Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (5 page)

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However, as the economy took off, Dad had more to do with his time than worry about whether or not I’d pressed the wrong chord on his favorite sonata. And as I got older, I no longer needed him to tell me what I had done wrong. I had been admitted to a first-rate high school, and my ambition was all my own. Dad didn’t have to discipline me—I was already hardest on myself.

Shanghai, 1992

A
S THE MUSIC BEGAN TO SWELL AND THE CREDITS ROLLED
across the screen, I squirmed in my seat.

“Sit
still
, Li Junheng!” my father snapped. It was one of his cherished moments of cultural edification, and I was threatening to ruin it with my childishness.
Gone with the Wind
was one of the first foreign films to become popular in China after the Reform and Opening Up policy began in 1978, and my father, American history fanatic that he was, had been looking forward to seeing it for months. He had finally located a showing one Saturday on a college campus in Shanghai. All I knew about it was that the movie was four hours long. We were cramped in a small, dark room with about 50 other people, and I couldn’t wait to be out in the sunshine again.

Then the film started, and I forgot where I was.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara took my breath away: with large jade-green eyes set in her pale heart-shaped face, her wavy
raven hair, and a slender frame, she was both exotic and perfect in my eyes. She pulled me into a world foreign to my own, one of whirling hoopskirts and galloping horses, high-class culture and romantic trysts. More than anything else, she was too smart and proud to be subservient to anyone. Even in a system in which women did not have much freedom, she played the system to find her own way.

I had never seen a female character like her before: brave, unconquerable, and free. Scarlett’s looks drew admirers in, but her brain and resilience were really her greatest assets. As she whirled around the dance hall in black mourning clothes, she and Rhett laughing at her “ruined” reputation, I smiled along with them. I had never seen anyone so free-spirited, liberated, and indifferent to how others viewed her. It was wildly different from the traditional Chinese tragedies and propaganda films I was accustomed to.

What came next was a scene that I could never forget. At the moment Scarlett faced her greatest adversity, she remained determined to fight and win, silhouetted against the setting sun:

“As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

If my father felt me fidget again, it was not out of impatience; I was getting chills. The movie had been dubbed in Chinese and censored in certain parts, the sound was warped, and the celluloid was scratched, but it had still spun a spell on me. Scarlett awakened something inside me that lay dormant, yet to be explored. I wanted to be a fighter and winner. But first and foremost I desired freedom and possibilities. I did not know a lot about the world then, but I felt the calling of America.

Dad was unusually silent on the walk home. We walked for nearly half an hour before he realized that he almost missed a chance to drive another lesson into my head.

He said: “America is a special place. Opportunities exist in all circumstances, whether you are falling down or ascending. You will make it there as long as you work hard and be smart. It is different in China—we might be making more money now, but our psyche will always be burdened by too long and devastating a history.”

I did not say anything, but I felt my father was right. Having just watched my first American film, I could not help but compare America with China. Yes, my future would have to be made in the United States.

The very next day I bought an original version of the book in English. With the help of both my father and a Chinese-English dictionary, I read
Gone with the Wind
from cover to cover at least five times that month, soaking up every word into the fiber of my being.

  *  *  *  

Maybe I also identified with Scarlett O’Hara because the world around me was changing, just as hers had after the war—and fast. In Shanghai, where I lived, the reform movement championed by Deng was beginning to take shape. Small family-run eateries and convenience stores started to pop up everywhere, as the government gave the go-ahead to private business.

The shift of labor from the farmlands to the factories that began in the 1980s accelerated into the 1990s. Parents parted from their children, leaving them in the care of their grandparents back on the farm, in order to make a better living in manufacturing towns. These migrant workers flooded the cities at an unprecedented rate, chugging along to the pace of “progress.” That was the buzzword of the 1990s. Neighborhoods were razed and replaced with hulking malls; new factories rose up that employed entire towns but devastated the countryside and ruined rivers, all for the sake of progress.

Immigrants from the western and central provinces would stand on the street peddling hand-pulled noodles, whirling and pulling the dough until it was thin enough to be boiled and consumed. That was the goal of this era: consuming. Getting other people to consume what you had to sell. Grandmothers turned their living rooms into tailoring shops. Villagers poured into the city, offering homemade snacks for sale on every street corner. People sold cigarettes out of hastily constructed lean-tos and cooked noodles for strangers in their communal courtyards. Hundreds of identical all-purpose-goods stores sprang up, all supplied by the same distant producer of soaps, slippers, and sponges.

By the early 1980s, the authorities instituted a dual-track system for most goods produced at
state-designated prices
. Some goods were still sold under the quota system, but all surplus production could be sold on the market at a different price. For the government, this was the only way to shift the economy gradually toward market-determined prices. But it also created alluring opportunities for price arbitrage. Anything people could get their hands on—shoes, color television sets, rice cookers, all of which were novel at the time—could be resold on the gray market to make a quick buck.

In the city, privatization took place first in manufacturing, led by light industries such as textiles, apparel, shoes, home appliances, and consumer electronics. Then came housing reform. Before the mid-1980s, urban housing was almost all public housing assigned by the work units. These vast bureaucracies allocated apartments according to the worker’s length of service, the worker’s position, and the number of people in his or her family. But the flood of workers into the cities created an acute shortage of urban housing. In Shanghai, the average family was crammed together in an apartment about the size of an American two-car garage.

As private-sector businesses took off, state-owned enterprises saw their profits decline as they faced competition for the first
time. The deregulation of prices, loose lending, and fast economic growth combined to push up the price of goods during the 1990s, and inflation reached a heady
27 percent in the middle of the decade
. The government and work units decided that they could no longer subsidize housing for their employees. Around the middle of the decade, Beijing started to privatize the housing market by drastically lowering the purchasing prices of houses to encourage people to buy the units they lived in.

That was the cue my family needed to transform ourselves into capitalistic entrepreneurs adept at spotting the latest opportunities. We were not alone. The neighborhood gossip turned away from the checkerboards and instead toward making money.

This newfound energy permeated not just business, but all sectors. With consumerism came a proliferation not just of soaps and snack foods but also of Chinese hopes and dreams. The arts had bloomed soon after the death of Mao in 1976, and while Deng reinstated a fair amount of media control by 1980, the door to the birdcage was now ajar. New ideas flooded the country in the form of forbidden books, films, and images, invigorating the Chinese public—just as Scarlett O’Hara galvanized my dreams. Young people traded dog-eared paperbacks of “scar” literature, which expressed regret over the wrongs of the Cultural Revolution. And along the fringes of society, avant-garde poetry and painting found fans in the young and the middle-aged alike, for many of the middle-aged felt they had been robbed of their youth.

People were busy trying to make life better—to put the 1970s behind them.

  *  *  *  

For most of the 1980s, they succeeded. But this energy ultimately propelled the Chinese people right into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The protest was a call for democratization, but the event itself was about much more than that. It was the ultimate
culmination of a decade of Reform and Opening Up, as people made the final push for their political freedom.

We learned from our relatives and friends who were in Beijing at that time that protestors carried banners that quoted new-age Chinese poets’ expressions of personal dignity, individuality, and martyrdom. Just as the Germans had knocked down the Berlin Wall, the Chinese wanted to break out of their birdcage.

The world watched as tanks rolled into Tiananmen, putting an end to the fervor of the 1980s. But most Chinese didn’t know what was happening, as the national media toned down their reporting of the “6.4 Incident,” as the Tiananmen episode was called. No one knew exactly how many people were killed, injured, or missing. Even the Voice of America (VOA) radio program, the official broadcasting service of the U.S. government, which my father tuned into in an effort to get the real story, was so full of static that it wasn’t much help.

The leaders of the Tiananmen protest—mostly intellectuals such as university teachers, students, artists, and political commentators—were imprisoned and exiled. Once again, Chinese people were taught a hard lesson in the dangers of having a “politically incorrect” opinion. “Do not challenge authority,” the government was telling us. Creativity was definitely not appreciated.

I was in high school in Shanghai at that time. I knew people were gathering on the street to demonstrate, but I was not aware of any violence. I didn’t realize how serious the incident was until Zhu Rongji, the mayor of Shanghai and a political liberal, held a surprise press conference broadcast on TV. His message was something like, “You can demonstrate, but make sure you go home by 5 p.m.”

At the very end of his speech, he expressed sympathy for the students and demonstrators who were injured. As he was wrapping up, he choked, and we saw tears in his eyes. It was only then that we began to realize that the loss of life in Tiananmen Square was much greater than we had guessed.

Just like that, the dreams, aspirations, and artistic blossoming of the 1980s were extinguished. The crackdown made it clear that business would now be the only activity in which Chinese people could safely invest their energies. Under this unspoken “Grand Bargain,” the Communist Party would continue Deng’s economic liberalization. But political reform of any kind would be squelched instantly. The message was clear: as long as the Chinese people concentrated on getting rich instead of building a fair and transparent society, then they and their children would enjoy the ever-ripening fruits of this labor.

The creators of the Grand Bargain could not have foreseen that by shifting their nation’s focus to solely making profits, they would create a culture bent on cutting corners. The Chinese learned to pursue short-term gain relentlessly at the expense of long-term sustainability and innovation, and their reward was a system rife with unfair and inferior commercial practices.

  *  *  *  

It isn’t that the Chinese are born without creativity—far from it. The Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, papermaking, and printing, among many other things. But under Communism, that creative energy was misspent finding ways to game rather than improve the system.

Consider a case involving a family friend of ours named Yang, who was a party member. An ambitious man, Yang never felt he made enough money from his job at a state-owned company. So he asked for sick leave. He used the time to launch a side career, scalping tickets to the concerts of popular singers from Hong Kong and Taiwan who had begun to tour the mainland in the early 1990s.

Scalping was a popular part-time job for many people at the time. People scalped everything from food stamps to consumer electronics—and made more money in an evening or weekend than their full-time jobs paid monthly.

Scalpers would buy up and hoard all the available tickets for a concert at the prices preset by the concert company. One or two hours before the concert, they all would show up at the gates and peddle the tickets—with big markups, of course. Scalpers had no inventory risks, since the ticket office colluded with them and would take back any unsold tickets. As long as the ticket office’s number of sold tickets matched the money it had collected, the higher-ups never noticed the discrepancy, and everyone made a profit.

Scalpers were just one of the many suspect businesses that sprang up in a market where prices were set by the government. A command-based economy like China’s created abundant arbitrage opportunities for gutsy people who weren’t afraid to enrich themselves by screwing others over.

Getting rich was glorious, in Deng’s words, but merely spotting good opportunities would not do it: you also needed to constantly be on the lookout to avoid being taken advantage of. For Dad, that meant keeping an eye on his migrant construction workers to make sure they weren’t stealing the good tiles or mixing dirt into the cement. For Mom, that meant driving miles to visit garment factories to make sure the subcontractors weren’t cutting corners with cheap textiles or shoddy workmanship.

  *  *  *  

One day, Mom came home from a factory that was two hours away from Shanghai, exhausted and frustrated. “Unbelievable!” she exclaimed. “They did it again. The managers told me that they spent
10,000 renminibi
on new textile material. But there is no material. I asked around and found out the guys have been living it up in karaoke bars every night!”