Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (3 page)

As I talked, Jason observed my body language attentively, checking out how I made eye contact, watching my hand movements, and listening for pauses between sentences. When I told him about my experience coming to the United States with nothing but one suitcase and limited English skills, but then graduating at the top of my class at Middlebury and ultimately moving to New York City with two suitcases, he laughed. I could see recognition in his eyes. Despite being in the midst of a high-stakes interview, I felt relaxed. In fact, I felt understood and appreciated.

Then Jason’s next question ambushed me. “What was your biggest failure?” he asked, watching my facial expression intently.

I paused, my mind racing, and had to answer honestly: “I can’t think of any.”

“This business is brutally humbling,” he warned me. “You are graded by the market every day. You will make plenty of mistakes, which is okay. But I will not tolerate an employee making the same mistake twice.”

Jason then launched into an explanation of the world of Aurarian. I knew this meant he was interested in hiring me, or he wouldn’t have wasted his time. Aurarian, a name inspired by the Latin word for “gold mine,” invested in small to mid-sized public companies in the high-technology sector. More specifically, the fund focused on companies with market capitalizations of less than $2 billion with patentable intellectual property. “These small businesses are the lifeblood of the U.S.,” Jason told me. “Our decision to invest in them makes a difference to their growth and success.”

It sounded exciting and compelling. I pushed for more information.

“Sell-side analysts write volumes about blue chip names like Apple, IBM, and Cisco,” I said. “But they typically don’t waste time covering small companies since the trading fees are so limited. So how do you research them?”

“Great question,” Jason responded, nodding in approval. “I use the research tools I learned over the course of my career from some of the best investors in the business and apply them to the under-the-radar stocks. I’ll train you on that, one technique at a time.”

The interview was the beginning of a great working relationship. A few months after I started, the COO told me that Jason went back to the trading desk after our interview and announced, “I saw fire in this woman. She is a lion—she can get anything done if she wants to.”

  *  *  *  

I certainly had had my share of challenges in life by that time, from Shanghai to Middlebury to New York. I was striving to learn new skills, solve problems, and meet people. And yet the pace of my life and the challenges it brought, no matter how daunting, were nothing compared with what almost every Chinese person of my father’s generation experienced during the Cultural Revolution.

China, 1949–1976

I
F
C
HINESE PEOPLE TOOK PSYCHOLOGY SERIOUSLY,
D
AD AND
most others of his generation would probably have been diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder brought on by the traumas of living through one of the most terror-filled times in Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution.

The revolution began in the summer of 1966 as an attempt by Chairman Mao Zedong to reorganize and recentralize power within the government and shore up support among the people. He piggybacked off a student movement at the time, encouraging the antibourgeois beliefs of these passionate students. Within a year, the student movement had transformed into a national mindset in which anyone with “bourgeois” or “anti-Communist” backgrounds could be punished—intellectuals, monks and nuns, doctors, experts in any field, people who grew crops for their own families—just about anyone.

The wealthy and educated classes were considered not merely passé but rather a serious threat to the livelihood of the Chinese people. Everything one needed to know, contended the cadres (the public officials charged with advancing the revolution) who formed the core of the new party, could be learned in the countryside, from laboring alongside one’s brothers-in-arms.

It was to this end that Mao forced 17 million
urban youth
out of the cities and into the countryside during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Colleges closed, and parents bade their children farewell, in some cases forever. Some students were killed. Others, like the countless girls who were raped by cadres, committed suicide. Relevant and accurate statistics from this era are impossible to find; only stories remain, and even those are murky. But the outcome was clear: the movement paralyzed China politically and left the entire country shell-shocked.

At the age of 17, Dad was stripped of his dream of going to college and was instead “reeducated”—that is, sent into the fields to hoe turnips. My grandfather lost not only his son to the countryside but also the family’s rice shop during a local purge of individual ownership. Although the official slogan claimed everyone was guaranteed an “iron bowl of rice,” my father’s generation remembers it only as a time of unfilled stomachs. The revolution spared no one.

Worse than the shortage of material possessions was the unpredictability and instability of a party in which there was no rule of law. People could disappear, be imprisoned, or be killed at the whim of the “Great Leadership.” Far more common and disturbing than commands from on high were the betrayals of friends, neighbors, and even family members to demonstrate a person’s loyalty to socialist principles.

But at the same time, China was oddly free. While the high ranks of the inner party rested in Mao’s palm and while the treacherous Gang of Four—Mao’s last wife and her cronies—dangled the
arts and media sector like marionettes, the central government had little to do with the everyday comings and goings of the common people. It was as if the government had constructed a metaphorical birdcage to house its people, songbirds that could sing as loudly as they wished, as long as they remained within that cage.

China’s Red Guard was the most raucous of all the cage-born birds. Nearly every middle and high school in the country had a group of Red Guards, a title conferred upon students by local officials and even other students themselves. With Mao’s blessing, Red Guard cliques erupted across the country in
August 1968
, competing with one another for control of their schools. On a good day, Red Guards would write revolutionary poetry and sing red hymns. At their worst, these students burned books, turned their parents in to the authorities, and lynched teachers.

Unbelievable though it may seem, Red Guards thought of themselves as innocent followers of a utopian ideology, brethren in a world free of classism and feudalism. My father was among them—until he spent time in the countryside. The Down to the Countryside Movement awakened him and millions of other Red Guards to the harshness of peasant life.

My father’s delusions about life in China finally shattered when, as a young man in his twenties, he was confronted with the brutal reality of life in the Cultural Revolution. Everyone seemed to be a victim and an aggressor at the same time.

On one occasion, he went into a government office to submit some papers and was halted at the door by a guard.

“Identification card,” the guard barked without looking at him.

When my father reached into his pocket, the man became agitated and pulled a gun on him, screaming reflexively, “Hands up! Hands up or I’ll shoot!”

My father came within a hair of being executed on the spot. Yet he still had to have the last word: “If the people are indeed the master of the country, why are you trying to kill me?”

  *  *  *  

Dad was a driven, outspoken, energetic young man. He thought that most of his comrades were too brainwashed to hold a meaningful conversation, and as a result, he had few friends. While his peers indulged themselves with Shanghai opera—a slightly more tolerable version of Beijing opera—simply because that was the music on the radio, Dad bought a violin and taught himself to play. In secret, he convinced a professor friend at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music to give him extra coaching. It was his passion for music that kept him mentally stimulated in the absence of the advanced education he coveted.

Dad didn’t do himself any favors by refusing to blend in or conceal his intellect. One night, as he was boarding the bus after a secret music lesson, a pushy stranger bumped into his violin. The man was a cadre, and he was trying to barge his way to the front of the line. Dad told him to wait his turn. When the cadre saw that my father had a violin, he charged him with “participating in an underground concert” and had him thrown into a basement cell by the Suzhou River near the Soviet Embassy.

Terrified as Dad surely must have been after spending a night in the cellar, he was actually lucky. Others were beaten or detained for weeks at a time, all depending on the mood of the cadres.

To this day, Dad struggles while talking about that period in his life. I know only a fraction of what he went through. But I do know that his independence and intelligence frequently landed him in trouble. Unlike most of his peers, he questioned everything, striving to lay claim to his own voice outside the Maoist rhetoric. He refused to be swayed by propaganda and read extensively, trying to understand why a revolution that intended to empower the working class instead caused such massive suffering and social upheaval. He used to tell my sister and me: “Don’t ever blindly believe in anything. You brain sits between your ears for a reason, so use it.”

My father finally concluded that the leadership fed the masses nothing but lies and that the revolution was no more than a political power struggle at the expense of the common people. He also decided that the one-party system would never be viable—a realization that, while obvious in retrospect, most of his peers failed to accept.

“If you give all the power to one person and there are no checks and balances, what can you expect?” he used to say. “Abuse of power is human nature.” This hard-bitten cynicism was passed on from father to daughter, and it has lingered with me ever since. In my line of work, this attitude has been useful; but in his time, Dad’s acute intelligence was a curse rather than a boon. In an environment where enlightened thinking and idea generation were not encouraged, ignorance was bliss.

Mom fared a little better during Mao’s reign. While she, too, missed out on a college education and lost her youth to the countryside, she was allowed to return home to care for her sick grandmother rather than continuing to toil in the fields.

That was how my parents spent their youth up until Mao’s death in 1976. When Deng Xiaoping took over not long after, everything changed.

Shanghai, 1976–1989

U
NTIL
D
ENG
X
IAOPING, A REFORMIST WITHIN THE
C
OMMU
nist Party of China, officially kicked off his Reform and Opening Up program in 1978, there was not much to do in one’s daily life. The schools had been closed for a decade. City children had been sent to work on farms. Even when they returned to the cities upon Mao’s death, there was still little to do but work one’s manual labor job, bike around town, and watch street-side games of checkers.

Everyone was poor. It was not a point of shame then, because we were all on equal footing. A concrete, one-story house with a tile roof was the only choice of residence for many families. Public toilets were the norm. The streets bustled with bicycles and some buses, but never cars. Not only was there very little private property, but the idea of privacy itself was also alien. Neighbors burst into each other’s living rooms without knocking, and idlers
gathered around checkerboards to watch the games. Local communities, carved by the tight alleyways and open-air markets, formed the fabric of city people’s lives.

Fortunately, my parents possessed remarkable survival instincts. By the time I was born, they had both secured stable jobs at state-owned enterprises. Mom was an accountant at a textile company, and Dad worked as a mechanical engineer at an automobile plant. Nevertheless, our family’s resources were limited, so the fact that their spending was concentrated on me and my baby sister, Jasmine, who was born four years after me, served as a practical reminder of my parents’ love. My parents each earned 36 renminbi (RMB) per month (a little less than $6 given the current exchange rate). Their apartment was paid for by their employers, or the “work units,” as the state-owned companies were called. It cost 1 RMB a day to bring food to the table, amounting to about 31 RMB a month—a little less than half of my parents’ combined income. The rest was spent on a nanny for Jasmine and on my private math and accordion lessons, which cost about another 8 RMB per month.

  *  *  *  

There was no such thing as quiet solitude where I grew up. My father, my mother, Jasmine, and I lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Jing An District, a desirable neighborhood at the center of the city. Our apartment was on the second floor of a six-story building on Tai Xing Road, a noisy commercial street filled with bicycle and bus traffic, snack carts, and fruit vendors. The clamor of people bargaining constantly floated up to our balcony. “Fresh peaches,
2 jiao!
” the stall owner would bellow. “No,
1 jiao
—deal or no deal!” a customer would retort, and back and forth they’d go. We shared our balcony with our neighbors, whose doors were always open. I knew everything from what they were cooking for dinner to what their underwear looked like; everyone was always
meddling in each other’s business. All you had to do was stick your head out the door to snag the latest gossip.

It was a working-class neighborhood, but by no means were we impoverished. If anything, by local standards, we were living a comfortable, middle-class existence, largely thanks to my mother’s shrewd housekeeping skills. Our home was always immaculate. She had a way of adding a few accents of lace and fabric here and there, subtle touches that made our home seem more refined than those of our better-off friends and neighbors.