Tiger Woman on Wall Stree (30 page)

To be fair, the Chinese system does have some merits. For example, Chinese schools excel in knowledge-based teaching. My friend was quick to point out that she did not idealize the American system, which lags behind the systems of East Asian countries in imparting some basic skills. “For some subjects like math and grammar, this is very important, especially during a child’s early years of schooling,” she said. “However, when it comes to teaching how to learn, not just what to learn, Chinese schools just cannot match the liberal arts approach of most private schools.”

Her words resonated with me, as I have experienced both worlds firsthand. My father and my Chinese education gave me discipline and perseverance, but Middlebury taught me integrity and curiosity. I don’t know what I would be without either experience. But I do know the combination of the two gave me the strength, audacity, and intelligence to compete on Wall Street and advance my career as a leader, not just a follower.

As I’ve faced down my fair share of challenges in life, I have always reminded myself of that steamy summer in Shanghai when I biked an hour and half every day to get to my TOEFL class and spent the evenings memorizing the entire dictionary to pass a test in a foreign language I did not really speak. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” my father drilled into me. His teachings were the source of my courage to achieve the seemingly impossible: to break into both the white-male-dominated world of Wall Street
and the Chinese-male-dominated sphere of corporate China. But it was my American education that gave me the courage and skill set to question and dare to be different, to embrace new ideas, and to take risks to turn those ideas into a business practice.

Another strong point of American education is its emphasis on collaboration, whether group work in the classroom, or teamwork on the sports field. A friend who is a partner in the Shanghai office of an American private equity firm conducted an experiment with two groups of MBA interns. He gave the same project to a team from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and to a team from a leading business school in China. One group of students gave a well-balanced and coherent presentation. The members of the other team took turns upstaging one another for personal glory and ended up with contradictory conclusions.

Most Americans would predict that the Chinese group would give the organized report, while the Americans would be out for themselves. After all, books like Amy Chua’s
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
have emphasized the high caliber of performance given by many second-generation Chinese students. But no one should be surprised that it was actually the reverse. Chinese students—from China, that is—have been taught only how to work for their own good, not how to cooperate to ensure the group’s success.

Sports provide another example. China is rightly proud of having won 51 gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the most of any country. However, its only teams to win gold were in gymnastics and fencing, both intensely solo sports. American expat friends who play pickup basketball and ultimate Frisbee in China have told me that they have trouble with the go-for-glory playing habits of Chinese teammates. As one American friend explained to me, “In a moment of pressure, they go for the big shots, never for the smart side pass. They rarely nail that shot.” I cannot help but think that even the sports culture reflects deeper
flaws in China’s education system—that students are raised to be so competitive that even a basketball game cannot be shared equally with friends.

The gaokao system—the countrywide college entrance exam that is almost the sole factor determining where a student goes to college—has contributed to a cutthroat competitive learning environment. For years leading up the gaokao, students are frequently tested and ranked on a narrow set of subjects, leading to incessant backstabbing and bitter competition. This engenders a society bent on self-promotion, lacking almost entirely in any community values beyond the immediate family. This legacy persists into adult life as well: a suspicious, zero-sum ethos pervades most Chinese work environments, limiting collaboration.

The costs to the Chinese economy are considerable. The wealthy spend millions of U.S. dollars overseas for private, international-style education. The long-term consequences of this trend are frightening. Graduates from international schools and universities often choose to remain abroad after graduation, unable to stomach returning to China once they step outside the country’s constrained political and social system. At home, meanwhile, the children who rise through Chinese schools to the top universities in China—an achievement that paves the way to the top jobs—are likely to be the yes-men with uncannily good memories and little mental flexibility. Instead of pumping money into sky-high tuition fees and passport-earning overseas investments, the Chinese should be investing in their own education system.

Rigid, lackluster schools are also the origin of China’s longstanding culture of cheating and corner cutting. In a 2008 survey of 900 college students by
China Youth Study
, 83 percent of students admitted to cheating on
their exams
. Whether the figure is accurate or not, the practice of copying from each other’s papers, sneaking information into tests on their calculators, or plagiarizing essays from the Internet is undoubtedly prevalent.

And as more Chinese students study abroad, these practices expand beyond Chinese shores. The number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States climbed to 57,000 by 2012, up from only 10,000
five years before
. A significant number of these students use forged transcripts or ghostwritten essays to beat out competitors and win coveted positions at American colleges.

The Chinese Internet abounds with consultancies that promise to “guide” the student through their college applications for a hefty fee. These consultancies often hire foreign expats to write the entrance essays (about $45 an essay, a significant amount in China), and they use special relationships with admissions counselors to guarantee students’ admittance. In 2010, Zinch China, an education consulting company, interviewed 250 Beijing high school students headed for American colleges. The survey found that 90 percent of Chinese applicants had submitted falsified recommendation letters, 70 percent had others write their college application essays, and half had forged
high school transcripts
.

Chinese schools should do much more to crack down on these behaviors. I believe honesty should be the foremost value taught in schools, before comradeship, citizenship, and even compassion or love. Without the existence of an honest culture, all these other values are cheapened. Cheating should result in severe repercussions, including expulsion—such as at Middlebury, which successfully implemented an honor code and self-regulating system, not only for students but also for teachers and administrative staff who accepted bribes.

Teaching materials should also reflect these values, in China and the rest of the world. Chinese history textbooks are far from this ideal, portraying the country as either a victim or a hero in international affairs. The history books emphasize the wrongs committed by colonialists during China’s “Hundred Years of Humiliation”
after the Opium Wars and by the Japanese during World War II. However, the Great Leap Forward—the period from 1958 to 1961, where 30 million people died of famine as Mao Zedong tried to transform China’s agrarian economy into an industrialized one—is remembered as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters,” with only nature to blame for millions of deaths. I didn’t learn the reality of the Great Leap Forward until I watched Zhang Yimou’s historical drama
To Live
at Middlebury College. Nor would I have been informed of the unspoken facts of the Tiananmen Square “episode”—modern China’s most significant event and best-kept secret—if I hadn’t left the country.

Granted, Americans also dress up their own history—for example, by including rosy portrayals of partnerships between Pilgrims and Native Americans in textbooks. But there is a difference, both in a matter of degree and in the consequences one faces for speaking the truth. Americans have gradually accepted and begun teaching the truth about how European colonizers destroyed native civilizations through warfare and disease. Even Plimouth Plantation—the living museum where the first meeting of the Pilgrims and Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is reenacted—has changed its museum to reflect this reality.

China, however, shows no interest in changing the way its history is taught. The only way for Chinese citizens to learn the facts of their home country is to leave China and go somewhere with a free and unbiased media.

This culture of denial and dishonesty begins in Chinese schools, but it has infected almost all other aspects of society. If truth telling is not mandated in schools and espoused by the media, how can one expect honesty to be observed and honored in business dealings or even courts of law? Old habits die hard, especially those formed at an impressionable age.

  *  *  *  

Investors outside China often fail to appreciate this dangerous imbalance between the country’s hardware and software. Many people living in China, from the top leadership in Beijing to corporate executives to average citizens, believe the country is nearing an inflection point that will force it to reflect and reform. The country’s singular focus on fast growth and the bottom line in the past ought to be shifted to the quality of economic growth, of the country’s citizenry, and of the society. But wresting control from vested interests and carrying out the dramatic reform to institutions necessary to make this shift will be very difficult.

For investors, this imbalance should send a clear message:
buyer beware
. Assuming that China’s past rate of growth will continue to be the norm will only invite costly mistakes. For Americans, the realization of this imbalance should also help alleviate the prevalent and unwarranted sense that America is in decline. With its principles, beliefs, and checks and balances, America is well equipped to continue to lead the world and thrive throughout the century, even with some structural problems it must address at home.

China today is essentially caught in a prison of its own success—the staggering and unprecedented achievement of lifting 500 million people out of poverty in a bit more than 30 years. Chinese people are energized and anxious at the same time. Outsiders are awed, and they assume past glory is indicative of future achievement. But the country’s trajectory seems similar to that of an athlete on steroids. As with most athletes on steroids whose temporary outperformance is inevitably followed by a long period of underperformance, the truth will eventually find its way out.

China is a special case in the speed and magnitude of its emergence and its ability to sustain GDP growth of roughly 10 percent
for so long. However, many transitional economies have gone through a period of brilliant growth—Japan in the 1960s and 1970s and Korea in the 1980s and early 1990s. The rich history of the developed world gives China an advantage: it can learn from other countries’ history and avoid some of their mistakes—should it choose to do so.

N
OWADAYS
, I
TRAVEL REGULARLY BETWEEN
N
EW
Y
ORK AND
Shanghai, cities I think of, respectively, as my residence by choice and my hometown by birth. I consider New York to be calm and orderly in comparison with the 24/7 action and frenetic pace of Shanghai. I enjoy watching people’s jaws drop when I tell them with a little exaggeration that compared with Shanghai, New York is rather sleepy.

My family’s life goes on with Shanghai’s transformation. Dad continues to work on various real estate projects, and one way I keep tabs on the state of the Shanghai property market is by noting how busy he is. He also keeps up with his violin practice and enjoys traveling whenever he has downtime. After touring around Europe last year, he decided that Switzerland is his favorite destination because of its peace and quiet. So we plan to meet up there this year. Since our last father-daughter vacation in Phuket, Thailand, I haven’t spent much one-on-one time with my father. I am very much looking forward to it.

Mom happily volunteers as my sister Jasmine’s full-time unpaid nanny, babysitting Jasmine’s three-year-old daughter, Audrey. I have never seen or heard my dad, nor anyone else in the family, drill Audrey on her multiplication tables, but Audrey is clearly quite smart. She can already recite an ancient Chinese poem, Li Bai’s famous “A Quiet Night Thought.” She can also count to 10 and name all the fruits in English. Whether Audrey should attend grade school in China or in Australia, where my sister and her husband are permanent residents, is an ongoing topic of family discussion.

On the other side of the globe, I am expanding my business and building my team as the track record of our due diligence–based research company strengthens. To cater to the needs of large institutional investors in the United States and Europe, our research today goes beyond Chinese companies to include multinationals with meaningful exposure to China. We are also developing and testing proprietary macroeconomic indexes. Today, I spend half my time as a research analyst and the other half managing a growing and exciting business. My life continues to be filled with exciting challenges and opportunities, as it should be.

After having lived in New York for a decade now, I am still mesmerized by what the city has to offer. I love New York for the top-notch talent and fascinating characters it draws from all over the world. My life has been defined by the group of friends, colleagues, teachers, and mentors whom I have been so fortunate to have met around the world. They inspire and motivate me every day to reach beyond my limits and to venture into the impossible.

In the midst of chaotic city life, I have fallen in love with yoga. In moments of calm and solitude after each practice, I often reflect on the journey I have made so far, from perching on the washboard for my father’s multiplication drills; to learning English in the dank dorms in Shanghai; to having an authentic American college experience in Vermont; to years of tireless learning, burning,
growing, and succeeding on Wall Street; to carrying what my American and Wall Street education taught me back to China as a stock analyst today.