The Porcelain Thief

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]

A CHICKEN TALKING WITH A DUCK

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.