Out of the Gobi

by Weijian Shan

  Since I had so much catching up to do and I wanted to compress two years of work into one year, I spent almost all my time on campus studying except when people invited me to their homes. I soon learned that it was quite difficult to get around without a car. I could go downtown by bus, although I preferred to walk. But going anywhere else outside the city was impossible. One of my friends among the Taiwanese students, Chen Yizhou, had a car. He drove a Ford Pinto, a model that had been recalled a few years earlier due to its propensity to catch fire in rear-end collisions. But it was a great privilege to own a car as a student, no matter what kind. He would take some of us out occasionally, on trips outside the city or down to Fisherman’s Wharf, a tourist spot on the city’s northern waterfront.

  Yizhou had a special and unique talent. Fisherman’s Wharf was full of carnival games of all types, where you could win prizes by throwing a ball into a hole, shooting a basketball into a small basket, or throwing a ring over some bottles. Yizhou somehow mastered the game of Skee-Ball, where you try to throw a fist-sized ball into a series of tiny holes and hoops. He was like a sharpshooter. Every time he visited those parlors, he would come back with giant stuffed toys. He won so many that sometimes the operators had to ask him to leave. His room was filled with stuffed animals and toys of all kinds and he gave them away to his friends. He gave me a white bear that was half as big as I was. I kept it and eventually sent it home to Beijing.

  Living in San Francisco was the first time I’d ever had to deal with violent urban crime. In Beijing, robberies were unheard of. But in the Bay Area, muggings seemed to be a fact of life. One night, as I was leaving our dorm to take a walk, a man whose face and body were covered with blood came staggering toward me. There was so much blood on his face I couldn’t tell who it was, although I vaguely recognized the clothes he was wearing. The sight was so shocking I could hardly bear to look at his battered face. Many people rushed over to help him and someone called the police and an ambulance. It was not until he spoke that I realized it was a student from Taiwan named Chen Junda.

  Junda and his father had gone out shopping in downtown San Francisco. They took a bus back to Lone Mountain, but they overshot the university by two stops. As they were walking back to campus, three men followed them. Just as they reached the stairs at the bottom of the hill, the men jumped them. One of them put a gun to Junda’s head and another held his father by the neck. His father had the presence of mind to immediately hand over all the money in his pocket, $1,500 and some 20,000 Japanese yen. I had no idea why he was carrying so much cash with him. But the money probably saved their lives. The robber punched him, twice, and let him go. Junda himself struggled to get free. The robbers punched and kicked him repeatedly, broke his glasses, and cut his face in multiple places. Then the three men fled with the money.

  The police came and asked some questions. It took a while for the ambulance to arrive to take him to the hospital. I saw him the next day. His face remained swollen and black-and-blue, and his eyes still could not open. It seemed there was never any follow-up by the police, as we never heard from them again. When I told my roommate Charlie about the incident, he told me that he had been mugged three times in the previous year, including once at gunpoint. I had known of the crime problems in the United States, but this was the first time I had witnessed it and heard about it from those I knew. I walked that path leading to the Lone Mountain stairs almost every day to and from the main campus. I never did it again at night after that incident. Junda dropped out of his program and moved to a university in Arizona.

  Not long after that incident, I read in the newspaper someone advertising to provide a reward of $5,000 for anyone catching the perpetrator who cut off the tail of his cat. I didn’t know what the punishment would be if the perpetrator was caught. Nor could I understand why anyone in his right mind would do such a terrible thing. My eyes wide open, I was seeing another side to the United States that I hadn’t anticipated.

  * * *

  Since I arrived late for the semester, it took me awhile to catch up and then keep up with all my classes. But when I finally came to grips with the workload, I began to enjoy the courses. I continued to think classes in law were harder than in the business school. But my objective was clear. I was determined to do well on my exams so that I could finish the program for an MBA regardless of whether I would eventually be able to get a degree.

  I became impressed with the common law system adopted by England and the United States. There was a great respect for precedents and history. A ruling by a court a few hundred years back could still be relevant and applicable today, when similar issues came before the court. Laws could be amended by the legislature, new laws could be written, and all laws, including the constitution, were subject to amendments and interpretation. But rarely would they change suddenly or arbitrarily. I believe that this tradition reduced uncertainty in the legal environment and social systems. They helped make a contract-based market economy possible.

  China, in contrast, had operated without a sound and independent legal system. Mao used to say that he was a “monk holding an umbrella”: wu fa wu tian, or “no hair and no sky.” The pronunciation of “law” and “hair” in Chinese is the same. The expression means “without regard to any laws or any kind of constraints.” The Cultural Revolution was the best demonstration of this arbitrariness. Mao’s word was the law, like that of the emperors who had preceded him. Even now that the chaos of the Mao era had ended, laws, policies, and rules were subject to change, sometimes arbitrarily or quite suddenly. There was a common expression in China at that time: “ji hua (a plan) cannot catch up with bian hua (change).” The resulting uncertainty and risk necessarily led to greater social costs.

  But keeping track of all these cases and precedents, especially in the age before computers were widely used, was a daunting challenge. How does one find all the relevant cases in a vast library? The answer, which I learned through Mrs. Cassou’s class on legal research and writing, was a system known as Shepard’s Citations, which was an indexing system. To “Shepardize” is to look at a particular legal issue in the index book, which would lead the researcher to find all the past cases related to the issue to know how the courts had ruled and whether the rulings had been subsequently overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by subsequent jurists.

  I thought the system of Shepardizing was ingenious. It allowed the researcher to find relevant cases and the written opinions of judges going back hundreds of years with efficiency and speed. I wondered how the US legal system worked before Mr. Shepard came up with his books in the late nineteenth century.

  I also learned from Mrs. Cassou’s class that lawyers were trained not to write as intelligibly as they could; I found some legal documents so verbose that a whole paragraph consisted of just one run-on sentence. By the time you reached the object of the sentence, you had already forgotten what the subject was, or worse; you had to read several times to get it. It was not only foreign students who were frustrated by this. I remember reading something written by Jimmy Carter suggesting that lawyers should write in a way that a layman could understand. I couldn’t agree with him more.

  I took my final exams for that semester in mid-December, just before the campus shut down for the winter break. All the students were expected to move out of the dorms; my Asia Foundation fellowship didn’t allow me to go back to Beijing, so I had to find another place to live.

  Luckily, I was invited to spend the holiday with Sandy and Connie Calhoun, to whom I had been introduced by Dr. Williams of the Asia Foundation.

  In his fifties, Sandy was tall and slim. He almost always wore a witty smile on his face. He liked to joke and as he was doing so, his eyes twinkled behind his glasses. Connie, also in her fifties, reminded me of my mother, gentle and kind. They had a big, beautiful home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. From their dining room on the second floor, one could see the Golden Gate Bridge. At night, when the fog rolled into San Francisc
o Bay, I could hear the foghorn. It initially kept me awake but I soon got used to it.

  Sandy Calhoun was a partner at a law firm, Graham & James.

  I knew that Sandy and his family had a long relationship with Asia, both through business and culturally. Sandy’s father had been a banker in Manila, where he met Sandy’s mother, who was teaching math at the University of the Philippines. Then they were transferred to Shanghai, where, in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked for First National City Bank, known in Chinese as huaqi yinhang, or Colorful Flag Bank, the predecessor to Citibank. Sandy spent his childhood in Shanghai, but he told me he only remembered swear words in Shanghainese.

  When the Japanese invaded China, his father went to work for the bank in Manila. He was captured and spent much of Sandy’s high school years—while Sandy was at school in New England—in a Japanese prison camp.

  After graduating from high school in 1943, Sandy joined the army, which shipped him out for Japan just as the war was ending, and he stayed for two years attached to General MacArthur’s headquarters. He returned to the United States, to Harvard, where he majored in Far Eastern history.

  He started his legal career with a San Francisco law firm specializing in maritime law. From there he built his business, living in and earning a license to practice law in Japan. Many of his clients were Asian and he had a deep appreciation for Asian art.

  Given Sandy’s ties with pre-1949 China it was not surprising that, as China opened up, he helped rebuild old connections that had been severed by war and the revolution. In 1979, Sandy, as a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, hosted visiting Chinese delegations and, as a result, met a group that included representatives from BIFT. It was Sandy who had introduced these officials from BIFT to Dr. Williams at the Asia Foundation.

  The Calhouns had four young children, three boys and a girl. At the dinner table, the whole family would often talk about politics. I was quite intrigued to watch the children arguing among themselves and with their parents. They made me feel at home. Connie was doing graduate studies in mycology. Once I accompanied her into a forest not far from San Francisco to help her collect mushrooms; there had been reports of a murder in that area and she wanted my escort.

  Shortly before Christmas, Sandy took me to visit his mother, who had been a banker in Asia as well as a member of the Shanghai Municipal Council, the de facto governing body of the city when it was divided up into foreign settlements. She had attended the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek. I quite enjoyed talking with her about Old China.

  On Christmas Eve, I went with the Calhouns to St. Luke’s Church for mass, my first time to a Christian religious service. The church was packed, but everyone was quiet and solemn. All the priests wore white robes over their black suits. A choir was singing beautifully, accompanied by a big organ. There were seven flickering red lights hanging above the stage and there were five candles burning on one side. There were two big candles on the altar, burning bright. The preacher gave a sermon and told a story of how people were able to find a lost boy by joining hands with his mother. Then a few people walked along the aisles to collect money. This was followed by Holy Communion, in which the congregants were invited to “join us at the Lord’s table.”

  I participated in the whole process except the Lord’s table, which was only for the baptized.

  * * *

  I received my grades once classes resumed after winter break. Other than marketing, I received all A’s at the business school. Professor Murray told me that I had placed first in his class. I was most concerned about how I did at the law school, especially Professor Garvey’s class on contracts, because it was so hard. Unlike at the business school, the law school professors posted grades next to the social security numbers of the students. I thought this was brilliant because it allowed you to know your own grade and how you stacked up against others, without disclosing the names of the students. I got a B + in contracts, but I was surprised to see that of 65 students in the class, only 3 received an A– and 4 received a B + . None received an A. I felt that my effort had paid off. My roommate, Charlie, also took this class. Throughout the semester, I had pestered him with questions, such as what an “arm’s-length transaction” was, or what “malfeasance” meant. When I told him my grade, he looked both incredulous and somewhat upset, which told me that he didn’t do as well as I did. From then on, I didn’t dare bother him with questions.

  When I returned to my dorm in January 1981, I noticed that my bed was already occupied. There were a few books placed on the bookshelf at the head of the bed. Among them were Japanese-English and Japanese-Chinese dictionaries. I was curious who would be using a Japanese-Chinese dictionary. I waited for this student to return, as now I had nowhere to put my own belongings. Soon he returned: medium height, dark hair, smiling face. He looked Japanese, probably because I was expecting a Japanese student. To my great surprise, he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese with a hint of a Shandong accent, similar to that of my parents.

  He introduced himself as Arai. Japanese names are usually written in kanji, or Chinese characters. The characters of his name are transliterated as huangjing and the name means “abandoned well” in Chinese. Even though he was Japanese, he told me that his Chinese was better than his Japanese and his Japanese better than his English.

  Arai’s story was a fascinating one. His father was a military doctor in the Japanese imperial army. After Japan surrendered in 1945, his parents decided to stay in China to work among the Chinese. They continued to work in China after the Communist takeover in 1949.

  Arai was born and grew up in Shandong, where he attended local schools. I asked him if he got along with his classmates or other Chinese children, considering the hatred for the Japanese among the Chinese populace because of the Japanese brutality during the war. He said he did, that occasionally some children would taunt him by calling him “Little Jap.”

  Like the United States, Japan did not recognize Beijing as the legitimate government of China for more than two decades. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 took Japan by surprise. After the US president’s historic trip, Japan quickly moved to change its policy and soon normalized diplomatic relations with China. After normalization, all Japanese who lived in China were given a chance to return to Japan. Arai’s parents returned in 1974, apparently for their children’s education.

  Eventually, the school figured out that they had made a mistake in assigning us both to the same bed. He was given another room elsewhere, but we remained good friends.

  I received an even bigger surprise when I went to see my law school dean, Mrs. Cassou. She and her husband, Phil, had been trying to find a solution to my tuition problem. They had helped me apply for a scholarship from Chevron, the company their neighbor Bill worked for. That didn’t work out. But now, she said, she had some good news for me: the school had found a private donor to help cover my tuition. I was overjoyed by this news. I realized that my performance during the last semester must have helped her convince my unknown benefactors that they wouldn’t be wasting their money. I wanted to know who the donors were, but she said the donor preferred to remain anonymous. I was overwhelmed by this generosity from a stranger.

  What’s more, Mrs. Cassou had already spoken to Bernie Martin, the dean of the business school, and he had agreed that the donor could cover the tuition requirement for my degree program. I was so grateful to her for working so hard on my behalf and for having resolved this money issue after I had given up all hope.

  But there were still two obstacles. First, I did not have enough time left under my fellowship to get all the credits I would need for my degree. I would need another semester in order to graduate. The Asia Foundation had to approve the extension of my program. The second, which I knew would be more difficult, was to get approval from my institution back in Beijing.

  I had been talking with Andy Andrews about my degree program for a long time. Now that the tuition issue was resolved, I hoped to get the Asia Foundation’s su
pport. I went down to their offices on Geary Street to give Andy the good news. But he was not as enthusiastic as I was. The foundation was unlikely to help me out, he told me. But he would try and he asked me to be patient.

  I was determined to pursue my degree program regardless of whether the foundation agreed because Mrs. Cassou had gone to great lengths to resolve my tuition problems. My business school professors had designed a study program just for me. Now that a degree was within my reach, getting permission was not going to stand in my way.

  I had never cared to respect authorities on the basis of their authority alone, and I believed that authorities should be defied if they stood in the way of what I considered to be right. Growing up in China, I never had much of a choice, as people by and large had to do what the Party told them to do, and there was no point ramming your head against a rock. But this was the United States, which its citizens always said was a free country. Here, I knew I would be able to do what I wanted. I would make every effort to win over the Asia Foundation and BIFT, but as far as I was concerned, my course was set.

  I came to the realization that there was a big difference between China and the United States. China was, more or less, a land of equal pay but unequal access to opportunities. The United States was, more or less, a land of equal opportunities but vastly different pay. Growing up in China, I knew almost everyone was equally poor, but to get what was considered a coveted job, you either had to be lucky or you needed to have the right parents or connections. In the United States, it seemed opportunities were available to all: if there was a will, there was a way to get almost anywhere in society, although lack of money did sometimes pose an obstacle. China was a society where survival didn’t depend on fitness, whereas in the United States, the fittest had a much better chance to succeed.