Tiger Woman on Wall Stree Read Online Free PDF Page B

sometimes on the surface of the wood desk. I would occasionally even tuck a piece of paper into one of my sleeves. None of us everboasted about this behavior to each other in public, let alone confessed it to our parents or teachers. I suppose we subconsciously knew that cheating was bad. But I never felt guilty about it—I was just doing what everyone else was doing. Even at that young age, we all understood that class rank mattered more than the score itself. If everyone in the classroom cheated, the ranking of the scores wouldn’t change—it simply inflated everyone’s scores. If bad students hoped to climb up the class rankings by cheating, good students like me wanted to make sure we stayed on top. Understanding this made it easy for all of us to continue to cheat. No one wanted to become a victim by not buying into the system.
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    In 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced reforms that lit the fires of economic change. He designed and implemented a program that freed agriculture from collective control, privatized state-owned enterprises, lifted price controls, and opened up the economy to foreign investments . There was so much pent-up energy that when Deng waved his red flag and said, “Charge,” there was no stopping the Chinese people from surging ahead.
    By the time I entered grade school, just about everyone my family knew was becoming an entrepreneur of some sort, with most leaving their state-sponsored jobs to start up businesses of their own. But quitting wasn’t always necessary. State enterprise jobs weren’t what one would call challenging; by midday, most people shed the pretense of productivity and sat around drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, and gossiping. It wasn’t unusual for the most resourceful among state employees to manage side businesses and fill up the remainder of their afternoons and sometimes evenings with outside appointments.
    My father was bored with his job and disgusted with the cadres in charge of the factory. He often complained about the way they abused power, soliciting bribes and harassing female workers. Hedidn’t have enough to do, so he spent most of his day in a quiet corner, reading and observing. His intelligence isolated him, so it was a godsend when freelance opportunities presented themselves. At last, Dad had a chance to fulfill some of his frustrated ambition.
    He started looking around for real estate deals. His sister held an important position at a Shanghai water company, in charge of water allocation to construction projects. No building could be sold without water flowing in, so my aunt would give Dad the inside track, and he would become the contractor on major sites. The more construction sites that popped up in Shanghai, the less often my father could be found at his auto plant.
    Meanwhile my mother left her accounting job and launched a garment import-export business with her colleague, a well-connected man with relationships with buyers in Taiwan and Japan. My mother served as a project manager and liaison between the foreign garment companies and the textile factories just outside of Shanghai, where they subcontracted production of their clothes. She kept a close eye on the factories so they wouldn’t be tempted to shortchange buyers with cheaper fabrics or shoddy workmanship.
    Graft in all forms was rampant; everyone was under the influence of short-term greed. The goal was to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. “Take the profit off the table while you can,” Dad was fond of saying. “Nothing is long term in this country.”
    These changes in circumstances didn’t take the pressure off me. I was still Dad’s focal point, his special project. My parents had made it in just under the wire of China’s one-child policy. My sister had been their second shot at having a boy, and when that didn’t come to pass, Dad resolved to channel all his energy and frustrated ambitions into me, his firstborn. I was raised to be the son