by Scott Tong
In my experience, a lot of people from his generation agree, which means many stories from their generation will die with them. “Older people don’t talk about their suffering,” Aunt Qi Menglan says. “They show it by sacrificing for their children. It’s their way of saying, ‘Never again.’”
***
For the first few months after my family and I moved to China, I barely saw my uncle, mostly because we were so busy getting settled. Five Tongs had to cope with a clothes washer one-third smaller than our Kenmore back home. There was no dryer. All our daily tasks seemed to take longer: cleaning the grit and dust from our clothes and shoes, grocery shopping, delivering the kids to school and back, getting to church in the French Concession.
It took three months to have the contents of our shipping container delivered, even though the container sat in the port of Shanghai. Here is the ridiculous bureaucratic story: releasing the container required that we present residence papers. Those papers required Cathy and me to undergo dodgy physical examinations (a few pokes, chest x-rays, $120 each). And they required a copy of our housing lease, a copy of my work permit, and proof that our children were actually our children.
This was the most absurd part. The kids’ birth certificates sat in a file inside a cabinet inside the shipping container. In the end, after emergency document requests by relatives stateside and a threat by Shanghai authorities to deport our one-year-old, we resolved the situation. “Your head was going to explode,” Cathy often reminds me.
Meantime, I worked and traveled endlessly. I reported on the new auto age; state-owned PetroChina’s mammoth $11 billion initial public offering; industrial pollution in lakes ringed by illegal paper mills; millionaires tasting Château Margaux for the first time; parents hiring brokers to marry off their lonely twenty-something only children. In 2007, China’s economy grew by a whopping 14.2 percent, by World Bank estimates.
And yet there were signs of slowdown. Many factories in coastal cities were losing competitiveness. As in previous low-cost manufacturing locales in history, Chinese labor costs were rising, as were the costs of electricity and raw materials like iron ore. Was the miracle over?
For this I consult Uncle Tong Bao. One day we meet at a Shanghai factory where he works as a consultant. We begin at the cafeteria. “First, we eat,” he says. “This cafeteria food is not good.” Then we walk the floor of a small workshop making dental machines that screen for plaque and cancer. He notes that the struggling factories are the ones with low-technology easy to replace in another country. But these dental machines are hard to make elsewhere.
“And, we can charge more,” he points out, “to customers in Japan and Europe.”
Tong Bao is good at explaining economics. China’s transition has coincided with his own. He thrived during the earlier, simpler era of China Manufacturing 1.0, when factory owners made money off the backs of the world’s cheapest workers and the practical advice of engineers like him. But China 2.0 requires a new recipe. The vast pool of what economists call “surplus rural labor” is drying up. Fewer young people are around to make more than they consume.
“I have five danwei,” or places of employment, he tells me. He teaches engineering at Shanghai’s elite Tongji University, but like many academics, he makes most of his income from business consulting gigs on the side.
***
In the United States, my parents got married in 1965. My father finished his engineering doctorate at the University of Minnesota, where my mother worked the grill at a restaurant called the Big Ten. My older brother, Tony, was born. Soon after, they moved to the IBM town of Poughkeepsie, where Dad joined the IBM Country Club volleyball team and became known simply as “Al.”
Alvin Tong had completed his transition from China refugee to white-collar American. His is a story of risk taking: living with an American GI in Taipei, postwar Taiwan’s bet on trade and globalization, studying in the United States.
But for his brother on the mainland, the key in the late ’60s was to avoid risk. This was the time of the political cleansing known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Tong Bao and his brother and mother tried to keep their political heads down, but it was no use.
Buried in his mother’s personnel file was an accusation that she’d received financial help from a person living in enemy Taiwan. In the 1950s, she was seen walking out of what was known as a Friendship Store. These enterprises catered to foreign visitors with a hankering for peanut butter, or Hershey bars, or uncensored versions of the New York Times. Some Chinese shopped there as well. All purchases required what are known as “foreign exchange coupons.”
Tong Bao’s mother bought comforters and blankets at the Friendship Store with coupons from a mainland friend who was member of the Communist Party. But upon her exiting, one of her teacher colleagues saw her and reported this to authorities. The assumption: she got the foreign exchange coupons from someone in Taiwan.
“This was the key issue” for her punishment, Tong Bao’s younger brother, Tong Qi, once told me. “But she got the coupons from a friend, not anyone with the Guomindang.” The informant, he said, was actually a family friend. This event was dredged up as evidence of disloyalty during the Cultural Revolution.
Uncle Tong Bao describes the beginning of this purification campaign one evening in our Shanghai apartment. My in-laws are visiting us from Toledo, Ohio. After dinner, our kids are down and the subject of everyone’s childhood comes up. In 1966, when my in-laws Chuck and Sue Thayer were graduating from Wooster College in Ohio, Mao was proclaiming the Cultural Revolution.
“We heard the announcement on school loudspeakers and speakers from cars,” Uncle Tong Bao says. In Changzhou, youth members of the Red Guard intent on purifying the party barged into people’s homes, looking to destroy evidence of China’s bourgeois, landlord past. Tong Bao’s mother took preventive measures, smashing anything porcelain, including a Qing-era bowl that had been passed down several generations. She burned a set of classic books with wooden covers. “We threw our rice bowls into the trash can,” Tong Bao says. “Destroyed photos. And the china. We had no choice. Some neighbors had seen our china and told the authorities.”
Chairman Mao orchestrated the Cultural Revolution as part of his political comeback. Marginalized following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, he returned to the public eye thanks to a well-publicized swim. Even though Mao was already in his seventies, he demonstrated his physical vitality by appearing in a white robe in Wuhan in July 1966. This was a repeat performance of a political trick he’d performed ten years prior, when he “swam” across the Yangtze River in Wuhan three times. This time, he disrobed to his trunks and crossed the river “relaxed and easy,” reported the official news service. “He stayed in the water a full sixty-five minutes, covering a total distance of almost fifteen kilometers.” This would have represented a world-record pace.
A month after this feat, the Great Helmsman stood on a platform atop Tiananmen gate in Beijing to observe hordes of fanatics chanting and waving copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao, also known in the West as Mao’s Little Red Book. He wore a military uniform—fitting for the estimated one million self-styled “red guards” standing below. Before long, the Red Guards demolished old buildings and temples, attacked teachers and school leaders, even their parents.
“Students kicked teachers, punched them,” Aunt Qi Menglan says. “Screamed at them like a mob. It was a mess! Hit them in the mouth. People were crazy. The crazier the better. There’s no way you could comprehend it. We even attacked our parents for not being revolutionary enough.” One coworker informed on her father. “Because he was a capitalist,” she says. “If you don’t participate, you’re not a revolutionary.”
She pauses briefly. “We don’t like to talk about the past, because we’re ashamed of what we did.”
Fanatical students targeted Tong Bao’s mother. She went to school and found herself locked inside during the day, pressured into confession. Members of th
e Red Guard dredged up the Friendship Store event, claiming she’d been aided and abetted by friends in Taiwan. They called her a “historic counterrevolutionary,” a designation for persons—and associated relatives—who had defied the Communist Party before the 1949 liberation. They resurrected language from an old campaign, calling her a “Three-Antis element” for a person presumed guilty of corruption, waste, or profiteering.
“She couldn’t sleep,” Tong Qi once told me. “The interrogations affected her emotionally, being forced to admit something she didn’t do.” Some of the punishment took place outdoors as well. One time, in the winter, she was made to stand for hours in the cold, with her head bowed forward so icicles above could drip inside her collar and down her neck.
Tong Qi says this wore her down so much she started having trouble thinking clearly. She started to wonder if she had indeed joined the GMD. She became suicidal. But she never confessed. “She never talked about this,” Tong Bao says. “We heard about it through other friends. There are things that happened in that classroom that we will never know.”
Tong Bao graduated from high school at the worst possible time. Just when he was preparing to take the nation’s university entrance exam, it was canceled by party authorities, ostensibly to let young people work as full-time revolutionaries. He was exiled to the countryside along with millions of other students with declared bad backgrounds, to “learn from the peasants.” From his classroom of forty-five students, most would be sent down to the countryside in Liyang, Jiangsu, about sixty miles away. “Only four or five had a choice of where to go,” because they had connections, he says. “Others like me had no choice.” Within days, he packed a suitcase and clambered aboard a bus. He was nineteen.
In the countryside, Tong Bao first slept in a cow shed with six other young men before they moved into a rudimentary house. The walls were made of brick with mud in the cracks (“no mortar”) under a roof of rice husks. They grew rice and attended mandated political meetings and self-criticism sessions.
This was his lost decade. The good part of this story is that he stayed long enough to meet the woman who would become his wife. A broken radio helped bring them together. He’d learned to fix them on the side during the Cultural Revolution. Qi Menglan, the woman who would become his wife, was teaching grade school in Liyang. “I liked him then,” she says during one conversation, before he shushes her. No further romantic details are forthcoming.
Uncle Tong Bao’s comeback story after the Cultural Revolution began when he was around thirty, when he took the reinstated college entrance examination. This came just after Mao died in 1976. Out of the messy leadership-succession process emerged the market reformer Deng Xiaoping. As part of his reforms, Deng pushed literacy and education. He believed sending bright students to the middle of nowhere for physical labor made for a waste of time.
Five million students took the reinstated test in 1977, including my uncle. What’s curious is why so many decided to take it. “It doesn’t make sense,” economic historian Thomas Rawski told me. “For so many years, there was no reward to education.” Going to school did not help you move up the ladder. Rawski believes the best explanation is historical continuity: the roots of education run so deep in society that the Communist Party could not dig them out.
As a thirty-year-old taking the two-day examination, Tong Bao sat alongside kids as young as eighteen. Of the five million test takers, only 272,000 earned university slots—a 5 percent pass rate. My uncle passed. This is his favorite story, and he deserves to tell it. Tong Bao enrolled in the Nanjing Institute of Technology. But sadly, his mother did not live to see him graduate and build a life she could not provide. She died in Changzhou of cancer in 1980.
Uncle Tong Bao married Qi Menglan—the woman who had him fix her radio a decade prior—shortly after graduating. A year later, their only son was born: Tong Chengkan. He is my cousin.
PART THREE
The Great Resumption
Chapter Thirteen
MY COUSIN AND HIS SHANGHAI BUICK
You know the problem with Chinese people? We’re too good at obeying.
—Cousin Tong Chengkan
During our last year in Shanghai, 2010, a soap opera took China by storm. It was called Snail House. In a way that captivated millions, the show captured the tensions so many young urban adults face: betrayal, corruption, tenuous relationships, and—most of all—the housing arms race. As an American, it was hard for me to grasp the importance of home (or apartment) ownership in China. For a man in Shanghai, it has just about become a prerequisite for matrimony; a woman will not marry you without the financial security of a home. You pretty much cannot take a cab ride without discussing ping fang mi, the local price per square meter.
Housing prices are out of reach for so many, as the soap opera title suggests. When I first arrived in China, my uncle Tong Qi did some ballpark math: In Arlington, Virginia, we figured a typical house sold for roughly ten times an annual salary. In Shanghai, it was on the order of thirty years. By one wonky ratio—housing prices divided by income—China is home to some of the world’s priciest markets.
Snail House starred two young professional sisters. The older one was taller, with a no-nonsense short haircut, the younger sister sporting longer hair with bangs; she was a bit more glamorous, a bit more whiny. Big Sister rented a tiny apartment with her husband, while Little Sister shared a room with another couple.
The plot gets busy quickly when Big Sister receives an anonymous envelope with the equivalent of $5,000—enough to start house hunting. It’s from her Little Sister. And the money is dirty.
It turns out Little Sister has been cheating on her boyfriend, sleeping around with a rich, crooked Communist Party member she met at a work function. The official is married, but the political sugar daddy is hunky—a viewer favorite. Even as he takes bribes from property developers, the dirty politician has a soft personality and good hair. In the show, he dials up mistress Little Sister to background piano accompaniment.
Yang Junlei, a professor of comparative cultures at Shanghai’s Fudan University, told me the show “hit on a very relevant problem in China today: infidelity, mistresses, housing. Snail House really nails it. It’s hot.’”
But the viewer knows it can’t last. Little Sister’s boyfriend eventually discovers her infidelity. There is lying, guilt, covering up, a pregnancy (naturally), and a showdown between the wife and the mistress. In the end, karma even catches up with the two-timing cadre: he dies when his car crashes into an oncoming truck—perhaps an ominous metaphor for the Shanghai housing market.
“Snail House—so accurate,” my cousin Tong Chengkan says over dinner in the summer of 2011. “Society is so materialistic.” This is something he talks about a lot, where traditional values have gone. There is a paradox here: we are sitting smack in the middle of Overpriced Showy Shanghai, at a Western-style brewery in the French Concession.
Tong Chengkan is the son of Uncle Tong Bao. Like his father, Tong Chengkan no longer goes by the surname Tong. He uses the maiden name of his father’s mother. But I’m referring to him as Tong Chengkan to provide him a measure of anonymity.
He himself still lives with his parents, which is a particularly sore spot. Most young professionals can only afford to buy their own places if they get help from their parents. But Tong Chengkan’s don’t have that kind of money, and in any event would prefer to spend it on their own lives. Fair enough.
“It has to be hard to buy without your parents’ help,” I say.
My cousin puts down his fork. “It is just about impossible.” Tong Chengkan works a respectable job—what you and I would call middle-class employment—as a factory maintenance manager at the General Motors plant in Shanghai. It churns out Buicks and Cadillacs for the world’s biggest new-car market.
He makes a reasonable salary, but since he lives at home, he is handicapped in the marriage market race—which disappoints his parents, even as he seeks to avoid them. And on this ni
ght it’s actually worse than that. I ask about his girlfriend, someone he works with at the plant. “We’re no longer together,” he says, and then delivers the stunning reveal. “She is now dating someone else—my best friend at the factory.”
“What? Are you serious?” I ask.
“He owns his own apartment.”
Ouch. “Is that the real reason she’s now with him?” At this point I have pushed too far.
“What do you think?”
He is running, and yet at the same time not keeping up. It’s a bit like the “Red Queen’s race” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. In the story, Alice (from Wonderland) runs and runs, yet doesn’t get anywhere. The Red Queen explains: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Alice exits the race. Cousin Chengkan does not.
In another marriage market, Chengkan would merit a higher value for his earnestness. He always picks me up at the airport when I come. He makes a point to visit my folks when they fly in from Oregon. But earnestness doesn’t pay the mortgage. Here is his problem: six decades after supposedly overthrowing the bourgeois landowners, too many mainlanders want to be bourgeois landowners, pushing up the price.
“What if you quit, try to get a new job?” I ask.
He laughs. “Too risky. My parents would never allow that.” In the past he’s told me the problem with Chinese people is they are too tinghua, too good at obeying.
Yet there is some good news here. Already Tong Chengkan has another prospect: a fetching viola player he met in the community orchestra. He plays clarinet. “I’ve given her a ride home a few times.”