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I ARRIVED IN SHANGHAI late one evening in August, connecting through Tokyo. As I walked through Narita to change planes, the Japanese had spoken Japanese to me. When I touched down at night at Pudong International, the Chinese spoke Chinese to me. I told everyone in English that I couldn’t understand them, and they all looked at me like I was crazy.
Stepping out of the airplane, even well past sunset, felt like entering a greenhouse, the concentration of wet, stifling summer heat that would later coalesce into the rainy season. My cousin Andrew met me at the terminal with a driver. Andrew was almost two years older than me, born in Montreal. He had spent his early years in Singapore and Hong Kong while his father, Lewis, my mother’s older brother, worked for a Thai multinational before the family settled in Texas, where, not knowing any better, Andrew showed up for his first day of elementary school in the Dallas suburbs wearing his Hong Kong schoolboy uniform: blazer, tie, Bermudas, knee socks, and loafers. He graduated from Baylor University with a philosophy degree and was an early pilgrim to Shanghai, joining our uncle’s company in 2000, when it consisted of a circle of temporary trailers on a stretch of farmland east of the Huangpu River.
Andrew and I had always looked different, and mutual acquaintances often expressed surprise when they learned that we were related. One of the photo albums in my parents’ house in Utah held a picture of the two of us as adolescents, building a sand castle at a Great Salt Lake beach, me, bow-legged and so scrawny that my protruding hipbones held up my swim trunks like an iliac clothes hanger, next to knock-kneed, heavyset Andrew wearing nothing but an unflattering Speedo and a grimace to keep his enormous eyeglasses from sliding down his nose.
When we were very young, our age difference was sufficient for him to know a lot more than me, and I was the one who annoyed him with elementary questions. I eventually caught up, literally, as evidenced by the series of rules in the doorway of Richard’s laundry room in Dallas, where our uncle had marked the heights of his nephews over the years. As our stature grew equal, our relationship also got more competitive. Andrew and I would stand back to back and argue who was on his toes or stretching his neck to make himself taller. In family photographs, he would stick his chest out and stand on his toes right as the shutter clicked, and it wasn’t until I was back home that I found out he’d cheated. I had heard that he had taken up marathon running after moving to China and worked himself into terrific, almost unrecognizable shape. But he stopped training after contracting tuberculosis, and by the time we reunited in Shanghai, his body had sprung back to its original form.
The first thing Andrew said to me was “That long hair makes it seem like you’re hiding something, like a physical deformity.”
The second thing he said was “The sun has aged you. You look way older than your age.”
We headed for the company living quarters in Zhangjiang, a district on the eastern outskirts of Shanghai, driving along a massive, well-lit, desolate freeway. Andrew had offered to let me stay in a spare room of his three-bedroom apartment in exchange for paying the utilities and the salary of the maid, or ayi—literally “auntie”—who came to clean three times a week. As we neared the living quarters, our route took us past the new church that our uncle had recently built, a cavernous glass-and-metal A-frame looming in the hazy glow of the streetlight, and I remarked that I had not seen it during my brief visit to the city three years earlier.
“We build things fast in Shanghai,” the driver said.
“They seem to build things fast in all of China,” I tried to say in Chinese, shaking my head.
I must have said something wrong, as the driver got defensive. “Yes, but we build things even faster in Shanghai,” she said. She also mentioned that the church had been closed for a while due to structural concerns, as if the two observations were completely unrelated.
THE SUN ROSE EARLY and hot over the living quarters, a seventy-acre complex abutting a technology park on the edge of Shanghai’s eastward urbanization as it churned through estuaries, villages, and farmland and left housing complexes, industrial parks, and manufacturing facilities in its wake. I didn’t start work for another week and wanted to buy a voice recorder for when I talked to my grandmother, so Andrew took the day off and we headed into the city for one of Shanghai’s massive electronics shopping malls.
The living quarters in Zhangjiang housed nearly six thousand employees and their families on a landscaped campus divided by one of the area’s many canals. Every day elderly men set up along it with bamboo fishing rods curving over the water. On one side rose about sixty high-rise apartment buildings along with a health clinic, guest housing for visitors, an administrative center (including a control room for monitoring the video feeds from the dozens of closed-circuit cameras trained on the walkways), and three dormitories for the machine assistants, or MAs, largely young, single women with basic educations from rural provinces who worked in the fab, moving items from one step of the manufacturing process to the next. On the other side of the canal, accessed by a small footbridge or a separate guarded entrance, was the executive housing, a gated community of about fifty villas with private yards and two rows of townhouses. Camphor trees shaded the walkways, and in the fall the pomelo trees near the playground sagged with fruit, tempting residents to climb up or fashion makeshift pickers to get at them.
Across the street from the residential campus was one of the company’s crown jewels, a bilingual K-through-12 private school headed by a former dean of Phillips Andover, and boasting all the facilities that a counterpart in America might have offered: a gymnasium with basketball and volleyball courts, a full-size running track, soccer fields that were repurposed into Little League baseball diamonds on the weekends, even an observatory. Flanking the school was a community center where employees and their families could work out, play Ping-Pong, take classes, or swim in the Olympic-size pool, and a commercial strip of stores, beauty salons, and a rotating array of eateries. Two small supermarkets sold fresh fruits and vegetables, scary-looking meats, and a handful of imported goods, like peanut butter and grossly overpriced Häagen-Dazs ice cream. People in the surrounding farming villages still burned their garbage, and when the wind shifted, the smoke blew right into the living quarters.
A multicolored line of taxis waited outside the main gate. Andrew explained that each taxi company painted its fleet a different color, and we caught a sky-blue Volkswagen sedan; Andrew had noticed that its drivers tended to be the best, denoted by the stars printed on their licenses, though I later learned that those, like many, many other things in China, could be bought. The taxi ferried us to the nearest subway station, on the other side of the technology park, its wide, empty boulevards named after famous scientists in Chinese history and the cross streets named for Western scientists. Some blocks were more than a quarter of a mile long to accommodate the massive manufacturing facilities headquartered there, our uncle’s being one of the largest. Street sweepers wearing sandals and reflective orange jumpsuits collected litter with handmade brooms and rickety carts at a languid pace. Many others dozed on the landscaped corners and medians, sprawled out as if dead.
After about three miles the taxi dropped us off at the Zhangjiang Hi-Technology Park metro station, an elevated monstrosity of concrete and dirty white tiles strewn with garbage and vomit and crowded with vendors selling street food and pirated DVDs (“Porn, porn,” one of them whispered to me as I walked past) and taxi touts angling for fares. The train zipped us over villages where small farm plots sat beside enormous, ever-growing mounds of trash, then dived underground as we approached the Huangpu River. Each time the train pulled into a station, passengers massed on both sides of the doors and charged forward as soon as the doors opened, crashing into and off of each other until both groups somehow osmosed to the other side. Despite stationing attendants at the turnstiles wearing signs to be polite, stand in line, wait one’s turn, and generally “be a cute Shanghai person,” the Western idea of civility was all but absent in the subways. While riding public transportation, or in public spaces in general, the Chinese had the same sense of personal space as puppies, often literally piled on top of one another. On escalators they stood on whichever side pleased them. They stuffed elevator cars so tightly I wasn’t sure everyone had their feet on the ground, and would often ride opposite their desired direction of travel just to ensure they got a space. Occasionally, on the less crowded trains, young men with spiky, chocolate-colored hair holding stacks of business cards advertising travel agencies would stride the length of the train and fling the cards onto the passengers, hitting each person’s lap with the accuracy of a casino dealer. I found this kind of guerrilla marketing obnoxious, but the Chinese riders never objected, brushing off the card as they would a stray hair.
After thirty minutes we arrived at the East Nanjing Road station in the heart of the city. It was a bit of a stretch to call the place where I would be living and working Shanghai. Situated at the mouth of the Yangtze River and bisected by a tributary called the Huangpu River, Shanghai consists of two sections, Puxi, literally “west bank of the [Huangpu] river,” and Pudong, “east bank of the [Huangpu] river.” Historically, Puxi had been the city’s cultural, economic, and residential center, and home to the nineteenth-century colonial concessions that included the Bund, the mile-long stretch along the river where Western architects had erected dozens of impressive consulates, bank buildings, and trading houses, a concentration of international financial and commercial institutions that made the Bund the Wall Street of Asia. In the middle of the Bund, straddling the east–west thoroughfare of East Nanjing Road, real estate magnate Victor Sassoon built a pair of hotels in the early 1900s. From the subway station, the pyramidal art deco top of the north building, dubbed the Peace Hotel, which was closed for a three-year-long renovation, loomed like a hilltop citadel. At the Bund’s north end is the oldest park in Shanghai, built in the late nineteenth century for the city’s affluent and growing foreign population, where, according to legend, a sign proclaimed “No Chinese or Dogs Allowed.” (No such sign existed, but the park did prohibit locals and pets.) The Bund remains the most desirable real estate in town, and the colonial-era buildings have been recolonized by luxury brand boutiques, art galleries, and five-star restaurants.
Far from the old city, my uncle had established his company and its living quarters in Pudong’s Zhangjiang area. Until the 1990s Pudong was undeveloped and agricultural, and most people crossed the river by ferry; it might have taken the better part of a day to travel the fifteen miles from the living quarters to the Bund. But after two decades of frenzied, nonstop growth, I could access downtown Puxi from Zhangjiang by taxi in thirty minutes, crossing the Huangpu on a seven-lane, quarter-mile-long suspension bridge so monumental that the spiraling off-ramp made three full revolutions before reaching street level, and all for about 70 RMB, or roughly ten dollars.
It was Pudong that built the landmark, skyscraping towers that had replaced the Bund as Shanghai’s—and China’s—iconic skyline: the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower; the serrated, crystal-topped, eighty-eight-story Jin Mao, home to the five-star Grand Hyatt hotel and its peerless dinner buffet—until the Shangri-La came along and did it bigger, better, and more expensive; and the bladelike, 101-floor Shanghai World Financial Center nearing completion right next door to the Jin Mao, tower cranes (the national bird of China, as the joke went) perched on its peak and putting its final beams and panels into place.
Pudong is home to the city’s convention center, biggest shopping mall, largest park, tallest buildings, and lots and lots of dust. As in many American exurbs, Zhangjiang’s wide streets indicate that its preferred mode of travel depends on internal combustion engines, and its scale verges on the inhuman. Residents live in gated communities, and the rare sidewalk tends to disappear abruptly. Pudong contains the expat enclaves of Big Thumb Plaza and Jinqiao (Golden Bridge), home to international schools set on expansive, manicured playing fields, community centers offering Western psychologists to treat the population of trailing spouses suffering from adjustment disorders, and Western-style eateries luring families of polo-shirted parents and their cloistered children with weekday dining specials. On weekend nights tourists and locals alike gather on each bank of the Huangpu to gaze at the other side. Puxi is where nostalgic expats go to see how China used to look, but Pudong seems to better illustrate where China is going.
As we emerged from the subway in Puxi, Andrew insisted we first stop at a stationery store. “You should probably get a pen and notebook, because you’re never going to remember everything I tell you,” he said.
I assured him—sarcastically enough, I hoped—that I had a pretty good memory. He shrugged and gave me a skeptical look. And thus began, nearly half a century after China’s students and professional classes were involuntarily sent to the countryside, my own forced reeducation, as Andrew nagged me about my Chinese and sought every opportunity to test my vocabulary, reading comprehension, and even sense of direction. Andrew had never resisted speaking Chinese as a child and had since added the ability to read, and he seemed to relish watching me rifle through the sackful of memories from my one previous trip to Shanghai, a patchwork of fragments that might not even exist anymore, and he clucked his disapproval when I failed, which was often. When I squeezed out questions between gritted teeth, he responded with either an incredulous how-could-you-not-already-know impatience or a patronizing explanation. I wondered how someone so generous—he would frequently treat me to meals and taxi rides—could be such a pain in the ass. Yet as annoying as I found his officiousness, I still felt a sense of accomplishment when I was able to recall certain phrases or routes with enough precision to impress him. All these years later I was still trying to persuade my older cousin that I was smart enough.
The streets in Puxi reeked of raw sewage and stinky tofu while the industrial paint slathered over the endless new construction projects gave off a noxious stench that I would come to identify as Shanghai’s natural scent. We made our way farther west, into the leafy streets of the French Concession, lined with colonial-era villas and hundred-year-old European plane trees. The neighborhood’s stately homes had long since been parceled out to house multiple families, and many had fallen into disrepair. Tangles of ad hoc wiring snaked over their edifices and through empty doorways and windows, and laundry flapped on lines strung up in the overgrown yards. Whether it was their mouths when they were laughing or buildings under repair, the Chinese loved to shroud things from view, as if trying to hide their private selves. Yet they commonly wore their underwear—boxer shorts and tank tops or pajama shirts and bottoms—on the street, and they literally aired their laundry on tree branches, utility poles, or whatever public structure would do the trick, a habit that many expats found charming but made me cringe.
I disappointed Andrew again at the electronics mall, one of at least three within walking distance, several overbright floors of vendors, grouped by the items they sold, peddling an overwhelming array of consumer products from flat-screen televisions to coaxial cables. Everything, it seemed, except for voice recorders. Just asking vendors if they carried them required a long explanation from Andrew, and I deemed inadequate the few that we managed to find. Our circuit of the mall revealed that the sheer number of goods disguised their homogeneity. Neighboring shops sold nearly identical items, and I would never truly understand the provenance of their inventories. Every shopkeeper insisted that his or her products were bona fide, using terms like AA huo (think bond ratings) or shui huo (smuggled goods) and often pointing to the plastic-sealed packaging as evidence of its legitimacy. Andrew’s opinion was that I wasn’t buying anything expensive enough to worry about that; the dubiousness of Chinese goods rendered everything under a certain price point as disposable as the bottled water I consumed each day.
Before heading back to the living quarters—by subway, and unaided, as part of Andrew’s colloquium on Shanghai transportation—Andrew took me to an upscale Japanese-owned supermarket in the basement of a luxury shopping mall in the Jing’An district, the western border of the French Concession and which took its name from an opulent Buddhist temple dating back to 1216 that now sat atop a major metro station. We entered the supermarket at the fruit section, which displayed model specimens of lychees, dragonfruits, custard apples, and fig-shaped salaks, or snake fruit, named for their scaly skins. On the shelves stood pyramids of imported cherries, every flawless garnet fruit individually stacked with its stem pointing straight up, priced at nearly fifty dollars a pound. In the seafood section fishmongers wearing crisp white aprons, paper hats, gloves, and face masks sliced sushi-grade tuna to order. Under the fog of the open frozen food bins rested king crab legs, their joints the size of softballs. Almost everything was imported, sparkling clean, and very, very expensive. We exited through the perfume of freshly baked cream puffs. The scene was such a far cry from what I remembered of Shanghai, when it was nearly impossible to find a decent loaf of bread or chocolate chip cookie, much less a carton of Greek-style yogurt, that my awe left no room for hunger, which was probably the most un-Chinese part of it all.
Andrew surveyed the store with equal parts amazement and dismay. “Look at how clean this is!” he said. “The Japanese are superior to the Chinese. If I could renounce my family and everything about being Chinese, and be able to speak Japanese fluently, I’d do it.”
I found Andrew’s attitude toward his own ethnicity, including the liberal and unironic use of chink in his speech, a little disturbing. “You know, Chinese people are just not capable of innovation,” he said another time. “They’re just not. I’m not talking about the culture. I’m talking about the race.”
“I think that guy from Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, was pretty innovative,” I said.
“An exception that proves the rule.”
I was running out of Chinese innovators. “What about the guy from Wang Computers?” I said. “Wasn’t he Chinese?”
“Yeah, and his company went under. You know why? Nepotism! This is what I’m talking about.”
“You know, if you hate being Chinese so much, we’ve made a lot of medical advances so people can change themselves,” I said. “Michael Jackson wanted to be white too.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a reason why Chinese people have to copy everything.”
“Your degree of self-loathing is incredible.”
“I’m just talking facts here, man,” he said. “I’m a realist.”
As we left the supermarket, I asked Andrew who could afford to shop there on a regular basis. “The rich,” he said. We paused under an escalator and used a section of it to plot an imaginary graph. “Okay, here’s China.” He drew a horizontal x-axis. “And here’s their income.” He drew a vertical y-axis. “Here are most of the people.” He marked off 90 percent of the x-axis. The last 10 percent fit between his thumb and forefinger. “This is the middle class,” he said, referring to 90 percent of the space between his fingers. “They make, oh, two to five thousand RMB a month.” That was roughly what the local engineers made at the company. He narrowed his fingers. “Here is the upper middle class, who make more than ten thousand RMB a month. That’s you and me.” He brought his fingers together until they were almost touching. “And here are the rich.” Those were the ones buying up all the luxury apartments, driving Ferraris, and eating fifty-dollar-per-pound cherries.
“How do they get rich?” I said.
“They start their own companies and get contracts from the government.”
“Could I do that?”
“Sure, if you had the political connections. But you don’t.” Andrew shook his head. “Richard does. He could make himself a lot more money than he is.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
Andrew sighed. “Because he’s a Jesus freak.”
THE NEXT EVENING Andrew suggested we pay our respects to our uncle, the man enabling me to come to China for our family’s porcelain. I had always wanted to like Richard, the requisite rich uncle of the family. I bragged about him plenty: smart, successful, committed to his causes, wealthy without ostentation. But my family was too Chinese for my uncles to engage their nephews with the easy congeniality I saw in American families, so I mostly remembered Richard as overworked, stressed out, and as likely to explosively express his disapproval as he was to be affectionate. It was difficult to know what he expected, which made it difficult to relax around him. Even talking on the phone with him about the job had filled me with anxiety, as if I were meeting royalty without any understanding of the protocols.
I followed Andrew over the bridge to Richard’s three-story, five-bedroom, six-bathroom villa abutting the canal. Richard had filled every available spot in his garden with trees and shrubs—camphor, pomelo, peach, lemon, and rosebushes. His wife, Scarlett, who was as even-keeled and intuitive as Richard was impulsive, liked to kid that Richard’s designs had “no white space.”
The other half of Richard’s garden was given over to the chickens, ducks, and geese that he had received as gifts, and the groundskeepers collected their eggs every morning and placed them at Richard’s door. At the far end of his property, he had built an aviary to house the pheasants someone had given him. It wasn’t unusual for Richard to receive as gifts chickens live and butchered, sections of pigs, and even a year-old Tibetan mastiff, a massive creature that barked nonstop and terrified everyone for the few months that she stayed staked in a corner of his garden until he donated her to the company’s security guards.
I had last seen Richard three years earlier, when I finally visited Shanghai one summer during graduate school, meeting up with my mother on her annual trip to see my grandmother. Back then the company living quarters had yet to mature, staked with rows of camphor saplings that shivered like wet dogs, and fresh soil still ringed the apartment buildings, reminding me of anthills. The villas had not yet broken ground, and the other side of the canal remained a blanched tract of desolate land that appeared to be in a state of ecological shock. The company had made its initial public offering in the spring, but the stock had since dropped about 40 percent, which might have explained the lukewarm welcome I received from both Andrew and Richard. Richard was preoccupied with work and mostly left me alone, except for nagging me to get a haircut every time he saw me.
I didn’t see much of China, or even Shanghai, on that trip, spending most of my month there bedridden with fever and diarrhea. I recovered in time to accompany my mother and Richard to church one Sunday and marvel at the size of the building and congregation and the number of worshippers who lined up after the service to shake Richard’s hand or pitch him a business proposition. Then, in the crowded parking lot, he asked if I felt like getting a haircut later. I rebuffed him again, and he erupted, screaming at me for not taking his advice (“I even offered to pay for it!” he said, no small gesture for a man who removed the batteries from his laser pointers when not in use) and for being disobedient, willful, and stupid in general. He turned to my mother, excoriated her for raising such a disobedient, willful, and stupid son, ordered her into the car, and left me to find my own way home. In hindsight, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole episode was how none of the other congregants seemed to notice his tantrum, going about their postchurch business as if this kind of thing happened all the time. After walking in circles for a while in the blazing heat, I eventually found my way back to the living quarters.
Andrew laughed when I reminded him of this episode. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on that haircut incident,” he said.
“So?” I said. “He’s never apologized.”
“He won’t. I’m sure he’s forgotten it even happened.”
My hair had not changed much since then, and I braced myself as we rang the doorbell, which played the opening to Beethoven’s Für Elise. Richard answered, dressed in his after-work outfit of long denim shorts and a white T-shirt. He exhibited the typical Chang phenotype: a large, round head on a thin neck, a slight hunch, and a gangliness in his limbs that made him seem taller than five foot seven. Though he was nearly sixty years old, his face remained cherubic, light pooling on his cheekbones, chin, and nose. His bare feet had the same shape as my mother’s.
We followed him into the house, which he had designed himself and featured the utilitarianism of a scientist, the expediency of a businessman, and the eccentricities of a middle-aged Chinese man. The tiled floors were heated. The ground-floor bathroom had an automatically flushing urinal. The décor was strictly exurban immigrant, and crosses and Christian scriptures hung on the walls. Most of the furniture, and many of the rooms, served mostly to store stuff. In addition to animals, he received trunkfuls of food and drink as tribute and acquired so much wine that he ran out of shelf space on which to store it, so he bought a couple of wine refrigerators, even though much of the wine was barely of drinking quality and he didn’t drink. In his office, bookshelves overflowed with technical manuals and business and management tomes, and there was a tatami room for hosting Japanese businessmen.
Richard said nothing about my hair and betrayed no memory of the incident at all. My grandmother was napping, he said, so I would have to wait to say hello to her. He ushered us in and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. Then he returned with a tape measure and pencil and ordered me to stand with my back against one of the weight-bearing columns in his dining room.
Just as he used to during the summers of my youth, Richard set a book on my head and drew his pencil along its edge. I stepped away, and he unwound the tape measure. In my stocking feet, I came in right at 180 centimeters, the height at which Chinese considered someone to be tall. He looked satisfied. “I’ve been telling all the single women at the company that my tall, handsome nephew is coming to work there,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if the flutter in my stomach was the nostalgic thrill at his approval, or recognition of the infantilization that would make it difficult to extricate myself from the company to search for my family’s porcelain. When I’d contacted Richard about a job, he rejected every arrangement I proposed that would have allowed me to conduct a proper search: a half-time employee, a contractor, an unpaid “consultant.” He had an answer for everything. I said I had to learn Chinese; he said the company offered free courses. I said I needed to spend more time with my grandmother; he said, “Grandma will be around for a long time. She’ll live to over one hundred. The Lord has blessed her. Don’t worry about her.” I said I wanted to travel; he said that was what weekends and holidays were for. I said I had to find my great-great-grandfather’s house and the porcelain; he said there was nothing to find.
I had figured that my coming to Shanghai—Richard didn’t disguise his disappointment in my chosen profession, or for not having kept the same job for more than a few years—would demonstrate enough commitment to win some slack from him. But as I stood barefoot in his house, I realized that for him, the whole of my existence could be reduced to a short, penciled line 180 centimeters above the floor. The company was the only thing that mattered, and he was expecting the same loyalty to it from me. “The Lord gave us this project,” he said. “We need to make sure it isn’t run by people who are nonmissionaries.” If I left the company, I would lose my visa. And while unlikely, Richard could fire me anytime he wished, which would also cancel my visa. I was stuck.
ON THE WAY BACK to the living quarters one night, as Andrew and I got into a taxi, instead of instructing the driver where to go, as he usually did when we were together, he turned to me and said, “Let’s see if you can get us home.”
I rolled my eyes. “Longdong Avenue and Guanglan Road, please,” I told the driver.
“Guanglan Lu, da guai haishi xiao guai?” the driver asked.
I lost him after Guanglan Lu and waited as long as I could before asking Andrew for help. He somehow managed to smirk and tsk at the same time. After instructing the driver, he told me, “He’s asking if he needs to take a left or a right at Guanglan Lu.”
“I thought ‘turn’ was zhuan wan.” That was one of the few phrases with which I had been equipped when I arrived.
“That’s how they say it in Taiwan,” Andrew said. “Here ‘turn’ is guai. Da guai, ‘big turn,’ means ‘left turn,’ and xiao guai, ‘little turn,’ means ‘right turn.’ Because the radius of a left turn is bigger than that of a right turn.”
“How was I supposed to know something I didn’t know?” I said.
“Keep practicing,” he said.
“Why are you talking to me like I’m an idiot?”
“Because you are an idiot.”
Eager to escape both his condescension and the heat—he refused to use air-conditioning at home—I was all too happy to venture into the city on my own in Shanghai’s temperature-controlled taxis and subway cars. I started at the clothing stores, to update my wardrobe with work attire. But my stature, just slightly above average in the United States, indeed rendered me a veritable giant in China, and the common lament from expat women that they couldn’t find any clothes or shoes remotely their size applied to me, too. The manager of one outlet of a famous German shoe brand assured me that none of its stores in Shanghai carried my size, or the two sizes below mine for that matter. I bought a pair of slacks at a Japanese chain that seemed to have been made for a human spider. The store offered free alterations, but the salesperson refused to shorten them for me. “They’re fine,” he insisted. “Pants are supposed to touch the ground.”
“Not when you’re wearing shoes,” I said. “Look, I’m the one who has to wear them, okay? Just shorten them a little.”
He squatted down and told me to join him. Local Chinese could hold a flat-footed full squat without support for an eternity, and most preferred to relieve themselves that way. The cuffs of my pants rode up flush with my shoe tops. “See?” he said. “They’re perfect. You’re 180 centimeters, and a tall guy like you would look really silly in pants too short.”
We argued back and forth until he finally agreed to take off the length that I requested. “Just promise me that if they end up too short, you won’t come find me,” he said.
The fabric market also failed me. It was a popular destination on the expat circuit, a run-down multistory building filled with a labyrinth of colorful stalls offering tailor-made suits and qipaos, traditional Chinese dresses that most female visitors bought as a matter of course. I had three suits made, choosing my fabric from a book that the purveyor assured me contained the most expensive swatches, getting measured, selecting a style, and finally haggling over the price. None of them ended up fitting. The waist was too small, or the collar too low, or the chest too large, but even my sharpest protests were met with assurances that the suits were perfect or, short of that, were exactly what I’d ordered. The only luck I ever had at the fabric market was when giving them existing pieces of my wardrobe to copy in different materials. Those always came back perfect.
Thank goodness for the knockoff markets, which reliably stocked larger sizes. Though they had been moved underground, literally, they continued to trade in flagrant, sometimes skillful reproductions of designer goods, and my need for clothes that fit justified my momentary disregard for intellectual property. The touts were so adept that they could somehow distinguish among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese shoppers and switched the language of their entreaties accordingly. When I walked past one store, the hawker shouted “Shoes!” to me in English.
WHEN I MOVED to China, I knew it would be mean. I expected chaos, overcrowding, pollution, the absence of Western manners and sanitation, inefficiency, and stomach problems. While China was known for rigid control, everything outside the political sphere appeared to be a free-for-all, and daily life in China hardly resembled the regimented totalitarian image that foreigners held. The short—and cynical—explanation was that the government had an unspoken agreement with its citizens: as long as they stayed out of politics, they were free to enjoy the fruits of capitalism and consumerism. Vendors could set up their carts on any public space they saw fit, hawking household goods, fruit, and English-language books, including The Wealth of Nations, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (a novella about the Cultural Revolution), and 1984, with neither shame nor irony. The city buses careened around their routes at reckless speeds, a holdover from the Mao years, when drivers were paid according to how many circuits they made per hour. There were no means for passengers to notify the driver, yet they made all the right stops and always paused to let sprinting passengers catch up. Everything operated according to unspoken and unwritten rules, and it was no wonder why so many Westerners became seduced by China, because the foundation for all this chaos was exactly what they had been told their whole lives that China lacked: freedom.
Nowhere was this more evident than on the roads. For all the environmental hazards in the air and water, the biggest health risk in China probably came from crossing the street. Despite having just one-fifth as many cars as the United States, China had twice as many car accident deaths each year. Though the taxi fleets boasted high-tech touch screens built into the headrests with a recorded message reminding passengers (in English) to wear their seat belts, none of the taxis had seat belts in the backseats. I quickly got in the habit of riding shotgun and not wearing white—the seat belts were so seldom used that they usually left a sash of dust across my chest. Meanwhile, cabbies took my wearing a seat belt as a grave insult. “I’m a good driver,” they huffed. “You don’t have to worry.” City buses swerved into oncoming traffic and cut across two lanes to make their stops. Drivers used their horns so liberally that expats joked about it being the Chinese brake pedal. Drivers could, and did, disobey every explicit and implicit traffic rule on the books. Police, fire, and medical vehicles enjoyed no special dispensation on the roads; nor did police seem interested in pursuing reckless drivers. It was common to see cars stopped in the middle of a freeway, crossing elevated medians, or driving long distances in reverse after they’d missed an exit, and in each case the rest of the cars simply purled around the offender like a stream around a boulder.
The streets follow a design that can only have been created by someone who didn’t drive. (The use of headlights was actually prohibited in China until the mid-1980s, when officials began going overseas and realized it was the norm.) Rights-of-way are completely reversed. The larger the vehicle, the more carelessly it drives, expecting everything smaller, including pedestrians, to give way. I pounded on many hoods of too-close cars, only to get yelled at by drivers for my physical invasion of their spaces or, worse, was ignored completely. In Hebei province, a local police official’s son ran into two university students while driving drunk, killing one and breaking the leg of the other. When arrested, he boasted that his father’s position rendered him immune to punishment. There is no affinity for the underdog in China. There isn’t even a word for it.
To face the absurdities of daily life, expats in Shanghai keep a mantra: This is China. The Middle Kingdom was not so much a foreign country as it was a parallel universe that managed to offend all five senses plus one more—common. China was cockroaches in pharmacy display cases, and employees who reacted to this being pointed out to them by responding, “Yep, that’s a cockroach.” China was people spitting, blowing their noses, or vomiting onto the sidewalk next to me, crowding entrances, pushing, cutting in line, littering, and smoking in the elevator. China was restaurants listing menu items that they never intended to serve (the loss of face from not offering something outweighing having “run out” of it). China was poorly insulated, badly heated apartments, and the ayi leaving my windows open while the entire area was burning garbage. The Chinese were pathological about the idea of circulating “fresh air,” even if it was some of the dirtiest air in the world.
China was people taking an eternity to use bank machines, bathrooms with hot-water taps that didn’t work, soap dispensers that never had any soap, and long, gross-looking fingernails that served no apparent purpose. China was where children were clothed not in diapers but in pants with open crotches so they could easily relieve themselves, and they were encouraged to do so whenever they felt the urge. It wasn’t uncommon to see mothers or ayis instructing children to piss or shit on sidewalks, in public parks, or on subway platforms. I once came home to encounter a girl urinating in the hallway of my apartment building while her father waited. When I asked local Chinese about these behaviors, they either professed to not like it any more than I did or claimed not to notice. Those who tried to offer explanations usually referred to some variation of China’s history of overpopulation and deprivation. If the Chinese didn’t fight for something, whether it was a cup of rice or a seat on the train, they had to do without it.
China was where cheating, cutting corners, and corruption appeared to be so ingrained that I began to question the supposed immorality of it all. Test preparation services advertised that their most expensive packages included actual copies of upcoming GMATs. To prevent cheating on the written portion of the driver’s license examination, some areas required candidates to take tests at computer terminals outfitted with webcams. An American friend who lived in rural China and couldn’t read Chinese made a few phone calls and, on the day of the test, sat before the computer while a Chinese man crawled over on his belly, out of the camera’s view, inched his nose over the keyboard, and completed the test for him.
China is one of the world’s largest markets for digital piracy, and the failure to stop it has less to do with an enabling government (though it is rumored that the People’s Liberation Army controls the pirated DVD trade) than with the sense of entitlement people have about illegally downloaded materials. Chinese watch Internet videos on YouKu and assume that Americans copied it to create YouTube. There are giant retailers in Beijing called Wu Mart. Copying is simply a way of life. Whether it is fruit stands, electronics malls, or factories, the surest bet for a business is to wait for someone else to figure out a successful model, then open up an identical shop down the street with slightly cheaper prices. On Shanghai’s Dagu Road, one of the city’s first expat enclaves, the venerable Movie World had sold pirated DVDs for years. Then along came a new store named Even Better Than Movie World, after which the original place changed its name to No Better Than Movie World.
Underlying all this anarchy was a sense of menace. Though crime in China tends not to be violent, and I felt perfectly safe anywhere, anytime in Shanghai, I couldn’t shake the feeling of a systemic dysfunction. From counterfeit drugs to cooking oil reclaimed from sewers under restaurants, there seemed to be a new scandal every month. Meat so packed with steroids that consumers got heart palpitations when eating it. Vinegar contaminated with antifreeze. Watermelons exploding on the vine from growth accelerants. The most egregious was the revelation that nearly two dozen milk companies had laced their products with melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical used to manufacture plastics, in order to boost their apparent protein content. The tainted milk caused kidney damage in hundreds of thousands of infants in China and at least six died as a result. A local reporter in Beijing revealed that street vendors were filling their steamed buns with cardboard, sparking widespread anger, until he admitted it was all a hoax and was sentenced to a year in jail. Or was it? Had he, as some suggested, been forced to confess in order to maintain “social harmony,” the catchall term that gave the government extrajudicial rights and was invoked the way Western countries used the phrase “war on terror”?
It didn’t help that while filling out my visa application in the United States, I had thoughtlessly written “journalist” as my occupation—technically true, since I was still employed by a newspaper at the time. The Chinese consulate refused to process my application until I faxed over a promise that I was not traveling as a writer and would not write anything while in the country. I eventually solved the problem with a carefully worded letter stating that I was not traveling as an employee of a newspaper, but this misstep only heightened the paranoia I already felt about going to China, where no one told you what the rules were until you broke one, and I arrived in Shanghai convinced that I’d been marked for government monitoring.
All the unease and crassness made me appreciate the occasional moments of kindness and civility. There was the man who answered when I called the service number listed on a subway drink machine that had eaten my money. He apologized and promised to send my refund—two RMB, or about thirty cents—to my address within a week. I could have hugged the Chinese woman who, before exiting the subway train, told her son, “Xian xia, zai shang,” or “First off, then on.” There was the woman I called at the bank who spoke good English and found me the address and hours for two nearby branches. Fearing that the branch employees might not understand me, she even gave me her personal cell phone number in case I ran into trouble. I thanked her profusely, to which she replied, “No problem. Welcome to China.” These encounters reminded me that China renews itself every day, and every day needs its own welcome.
THOUGH I TRIED to avoid eating raw vegetables at restaurants, drank only bottled water, and used gallons of antibacterial hand gel, I still fell victim to a virulent stomach bug that left me with a high fever and diarrhea, or la duzhi. A variant of la shi, or “pull shit,” which describes a regular bowel movement, la duzhi means “pull stomach,” which described my condition and, no less accurately, the sensation of having my stomach pulled out of me every time I went to the bathroom. Once the fever subsided, the stomach cramps continued, feeling as if my intestines were being wrung out like a towel. Andrew didn’t believe me. “You’re weak,” he declared. “I think you like this.”
I recovered in time to start work. My uncle’s company was one of the Zhangjiang technology park’s anchor tenants, a dozen glass and poured concrete boxes the size of airplane hangars occupying a hundred-acre parcel about a mile from the living quarters at the intersection of two major roadways. Emblazoned at the top of the main building was the company’s name, SMIC, superimposed over a silicon wafer, which lit up at night like a beacon. I took a taxi to the company’s front gate, signed in at the guard booth, and walked through neatly trimmed hedges to the main building, its curvilinear blue glass facade the only exception to the Mondrian architecture of the campus. Though it was just eight in the morning, the short walk through the heat and humidity soaked my clothes with perspiration. At the building entrance, a circular drive ringed a dry water fountain that was switched on when important customers or government officials visited. Inside, a security guard ordered me over to a bin of blue shoe covers and made me put on a pair.
A few minutes later a Malaysian Chinese woman from human resources named Ivy escorted me to the auditorium for the new employee orientation, where I was the only American. A screen above the stage bore a projection reading “Welcome to SMIC Big Family Orientation Meeting.” Another Chinese woman from human resources introduced herself as Grace, who would be supervising us over the next three full days. She clicked a button on the laptop on the podium, and the next slide appeared: “Training Purposes.” I realized then that I had been misled in terms of how much the company relied on English as its lingua franca. Though all the orientation instructors, called “owners” in the company’s business-speak, introduced themselves by their English names, that was often the only English I heard during their sessions. Their Mandarin sounded familiar, and their speech didn’t seem fast to me, and sometimes I could even understand a good number of the words. But I couldn’t comprehend a thing because I was missing all the important ones, so I would hear something like, “Okay, and now we’re going to talk about [blank] and why you [blank] and [blank] because [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] otherwise [blank] [blank] [blank]. Any questions?”
We filled out stacks of paperwork, some of which I had already completed before I was hired. I said as much to Ivy, who had stuck around to translate for me when I revealed that I was all but illiterate in Chinese. Ivy gave me a look as if to say that I’d better get used to this kind of thing and told me to just do it again.
Almost all of the company’s paperwork was in Chinese.
“What’s this?” I would ask.
“It’s the SMIC corporate culture,” Ivy would say.
“I mean, what does it say?”
Ivy would read the Chinese. I would try to conceal that I had no clue what she was saying. Then I’d sign the form.
Despite having already been hired, I had to fill out a job application for the company records, which asked for my Chinese name. I scratched out mangled versions of the two characters, which Ivy recognized and rewrote properly. The next line on the form, Ivy said, was “where you put your English name.”
While all the other Chinese parents in America appeared to have given their children “American” names, my parents—born in China, raised in Taiwan, and educated in the United States—neglected to do so for me and my brother, for reasons that they never fully explained. All my parents’ siblings in America had English names, and so did all my cousins, but not me, and when I was young I hated it for the inevitable mispronunciations during classroom roll calls, the misguided compliments on my English when I introduced myself, and the constant questions about where I was from—No, I mean, where are you FROM? I lost count of how many times I parsed the answer to that question in a manner that was probably familiar to other hyphenated Americans: I was born in California, and my parents grew up in Taiwan (which people often confused with Thailand).
Whenever I complained to my parents, they told me I was free to change my name to anything I liked when I turned eighteen. That felt light-years away in my mind, and my parents always said it in a tone that suggested such an unfilial act might cause them to die of disappointment. My father liked to point out that common Chinese surnames are about as plentiful as common English given names, so did I really want to be another one of the thousands of Michael or Steven Hsus in the world? (I did.) My mother, who never passed up an opportunity to trot out her well-worn, Christian-inspired “think of the less fortunate” palliative, would remind me that it could have been worse. “Your name could start with an X or something,” she would say.
Now, given the opportunity to adopt the English name I had always wanted, I froze. The forty or so other employees, all Chinese, and all presumably with English names, began passing their completed forms up to the front for collection. Ivy, who already seemed panicked at how little Chinese I could read or speak, made impatient noises.
“Sorry,” I said finally. “But I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have an English name?” Ivy gasped. “You should really pick one.” She folded her arms and waited for me to do just that, as if I could make such an existential decision on the spot.
“Can I just leave it blank?” I said.
I could not, she said. This was the name that was going to be printed on my identification badge and all my company records, including my work visa, and leaving it blank would delay all the processing. We were holding up orientation. I was already a curiosity for being the only newcomer with a personal assistant, and I could feel the other employees watching me.
“What do your friends call you?” Ivy asked.
“Uh, Huan?”
