by Scott Tong
“That’s great. Tell me more.”
“Well, there’s a problem.” The musician woman hails from a relatively poor province in the north, Henan. In Shanghai, any reference to people from Henan is typically unkind. It would represent marrying down.
“Why does this matter?” I ask.
“It’s not just me getting married—it would be our whole families getting married. Think about it: her relatives would want to move to Shanghai to get jobs, and use our connections to do it. What if they are farmers? That’s a problem. Do they celebrate Chinese New Year different than we do?”
It’s clear he has thought this out. He continues: “Then if we have a child, her mother will come to care for it and live with my family. There will be conflicts. We all have different standards.”
I blink in a way that he knows means I don’t understand. So Tong Chengkan gives an example of his own parents. His father grew up in Changzhou, whereas his mother is from Shanghai. “And this is always an issue.” Indeed, his father—my uncle Tong Bao—has told me, “To Shanghainese people, any other place is a small town.” The upshot is, marrying down brings problems, yet it’s also unlikely he’ll marry up. He’s stuck.
This captures something fundamental about today’s young Chinese. From far away, they are the rising, scary Chinese middle class, pilfering American jobs. The competition. But in reality, it’s like watching a duck swim: smooth and graceful on the surface, yet paddling madly underwater to stay afloat.
My cousin insists on paying the bill, as he always does (“you’re the guest here”), and we walk down a curved street in the leafy French Concession. This is our favorite part of town. Tong Chengkan gestures at a large single-family house with a yard. A gate and a guard stand between my cousin and a house he’ll never afford. “I bet you,” he says, “that a government official lives there.”
***
When I first meet my cousin in 2007, I fail to notice any pressures or anxieties. He has come to the airport with his father to pick up seven Tongs from America—Cathy, me, the kids, and my parents. Tong Chengkan is tall and lean, and even though he’s cursed with the bushy Tong eyebrows, his arc in a way that make him look curious and friendly. It’s like a question mark is always hovering over him.
During our frenzied first week, he comes over and whips out a digital Canon SLR camera bigger than mine. The camera has a sensor technology known as EOS, which explains his e-mail address at the time: [email protected]. Later, he pulls out an IBM ThinkPad laptop that is sleeker and slimmer than mine. It all seems rather overdone at first glance.
There are a couple things I don’t realize at the time. First, I’m looking straight into the face (and the eyebrows) of what economists call convergence. Or catch-up. He embodies in a single lifetime the turbocharged boost China has pulled off. The story has happened on his watch. Just to compare, this path from starvation to show-off took the industrial West two full centuries, according to Nobel economist Michael Spence in The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World.
Spence offers a number of explanations for this, but they all exist in Tong Chengkan’s experience: his parents saved like crazy to invest in him; he and his father work in sectors where China can sell what it makes to the world; and their country has imported the outside world’s lessons about globalization dos and don’ts, so it doesn’t have to relearn everything.
Here’s the other thing I miss: that brand-name goods carry more social currency and value here. They help you stand out from an enormous Chinese pack. Back home, Cathy and I proudly proclaim our brand and logo fatigue, that we are so above this. It doesn’t so much work this way in Shanghai, where material goods can bring more material benefits. “When people see my girlfriend’s Louis Vuitton bag,” my former intern Sheng Liyu once told me, “they treat her differently. She might get a job interview that she wouldn’t without the bag.” He paused to smile. “Assuming it’s not fake.”
Indeed, my cousin has reason to invest in himself. In this race for scarce opportunities, he is an only child bearing the burden of unmet expectations. It can be soul crushing. Often when I think about China’s new Generation Me, I compare or contrast cousin Tong Chengkan with my longtime Marketplace bureau assistant, Cecilia Chen. Both are culturally hybrids, adaptable to both very Chinese and very Western environments. They’re around the same age, and have worked for multinational companies.
And yet they’ve turned out remarkably different. Cecilia rebelled against these expectations and became, to my mind, very culturally un-Chinese. Tong Chengkan, though, turned out proudly nationalistic. It is a striking contrast of two thirty-somethings, both born at a key moment in time: the start of the one-child policy.
Tong Chengkan was born in 1981, two years after the rollout of the strict family-planning regime. The policy was a reversal from an earlier position. In the 1950s Chairman Mao proclaimed that a large population was “a very good thing.” In fact, during the Cold War he went toe-to-toe with US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who suggested China could not feed its growing population. An angry Mao fired back. “He said, ‘Of all things in the world, people are the most precious,’” anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, author of the book Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, told me in an interview. But China could not feed its people during the great famine of the late 1950s and early ’60s.
Despite his rhetoric, Mao began to explore population controls. The first rules were voluntary, nudging couples to delay pregnancies and space out their babies. And these rules showed promise. The fertility rate plunged from around six births per woman to fewer than three.
But then the controls became mandatory. Greenhalgh told me of the two competing camps: one advocating a softer policy, the other hardline; the hardliners prevailed. This served the interests of Deng Xiaoping, who staked his legitimacy on making people wealthier. One way to do this was reducing the amount of people. The strict policy took effect in 1979.
Two years later, Tong Chengkan’s mother was in the third term of her pregnancy. She called into work sick to fake an illness. That way, she could still receive her full-time salary, even as she was in labor. At the time, she was living in Liyang city, but she went to Shanghai—sixty miles away, and where her mother lived—to deliver. This was against the law: having a baby outside your place of residence violates the household registration, or hukou, rules. Uncle Tong Bao describes this violation as “black hukou. But don’t write too much about this.”
After Tong Chengkan was born, population officials gave his mother a special certificate for abiding by the policy. It entitled her to a payment of five renminbi per month. “You could buy a lot of meat for five renminbi,” my uncle says.
“But what if officials found out you got pregnant with a second child?” I ask. “Would they take away the payments?”
“Immediate abortion. Everything is done through the work unit. And if they find you have a second kid, you’re fired.”
For the first month, Aunt Qi Menglan’s mother did not let her bathe or wash her hair, or brush her teeth, for an entire month. This, as the belief goes, prevents new moms from getting sick. Qi Menglan’s mother fed her the same food every day: eggs, raw sugar, dates. “It was terrible,” she says.
Baby Cecilia Chen arrived two years prior to that, in the northeastern city of Dalian. She almost came home from the hospital as one of two babies, and this is not a twins story. Cecilia was born a few months before the strict one-child policy took effect, but the voluntary system provided powerful financial incentives. During pregnancy, Cecilia’s mother wrote up a pledge at work. “It said, ‘I promise to only have one child,’” Cecilia says. “She got one hundred days of vacation instead of only fifty-six.” Her father, then in the army, would have missed out on promotion if he’d had a second child.
But the maternity ward provided them a two-for-one offer. Newborn Cecilia’s mother and father struck up a conversation with another set of new parents with an infant boy. The boy’s
parents did not want to keep him, as he was born out of wedlock. So they offered to sell him.
“The price was forty kilograms’ worth of grain ration coupons,” she says. To me this is one of the most remarkable parts of this bizarre story: the ration coupons were more valuable than cash. Cecilia’s parents went home that night and pondered, and returned the next morning with their ration coupons in hand. They were ready to buy. “But by then he was already sold.”
***
During Cecilia’s and Tong Chengkan’s teenage years in the 1990s, China was making a bumpy transition to a market economy. McDonald’s outlets started to open up, and my cousin remembers the day he first tasted Coke. At the same time, grains, meat, and milk still were scarce and rationed. To supply him with enough milk, his parents obtained extra milk powder by zou hou men, “taking the back door.” This situation stayed in place right up through high school, at which point I presume they’d left poor old China behind. After all, by the late ’90s, I was grooving on a Windows computer, the state-of-the-art Excite search engine, and an AOL e-mail account. Wasn’t everyone?
I was wrong. At dinner one night (we went to many, many restaurants), I ask if he still keeps in touch with old high school friends from the ’90s.
He looks at me. “It was hard to keep in touch with them, even back then,” he says.
“Why? You had their phone numbers.”
“Phones? We didn’t have phones then.”
China’s great housing chase began in the ’90s, and Tong Chengkan’s family bought in. Privatization reforms allowed them to purchase the university apartment they’d been living in (technically, land belongs to the state, though individuals can buy and sell “use rights”). “We were the first group,” his father, Tong Bao, says. They paid twenty thousand renminbi for the flat, or around $2,300 US. It would easily go for half a million today. “We should have bought more then,” Tong Bao adds ruefully.
China’s internal reforms went hand-in-hand with foreign trade and investment, which in my cousin’s family was translated as Black & Decker—or bu-lai-ke and dai-ke. The company, which dates back to the Qing era on the Chinese calendar, put out the world’s first portable electric drill. It made fuses and ordnance shells for the Allies in World War II. It brought us the magical Dustbuster.
But the company’s growth slowed after the war. Germany and Japan rebuilt their economies and delivered high-quality, affordable alternatives to the market. In this newly competitive global market, Black & Decker closed plants in England, Ireland, and the United States, moving production to lower-cost locations like China. In the Shanghai industrial zone of Songjiang, Black & Decker contracted with a no-name manufacturing plant to take advantage of the so-called China price: a typical Chinese worker at the plant made one-sixtieth of the average American. This plant brought in the engineering professor Tong Bao to consult.
“This was ODM manufacturing, not OEM,” he says proudly during the plant tour he gives. An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is basically a direction follower—for instance, the iPhone assembly firm Foxconn does exactly what Apple tells it. It takes a blueprint from a client and follows instructions. Chinese workers contribute relatively little brainpower and thus receive meager profits.
Original design manufacturers (ODM), by contrast, take a rough idea and figure out themselves how to design and make it. They’re given responsibility, freedom, and a bigger share of the money pie. This kind of incremental innovation is what China Inc. tends to be very good at.
In my uncle’s case, Black & Decker came in with a concept, and he consulted on plant design, materials, assembly, and quality control. This kind of gig was what globalization was delivering, and the trend would soon speed up. One year later, China joined the club that enshrined this collapse of distance around the world: the World Trade Organization.
***
One reason Chinese parents apply so much pressure to their children is that they, the parents, have sacrificed so much to get where they are. My first bureau assistant, Linda Lin, compares it with the American kids’ book The Giving Tree. One year I gave this book to her son (along with Goodnight Moon, which he preferred less), and Linda told me that the story of a tree giving up everything for a child (its leaves, branches, trunk) is exactly the kind of sacrifice Chinese parents make. The issue is, by the time the parents have been reduced to mere stumps, their child better make something of his or her life.
Cecilia faced this kind of pressure at a very early age. She grew up in the old treaty port of Dalian in northeast China. (It’s one of those places that has changed hands several times. Russian leaseholders in the late 1800s called it Port Arthur [and also Dalniy] until losing the 1905 Russo-Japanese conflict to Japan, which renamed it Dairen.) By the age of three, she could recite Chinese poems, and she started English lessons at five. That left little time to see her favorite monkey stage-show at a nearby park, where she’d watch with a caramel from a street peddler in her small hand. It cost 0.02 renminbi—one-fifth of one penny.
When Cecilia was nine, her mother forced her to learn electronic keyboard. “We had no electric fan in those days,” Cecilia wrote in a Marketplace blog post, “so when I practiced on hot days, my mom would sit beside me and fan me.” Later, her mother switched her to accordion, all the while monitoring Cecilia’s grades as any good helicopter parent would. “On Chinese New Year of fifth grade, I ranked 10th out of 53 students, 7 places lower than my previous ranking,” Cecilia wrote. “My mom scolded me the entire day, and I didn’t eat the most important meal of the year: New Year’s Eve dinner.”
She grew to be tall and lean, with a defined set of cheekbones. On the eve of the entrance examination for high school, her mommy dearest delivered the following threat: if she scored too low and didn’t get into high school, she’d “grow up to be a kindergarten teacher.” In the blog entry, Cecilia wrote that she longed for a sibling not so much to play with as to share the harsh parental spotlight.
Cecilia’s grades slipped in high school. “She didn’t focus on her homework enough,” her father told me over lunch at a seafood restaurant in his home city of Changzhou. “Listened too much to her Sony Walkman. We weren’t strict enough.” He’d become a businessman by then, and described his daughter in market terms. “I invested so much, but there has been no return.” Negative parenting ROI.
Still, Cecilia did well enough to enroll in Dalian Marine College and receive an associate’s degree in industrial electricity. The problem was, she graduated into a glut of college students. The central government in the late 1990s promoted university enrollment to upgrade its skilled workforce, and campuses starved for revenue were happy to oblige. As a result, too many degreed students were chasing a limited number of jobs. “You needed a degree even to get a job cleaning hotel rooms,” Cecilia said.
Then, unexpectedly, her family moved to Canada. Unbeknownst to Cecilia and her mother, her father had applied for a special Canadian visa for immigrant investors and entrepreneurs. When it came, they all moved to Vancouver—well, sort of. Cecilia settled in, but her folks became what Chinese Vancouverites call “astronauts,” floating in and out of Canadian airspace, landing just frequently enough to maintain visa status. Mostly, they stayed in Dalian to work while Cecilia lived alone in Vancouver.
Cecilia became a barista and hung out with Chinese twenty-somethings from the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. And she went back to school, enrolling in the University of British Columbia to study psychology. The problem was, learning psych terminology “was a pain in the ass, especially for people not born” in Canada, she said. So she switched into communication arts—but again, this disappointed her father. “She could have stayed with psychology and become a psychiatrist,” he said, shaking his head. “Could have made a lot of money.”
In 2007 Cecilia was forced to return to China, and it didn’t go well. Her father had failed to adhere to the Canadian visa rules and got them kicked out. So Cecilia became what mainlanders call a “sea turtle.
” It’s a pun. Hai gui out loud means both “sea turtle” and “oversees returnee.” Sea turtles, given their overseas education and experience, are often targeted by multinational and Chinese firms looking for workers with English language and critical thinking skills.
Cecilia took a public relations job at Carrefour, the French big box chain. But inside the company, the structure was still “very Chinese,” and she did not last long. The issue was, Cecilia’s worldview had changed. At Carrefour, prime assignments were given out based more on connections than merit. Yes-men and yes-women became vice presidents, and from what she could tell, appearances and connections meant everything. The brownnosing environment discouraged the honesty and blunt talk she’d become used to. “It’s easier to deal with non-Chinese people,” she often says.
She got annoyed with Chinese society in general. It bothered her when a journalist friend regularly showed up forty-five minutes late at a restaurant, without apologizing (this is very common on the mainland). “So I stopped calling him.” While she liked to read books, her friends went on about stocks and bonds and property prices. So for a fresh start, Cecilia quit her job at Carrefour and eventually landed at Marketplace. And she began dating a white guy from Albany.
***
The live woman’s voice comes from inside the car speaker, speaking Mandarin: Hello—OnStar service, may I help you? Yes, please hold. Here are your directions, thank you.
I’m on a road trip with cousin Tong Chengkan, in his Buick LaCrosse sedan. We are driving to Changzhou, about two hours away, to visit a mutual uncle—the brother of his father and mine. I want to ask about one particular family sore spot: our grandfather Tong’s first and only return to China in 2000. It came more than five decades after my grandfather fled. Aligned with the anti-Communist Guomindang, he and his mistress and my father boarded an overloaded vessel bound for Taiwan when it became clear the US-backed GMD had lost the mainland to the Communists. Left behind were Uncle Tong Bao and his brother still in their mother’s womb, Tong Qi. Tong Qi is the brother now living in Changzhou.