Tiger Woman on Wall Stree Read Online Free PDF Page A

were cooking for dinner to what their underwear looked like; everyone was alwaysmeddling in each other’s business. All you had to do was stick your head out the door to snag the latest gossip.
    It was a working-class neighborhood, but by no means were we impoverished. If anything, by local standards, we were living a comfortable, middle-class existence, largely thanks to my mother’s shrewd housekeeping skills. Our home was always immaculate. She had a way of adding a few accents of lace and fabric here and there, subtle touches that made our home seem more refined than those of our better-off friends and neighbors.
    My mother is lovely, tall, and slender, with porcelain skin and high cheekbones. Thanks to her innate elegance and the keen sense of style unique to Shanghainese women, her exquisite beauty seemed almost effortless. “There are no ugly women, only lazy women,” Mom used to say; whatever favorable qualities you possessed, you had to use them to their fullest advantage, no excuses. Shanghai women enjoy the reputation of being fashionable, practical, and commercially savvy, and Mom took that claim to the highest degree.
    I was tall, robust, and clear-skinned, with large, catlike eyes and long dark hair, typically bunched up into two pigtails. The neighbors called me “doll.” My mother dressed me simply, but always in bright colors, in bold contrast to the navy blue Maoist outfits of the time. One of the happiest memories of my childhood was the time my mother presented me with a colorful butterfly-print dress on Children’s Day, June 1, right before my accordion performance at school. It was my first short dress, hemmed just above the knee. Unlike the plain school uniform of a starched white shirt, blue skirt, and the Communist Youth League’s Young Pioneers red scarf we all had to wear, this dress embodied everything that life should be, all the joy and freedom I so rarely enjoyed during the course of my childhood. The skirt flared at the bottom when I twirled around, like a flower opening in sunlight. I wanted spin around the stage at my accordion recital, just to mesmerize the world with the colors.
    The woman next door, whom I called “Grandma,” couldn’t stop staring at me in my dress. My enthusiasm sent deep wrinkles across her face, branching out from a timeless smile. “This girl has a lot of fire inside of her,” she would proclaim, to no one in particular.
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    I lived a charmed childhood—except when it came to my education, which dominated my youth. I was the constant target of my father’s relentless, militaristic discipline. Looking back, I understand why. China’s population topped 1 billion in the early 1980s , and the vast majority of this number lived in poverty. In order to break out of the cycle and succeed in China, attending a first-rate high school was obligatory. Shanghai had about two-dozen “flagship” high schools that could funnel their students into good colleges—two-dozen schools for 2 million children of high school age. Clearing the next hurdle would land you in a top-tier college in China that usually resulted in securing a plum white-collar job with a stable, above-average salary after graduation. Dad truly believed brute force was the only thing powerful enough to propel his daughter through this narrow channel of opportunity.
    My father was essentially competing against 4 million other anxious parents (and 8 million grandparents). Nowhere was this more evident than in class, where the teachers were the greatest facilitators of a fierce competition that began in grade school. Each student’s successes and failures were paraded in front of the entire class, and laggards were intentionally embarrassed when the results of our classwork and exams were posted publicly. If that wasn’t enough pressure, our parents and teachers colluded to instill a fear in each of us that failure to excel in school would lead to a lifetime of poverty, since only