The Journey, Episode 2: Intended Parents

0:00Previously on The Journey.

0:30Oh my goodness. And now to a bizarre story in the San Gabriel Valley. Police say while Sylvia Zing and Guangdong 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.

1:03Continue on South Baldwin Avenue for one mile. 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-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.

1:47So we're getting close? We're very close. This is also the land of white Teslas. Every time I see a white tussle, I'm like, is it her? We were headed to the house of Sylvia and Guojun, the couple who'd used surrogates to have more than 20 kids, and who are now under investigation by 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.

2:37This 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 Guojun. I wanted to understand 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? or are we concerned at all about being spotted or anything?

3:17Okay. 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 that, like, I'm here to talk if you guys want to talk. And I've lost some 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.

3:58Hi. We ducked into his garage, filled with boxes of shampoo. Oh, my God, it's really coming down. Hey. Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. We're working together on this. Oh, nice. Yes. Working with a group. 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 stuff you have here.

4:33I have a CCTV there on the top, outside, yeah, right there. And then you have another one on the corner here. On the corner here. I'm going to put someone, two, 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?

5:10Uh, I saw, I don't know when, I saw two little babies like this. Like two foot tall, like toddler? Yeah, toddler, playing around inside the gate. Bold. Totally bold? Yeah. Like, like shaved or like? Yeah, of course, shaved. Okay. 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 10. More than 10? Yeah, more than 10. They'd show up in the morning and leave before dinner.

6:01And 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.

6:12A mansion with a ton of cars parked outside, owned by a couple whose children never seemed to leave. What did you think was going on in the house at the time? I don't know, like, probably they're hiding something. I don't know. Who were Sylvia and Guojun? And what were they actually up to?

6:47From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kaufman, and this is The Journey. Episode 2, Intended Parents.

7:03I'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 mordant 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.

7:58Inside, 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 station. There was just TVs everywhere. He had cameras everywhere. There were monitors displaying surveillance footage, and seated before them was the real estate company's owner, Guo Junxuan. He was dressed smartly, in a collared shirt and slacks, but he gave off a bracing 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.

8:45And 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 who 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.

9:27A lot of the properties owned by Udow 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, seven, I mean, not cheap. These were not cheap houses. Yudao 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.

10:04An 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. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, M, N, 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, Like, you colluded at lunch because so-and-so was in the car with you.

10:54You 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 Alberts's before. Oh, boom. Five minutes. Oh, what are you doing? Who came over here? Mr. Shep. Yeah, he came down. Oh, you know, he ends behind his back walking around. Tina told me that anytime Guojun spotted something he disliked, he'd call a staff-wide disciplinary meeting.

11:37Once, 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 used to do the rules, right? The employee handbook listed fines for minor infractions. $10 for parking in front of the garbage cans. $100 if he 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.

12:21That's what it felt like because Guojun had a temper, made worse by his habit of drinking mao thai, a strong, expensive liquor from China. 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 mao thai, it is responsibly and on occasion.

12:47In 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?

13:28Or did she start out as his employee and end up dating her boss?

13:37Whatever 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. It was just like, oh God, here we go again. Yeah, and she'd come out crying and he hates me. And that's how he used to play her. Like, oh my God, play her like a fiddle. Sometimes after a blowup, 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.

14:17So 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.

15:00All of us did. She had him on her face. She was tatted 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.

15:52The 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's 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 employee downstairs was the first time Tina heard about any of this. So they said, I'm running a surrogacy agency at the house?

16:37Yeah, 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 telling her, she 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.

17:25The American benefits, that's why they're having the kids. What benefits? The premise was 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 we were assuming that they were doing.

17:54There's not much of a paper trail in English on either Sylvia Zhang or Guo Junquan. 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.

18:22Guojun 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 westernmost 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 Guozhun in an encyclopedia called Outstanding Figures in China's Regional Economy from 2006. It describes him as a young entrepreneur with a pioneering spirit who'd benefited from China's liberalizing markets. Guozhun had successfully taken the frozen food company private, and with the earnings, he'd capitalized on China's real estate boom.

19:16According to Chinese court records, he became a private lender, demanding high interest rates. All the while, Guojun 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, Guojun was known for proposing more legislation than any of his peers. 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, I'm someone who likes to meddle in other people's business and often offends people.

20:06He 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. And scores of Chinese elites and business leaders started shifting their money into American real estate. Chinese investors are both building and buying U.S. homes at an unprecedented rate.

20:49Chinese nationals now buy more U.S. 35 % 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, decision to pursue the American dream. 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.

21:29County. One evening, I drove out there with a Mandarin translator I'd been working with named Zemo Lee, 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 Gojun'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 residents speak Mandarin. Just down the street from where Guojun lived, Zemo and I knocked on the door of a house and met Rei Wu and his wife.

22:17It's raining, right? It's raining. No problem. Don't take off your shoes. Keep on. Oh, keep on? Okay. Yeah, thank you. 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. Ray became friendly with Guo Jun, who invited him over for dinner. Big meals with other Chinese men from around the neighborhood, crowded around a table. Guo Jun appeared to live by himself. Ray once overheard him telling someone back in China that he was so lonely in the States, his only friends were the squirrels. You know what?

22:58You guys doesn't know how lonely I am here. You know, 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 friend. But eventually, Ray learned that Guojun was married to a woman in China. Her name was Yuchin Li, and they had an adult son. Ray 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 Ray could tell.

23:40Ray suspected that he left the country following the craft down on corruption. These suspicions grew after Ray 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, said, 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.

24:22As a neighbor, Gwo Jun could be puzzling. I talked with two sisters who lived across the street, Cindy and Tracy Galdamas. They sometimes spotted him walking around in his underwear and yelling into his phone. They told me Gwo Jun once offered them$500. And I'm like, no, no. And he's on, 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 Guo Jun was simply being generous. But that generosity was getting lost in translation. The sisters wondered if he was trying to buy their goodwill.

25:04Then there was the incident one night, when Guo Jun's wife, Yujin Lee, 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 in. Like, it was kind of like a standoff. The sheriffs came in front of the house and they finally got through the gate and went inside. So I don't know what happened after that, but he didn't get arrested. Rae 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.

25:46So 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 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 moved out and moved to where? Nobody knows. 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.

26:34Sylvia. 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.

27:21That 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 Guo Jun was using money to control Sylvia. And that it seems that she thinks that Sylvia really doesn't have a lot of money and is like Sylvia tends to be the face of a lot of this while Guo Jun 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 Guo Jun needed done. In late 2020, that meant becoming pregnant. But the circumstances of the pregnancy were not exactly what they seemed.

28:14The former employee was under the impression that Guo Jun 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, 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 Yudao Management on the first She worked non-stop The anonymous employee said she could sense Sylvia's pain.

29:26Sylvia 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.

30:00By 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.

31:01Tina 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 LA County. And it's here, in the courts, that the document trail on Sylvia and Guojun becomes a lot more substantial.

31:47It 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 Guo Jun 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 Guo Jun retaliated against him after he objected to Guo Jun's aggressive eviction tactics.

32:33He'd seen Guo Jun 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.

32:58I kept encountering Guojun's fearsome reputation. When I visited the house of his former driver, the driver told me his old boss had a lot of powerful connections and warned me, don't fuck with him. Be careful.

33:19Hello, 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.

34:07the 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 screams. You know, have you heard of that before? And there was the Maotai. You do also know about the 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.

34:58How 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. Frankert rumors that his boss had ties to organized crime. When you first decided to sue, did you have any fear? No, 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've got the guts.

35:41Unlike 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.

36:27What 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 residence, 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.

37:09Zane 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.

37:37He'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.

38:18Both 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 Haorun Ma, and his nickname was Dragon. A Hauran Dragon mob as 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 Guogen 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.

39:17In the summer of 2025, just two months after the news broke about Guojun's reproductive exploits, the city of Elmani 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.

40:01to 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 Hsu. Hello, this is Ray Hsu 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.

40:39I 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.

41:21But Ray told me these personal injury, or PI claims, were unfair. After all, Guojun had also been hurt. Our client is the old guy. He got beaten out. And then the worker filed a P.I. case saying he got assaulted in battery. But photos show our clients got injured very badly. 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.

42:05Ray hadn't been hired to defend Guo Jun in this case, but he was happy to offer 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 tenant's fault. 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.

42:51Ray 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 committed 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.

43:46So I 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 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.

44:30The police seem to be looking into this. They refer 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.

44:58But 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.

45:42In 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 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.

46:27Even 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? Guozhin 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.

47:07But now, it seemed, he was making up for lost time. He said,

47:26Guozun 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.

48:05But Guojun's political aspirations appear to run deep. Several employees told me that Guo Jun 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, Guo Jun was hoping to increase the odds that one of them would succeed. Guo Jun'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.

48:53Elon 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. Zhu Bo, the Chinese video game billionaire, has conceived more than a hundred children through surrogacies, with 12 of those carried out in the U.S.

49:42But if Guo Jun'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.

50:06Why was the American surrogacy industry willing to provide exactly what Guojun and these other rich men were looking to buy?

50:22that'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 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?

51:08and that's going to follow me forever.

51:26The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kaufman, Senior Producer, Natalie Jablonski, and Producer, Raymond Tungakar. Samara Freemark 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 Additional music by Chris Julin and Allison Leighton-Brown This episode was mixed by Corey Shreppel Our art is by Vardika Sharma Art direction by Aviva Miklov and Ben Kothi Fact-checking by In-Wa Shi Additional reporting and translation by Zima Oli 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 inthedark at newyorker.com and make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts

52:59Thank you.