Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (8 page)

After the hearing, my professor approached me. He was very disappointed that I had not shared the bit about Nikolai taking the textbook with him. “I was too scared!” I quaked. “What if he came after me?”

“Junh, it is breaking school code to omit this information,” he explained. “We all have the responsibility to report unlawful actions. Now that I know you left something out, this puts me in an awkward position too.”

“Am I in trouble?”

He sighed. “No, this case is over. Nikolai will get red-flagged but not suspended. Just please think about the fact that you assisted him in breaking the honor code. All right?”

As if Nikolai and his gang’s dining hall jeers were not bad enough, I was racked with guilt for months to come. I’ve heard that Asian societies are shame based and Western (Christian) societies are guilt based. I really cannot say how true this philosophy is, but I do know that this was the first time in my life I had ever felt so consumed by my own wrongdoing. It was strange how everything before that moment of guilt seemed like an innocent time in my life.

It was only over time that I realized that the goal of the honor code was to establish a system of trust—or create a social norm—in which all of us would make conscious decisions about right and wrong. Since we were not monitored during the exams, the onus of upholding honest behavior fell completely on the individual. We were expected to know what was right and to help carry it out.

That’s why, in comparison with the Chinese system, Middlebury’s honor code was much cleverer: it relied on self-regulation. In that sense, the honor code was one of the very first examples of how effective freedom could be. In China, our teachers had vaguely informed us not to cheat, then didn’t really care what we did. Since the teacher—the authority—didn’t care, naturally neither did we. At Middlebury, however, I was the one responsible for my own moral compass.

It might be hard to understand how difficult it was for someone not used to making choices to suddenly have to make a very important decision like this. But dealing with this challenge played a major role in my personal development. This dawning of my own moral awareness was a significant step in my life—something I may never have realized if I had remained in an authoritarian society.

One Friday night, I was in the library photocopying some class materials when I noticed a poster on the bulletin board that was printed with Chinese characters. A beautiful woman with high cheekbones was looking stoically outward. Printed above her in both English and Chinese was the phrase “To Live.”

At the bottom, it read: “Nominated for a Golden Globe, this astounding tale has been banned in the PRC for exposing the tragic side of Mao’s China.” The movie was produced by Zhang Yimou and starred Gong Li, the most controversial cinema duo in China at the time. The former was China’s top director, the latter China’s most glamorous actress, and they were also rumored to have had an affair. I rarely took nights off from the library, but this piqued my interest enough to make an exception. I packed up my books and headed to the school’s auditorium, which was very close to the library.

As the movie began, I was instantly drawn into the turbulent world of mid-twentieth-century China. The first scenes depicted the fall of the Nationalists to Communist forces, and I watched the initial joy with which the newly “liberated” China turned hopeful eyes onto Mao and the beginning of his Great Leap Forward. I witnessed the members of a happy family, reinvigorated by the socialist promise, gladly contribute their efforts to the new political campaigns. I then wept as one tragedy after another unfolded around them—as their son died at the careless hands of a party cadre and their daughter because there were no doctors to tend to her during childbirth as the doctors had all been imprisoned as “intellectual criminals.” It was a story of how an innocent family was ultimately powerless in a sociopolitical system. The parents were then left with no children of their own; only their son-in-law and his new baby remained. After the movie ended, my head was heavy from weeping for three hours in the dark. The movie’s
narrative was so devoid of emotion that I felt I had to compensate for its matter-of-fact delivery by crying my eyes out. I was too exhausted to return to the library afterward.

Instead, I called home that night. I wanted to hear my father’s voice. I felt I had a new understanding of the intensity he had used to prepare me for life, starting when I learned my multiplication tables perched on the washboard and when Dad threw me into the swimming pool to force me to float. The Cultural Revolution must have scared him, and he had been terrified to leave me unprepared for my own adulthood.

Mom picked up the phone. Dad was not home.

“Mom, what was it like to live through the Cultural Revolution?” I asked, after exchanging a few pleasantries. There was only silence on the other end of the phone. “The Cultural Revolution is long over now,” she finally answered in a quiet voice. “We have all moved on. What is the use of lingering in the past?”

Mom then asked how my studies were going. I assured her that I was studying hard, then quickly wrapped up the conversation. I was tired but restless, and I decided to take a walk around campus.

Strolling down the path, listening to the crickets in the grass, I could not keep the movie out of my mind. The family lost a son and then a daughter; yet somehow the story ended with everyone smiling at each other. They were still hopeful that the society that had caused their pain would also bring them relief and that a bright future was still in store.

I wondered whether this could be the attitude that sets Chinese people apart. We have a long history blighted with disasters, the Cultural Revolution being just the most recent example. But that period of suffering did not result from an external attack like the Japanese invasion of China. It wasn’t a civil war between political parties, either, as when the Nationalists fought the Communists. It was a time when best friends and sometimes even family members sold each other out in order to fulfill a leader’s wishes. And rather
than discussing these dark times, China had collectively chosen to move on so the people could just forget about it. This is how Chinese people choose to deal with their very own dark history and to “move on.”

I was in America now, and I was grateful for that.

  *  *  *  

It’s unclear what career path I would have been allowed to follow had I remained in China. In America, where you can make your own destiny, my choice became obvious. You could describe my relationship with economics as love at first sight. I sat in on an Intro to Macroeconomics class during the first week of classes, or “shopping week” as it was called, and was smitten after just a few lectures.

My passion for the subject was practical, philosophical, and also personal. Since my own family benefited from a rapidly transforming economy, I wanted to learn more about how and why China had transformed itself. I saw how people were more charitable in America than in China, which made me curious to learn how this behavior was connected to wealth and freedom.

Concepts that were steeped in deductive reasoning and free of ideologies were very compelling to me—especially given that economic principles help explain how much of society interacts. In China, I had been taught that socialism is superior to capitalism (despite the obvious disasters in China’s recent history, which our textbooks conveniently glossed over), because a socialist government takes care of its people as long as the people follow its rules—the way parents reward their children as long as the children behave. But now that I was in the United States, studying economics allowed me to see the capitalist system around me with a new clarity.

The invisible hand was one of the first theorems that drew me in. This metaphor, first conceived of by Adam Smith in the
eighteenth century, describes how society as a whole will benefit from everyone acting in her or his own self-interest. This world-changing concept suggested that the market can naturally replace the government in its ability to coordinate a multiplicity of individual choices and make many key societywide decisions.

“Does the market always work?” I remember asking in one class. Class participation was part of the grade, which gave me the incentive to speak up.

“No, it doesn’t,” my professor answered. “But it works better than all the other alternatives we’ve thought of.”

Each class I took taught me something new, and I began to realize that economics was intellectually stimulating, ferociously logical, and highly practical. I was shown a new world where things made sense. I tore through the classes offered by the department: political economy, game theory, econometrics, monetary theory, and financial markets. I could apply the lessons I was learning immediately through the decisions I was making in my own life.

For example, I learned about
opportunity cost
, a concept that I think about, use, and live by every day. The opportunity cost of a choice is the sacrifice of the foregone value of the next best alternative that is not chosen. For example, the opportunity cost of my becoming an economist would be the rewards I could have reaped from becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

Then there was the law of
diminishing marginal utility
. The term describes the economic concept where the pleasure, benefit, and utility from consuming goods and services diminish as the amount of consumption of those goods and services increases. I experienced it every night during study sessions, when the first bite of Cheez-Its and Oreos tasted heavenly, but the last one usually made me feel bloated and a little sick. In this case, each additional bite gave me less and less pleasure.

There was also
game theory
, an approach to understanding (and therefore predicting) human strategic interactions—whether and
when to cooperate, compete, or withdraw. Today, a dozen years later, I apply game theory principles to analyze and predict the strategy of many Chinese companies and businesses I research, particularly when it comes to understanding a price war.

Beneath all the equations and charts—what I think of as the scientific appearance of economics—is the study of human behavior. While the scientific appearance scares many American kids who are intimidated by numbers and unfamiliar symbols, my rigorous math training enabled me to see through to the core of the subject quickly. In fact, economics was closer to social studies than anything I had encountered before in my propaganda-driven education.

  *  *  *  

Studying economics also helped me realize that I was destined for a career working on Wall Street. But while I was mastering the theories behind the market, I knew I needed some practical hands-on experience as well. So I applied for and received an internship at M Capital, a prestigious, multibillion dollar, multistrategy hedge fund run by a Middlebury alum. My job was to help an equity fund manager in analyzing transportation companies—just the sort of high-rolling opportunity that I was hoping to get in on.

M Capital is headquartered in bustling midtown Manhattan. The entire office was set up as an open trading floor, with most people sitting in front of three or four computer screens. I sat in the back next to a “quant trader”—someone who used a lot of math to calculate and execute profitable trades.

For two months, I attended meetings and painstakingly scribbled notes on airlines and on shipping, trucking, and cruise companies. While I was enthralled by this whole new world of stocks and the market, the people and culture of the firm were equally fascinating. If my intensity was considered off the charts at Middlebury, I felt mellow compared with the traders and analysts at M Capital.

Part of the draw of that environment was that it was first time I felt being such a work addict was socially acceptable. I did not have to explain myself to anyone; in fact, it was expected that everyone work as hard as the next person and remain single-mindedly focused for the grueling hundred-hour workweek. This was something I excelled at, and it made me excited to have so many new acquaintances of the same mindset. The fact that it involved the field of global economics was more than enough to keep me hooked. I was starting to fall in love with this kind of workplace and this lifestyle.

After my summer internship at M Capital ended and my senior year began, I was intent on returning to Wall Street after graduation. I had caught the New York bug and couldn’t wait to return.

  *  *  *  

As my time in college drew to a close, there were only a few courses that stood between me and my future on Wall Street. I still had to fulfill two humanities credits, required classes that I had put off since my freshman year: history and art. I chose a class called History of Renaissance and Modern Art so that I could kill two birds with one stone.

Up until that point, my interaction with art had been minimal. I could not name any famous pieces of Chinese artwork, as my education had mostly revolved around science and math. I had been to an art museum only once, in New York during my summer internship. As I wandered around the hulking building, listening to other people’s comments on the pieces, all I could muster were the adjectives
pretty, nice, weird, scary
—like a child trying to speak in an adult’s world. I hoped that with this class, I could at least learn to talk the way other people did about art.

That art class turned out to be my hardest class yet. The textbook we used was Helen Gardner’s
Art Through the Ages
, and I struggled every time a name like Ghiberti or Brunelleschi popped
up, not to mention Cailebotte, Baselitz, the Louvre, and Die Brücke. I felt like I should be getting a foreign language credit on top of the history and art one.

But the memorization wasn’t the hardest part. When the professor urged us to analyze and explore the aesthetic elements and social contexts so that we could understand “art for art’s sake,” the course very nearly became a game over for me.

As the final exam approached for my art class, I became as anxious and jittery as an ant on a frying pan. I sought out the professor in her office, bringing the voluminous textbook and my even thicker notebook along with me. I began telling her how difficult and confusing the course was for me. In China, I said, everything we were taught in school had some specific message or ideological function. Chinese students studied stories, films, or artworks because of their underlying message, whether the selfishness of a government official or the piety of a daughter to her parents. But in this class, I never felt as if I figured out the right answer to the teacher’s questions.