Age of Ambition (12 page)

With the help of loans from the coal mine boss and others, Michael went to college, where English became his obsession. In his journal, he wrote, “Some nights I can't even sleep, I want to wake up so badly and practice English.” He watched American movies and emulated the booming voice of Mufasa, the father lion in the animated film
The Lion King
. Mufasa was voiced by James Earl Jones, and on campus, the young Chinese man who sounded a bit like Darth Vader did not go unnoticed. “He was like a little weed,” his friend Hobson told me.

In college, Michael worked at a local radio station, at KFC, as a dishwasher, but even with the loan from the coal mine boss, tuition was expensive, and Michael dropped out after two years to study Crazy English full time. He had absorbed the promise of self-creation more thoroughly than anyone I had met. He took to calling himself a “born-again English speaker.” In his journal, he stopped dwelling on his frustration. “The growth of a tree depends on the climate, but I make my own weather. I control my own fate,” he wrote, adding, “You can't change the starting point of your life, but with study and hard work, you can change the endpoint!” His bookshelves were heavy with business how-to books and self-help guides. He had picked up a salesman's habit of peppering his comments with ingratiating questions such as “Can you believe it?”

As we sat in his bedroom, he decided to play some recordings he'd been making for his students, as models of pronunciation. He clicked on a recording called “What Is English?” He had layered the sounds of waves and seagulls into the background and recorded it with a girl named Isabell, the two trading sentences as they went: “English is a piece of cake.
I can totally conquer English
. I will use English.
I will learn English
. I will live in English.
I am no longer a slave to English
. I am its master.
I believe English will become my faithful servant and lifelong friend
…”

It went on for another minute, and while Michael listened intently, my eyes settled on a small handwritten Chinese sign taped to the wall at the foot of his bed:
THE PAST DOES NOT EQUAL THE FUTURE. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. CREATE MIRACLES.

 

SIX

CUTTHROAT

 

The age of ambition swept inland from China's coast, reversing the route of migration; it moved from the cities to the factory towns, and from the factory towns to the villages. As it reached people who had long waited for a chance to escape their origins, the pursuit of fortune intensified into magical thinking. Farmers in remote villages embarked on audacious inventions, earning the nickname “Peasant da Vincis.” Some ideas were grimly pragmatic—a man with kidney disease built his own dialysis machine out of kitchen goods and medical parts, including clothespins and a secondhand blood pump. But more often, the inventors were animated by a pervasive sense of possibility: They built race cars and robots, and a grandfather named Wu Shuzai built a wooden helicopter. His neighbors said his helicopter looked like a chicken coop, but Wu kept at it in the hope, as he put it, that he might “fly it out of this mountain and see the world.”

Yet, for all the talk of Peasant da Vincis and bare-handed fortunes, it was becoming clear that the Got Rich First Crowd was pulling ahead far faster than others could catch up. By 2007 the top 10 percent of urban Chinese were earning 9.2 times as much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous year. Public protests, often staged by workers angry about unpaid wages or by farmers whose land had been seized for development, soared to 87,000 in 2005, up from 11,000 a decade earlier. The more that people became aware of the widening gap, the more desperate they became. Michael, the English teacher, concluded that he needed to work a greater portion of each day, so he decided to limit himself to four hours of sleep a night. “Money, I can make. But time, I can't make,” he told me.

The race to catch up inspired creativity, but occasionally with disastrous results. Wang Guiping, a tailor in the Yangtze River Delta, joined his neighbors in the new business of chemical production, telling another villager that it would “put my son in a good school and make us city people.” At night, while his family slept, the tailor, who had a ninth-grade education, experimented with the help of a chemistry book and found that he could disguise a solvent as a more expensive variety and save the difference in cost. “Before selling it, I drank some,” he recalled later. “It burned my stomach a bit, but nothing too strong.” He found other cheap substitutes for chemical components, and his profits rose. But his concoctions turned out to be poison, and when they ended up in cough syrup in 2006, they killed fourteen people at a hospital in Guangdong, and the tailor went to jail. China closed down more than four hundred small-time medicine makers that year; in all, their tainted products had killed hundreds of people, some as far away as Panama.

The race to catch up affected each person in a different way. A fifty-year-old former barber named Siu Yun Ping found that it stirred his appetite for risk. In the summer of 2007 he began making regular visits from his village in Hong Kong to the city of Macau, the only Chinese territory where it is legal to gamble in a casino. Macau sits on a horn of rocky coastline where the Pearl River washes into the South China Sea. It's about a third the size of Manhattan, covering a tropical peninsula and a pair of islands that look, on a map, like crumbs flaking off the mainland. Chairman Mao banned gambling in China long ago, but it endures in Macau because of a historical wrinkle: for nearly five hundred years, the city was a Portuguese colony, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions that led W. H. Auden to christen it “a weed from Catholic Europe.” The infusion of China's new riches triggered an unprecedented surge in construction; by 2007, when Siu began to visit, Macau's casino revenues had surpassed those of Las Vegas, until then the world's largest gambling town. Within a few more years, the quantity of money passing through Macau would exceed that of Las Vegas six times over.

Siu Yun Ping had known little good fortune. He grew up in a tin-roofed hut in a squatters' settlement on the mudflats of rural Hong Kong. The year he was born, a fatal flood swept through his neighborhood; subsequent years brought drought, then typhoons. “It was as though the gods wished to destroy us by driving us mad,” a local official wrote in his memoirs about the period. Siu had five siblings, and his education ended in primary school. Before he was a barber, he found employment as a tailor and construction worker. Gambling was technically illegal in Hong Kong, but as in many Chinese communities, it was a low-key fixture of life, and by the age of nine, Siu was pushing his way into the crowd to watch local card games. At thirteen, he was playing for small stakes, and an underground gambling den hired him to hang around and keep an eye on the players' hands. “I'm good at observing people's movements,” he told me. “Whenever I saw someone cheating, I told the boss.”

As an adult, he continued to play cards, though with little success. He was an unglamorous presence—trim and wiry, with plump cheeks, bushy hair, and the fast, watchful eyes of a man accustomed to looking out for himself. He married at nineteen, had three children, divorced, and married again. Around his home village, Fuk Hing, which means “Celebrating Fortune,” he was known by a nickname that he did not much care for: Lang Tou Ping, or Inveterate Gambler Ping.

While working as a barber, he befriended a skinny local teenager named Wong Kam-ming. Wong had grown up in the same district as Siu, one of the poorest places in Hong Kong, and had also dropped out of school to find work. They occasionally met for supper at a café where Wong worked for his mother. Siu was trying to become a small-town developer, building and selling houses among the paddy fields near his village, and Wong opened his own restaurant. They became even closer after Wong began working on the side in Macau, as a “junket agent,” recruiting gamblers, giving them lines of credit, and earning commissions on how much they bet. One of the people he recruited was Siu.

Once or twice a week, Siu boarded the public ferry for the trip across the rolling gray waters of the Pearl River estuary. Seventy thousand people went to Macau each day to try their luck, more than half of them from mainland China. Siu had no illusions about whether his habit was in his favor. “Out of every ten people who gamble, maybe three will win,” he said. “And when those three keep on gambling, only one will win.” He played baccarat, the Chinese gamblers' favorite. (It offered slightly better odds than the alternatives and was easy to master.) The
punto banco
style, favored in Macau, involved no skill; the result was determined as soon as the cards were dealt.

In August of 2007, within weeks of beginning his regular trips, Siu hit a hot streak. Some days, he won thousands of dollars. Others, he took home hundreds of thousands. With Wong's recommendation, he was invited into opulent VIP rooms, which were open only to the biggest bettors, and he became a regular on the high rollers' helicopter trips across the water. The more Siu played, the more Wong earned in commissions and tips. As winter approached, Siu's success set in motion a chain of events that showed why, in China's new landscape of money and power, Macau is a place where it is easy to get into trouble—whether you are a former barber in Hong Kong or one of the richest men in America.

*   *   *

Gambling towns are shrines to self-invention. Las Vegas was a desert outpost bedeviled by sandstorms and flash floods—a land that “the Lord had forgotten,” in the view of nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries, who abandoned it—before it grew into the city that now attracts more people each year than Mecca. Hal Rothman, the late historian of the American West, wrote that Las Vegas posed the same question to every visitor: “What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?”

The ferry to Macau is greeted by a crowd of touts. When I arrived on a fall afternoon, a young woman handed me a Chinese advertisement for “USA Direct,” which offered a toll-free number for Mandarin speakers to buy American real estate at cut-rate prices. My phone buzzed. It was an automated message from a casino:

The City of Dreams congratulates the lucky winner of the “$1-to-Get-Rich, Rich, Rich” Giveaway on the grand prize of $11,562,812 Hong Kong Dollars! Climb abroad the Fortune Express. The next millionaire could be you.

With a population of just half a million, Macau feels like China amplified and miniaturized. It is animated by the same combination of ambition, risk, and self-creation, but the sheer volume of money and people passing through distilled the mixture into an extract so potent that it can seem to be either the city's greatest strength or its greatest liability. Macau used to manufacture fireworks, toys, and plastic flowers, but once the casinos arrived, the factories vanished. The average citizen now earns more than the average European. Construction is ceaseless. When I checked into a hotel, the scene outside reminded me of my first months in China, with welders' torches flashing against the windows twenty-four hours a day.

Even by China's standards, the speed of Macau's growth was breathtaking. In 2010, high rollers in Macau wagered about six hundred billion dollars, roughly the amount of cash withdrawn from all the ATMs in America in a year. But even all that cash changing hands on the tables was only part of the picture. “The growth of gambling in Macau, fueled by money from mainland Chinese gamblers and the growth of U.S.-owned casinos, has been accompanied by widespread corruption, organized crime, and money laundering,” according to the 2011 annual report by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The place had become the “Macau Laundry Service,” as U.S. diplomats put it in an internal cable in 2009. David Asher, who was a State Department senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Bush administration, told me it had “gone from being out of a James Bond movie to being out of
The Bourne Identity
.”

In 2005 the FBI infiltrated a smuggling ring involving a Macau citizen named Jyimin Horng, by posing as representatives of Colombian FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) guerrillas. When an FBI agent named Jack Garcia asked for weapons, Horng sent him a catalogue; Garcia ordered antitank missiles, grenade launchers, submachine guns, and AK-47s. To lure Horng and others to the United States for arrest, the agency staged a mock wedding for a male and a female agent involved in the sting. Horng and other guests received elegant invitations to a celebration aboard a yacht moored off Cape May, New Jersey. “I was the best man,” Garcia told me. “We picked them up for the bachelor party and drove them straight to the FBI office.” Fifty-nine people were arrested. Based on that case and on other information, the Treasury Department blacklisted Banco Delta Asia, in Macau, for participating in money laundering with links to the North Korean regime, charges the bank denied.

*   *   *

Games of chance had been a part of Chinese history since the Xia dynasty (2000–1500
B.C.E.
). “The government often imposed rules against them, and yet officials themselves were the ones who gambled the most,” Desmond Lam, a marketing professor at the University of Macau, told me. “They would get stripped of their titles, caned, jailed, exiled, but we still see the trend across the dynasties.” Lam studied Chinese attitudes toward risk. He and I were taking a walking tour of the City of Dreams, a casino complex that uses the promotional tagline “Sign Up, Play, Change Your Life.” After six years of studies and surveys, Lam views each gambling table as a “microscopic battle,” a standoff between science and faith. On one side is the casino, which can reliably calculate its advantage to two decimal points. On the other is a collection of Chinese beliefs about fate and superstition, which, Lam says, “people know are irrational but are part of the culture.” He ticked off some received wisdom: To improve the odds, wear red underwear and switch on all the lights before leaving home. To prevent a losing streak, avoid the sight of nuns and monks when traveling to the casino. Never use the main entrance. Always find a side door.