The Journey, Episode 2: Intended Parents

Ava investigates what is going on inside the Arcadia mansion. What is the couple actually up to? And why do they want so many kids? New Yorker subscribers get early, ad-free access to “The Journey.” In Apple Podcasts, tap the link at the top of the feed to subscribe or link an existing subscription. Or visit newyorker.com/dark to subscribe and listen in the New Yorker app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Madeleine Baran?

  Previously on The Journey.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  It 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.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  And that's what really stopped me in my tracks. She's like, look at this. She's all, can you imagine? I go, I go, I, what do you mean, can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  They put my husband on the media, all in the jail.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  And now to a bizarre story in the San Gabriel Valley.

• 0:37Speaker 04

  Police say while Sylvia Zhang and Guangzhen Chen were arrested and released, their investigation into them and what went on inside this home continues.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  I've never talked with anyone. You are the only person I talk with. The story, trust me.

• 1:03Madeleine Baran?

  Continue on South Baldwin Avenue for one mile.

• 1:08Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 1:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you'll see it's like a lot of new builds, a lot of like really, really big houses.

• 1:26Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  So we're getting close?

• 1:49Speaker 05

  We're very close. This is also the land of white Teslos. Every time I see a white Tesla, I'm like, is it her?

• 1:56Madeleine Baran?

  We were headed to the house of Sylvia and Guo Jun, the couple who'd used surrogates to have more than 20 kids and who are now under investigation by police and the FBI.

• 2:07Speaker 05

  This is the house.

• 2:09Madeleine Baran?

  We pulled up to a mansion surrounded by a low fence.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Wow, that is a big house.

• 2:16Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun. I wanted to understand what was happening inside the house and what they'd been planning to do with all these kids.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And is it okay to just sort of be around? Are we concerned at all about being spotted or anything?

• 3:17Speaker 05

  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 that like I'm here to talk if you guys want to talk. And I've left, lost messages and stuff, so.

• 3:30Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Oh, Johnny's back.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  Let's talk to Johnny in a second.

• 3:47Madeleine Baran?

  Okay.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  I just don't want to miss him.

• 3:51Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 3:59Madeleine Baran?

  We ducked into his garage, filled with boxes of shampoo.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, it's really coming down. Hey.

• 4:05Speaker 06

  Hi, how are you?

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Nice to meet you. We're working together on this.

• 4:08Speaker 06

  Oh, nice.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  Working with a group.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Working with a group, well, there's so much to look into.

• 4:13Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun's mansion, and some of theirs seem to face his. It's almost like a surveillance standoff.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  Explain to Natalie the stuff that you have here.

• 4:34Speaker 06

  I can see a TV there on the top outside, yeah, right there.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  And then you have another one on the corner here.

• 4:39Speaker 06

  On the corner here. I'm gonna put some more, two, one more over there in the window, yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:46Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 5:01Speaker 06

  That's why I said, really? And I said, I didn't know, oh, really? Yeah.

• 5:06Madeleine Baran?

  Did you have any idea that they had kids at all?

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Uh, I saw, I don't know when, I saw two little baby like this.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Like, like two foot tall, like toddler?

• 5:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, toddler, playing around on the, on the, inside the gate. Ball.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Totally ball?

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Like, like shaved or like?

• 5:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course shaved.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, shaved.

• 5:34Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  A lot of cars parked over here, more than 10s.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  More than 10?

• 5:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, more than 10s.

• 5:58Madeleine Baran?

  They'd show up in the morning and leave before dinner.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  And then all of a sudden, it would be like a normal neighborhood again?

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  And on the weekends, you wouldn't see those cars?

• 6:07Speaker 06

  No, no, no, yeah, that's why, you know, I was sorry.

• 6:12Madeleine Baran?

  A 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?

• 6:23Speaker 06

  I don't know, like, probably they're hiding something, I don't know.

• 6:28Madeleine Baran?

  Who were Sylvia and Guo Jun? And what were they actually up to?

• 6:48Madeleine Baran?

  From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Eva Kaufman, and this is The Journey.

• 6:55Madeleine Baran?

  Episode two, Intended Parents.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  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...

• 7:15Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  I didn't know what it was. It just said for, you know, Yodao, they were paying excellent.

• 7:38Madeleine Baran?

  $25 an hour, to be exact, for an assistant position at a real estate investment firm called Yodao 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.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  There was just TVs everywhere. He had cameras everywhere.

• 8:20Madeleine Baran?

  There were monitors displaying surveillance footage. And seated before them was the real estate company's owner, Guo Jun Shuen. 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.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  And I interviewed up in his office.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:48Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun's second-in-command, a thin woman with a distracted and impatient demeanor who spoke limited English. This was Sylvia Jong.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:28Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  They have over 350 properties. A lot of them were over a million, a million, 450,000, 700, I mean, not cheap. These were not cheap houses.

• 9:52Madeleine Baran?

  Yudao appeared to be flush with cash, and Tina wondered where all of it might be coming from.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:05Madeleine Baran?

  An attorney for Guo Jun told me that his client has never engaged in any illicit financial transactions, including money laundering.

• 10:14Madeleine Baran?

  Tina found it strange how many of the properties were shuffled between LLCs linked to Guo Jun 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 Guo Jun 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.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:58Madeleine Baran?

  Multiple people told me Guo Jun 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.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  I was looking at an Albertson's ad really quick. I'm like, oh, I gotta go to Albertson's before, oh, boom. Five minutes. Oh, what are you doing?

• 11:23Madeleine Baran?

  Who came up with your?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Mr. Chen. Yeah, he can do it. Oh, you know, hands behind his back, walking around.

• 11:30Madeleine Baran?

  Tina told me that anytime Guo Jun 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.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  He would come down every day and make a new rule. I used to do the rules, right?

• 11:51Madeleine Baran?

  Mm-hmm. 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.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  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 will be taken out and shot. Just kidding. Because that's what it felt like.

• 12:21Madeleine Baran?

  That's what it felt like because Guo Jun had a temper, made worse by his habit of drinking Maotai, a strong, expensive liquor from China. Several employees told me they'd sometimes see him drinking straight from the bottle. I asked one of Guo Jun's lawyers about this, and he replied that when his client drinks Maotai, it is responsibly and on occasion.

• 12:47Madeleine Baran?

  In the intended parent profile that they sent to the surrogates, Sylvia and Guo Jun 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 Guo Jun 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 Guo Jun's girlfriend, who was now helping out at his business? Or did she start out as his employee and end up dating her boss?

• 13:37Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  They would scream and fight and throw constantly. Did people tell you that?

• 13:51Madeleine Baran?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:07Madeleine Baran?

  Sometimes, after a blow up, Sylvia would turn to Tina for solace.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  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."

• 14:32Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  I never knew her name. We just called her the girl with the tattoos.

• 14:58Madeleine Baran?

  You just called her the girl with the tattoos?

• 15:00Speaker 04

  All of us did. She had them on her face. She was tatted from head to toe.

• 15:05Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun's businesses. And then the woman presented Crystal with an unexpected offer.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  She told Crystal what she did upstairs. And proposition Crystal.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  They wanted Crystal to carry a baby.

• 15:32Madeleine Baran?

  Carry a baby for Mark's surrogacy.

• 15:53Madeleine Baran?

  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's surrogacy.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:20Madeleine Baran?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Very much so. But like hidden in the house, very much hidden in the house.

• 16:28Madeleine Baran?

  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?"

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, yeah, yeah.

• 16:39Madeleine Baran?

  And the babies are for all kinds of families?

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:42Madeleine Baran?

  The tattooed woman added that she herself had carried for the agency, and it was good money.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get paid, you know, because this girl, she'd already done two. And she was so impressed, you could do up to four.

• 16:55Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun's prohibition on chit-chat, all kinds of rumors started to circulate.

• 17:17Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  The American benefits, that's why they're having the kids.

• 17:29Madeleine Baran?

  What benefits?

• 17:30Speaker 04

  The premise was is that they're going to have these kids and they're going to sell these kids to these Chinese men that can't have them.

• 17:37Madeleine Baran?

  Is that what they told you, or that's what you think?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  That's what was said.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  That's what we were assuming that they were doing.

• 17:54Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 18:22Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 18:51Madeleine Baran?

  We found a short entry on Guojun in an encyclopedia called Outstanding Figures in China's Regional Economy from 2006.

• 19:01Madeleine Baran?

  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 capitalized on China's real estate boom. According to Chinese court records, he became a private lender, demanding high interest rates.

• 19:23Madeleine Baran?

  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, "I'm someone who likes to meddle in other people's business and often offends people."

• 20:06Madeleine Baran?

  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. Chinese investors are both building and buying US homes at an unprecedented rate. Chinese nationals now buy more US-

• 20:50Madeleine Baran?

  35% of reported purchases by Chinese buyers were in California. Why? Because it's closer. As a result, the market- 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 Roland Heights, another neighborhood in LA County. One evening, I drove out there with a Mandarin translator I'd been working with,

• 21:35Madeleine Baran?

  named Zimo 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 Guojun's old house.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:02Madeleine Baran?

  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, Zimo and I knocked on the door of a house and met Ray Wu and his wife. It's raining outside, raining, right? Yeah.

• 22:21Madeleine Baran?

  Don't take off your shoes. Keep on. Oh, keep on? Okay. Thank you. The two of them told us they definitely remembered Guojun.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  He speaks so loud, you know? He make a phone call from across the street. I can hear from my house.

• 22:37Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  He said, "You know what? You guys doesn't know how lonely I am here, you know? My company is some squirrel here. He said, "That's I did. I just talked to squirrel. I have nobody talk here. I have no friend."

• 23:10Madeleine Baran?

  But eventually, Ray learned that Guojun was married to a woman in China. Her name was Yuchun 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.

• 23:36Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 23:46Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  And he just yelled to his wife, said, "No, that's not true. You're giving the money too little, you know? Give them more."

• 24:12Madeleine Baran?

  One of Guojun's attorneys told me his client never engaged in bribery.

• 24:23Madeleine Baran?

  As a neighbor, Guojun could be puzzling. I talked with two sisters who lived across the street, Cindy and Tracy Galdames. They sometimes spotted him walking around in his underwear and yelling into his phone. They told me Guojun once offered them $500.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  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".

• 24:48Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 25:05Madeleine Baran?

  Then, there was the incident one night when Guojun's wife, Yuchun Li, was in town. Cindy got particularly worried.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  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,

• 25:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:37Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 25:47Madeleine Baran?

  So much for his only friends.

• 25:51Madeleine Baran?

  And then one day, Guojun's neighbors in Roland Heights stopped seeing him around.

• 25:56Speaker 05

  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.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  I checked with my other neighbors, "Hey, did you see that guy? Oh, he moved out." "Moved to where? Nobody know."

• 26:16Madeleine Baran?

  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 Yuchun Li, but by then, he'd formed an intimate connection with someone new: Sylvia.

• 26:36Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia 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 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'd just turned eight. Around the same time, Sylvia got a real estate license and started working for Guojun.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  It seems that Sylvia first got into the business as just an applicant for a job.

• 27:14Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  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 and is, like, Sylvia tends to be the face of a lot of this, while Guojun kind of like hides behind her almost.

• 27:54Madeleine Baran?

  The former employee told Zimo 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.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  Like Sylvia needed money and a job and wanted to do that. And then she realized that having a baby-

• 28:36Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 29:00Madeleine Baran?

  In the spring of 2021, Sylvia delivered a son, and she and the infant, along with her pre-teen 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 nonstop. 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,

• 29:44Madeleine Baran?

  though she has at times indicated it was Guojun.

• 29:49Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia gave birth that next summer, in 2022, and returned to work right away.

• 30:00Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 30:22Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 30:41Madeleine Baran?

  In less than a year, the couple had doubled the size of their brood to 10.

• 31:02Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 31:47Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 32:11Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 32:21Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 32:33Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 32:58Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 33:13Madeleine Baran?

  Be careful."

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Hello, this is Ava.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Hello, Ava. My name is Frank Acuna. The reason for the phone call is a couple in Arcadia.

• 33:29Madeleine Baran?

  One day, I got a call from Frank Acuna, yet another former employee suing Guojun for labor violations.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Are you still investigating that story?

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yes, very much so.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Okay. Let me tell you my affiliation with that. And if you want to continue, I happen to be an open book.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Great.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:49Madeleine Baran?

  In 2023, Frank worked as an architectural designer for Guojun's real estate firm, which had been renamed since Tina left.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  They changed the name of that company all the time. They call it Pacific Real Estate was one name.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  The other name was ABC Investment. Then you'll get a kick out of the next name. ABCD Investment.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:18Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  I mean, murder screams. You know, have you heard of that before?

• 34:38Madeleine Baran?

  And there was the Maotai.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  You do also know about the teacher's drinking problem?

• 34:43Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  How did you know that about the weapons? Did you ever see him open it?

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, it was, 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.

• 35:18Madeleine Baran?

  Frank heard rumors that his boss had ties to organized crime.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  When you first decided to sue, did you have any fear in watching the lawsuit?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  No, I don't. I don't, I don't, I'm not scared of anybody.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Go, 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.

• 35:41Madeleine Baran?

  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 Elmani. 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,

• 36:24Madeleine Baran?

  as though it was only then that the office was coming to life.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  What did you think it was?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  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, if anything.

• 36:41Madeleine Baran?

  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, "Arrriers of wages, I need salary, and I work hard."

• 37:22Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 37:37Madeleine Baran?

  He's shouting, "Scoundrels, we're not paying you a cent. Fuck you all to death."

• 37:45Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  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...

• 38:10Madeleine Baran?

  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 Haorun Ma, and his nickname was Dragon.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  A Haorun Dragon Ma is the ringleader of the unlicensed gambling and narcotics activities carried out at this property and others.

• 38:46Madeleine Baran?

  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

• 39:28Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 39:58Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 40:16Speaker 05

  Hello, this is Ray Xu speaking.

• 40:18Madeleine Baran?

  Hey, Ray, this is Ava from The New Yorker. How are you?

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Good, how are you?

• 40:23Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  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 by filing employment law claims.

• 41:09Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  Our client's the old guy. He got beaten up. And then, and then the worker filed a PI case, saying he got assaulted and battered by a photo show. Our client got injured very badly.

• 41:43Madeleine Baran?

  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 Almani, 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. And what do you make of those charges?

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Well, well, I have to defend, 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, I'll do what I can do.

• 42:28Madeleine Baran?

  "Even problematic clients are entitled to representation," he said, and added that "all the activities at Pacific Place were the tenants' 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."

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Eventually, they are targeting a 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 the moment.

• 43:14Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 43:46Madeleine Baran?

  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 broke in the summer of 2025, the dominant theory was that the couple was having all these kids to sell them.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  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.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  I feel like it's a, it's a human trafficking for babies.

• 44:30Madeleine Baran?

  The police seemed 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.

• 44:58Madeleine Baran?

  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

• 45:39Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  Why would anyone want to buy a kid with this other guy's sperm? Right.

• 46:10Madeleine Baran?

  I was really hung up on this.

• 46:11Speaker 05

  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...

• 46:18Madeleine Baran?

  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 Guo Jun's original intention, I didn't come across evidence that any children had been sold or that Guo Jun and Sylvia had ever tried. So what else could it be? Guo Jun 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.

• 47:04Madeleine Baran?

  Under China's one-child policy, that hadn't been possible. But now, it seemed, he was making up for lost time.

• 47:12Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 47:26Madeleine Baran?

  Guo Jun 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.

• 48:05Madeleine Baran?

  But Guo Jun'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 US 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.

• 48:34Madeleine Baran?

  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. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has had at least 14 children with four different women using IBF and has reportedly expressed interest in hiring surrogates to have even more. Pavel Durav, the Russian founder of the messaging platform Telegram, has described the propagation of his own genes as a civic duty.

• 49:18Madeleine Baran?

  Durav 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. Zhu Bo, the Chinese video game billionaire, has conceived more than 100 children through surrogacies, with 12 of those carried out in the US.

• 49:42Madeleine Baran?

  But 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.

• 50:06Madeleine Baran?

  Why was the American surrogacy industry willing to provide exactly what Guo Jun and these other rich men were looking to buy?

• 50:22Madeleine Baran?

  That's Next Time on The Journey.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  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?"

• 50:37Speaker 05

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. She wanted to have a lot of surrogates at one time.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  I'm really afraid that the 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.

• 51:27Madeleine Baran?

  The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kaufman, senior producer Natalie Jablonsky, and producer Raymond Tungakar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeline Barron. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Chris Julin and Alison Leighton Brown.

• 51:55Madeleine Baran?

  This episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel. Our art is by Vartika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Miklov and Ben Kothi. Fact-checking by Inwah Shih. Additional reporting and translation by Zimo Lee. Our summer research assistant is Ethan Khan. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild, with additional support from Kiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick.

• 52:32Madeleine Baran?

  If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at [email protected]. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.