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“Well, that’s fine,” she said. “Just put that down for now. You can always change it later.”
After that she had to get back to work. “Just do your best,” she said as she left.
I spent the next three days of orientation sitting through a blizzard of Chinese characters punctuated with the occasional English word. Much of the English was also incomprehensible, as the company seemed to employ acronyms at every opportunity, a penchant that I chalked up to the representational nature of its mother tongue, so I remained mystified through sessions such “Q&R Intro,” “IP Intro,” “KMS & DMS Intro,” and “Quality System Intro & ISO/TS 16949/TL900.”
My comprehension improved when the information moved away from business or technical terms. I gathered that, to motivate employees to arrive at work early, breakfast was free in the cafeteria before seven-thirty a.m., that there were hot water limits in the dormitories housing the MAs, and that the company’s management style was decidedly punitive. During a session explaining clean rooms, where blank silicon wafers were etched into chips, cut, and packaged, and which had air filters extracting everything larger than five microns (the size of a human red blood cell) because even the tiniest particle could interfere with or damage the equipment or wafers, we learned that employees could be fined for using their storage cabinets for anything other than their full-body clean suits or shoes. Or for stepping on the wardrobe clapboard when changing out of the clean suit. Or for “doodling on clean suit or shoes” (a 700 RMB fine, which was a month’s salary for an MA). Or for failing to hang the suit on the right rack (100 RMB; employees were fired after the third offense). Or for failing to escort a visitor (200 RMB). Inside the fabs there was to be no food, drink, or communication or recording devices, no games, no running, and no more than two people chatting at one time. “Violators ticketed and told on,” the signs warned. There were also fines for spitting in sinks, running in the hallways, and not wearing clean socks.
The importance of clean socks came up often during orientation, one instructor after another exhorting us to mind our pedal hygiene. In an effort to reduce the dirt and dust that might ruin wafers, the mass of employees who surged through the turnstiles every morning first went into a locker area, where they changed into a pair of indoor shoes, a familiar habit for Chinese. The company provided white canvas slippers for this purpose, an affront to even my rudimentary sense of fashion, and everyone got a pair the first day except for me, because they didn’t have any big enough for my feet.
We were reminded to smile for the photograph that would appear on our identification badge and to wear it around our necks at all times. To flush the toilets after using the bathroom, to be polite and mannered when getting on and off the elevator, to show up for work on time and every day, to have a good attitude (“Your boss isn’t looking for who’s smart but who’s helpful”), and once again to wear clean socks. “Buy enough and wash them so that you can wear new ones every day,” another instructor, Christa, said. “We can look up your locker number and find out who has stinky socks and tell their boss.”
I looked around to see if anyone else was amused at this paternalism, but most of the other new recruits seemed engaged and interested. Some of them took notes. After Christa exited, Grace asked if there were any questions.
One man raised his hand. “Yes,” he said, “when’s the test?”
I chuckled at his joke.
“Right after class,” Grace answered.
There was even a session devoted to graft, during which we were told that it wasn’t okay to accept kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to offer kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to suggest giving or receiving a kickback, and so on. When I asked Andrew later for the reason behind all the lecturing, most of which seemed common sense to me, he said, “Because they’d all take kickbacks if they could.”
There is a term that describes the way interpersonal relationships work in China: guanxi. Basically, guanxi is a person’s connections, the social network in which members look out for one another—similar to the way family members can count on one another for a favor. Originally a value-neutral idea rooted in Confucian values, guanxi was critical to doing business in China and had lately become conflated with nepotism, cronyism, and other corruption.
“You mean that’s not understood as unethical?” I asked.
“Listen,” Andrew said. “I went to a Chinese university for my MBA. Plagiarism isn’t seen as such here. They copy everything. It’s all about the grades. It’s probably because of the entrance exam system. They compete for spots, and once they’re in, they’re not well served. It’s not like America, where there’s always the guy who buys the beer and pizza, provides the apartment, and sort of skates by. Here they’re cribbing on exams, and everyone’s doing it.”
In a twist to Deng Xiaoping’s famous pronouncement that it didn’t matter if the cat was black or white as long as it caught the mouse, the Chinese valued results, not processes. And now, in a race to catch up with the West, it didn’t matter how the cat caught the mouse. This created an environment where, as one popular saying went, China’s hardware (technology, machinery, materials) far exceeded its software (knowhow, critical thinking, moral reasoning, the entire education system). That’s why motion sensors in public bathrooms were installed upside down. And road and building construction flouted safety codes, established practices, and even basic physics in contractors’ haste to present a “finished” project that could pass eye tests. Across the street from the company, next to a landscaped park with winding stone pathways and groves of bamboo along a canal that would have offered the neighborhood a rare green space if the iron gates hadn’t been locked at all times, the local government erected and tore down a new administration building three times before the last try was deemed satisfactory (or the building and demolition contractors had enriched themselves enough).
WITH MY ORIENTATION completed, I was assigned to the business development department and given a desk in the reception area of a suite on the fifth and top floor, near the executive offices. From the windows, I had a view of the neighboring farmland on which had encroached luxury home communities, wanton monstrosities assembled from every convention of European architecture, adorned with swimming pools and tennis courts, and as far as I could tell, completely unoccupied. The multimillion-dollar properties had all been purchased solely as investment properties. At night the communities were completely dark.
My colleagues, all of whom had English names, consisted of a fellow American-born Chinese (or ABC), two local Chinese, and another born and raised on the mainland, educated in the United States, and returned to China in midcareer. Those were affectionately termed haigui, or sea turtles, and the company’s management was full of them. The head of the department, a genial Taiwanese man who received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell and a doctorate from Columbia, was known as one of the best, most Westernized managers in the company. He had struck me as efficient but not overly friendly during my phone interview, perhaps due to his compromised position. “You’re the CEO’s nephew,” he explained to me one day after work. “We had to hire you.”
My first duty was to read a semiconductors for dummies book. My second was to review about four hundred pages of electronic presentations about the company and its processes and products, full of acronyms and unfamiliar terms. When I asked where I could find the answers to my questions, I was told to check the Internet. But Internet access was so tightly controlled that the entire company had a fixed number of “permissions,” irrespective of employee numbers or needs, of which my department of six people had only two. Even though the company had grown exponentially since those permissions were first doled out, the quota had not increased. I couldn’t have imagined that an international high-tech company like my uncle’s could be so draconian, but Andrew assured me the Internet arrangement wasn’t the norm in China. It was a productivity measure concocted by the chief technology officer and head of the IT department, a buddy of Richard’s from Dallas known as “NYC,” whose seemingly innocuous initials were uttered with the same dread as “KGB,” and even Richard somehow didn’t have much veto power when it came to this. The Internet permissions were so coveted that anytime someone with Web access left the company, a frenzy ensued as other employees, and sometimes even entire departments, scrambled to get that person’s access transferred to them.
The idiosyncrasies extended to the phones, which didn’t allow callers to leave messages—China had leapfrogged voicemail as it tried to catch up with the world’s technology. Instead, employees carried long-range cordless phones with them whenever they left their desks, and they were expected to answer without delay whether they were midbite at lunch, midsentence in a meeting, or midgrunt in a bathroom stall, which were marked “Western” and “Eastern” for having regular toilets and porcelain-lined pits in the floor, respectively.
Speaking Chinese at a preverbal level had its benefits. Nobody expected me to say anything in meetings, which were conducted almost exclusively in Chinese, with a few technical or business English terms that tempted me into believing I understood what was being discussed. And it forced executives into their nonnative languages, relinquishing their positions of power, though not everyone played along. Chen Laoshi (laoshi means “teacher” and is used as a respectful way to address elders), the Communist Party cadre and vice-president who oversaw my department, spoke Chinese with complete indifference to the person in front of her. An otherwise pleasant, fashionable older woman who liked to experiment with hairstyles, she nonetheless terrified me, owing to her status as a party member old enough to have participated in the Cultural Revolution. I had read of the heinous crimes committed during that period, including students who killed and ate their teachers to demonstrate their ideological bona fides. Another cadre in the company, Zhang Laoshi, spoke only in the inflected rhetorical style of revolutionaries and said that when she passed away, she would see Lenin and Engels in heaven.
With little work to do and no Internet, I spent most of my early days at the company browsing the employee directory. Ivy’s bewilderment at my not having an English name proved to be no isolated event. My Chinese colleagues, with names like Caroline, Catherine, and Lanna, had done double takes when I introduced myself and asked me to spell out my name in both English and Chinese. Though the company was 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or received in school, and commonly used it when addressing one another, even when the rest of the conversation was in Chinese. Unable to recall my name, one Shanghai-born vice-president called me “Steve” for almost three months.
Even the characters of my Chinese name confused my colleagues. For as long as I could remember, I had been asked what my name “meant”—some people assumed that it must be Chinese for “John,” which it was not. My answer was always more complicated than people wanted—Chinese just didn’t translate one-to-one into English, something I would come to understand better when I started taking language lessons—and drawn from a childhood conversation that I remembered having with my parents, probably after the first time someone asked me about my name. The character for Huan is an obscure, seldom-used one that appears almost exclusively in personal names and has to do with the main wooden beam of a traditional Chinese house. The radical,
, or mu, means “wood,” and the second part,
, or gen, consists of the character for “sun” between two columns. So my name means something like “pillar” and connotes things like strength, steadfastness, and permanence. But modern Chinese often aren’t familiar with the ancient character
, which differs from the more common heng,
, by a single stroke. I fielded a lot of phone calls from people asking for Hsu Heng and found myself correcting my name’s pronunciation just as often as I had back home.
I also learned that in China my mother’s be-thankful-it’s-not-spelled-with-an-X words of comfort didn’t hold up, because it was spelled with an X. My family spells our surname “Hsu” because Taiwan and other diaspora regions anglicize according to the Wade-Giles rules. But in the People’s Republic, which uses the pinyin system developed during Mao’s rule, my surname appears as “Xu,” one of the few spellings that make it even more difficult for non-Chinese to pronounce.
As most of the English names in the company directory were chosen, not bestowed, I concluded that the “regular” Western names had been selected for their ease of pronunciation—there were almost two hundred employees named Jacky. Meanwhile, the more unusual names appeared to reveal hobbies, aspirations, and values. There was a man in the legal department named Superiority. There was a Holy, a Hebrew, and a Leafy. There was a Shopping, a Running, and a Cooking. A Snow and a Vanilla. A Mars, a Soda, a Silk, and a Coma. There was a Quake, whom I later met; he’d chosen the name because he liked the computer game. There was a Snoopy, a Fantasy, a Leeway, and a couple of Creams. There was a Fire and an Ice, a Fish, Lion, Bison, Fox, Gazelle, and Ducky. There was a Water, Fjord, and Mountain; a Spring, Summer, Winter, and Season. There was an Ares, Apollo, Zeus, and Socrates. There were Zhongs named Stuck and Feeling. There were Wangs named Double, Soda, Viking, Power, Burden, Sprite, Wonder, and the unfortunately chosen Blown. There were Lions (one), Tigers (eight), and Bears (three). There was a Sky, Rainbows (two), a Sleet, a Rain, a Cloud, five Dragons, a Condor, and an Icecrane. There were many Ivys but only one Yale. A man named Penguin really did resemble a penguin. There were soccer fans: Baggio, Lampard, Bolton, and Arsenal. And basketball fans: two Magics (plus one Earvin), three Birds, three Jordans, two Kobes, an Iverson, and even a Shaquille. Oddly, there wasn’t a single Yao Ming. There was a Chocolate and a Greentea. A Charming, Hansome (without the d), Bright, and Hyper. There was a Demon, the second to come along at the company, and a couple of Lucifers. A married couple at the company was named Alpha and Beta (Alpha was the male), who subsequently named their son Gamma. There was a Cheney but no Bushes. No Obamas appeared after the 2008 presidential election, but there was a Change. And who said there was no freedom in China? Freedom Huang worked in the IT department.
I wasn’t the only one wasting time. The news back home tended to be a chorus of lamentations over America losing ground to Asian students, who were scoring better on science and math tests. But from my perch, and considering the rampant cheating, apathy, ineffectiveness, and outright incompetence and laziness of some local employees, many of whom were graduates of China’s top universities, the world could rest easy. Despite the ABCs’ grumblings over the company’s many regulations, such as wage garnishment for any employees who failed to clock in by eight-thirty a.m. or who clocked out before five-thirty p.m., even if it was only by a minute, most also had to concede that they were necessitated by a workforce that didn’t exactly disprove the notion that if they weren’t carefully watched and supervised every second of the day, they wouldn’t get anything done.
If they exhausted all other forms of time wasting, there was always napping. Employees dozed in the darkened cafeteria between meals, or at their desks. Andrew discovered cardboard pallets in a corner of the solar cell fab where his subordinates literally slept on the job. An engineer on the floor below me even tucked a chaise longue, pillow, blanket, and eyeshade under his desk. The Westerners who liked to characterize China as a sleeping dragon were focused on the wrong word. I began to suspect that the groundswell of Christianity at the company had something to do with the permission it gave people to shut their eyes at their desk. Anyone with their arms folded, eyes closed, and head bowed before an open Bible on their desk was typically beyond reproach.
Eventually I gave up my search for an English name, but I did acquire one of sorts, as I became known around the company as Li Xiao Long, or Bruce Lee. I learned of this from another ABC at the company, who told me that the entire human resources department referred to me as the kung fu movie star, owing, I supposed, to my shaggy hair. In fact, he said, my given name usually elicited blank or confused stares. But when he said, “You know, that ABC guy with the long hair,” everybody smacked themselves on the forehead and said, “Oh, you mean Bruce Lee! Why didn’t you just say so?”
EXCEPT FOR THE final afternoon of my orientation, when Richard had given a short presentation to the new employees on the differences between a mercenary and a missionary (“I hope everyone here will be a missionary, not a mercenary,” he said), I didn’t see my uncle much. I sometimes encountered him in the hallways, dressed in his usual work outfit: loose-fitting black pants; a light-colored short-sleeved dress shirt with his identification badge clipped to his collar; a chunky multifunction metal wristwatch one or two links too large, requiring him to constantly shake it back up his right arm; and black leather shoes with round toes and rubber soles. His only sartorial concession was his hair, which he dyed black, a popular practice among aging Chinese executives and party officials. A retinue of important-looking people dangled around him like eager accessories. If he noticed me, he’d wave and remind me to “be a good boy.”
Despite having told Richard from the beginning that I was coming to China to look for the family’s porcelain, he seemed to consider it a waste of time, aside from the filial component of talking to my grandmother, disbelieving that I could possibly be more interested in that than in all the opportunities his company afforded. Whenever I brought up the subject of the porcelain, he got so annoyed that I stopped talking to him about it. Still, I understood and respected his sensitivity to any appearance of nepotism and was happy to be just another employee, especially when I saw the way some people would react—sensing an opportunity, shying away, or projecting their animus toward him onto me—when they found out I was Richard’s nephew.
For all the money behind Richard’s company, it was hamstrung from the start. Because he had hired many employees from the major competitor, TSMC, which had acquired his first company, TSMC sued him almost immediately, claiming that he stole intellectual property via its former employees. It didn’t help that the name SMIC—which Richard insisted be pronounced as an acronym and not as a word—had a certain Even Better Than Movie World ring to it. In 2003 SMIC paid a $175 million settlement. But a year later TSMC sued again, claiming SMIC had broken the terms of the settlement and alleging more intellectual property theft; that suit remained unresolved when I arrived. The party line at the company was that the lawsuits were frivolous and the cost of doing business; being targeted by the top dog was a kind of honor and Richard was noble for settling in the first place to avoid a protracted battle. Some Christians at the company even cast the lawsuit in terms of spiritual warfare, a tribulation that would eventually be triumphed over by faith and good works.
Amid the legal wrangling, the company went ahead with a much-anticipated IPO in 2004; the demand for shares was 272 times what was issued. On the day of the IPO, Andrew and a group of expats gathered at his apartment to rejoice—they were about to become rich. But as soon as Scarlett helped ring the opening bell on Wall Street, the stock price dropped 15 percent, and what should have been a celebration turned into a wake. The stock price never recovered. “It was one of the worst days of my entire existence,” Andrew told me. “If anyone should be pissed, it’s me. I’ve paid a huge price. I’ve taken years off my life by living here.” At the time of the IPO, he had transformed himself into a marathon runner. Then he caught a cough he couldn’t shake, began coughing blood, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent half a year convalescing and didn’t run much after that.
By the time I got to Shanghai, the stock options that my other uncle, Lewis, had once castigated me for turning down were trading at less than a third of their IPO price, an all-time low. Despite Richard’s ambitions, the company had only a handful of profitable quarters since its inception, and his investors—the Chinese government among them—were growing impatient. Yet for the prohibitive start-up costs—a single fab could run upward of a billion dollars, and SMIC operated half a dozen of them—and the crushing pressure to consistently produce more for less money, chip making was paradoxically a long game. I often wondered why Richard chose to take on such an endeavor. The easy answer was that he knew something others didn’t, that the conditions were right to fill a vacuum, and that he, perhaps due to some kind of Christian exceptionalism, believed he could succeed where others couldn’t. I guess that part ran in the family.
Unable to win big high-margin orders, the company relied on cutbacks to help balance its books. Richard never passed up the chance to remind people that the reason a rival foundry in the technology park, backed by the sons of Taiwan’s second-richest man and China’s former president Jiang Zemin, respectively, had floundered even worse than SMIC was because it spent too lavishly, citing the widespread provision of company cars and laptops as prime examples. So at SMIC the bathroom taps gave only cold water, the paper towel bins were empty, and the soap dispensers usually were, too. Workmen went through the office suites and removed every other fluorescent light from the overhead banks. They turned off the hallway lights and air-conditioning and disabled the area thermostats. Only facilities management could activate the air-conditioning and didn’t dare to even on the most sweltering days; one meeting room had its thermostat set at 88 degrees in the middle of summer.
Like many Chinese, Richard didn’t equate time with money. His assistants spent entire afternoons trying to save a few dollars on airplane tickets. (Unless someone else was paying, Richard flew coach.) Purchase orders for as little as fifty dollars had to wait for his approval first. Even the supply of company tchotchkes was kept in his office, and only special occasions warranted their gifting. The entertaining budget for the sales department was capped at thirty RMB per person, or roughly four dollars. That was typical Richard, noble in his unwillingness to wine and dine or dirty-KTV (the karaoke with “companions” that highlighted many Chinese business trips) his way to business deals and unconcerned how it was perceived.
Had I not been related to Richard, I probably would have found his habits endearing. And I did feel a certain protectiveness when disaffected former employees criticized him. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of a CEO, especially in China, and visitors almost always found him disarming and refreshing. While other CEOs traveled by chauffeured luxury car (Communist cadres favored black, German-made sedans), Richard drove himself to work every morning in a white Volkswagen Santana, the same model as the Shanghai taxi fleet. He didn’t have a designated parking space because he didn’t need one—he was always the first to arrive. He also tried to minimize the environmental impact of his company with schemes befitting an eccentric genius—as soon as he was old enough to manipulate small tools, he had dissected every electric appliance the family owned, studied their innards, and reassembled them in perfect order. He spun off an energy company that used scrap wafers from the fabs to make solar cells. The factory rooftops housed solar panels, wind turbines, and a rainwater-recycling system. Instead of lawn mowers to trim the company’s grass, Richard kept a herd of goats, which he never hesitated to mention had the added benefit of excreting odorless fertilizer. An American technology reporter based in Shanghai told me that he always enjoyed talking to Richard, whose inner nerd and disdain for bullshit frequently led him afield from carefully prepared talking points; the reporter described him as a small-town diner owner who just happened to be running a billion-dollar tech company.
WHEN I STARTED WORK, the first question many of my co-workers asked me was not “Where are you from?” but “Are you a Christian?” Thanks to Richard’s evangelism, his company could have been considered one of the largest ministries in China. He closed meetings with his inner circle with prayers, which sometimes included praying for the stock price to improve. Prospective employees were asked if they were Christians at job interviews. On my first visit to Shanghai, I sat in on a meeting held with about a dozen other ABCs in Richard’s office while he gave a presentation about the company’s evangelical aims, complete with a map of China, the company’s footholds on the coast, and arrows pointing inland, indicating the desired direction of the spread of the gospel and probably what a lot of Japanese army maps of China looked like during World War II.
On Sundays much of the living quarters population made the short walk to the twin churches, one Chinese and one English, that Richard had built nearby and where company security guards sometimes moonlighted at the entrances. While the English church, dubbed Thanksgiving Church, was between pastors, members of the congregation volunteered to give the weekly sermon. The service was standard, raised-hands-and-hallelujahs, clapping-to-the-music Chinese American evangelical. Song leaders with guitars strummed major chords and guided the congregation through contemporary Christian rock anthems, for which the lyrics were projected onto a screen, and everyone seemed to know the tunes except me. One morning the substitute preaching duties fell on an ABC from Texas. During the discussion of a scripture passage, he focused on the word therefore, explaining that it was important to pay attention to the phrases it linked, as it signified a causal relationship. “For example,” he said, “some people believe in evolution, therefore they abort their own babies.”
Richard didn’t have to hide or minimize his beliefs or his ministry. He had the government’s full approval, and he liked to point out high-ranking officials who were in fact Christians. So the company’s employees held weekday Bible studies and prayer fellowships at their homes without fear of incursion—it wasn’t unusual to hear hymns emanating from the high-rise apartments in the evenings. Nor did anyone bother them when they went to church—as long as it was a state-approved one. At the official churches, a pastor from the government gave a fifteen-minute sermon at the beginning and then left the congregation to hold the rest of the service as it wished, a convention that seemed rooted more in insularity than in oppression. The content of that sermon varied widely. One Sunday a young government pastor gave a message at the company’s Chinese church ostensibly about the importance of a life lived with joy. He gave an example: In photographs and in movies, Mao Zedong was always smiling and jolly while Mao’s mortal enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, was always somber and buttoned up in his Western-style suit, surrounded with American weapons. So it was no wonder Mao had won the civil war, because he was full of joy.
As job and life homogenized, SMIC employees worked together, lived together, worshipped together, and ate meals together at the nearby restaurants. My guess was that it stemmed from Richard’s desire to run the company—all twelve thousand employees of it—as a family. Though it wasn’t my style, I wouldn’t have minded if I had not had to deal with the widespread expectations to attend church and demonstrate proper missionary zeal. But I soon learned that even if the government wasn’t watching me, someone else always was.
Richard couldn’t persuade me at first, but he successfully lured many other ABCs to work in Shanghai, by “selling the dream” of proselytization, exoticism, and of course, stock options. Although that first wave of ABCs at SMIC consisted of just a few dozen men and women, they had apparently demonstrated sufficient entitlement, superiority, and disdain for the local population not only to rival China’s colonial-era occupiers but also to preemptively ruin the reputations of the ABCs who followed, which helped explain why I was greeted mostly with circumspection and, when I did anything correctly or on time, surprise.
There was nothing particularly unique about misbehaving foreigners in China—the Puxi party scene, replete with a full complement of recreational drugs, crawled with them. But the Chinese reserved a special scorn for ABCs, reacting with smug disappointment when we admitted we couldn’t speak Chinese, and monitoring us for putting on even the faintest of airs. A native term for overseas Chinese is huaqiao. Hua means “Chinese” and qiao is a homonym for “bridge.” When I first heard the term, I imagined myself stretched across the Pacific Ocean with my head in America and my feet in China (or vice versa, a fitting confusion for an ABC) and getting trampled on by people from both sides.
I lost count of how many times I was asked, usually by middle-aged men, if I felt Chinese or American. They wanted me to say, “Chinese, of course,” but I always said, “Half and half,” or “Chinese in America and American in China.” One man, unsatisfied with these answers, pressed me to the point of asking, “Let’s say the U.S. and China went to war right now. Which side would you fight for?” I told him I’d run away to Canada.
The same discomforts, corruption, and disregard for the environment and human life that bothered expats living in China exist in many developing countries. But unlike our non-Chinese counterparts, ABCs can’t just dismiss them as the novelties of an exotic place. While the Holy Grail for some foreigners living abroad is the day when they become native, I wondered if that was really possible for an ABC. It took so much effort, both psychic and physical, to maintain the bulwarks defending against Chinese culture that ABCs tended to be measured when I asked them how they felt about China. A frequent answer for how long they had lived in China was “Too long.” But for non-ABCs, assimilation didn’t necessitate acquiescence. I was reminded of that every time I watched a white guy part the crowds on a French Concession street wearing a collarless shirt, loose pants, canvas slip-ons, and a giant smirk, speaking bad Mandarin with a ridiculous Beijing accent while locals practically fainted in admiration around him.
Though ABCs enjoyed many perks as foreign students or workers, it often seemed that the Chinese took great pleasure devising complications to remind us where we came from. Whether it was not getting the discount for “foreigners” at happy hour, or having to produce identification before entering the international, foreigners-only church (a white face was the best passport in China), being ignored for jobs teaching English (nearly all the private language schools requested a photograph of the applicant to weed out those with Chinese heritage), or being complimented on our English by Westerners, ABCs got the Chinese treatment at foreigner prices.
This fetishization of Westerners was perhaps the most exasperating part of being an ABC in China. Crimes against foreigners, colloquially known as laowai, were taken seriously, and just being American was usually enough to deter criminals, but the Chinese still regarded laowai as an ethnicity, not a nationality, so we lacked the necessary skin tone and hair color. For Chinese companies, there was great value to bringing on a laowai in order to legitimize it, a concept explained to me as “the nose.” If one Chinese company was doing business with another Chinese company, it was better to bring along a white guy—any white guy—because it implied that the company was international, high profile, well run, and ethical. It didn’t matter if the nose was actually in charge. I met a Canadian-born architect whose fluent Chinese made a skeptical client spend an entire meeting making her prove that she had been born, raised, and educated in the West. There was only one white person at her company, and he usually gave all the presentations, even if he wasn’t involved with the project. The company even moved him to a window office, so passersby could see him.
And still I felt wounded when a fellow expat’s gaze passed over me without acknowledgment. Non-Chinese foreigners seemed to always notice one another on the street, sharing a knowing, conspiratorial glance, and when I tried to catch their eyes, they probably regarded me as just another impolite, ogling local. Though I stood out to the local Chinese, I was also invisible to many of my countrymen. What allowed me to move between local and Western cultures also meant that I could be frustrated by both. Every time I went out, I felt like I was in the middle of an enormous family reunion, surrounded by backwoods relatives bent on embarrassing me in front of my fellow expats.
Because of that familiarity, I found myself engaging in behavior I would have never even considered back home. I had no inhibitions telling locals to pick up their trash, step aside, queue up, or otherwise mind the business of anyone who broke my personal code of ethics. I shoved a man who flew through a red light on his scooter. I welcomed rainy days for the opportunity to carry an umbrella, which I tucked under my arm, pointed end forward, and swiveled it back and forth to delineate my personal space, or swung it like a cane while I walked, allowing me to “accidentally” hit offending cars, scooters, or people. Almost once a week, as the subway train pulled into my stop, I scanned the riders on the platform waiting for the car doors to open, searching for the person in most flagrant violation of not moving aside for exiting passengers, and charged into him like a football lineman. It was always unsatisfying. Feeling his lungs empty in a surprised “oof!” when I drove my shoulder into his chest only reminded me that in his judgment, he was just minding his own business when some jerk broke the Chinese code that, for all the molestation one endured when pushing and shoving his way through public spaces, you didn’t touch someone in anger.
Coming from lily-white Utah, I had never spent much time around ABCs, but I soon discovered the comfort of the shared experience of growing up with Chinese parents in America; it was nice to know that my parents’ weird habits were more or less universal among overseas Chinese, as were my own. My fellow ABCs instinctively knew what I meant by Chinese and Chinese, American and American. They never called themselves “Chinese American,” a meaningless term that doesn’t describe anything at all, least of all the people it intends to describe. I always knew what they meant when they asked where I was from. No one teased me for flushing when I drank alcohol, because their faces were red, too. Everyone took off their shoes when entering houses.
ABCs understood my obsession with food in general and fruit in particular, as well as my discrimination when selecting fruit and my belief in it as a panacea. I had always thought my fruit fetish was because my mother, a health food junkie, refused to buy candy for my brother and me when we were young; fruit was our only source of sugar. We regularly fought over the last cluster of grapes or the right to gnaw on the remains of a disassembled mango, and like the ancient Chinese who dropped their chopsticks in horror when they saw Western barbarians butchering their food with knives and forks, I recoiled when I watched my American friends eat kiwis with a spoon or smear their hands and faces as they attacked a wedge of melon. In our house, kiwis were peeled and sliced, and watermelon was always chilled before it was deseeded and cubed so that it could be eaten with forks. The hollow burst of a knife plunging into a ripe watermelon elicited a delicious anticipation akin to cracking a crème brûlée’s shell and had a Proustian effect on me.
But it wasn’t just our household. Fruit is China’s apple pie. Dessert in China most commonly takes the form of a plate of fresh-cut fruit. The phrase for “consequently” or “result” in Chinese is jieguo, or “bear fruit.” Even the humblest fruit shack in China offers dragonfruits with flaming petals and pink or bloodred flesh, like a sweeter, milder kiwi; strands of purple grapes, plump as roe and bursting with intense, bubblegum flavor; or crispy, refreshing starfruit. The native kiwis, known as Chinese gooseberries before New Zealand farmers rebranded them, are sweeter and more pungent than their exported counterparts. Bowling-ball-sized pomelos, like meaty, fragrant grapefruits, whose rinds my grandmother used to fashion into hats for her children. Mangos of all kinds, from the small champagne varietals to the leathery giants named “elephant horns.” Lychees, grown in southern China and quick to spoil, but the taste so ethereal that one emperor supposedly uprooted an entire tree and had it shuttled back to Beijing in horse carts. Sacks of tiny sha tang ju, aptly named “sugar mandarins,” that I peeled and ate whole, a dozen at a time.
As difficult as being an ABC in China could be, ABC women had it even harder. ABC men could dip into both local and expat dating pools, while I never met a single ABC woman who expressed interest in local men. But having witnessed the kind of nagging, overprotective dragon ladies that Chinese women could become, I never had much interest in dating one, and even Chinese people characterized Shanghainese women, though beautiful, as conniving and high maintenance. I certainly noticed plenty of attractive women walking the streets of Shanghai. Sometimes they were flocked two or three at a time under a foreigner’s arm, an implicit sex-for-financial-security exchange that universally disgusted female ABCs almost as much as the ankle-length nylons local women favored. It wasn’t just Western men who took advantage of their elevated socioeconomic status in China. Plenty of my ABC friends ran through local women with an exuberance that belied a sense of unshackledness; some admitted to having four or five different sexual partners every week. Part of the allure, as one friend explained to me, was that local women could be shaped into anything the boyfriend wished. They were open to acquiring new ideologies, new languages, and perhaps most important, new talents in the bedroom. An expat bartender in a swanky club summed it up for me one night. “Chinese girls, they don’t have the same sexual hangups as Americans,” he said. “They’ll do anything, you name it.” And just as the music paused between songs, he shouted, “Even anal!” I couldn’t help thinking this was one of the variables in some subconscious calculus that persuaded ABC men, despite all their complaining, to stay in China long after they had planned.
AS SHANGHAI ENTERED the rainy season, a typhoon always seemed to be spinning somewhere off the coast. Most of the time it just cleared the smoggy skies, but occasionally a wet tendril would inundate the city. One morning a heavy shower flooded the streets and drenched me as soon as I stepped into it. With the sidewalks and gutters under many inches of water, I walked along the crest in the middle of the driveway encircling the living quarters. As I neared the exit, a white Toyota sedan came up behind me. I knew the driver expected me to move. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, I probably would have, but he was dry and I was the one in the rain; I figured he could accommodate me for once. The driver honked. I kept walking. The driver lay on the horn, a long, unbroken proxy for his annoyance, which under the circumstances only irritated me more.
A local would have just given way, because in China the ones being honked at, not the drivers, controlled whether the honking continued. As soon as the pedestrian yielded, the driver would have gone by, and because Chinese seemed to lack object permanence for these types of exchanges, both would have ceased to exist in each other’s minds. A non-Chinese foreigner also probably would have moved, bemused, perplexed, and possibly upset with the driver but not wishing to appear as the arrogant foreigner. And then there was me, the American-born Chinese. I decided that I wasn’t going to move. I couldn’t disavow our common heritage, but being Chinese didn’t mean I had to be Chinese, too.
This was more than a traffic dispute or a cultural misunderstanding. The driver was the Chinese Red Army, a column of armored vehicles rolling over the principles of right of way and common courtesy, and I was the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, armed with nothing but an umbrella, staring down the machine for the millions of oppressed pedestrians and bicyclists forced to run for their lives to avoid vehicles blowing through stop signs and red lights, making left turns from right lanes, crossing medians, and diving into bicycle paths. The honking got louder, longer, and angrier. I put my head down and kept walking. Go ahead and run me over, I thought, because I wasn’t budging. I had rights.
I walked all the way to the gate with the car crawling behind me, its horn sounding a continuous, grating wail. When I finally peeled off, the driver pulled up to me, rolled down his window, and screamed, “Ni you shenme yisi?” Basically, “What the hell is your problem?” I had neither the energy nor the vocabulary to retort. For the rest of the day I indulged in violent fantasies of tearing the driver apart while berating him with immaculate Chinese and resolved to learn the Chinese word for “motherfucker.”
[2] (#ulink_bb504bf6-fad6-5790-9182-1a3811f4f756)
A CHICKEN TALKING WITH A DUCK (#ulink_bb504bf6-fad6-5790-9182-1a3811f4f756)
I INTENDED TO STAY IN CHINA FOR JUST A YEAR, BUT AFTER a few months I had learned nothing more about my family’s porcelain. I hadn’t even found my own apartment, despite Andrew’s frequent hints that I had freeloaded long enough. At work, Richard moved me to the corporate relations department, where I had marginally more to do, editing press releases, but mostly I waited for the delivery of the English-language dailies in the afternoon. On weekends I played basketball and poker with a group of ABCs, many of them former SMIC employees, whom I’d met through Andrew. Though my Chinese had improved as a matter of course and immersion, I still couldn’t really speak it outside taxis or restaurants, and I risked becoming one of the expat dilettantes whom I so readily impugned.
Having shaken the illnesses that dogged me when I arrived, I regained my weight by rediscovering Chinese food. My mother had eschewed many typical Chinese dishes that she found too greasy, so I knew what couscous was long before san bei ji, clay pot chicken cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil and dressed with ginger and basil. Or yu xiang qiezi, spicy, stir-fried sweet and sour eggplant that was the platonic ideal for topping a bowl of rice. Though my family frequently ate dim sum on the weekends, it wasn’t until I moved to China that I discovered boluo bao, pineapple buns, named for the checkered crust of golden sugar on their tops and best eaten steaming hot with a slab of butter sandwiched in the middle. Or xiaolongbao, the famous steamed soup dumplings, delicate bite-size morsels that sagged like water balloons when picked up between chopsticks, were placed on a spoon with a splash of vinegar and shredded ginger, and were then popped whole into your mouth.
Despite the horror stories that street vendors cooked with oil reclaimed from sewers, or that the meat of the yangrouchuan lamb skewers was actually cat, I managed to eat street food with no ill effects, breakfasting on jian bing, a thin eggy crepe wrapped around pickled vegetables and a smear of chili sauce. For lunch or dinner, I gobbled shengjianbao, another type of soup dumpling, but larger, thicker skinned, and pan-fried to create toothsome sesame-sprinkled tops and browned bottoms with the crunch of a perfectly cooked french fry. These were rested on soup spoons in order to bite a small hole in the top to release the steam and suck out the minced pork juices, and then were eaten with vinegar in two or three meaty, doughy, oily mouthfuls.
As the vise of the Shanghai summer loosened, the air grew sharper, and autumn in the city brought blue skies and soporific temperatures. One afternoon at the office, a headline in the Shanghai Daily caught my attention: “Police Hunt for Treasure Trove of Old Coins.” A one-hundred-year-old residence in Nanhui, a transitioning rural district of Shanghai between Zhangjiang and the airport, was being developed into an entertainment center. Junkmen visited the construction site every day to gather scrap metal, and one day a neighbor heard a shout that gold had been found. Moments later the neighbor saw people scattering from the construction site with jars of coins. Apparently the junkmen, looking for metal with homemade detectors, had unearthed jars full of silver coins. As quickly as the initial discoverers fled, more treasure hunters descended on the site, and an overwhelmed security guard called the police, who were able to recover a few of the jars containing coins that had circulated during the 1920s. Once the police took control of the site, the local cultural relics department found another jar full of silver coins marked “Mexican Republic” and estimated that they had been buried at the end of the nineteenth century, though the reasons for the burial were unclear. Efforts to recover the rest of the coins taken from the site were under way. “Any relics found under the ground or sea in China belong to our country and not to individuals,” an official was quoted as saying.
That weekend I returned to Richard’s house to visit my grandmother, whom I had seen only in glimpses since I arrived in China. Halfway through the first bar of Für Elise, Richard opened the door. “Ma!” he shouted. “Huan’s here! He wants to hear your stories!”
I found my grandmother in the kitchen, watching the ayi make jiaozi, dumplings of minced pork and chicken, scallions, and garlic folded into hand-rolled skins and then pan-fried or boiled. My family ate them doused with soy sauce infused with chopped chilies and more garlic. The ayi mentioned that about fifteen cloves of garlic had gone into the meat mixture. My grandmother nodded as she dredged a jiaozi in sauce and said, “You have to have garlic with jiaozi.”
I asked her why, thinking it related to some ancient Chinese proverb or principle of traditional Chinese medicine. My grandmother paused, pinching a jiaozi between thin metal chopsticks with a dexterity I would never achieve. She looked at me over the plastic eyeglasses obscuring half her face and replied, in English, “Tastes better.”
After we finished our jiaozi, we moved down the hall to her room so she could floss and brush her teeth, all original and all very healthy. I had not spent time with her since my grandfather’s funeral in 1997, when she was already in her eighties. Now ninety-six and less than five feet tall, she seemed even smaller than I remembered. The many layers of clothing she wore, even in the middle of summer, disguised her frailness. Her hands tremored too much for her to write, her eyes had cataracts that she refused to treat, and she didn’t hear very well. She seldom left the house, spending most of her waking hours at the desk in her room praying or reading scripture with a magnifying glass. When she napped, lying on her back inside a mosquito net with her mouth drawn over her teeth, she looked dead. Still, she remained in good health, and her mind was especially sharp.
When I was young, I always envied how a day with the grandparents, for my friends, was an anticipated event, skiing or tennis followed by a meal at a nice restaurant. But my grandparents had been old, infirm, and inscrutable for as long as I could remember them. Visits to Texas, where they lived with Richard at first and then in a senior home, typically consisted of us staring at each other in silence. The liveliest thing I ever witnessed them doing was singing in their senior choir or playing mah-jongg. Though my grandmother had helped care for my brother and me after we were born, I couldn’t remember her touching us except for the occasional pat on the arm. When my grandmother called on Christmases and my birthdays, my vocabulary limited our conversations to ni hao ma? (hello, how are you?) and, after a sufficient period of awkward silence, zai jian (goodbye). Probably because of this, I never learned to respect her the way I should have.
We sat in chairs next to her bed. It wasn’t clear if she remembered that she was the reason I had come to Shanghai. Perhaps she didn’t believe that I actually moved there just to ask her about her family’s porcelain.
“Did you go to church last Sunday?” she asked. “How was it?”
“Boring,” I said. “There’s no pastor, not until December.”
“Do you take Andrew with you to church?”
I laughed. Andrew was even less interested than I was. “No.”
“I hope you can be an ‘encourager’ to him,” she said, using the English word. She showed me the current page on her daily devotional calendar: “Remind me to be an encourager to others.” “How are things with him? Is he very bossy? Wants to ‘dominate’ you?” Another English word.
“Yeah, he’s like an older brother.”
My grandmother chuckled. “Yes, like a big brother,” she said. “You should help each other. Your nature is better than his, your temper is better than his, so don’t take it personally.”
“So I want to hear your stories,” I said, fumbling with my voice recorder.
“What would you like to know?” she asked.
“Your, um, house,” I said. I didn’t know the word for “family.”
My grandmother seemed to understand and began talking about her grandfather. I tried to follow along, scribbling terrible phonetic equivalents of words to look up later. Her grandfather was bad tempered but principled. Her grandmother was compassionate. They lived outside the Jiujiang city limits, in the countryside. My grandmother listed relatives who lived with her or nearby, but I couldn’t understand their names—most of which I was hearing for the first time—or kinship terms. The Chinese had unique terms for every possible family relationship, of which I knew only a few. After about a half hour, unable to keep up, I thanked my grandmother and told her I would come back another day. This was the longest I had ever spoken to her, if that’s what you could call it.
I TRIED TO VISIT my grandmother every weekend, sitting with her while she squinted over her medicine or slurped her lunch of rice noodles in a broth with bits of ground pork, pumpkin, egg, and vegetables. No one seemed very interested in translating for us, so we made do with my very limited Chinese and what English my grandmother had retained. That allowed me to grasp the topic being discussed, but since I had no control over the language, I couldn’t control the conversation. When I felt myself drowning, feet clawing for bottom, I attempted to gain purchase by asking questions about her life.
“My story is still later,” she’d say, with a hint of annoyance, and continue on with her story about some relative.
Her energy would flag after about an hour, and I would say goodbye. Though I often left our visits feeling confused and overwhelmed, I also felt energized to be finally speaking with my grandmother. I managed to glean the basic story of her childhood as the eldest of five sister-cousins, her schooling, and her immediate family. She recalled the arrival of the Japanese and the chaos of the war and, without prompting, confirmed both the existence and the burial of my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain.
One Saturday, after I gathered that Japanese officers had occupied my great-great-grandfather’s house during the war, I speculated to Andrew that the trail for the porcelain might lead to Japan. “So are you going to get us kicked out of two countries?” Andrew said. “Going to Japan is idiotic.”
His forcefulness took me aback. “Why?” I said.
“It’d be one thing if you had a name, like Colonel Nagasaki in some city. What makes you think you’ll need to go to Japan?”
“Jesus, I said ‘might.’”
“There’s no way you’re going to Japan,” Andrew insisted.
“Why not? The Japanese were the ones occupying the town. It’s reasonable that a Japanese guy could have taken the stuff.”
“So? Why would you go to Japan?”
“I didn’t say I was going. I said it was a possibility.”
“So there’s an infinitesimal chance, and you’re going to go?”
It was typical of Andrew, ascribing to me motivations that I hadn’t even considered yet. “I’m not going to argue with you about what percentage of chance ‘might’ means,” I said. “It’s a possibility, that’s all.”
“Well, I ‘might’ date a supermodel, but I’m not going to.”
“Not with that attitude, you’re not.”
“There’s no way you’re going to Japan. They won’t even compensate comfort women from the war.”
“Who’s asking for compensation?” I said. “Why are you so keen on disagreeing with me, especially when I’ve just barely started? Forget it. This is infuriating.”
As my grandmother wound up her family history, she must have wondered why I kept visiting and asking her the same questions. I probably asked her five times for all the names of her relatives, but I still couldn’t manage to create an accurate family tree because I couldn’t comprehend her answers. The day she spoke of leaving Macau through Guangzhou Wan, I wasted the whole time trying to figure out what a wan was (a bay). Her Jiujiang accent, which I had never noticed before, added to the confusion. A workmate taught me a Chinese expression that described these conversations: Ji tong ya jiang. A chicken talking to a duck. They were both birds, they sounded sort of the same, so they went on clucking and quacking and thinking they were having a dialogue.
