in a cave for seven years amid rural Chinese peasants, working feverishly among them. This time, he claims, taught him to understand poverty and suffering. When he became president, many hoped he would bring reform, but he proved to be a cautious leader. He has attempted to crack down on corruption and worked to improve maternal mortality and promote mass literacy, but does so while strictly enforcing the supreme power of the Chinese Communist Party, which he rules with an iron hand. Hilgers’ book would have benefited from some historical context, since Zhuang and Little Yan, born after Mao, still carry within them the emotional baggage that was inflicted upon their parents and grandparents during Mao’s reign. Her book seems oblivious to these underpinning psychological forces and their long-term effects. Chinese life under Mao is now seen by historians as a calamitous event, with harrowing consequences comparable to the suffering inflicted by Stalin and Hitler.

  Finally, Hilgers sometimes seems a step too removed from her own narrative. She can feel at times like an invisible presence, and we long to hear more about what drives her. We never learn what possessed her to go to Shanghai as a young woman in 2006 in the first place. Or why she was willing, as a new wife and mother in Brooklyn, to become so entrenched in Zhuang and Little Yan’s lives when they arrived. Her emotional reticence hinders her otherwise stunning narrative.
  Elaine Margolin
  Contributor
  In addition to writing book reviews for Truthdig, Elaine is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, and several literary journals. She has been reviewing…
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  beijing china chinese immigrants chinese-americans hitler Lauren Hilgers mao new york Patriot Number One Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown patriotism stalin undocumented undocumented chinese immigrants undocumented immigrants wukan

• Library Journal
  https://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2018/03/books/nonfic/soc-sci/lj-talks-to-lauren-hilgers/
  Word count: 1931

  QUOTED: "Zhuang is such a wonderful, headstrong, optimistic person, I think it would have been a challenge not to be drawn to his story. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Zhuang pulled me in. The first time we met was in China, in a tea shop he was running in his home village of Wukan. He called me in, offered me tea, and told me his story. It was clear then that Zhuang was a dreamer."
  "He had big aspirations for himself and for his village. He also had a deeply held sense of right and wrong and was a bombastic storyteller. It was the obvious pleasure he took in telling his story, which was not a particularly hopeful one, that at first led me to underestimate him. It took me some time to realize that, in addition to being a dreamer and an idealist, Zhuang was determined."

  LJ Talks to Journalist Lauren Hilgers
  By Stephanie Sendaula on March 26, 2018 Leave a Comment

  Photo © Erich Hehn

  Journalist Lauren Hilgers (Harper’s, Wired, Businessweek, The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine) lived and worked in Shanghai, China, for six years. While reporting on the Wukan protests, the author met activist Zhuang Liehong, who was eventually arrested for his activities. After Hilgers moved to New York, Zhuang contacted her to explain that he and his wife, ­Little Yan, were planning to escape from their American tour group and reside in Flushing, Queens. Then they arrived on her doorstep. ­Hilgers won a MacDowell Fellowship to complete her debut book, ­Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown (starred review, LJ 2/1/18), which chronicles Zhuang and Little Yan’s experiences as new immigrants. ­

  LJ: What drew you to Zhuang and inspired you to tell his story?
  LH: Zhuang is such a wonderful, headstrong, optimistic person, I think it would have been a challenge not to be drawn to his story. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Zhuang pulled me in. The first time we met was in China, in a tea shop he was running in his home village of Wukan. He called me in, offered me tea, and told me his story. It was clear then that Zhuang was a dreamer. He had big aspirations for himself and for his village. He also had a deeply held sense of right and wrong and was a bombastic storyteller. It was the obvious pleasure he took in telling his story, which was not a particularly hopeful one, that at first led me to underestimate him. It took me some time to realize that, in addition to being a dreamer and an idealist, Zhuang was determined. Some of his ideas might have been unrealistic, but Zhuang was always devising backup plans. He likes to say that he isn’t particularly well educated or well spoken, but he is persistent.

  When you set out to write your book, were you intending to profile an activist?
  LH: When [Zhuang and I] first met, I was not aiming to write about a single activist, but rather an entire village of activists. After months of protest in 2011, Wukan had been allowed to elect a representative body—the Wukan Village Committee—and Zhuang was among those elected. I was interested in how this group of villagers, with no previous experience in governance, was attempting to resolve the problems that had caused the protests in the first place. Things didn’t go as planned, and Zhuang fled to New York. The story I was writing changed with his arrival. Suddenly, I was following what seemed to be a tale of an everyday immigrant who had left his activism behind him in China to become an anonymous face in the crowd. I switched gears as his life shifted, and one of the tensions in the book is the struggle that ensued. Zhuang is trying to determine who he is now that he’s in the United States, now that he doesn’t have the reputation he had built [in China], the friends he had made [there], and the respectability that he had painstakingly acquired over years.

  Please describe your relationship with Little Yan.
  LH: It took me longer to get to know Little Yan; she is quiet where her husband is outspoken. She doesn’t volunteer her opinions as quickly. Zhuang sees himself as the hero of his own story. As a villager in Southern China, and as an immigrant, Zhuang has chafed against the limits of his circumstance. Little Yan, however, is more ambivalent. She doesn’t feel she has the space to be as idealistic as Zhuang. She’s practical and wonderfully blunt. She figures out what needs to be done and does it. At the same time, underneath all that work and practicality, Little Yan is very observant. She has had to be to adjust to so many different worlds (Guangzhou, Wukan, Flushing). She puts real work into adapting herself to a new environment. Her observations shaped my understanding of Flushing; in particular how immigration, in removing people from the communities of their hometowns and villages, can shake up social norms. She talked very openly about how many divorcees she met, the affairs people were having, the social status they would have had back in China.

  What led you to include the story of Karen, a classmate of Little Yan?
  LH: The more I got to know Little Yan, the more I wanted to explore the Flushing that she was experiencing, which for a long time was very different from the world Zhuang was living in. Little Yan was worrying about money and occupying herself with the practicalities of making life work in Flushing. And she often talked about those decisions as gendered. I met a few of Little Yan’s friends and Karen stood out as someone who had thought clearly about where she was and what she needed to be happy. Neither Karen nor Little Yan were occupied with differentiating themselves from the other immigrants in Flushing. Both of them were really just looking to carve out a comfortable, happy life for themselves. At the same time, I think they faced similar challenges as Zhuang—they were really considering who they were now they were no longer in China. You don’t have to be a democracy activist to struggle with what it means to be a new arrival in America.

  Can you elaborate on the isolation Zhuang and Little Yan experience?
  LH: My expectation was that new immigrants would have a community that was welcoming and easy to access. For Zhuang and Little Yan, that wasn’t the case. Zhuang, in particular, was slow to trust people. New immigrants are easy to take advantage of, and it can be dangerous not to know how much things cost or how things are typically done. And once you overcome those challenges and are comfortable enough to start making friends, there is the question of people’s work schedules. Everyone is working such long hours, sometimes traveling out of the city for weeks or months at a time. It’s very difficult to make lasting connections.

  Was there research you found while writing the book that surprised you?
  LH: Early on, I remember how shocked I was when faced with the tiny living spaces that are common throughout Flushing; Sunset Park, Brooklyn; and Manhattan’s Chinatown. Looking for Zhuang’s first apartment, I realized you can walk into a reasonably-sized single-family home on a suburban-looking street in Queens and there will be three or four families living there. I spent a few nights in a local hostel, also, and there was no indication from the outside that there were 20 beds in a two-bedroom apartment. At night, you were expected to thread your way quietly through a maze of curtains to find the bed you had rented. In the morning, everyone cycled in and out of the two bathrooms and the kitchen. That hostel was a quick introduction to the transient workforce based in New York. One of the women I met there got a job with a nail salon in Upstate New York; she had been in the United States a total of three days. She was given a time and a street corner to stand on, and was told that a van would pick her up and drive her upstate, where her new boss would provide housing. The next day she left with her suitcase and someone else took her bed. (That woman ended up very happy with that job. We kept in touch and, about six months later, met in Flushing when she came back to send money to her husband and son in China.)

  Are there misconceptions about the process of applying for asylum?
  LH: Most Americans would be surprised at the sheer amount of time someone can spend in limbo, without status. It took Zhuang and Little Yan just over a year to obtain asylum; more than that if you consider how long it took to put together their application. Now, you’ll hear them talking about how lucky they were. They had good lawyers and connections with the Congressional-Executive Committee on China. A year, now, is considered fast. (I also think many people would be surprised that, during those lengthy waits, thanks to temporary work permits, most people have social security numbers and are paying taxes.) Watching Zhuang and Little Yan, the thing that really struck me was the countless opportunities they had to let things fall through the cracks. Even with a very convincing asylum case, Zhuang had to stay on top of his application, follow-up, and propose his own solutions to problems that came up. He had to make sure that no appointments were missed, no letters got lost in the mail. Even though he was moving every few months, even though he couldn’t always read the mail he was being sent, and even when he was working 12 hour days, he and Little Yan had to drop everything when they received a letter from immigration, figure out what they needed to do, and then do it.

  Do you think Zhuang found his American Dream?
  LH: This was a topic I returned to repeatedly over the three years of reporting in Flushing. And it was one that proved difficult to talk about. Zhuang and Little Yan didn’t know what to expect. Their ideas about the United States were mostly vague—slippery generalizations that involved freedom, wealth, and ultimately, comfort. Today, Little Yan repeats a refrain you hear a lot in Flushing: that the streets are crowded, chaotic, and dirty. The trains are old. Zhuang was shocked when he first encountered a homeless person on a New York subway platform. He certainly didn’t expect the kind of bureaucracy he encountered when he applied for asylum. They also hadn’t anticipated the daily humiliation of being completely out of your element. In other ways, however, the United States has lived up to ideals. Zhuang see his adopted country as a place that gives everyone the chance to speak; a place where the truth matters.—Stephanie Sendaula

  This article was published in Library Journal's April 1, 2018 issue. Subscribe today and save up to 35% off the regular subscription rate.
  Filed Under: Books, LJ in Print, Social Sciences Tagged With: LJ_2018_Apr_01 Discussion: Leave a Comment

• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=698#m12259
  Word count: 348

  QUOTED: "Hilgers captures these harsh realities and more in this empathetic and timely tale of exile and the search for new beginnings."

  Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown
  by Lauren Hilgers

  Patriot Number One offers an intimate portrait of one immigrant family's struggles to assimilate into U.S. culture while examining the harsh realities that Chinese immigrants face in pursuing the American dream.

  Zhuang Liehong was a 30-something activist and dreamer from the Guangdong village of Wukan. He became acquainted with journalist Lauren Hilgers while she was reporting on the aftermath of a 2011 protest that swept through the village. Using the code name "Patriot Number One" on social media, Zhuang hatched a plan to obtain tourist visas to the United States, with the intention of seeking political asylum in "a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own." Two years later, Zhuang and his wife, Little Yan, unexpectedly show up at Hilgers's doorstep in the U.S., seeking her assistance in settling in Flushing, N.Y. This begins a journey of discovery, in which Hilgers documents the hardships and turmoil that many immigrants within the community face while settling in the United States. She also examines the roles that infrastructure and networks established immigrants play in helping their countrymen assimilate.

  Despite Hilger's closeness to Zhuang and Little Yan, she maintains a detached distance as the astute and attentive ethnographer observing her subjects. Their lives, she comes to discover, are not so different from the lives of hardworking U.S.-born citizens living paycheck-to-paycheck in search of an American dream that moves in either direction depending on where the political tide falls. Hilgers captures these harsh realities and more in this empathetic and timely tale of exile and the search for new beginnings. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

  Discover: Lauren Hilgers reports on how the harsh realities of assimilation have affected the American dream for a new generation of Chinese immigrants seeking fresh starts.
  Crown, $27, hardcover, 336p., 9780451496133

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/597999205/chinese-dissident-finds-struggles-independence-in-america-after-immigrating
  Word count: 1227

  Chinese Dissident Finds Struggles, Independence In America After Immigrating
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  March 29, 20186:22 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered

  Jessica Cheung
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  Ailsa Chang

  Zhuang Liehong is one of many Chinese immigrants who's made his home in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. Zhuang came to the U.S. seeking asylum from his village in China.
  Courtesy of Zhuang Liehong

  The Flushing neighborhood of New York's Queens borough is home to the largest population of Chinese immigrants in any city outside Asia.

  Zhuang Liehong is one of those immigrants. He arrived in 2014 from Wukan, a small village in the Guangdong province of southern China.

  When he first arrived in Flushing, he says it felt like a city in China.

  "Other than the buildings and Chinese store signs, just look at the pedestrians on the streets," he says. "They're mainly Chinese people."
  Why Abolishing China's Presidential Term Limits Is Such A Big Deal
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  Why Abolishing China's Presidential Term Limits Is Such A Big Deal

  As much as Flushing felt like China, Zhuang says there are some things that make it clear it's not China.

  "Here in Flushing, there are signs for the Democratic Party. On street corners, there are supporters with brochures," Zhuang says. "There are also Christian people doing outreach in the streets. All of this doesn't exist in China. It's not possible."

  In 2014, Zhuang fled Wukan just as the Chinese government was cracking down on protests there. The people of Wukan were demonstrating against government officials for selling communal land to developers.

  People close to him were hauled away to prison. He also says one of his friends died under police custody.

  Zhuang knew he needed to leave China, and he set his sights — as many immigrants do — on New York City.

  He and his wife, Little Yan, devised a plan to sneak into the country as part of a tour group. Once the tour group got to the U.S., the couple quietly broke away and hopped a flight to New York.

  Zhuang Liehong with his wife, Little Yan, and one of his sons, Kaizhi, in 2013 — a year before immigrating to the United States.
  Courtesy of Zhuang Liehong

  At the time Zhuang knew only one person in New York: Lauren Hilgers, a journalist who had visited Wukan to report on the uprisings.

  Hilgers is the author of the new book Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown, in which Zhuang is the central character.

  "As soon as he got to my house he was very intent on getting to Flushing and starting a life, and — he had all of these goals," Hilgers says. "He wasn't going to stay at my house forever."

  Hilgers was right; today Zhuang has a place of his own in Flushing. Though it's on a middle-class, suburban-looking street — manicured front lawns, leafy sidewalks, driveways — Zhuang's family home is a bit less idyllic.

  He, his wife and their two young sons are crammed into a basement, sleeping together in one small bedroom. They share a bathroom and a tiny kitchen with two other people, who also rent space down there. There's scarcely room to move around, but Zhuang insists on certain dignities when people visit, like brewing tea.
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  "We have this traditional virtue of becoming friends through drinking tea," he says. "So whenever a friend arrives, you have to make tea for them."

  Zhuang came to the U.S. for political reasons more than economic ones, and he says that he wasn't hoping to be given "preferential treatment" when he got here.

  "I only wanted to escape the possibility of being persecuted in China," he says. "The pressure in Wukan was that at any moment you could be arrested, at any moment you could be convicted, grabbed and thrown into prison. How long you would be locked up, you wouldn't know. How long you would be sentenced for, you wouldn't know."

  As Hilgers says in her book, Chinese people apply for and receive asylum more often than any other group of immigrants in the U.S. She says there are many reasons for that, including some that are political, like Zhuang's.

  "There's a lot of sympathy for Chinese people because the reasons that they apply with asylum have to do with forced abortions, the one-child policy which strikes quite a chord here," Hilgers says, referencing population-control measures that were eased in 2016. "Political trouble, which I think after Tiananmen Square also was very well-publicized here."

  But even though Zhuang and his family were granted asylum, he had difficulty adapting, as Little Yan was able to go out and get a job while he couldn't work. This went against a traditional Chinese idea and initially made him feel uncomfortable.
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  "In America, it's very difficult for a man without skills to find a job," he says. "To solely rely on her to work, I didn't feel good either."

  But Hilgers says it's common for men and women to exchange roles when it comes to earning money for their family after immigrating.

  "I kind of understand this to be almost a trope of immigration," she says. "These sort of women that do backbreaking work, and support the family and are really practical. A lot of times, men will go out and work in restaurants outside of the city, women will stay here and work, so I think women really shape the community."

  Zhuang now has a job that keeps him busy: driving for Uber. Though he once measured success by the political impact he had, he now has a different definition. Now being successful for him is "to have my own stable life, for my family. We don't necessarily need to be rich," he says.

  But Zhuang still thinks about Wukan and the state of life there.
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  "In Wukan, there is no democracy, rule of law, freedom, and equality. Wukan needs this and the whole China needs to have it," he says. "If China doesn't change its policies, Wukan will never truly have free rule of law, democracy and equal society, good village."

  Until that happens, Zhuang says he cannot say that he's succeeded politically.

  NPR's Hansi Lo Wang and WNYC's Richard Yeh provided translations for this piece. WNYC's Richard Yeh also contributed to voiceovers.
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• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/books/patriot-number-one-lauren-hilgers-review.html
  Word count: 1357

  QUOTED: "It’s a testament to Lauren Hilgers’s rich and absorbing Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown that the patriot of her title, a Chinese activist and immigrant named Zhuang Liehong, comes across as frustrating and, at times, downright infuriating. But Zhuang is also determined and dreamy, suspicious and generous—he becomes real to us, in other words, an inextricable combination of noble and naïve."

  A Chinese Revolutionary, Reinventing Himself in American Exile
  Image
  CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

  By Jennifer Szalai

  March 21, 2018

  查看简体中文版查看繁體中文版

  As futile as it can feel, there’s a lot to be said for frustration. Having our desires and expectations thwarted lets us know where our selves end and where others’ begin. “People become real to us by frustrating us,” the psychoanalyst (and master aphorist) Adam Phillips writes. “If they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.”

  It’s a testament to Lauren Hilgers’s rich and absorbing “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown” that the patriot of her title, a Chinese activist and immigrant named Zhuang Liehong, comes across as frustrating and, at times, downright infuriating. But Zhuang is also determined and dreamy, suspicious and generous — he becomes real to us, in other words, an inextricable combination of noble and naïve.

  Hilgers, a New York-based journalist who lived in Shanghai for six years, has written a penetrating profile of a man and much more besides: an indelible portrait of his wife and their marriage; a canny depiction of Flushing, Queens; a lucid anatomy of Chinese politics and America’s immigration system. Such a comprehensive project could have easily sprawled across a book twice as long, but “Patriot Number One” stays close to the people it follows, in a narrative as evocative and engrossing as a novel.

  We first meet Zhuang in early 2013, when he’s still moored in the village of Wukan, an outpost of booming Guangdong Province, planning his escape. “He suffered from the occasional lapse in reading social cues and fought it with volume, warmth and a strong handshake,” Hilgers writes, in a characteristically vivid description. His audacity had already made him a hero. A little more than a year before, he started an unlikely rebellion after discovering that local officials had been selling off the villagers’ land without their knowledge. Since then, he anticipated a government crackdown, and if he had to leave his beloved Wukan, there was only one place he wanted to go.

  The United States “was a country of justice and freedom, a place with values that paralleled his own,” he reasons. “Work would be easy to find there. People would be friendly.” Zhuang could already envision the hearty welcome an ardent democracy advocate like himself would receive. He was so enamored of his chosen destination that “he had to whisper when he said it: America.”

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  Needless to say, his fantasy of America founders once he reaches its rough shores. And it’s then, when the country frustrates him, that life in America becomes palpable, and exceedingly real.

  Zhuang and his wife, Little Yan, neither of whom speak any English, wait for their asylum applications to come through while they try to eke out a new life in Flushing after arriving on a tourist visa. Little Yan, unrelentingly practical and resigned to “eating bitter,” immediately starts to work in a nail salon; Zhuang, meanwhile, keeps telling her she should quit her job because he’s perpetually on the verge of something big. Ever entrepreneurial, he pursues a number of moneymaking schemes, including a logistically convoluted and barely profitable personal-shopping business, schlepping to an outlet mall north of the city to buy up discounted designer goods and resell them to moneyed customers back in China.

  Hilgers observes all of this with a sharp eye and an open heart. She follows Zhuang and Little Yan around, together and separately, becoming privy to their daily routines and their candid thoughts about America and each other. But Hilgers isn’t in this book more than she needs to be. Aside from hosting the couple in her Brooklyn apartment when they first arrive — the inquisitive Zhuang is curious about everything, including why she owns more than one kitchen knife — Hilgers recedes into the background, the better to let them speak for themselves.
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  Unlike a number of other asylum-seekers from China, Zhuang and Little Yan are in a relatively privileged position: They arrive flush with savings from a land sale, and without crushing debts. At the same time, they have no family, no ready-made network to show them how anything is done. Zhuang never finished middle school. Not to mention that New York City is an extraordinarily expensive place to live.
  Image
  Lauren HilgersCreditErich Hehn

  It takes them 18 months to get permission to bring over their son, whom they left with Little Yan’s family when they traveled to the United States. He was a baby at the time, and has spent half his life apart from his parents. The scene of the couple meeting their son at Kennedy Airport is all the more wrenching for Hilgers’s understated description of what she sees: “When Little Yan reached her hand out to him, he shook his head and backed up a step. He looked up at her as if she were a giant.”

  Hilgers widens her lens to include other Chinese émigrés, and she offers historical context too, including the codified bigotry of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed a 10-year moratorium on immigration by Chinese laborers. She weaves the details into a chapter on Tang Yuanjun, the chairman for Flushing’s Chinese Democracy Parties, who leads a monthly protest in front of the Chinese consulate in Manhattan. After spending eight years in a Chinese prison for his dissident work, he escaped by swimming to Taiwan from a fishing boat.

  Despite what amounts to little more than a cameo appearance, Tang is an intriguing character, and he has some of the best quotes in the book. He continues to be a committed activist even as he gains the realism and perspective of someone who, in his late 50s, has seen it all. He knows people might claim asylum for all sorts of reasons. Still, he hopes that even those whose dissident credentials are less than sterling might learn a thing or two about democracy by attending his meetings. “People are complicated,” Tang says. “If you say they are here for their asylum case, that’s not true. But if you say they are not here for their asylum case, that’s not true.”

  Zhuang’s own activist credentials are never in doubt. If anything, without a good fight to sustain him he begins to drift, and it’s only when Wukan needs him again that he gets a renewed sense of purpose. By the end of the book, he’s traveling across the United States, protesting another government crackdown on his village.

  Tang tells Hilgers that the trajectory for a new émigré tends to follow a certain arc: “In the first year you speak brave, bold words. In the second, nonsense. By the third, you have nothing to say at all.” That doesn’t hold true for Zhuang, who frustrates expectations at every turn.

  Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

  Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown
  By Lauren Hilgers
  324 pages. Crown. $27.
  A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2018, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Immigration Often Demands A Reinvention. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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