‘Patriot Number One’ review: Lauren Hilgers chronicles the ups and downs of a Chinese immigrant in Flushing, Queens

Like many immigrants to the United States, Zhuang Liehong arrived with big plans for the future. He was already a semi-celebrity at home in China after helping foment bold protests in the 2010s in Wukan village. He was a passionate believer in democracy, and when the expected crackdown came from the Chinese authorities, he knew where he wanted to escape to.

Then he arrived in Flushing, Queens.

What emerges in Lauren Hilgers’ quietly emotive “Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown” is the distance between expectation and reality in the modern immigrant experience. Zhuang and his wife, Little Yan, were never naive enough to believe they’d find gold-paved streets. But they didn’t expect things to be so hard, either.

Zhuang landed on Hilgers’ doorstep in a 2014 snowstorm, unfamiliar with Western food and the English language. Hilgers, a journalist who has reported extensively from China, knew Zhuang from his Wukan activism, and she tags along to observe his new life in New York City.

It is no spoiler to say that Zhuang’s limited fame did not grant him or his wife a hero’s welcome. While a chunk of savings eased their long wait for asylum, the young couple was not immune to the shock that eventually hits all migrants to the great American metropolis: good jobs are tough to find, housing is expensive, and life’s hard.

“Eat bitter,” Little Yan’s family taught her about enduring hardship as a young girl. And at first it is she who moved to make a real life for the family in America, with acts of quiet bravery pointedly noted by Hilgers: Little Yan traveling in strange vans to her nail salon job, an occupation whose fumes can give pounding headaches. Or taking the leap to night classes at the Long Island Business Institute with the dream of someday perhaps getting a better job.

Hilgers carefully documents the ebbs and flows of the couple’s marriage, as Zhuang toggles somewhat aimlessly through jobs and entrepreneurial schemes while still trying to keep alive his activist past. For large passages of the book, nothing particularly extraordinary happens to the new arrivals, or their fellow “min yun” democracy activists and other acquaintances in Flushing, who largely escape both nightmare situations or extreme success.

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The emotional exceptions are real high points, as when the couple’s toddler Kaizhi finally receives permission to enter the United States and does so, hardly remembering his parents. Wonderfully evocative sections fellow about the child’s quick embrace of a new country, helped along by Zhuang’s relentless optimism: “In two days we won’t seem like strangers,” he says that first night.

Politically, the book does not often need to stretch for melodramatic high points, either. Donald Trump is a minimal presence, the object of some concern but not enormous fear. Toward the end of the book, Hilgers documents a 2017 protest attended by Zhuang at which he hopes to raise awareness about the crackdowns in Wukan. The scene? A meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. Zhuang’s protest on American soil was mostly futile, though he escaped unharmed from the exercise of this vital part of our national political culture. In his home village, similar acts have brought him and others intimidation, jail sentences and even violent threats.

Escaping all that is what brought Zhuang to America, where he found different hopes and hardships — the regular ones found by all immigrants. The country doesn’t need Trump to make the immigrant experience strange and discomfiting. Hilgers shows how difficult yet vital it always is.