Tang had to get to Manhattan from the airport and report to the Chinese consulate there before the journey up to Harvard. He saw an endless line of yellow taxis and politely asked what the trip to the city would cost. At first he thought the man in the turban had not understood him correctly. The driver was asking for more money that his mother in Chengdu earned in a month. He would never pay such an amount for a car ride; he would rather walk into the city. The bus was also too expensive, so Tang did something that the consulate expressly advised its exchange students against: He ignored the warnings about attacks and took the subway to Manhattan.
He felt more confident on the subway. Among the many people with brown and black skin who were themselves unremarkably dressed and did not pay him the slightest bit of notice, his odd costume no longer stood out. The rumbling of the shabby old cars on the worn tracks reminded him of the pathetic condition of the trains in his homeland. At some point they disappeared into a tunnel from which they did not emerge, and Tang felt himself becoming a little dizzy. He clung to the silvery metal pole in front of him and hoped that he would soon feel better again.
The station at Fifty-Third Street was full of people. The confined space and the warm humid air in the underground station made his dizziness worse. The train platform was uncomfortably narrow. Tang made his way up the stairs, walked through a tunnel toward the exit, and pushed himself through a heavy door there. Outside, he took in several deep breaths, one hand holding on tight to the stair railing while the other clutched his suitcase. He walked up the subway stairs one step at a time. Just before the final step, he stopped and looked around him. He could not believe his eyes. His gaze passed over the sidewalk, the streets, and lighted on a shopwindow full of bags and suitcases, moving up the building floor by floor toward the sky, higher and higher until he had to lean his head back on his neck to see the top of the skyscraper. He had never stood in front of a building anywhere near as high as this one.
Tang turned around in a circle like a child who could not decide which direction to run in. He walked down Lexington Avenue, turning left and right constantly, not knowing where to look first. Sometimes he simply wanted to stand still, but passersby jostled him immediately and their irritation and curses drove him. Aimlessly, he turned into Fifty-First Street and crossed Madison Avenue, then Park Avenue, in the middle of which flowers were blooming, and stumbled many times over fire hydrants and trash cans before finally retreating into the entrance of a building and gaping in amazement. He could not get enough of looking at the canyonlike but dead-straight streets with their traffic lights flickering red, yellow, and green reflected in the glass claddings of the towering buildings, of the many cars, of the shops filled to bursting with goods but with no lines of people outside them.
He felt his understanding of the world, constructed by so many people over so many years, dissolving before his eyes, hissing like a drop of water falling onto a red-hot surface. This was the moment in which his life took a new turn.
Tang understood that he had been lied to. For more than thirty years. Every day. From dawn till dusk. They had told him fairy tales. As a child, as a young man, he had given them the most precious thing he had, his trust, and they had exploited it. Where were they now, the teachers, the party secretaries, the great chairmen, and their many little helpers? What would they say? How would they explain this to him?
He had grown up believing that he was lucky to live in a country that was better than the rest of the world in every way. They did not have a great deal to eat but the teachers had often told him how much worse it was for the children in Europe and America, who ran through the streets dressed in rags, their stomachs growling with hunger. In school, they had not had lunch for a whole week so that the poor children in America could have enough to eat for once. Sacrifice for America, the campaign was called! Starve for America! And they had done it! Eagerly and enthusiastically. With a secure sense of their own superiority.
He had trusted them when they had arrested his father, a loyal PLA officer, at the beginning of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was surely something justified, thought Tang, about the party’s accusations. He had trusted them when they had sent him to the countryside to learn from the farmers, when he had joined the Red Guards and they had to carry out the Revolution against bourgeois elements and outmoded thinking, defend themselves against revisionists and counterrevolutionaries, with violent measures if necessary. He had obeyed every one of their orders, not out of fear, but with the deepest conviction. Because he had believed them. Because he had trusted them. Now he walked through the streets of Manhattan and knew that trusting was for the weak. For people who did not have the courage to seek the truth for themselves. For people who lacked the strength to check things out properly, who were too cowardly to live with the consequences of lies. Those who preferred to believe rather than to strive for certainty. It was no longer for him. Victor Tang had wasted enough trust in his life.
Before he arrived in New York he had, of course, known that China lagged behind the West, the United States in particular, in terms of economic development and the standard of living. The Sichuan provincial government had prepared him for his journey: He knew all the figures and statistics, he had seen photos and read books. Despite that, this first sight of the streets of Manhattan struck him like a blow that he could not defend himself against. He was deeply disturbed by how little numbers were able to tell you about a place. Even words and pictures could not encapsulate the essentials.
The first months at Harvard had been difficult; at times, he had not known how he would get through the day. The tranquility and the amount of space around made him nervous. The beauty of the old buildings and the elegance of the surroundings made him feel shy. Almost all the students and professors were extremely friendly and helpful to him, but he often found it difficult to accept their generosity. They invited him to dinner in their town houses, and he spent a few weekends in luxurious houses in the country. He told them about China and his audience marveled politely without really taking an interest in or understanding what he was describing. And how could they? Tang always felt uncomfortable at these dinners. He was the poor cousin; their generosity would not change that. On the contrary, it spelled it out anew every time. He was with them but he did not belong.
What saved him was his diligence, his intelligence, and his desire not to waste a minute that he spent there. He studied obsessively hard, as though there would be an exam that decided whether his family lived or died at the end of the period. He wanted to soak up everything to the limit like a sponge.
He had been forced to throw away the first thirty years of his life. Thirty years in which his American contemporaries had attended kindergartens, normal schools, and colleges. In which they had had time to play, to read what they wanted, and to study what was important to them. Thirty years head start.
Victor Tang did not have a single day more to waste. He was so busy that he did not even have the time to envy his fellow students. He wanted to understand what made America so successful. There had to be a secret to the superiority of the West, and he wanted to find out what it was.
His day began at five in the morning. During his time at Harvard he only had four hours’ sleep a day. When there was barely anything left of his English to improve, before and after the seminars he devoured every book in the university library about the American Civil War, the robber baron era, and the Great Depression. He also took supplementary courses in philosophy, economics, literature, and history.
He was well known among the students for his ability to refresh himself with five minutes’ sleep. He could fold his arms and put his head down on them for a short nap anywhere—in the cafeteria, during a seminar break, or in the library—regardless of any hustle and bustle around. The others thought he was an oddity but respected him; his capacity for hard work and boundless thirst for knowledge was a little strange to them. How could he explai
n it to them? How could a well-fed, well-nourished person ever understand the despairing greed of a starving man? Thirty years. Half a life!
During the semester breaks, he traveled on Greyhound buses to several American states. When he accidentally knocked over his plastic cup of iced tea in a coffee shop in Butte, Montana, and read the words on the bottom of the cup, he knew, from one moment to the next, that he had found what he was looking for. Made in China was written on the plastic cup. It was the first time in America that he registered a product made in his homeland. Why were the plastic cups not produced in Texas, Florida, or California? Because they were produced more cheaply in China, even when you added the costs of transport. What was true of plastic cups would also be true of plastic toys. Or rain boots. Pants. Shirts. Sweaters. Or even, much later on, TVs. Phones. Fridges. Cars. If one of the lessons that he had learned from his economic history seminars was right, then in the end, every product would be manufactured by whoever could do so most cheaply. That was as obvious as the fact that water always flowed downhill. A law of nature in economics.
When he told a few classmates this a few days later in the cafeteria, they laughed in his face. China? TVs from China? There were hardly any TVs there. Phones? From a country in which only one out of every ten thousand people owned one? Cars? They snickered and cackled; they slapped their thighs, roaring with laughter as though he had told a fantastic joke. China did not even produce six thousand cars in a whole year. Tang must be crazy. If anything, these products would one day come from Mexico. Or Brazil. Or maybe from India. But not from China, which was poor and had a Communist government.
There were 1.3 billion hungry people waiting for their opportunity in China. Why did they not see what was so obvious? Was he wrong or did these American students lack imagination? In that moment, Victor Tang understood that the first thirty years of his life had not been as much of a waste as he had previously thought. True, he had not been able to attend school regularly during the Cultural Revolution, and before he had come to America he had no idea of history, economics, law, literature, or classical music, but life had taught him important lessons instead.
They had not the faintest glimmering of where he was coming from. Their laughter made clear to him how privileged he was. Not in comparison with the people in his homeland, he knew that already, but in comparison with the young men and women sitting in front of him, who had spent their lives up to now in town houses and homes in the country. He slowly began to understand their world, but they had not the least idea of his. They did not understand how hungry the people in his country were and they would never completely understand it. That was neither their fault nor a failing; it simply was the way it was. And he, Victor Tang, belonged with the others, not with them, even though he ate in the same cafeteria with them, wore jeans, sweatshirts, and baseball caps, could barbecue pork ribs, and knew what a quarterback and a fastball were. Despite this, he did not belong, and he would never belong, even if he wanted to. He was a guest here; he belonged to the world of the others; he knew the hunger, the despair, and the greed, the willpower and capacity for suffering that were over there. They were the qualities he possessed. They had brought him to Harvard, to this very table, and they would drive him onward. On to a point when no one would laugh about him anymore.
———
He stayed four years at Harvard. On the grounds of his outstanding talent, despite his age, his scholarship was extended twice after the two-year period, one year each time. It came to an end in the early summer of 1989. Students in Beijing were staging demonstrations for freedom and democracy in Tiananmen Square at the same time. When the Chinese government was declaring martial law, Victor Tang was traveling through Arkansas on the bus. When the People’s Liberation Army began marching and the tanks rolled through the streets of the capital city, he was sitting on a beach in Los Angeles, looking at the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of which his homeland lay.
He could have stayed. Nothing would have been easier. An application for political asylum, a written declaration to follow the American way of life, and a mention of a made-up family member who had been crushed by a PLA tank in the streets of Beijing in his fight for freedom and democracy would have been enough. That was what thousands of Chinese students in America did in the weeks and months after, and they were given a warm welcome. Tang had the prospect of an assistantship at the University of California in Los Angeles, and they would surely have found something for him at Harvard too.
Tang did hesitate, but only for two days.
The interviews on campus and with the professors in Los Angeles put an end to every one of his doubts. In their pity and their appalled reactions to the events in Beijing was too much self-justification; in their offers for him to stay in America was too much self-importance. He did not want to be passed around as an exile at official events and receptions, marveled at as an exotic creature who had just about managed to wriggle his head free from the Communist noose; thanks to help from the Americans, no one would fail to mention that. Tang did not want to serve once again as a living example of the superiority of a system; he had done that for long enough.
He wanted to go back. His place was in China; anything else would have been a betrayal. His time would come. He was still young enough. With his American education, the future was his in his homeland; he had understood that in the run-down coffee shop in Montana, even though he still had to be patient. The exceptional circumstances, the events in Tiananmen Square, were no more than setbacks, and the falling markets were no reason for panic; they were buying opportunities; his professor at Harvard had explained that convincingly. China’s market had crashed in the summer of 1989, to the very bottom; it could go no lower. Economic sanctions. Trade embargoes. No investment. Horror over the “Beijing killers.” From the analysts’ point of view, it was like an extremely undervalued company; there was no better time to get in.
Only a fool could have believed that it would last. Only an ignoramus could have believed that, in the end, everything would not be manufactured by those who could do it most cheaply.
The world needed China. China needed the world.
After four years in America, he was convinced that the land of unlimited future opportunity no longer lay on the American side of the Pacific.
And he did not doubt it over the three years that followed, when China was politically and economically paralyzed as a result of the student protests and the military intervention. There was a leaden heaviness in the country: All the foreign investment that had been on the cards was canceled or suspended and economic reforms that had been agreed on were put on hold or rescinded. The state security apparatus hunted down the leaders of the protests and their followers; hundreds of them disappeared into forced labor camps and prisons. Everyone who had demonstrated sympathy for the demands of the students too openly was thrown out of the party; the liberal and conservative factions of the Communist Party fought over the future of China in Beijing, and what the outcome of these power games would be was unclear. Was the new party chief Jiang Zemin a reformer or did he want a return to a socialist planned economy? Which side was Deng Xiaoping on? What influence did the old man still have? The country was crippled, right down to the lowest levels of the party and the provincial governments. No one dared to make any decisions because everyone was afraid to be found standing on the wrong side of the political divide when the conflict came to an end.
Tang took only a passing interest in all this. He worked in a sort of division for economic development in Chengdu, but had practically nothing to do, so he spent his time networking and laying plans. For him, the continuation of political reform was only a matter of time. There was, as he had learned in America, a kind of economic logic that no one could resist in the long run, and it made a further opening up of the country inevitable.
In the spring of 1992, Deng Xiaoping traveled through southern China with his family. His speech in Shenzhen,
his call for further vigorous economic reforms, was the sign that Tang—and practically the whole country besides—had been waiting for. That summer he persuaded the provincial government of Sichuan to send him to the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen to seek out investment opportunities and establish contact with foreign investors. He established several firms on their behalf, built a shoe factory, one for plastic cutlery, and one for Christmas decorations, and set up a construction and property business of his own, seeing his vision of China as the factory of the world taking form very slowly.
———
The finale of the Kreutzer Sonata came to an end, and Tang told his driver to put on the Beethoven violin concerto. There would be enough time for the first movement.
They passed the site of an accident. Several policemen were waving traffic past it: In the right-hand lane was a smashed-up minibus with a motorcycle in front of it; next to it, Tang saw the outline of a person under a cloth. The Mercedes gradually glided into motion again, and exactly twenty minutes later they rolled through the gates of the Cathay Heavy Metal works. He remained sitting in the car for the final one-and-a-half minutes of the first movement of the violin concerto, looking out at the factory grounds. Thick white smoke was rising from the three chimneys, and several containers were being loaded at the front of the yard; farther behind, two big trucks were delivering fresh steel. The plant was working at the limits of its capacity; it was barely managing to produce enough. It was high time for them to start building a second factory. Tang had counted on a boom in the Chinese car industry from early on. He had started with a shoestring outfit that had grown quickly, but it had only grown into a goldmine in the last three years with the help of the Owens, their years of experience, and their contacts with the big American firms. And that was only the beginning. The best years lay ahead of them. China was growing into the biggest market for cars in the world. Everyone, whether American or Chinese, seemed to dream of having their own car. Tang was profiting from it and he would not let anyone take that away from him. Not for anything.
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