Tiger Woman on Wall Stree

by Junheng Li

  While I now live out my American dream in New York City, I will never forget who and what made me.

  CHAPTER 1

  Tiger Dad, Tiger Daughter

  SLIVERS OF WOOD BORE INTO MY SKIN, MY BACK ACHED, AND my shins throbbed with pain. I had been forced to kneel on a washer board in front of my father for more than an hour while he drilled me on the multiplication tables, and the wooden ridges were digging so deeply into my legs that I could barely think.

  “Eight times six!” he barked.

  “Uh . . .”

  I must have taken a beat too long to answer, so he slapped me hard across the face.

  “EIGHT TIMES SIX!” he repeated.

  “Forty?” I ventured.

  “Stupid, useless girl!” he yelled, and slapped me again, even harder this time.

  “Baba, I know it! Forty-eight!”

  On and on it went, until well past dusk. I was beginning to bleed, but there would be no respite until I completed the entire multiplication table without hesitation. I was expected to spit out the correct answers like a machine. Dad was determined that I get these basic mathematic lessons down cold, and as far as he was concerned, the best way of teaching was through a brutal system of punishment and reward.

  It was not unusual for my father to take this zealous tutoring too far. He believed it was the only way his daughter would gain an edge in China’s highly competitive education system and get ahead in the world. Others might call it torture; he called it tough love. Later in life, he figured, I would understand and even thank him. But right then, there was to be no sparing of the rod.

  I was just three years old.

  When Dad decided the drilling had sunk in, he lifted me off the washer board and brought me to a nearby park where I could run around and play. At the park, I felt so liberated that I dropped my father’s hand and took off, sprinting across the grass. By then, it was so dark that I couldn’t see in front of me—the public park authorities turned off the lights after 8 p.m. to save electricity. The groundskeepers had just mowed the lawn and erected barbed wire to protect the grass. I ran straight into it.

  The barbs pierced my stomach’s tender flesh and blood started to blossom, staining my blue dress. Dad scooped me up, took me home, and cleaned my wound, the pain flaring as he dabbed rubbing alcohol on my punctures. When I screamed, his face flinched. Then he said something I have never forgotten: “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”

  Dad tucked me in, then sat next to my bed until I fell asleep, touching my forehead from time to time and checking my injuries. In that bittersweet moment, I knew he cared for me. If anything, that fierce love was why he always demanded nothing less than perfection. His high standards for me were just part of his language of love that got lost in translation.

  * * *

  Throughout my childhood, his militaristic drills and beatings were almost a daily routine. If I displeased him for any reason, whether it was for coming home late after playing games with the neighborhood boys or stumbling as I played a tune on my accordion, I would suffer a whipping from his leather belt.

  As brutal as he could be, I never once doubted that my father loved my younger sister, Jasmine, and me more than anything in the world. He would do little things for us, small love tokens like leaving toothpaste on my toothbrush for me before heading to work in the morning or preparing special breakfast foods. He always rose early to make breakfast for Jasmine and me; he was a stickler for proper nutrition, especially when it came to his children. When the monthly budget was strained, he would eat less so we could have more. If I were facing an important day at school, such as a big test or an accordion recital, he would prepare two eggs poached in hot milk. But I never liked the taste of egg no matter how good it was supposed to be for me. Once, Dad spotted me spitting it out the moment I left the apartment. After that, I wasn’t allowed to leave until I finished chewing and swallowing right in front of him.

  If I did something that pleased him, like scoring at the top of my class or winning a speech contest, he would wake even earlier than usual and bike 20 minutes to his favorite dumpling joint to bring home my favorite pan-seared pork buns and curried beef soup. Every time I saw pork buns for breakfast, I knew that I had made him happy. Poached eggs and takeout pork buns were luxury breakfast items at that time—a real splurge. And they were all for my sister and me. Dad would sit in the corner of the living room and eat his rice porridge separately, a contented look on his face.

  Dad never spoke the words, “I am proud of you.” He didn’t have to. It was obvious. “One day you will understand why I’m so hard on you right now,” he told me once. “All I do is to prepare you while you are young and moldable, so that you will have a bit more control of your destiny when you grow up.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Working in the Gold Mine

  New York, Spring 2005

  WHEN I FIRST SAW JASON GOLD, HE WAS CARRYING HIS DRY cleaning into the office, a gleaming glass and steel money fortress on Fifth Avenue, right next door to Harry Winston’s New York flagship store. He made a good first impression: he seemed energetic, sharp, and youthful, with a ready smile. His dark eyes were alert and penetrating.

  Jason was the founder of Aurarian Capital, a start-up hedge fund where I was trying to land a job. I was there for my first interview. After working for several years on Wall Street, I was ready for a new challenge. The ad for the position said the fund was focused on under-the-radar small-cap technology companies. I knew very little about technology—in fact, I didn’t even understand what a computer motherboard was at the time—but I knew I could learn anything if I set my mind to it. I could not wait to learn the ropes of a start-up hedge fund by working my heart out.

  Before my interview, I asked around on the Street about Jason’s reputation. He had an impressive résumé graced with some of the most prestigious multibillion dollar fund names in the business. Before launching Aurarian Capital, he was a research director at SAC Capital, one of the world’s largest multistrategy funds, run by Steve Cohen. He had also been a lieutenant to Dan Benton at Andor Capital Management. Both funds were known for their cutthroat cultures.

  The people I spoke with described Jason as everything from a bulldog to ultimately a good guy. He was a devoted family man, but he also worked like a maniac and suffered no fools. I didn’t mind working for a tough boss, as long as he would be fair and even-keeled: a balance I would soon learn that Jason personified.

  During the interview, Jason pointed me to a seat by his office desk while he sat on the couch across the room. Only much later did I realize that the seating arrangement was a part of his signature interview technique. By lulling interviewees into an informal dialogue, he later explained to me, he tried to open them up to reveal their true selves.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Jason began, looking directly into my eyes, “How do you describe yourself?”

  “Two words—curious and tenacious,” I replied, without even thinking.

  I went on to tell him that I inherited an insatiably curious mind from my dad—nothing turned me on more than learning. I also inherited his legendary tenacity, which meant I would never back down in front of challenges, ever.

  “I also possess common sense, and I am resourceful,” I added, listing the qualities I inherited from my mother. I explained how my mother shrewdly ran a household with limited financial resources. She would make the rounds at the farmer’s market and would speak to dozens of vendors to ferret out the best deals. My mom was also a great listener, someone whom other people trusted with their stories and insights. She’d listen, digest, and then dispense sage advice with all that information. In my mind, that kind of instinct and pragmatism were much harder to teach than the ability to analyze a company’s income statement.

  As I talked, Jason observed my body language attentively, checking out how I made eye contact, watching my hand movements, and listening for pauses between sentences. When I told him about my experience coming to the Uni
ted States with nothing but one suitcase and limited English skills, but then graduating at the top of my class at Middlebury and ultimately moving to New York City with two suitcases, he laughed. I could see recognition in his eyes. Despite being in the midst of a high-stakes interview, I felt relaxed. In fact, I felt understood and appreciated.

  Then Jason’s next question ambushed me. “What was your biggest failure?” he asked, watching my facial expression intently.

  I paused, my mind racing, and had to answer honestly: “I can’t think of any.”

  “This business is brutally humbling,” he warned me. “You are graded by the market every day. You will make plenty of mistakes, which is okay. But I will not tolerate an employee making the same mistake twice.”

  Jason then launched into an explanation of the world of Aurarian. I knew this meant he was interested in hiring me, or he wouldn’t have wasted his time. Aurarian, a name inspired by the Latin word for “gold mine,” invested in small to mid-sized public companies in the high-technology sector. More specifically, the fund focused on companies with market capitalizations of less than $2 billion with patentable intellectual property. “These small businesses are the lifeblood of the U.S.,” Jason told me. “Our decision to invest in them makes a difference to their growth and success.”

  It sounded exciting and compelling. I pushed for more information.

  “Sell-side analysts write volumes about blue chip names like Apple, IBM, and Cisco,” I said. “But they typically don’t waste time covering small companies since the trading fees are so limited. So how do you research them?”

  “Great question,” Jason responded, nodding in approval. “I use the research tools I learned over the course of my career from some of the best investors in the business and apply them to the under-the-radar stocks. I’ll train you on that, one technique at a time.”

  The interview was the beginning of a great working relationship. A few months after I started, the COO told me that Jason went back to the trading desk after our interview and announced, “I saw fire in this woman. She is a lion—she can get anything done if she wants to.”

  * * *

  I certainly had had my share of challenges in life by that time, from Shanghai to Middlebury to New York. I was striving to learn new skills, solve problems, and meet people. And yet the pace of my life and the challenges it brought, no matter how daunting, were nothing compared with what almost every Chinese person of my father’s generation experienced during the Cultural Revolution.

  CHAPTER 3

  Growing Up Under Mao

  China, 1949–1976

  IF CHINESE PEOPLE TOOK PSYCHOLOGY SERIOUSLY, DAD AND most others of his generation would probably have been diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder brought on by the traumas of living through one of the most terror-filled times in Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution.

  The revolution began in the summer of 1966 as an attempt by Chairman Mao Zedong to reorganize and recentralize power within the government and shore up support among the people. He piggybacked off a student movement at the time, encouraging the antibourgeois beliefs of these passionate students. Within a year, the student movement had transformed into a national mindset in which anyone with “bourgeois” or “anti-Communist” backgrounds could be punished—intellectuals, monks and nuns, doctors, experts in any field, people who grew crops for their own families—just about anyone.

  The wealthy and educated classes were considered not merely passé but rather a serious threat to the livelihood of the Chinese people. Everything one needed to know, contended the cadres (the public officials charged with advancing the revolution) who formed the core of the new party, could be learned in the countryside, from laboring alongside one’s brothers-in-arms.

  It was to this end that Mao forced 17 million urban youth out of the cities and into the countryside during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Colleges closed, and parents bade their children farewell, in some cases forever. Some students were killed. Others, like the countless girls who were raped by cadres, committed suicide. Relevant and accurate statistics from this era are impossible to find; only stories remain, and even those are murky. But the outcome was clear: the movement paralyzed China politically and left the entire country shell-shocked.

  At the age of 17, Dad was stripped of his dream of going to college and was instead “reeducated”—that is, sent into the fields to hoe turnips. My grandfather lost not only his son to the countryside but also the family’s rice shop during a local purge of individual ownership. Although the official slogan claimed everyone was guaranteed an “iron bowl of rice,” my father’s generation remembers it only as a time of unfilled stomachs. The revolution spared no one.

  Worse than the shortage of material possessions was the unpredictability and instability of a party in which there was no rule of law. People could disappear, be imprisoned, or be killed at the whim of the “Great Leadership.” Far more common and disturbing than commands from on high were the betrayals of friends, neighbors, and even family members to demonstrate a person’s loyalty to socialist principles.

  But at the same time, China was oddly free. While the high ranks of the inner party rested in Mao’s palm and while the treacherous Gang of Four—Mao’s last wife and her cronies—dangled the arts and media sector like marionettes, the central government had little to do with the everyday comings and goings of the common people. It was as if the government had constructed a metaphorical birdcage to house its people, songbirds that could sing as loudly as they wished, as long as they remained within that cage.

  China’s Red Guard was the most raucous of all the cage-born birds. Nearly every middle and high school in the country had a group of Red Guards, a title conferred upon students by local officials and even other students themselves. With Mao’s blessing, Red Guard cliques erupted across the country in August 1968, competing with one another for control of their schools. On a good day, Red Guards would write revolutionary poetry and sing red hymns. At their worst, these students burned books, turned their parents in to the authorities, and lynched teachers.

  Unbelievable though it may seem, Red Guards thought of themselves as innocent followers of a utopian ideology, brethren in a world free of classism and feudalism. My father was among them—until he spent time in the countryside. The Down to the Countryside Movement awakened him and millions of other Red Guards to the harshness of peasant life.

  My father’s delusions about life in China finally shattered when, as a young man in his twenties, he was confronted with the brutal reality of life in the Cultural Revolution. Everyone seemed to be a victim and an aggressor at the same time.

  On one occasion, he went into a government office to submit some papers and was halted at the door by a guard.

  “Identification card,” the guard barked without looking at him.

  When my father reached into his pocket, the man became agitated and pulled a gun on him, screaming reflexively, “Hands up! Hands up or I’ll shoot!”

  My father came within a hair of being executed on the spot. Yet he still had to have the last word: “If the people are indeed the master of the country, why are you trying to kill me?”

  * * *

  Dad was a driven, outspoken, energetic young man. He thought that most of his comrades were too brainwashed to hold a meaningful conversation, and as a result, he had few friends. While his peers indulged themselves with Shanghai opera—a slightly more tolerable version of Beijing opera—simply because that was the music on the radio, Dad bought a violin and taught himself to play. In secret, he convinced a professor friend at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music to give him extra coaching. It was his passion for music that kept him mentally stimulated in the absence of the advanced education he coveted.

  Dad didn’t do himself any favors by refusing to blend in or conceal his intellect. One night, as he was boarding the bus after a secret music lesson, a pushy stranger bumped into his violin. The man was a cadre, and he was trying to
barge his way to the front of the line. Dad told him to wait his turn. When the cadre saw that my father had a violin, he charged him with “participating in an underground concert” and had him thrown into a basement cell by the Suzhou River near the Soviet Embassy.

  Terrified as Dad surely must have been after spending a night in the cellar, he was actually lucky. Others were beaten or detained for weeks at a time, all depending on the mood of the cadres.

  To this day, Dad struggles while talking about that period in his life. I know only a fraction of what he went through. But I do know that his independence and intelligence frequently landed him in trouble. Unlike most of his peers, he questioned everything, striving to lay claim to his own voice outside the Maoist rhetoric. He refused to be swayed by propaganda and read extensively, trying to understand why a revolution that intended to empower the working class instead caused such massive suffering and social upheaval. He used to tell my sister and me: “Don’t ever blindly believe in anything. You brain sits between your ears for a reason, so use it.”

  My father finally concluded that the leadership fed the masses nothing but lies and that the revolution was no more than a political power struggle at the expense of the common people. He also decided that the one-party system would never be viable—a realization that, while obvious in retrospect, most of his peers failed to accept.

  “If you give all the power to one person and there are no checks and balances, what can you expect?” he used to say. “Abuse of power is human nature.” This hard-bitten cynicism was passed on from father to daughter, and it has lingered with me ever since. In my line of work, this attitude has been useful; but in his time, Dad’s acute intelligence was a curse rather than a boon. In an environment where enlightened thinking and idea generation were not encouraged, ignorance was bliss.