The Journey, Episode 2: Intended Parents

Hi, it's Madeline. Before we start this episode, I want to remind you that New Yorker subscribers can listen to all five episodes of The Journey right now. The full series, ad-free, no waiting, right here in Apple Podcasts. To subscribe and get a seven-day free trial, just tap the link at the top of the In the Dark feed. Previously on The Journey. So they started by saying, hey, do you want to have a baby for this? Yeah, basically they were like, hey, Kayla, we have a Chinese couple that's ready to get started. You know, are you interested in talking? And I was like, yes. And so I checked my email and here my attorney had sent us a TikTok. And that's what really stopped me in my tracks. She's like, look at this. She's all, can you imagine? I go, what do you mean, can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for. They put my husband on me and all in the jail. Oh my goodness. And now to a bizarre story. A bizarre story in the San Gabriel Valley. Police say while Sylvia Zeng and Guangzheng Chen were arrested and released, their investigation into them and what went on inside this home continues. I've never talked with anyone. You are the only person I talk with. The story. Trust me. Continue on South Baldwin Avenue for one month. On a good day, the kind without traffic, I live about 20 minutes from Arcadia, a wealthy city in L.A. County. One afternoon, last November, I drove out there with our producer, Natalie Jablonski. Yeah, so you'll see it's like a lot of new builds, a lot of like really, really big houses. Arcadia is referred to locally as the Chinese Beverly Hills because a lot of prosperous Chinese immigrants live there. The city is dense with flashy cars and neo-Mexicans, Mediterranean villas, big stucco houses with red-tiled roofs, shielded by tall hedges or gates. All morning, it'd been raining, and even the palm trees were hard to make out in the mist. So we're getting close? We're very close. This is also the land of white Teslas. Every time I see a white Tesla, I'm like, is it her? We were headed to the house of Sylvia and Guangzheng, the couple who'd used surrogates to have more than 20 kids and who are now under investigation by police. The police and the FBI. This is the house. We pulled up to a mansion surrounded by a low fence. Wow. That is a big house. It really was enormous, with an imposing stone facade, arched entryways, and castle-like turrets flanking the double doors. A white Tesla was parked in the driveway. And all the blinds are drawn. It does have this kind of like fortress feel, like you kind of don't know what's going on in there. This was the mansion where police had shown up a few months earlier after getting a tip about potential child abuse. Inside, they'd found surveillance cameras everywhere, dining areas converted into classrooms, and over a dozen infants and toddlers with buzz cuts. Those children were now in foster care. And for weeks, I'd been trying to get in touch with their parents, Sylvia and Guangzheng. I wanted to understand what was happening to them. What was happening inside the house. And what they'd been planning to do with all these kids. And is it okay to just sort of be around? Are we concerned at all about being spotted or anything? Okay. I made a point to like leave a letter the first or second time I was here. Because I feel like that just makes it more normal. But like, I'm here to talk if you guys want to talk. And I've left lots of messages and stuff, so. Sitting in the car outside their house that rainy afternoon, Natalie and I didn't see the couple, but we did see someone else. Someone who'd become almost as obsessed with a mystery mansion as I was. Oh, Johnny's back. Let's talk to Johnny in a second. - Okay. - I just don't want to miss him. Johnny is a hairstylist. I met him while knocking on doors in the area and started dropping by his place every time I was nearby. - Hi. - We ducked into his garage filled with boxes of shampoo. Oh my God, it's really coming down. - Hello. - Um, hey. - Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you. - We're working together on this. - Oh, nice. - Yes. - Yes. - Working with a group. Well, there's so much to look into. - Johnny has an extensive surveillance system installed around the perimeter of his property to deter potential burglars. And because he lives directly across the street, some of his cameras face Sylvia and Guojun's mansion, and some of theirs seem to face his. It's almost like a surveillance standoff. - Explain to Natalie the setup you have here. - Yeah. - Oh my God. - You see Sylvia there on the top outside? Yeah, right there. - And then you have another one on the corner here. - On the corner here. I'm gonna put some more, too. One more over there in the window, yeah. - Uh-huh. - Yeah, yeah. - The strange thing was, Johnny's dragnet hadn't tipped him off to what was occurring across the street. He told me he was shocked when he first heard the news about the couple's 21 kids. As far as he knew, his cameras had never captured them coming or going. - That's why I said, "Really?" And I said, "I didn't know." - Oh, really? Yeah. - Did you have any idea that they had kids at all? - I saw, I don't know when, I saw two little baby like this. - Like two foot tall, like toddler? - Yeah, toddler. Playing around inside the gate. Bald. - Totally bald? - Yeah. - Like shaved or like? - Yeah, of course, shaved. - Okay. - Yeah, shaved. - Yeah, shaved. Other neighbors we talked to said something similar. They rarely saw kids outside. Some of them didn't know the couple had any children. Johnny was one of several neighbors who told us that what he did notice at the house was not kids, but cars. - A lot of cars parked over here, more than 10s. - More than 10s? - Yeah, more than 10s. - They'd show up in the morning and leave before dinner. - And then all of a sudden, it would be like a normal neighborhood again. - Yeah, yeah. - And on the weekends, you wouldn't see those cars? - No, no, no, no. Yeah, that's why, you know, I was so, you know. - A mansion with a ton of cars parked outside. Owned by a couple whose children never seem to leave. What did you think was going on in the house at the time? - I don't know, like, probably they hiding something. I don't know. - Who were Sylvia and Guojun? And what were they actually up to? From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kaufman, and this is The Journey. Episode 2, Intended Parents. I've been in real estate since 1994. I started off as a receptionist and then I got my license. I was an administrator for a. Tina Powers is in her 60s. She has a morbid sense of humor and a saleswoman's charm. She'd had a long career, even run her own real estate brokerage. But by the spring of 2022, she was looking for work. One day in March, she saw a posting online. I didn't know what it was. It just said for, you know, Udow. They were paying excellent. $25 an hour, to be exact, for an assistant position at a real estate investment firm called Udow Management. When Tina arrived for the interview, she was surprised to find herself not in a commercial district, but on a quiet residential street, standing before the double doors of a palatial home. Inside, the rooms on the first floor were set up as offices, with leather-rolling chairs. And clusters of desks topped with computer screens. A laminated list of workers' rights was pasted on one of the walls. Tina was led upstairs to a room that looked like a security guard's station. There was just TVs everywhere. We had cameras everywhere. There were monitors displaying surveillance footage. And seated before them was the real estate company's owner, Guojun Xuan. He was dressed smartly, in a collared shirt and slacks. But he gave off a bracing expression. And he smelled the odor, as though he'd already knocked back a few. And I interviewed up in his office. And he was already drunk by then, but I just kind of didn't pay attention to that, because they paid well. And he hired me right then and there. And that's how Tina started working inside the Arcadia mansion, and parking her car on Johnny Street. Tina's job was to take calls for Guojun's second-in-command, a thin woman with a distracted, impatient demeanor, and she spoke limited English. This was Sylvia Zhang. So I was really her voice. She was the real estate agent, and I was just her voice out there, and doing what she would do as a real estate agent. She just, I did it because she didn't speak any English. And she didn't understand a lot of the verbiage on the contracts and things. So I had to sit there and explain them to her. A lot of the properties owned by Yudao Management were bought at foreclosure auctions, according to Tina. When I met up with her at her house on a busy street in L.A., she showed me one of the company's internal spreadsheets. They have over 350 properties. A lot of them were over a million, a million, 450,000, 700,000. I mean, not cheap. These were not cheap houses. Yu Dao appeared to be flush with cash, and Tina wondered where all of it might be coming from. And where is he getting that from? Like, it was just always a question. I think they were laundering money. That's what I thought they were doing. An attorney for Guojun told me that his client has never engaged in any illicit financial transactions, including money laundering. Tina found it strange how many of the properties were shuffled between LLCs linked to Guojun, and named after combinations of letters in the alphabet. ABCD, EFG, KLMN, that sort of thing. Tina knew that finding out the purpose of these shell companies would be nearly impossible. Not least because Guojun instructed his employees not to chat with one another. He called it collusion. Tina and her colleagues had to sneak around just to grab lunch. We'd all have to take our separate cars because he would be like, you colluded at lunch because so-and-so was in the car with you. You continue to do that and you won't work. You know what I mean? That type of thing. Multiple people told me Guojun was a controlling, paranoid boss. The surveillance cameras Tina had seen when she showed up for her interview were trained on the employees. One day at work, Tina clicked on an ad for a grocery store. I was looking at an Albertsons ad really quick. I'm like, oh, I got to go to Albertsons before. Oh, boom. Five minutes. Oh, what are you doing? Who came over here? Mr. Chip. Yeah, I can't get down. Oh, you know, hands behind his back, walking around. Tina told me that anytime Guojun spotted something, he'd be like, oh, I'm going to go to the grocery store. When Guojun spotted something he disliked, he'd call a staff-wide disciplinary meeting. Once, when someone had forgotten to flush the toilet, he decreed he would scour his surveillance tapes to identify the culprit. He would come down every day and make a new rule. I sent you the rules, right? The employee handbook listed fines for minor infractions. $10 for parking in front of the garbage cans. $100 if you worked in the accounting department and failed to lock the door. Okay, there's more. Okay. The fine for not turning off the air conditioner is $10. The fine for leaving the lights on is $10. Theft of company property will be taken out and shot. Just kidding. That's what it felt like. That's what it felt like because Guojun had a temper. Made worse by his habit of drinking maotai, a strong, expensive liquor from China. Several employees told me that Guojun had a temper. Several employees told me they'd sometimes see him drinking straight from the bottle. I asked one of Guojun's lawyers about this, and he replied that when his client drinks maotai, it is responsibly and on occasion. In the intended parent profile that they sent to the surrogates, Sylvia and Guojun had described themselves as a loving, married couple with just one child. But according to Tina and other employees, this wasn't, quite accurate. For one thing, the couple already had four children by the time Tina was working inside the house. For another, Sylvia and Guojun weren't actually married, as they'd repeatedly claimed. They did seem to be romantically involved. Tina once saw them ferociously making out at a company dinner. But it was never clear to Tina how they came to know each other. Was Sylvia Guojun's girlfriend, who was now helping out at his business? Or did she start out as his employee? And end up dating her boss? Whatever the arrangement was, it was tense. Tina couldn't understand the couple's arguments, which were in Mandarin. Though, it was easy enough to get the gist. They would scream and fight and throw constantly. Did people tell you that? Yeah. It was so volatile. I was just like, oh God, here we go again. Yeah, and she'd come out crying. And he hates me. And that's how they. He used to play her. Like, oh my God, play her like a fiddle. Sometimes, after a blow-up, Sylvia would turn to Tina for solace. She would tell me, oh, he doesn't think I'm a good real estate agent. And she would just be crying and this, this, and that. So that dynamic, he held her in fear. And that's when she told me, she says, I just came from a small village in China. And coming to the United States, this has all been very new to me. Tina already felt uncomfortable. Working for a day drinker who yelled at his business-slash-romantic partner and surveilled his employees at their desks. And then she learned something else that made her workplace feel even more bizarre. One day, not long after Tina started, a woman came down the stairs. She was covered in tattoos. I never knew her name. We just called her the girl with the tattoos. You just called her the girl with the tattoos? All of us. She had them on her face. She was tattooed from head to toe. The tattooed woman approached one of Tina's colleagues, a young real estate employee named Crystal. The woman told Crystal she worked as a recruiter for another one of Sylvia and Guojun's businesses. And then the woman presented Crystal with an unexpected offer. She told Crystal what she did upstairs and propositioned Crystal. They wanted Crystal to carry a baby. Carry a baby for Mark Surrogacy. The entire time Tina was working inside the mansion, there was a surrogacy agency located just upstairs. Tucked away on the second floor. What am I pulling up? I'm pulling up these registrations. So, yeah, it's incorporated actually May 2021, Mark Surrogacy. Yeah, and all of that makes sense because they were really already, that company was very much going by the time we got there. Yeah. Very much so. But, like, hidden in the house. Very much hidden in the house. The day that the tattooed woman made her pitch to the employer. The day that the tattooed woman made her pitch to the employee downstairs was the first time Tina heard about any of this. So they said, I'm running a surrogacy agency out of the house? Yeah, yeah. And the babies are for all kinds of families? Yeah. The tattooed woman added that she herself had carried for the agency. And it was good money. Yeah, you get paid, you know, because this girl, she had already done two. And she was selling for it, so you could do up to four. Up to four. As in four surrogate pregnancies. Crystal said no thank you. And that was that. But the situation was strange enough that employees gave the upstairs office a nickname. The Egg Factory. And despite Guojun's prohibition on chit-chat, all kinds of rumors started to circulate. One of the theories Tina heard was that the kids were being commissioned by Chinese nationals who were looking to have children with American citizenship. The American benefits, that's why they're having the kids. What benefits? The premise was, is that they're going to have these kids, and they're going to sell these kids to these Chinese men. Is that what they told you, or that's what you think? That's what was said. That's what we were assuming that they were doing. There's not much of a paper trail in English on either Sylvia Zhang or Guojun Chuan. But when I scoured what was available on China's equivalent of Google, with the help of three researchers who speak Mandarin, I found quite a lot about Guojun. It turned out he had something of a public profile in China, as a politico and successful businessman. Guojun was born in 1959 in a city south of Shanghai. By the time he was a teenager, he'd relocated some 2,000 miles away, to Xinjiang, China's western-most region. In his 20s and 30s, Guojun climbed the ranks of various state-owned firms. By the late 2000s, he was being celebrated in the local press for saving a frozen food company from bankruptcy. We found a short entry on Guojun in an encyclopedia called "Outstanding Figures in China's Regional Economy" from 2007. from 2006. It describes him as a young entrepreneur with a pioneering spirit who'd benefited from China's liberalizing markets. Guo Jun had successfully taken the frozen food company private, and with the earnings, he'd capitalized on China's real estate boom. According to Chinese court records, he became a private lender, demanding high interest rates. All the while, Guo Jun was getting into local politics. He was eventually named a deputy to the People's Congress for Xinjiang. The role is kind of equivalent to that of a state representative in the U.S. During his five-year term, Guo Jun was known for proposing more legislations He earned the nickname Spiky Head Deputy, Spiky Head being regional slang for pain in the ass. Guojun seemed to embrace this reputation. In 2012, he told a Chinese newspaper, quote, He may have offended the wrong people. Around 2013, Guojun started moving his money abroad, investing in property in Southern California. I wondered if this timing was just a coincidence. Several people I spoke to suggested it wasn't, because 2013 was also the year that China's new president, Xi Jinping, announced a sweeping anti-corruption initiative to target senior Communist Party leaders and low-level bureaucrats. Chinese investors are both building and buying U.S. homes at an unprecedented rate. Chinese nationals now buy more U.S. homes. Thirty-five percent of reported purchases by Chinese buyers were in California. Why? Because it's closer. I don't know for sure if this is why Guojun left China and came to the U.S. I tried to ask him directly and got a response from one of his attorneys. He told me that the anti-corruption initiative was unrelated to his client's, quote, But by 2018, Guojun seems to have moved to the U.S. full-time. His first long-term residence was far more modest than the Arcadia Mansion. It was a two-bedroom house in Roland Heights, another neighborhood in L.A. County. One evening, I drove out there with a Mandarin translator I'd been working with, named Zimo Li. A student journalist and history major at UCLA. And as we were heading over, she realized she'd grown up just a few blocks from Guojun's old house. It's really crazy. I used to live right there. And this is, like, a very common walking area. Like, I learned to drive probably on, like, these streets. Roland Heights, like Arcadia, is in the San Gabriel Valley, where many of the shopkeepers and workers live. And many of the shopkeepers and residents speak Mandarin. Just down the street from where Guojun lived, Zimo and I knocked on the door of a house and met Rui Wu and his wife. The two of them told us they definitely remembered Guojun. He speaks so loud, you know. He make a phone call from across the street. I can hear from my house. Rui Wu: Ray became friendly with Guojun, who invited him over for dinner. Big meals with other Chinese men from around the neighborhood, crowded around a table. Guojun appeared to live by himself. Rui once overheard him telling someone back in China that he was so lonely in the States, his only friends were the squirrels. He said, "You know what, you guys doesn't know how lonely I am here. You know, all of my company is some squirrel here." He said, "That's what I did. I just talked to squirrel. I have nobody talking, I have no friends." But eventually, Rui learned that Guojun was married to a woman in China. Her name was Yuchen Li, and they had an adult son. Rui actually met the son while he was visiting and took him out to a shooting range at Guojun's request. According to Chinese business records, his wife and son appear to control many of the family's companies in Xinjiang. We weren't able to reach either of them. Guojun himself never traveled back to China, as far as Rui could tell. Rui suspected that he left the country following the crackdown on corruption. These suspicions grew after Rui gave his neighbor a ride to a meeting. Guojun was talking loudly, as usual, about a business interest back home. On the call, Guojun's wife was explaining to him that it was no longer possible to bribe government officials. Guojun disagreed. And he just yelled to his wife and said, "You know what? No, that's not true. You give them the money too little. You know, give them more." One of Guojun's attorneys told me his client never engaged in bribery. As a neighbor, Guojun could be puzzling. I talked with two sisters who lived across the street, Cindy and Tracy Galdamez. They sometimes spotted him walking around in his underwear and yelling into his phone. They told me Guojun once offered them 500 dollars. And I'm like, "No, no." And he's like, "Take it." And his interpreter's like, "This is an offense if you don't take it." And we're like, "Okay." There were other gifts, too. Fruit from his trees. Groceries from Costco. It's possible Guojun was simply being generous. But that generosity was getting lost in translation. The sisters wondered if he was trying to buy their goodwill. Then there was the interesting part. Guojun was saying, "You know what? You know what? You don't have to do that. You have to do that. You have to do that. You have to do that." And he said, "No, no, no. You don't have to do that." And he said, "No, no, no. You don't have to do that." Then there was the incident one night. When Guojun's wife, Yuchen Li, was in town. Cindy got particularly worried. He was chasing her. He chased her, like, behind the gate. Yeah, and that's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun. And I mean, there was a whole, like, four cars that came and, like, it was kind of like a standoff. The sheriffs came in front of the house and they went, they finally got through the gate and went inside. So I don't know what happened after that, but he didn't get arrested. Rui Wu also told me a similar sounding story. He remembered that Guojun explained to police that he'd been using a BB gun to shoot a squirrel. So much for his only friends. And then one day, Guojun's neighbors in Roland Heights stopped seeing him around. I don't know when, suddenly, I just realized, "God, he's disappeared from here." He didn't say bye. He didn't say hi. He didn't say anything. Just disappeared. I checked with my other neighbors, "Hey, did you see that guy?" "Oh, he move out." "He moved away. Nobody know." Which makes sense, because in 2021, he purchased the mansion in Arcadia. Or to be exact, it was purchased through an LLC with links to him. He was still married to Yuchen Li, but by then, he'd formed an intimate connection with someone new: Sylvia. Sylvia had come to the U.S. from China in 2016. At the time, she was married to an elderly man with American citizenship. They shared a young daughter. According to Sylvia's divorce filings, a few years after arriving in the States, her husband abandoned the family, and she had to look for a job to support her child, who just turned eight. Around the same time, Sylvia got a real estate license and started working for Guojun. It seems that Sylvia first got into the business as just an applicant for a job. That's Zemo again, our translator, filling me in on what she heard from a former employee who speaks Mandarin. That employee asked for anonymity, because she was scared of Guojun. "And what she said that was pretty interesting is that it seems that, from her perspective at least, that Guojun was using money to control Sylvia, and that it seems that she thinks that Sylvia really doesn't have a lot of money. Like, Sylvia tends to be the face of a lot of this, while Guojun kind of like hides behind her almost." The former employee told Zemo that Sylvia made herself indispensable to her boss, that she was willing to do whatever Guojun needed done. In late 2020, that meant becoming pregnant, but the circumstances of the pregnancy were not exactly what they seemed. The former employee was under the impression that Guojun had paid Sylvia to carry a child for him, that Sylvia was acting as a surrogate. "Like, Sylvia needed money and a job, and wanted to do that. And then she realized that having a baby comes with $5,000. Yeah, give birth to a kid, get $5,000." According to sources and documents I obtained, Zemo was the first person to get a baby. "The first person to get a baby, get $5,000." "The first person to get a baby, get $5,000." According to sources and documents I obtained, the baby Sylvia was carrying in 2020 was conceived through IVF, with Guojun's sperm and an anonymous donor egg. A lawyer for the family denied that Sylvia had ever worked as one of Guojun's surrogates. In the spring of 2021, Sylvia delivered a son, and she and the infant, along with her preteen daughter, all moved into the mansion in Arcadia. Sylvia launched Mark's surrogacy from the mansion's second floor, and started selling houses through Yudow Management on the first. She worked non-stop. The anonymous employee said she could sense Sylvia's pain. Sylvia would sometimes talk about wanting to move somewhere new. The employee thought that if Sylvia had money of her own, she would have run away. Instead, Sylvia soon became pregnant, again. with another son. It's not clear who the father of this child is, though she has at times indicated it was Guojun. Sylvia gave birth that next summer, in 2022, and returned to work right away. By then, the couple had five children. There was Sylvia's daughter from her previous relationship, who was now 10 and looked a lot like her. There were the two baby boys Sylvia had given birth to, just over a year apart, and two more children, a three-year-old and an infant, carried by surrogates. And it's at this point, in the middle of 2022, that the couple's reproductive spree started to pick up momentum. By the end of December, Sylvia and Guojun had become parents to an additional five kids, also carried by surrogates. In less than a year, the couple had doubled the size of their brood to 10. Tina Powers, the real estate employee, wasn't aware of the family's rapid expansion because, by the end of 2022, she no longer worked in the house. She'd been miserable since she'd started the job in April. But she'd waited, hoping to get fired so she could collect unemployment benefits. That finally happened in September. The next year, in 2023, she and five of her colleagues banded together to file a class-action lawsuit. They accused Sylvia and Guojun of withholding pay and breaks. That's how I'd found Tina, actually. I'd been searching through court records in L.A. County. And it's here, in the courts, that the document trail on Sylvia and Guojun becomes a lot more substantial. It turned out, Tina was far from the only person to have filed a lawsuit against the couple. I found that workers and tenants had sued Sylvia, Guojun, and their LLCs at least nine times in the past five years. A lot of these complaints involved working conditions, but there were also allegations that Guojun could be violent. Some plaintiffs claimed Guojun had beaten them up. One contractor told me Guojun had pushed him so hard he couldn't raise his right arm. In a particularly memorable case that settled last year, a manager alleged that Guojun retaliated against him after he objected to Guojun's aggressive eviction tactics. He'd seen Guojun attempt to kick down the door to a rental property, and fire a taser at a tenant's dog. After the manager raised concerns, Guojun allegedly hit him in the arm, threw rocks at him, and took an assault rifle out from the trunk of his car. When police arrived, Guojun told them it was a BB gun. I kept encountering Guojun's fearsome reputation. When I visited the house of his former driver, the driver told me his old boss, Guojun, had a lot of powerful connections and warned me, don't fuck with him. Be careful. Hello, this is Ava. Hello, Ava. My name is Frank Acuna. The reason for the phone call is a couple in Arcadia. One day, I got a call from Frank Acuna, yet another former employee suing Guojun for labor violations. Are you still investigating that story? Yes, very much so. Okay. Let me tell you my affiliation with that. And if you want to continue, I happen to be an open book. Great. Okay. In 2023, Frank worked as an architectural designer for Guojun's real estate firm, which had been renamed since Tina left. They changed the name of that company all the time. They call it Pacific Real Estate was one name. The other name was ABC Investment. Then you'll get a kick out of the next name. ABCD Investment. Mm-hmm. Okay. Like Tina, Frank found the working environment at Guojun's real estate firm bizarre. The Chinese employees he worked with were told to call Guojun teacher. Guojun and Sylvia were constantly getting into huge blow-up fights. I mean, murder screens. You know, as you heard, I've heard of that before. And there was the Maotai. You do also know about a teacher's drinking problem. And there was the day Frank walked into Guojun's office and saw a gun lying on his desk. Another time, Frank told me he'd seen a collection of assault rifles hidden in a safe behind a thick door made of reinforced steel. How did you know that about the weapons? Did you ever see him open it? Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know, he was closing it when I, you know, knocked on the door. And I said, oh, maybe he's a, you know, he likes guns as a hobby, but when you do that many, nah. So it's definitely got to be something. Frank heard rumors that his boss had ties to organized crime. When you first decided to sue, did you have any fear in launching the suit? No, I don't. I don't, I don't, I'm not scared of anybody. Go ahead, point a gun at my head and I'll be basically telling you you'll be doing me a favor. If you got the guts. Unlike Tina, Frank never worked inside the couple's home. Perhaps to make room for their rapidly growing family, the couple had moved their real estate and surrogacy offices out of their house and into a sprawling office complex in the nearby city of El Mani. The complex was called Pacific Place and Guojun owned some of the buildings. I'd actually been curious about this address pretty early on in my reporting because many of those LLCs with their fungible alphabet soup names had been registered there. From the outside, Pacific Place seemed like a regular office building. But when Frank passed by, driving late at night, he saw lots of people coming in and out of the building as though it was only then that the office was coming to life. What did you think it was? It's like, oh, they're doing something inside there. Plus, you know, they've got people living in there at nighttime and it's not a place to have residents if anything. I heard the same thing from another worker. He goes by the American nickname Zane and he too had clocked men shuffling into Pacific Place after dark. Zane had noticed these men because he and his fellow construction workers had been staging a protest. According to Zane, Guojun's company owed them tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. So, Zane had actually spent several nights camped out at the property sleeping in his car. Zane showed me the videos he recorded from the protest. He and his colleagues are holding cardboard signs that read arrears of wages, I need salary, and I work hard. In the videos, I could see Sylvia wearing a pink blazer and white sneakers and trying to stay off camera. One of her real estate employees shouts profanities at the protesters. You don't have any money to pay! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! I got it from you, man! He's shouting, scoundrels, we're not paying you a cent. Fuck you all to death. As for what was happening at night at Pacific Place, Zane figured it was after-hours construction. Frank Acuna thought it was an illegal massage parlor, to put it delicately. But, neither suspected what was actually going on at their boss's building. Illegal drugs, firearms, and gambling. It was all allegedly happening, at a property managed by the man at the center of the surrogacy scandal that centered here in Pacific Place, it turned out, was housing an illicit casino and an elaborate drug manufacturing operation. Both enterprises were allegedly run by one of the building's longtime tenants, who was renting space from Guojun. This tenant had been previously sentenced to four years in federal prison for running a massive immigration fraud scheme. His name was Harun Ma, and his nickname was Dragon. Harun "Dragon" Ma is the ringleader of the unlicensed gambling and narcotics activities carried out at this property and others. Police have raided Pacific Place and other addresses linked to Guojun or Dragon multiple times over the years, and they've uncovered an array of illicit commodities. Gambling machines with flashing lights, 20,000 vape cartridges, trash bags full of weed, a stolen Uzi gun, boxes of ammo, counterfeit cash, plastic bundles of meth, and a psilocybin mushroom farm with hundreds of pounds of shrooms sprouting in boxes and jars and petri dishes. In the summer of 2025, just two months after the news broke about Guojun's reproductive exploits, the city of Almani filed a lawsuit against Guojun, Dragon, and a few of their associates and associated LLCs. To be clear, this is a civil case, not a criminal one. Guojun himself hasn't been accused of selling drugs. or of engaging in any criminal behavior here. Instead, the city is suing him for allegedly turning a blind eye to the gambling and narcotics activities that appeared to be flourishing at his property. Dragan could not be reached for comment. I wanted to get Guojun and Sylvia's response to the dizzying array of allegations that had been made against them. I tried to reach them by phone, email, and in person, but they declined to speak with me. So I arranged an interview with one of their lawyers. His name is Ray Xu. Hello, this is Ray Xu speaking. Hey, Ray, this is Ava from The New Yorker. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, thanks. Ray has defended Sylvia, Guojun, and their companies in several cases, including the class action filed by Tina that settled last fall. I asked Ray about all the lawsuits brought by Guojun's former employees, alleging that Guojun violated labor laws. I wanted to just get a better sense of your response to those claims and whether or not you thought they had any merit, how you view them, and how your clients view them. I was expecting Ray to say something pro forma and lawyerly, but his response was unconventional. Our clients are actually very feisty, so he actually got into physical fights with those workers, and those workers basically retaliated against our clients by filing employment law claims. Feistiness was not an employment law defense I'd heard before. And as for physical fights, that's exactly what some of Guojun's former employees were alleging, that Guojun had beat them up. But Ray told me these personal injury or PI claims were unfair. After all, Guojun had also been hurt. Our client's the old guy. He got beaten up. And then the worker filed a PI case saying he got assaulted in battery for a photo shoot. You know, our clients got injured very badly. Hmm. Yeah. Ray told me the workers were filing lawsuits to retaliate for their injuries. Eventually, he said, they all settled with what he called miserable amounts. I asked Ray about the pending lawsuit brought by the city of El Mani, the one involving the underground casino, psychedelic mushrooms, and alleged ringleader known as Dragon. Ray hadn't been hired to defend Guojun in this case, but he was happy to offer him a chance. And he offered his point of view. And what do you make of those charges? Well, I have to defend the clients. So I have to say, I have to, you know, even problematic clients are entitled to representation. So I'll do what I can do. Even problematic clients are entitled to representation, he said. And added that all the activities at Pacific Place were the tenants' fault. He said, Since Ray had been rather forthcoming so far, I wondered if he would have any insight into the most serious allegations against his clients. That they'd abused their children or ignored such abuse. Ray placed the blame on the nanny who'd cared for the two-month-old child who'd ended up in the hospital. He said, if the police were going to look at anyone, it would be her. Eventually, they are targeting the domestic worker who cared for the baby. He actually, she may have, that individual may have come in, they did child abuse. But that has nothing to do with our clients at the moment. As for the other questions I had about why the couple had amassed such a big family, their chatty labor lawyer told me he wasn't at liberty to respond on the record. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ So I'd learned a lot about Sylvia, a single mom strapped for cash, and about Guojun, her mercurial paramour with an American dream and a penchant for waving weapons around. But I still didn't understand why they'd done all this. Why have more than 20 kids through surrogacy? When the news first came out, the first time the couple's marriage first broke, in the summer of 2025, the dominant theory was that the couple was having all these kids to sell them. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ This smells like trafficking, looks like trafficking ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory ♪ ♪ I feel like it's human trafficking for babies ♪ ♪ ♪ The police seem to be looking into this. They referred to it in their early interviews. ♪ ♪ We believe that it extended beyond our city, into possibly other parts of the country, and maybe internationally. And it was the possibility of child trafficking that apparently got the FBI to open an investigation. The Bureau refused to comment on the case, but Arcadia Police confirmed that their detectives are working with the FBI. ♪ ♪ But, as far as I could tell, there wasn't that much evidence to support this theory. For one thing, the financial incentives were all wrong. It had likely cost Sylvia and Guojun at least $150,000 to have each child through surrogates. Add in the cost once the child was born, the years of health insurance, the fleet of nannies, the clothes, the food, and each child could have cost them around half a million dollars. At least. If you needed to recoup all those investments, that four- or five- or six-year-old would be a pretty expensive kid to sell. Economics aside, there was another, more biological problem with the notion that these kids were for sale. In all the surrogacy contracts I'd reviewed or heard about, Guojun was described as the child's genetic father. It was difficult to imagine why any aspiring dad would want to purchase a kid with Guojun's genetic material when they could simply hire a surrogate of their own. I talked with our producer Natalie about this, again and again. Why would anyone want to buy a kid with Guojun? Why would anyone want to buy a kid with this other guy's sperm? Right. I was really hung up on this. That's the part that doesn't make sense. No one's going to spend a million dollars on a kid that has some other 60-year-old guy's sperm. The other thing that wasn't adding up for me was that the children were all accounted for in Los Angeles. Even if trafficking had been Sylvia and Guojun's original intention, I didn't come across evidence that any children had been sold, or that Guojun and Sylvia had ever tried. So what else could it be? Guojun had actually offered his own answer in the only interview he'd granted after his arrest. He spoke with World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper, and vehemently denied the child trafficking rumors. He told the reporter he understood why police might find his number of children unusual. His goal, however, was simple. He'd always wanted a big family. Under China's one-child policy, that hadn't been possible. But now, it seemed, he was making up for lost time. He said, "Being surrounded by so many kids in old age was a joy. And what he hoped for most of all was for each of his children to have careers that would one day surpass his own." Guojun didn't let his own career go unmentioned either. In the interview, he boasted about his reputation in the Chinese-American community and also told the reporter that he had connections to the Trump administration. He said he was a member of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and of something he called the White House Advisory Committee. I later found that he'd even printed a business card listing himself in these roles. A White House official told me she could not find any record confirming his positions there. Neither could I. But Guojun's political aspirations appear to run deep. Several employees told me that Guojun wanted one of his children to become president of the United States. Many of his sons and daughters were named after U.S. presidents and other political leaders. Apparently, by having as many kids as possible, Guojun was hoping to increase the odds that one of them would succeed. Guojun's goals, as he's described them, might sound impractical or grandiose. But they do seem to be part of a growing trend. Advances in reproductive technology have enabled men to procreate at new, industrialized scales. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has had at least 14 children with four different women using IVF. And has reportedly expressed interest in hiring surrogates to have even more. Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of the messaging platform Telegram, has described the propagation of his own genes as a civic duty. Durov has conceived six children naturally, fathered more than 100 through sperm donations, and drafted plans to grant all of them access to his multi-billion dollar fortune. Xu Bo, the Chinese video game billionaire, has conceived more than 100 children through surrogacies, with 12 of those carried out in the U.S. but if Guojun's project was part of this broader movement toward reproductive maximalism if it wasn't a trafficking scheme but a rather distorted vision of family produced from a rather distorted vision of one's own importance to the world the question I was left with was a different one why was the American surrogacy industry willing to provide exactly what Guojun and these other rich men were looking to buy that's next time on The Journey she mentioned to me oh they want you to name the baby and his American name so I'm like this is weird why would you do that why would you want me to name your baby me and my co-worker we named her the surrogate pimp she wanted to have a lot of surrogates at one time we would never build a welfare system a child welfare system the way that surrogacy is allowed to run we would never build that we're here because we love families we want families to grow I'm really afraid that people who have no other way to have a family this will be taken away from them yes I changed somebody's life but it wasn't all for good you know and that's going to follow me forever if you're a New Yorker subscriber you can listen to the rest of The Journey right now ad free in Apple Podcasts to become a subscriber tap the button at the top of the in the dark feed for non-subscribers new episodes will be released every Tuesday the journey is written and produced by me Ava Kaufman senior producer Natalie Jablonski and producer Raymond Tungakar Samara Fremark is the managing producer for the series it's edited by Allison McAdam additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeline Barron theme and original music by Alex Weston the journey is written and produced by me Ava Kaufman additional music by Chris Julin and Allison Leighton-Brown this episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel our art is by Vartika Sharma art direction by Aviva Mikelov and Ben Kothi fact-checking by Inwo Shi additional reporting and translation by Zimo Lee our summer research assistant is Ethan Kahn legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray our managing editor is Julia Rothschild with additional support from Kiara Ortiz thanks also to Parker Jesko the editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick if you have comments or story tips please send them to the team at inthedarkatnewyorker.com and make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts and you can find us on Twitter @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com and on Facebook @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com and on Twitter @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com and on Twitter @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com and on Facebook @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com and on Twitter @Inthedarkatnewyorker.com