by Weijian Shan
In the summer of 1985, I went back to Beijing with Bin to see our son and to visit with our family. Bin spent the whole summer running around the city trying to persuade the relevant authorities to let us bring our son to the United States. I was not hopeful about our chances of success, but she would not give up, and spent day after day tirelessly working at it.
LeiLei, now two years old, was a handful, and proving difficult for my parents to take care of alone. At that time, they were also caring for my sister’s daughter, as my brother-in-law lived and worked in Shanghai and had been unable to get a permit to move to Beijing. I was worried that the two kids would wear out their grandparents completely. One time, our son fell and fractured a bone in his leg. Another time, he fell down horsing around in my parents’ small apartment and split open his chin, requiring stitches.
These accidents worried Bin to death. She was determined to find a way to bring LeiLei to California with her, or she would not leave Beijing—even though her own semester at USF was about to begin. At the end of July 1985, I flew back to San Francisco by myself. Bin stayed in Beijing and continued her campaign.
I spent the next several weeks by myself in Berkeley, feeling down and wondering if Bin would return in time for the start of the semester. Just before the new academic year began, I received another collect call from China. I was incredulous when Bin told me she had succeeded in securing all the necessary papers for our son to travel to the United States. They would be arriving by the end of August. If there’s a will, there’s a way, I thought. And Bin’s will had won out.
Bin and LeiLei arrived in San Francisco at the end of August. Bin and I had been married in 1980, and now, after five years, our family was finally together. It was our happiest moment. Money was tight, but we loved being in the Bay Area; Bin and I never tired of taking LeiLei to the zoo and Golden Gate Park. The Albany Student Village operated a university-sponsored kindergarten, with free admission for residents. We would drop LeiLei off in the morning and pick him up after school in the afternoon. He soon fit in, even though he arrived not speaking a word of English.
Albany Village also had a swap shop where residents traded clothes and items they no longer needed, exchanging them for others. Bin volunteered as a manager. It was unpaid, but throughout the rest of our stay at Berkeley, she did not have to buy a single piece of clothing for any of us or toys for LeiLei. Everything we had was secondhand, sent over to the swap shop by departing students.
It was a frugal life, but we felt privileged to have made it work. We were the envy of many other Chinese students, as we were the first to have our whole family living together. This soon changed, as China relaxed its passport issuance rules, and more student families reunited in the United States. But then the US consulates in China began to tighten their visa issuances. We were lucky to be among the first ones to squeeze through the door of opportunity.
* * *
Meanwhile, I worked steadily toward my doctorate. My thesis was on the collaborative relationship between established pharmaceutical companies and biotech start-ups. It was an empirical analysis of what determined these relationships. Biotechnology was a relatively new realm of medicine. Tackling as it did new areas like recombinant DNA and gene sequencing, biotech was risky and not well understood by the established pharmaceutical companies, so funding was often provided by venture capital.
Companies like Genentech and Amgen were launching all kinds of innovative new drugs. The ecosystem that allowed this to happen was, I thought, a uniquely American one, where venture capitalists would fund biotech start-ups’ work to develop new therapies, and then the start-ups would license the technology to large pharmaceutical firms that could afford the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars it took to go through the FDA approval process and to bring a new drug to market.
At the beginning of 1986, when I was still about a year away from finishing my doctoral thesis, a representative from the World Bank came to Berkeley to meet with me. He was looking for candidates for the bank’s Young Professionals Program, a special recruiting program to bring in talented young professionals and future senior managers. The program was highly selective and only accepted 25 people a year, he told me, chosen from among those who had recently earned graduate degrees. He said that since China had recently become a member of the World Bank, they were keen to recruit more Chinese nationals. I told him that my intention after getting my PhD was to pursue a career in teaching. But he was persistent and encouraged me to apply. “The YP program only accepts the best talent,” he said. “You may find the World Bank interesting. If you don’t, you can always quit.”
Soon I received an invitation to interview at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. I arrived on January 28, 1986. My interview was scheduled for the following day. I visited the home of a friend, and no sooner had I walked in the door than we saw the news flashing across his TV screen that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded during its ascent, killing all the crew members. It was such a tragedy. One of the shuttle’s crew, Christa McAuliffe, had been a schoolteacher. I shuddered at the thought of her students, sitting in front of a TV eagerly hoping to watch their teacher’s historic mission, and instead seeing a tragedy unfold.
The next day, with that gloomy thought in mind, I arrived at the headquarters of the World Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue. I interviewed with a number of officers. The last person I spoke with looked to be the most senior of the half-dozen or so people who had spoken with me. He asked me what I hoped to be doing in 10 years. Growing up in China, I always did what I was assigned to do, and I had never planned for my own future. I captured opportunities that came my way, but I was not used to the idea of making plans for myself. “I have no idea what I’ll be doing in 10 years,” I told him. “I don’t think so far into the future.”
“Well, what about five years?” he asked.
I had to repeat my answer.
That clearly wasn’t the answer he was looking for. He prodded me:
“Come on, you must have an ambition. Everyone does.”
I realized that he would not let me off the hook easily. I long ago learned from experience that it was useless to think about a future over which I had no control. To me, the future had always been unpredictable. Why torture myself with dreams? My philosophy in life was to be always prepared, to capture whatever opportunity came my way.
“My ambition knows no bound,” I said.
“That’s a good answer.” He appeared much more pleased. “But what’s your next career objective?” He just wouldn’t let it go.
Amused, I said, ‘My next objective is to take over your position so that I can ask people the same questions as you are asking me now.”
He laughed and didn’t push me further.
The World Bank offered me a position in the YP Program. I still hoped to get a teaching job. But I was scheduled to finish my PhD program in December and I had yet to search for one. Even if I found one, it likely would not begin until the following September, the start of the next academic year. I decided to take the job at the World Bank while I looked for a job at a university. After all, as my recruiter told me, if I didn’t like it I could just quit.
Chapter 22
Ivy League Professor
The term “Ivy League” epitomizes academic excellence and social elitism. The schools that make up this group—Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania—are regarded as the most prestigious of US colleges and universities. But they are not the only top schools in the United States, and they are not necessarily the best: Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT are also considered among the finest institutions in the world.
Today, the Ivy League is really little more than a collegiate athletic association. But the reason it survives as an institution has as much to do with the proximity of its members’ locations and the commonality in their history as it does with their reputation for academic excellence. These Ivy League schools are a
ll situated on the East Coast; seven of the eight were founded before the American Revolution. Their academic reputations were built over generations.
Harvard is the oldest college in the United States, founded in 1636. It and three other colleges established in the English colonies—William and Mary, Yale, and Princeton—were all created to educate the clergy. Benjamin Franklin founded the first true liberal arts university for common folks, the University of Pennsylvania, in 1740 in Philadelphia, the city that would become the center of the American Revolution.
Joseph Wharton was a native of Philadelphia. Born to a Quaker family in 1826, he started his career as an apprentice accountant and learned bookkeeping and other key aspects of running a business. He became a successful industrialist, with interests in mining and steelmaking, among other areas. He gave $100,000 (nearly $2.5 million in today’s dollars) to the University of Pennsylvania to found the first business school in the United States, which he called the School of Finance and Economy. Today, it is known simply as the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Joseph Wharton’s intention was, in his own words, for the school to “instill a sense of the coming strife [in business life]: of the immense swings upward or downward that await the competent or the incompetent soldier,” or in other words, to understand and navigate through business cycles, to keep a clear mind through the difficult challenges all leaders face.
* * *
I completed my PhD in December 1986 and started working at the World Bank in January. The Bank had offered to pay for our travel to Washington, DC, where I would be working. We had a choice: travel by rail in first class, or by air in coach. The rail journey would take us across the continental United States, and we could get off and on the train if we wished to stop at some places. A comfortable train journey across America appealed to our sense of adventure.
We boarded the train for the East Coast at Oakland Train Station on December 29, 1986. Our first-class sleeper cabin was big enough for the whole family, with its own shower. Over the next several days we enjoyed the endless and changing scenery as we traveled across the country. Our son loved it, jumping up and down on the sleeper bed when he wasn’t staring out the window and pointing out interesting things passing by. We got off train twice, in Denver and Chicago, to visit friends. Denver was sunny and warm, just like the Bay Area. But Chicago, true to its reputation, was wind-whipped and freezing cold. Still, it impressed us as a great city, with its soaring buildings. Lake Michigan seemed so vast that Lake Wuliangsu in the Gobi looked like a small pond in comparison. Bin and I had not been so relaxed and carefree since she had arrived in the United States. As we had the private cabin all to ourselves, we found ourselves singing aloud whenever we felt like it, joyfully. What a great way to see the country, I thought to myself.
Our family settled into an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC, and a 15- to 20-minute drive from World Bank headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. The compound where we lived had a kindergarten where we enrolled our son. The suburbs of Washington were a nice place to live, with so many attractions in the vicinity including parks, museums, and monuments, which our family visited on weekends. Even Foggy Bottom, where my office was located, wasn’t so bad. Although it was deserted after office hours, it offered some of the best Chinese restaurants in town. We loved the Maryland blue crabs from Chesapeake Bay, where we would go occasionally to buy them fresh off the boat.
The World Bank was founded at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, as part of the new world financial order conceived by John Maynard Keynes and others. As an institution, it started off providing reconstruction assistance to countries recovering from World War II and grew to become a major source of capital for the developing world. By the time I joined, the bank was making billions of dollars’ worth of loans to developing nations, financed by its 170-member countries. The YP Program rotated its members through several different assignments at the bank, allowing them to get broad experience with the bank’s operations. I was placed in the investment department, where I would be trading Canadian government bonds. In addition to loaning capital around the world, the bank also invested, conservatively, to maintain the level of funds in its treasury. The World Bank was only allowed to invest in triple-A rated government bonds. They set me up with a phone and a computer, and I was allowed to begin trading for the bank under the guidance and supervision of my senior colleagues. Every day, I bought and sold bonds with my Canadian counterparts.
I enjoyed bond trading, which involved analyzing how interest rates might move in response to macroeconomic factors. There was one Toronto-based trader who would call me every morning and ask, “How’s the weather in the nation’s capital?” His cheerful greetings brightened my day.
We tracked trades using paper tickets, which would be sent along for record keeping and processing, but prices were agreed upon and confirmed over the phone. A verbal agreement between traders was binding. There was no cancellation, even if one made a mistake. One day, the cheerful Canadian trader offered to buy a certain number of bonds at a price that looked extremely attractive to me. I quickly agreed to the trade. I later realized my friend in Toronto might have made a mistake and quoted me an incorrect price. Since the word of a trader was as good as a contract, the transaction went through. But that was the last I heard from this cheerful trader.
While I learned a lot from the job and from my colleagues on the trading desk, I was still interested in teaching, which, after all, was why most people entered PhD programs. David Teece, who had been the chair of my thesis committee, wrote letters to a number of US business schools to recommend me for a position. Teaching jobs typically started in September, at the beginning of the academic year. So I had several months to go, and in the meantime the job at the World Bank provided me with both good work experience and needed income.
A couple of months after I’d started working at the World Bank, I received invitations to interview at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and some other business schools. I was quite pleased, but I also thought I stood no chance. These were among the top business schools in the world. I figured the invitations had much more to do with Professor Teece’s reputation and academic standing than my own. I thought I would simply take this as a good exercise, and I appreciated the opportunity to meet with the best in the field.
I arrived in Philadelphia on a Sunday night in February 1987, just ahead of a major snowstorm. The next morning, the entire city was blanketed with several inches of heavy snow. When I arrived at the university campus, it was quiet and empty; there was no one in sight, and the paths had not been plowed. I trudged through deep snow and eventually found Penn’s famous Locust Walk, a wide footpath lined with its namesake locust trees, their branches weighted down with snow. On one side of Locust Walk stood Steinberg Hall–Dietrich Hall, Wharton’s main building. It seemed deserted. As I walked in, however, I noticed a light on in one of the offices.
I knocked on the door and pushed it open when invited. A tall man with a mustache and a pair of glasses was seated at his desk. He gave me a broad smile. I excused myself and told him I was here for a job interview.
“Ni hao,” he greeted me in good Chinese.
I was surprised. I did not expect the first person I saw on this campus to speak Chinese. He told me his name was Jeff Sheehan and he was the associate dean in charge of international relations. He said that the university was closed due to the snowstorm; but he lived nearby and he had too much work to do, so he came to the office anyway. He said the Wharton School had many alumni in Asia, including Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and he had frequent interactions with them, which explained his Chinese.
He made a phone call to one of the faculty members of the management department. As we were chatting, Bruce Kogut came in. He was another Wharton professor who lived within walking distance. Bruce was about my age, with lively blue eyes; he greeted me warmly and offered to t
ake me to lunch. We had a pleasant chat through which I learned about the faculty, the management department (the one considering me as a candidate), and a few things about the city of Philadelphia. The interview itself would have to be rescheduled, however, so after lunch I returned to Washington by train.
The following week was my interview with MIT. I arrived in Boston on March 1, and the following morning, a cold, windy Monday, I went to visit the campus. My impression of MIT was of a lot of concrete and not much else; perhaps in the summertime, I thought, it would be greener. It certainly felt like an engineering school, as the buildings were tall with sharp and precise edges. I met with Professor Don Lessard, a tall, dark-haired Stanford PhD who taught international business management and who had been responsible for arranging my invitation to Boston. I also met with a number of other faculty members and gave a seminar in the afternoon on my thesis research. I was prepared for the audience to tear apart my presentation, but they were surprisingly polite. Afterward, I thought I’d handled their questions well. I was certainly familiar with the subject.
The next day, I was in Philadelphia again. The drill at Wharton was similar to the one at MIT. I visited with a number of faculty members and gave a seminar in the afternoon. The presentation went a bit better as I had already been through it once at MIT, and answered many similar questions.
Professor Russ Root of Wharton called me the very next day, on March 3, to offer me a job as an assistant professor. I was delighted. I called Bin immediately to share the good news with her. A week later, following another trip to Boston where I met with several more faculty members, Professor Don Lessard and Professor Al Silk, the business school’s deputy dean, called and offered me a job as an assistant professor at MIT.