This transcript has been automatically generated.


Episode 2: Intended Parents
Ava Kofman: Previously on The Journey.
Ava Kofman: So they started by saying, "Hey, do you want to have a baby for this–." 
Kayla Elliott: Yeah, basically they were like, "Hey Kayla, uh, we have a Chinese couple that's ready to get started. You know, are you interested in talking?" And I was like, "Yes." 
Alexa Fasold: 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.
Crystal Calderon: She's like, "Look at this." She's all, "Can you imagine?" I go, I go, "What do you mean can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for." 
Silvia Zhang: They put, uh, my husband and me all in the jail. 
Kayla Elliott: Oh my goodness. 
Television news anchor: And now to a bizarre story in the San Gabriel Valley. 
Television news reporter: Police say while Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan were arrested and released, their investigation into them and what went on inside this home continues.
Silvia Zhang: I've never talked with, uh, anyone. You are only person I talk with the story. Trust me.
Automated voice: Continue on South Baldwin Avenue for one mile
Ava Kofman: On a good day, the kind without traffic, I live about 20 minutes from Arcadia, a wealthy city in LA County. One afternoon last November, I drove out there with our producer, Natalie Jablonski. 
Ava Kofman: Yeah, so you'll see, it's like a lot of new builds, a lot of like, really, really big houses. 
Ava Kofman: Arcadia's 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. 
Natalie Jablonski: So we're getting close? 
Ava Kofman: 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?"
Ava Kofman: We were headed to the house of Silvia 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.
Ava Kofman: This is the house.
Ava Kofman: We pulled up to a mansion surrounded by a low fence.
Natalie Jablonski: Wow. That is a big house.
Ava Kofman: 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. 
Natalie Jablonski: And all the blinds are drawn. It does have this kind of like fortress feel, like you kinda don't know what's going on in there. 
Ava Kofman: This was the mansion where police had shown up a few months earlier after getting a tip about potential child abuse. Inside, they 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, Silvia and Guojun. I wanted to understand what was happening inside the house, and what they'd been planning to do with all these kids.
Natalie Jablonski: And is it okay to just sort of be around, or are we concerned at all about being spotted or anything? 
Ava Kofman: No, they’ve seen me around. 
Natalie Jablonski: Okay. 
Ava Kofman: I made a point to, like, leave a letter the first or second time I was here, 'cause I feel like that just makes it more normal that, like, I'm here to talk if you guys wanna talk, and I've left lots of messages and stuff.
Ava Kofman: 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 the mystery mansion as I was. 
Ava Kofman: Oh, Jonny's back. Let's talk to Jonny a second. 
Natalie Jablonski: Okay. 
Ava Kofman: I just don't want to miss him.
Ava Kofman: Jonny is a hairstylist. I met him while knocking on doors in the area, and started dropping by his place every time I was nearby. 
Ava Kofman: Hi. 
Ava Kofman: We ducked into his garage, filled with boxes of shampoo. 
Ava Kofman: Oh, my God, it's really coming down. Yeah. Um, this is Natalie. 
Jonny: Hi, how are you? How are you? Nice to meet you. 
Natalie Jablonski: Nice to meet you. 
Ava Kofman: We're working together on this.
Jonny: Oh, nice. Working with the group. Working with the group. 
Ava Kofman: Well, there's so much to look into.
Ava Kofman: Jonny 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 Silvia and Guojun's mansion, and some of theirs seem to face his. It's almost like a surveillance standoff. 
Ava Kofman: Explain to Natalie the setup you have here.
Jonny: Yeah. Right there, CCTV there on the top outside, yeah, right there.
Ava Kofman: And then you have another one. 
Jonny: Yeah 
Ava Kofman: On the corner here. 
Jonny: On the corner here. I'm gonna put some more, too, one more over there in the window, yeah.
Ava Kofman: Uh-huh. 
Jonny: Yeah. Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: The strange thing was Jonny'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. 
Jonny: That's why I said, "Really?" I, I say, "I didn't know. Oh, really?" Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: Did you have any idea that they had kids at all? 
Jonny: Uh, I saw, I don't know when, I saw two little baby, like this. 
Natalie Jablonski: Like, like two foot tall, like toddler? 
Jonny: Yeah, toddler, playing around on the, on the inside the gate. Bald. 
Natalie Jablonski: Totally bald? 
Jonny: Yeah. 
Natalie Jablonski: Like, like shaved or like? 
Jonny: Yeah, of course, shaved. 
Natalie Jablonski: Okay. 
Jonny: Yeah, shaved.
Ava Kofman: Other neighbors we talked to said something similar. They rarely saw kids outside. Some of them didn't know the couple had any children. Jonny was one of several neighbors who told us that what he did notice at the house was not kids, but cars. 
Jonny: A lot of cars parked over here, more than 10. 
Natalie Jablonski: More than 10?
Jonny: Yeah, more than 10. 
Ava Kofman: They'd show up in the morning and leave before dinner. 
Ava Kofman: And then all of a sudden it would be like a normal neighborhood again? 
Jonny: Yeah. Yeah.
Ava Kofman: And on the weekends you wouldn't see those cars? 
Jonny: No. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, that's why, you know, I was saw. 
Ava Kofman: A mansion with a ton of cars parked outside, owned by a couple whose children never seemed to leave.
Ava Kofman: What did you think was going on in the house at the time? 
Jonny: I don't know. Like, probably they hiding something. I don't know. 
Ava Kofman: Who were Silvia and Guojun, and what were they actually up to? From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kofman, and this is The Journey. Episode 2: Intended Parents
Tina Powers: I've been in real estate, uh, since 1994. I started off as a receptionist, and then I got my license. I was a, an administrator for a–. 
Ava Kofman: 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. 
Tina Powers: I didn't know what it was. It just said for, you know, Yudao. They were paying excellent. 
Ava Kofman: $25 an hour, to be exact, for an assistant position at a real estate investment firm called Yudao 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 station. 
Tina Powers: There was just TVs everywhere. He had cameras everywhere. 
Ava Kofman: 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 odor, as though he'd already knocked back a few. 
Tina Powers: 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.
Ava Kofman: And that's how Tina started working inside the Arcadia Mansion and parking her car on Jonny’s 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 Silvia Zhang. 
Tina Powers: 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. I did it 'cause 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. 
Ava Kofman: 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 LA, she showed me one of the company's internal spreadsheets.
Tina Powers: They have over 350 properties. A lot of them were over a million, a million, four hundred and fifty thousand, seven hun–. I mean, not cheap. These were not cheap houses. 
Ava Kofman: Yudao appeared to be flush with cash, and Tina wondered where all of it might be coming from. 
Tina Powers: So, 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. 
Ava Kofman: 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. 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.
Tina Powers: 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 here." You know what I mean? That type of thing. 
Ava Kofman: 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. 
Tina Powers: I was looking at an Albertsons ad really quick. I'm like, "Oh, I gotta go to Albertsons before–." Oh, boom. Five minutes. "Oh, what are you doing?" 
Ava Kofman: Who came over you?
Tina Powers: Mr. Xuan. Yeah, he came down. Oh, you know, hands behind his back, walking around. 
Ava Kofman: Tina told me that any time 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. 
Tina Powers: He would come down every day, and make a new rule. I sent you the rules, right? 
Ava Kofman: Mm-hmm.
Ava Kofman: 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.
Tina Powers: Okay, there's more. Okay. The, the fine for not turning off the air conditioner is $10. The fine for leaving the lights on is $10. Theft of company property, you will be taken out and shot. Just kidding.
Ava Kofman: That's what it felt like because Guojun had a temper, made worse by his habit of drinking Moutai, 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 Moutai, it is responsibly and on occasion. In the intended parent profile that they sent to the surrogates, Silvia 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, Silvia 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 Silvia 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. 
Tina Powers: They would scream and fight and throw constantly. Did people tell you that? 
Ava Kofman: Yeah. 
Tina Powers: It was so volatile. I was just like, "Oh God, here we go again." Um, 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. 
Ava Kofman: Sometimes after a blowup, Silvia would turn to Tina for solace. 
Tina Powers: 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." 
Ava Kofman: Tina already felt uncomfortable working for a day drinker who yelled at his business/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. 
Tina Powers: I never knew her name. We just called her the girl with the tattoos. 
Ava Kofman: You just called her the girl with the tattoos? 
Tina Powers: All of us did. She had them on her face. She was tatted from head to toe. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia and Guojun's businesses, and then the woman presented Crystal with an unexpected offer. 
Tina Powers: She told Crystal what she did upstairs, and propositioned Crystal. They wanted Crystal to carry a baby. 
Ava Kofman: Carry a baby for Mark Surrogacy.
Ava Kofman: The entire time Tina was working inside the mansion, there was a surrogacy agency located just upstairs, tucked away on the second floor. 
Ava Kofman: What am I pulling up? I'm pulling up these registrations. So yeah, it's incorporated actually May 2021, Mark Surrogacy. Yeah. 
Tina Powers: Yeah. And all of that makes sense because they were really already–. That company was very much going by the time I, we got there. 
Ava Kofman: Yeah. 
Tina Powers: Very much so. But, like, hidden in the house. Very much hidden in the house. 
Ava Kofman: The day that the tattooed woman made her pitch to the employee downstairs was the first time Tina heard about any of this. 
Ava Kofman: So they said, "I'm running a surrogacy agency out of the house?"
Tina Powers: Yeah, we, yeah. Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: And the babies are for all kinds of families. 
Tina Powers: Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: The tattooed woman added that she herself had carried for the agency, and it was good money. 
Tina Powers: Yeah, you get paid, you know. Because this girl, she had already done two. You, and she was telling Crystal you can do up to four. 
Ava Kofman: 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 chitchat, 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.
Tina Powers: The American benefits, that's why they're having the kids. 
Ava Kofman: What benefits? 
Tina Powers: The premise was is that they're gonna have these kids, and they're gonna sell these kids to these Chinese men that can't. 
Ava Kofman: Is that what they told you, or that's what you think?
Tina Powers: That's what was said. That's what we were assuming that they were doing.
Ava Kofman: There's not much of a paper trail in English on either Silvia Zhang or Guojun Xuan. 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 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 Guojun 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. Guojun 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, 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 US. 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." 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. And scores of Chinese elites and business leaders started shifting their money into American real estate. 
Speaker 1: Chinese investors are both building and buying US homes at an unprecedented rate. Chinese nationals now buy more US...
Speaker 2: 35% of reported purchases by Chinese buyers were in California. Why? Because it's closer. As a result, the market...
Ava Kofman: I don't know for sure if this is why Guojun left China and came to the US. 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 US full time. His first long-term residence was far more modest than the Arcadia mansion. It was a two-bedroom house in Rowland Heights, another neighborhood in LA 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.
Zimo Li: It's really crazy. I used to live right there, and this is, like, a very common, um, walking area. Like, I learned to drive probably on, like, these streets. 
Ava Kofman: Rowland 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, Zimo and I knocked on the door of a house, and met Ray Wu and his wife. 
Speaker 3: I mean, outside raining, right? No problem. Don't take off your shoes. Keep on. 
Ava Kofman: Oh, keep on? Okay. Yeah. Thank you.
Ava Kofman: The two of them told us they definitely remembered Guojun. 
Ray Wu: He speak so loud, you know? He make a phone call from the cross the street, I can hear from my house.
Ava Kofman: 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. Ray once overheard him telling someone back in China that he was so lonely in the States, his only friends were the squirrels.
Ray Wu: He said, "You know what? You guys doesn't know how lonely I am here, you know? Uh, all of my company is some squirrel here." He said, "That's what I did. I just talk to squirrel. I have nobody talk to. I have no friend." 
Ava Kofman: But eventually, Ray learned that Guojun was married to a woman in China. Her name was Yuqin 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. Ray suspected that he left the country following the crackdown 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. 
Ray Wu: And he just yelled to his wife, said, "No, that's not true. You, you giving the money too little, you know. Give them more." 
Ava Kofman: 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. 
Cindy Galdamez: And I'm like, "No, no." And he's all, "Take it." And his interpreter's like, "This is an offense if you don't take it." And we're like, "Okay." 
Ava Kofman: 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 incident one night when Guojun's wife, Yuqin Li, was in town. Cindy got particularly worried. 
Cindy Galdamez: He was chasing her. He chased her, like, uh, 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, uh, like four cars that came, and like, uh, 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. 
Ava Kofman: Ray 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 Rowland Heights stopped seeing him around.
Ray Wu: I don't know when. Suddenly I just realized, God, he's disappeared from here. He didn't say bye. He didn't say, he didn't say anything, just disappeared. I check with my other neighbors. Say, "Hey, did you see that guy?" "Oh, he move out." And moved to where? Nobody know. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Yuqin Li. But by then he'd formed an intimate connection with someone new: Silvia. Silvia had come to the US from China in 2016. At the time, she was married to an elderly man with American citizenship. They shared a young daughter. According to Silvia'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'd just turned eight. Around the same time, Silvia got a real estate license, and started working for Guojun. 
Zimo Li: It seems that Silvia first got into the business as just an applicant for a job. 
Ava Kofman: That's Zimo 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.
Zimo Li: 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 Silvia, and that it seems that she thinks that Silvia really doesn't have a lot of money, and is like Silvia tends to be the face of a lot of this. 
Ava Kofman: Mm-hmm. 
Zimo Li: While Guojun kind of like hides behind her almost.
Ava Kofman: The former employee told Zimo that Silvia 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 Silvia to carry a child for him, that Silvia was acting as a surrogate.
Zimo Li: Like Silvia 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. 
Ava Kofman: According to sources and documents I obtained, the baby Silvia was carrying in 2020 was conceived through IVF with Guojun's sperm and an anonymous donor egg. A lawyer for the family denied that Silvia had ever worked as one of Guojun's surrogates. In the spring of 2021, Silvia delivered a son, and she and the infant, along with her preteen daughter, all moved into the mansion in Arcadia. Silvia launched Mark Surrogacy from the mansion's second floor and started selling houses through Yudao Management on the first. She worked nonstop. The anonymous employee said she could sense Silvia's pain. Silvia would sometimes talk about wanting to move somewhere new. The employee thought that if Silvia had money of her own, she would have run away. Instead, Silvia 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. Silvia gave birth that next summer in 2022 and returned to work right away. By then, the couple had five children. There was Silvia's daughter from her previous relationship, who was now 10 and looked a lot like her. There were the two baby boys Silvia 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, Silvia 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. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia 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 Silvia 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 Silvia, 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 had a lot of powerful connections, and warned me, "Don't fuck with him. Be careful."
Ava Kofman: Hello, this is Ava. 
Frank Acuna: Uh, hello, Ava. My name is Frank Acuna. Um, the reason for the phone call is a couple in Arcadia.
Ava Kofman: One day I got a call from Frank Acuna, yet another former employee suing Guojun for labor violations. 
Frank Acuna: Are you still, uh, investigating that story? 
Ava Kofman: Yes, very much so. 
Frank Acuna: Okay. Uh, let me tell you my affiliation with that, and if you wanna continue, I happen to be an open book.
Ava Kofman: In 2023, Frank worked as an architectural designer for Guojun's real estate firm, which had been renamed since Tina left. 
Frank Acuna: They changed the name of that company all the time. They call it, uh, Pacific Real Estate was one name. Um, the other name was ABC Investment. Then you'll get a kick out of the next name: ABCD Investment. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay? 
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia were constantly getting into huge blow-up fights. 
Frank Acuna: I mean, murder screams, you know? Have you heard of that before? 
Ava Kofman: And there was the Moutai. 
Frank Acuna: You do also know about, uh, teacher's drinking problem? 
Ava Kofman: 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.
Ava Kofman: How did you know that about the weapons? Did you ever see him open it? 
Frank Acuna: Yeah, mm-hmm. I, you know, it was, uh, he was closing it when I, um, you know, knocked on the door, and I said, "Oh, maybe he's a, you know, he likes guns as a hobby." But, uh, when you do that many, nah, uh-uh. So it's definitely gotta be something. 
Ava Kofman: Frank heard rumors that his boss had ties to organized crime. 
Ava Kofman: When you first decided to sue, did you have any fear in… 
Frank Acuna: No, I don't. I don't, I'm not scared of anybody. Go, go ahead, point a gun at my head, and I'll be basically telling you you'll be doing me a favor. Yeah, if you got the guts. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Monte. 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.
Ava Kofman: What did you think it was? 
Frank Acuna: It's like, "Oh, they're, they're doing something inside there." Plus, you know, they've got people living in, in there at nighttime, and it's not a place to have residents, um, if anything. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia wearing a pink blazer and white sneakers, and trying to stay off camera. One of her real estate employees shouts profanities at the protesters.
[Employee speaking in Mandarin]
Ava Kofman: 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.
Television news reporter: 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… 
Ava Kofman: 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 Haoren Ma, and his nickname was Dragon. 
Television news reporter: Haoren "Dragon" Ma is the ringleader of the unlicensed gambling and narcotics activities carried out at this property and others.
Ava Kofman: 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, twenty thousand 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 El Monte 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. Dragon could not be reached for comment. I wanted to get Guojun and Silvia'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 Hsu. 
Ray Hsu: Hello, this is Ray Hsu speaking. 
Ava Kofman: Hey, Ray. This is Ava from The New Yorker. How are you? 
Ray Hsu: Good. How are you? 
Ava Kofman: Good, thanks. Just was wondering…
Ava Kofman: Ray has defended Silvia, 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. 
Ava Kofman: I wanted to just get a better sense of your response to those claims and whether or not you thought they had any, any merit, how you view them, and how your clients view them. 
Ava Kofman: I was expecting Ray to say something pro forma and lawyerly, but his response was unconventional.
Ray Hsu: Our clients are actually very feisty, so they, he actually got into physical fights with those workers, and those workers basically retaliated against our clients, uh, by filing employment law claims. 
Ava Kofman: 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. 
Ray Hsu: Our client's the old guy. Mm-hmm. He got beaten up. And then, and then the worker filed a PI case saying he got assaulted and battery, but photos show our client got injured very badly. 
Ava Kofman: Hmm. Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Monte, 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 his point of view.
Ava Kofman: And what do you make of those charges? 
Ray Hsu: Well, well, I have to defend, I have to defend the client, so I have to say, um, I have to–. Every, you know, even problematic clients are entitled to representation, so I'll do, I'll do what I can do. 
Ava Kofman: 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. 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. 
Ray Hsu: Eventually, they are targeting the domestic worker who cared for the baby. And he actually, she may have, that individual may have committed child abuse. But that has nothing to do with our clients at, at the moment. 
Ava Kofman: 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 learned a lot about Silvia, 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.
Kallie Fell: This smells like trafficking, looks like trafficking. 
Television news reporter: It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory. 
Speaker 4: I feel like it's a, it's human trafficking for babies. 
Ava Kofman: The police seemed to be looking into this. They referred to it in their early interviews.
Kollin Cieadlo: We believe that it extended beyond our city into possibly other parts of the country, and maybe internationally. 
Ava Kofman: And it was the possibility of child trafficking that apparently got the FBI to open an investigation. 
Television news reporter: The Bureau refused to comment on the case, but Arcadia Police confirmed that their detectives are working with the FBI.
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia and Guojun at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars 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. 
Ava Kofman: Why would anyone want to buy a kid with this other guy's sperm? 
Natalie Jablonski: Right. 
Ava Kofman: I was really hung up on this.
Ava Kofman: That's the part that doesn't make sense. No one's gonna, you know, no one's gonna spend a million dollars on a kid that has some other sixty-year-old guy's sperm. 
Ava Kofman: 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 Silvia and Guojun's original intention, I didn't come across evidence that any children had been sold or that Guojun and Silvia 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 US 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 multibillion-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 US 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. 
Amber Applegarth: She mentioned to me, "Oh, they want you to name the baby. Uh, his American name." So I'm like, "This is weird. Why would you want me to name your baby?" 
Rebekah Hernandez: Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. She wanted to have a lot of surrogates at one time. 
Kallie Fell: We would never build a welfare system, a child welfare system, the way that surrogacy is allowed to run. We would never build that. 
Adrienne Black: We're here because we love families. We want families to grow. 
Molly O'Brien: I'm really afraid that people who have no other way to have a family, this will be taken away from them. 
Olympia Belmonte: Yes, I changed somebody's life, but it wasn't all for good, you know? And that's gonna follow me forever
Ava Kofman: The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kofman; senior producer, Natalie Jablonski; and producer, Rehman Tungekar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeleine Baran. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julin and Alison Leyton-Brown. This episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel. Our art is by Vartika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Michaelov and Ben Kothe. Fact checking by Yinuo Shi. Additional reporting and translation by Zimo Li. Our summer research assistant is Ethan Kan. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothchild, with additional support from Khiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at inthedark@newyorker.com and make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.