by Junheng Li
* * *
It was around this time that I first became intrigued by financial markets. The Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 after having shuttered its doors for 41 years. The early days of the exchange attracted international media attention, and I watched the news segments on CCTV, the state-run TV channel, with fascination. The images of red-vested men hustling and bustling across the stock exchange floor appealed to me even before I knew exactly what they were doing. They looked sophisticated, fielding multiple phone calls at the same time and reading symbols and numbers off those big computer screens with a fluency I admired.
Compared with the staid, inefficient, and corrupt world of state-owned enterprises where my parents had toiled, capitalism in action was invigorating. As I watched the stock runners and traders on TV, Dad would mutter under his breath about how much money those “youngsters” made. I was drawn to the idea of a glamorous money business, and it wasn’t just the money that fascinated me: it was also how busy and important the job seemed to be.
Whatever they did, I wanted in.
* * *
Despite the challenges and the risks, my parents’ business savvy and can-do attitudes eventually helped them amass a small fortune. Today, they have three apartments in Shanghai, with a market value of a few million U.S. dollars—a level of prosperity that was unthinkable when I was a teenager. Back then, none of us could have imagined the economic behemoth China would become. Instead, we were focused on making our immediate circumstances more comfortable. One by one, my parents brought home the “big three” appliances—a washing machine, TV, and refrigerator. Once considered unaffordable luxuries, these household appliances had become the new must-haves.
We were immensely proud of our new imported household appliances, and we were happy to let the neighbors come over to admire our Japanese-made washing machine. Having a fridge allowed Mom to save time by making fewer trips to the farmer’s market, and it saved me from having to make my regular trip to the ice cream store around the corner. For the most part, I was not allowed to watch TV except for a few American shows for which my dad had a soft spot, such as Growing Pains, Falcon Crest, Hunter, and Superman. He was always happy to let me familiarize myself with American culture through movies and television.
For my father, though, the family’s rapidly rising living standard did not satiate his intellectual curiosity and need for stimulation. In fact, his most prized material possession was his compact radio. Every night, Dad indulged himself with news from America. As China transformed economically, one thing in particular did not change: the opaque media. People’s Daily was still full of the great deeds of the Communist Party and the suffering of the rest of the developing world—the leadership’s transparent way of making us feel better about our own struggles.
The Chinese have a phrase to describe being walled off from the outside: “like a frog in a well.” Most people read People’s Daily and did not look beyond the walls of China’s well. My dad was different.
Through Voice of America, which began broadcasting news from the United States in 1942, Dad’s cherished radio became the window through which he glimpsed the rest of the world. Whenever a politically sensitive topic came up on a Chinese radio show, we knew it would usually be interrupted or even completely blocked by the state. Any discussion of human rights, for example, meant almost instant static on the radio or TV. But with the VOA, there was a chance to get the real story (or at least part of it). So Dad decided to learn English, with the VOA as his teacher.
It was something Dad and I did together, and he did not have to force me on this one. It also became a useful tool for me to improve my listening comprehension, as I was preparing for the English exams that would give me access to my American dream.
One event that I followed intently on VOA was the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton won the presidency. Besides the fact that I thought Bill Clinton was incredibly articulate and rather handsome, the rise of the Clintons from a humble background to the highest rank in American and global politics seemed to embody the quintessential American spirit. In my impressionable mind, America was a land with abundant opportunities for those who are smart, driven, and willing to work hard.
All this exposure to American culture only served to fuel my determination to get there by any means necessary. I was already well on my way. My father’s methods were paying off, and by the time I made it into a top high school, he did not need to beat me into academic stardom. In fact, his tiger parenting eased up considerably as his business took off, in part because he had less time to focus on me. He didn’t have to; he had already molded me into his perfect tiger daughter. Taking his lessons to heart, I learned not only to succeed but also to imagine what might come next for me.
Nothing seemed impossible for me. I made it into one of the top colleges, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), which has a strong English language program. Because SISU funneled so many of its students into Western universities each year, I viewed the college primarily as my necessary stepping-stone to get to America. I spent most of my time studying for the test that would get me a full scholarship to a school in the United States: the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) examination.
Although the economy was rapidly improving and people were visibly happier now that they had opportunities to acquire material possessions, many university students were eager to attend American colleges. American schools had the reputation of awarding generous financial aid to high-caliber applicants from around the world, which was important because a top American liberal arts college cost around $20,000 to $25,000 in 1996 when I applied, an astronomical figure to most Chinese middle-class families.
In the summer of 1994, after my freshman year, I signed up for an evening English prep course. I took a sample test before the class started; I got 480, which ranked me in the twenty-first percentile. At the end of class on the first night, I cornered the teacher.
“What is the minimum score I need to get a full scholarship from a good American college?” I asked.
“You’d need to get 600 out of 677,” the teacher said, not looking up as he shoved papers into his bag.
“I am at 480 now. What are my odds of getting up to 600 in three months?” I persisted.
“Three months!” He looked up.
“I need to score above 600 in three months—what do I have to do?”
“Where there is a will, there is a way. Good luck, SISU lady.”
The only way to reach my goal was to lock myself up and do nothing but study English. That night, I went back home and packed up everything I needed to withdraw from the world for two months. By then, my parents had bought an apartment in one of Shanghai’s up-and-coming neighborhoods, which was anything but peaceful and quiet.
Shanghai real estate was booming, and with it came such relentless construction noise that it was impossible to study. Besides hammers, drills, and pile drivers, workers used giant hydraulic hammers to lay the building foundations that shook the ground beneath us. Migrant workers, with or without work permits or resident cards, toiled away day and night. Since Shanghai was so hot, they would sometimes sleep in tents during the day and then work in their underwear during the nights, drilling the whole neighborhood into madness. I still wonder whether my deep aversion to noise came from living in Shanghai during that turbulent time.
I returned to the SISU campus, empty for the summer, and locked myself in my dorm room. It was an austere room made of concrete, with no rugs or wallpaper; we slept eight to a room in bunk beds. Since I was the only student there that summer, I had a bit more space than I was used to and a desk all to myself. I would sit on that metal chair all day in spite of any discomfort, venturing out only for a few scraps of food when I was growing faint from hunger.
The campus was about an hour and a half from downtown Shanghai. Out in the suburbs, it was eerily quiet. Not only were the drills and jackhammers a distant memory, but even the lively murmur of students was absent.
The cafeteria opened only once a day and served a handful of insipid and unappetizing dishes that would have been appropriate for a prisoner. For two months, I lived on cabbage and watermelon.
Studying or not, I probably would have spent the day in my dank concrete dorm room anyway. The summer heat hung heavily from a sky that was increasingly gray and polluted by industrial activity. I took a cold shower every evening—we didn’t have hot water—and as soon as I put my clothes back on, I was sweating again. The only relief from the heat and my studies came at dawn, when I woke up naturally. The air was fresh at that hour, and campus felt peaceful. I never allowed myself to get too comfortable for more than a few minutes, but the cool stillness of dawn gave me one of the very few moments of pure joy I felt during the day.
Every morning, I took two 3-hour TOEFL sample tests. I would then grade myself, analyze my errors over and over, circle every English word I didn’t recognize or understand, look them up in a newly bought dictionary, and hand-copy the definition next to the word. I marked each word I looked up in the dictionary, and by July the dictionary bled with black ink.
In the afternoons, I read English novels. My reading speed needed a big kick if I ever wanted to finish the test on time. So I trained myself to read fast, focusing on the first and last sentences of each paragraph and then skimming the middle to look for key words. I knew many people read novels for pleasure, but my method was mechanical, my goals too specific for it to be pleasurable, with the exception of Gone with the Wind. Reading that book was a treat to myself, and sneaking in a chapter here and there reminded me why I was so willing to suffer.
After my reading session, it was time for evening class. It took an hour and a half by bike to get back to the inner city, so I had to leave around 4:30, when the sun was at its worst. There were almost no cars on the streets then, only a sea of bikes in an endless wave of heat. I swerved through masses of gray and blue uniforms, racing through the areas where the sun beat down and slowing in the shady stretches. By the time I got to the classroom, my clothes were stained with sweat, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I was even a little proud that my dedication was visible in this basic, bodily way.
I grabbed a seat near the front of the room and waited to stop sweating. It was a huge auditorium—so big that TV screens hung in the middle of the room to broadcast the class to students in the back and corners. Seating was first-come, first-served, and those who came late would end up sitting on the floor or windowsills. My teacher was one of the center’s most popular instructors. Because his students typically scored well on the TOEFL classes he taught, hundreds of eager students had signed up to take his class.
At the time, attending class was the closest thing I had to socializing. After it ended, it was back to the dorm for more vocabulary review.
* * *
After a few weeks of this grueling schedule, Dad came by the evening school to check up on me. When he first saw me, his eyes grew wide with alarm.
“Junh, what’s happened to you? You look sick and starved!”
There was no mirror in our dorm, so I had no idea what I looked like to others, though I had noticed my clothes becoming looser. In fact, I was red as a tomato from sunburn and emaciated from my watermelon diet. I had always been thin, so losing 11 pounds made me look skeletal. By then my TOEFL score hovered around 630, so I didn’t mind.
I don’t think Dad could quite believe the intense and focused monster he’d created. From then on, my father or mother would stop by twice a week to deliver a dinner box stuffed with something nutritious, like chicken or smoked fish. The delicious food seemed to shake me out of my malaise. After a few minutes of ravenous eating, I would sit and savor what had just happened, staring at the empty tin bucket. I then biked all the way back to my dorm and collapsed onto my bed by midnight.
I was running on fumes. To make my dream happen, I had to work that hard. For Chinese people, logic and math are easy topics, but English is tricky. Since I never had the opportunity to practice English in real conversation, my listening comprehension was poor, and I found slang to be baffling.
The only other human being I had contact with that summer outside of class was Catherine, a brilliant and equally driven girl. By pure coincidence, she’d planned to take the test at the same time as I was. While it was comforting to realize that I wasn’t the only one slaving the summer away, in my mind I’d turned her into a “frenemy,” measuring myself each day by her progress. I always made a point of getting up earlier and going to bed later than she did.
Catherine brought out the super-competitiveness in me. I was already aware of this cutthroat tendency of mine, but this experience with my unwitting rival reinforced it. In many ways, she served as a more effective propeller than my father did.
I vowed to nail the TOEFL, and I did. After receiving 640 on my TOEFL in the spring of 1995, I applied to a dozen liberal arts colleges in New England. I was determined to attend this type of school, seeing it as a place where I was likely to be the only Chinese student on campus. It was my intent to spend four years studying hard and absorbing everything I could about the United States and its culture.
Just a few months after I submitted the results of my TOEFL test, Middlebury College in Vermont granted me early admission—plus an annual renewable $23,000 financial aid package. My rival Catherine got a similar package from Wellesley.
The college admission came like a sigh of relief. Everything in my life had prepared me for this admission. Oddly, the America I knew was still a distant stranger, a land I had become obsessed with through movies and the VOA.
But far from being scared to leave, I thought that the more different my new home was from where I grew up, the better.
CHAPTER 6
An American Education
Vermont, 1996
MAKING THE 20-HOUR JOURNEY FROM SHANGHAI TO BURLington, Vermont, may have been the most important event in my life, but my grand arrival to the United States was greeted with silence. It was the middle of the night when I landed, and the airport was nearly empty.
The cultural differences I encountered at Middlebury College presented far greater challenges for me than learning a new language and living a different campus lifestyle. The hardest changes lay in the social and ethical rules that governed the campus. At Middlebury, there were different expectations of how to behave in and contribute to the classroom and community.
Everything ideological that my Chinese educators had taught me about America—that it was a depraved society of selfish capitalists—was simply false. My American education gave me a chance to do something I had never done before: to discover my personal principles and to choose a career path. For the first time, I was allowed and encouraged to make decisions about my own life.
Looking back on my two disparate experiences in education, it is clear how the United States and China got where they are today. Competition was fierce in Chinese schools, but we were spoon-fed information. Our teachers wanted us to do well so that they looked good, and they ensured this by holding our hands through endless testing. At college in America, the professors wanted me to do well, but at the same time, they cared about me as an individual. The long comments they took the time to write on papers, tests, and assignments are a testimony to that. My American professors also pushed me outside my comfort zone by teaching me to consider the how and not just the what. For someone like me who had to work her way out of an authoritarian system with hundreds of millions of competitors, these changes were not just opportunities; they were privileges. Without that push, I could not be the analytical thinker that I am today.
* * *
When I applied to Middlebury, I intended to inundate myself with every American experience I could. I certainly got that right: I could not have ended up in a place more different from Shanghai than Middlebury, Vermont, which forced me to make nearly constant adjustments.
Growing up in Shanghai, I hadn’t noticed that I was living my entire life surrounded by concrete and steel�
��there was nothing to compare it with since I almost never traveled outside the city. At Middlebury, I was shocked when the green mountains on all sides of the campus suddenly blazed red in autumn and then faded away with the winter. I took the first hike of my life in those mountains, which was also the first time I had ever walked any considerable length on unpaved ground.
I immediately recognized that Americans behave differently from the way Chinese people do. I found them strangely intimidating because they smiled a lot and looked you directly in the eye—something that rarely happened back in China.
My fellow students were also apparently experts at lounging. I couldn’t help but stare every time I saw this phenomenon, and it was everywhere: students were lying on the grass, sprawled out in student lounges, milling about in the hallways, and sitting in the dining halls after meals. Even though they had books open in front of them, they were often talking to their friends.
It was frustrating to watch this form of “studying” and still not be able to outperform them in class discussions. The American students spoke in class with such ease. While I certainly did well on my TOEFL, I could not really speak English confidently, so I usually kept my mouth shut. But they would talk for more than a minute at a time, sometimes several minutes, completely unrehearsed. I spent most of the first semester watching them as if I were watching a farce: they would interrupt and challenge the teacher, and the teacher would reward them with a smile and encouragement. This show was almost opposite from what I had experienced in China, where the teachers were the masters who ruled the classroom.
Later, an American classmate shared with me his insights: we pay high prices for a college education in the United States, he said, making us customers of top-tier education. The students were, in a sense, entitled to be the masters of the classroom.
