Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (6 page)

A few weeks later, she had to close down the factory. When she went there to collect the valuables, there was nothing left—the managers had taken even the sewing machines with them.

Sketchy business practices happened all around us. For example, restaurants and other small businesses rarely printed the receipts that the government used to track sales taxes. Instead, they used only handwritten slips of paper. They didn’t want to leave a paper trail that the government could use to punish them for skimping on their taxes. If a customer asked for a receipt, the restaurant would offer a free drink or even a discount on the meal instead.

Indeed, the practice of having multiple accounting books became commonsense strategy for businesses in China. One was the real book for internal use, one was for tax purposes, and one was for a business owner’s wife to see. (There might have been one more set of books for the mistress as well.)

My parents taught me a much more valuable and practical lesson than any business school class ever could: in China, numbers don’t mean very much. My parents never believed anything unless they had seen it with their own eyes—and, eventually, neither did I. Seeing was believing, and that meant that every penny we earned was a result of hard work and extra caution.

  *  *  *  

But all the corner-cutting and shady business practices were becoming downright dangerous—a fact that my family learned firsthand due to the death of my uncle.

“Little Uncle,” as he was called, was my maternal grandmother’s youngest child and her only son. He was a sales manager at Shanghai No 2 Toy Company. Smart and charismatic, he was one of the company’s top sales people. I was Little Uncle’s favorite niece, and he always brought me new toys when he visited on the weekends. Little Uncle’s job frequently took him to distant, unheard-of towns to do business, and he was away most of the time. And as business picked up around 1994, his trips became more and more frequent.

But as Little Uncle continued to sell, his customers began to rack up debts to him. On one trip to a very rural area, his client took him out to dinner. They had a feast and drank a lot of rice wine (strangely enough, the company had enough money to wine and dine its supplier but not to pay its debts). Almost all business deals in China involve plenty of drinking and cigarette smoking, and so, as a good businessperson, Little Uncle was a strong drinker.

Apparently even strong drinkers have their limits. He went into a coma that same night and died in the village hospital a few days later. We didn’t even have time to fly him back to Shanghai to get him help in a real hospital. The event was so sudden and unexpected that our family could only think of rescuing his body from the remote town. No one—not even my Dad—had a minute of rational thought to request an investigation or autopsy. It was not until a few days after his death that we all started to reflect on how this tragedy could have been avoided.

Little Uncle’s manager showed up at my grandmother’s home with a box of fruits and an envelope of cash. He promised my heartbroken grandmother that he would take care of her just as if she were his own mother. He left, and we never heard from him again.

This was the first loss that I experienced in my life. I remember the funeral, where I was dressed in black from head to toe and wailed for hours. We kept my grandmother away from the funeral; she was so disconsolate that we were terrified she might take her own life. There is nothing more painful than a parent burying a child—especially in China, where it is said that if you lose your only son, you have nothing else to live for.

Little Uncle’s death left us feeling powerless, not unlike the way most Chinese people felt during the Cultural Revolution. Had Little Uncle been poisoned by someone who could not pay his debts? Or with corner-cutting becoming so rampant in China,
perhaps the alcohol he drank was fake or tainted and his death really was an accident. Both scenarios should have warranted an investigation. But China’s legal system played second fiddle to the progress of the economy; we had no legal recourse to pursue. Pressing charges would mean implicating someone—someone in a province that we didn’t reside in.

Instead, the case got lost in China’s bureaucratic black hole, somewhere between “out-of-province affairs” and “food and health inspection.” Government workers avoided taking responsibility for our case and lawyers were so rare that we didn’t stand a chance of finding someone to help us press charges. We were completely without options. Once again, an individual’s life proved to be worth very little in the grand scheme of China’s economic reform.

  *  *  *  

It was around this time that I first became intrigued by financial markets. The Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 after having shuttered its doors for 41 years. The early days of the exchange attracted international media attention, and I watched the news segments on CCTV, the state-run TV channel, with fascination. The images of red-vested men hustling and bustling across the stock exchange floor appealed to me even before I knew exactly what they were doing. They looked sophisticated, fielding multiple phone calls at the same time and reading symbols and numbers off those big computer screens with a fluency I admired.

Compared with the staid, inefficient, and corrupt world of state-owned enterprises where my parents had toiled, capitalism in action was invigorating. As I watched the stock runners and traders on TV, Dad would mutter under his breath about how much money those “youngsters” made. I was drawn to the idea of a glamorous money business, and it wasn’t just the money that fascinated me: it was also how busy and important the job seemed to be.

Whatever they did, I wanted in.

  *  *  *  

Despite the challenges and the risks, my parents’ business savvy and can-do attitudes eventually helped them amass a small fortune. Today, they have three apartments in Shanghai, with a market value of a few million U.S. dollars—a level of prosperity that was unthinkable when I was a teenager. Back then, none of us could have imagined the economic behemoth China would become. Instead, we were focused on making our immediate circumstances more comfortable. One by one, my parents brought home the “big three” appliances—a washing machine, TV, and refrigerator. Once considered unaffordable luxuries, these household appliances had become the new must-haves.

We were immensely proud of our new imported household appliances, and we were happy to let the neighbors come over to admire our Japanese-made washing machine. Having a fridge allowed Mom to save time by making fewer trips to the farmer’s market, and it saved me from having to make my regular trip to the ice cream store around the corner. For the most part, I was not allowed to watch TV except for a few American shows for which my dad had a soft spot, such as
Growing Pains, Falcon Crest, Hunter,
and
Superman
. He was always happy to let me familiarize myself with American culture through movies and television.

For my father, though, the family’s rapidly rising living standard did not satiate his intellectual curiosity and need for stimulation. In fact, his most prized material possession was his compact radio. Every night, Dad indulged himself with news from America. As China transformed economically, one thing in particular did not change: the opaque media.
People’s Daily
was still full of the great deeds of the Communist Party and the suffering of the rest of the developing world—the leadership’s transparent way of making us feel better about our own struggles.

The Chinese have a phrase to describe being walled off from the outside: “like a frog in a well.” Most people read
People’s Daily
and did not look beyond the walls of China’s well. My dad was different.

Through Voice of America, which began broadcasting news from the United States
in 1942
, Dad’s cherished radio became the window through which he glimpsed the rest of the world. Whenever a politically sensitive topic came up on a Chinese radio show, we knew it would usually be interrupted or even completely blocked by the state. Any discussion of human rights, for example, meant almost instant static on the radio or TV. But with the VOA, there was a chance to get the real story (or at least part of it). So Dad decided to learn English, with the VOA as his teacher.

It was something Dad and I did together, and he did not have to force me on this one. It also became a useful tool for me to improve my listening comprehension, as I was preparing for the English exams that would give me access to my American dream.

One event that I followed intently on VOA was the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton won the presidency. Besides the fact that I thought Bill Clinton was incredibly articulate and rather handsome, the rise of the Clintons from a humble background to the highest rank in American and global politics seemed to embody the quintessential American spirit. In my impressionable mind, America was a land with abundant opportunities for those who are smart, driven, and willing to work hard.

All this exposure to American culture only served to fuel my determination to get there by any means necessary. I was already well on my way. My father’s methods were paying off, and by the time I made it into a top high school, he did not need to beat me into academic stardom. In fact, his tiger parenting eased up considerably as his business took off, in part because he had less time to focus on me. He didn’t have to; he had already molded me into his perfect tiger daughter. Taking his lessons to heart, I
learned not only to succeed but also to imagine what might come next for me.

Nothing seemed impossible for me. I made it into one of the top colleges, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), which has a strong English language program. Because SISU funneled so many of its students into Western universities each year, I viewed the college primarily as my necessary stepping-stone to get to America. I spent most of my time studying for the test that would get me a full scholarship to a school in the United States: the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) examination.

Although the economy was rapidly improving and people were visibly happier now that they had opportunities to acquire material possessions, many university students were eager to attend American colleges. American schools had the reputation of awarding generous financial aid to high-caliber applicants from around the world, which was important because a top American liberal arts college cost around $20,000 to $25,000 in 1996 when I applied, an astronomical figure to most Chinese middle-class families.

In the summer of 1994, after my freshman year, I signed up for an evening English prep course. I took a sample test before the class started; I got 480, which ranked me in the twenty-first percentile. At the end of class on the first night, I cornered the teacher.

“What is the minimum score I need to get a full scholarship from a good American college?” I asked.

“You’d need to get 600 out of 677,” the teacher said, not looking up as he shoved papers into his bag.

“I am at 480 now. What are my odds of getting up to 600 in three months?” I persisted.

“Three months!” He looked up.

“I need to score above 600 in
three months
—what do I have to do?”

“Where there is a will, there is a way. Good luck, SISU lady.”

The only way to reach my goal was to lock myself up and do nothing but study English. That night, I went back home and packed up everything I needed to withdraw from the world for two months. By then, my parents had bought an apartment in one of Shanghai’s up-and-coming neighborhoods, which was anything but peaceful and quiet.

Shanghai real estate was booming, and with it came such relentless construction noise that it was impossible to study. Besides hammers, drills, and pile drivers, workers used giant hydraulic hammers to lay the building foundations that shook the ground beneath us. Migrant workers, with or without work permits or resident cards, toiled away day and night. Since Shanghai was so hot, they would sometimes sleep in tents during the day and then work in their underwear during the nights, drilling the whole neighborhood into madness. I still wonder whether my deep aversion to noise came from living in Shanghai during that turbulent time.

I returned to the SISU campus, empty for the summer, and locked myself in my dorm room. It was an austere room made of concrete, with no rugs or wallpaper; we slept eight to a room in bunk beds. Since I was the only student there that summer, I had a bit more space than I was used to and a desk all to myself. I would sit on that metal chair all day in spite of any discomfort, venturing out only for a few scraps of food when I was growing faint from hunger.

The campus was about an hour and a half from downtown Shanghai. Out in the suburbs, it was eerily quiet. Not only were the drills and jackhammers a distant memory, but even the lively murmur of students was absent. The cafeteria opened only once a day and served a handful of insipid and unappetizing dishes that would have been appropriate for a prisoner. For two months, I lived on cabbage and watermelon.

Studying or not, I probably would have spent the day in my dank concrete dorm room anyway. The summer heat hung heavily
from a sky that was increasingly gray and polluted by industrial activity. I took a cold shower every evening—we didn’t have hot water—and as soon as I put my clothes back on, I was sweating again. The only relief from the heat and my studies came at dawn, when I woke up naturally. The air was fresh at that hour, and campus felt peaceful. I never allowed myself to get too comfortable for more than a few minutes, but the cool stillness of dawn gave me one of the very few moments of pure joy I felt during the day.

Every morning, I took two 3-hour TOEFL sample tests. I would then grade myself, analyze my errors over and over, circle every English word I didn’t recognize or understand, look them up in a newly bought dictionary, and hand-copy the definition next to the word. I marked each word I looked up in the dictionary, and by July the dictionary bled with black ink.

In the afternoons, I read English novels. My reading speed needed a big kick if I ever wanted to finish the test on time. So I trained myself to read fast, focusing on the first and last sentences of each paragraph and then skimming the middle to look for key words. I knew many people read novels for pleasure, but my method was mechanical, my goals too specific for it to be pleasurable, with the exception of
Gone with the Wind
. Reading that book was a treat to myself, and sneaking in a chapter here and there reminded me why I was so willing to suffer.