by Rob Schmitz
Zhao was right. Tax Bureau employees were some of the most powerful local officials in China. They were charged with collecting fees from businesses, and bribes were a big perk of the job. In some ways, it was the perfect position: not so high on the Party totem pole that it attracted investigations during central government anti-corruption crackdowns, but high enough to afford a couple of homes, a luxury car, and at least one mistress maintained with whatever funds could be skimmed off the top.
“What if she comes to Shanghai like you did?” I asked.
“She ended up with a few of his homes after the divorce. She’s used to the lifestyle there. She wouldn’t be able to start over and eat bitter here,” Zhao explained. “It’s hopeless. Last year she drank a bucket of pesticide, but they pumped her stomach and she didn’t die. In my hometown, drinking pesticide is the most common way to solve problems.”
I thought about what Zhao had said earlier: America and China are so much alike. I was touched Zhao considered me close enough of a friend to ask me for advice on a matter like this, but any guidance I could offer would seem naïve. This was a thorny rural Chinese problem rooted in cultural tradition, endemic political corruption, and centuries of poverty no foreigner from America could hope to solve. All I could do was sit silently beside Zhao, thinking how sometimes our two countries seemed so far apart.
I asked about Big Sun, Zhao’s eldest son. A few months ago, he had quit his job at the golf course to work as a hairdresser in Hangzhou, a city a little over an hour away by high-speed train. It seemed strange he wasn’t here, helping his disabled mother run the shop while Little Sun and his wife were away.
Zhao scrunched her nose in disappointment. “I asked him to take a few days off and come to Shanghai to help me, but he didn’t come,” she said. “He said it was the busy season for hairdressers. I lost my temper and told him he shouldn’t bother coming home for Chinese New Year.”
This was probably one of the worst things a Chinese mother could say to her son. But refusing to help your crippled mother was a serious violation of filial duty. This situation was becoming more common in China. Young adults of working age faced too much pressure in their jobs or lived too far from home to fulfill the traditional role of caregiver for their parents. The new reality posed a threat to two millennia of Confucian custom—one of the most distinctive elements of being Chinese—and it worried leaders enough to issue a national statute requiring family members to attend to the spiritual needs of the elderly and visit them “often” if they live apart.
The law had only been in effect for a few months, yet elderly parents across China were already winning lawsuits against their children for neglect. What seemed like lighthearted news fodder for Western media was a grave issue for China’s government. Demographers predicted that a third of the country—nearly half a billion people—would be seniors by mid-century. If economic growth depended on moving hundreds of millions of young workers to the cities in the next dozen years, who would take care of the parents back home? As if left-behind children weren’t a big enough problem, China now had left-behind grandparents, too.
Zhao wasn’t finished complaining about Big Sun. “He wants to save enough money to get married,” she said. “Where’s he going to get it?”
Zhao knew her eldest son didn’t have enough money to become a husband and that she’d have to foot the bill, but it felt good to vent. “A couple of years ago, he rejected girls I helped find for him. Back then, finding a girl for your son cost around twenty thousand kuai”—around $3,500—“now the price has doubled.”
Zhao’s daughter-in-law Zhang Min had been purchased at a good price for her younger son, but the girl’s family was poor and couldn’t offer much of a dowry in return. Zhang Min was built like a farm girl: strong and big-boned. Her face resembled those of peasant girls I had seen in Party propaganda posters from the 1960s: high cheekbones, glowing skin, and a perpetual look of confidence. In many ways, she looked and behaved a lot like Zhao must have when she was younger. She was beginning to help Zhao in significant ways at the shop. She was in charge of purchases from the wholesale markets, and she cooked for the entire family.
“She sure is smart,” said Zhao. “She works hard. She knows how to take charge.”
Zhang Min was a natural. She had Zhao’s booming voice and her open smile made customers feel at ease. Her husband, Little Sun, on the other hand, often kept to himself and was slow to learn.
“I tell him he’s like mud that can’t even be used to build a wall,” Zhao said. “He answered, ‘If you think I’m no better than mud, then you must be right.’ Isn’t that aggravating? He has no brain, you know? He turns all his earnings over to his wife. He prefers not to handle money. Last time my daughter-in-law put two hundred yuan into his pocket he returned it to her. What are you supposed to do with a son like that?”
IT WAS NEVER EASY for young Chinese men and women to please their parents. This is especially true today, with the country’s economy growing by hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Zhao had always felt her sons would be denied their piece of China’s bulging economic pie because she had failed to steer them on the path to college.
But many college graduates I knew seemed worse off. The previous year, seven million Chinese had earned university degrees. A year later, nearly a third of them were still looking for work. With more and more opportunities arising from China’s growing economy, the numbers didn’t make sense.
In the spring I visited a job fair a few miles west of the Street of Eternal Happiness on the outskirts of downtown Shanghai. Thousands of young graduates milled around the floor of a sports arena, hopping between booths from hundreds of companies throughout China. The arena hosted a fair like this every Friday.
I met a petite young graduate with oversized eyeglasses that made her look birdlike. She was from Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. She’d completed her student teaching at a local kindergarten, yet she didn’t want to work as a teacher. “After taxes, I’d only make two thousand renminbi,” she said with a pout. “I’d rather be a wedding planner.”
The only problem was she had no capital to start a wedding business, and no experience to speak of. “Well, I’ve helped plan a friend’s wedding,” she told me.
“What kind of job are you seeking?” I asked her.
I hadn’t seen any booths from the wedding industry at the fair.
“Bu zhi dao…” she said, lazily drawing out the last word of “I don’t know” as if she were a little girl. “Most of the jobs here aren’t really interesting. I’m looking for a company that’ll give me a high salary, money for meals, and rent. A place where the working hours aren’t too long.”
“Aren’t you being a little unrealistic?” I asked politely.
“Yeah, probably,” she said through giggles.
Chinese born in the 1990s had never experienced an economic downturn. In the four years this young woman had spent at college in Shanghai, the city had added six subway lines and the country had completed the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network, reducing the time it took to ride a train from Shanghai to Beijing by nine hours. No civilization on the planet had ever grown this quickly. But as far as she and her peers were concerned, this was normal, and it had come to influence what they wanted from the world. It was at job fairs like this where these outsized expectations came to die.
A human resources manager I met at the job fair summed up the problem neatly. “We need technicians to fix software problems, but college graduates don’t have these skills,” she complained. “We need people for exhibitions who can do presentations in English, but they can’t do that, either.”
The manager showed me a pile of a few dozen applications dropped off that day from graduating students.
“How many are qualified?” I asked her.
She held up her hand, touching her finger to her thumb: zero. “They’re all spoiled. Their parents probably give them five thousand yuan a month. Our jobs pay
around three thousand a month. We’re not interested in them and they’re not interested in us.”
It made for a miserable job fair: thousands of prospective employees and employers gathered together in one place, only to be disappointed in one another. The predicament made me wonder if Big Sun and Little Sun—two high school dropouts—might be better off than their college graduate peers. They weren’t picky about the type of job they had, their parents had low expectations, and they were both charging forward, gaining skills that might help them later on in their careers. In times like this, people seemed better off skipping college altogether.
BIG SUN was a lousy flower salesman.
First, he overdressed for the job, wearing black slacks, black dress shoes, a black polyester V-neck shirt, and over that, a black sport jacket. He looked like a shadow standing in front of a window full of bright spring flowers.
Secondly, he was easy to anger, and didn’t like pandering to strangers.
I had biked to the flower shop on a breezy, sunny afternoon in late March and saw mother and son arranging bouquets together on the sidewalk. The two had made up, and he was in Shanghai to help his mother. Zhao was out of her brace, but she still walked with a limp and leaned on a cane.
Big Sun was tall, thin, and handsome. He had dark skin, an aquiline nose, and calm eyes shaped like almonds that stretched to the ends of his face. He spoke confidently and was naturally curious, asking lots of questions. He was nothing like his younger brother.
A Shanghainese woman in her sixties stepped into the tiny shop moments after I arrived. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a potted flower.
“Western peony,” said Zhao from her position on the sidewalk.
“Really? I don’t think so. It looks like a Chinese peony. Western ones don’t have this many petals.”
“It’s a Western peony,” said Zhao.
“That can’t be right,” huffed the woman.
Big Sun jumped in. “If you say it’s a Chinese peony, then it’s a Chinese peony. Would you like to buy some? They’re twenty yuan.”
The woman ignored Big Sun. “Can you lower the price if I buy two pots?”
“Two pots for thirty-five. I normally don’t haggle,” Zhao said.
“I’ll give you thirty,” said the woman.
“Fine. Thirty,” said Zhao, reaching over to wrap the pot.
Big Sun seemed irritated. “You can search online to learn more about peonies,” he said.
The woman looked at him, her jaw tight. “I don’t think a Western peony looks like this,” the woman said stubbornly.
“I don’t think a Chinese peony looks like this, either,” replied Big Sun with a smile, looking her in the eye.
The woman stormed out of the shop. Zhao burst into laughter at her son’s defiance. I watched the two together, doting mother and rebellious son.
“What happened to your job at the golf course?” I asked him.
“Sheer exploitation of cheap labor,” he responded. “It was terrible. The salary was low and the food was lousy.”
His bosses had lured him with the promise of becoming a golf coach and possibly a manager someday, but he gradually realized they had been lying. Eventually, he and his colleagues left. “A lot of Chinese companies behave this way—they promise you a great future, but it’s hopeless.”
Zhao clipped white rose stems, listening intently.
I thought about Zhao’s first factory job making televisions. Her bosses certainly didn’t promise management positions. They just expected her to work hard, and she did. Twenty years later, inside the flower shop she had worked so hard to establish, here was her firstborn complaining about his job at a golf course. Flowers had also been unworthy. “I don’t want to deliver flowers in the rain,” he’d said. Big Sun’s generation felt more pressure to find jobs that conveyed status than working on an assembly line or at a construction site—jobs typical of their parents’ generation. In doing so, they were limiting their options. In Big Sun’s case, he had followed a shifu—a master—to Hangzhou to learn how to become a hairdresser. He didn’t have many customers yet, he admitted, but he was still studying the craft.
Zhao broke her silence. “Big Sun argues with me a lot. He places a lot of hope in our new president. He tells me he’s a good leader. I said, ‘How good is he if I’m losing business because of him? Is he your grandfather? Is he filling your stomach?’ ”
Zhao laughed, but it was a serious topic among the street’s shop owners. Xi Jinping had only been in power for a year, but he was already clamping down on endemic corruption within Party ranks. He issued a steady stream of new rules for local officials: no more gifts, no more alcohol, and no more lavish banquets.
Xi was born in 1953, four years after the Communists had taken control of China. His father was a revolutionary leader, and Xi grew up surrounded by other revolutionary “princelings” in Beijing’s exclusive residential compounds, groomed to one day become China’s ruling elite. In the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, Mao purged Xi’s father from the Communist Party, and Xi was sent to rural Shaanxi province, where he lived in a cave, worked alongside farmers, and studied Marx. A professor who grew up with Xi told U.S. diplomats in a WikiLeaks cable that while he and his friends “descended into the pursuit of romantic relationships, drink, movies, and Western literature as a release of the hardships of the time, Xi Jinping, by contrast, chose to survive by becoming redder than red,” choosing to “join the system to get ahead.”
By contrast, Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, was the son of a tea trader and was trained as an engineer. During Hu’s ten years in power, China’s economy grew at a double-digit rate, but the flood of investment led to unchecked corruption. When Xi Jinping became president in 2013, he set his sights on cleaning up the Communist Party. Within two years, his anti-corruption campaign led to disciplinary action against more than 400,000 Party officials.
The Party’s party was over. Up and down the Street of Eternal Happiness, shops were closing, and Zhao was steadily losing business. The Pine City Hotel had just called: the district government’s annual banquet had been canceled. Each year the hotel had paid her a thousand dollars—half her month’s salary—to arrange flowers for the event.
Big Sun defended the new president. “This will impact the economy in the short run, because public spending drives China’s economy,” he told his mother. “But from a long-term perspective, if the welfare of the people can be secure—for example, better medical insurance coverage, and things like that—the situation will get better.”
As a reporter covering China’s economy, I couldn’t have said it better.
“Regardless of how good he is, does he feed you?” Zhao retorted.
“If the leader is good, then the country will improve and the people’s lives will naturally become better. Bing xiong xiong yi ge, Jiang xiong xiong yi wo,” recited Big Sun. An incompetent soldier only hurts himself. An incompetent general hurts everyone.
Zhao’s generation of Chinese were born into poverty in the 1960s and ’70s before riding a wave of economic growth during their working years. They tended to focus on short-term gain in a system where corruption was an everyday reality. Those in Big Sun’s generation, however, were worried about the long-term sustainability of China’s economic system, especially now that the economy was slowing down. How would they provide better lives for their children?
Big Sun turned to me. “I think America seems very different from China,” he said. “Chinese people think the U.S. is a great place, very democratic and free.”
“You’re free to buy guns in America!” said Zhao.
“Yeah,” I said, “but guns can also become a problem.”
Big Sun thought about this for a moment. “But if you own guns, no matter how strong you are, you have the same attack power. If you don’t have guns, then the powerful will take advantage of the weak.”
Reciting ancient Chinese war proverbs, making eloquent arguments fo
r the arming of the working class, Big Sun reminded me of a young Communist leader. He was intelligent, well read, and had spent a good amount of time thinking about China’s problems. I thought about what his future would have been like had he finished his schooling at the top of his class in Shanghai. With the grades he was getting and with a mind like his, he might have ended up in one of China’s elite schools. Instead, he was drifting from one menial service job to another, working as a hairdresser-philosopher.
The wind picked up, and the bare branches of the plane trees rattled against each other, sounding like a band of castanets. Light green leaves were emerging from their buds, but it would be a month until the signature canopy of the neighborhood returned.
I asked Zhao if she was happy about her son’s career change.
“I’m not satisfied at all,” Zhao said sternly, “but what can I do? In the end, being safe and sound is good enough. Don’t aim for anything too high. His father will retire in two years, his younger brother is married, and once he’s married, my mind will finally be quiet.”
Big Sun stared at the floor, dejected. I reminded Zhao that Big Sun was doing exactly what she had done: quit a job, find a master, and try to make money for himself.
“Right,” she said, “he’s doing his own thing and learning skills so that he can start his own business. That’s exactly how I started. I knew nothing.”
Zhao laughed, looking over at Big Sun. “But I had pretty high hopes for him. I didn’t expect much from his younger brother, but from him, I expected a lot,” she said. “Once when he was a little boy, we went out to eat crabs. He noticed that other people’s crabs had ovaries and fat. Why didn’t his have that? He realized the others were eating female crabs. He’s always liked using his brain. He likes reading. He’s smarter than most everyone his age in my hometown, and now he’s a hairstylist.”
