Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (4 page)

My mother is lovely, tall, and slender, with porcelain skin and high cheekbones. Thanks to her innate elegance and the keen sense of style unique to Shanghainese women, her exquisite beauty seemed almost effortless. “There are no ugly women, only lazy women,” Mom used to say; whatever favorable qualities you possessed, you had to use them to their fullest advantage, no excuses. Shanghai women enjoy the reputation of being fashionable, practical, and commercially savvy, and Mom took that claim to the highest degree.

I was tall, robust, and clear-skinned, with large, catlike eyes and long dark hair, typically bunched up into two pigtails. The neighbors called me “doll.” My mother dressed me simply, but always in bright colors, in bold contrast to the navy blue Maoist outfits of the time. One of the happiest memories of my childhood was the time my mother presented me with a colorful butterfly-print dress on Children’s Day, June 1, right before my accordion performance at school. It was my first short dress, hemmed just above the knee. Unlike the plain school uniform of a starched white shirt, blue skirt, and the Communist Youth League’s Young Pioneers red scarf we all had to wear, this dress embodied everything that life should be, all the joy and freedom I so rarely enjoyed during the course of my childhood. The skirt flared at the bottom when I twirled around, like a flower opening in sunlight. I wanted spin around the stage at my accordion recital, just to mesmerize the world with the colors.

The woman next door, whom I called “Grandma,” couldn’t stop staring at me in my dress. My enthusiasm sent deep wrinkles across her face, branching out from a timeless smile. “This girl has a lot of fire inside of her,” she would proclaim, to no one in particular.

  *  *  *  

I lived a charmed childhood—except when it came to my education, which dominated my youth. I was the constant target of my father’s relentless, militaristic discipline. Looking back, I understand why. China’s population topped 1 billion in the
early 1980s
, and the vast majority of this number lived in poverty. In order to break out of the cycle and succeed in China, attending a first-rate high school was obligatory. Shanghai had about two-dozen “flagship” high schools that could funnel their students into good colleges—two-dozen schools for 2 million children of high school age. Clearing the next hurdle would land you in a top-tier college in China that usually resulted in securing a plum white-collar job with a stable, above-average salary after graduation. Dad truly believed brute force was the only thing powerful enough to propel his daughter through this narrow channel of opportunity.

My father was essentially competing against 4 million other anxious parents (and 8 million grandparents). Nowhere was this more evident than in class, where the teachers were the greatest facilitators of a fierce competition that began in grade school. Each student’s successes and failures were paraded in front of the entire class, and laggards were intentionally embarrassed when the results of our classwork and exams were posted publicly. If that wasn’t enough pressure, our parents and teachers colluded to instill a fear in each of us that failure to excel in school would lead to a lifetime of poverty, since only the top students would be rewarded with decent-paying jobs.

My dad, obviously, had begun preparing me for those games much earlier. After being savagely drilled by him at home on almost all the subjects I studied in school, I didn’t learn much from the teachers themselves. For me, going to class gave me the chance to leave home—and to show off. But I also got into trouble by interrupting and sometimes even correcting the teachers without solicitation. This was, of course, utterly unacceptable. As a result, I would often have to spend the rest of the class period standing with my back pressed against the blackboard. I didn’t mind it; it may have been exhausting for my legs, but it was a breeze compared with the punishments my dad delivered. I actually liked the view of the class from the teacher’s perspective, and I enjoyed making faces at the other students.

Despite my tendency to interrupt, I knew even then that the teachers liked me. With my consistently perfect scores, I was the ideal student to set an example for the others. At the same time, the teachers were concerned that indulging my brazen behavior would lead to a disorderly classroom. Order was the ultimate goal at school; we had to sit with our hands clasped and backs straight at all times. We always had to repeat what the teacher said verbatim, even mimicking her tone of voice.

In addition to remembering the rigid classroom environment, my other distinct memory was the endless stream of tests. We took hundreds of them throughout the semesters, the results of which were always announced in front of the entire classroom, from the highest to lowest scores, distinguishing the “good” students from the “bad.”

My favorite moments were having my name called for first place. But the worst times were when the teacher called the name of my desk neighbor, Yianjie. Her name was almost always at the end of the list. Yianjie would then duck her head and suck mournfully on a corner of her red scarf. Good students were purposefully paired with bad students in order to mentor them. Yianjie and I
were the perfect desk mates in that sense. She was a sweet, bubbly girl from a big cadre-filled family, but that didn’t save her from the heartache of failing tests. I figured that her father was not hard enough on her.

Memorization, not creativity, was the key to academic success. One story we all had to learn was Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which is about a poverty-stricken little girl who spends New Year’s Eve trying to sell matches to passersby. Though chilled to the bone, she is afraid to return home where she knows she will face a beating from her father. So she lights the few matches she has left to try to keep warm. Tragically, she eventually freezes to death during the night.

There was one thing and one thing only to remember about the story: that although it was written by a Danish children’s writer in the 1800s, China’s Communist Party taught it as an example of capitalism’s brutality and heartlessness. Capitalist class divisions exploited poor workers like her, and the little girl’s very life depended on her commercial enterprise. It was a mouthful of a lesson, but after learning it once, you never had to memorize it again. This kind of lesson eventually became intuitive—it was a safe go-to answer on all our tests.

We rarely asked any questions in class. Very occasionally someone would whisper something. If the teacher didn’t like the comment or the question, he or she dismissed our interruption, saying, “It won’t be on the exam. Don’t get distracted by a minor point.”

Opinions were not required or encouraged. Instead, there were countless formulas, stories, and poems we had to memorize for our tests—which we were allowed to then forget so we could free up brain cells for future tests.

Cheating was rampant throughout grade school and high school. Sometimes we wrote formulas on the backs of our hands, sometimes on the surface of the wood desk. I would occasionally even tuck a piece of paper into one of my sleeves. None of us ever
boasted about this behavior to each other in public, let alone confessed it to our parents or teachers. I suppose we subconsciously knew that cheating was bad. But I never felt guilty about it—I was just doing what everyone else was doing. Even at that young age, we all understood that class rank mattered more than the score itself. If everyone in the classroom cheated, the ranking of the scores wouldn’t change—it simply inflated everyone’s scores. If bad students hoped to climb up the class rankings by cheating, good students like me wanted to make sure we stayed on top. Understanding this made it easy for all of us to continue to cheat. No one wanted to become a victim by not buying into the system.

  *  *  *  

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced reforms that lit the fires of economic change. He designed and implemented a program that freed agriculture from collective control, privatized state-owned enterprises, lifted price controls, and opened up the economy to
foreign investments
. There was so much pent-up energy that when Deng waved his red flag and said, “Charge,” there was no stopping the Chinese people from surging ahead.

By the time I entered grade school, just about everyone my family knew was becoming an entrepreneur of some sort, with most leaving their state-sponsored jobs to start up businesses of their own. But quitting wasn’t always necessary. State enterprise jobs weren’t what one would call challenging; by midday, most people shed the pretense of productivity and sat around drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, and gossiping. It wasn’t unusual for the most resourceful among state employees to manage side businesses and fill up the remainder of their afternoons and sometimes evenings with outside appointments.

My father was bored with his job and disgusted with the cadres in charge of the factory. He often complained about the way they abused power, soliciting bribes and harassing female workers. He
didn’t have enough to do, so he spent most of his day in a quiet corner, reading and observing. His intelligence isolated him, so it was a godsend when freelance opportunities presented themselves. At last, Dad had a chance to fulfill some of his frustrated ambition.

He started looking around for real estate deals. His sister held an important position at a Shanghai water company, in charge of water allocation to construction projects. No building could be sold without water flowing in, so my aunt would give Dad the inside track, and he would become the contractor on major sites. The more construction sites that popped up in Shanghai, the less often my father could be found at his auto plant.

Meanwhile my mother left her accounting job and launched a garment import-export business with her colleague, a well-connected man with relationships with buyers in Taiwan and Japan. My mother served as a project manager and liaison between the foreign garment companies and the textile factories just outside of Shanghai, where they subcontracted production of their clothes. She kept a close eye on the factories so they wouldn’t be tempted to shortchange buyers with cheaper fabrics or shoddy workmanship.

Graft in all forms was rampant; everyone was under the influence of short-term greed. The goal was to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. “Take the profit off the table while you can,” Dad was fond of saying. “Nothing is long term in this country.”

These changes in circumstances didn’t take the pressure off me. I was still Dad’s focal point, his special project. My parents had made it in just under the wire of China’s one-child policy. My sister had been their second shot at having a boy, and when that didn’t come to pass, Dad resolved to channel all his energy and frustrated ambitions into me, his firstborn. I was raised to be the son he never had.

Outwardly, I am very feminine. But inside I grew tough as nails. I refused to cry, and I learned to tolerate beatings the way a boy would.

Dad also taught me how to ride a bike and play sports. Of course, his teaching methods were no less extreme when it came to the physical arena than they were in the classroom. When I was just a toddler, he taught me to swim by equipping me with an inflatable ring and tossing me into the deep end of the public swimming pool.

“You won’t sink—the ring will keep you afloat,” he assured me while adjusting the ring around my waist.

“Okay,” I croaked.

My voice was trembling, and I could hardly breathe; I was in the throes of an anxiety attack. I urged myself to calm down, because I knew any show of fear on my face would be taken as a sign of weakness, which would inevitably enrage him.

“Put your head in the water, but keep your eyes open,” he commanded.

Duly submerged, I was confronted by an unfamiliar blue world, dappled with reflected sunlight. I was just a small child at the time, and the liquid silence below the surface completely disoriented me. I was terrified. I was certain I would drown.

My reward for surviving the water torture consisted of a trip to the yogurt stall. Chinese yogurt is nothing like the delicious treats Westerners are used to—it’s lumpy, sour stuff, and it made me gag. “It’s good for your health,” Dad said, staring at me closely to make sure I swallowed it. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”

As painful as some of my earliest memories are, I recognize that, in many ways, I was lucky that my father took the trouble to teach me how to swim and play the accordion. It was unusual for most Chinese parents at the time, and it lent me a certain edge. Unlike many of my peers, especially those who did well in school,
I wasn’t just an assembly-line robot, memorizing facts and spewing numbers to get through school. Dad’s lessons made me well rounded and creative, as strong in the right side as in the left side of my brain.

More often than not, my father’s rages were completely disproportionate to any perceived transgression. His reactions to my music practice were a case in point. One of his favorite pastimes was listening to or playing a piece of classical music; I can still remember him standing by the window in the dimming evening light, playing “The Swan,” his favorite piece by Camille Saint-Saens. The devotion with which he played afforded us a rare glimpse of his softer side, and even today, the sad strains of that piece can move me to tears. Music was Dad’s way of finding freedom of expression without resorting to politics. It was nourishment for his starving soul, and he wanted the same for me.

This made him determined to transform me into a miniature maestro. But because we couldn’t afford a piano, I was forced to learn the accordion. The wretched instrument was about two-thirds my size and weighed more than I did. I particularly hated the way the bellows would pinch the flesh on my thighs if I practiced sitting. But I had no choice. Dad engaged the services of one of the best instructors in the city for me, and she often came so early I’d wake to her sitting by my bed in the morning, waiting for me to get up so we could begin.

Music was so important in our household that on weekends my mother would prepare a sumptuous lunch for my instructor, an honored guest in our home. I enjoyed the feast but thoroughly dreaded what came after. Dad would tell us what piece he wanted to hear, and if I didn’t measure up to his standards by the end of the day, I would receive yet another walloping. The performance could have been note-perfect, but it wouldn’t have mattered. His reaction depended entirely on his moods.