Born in 1969, He Caught the Best Years of Foreign Companies. His Way of Coping Was to "Study" | Housing and Our Lives ⑦

Housing is the largest commodity a person can ever consume, and it is also a witness to the changes in an individual's life. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread, to see what happened over the years.

It's time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a firm belief in progress and development; a belief that society will keep opening up better, larger space for the individual; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These are, in fact, universal values.

When a word like "history" is set in front of us, it tends to disappear under grand narratives. We hope to do what we can, through interviews at a smaller scale, to sort some of it out.

We're beginning this record with "housing," the part of personal life that draws the most attention.

Several things about Xu Chuangxin don't fit together.

His ideal life is "reading alone, writing a little, idling over wind and flowers" — and yet he is a sales director whose job is a long run of dinners, drinks and small talk.

Deep down he wants stability and solid ground, but after the age of 20 he almost never lived in his hometown of Hangzhou again, moving between Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and other cities. He thinks the "new" in his name may have foretold a lifetime of moving around.

Xu Chuangxin was born in 1969, in the staff compound of the telecommunications bureau outside Qingchun Gate in Hangzhou. He and the other children called their building the "Mahavira Hall" — it had a steep pitched roof scattered with tiles. His father was an ordinary worker at the bureau; his mother worked at a textile mill. With his younger brother, the family of four lived in 40 square meters, furnished with the "four must-haves" of a 1950s Chinese household: a sewing machine, a radio, a watch and a bicycle.

From the time he was small, his parents told him: "We have nothing much to give you. From now on you rely on yourself."

Xu started college in 1988. A year later China issued the "Report on Reforming the Job-Assignment System for College Graduates," and by the time he graduated he had to "rely on himself" and find his own work. He took a job at a state-owned company, then moved to a foreign one, and in the nearly 30 years of working life since, he has never let himself sit idle. "I worked during work hours and read during the rest — that's how I got through it," he says.

Xu wears glasses, speaks softly, and looks bookish. He is rather proud of being from Zhejiang. Zhejiang is described as "seven parts mountain, two parts water, one part farmland" — plenty of hills, little flat ground. He believes it is precisely because land is scarce that people there have to work harder for a living. In his words: "We live in fear every day, afraid that one day there won't be food."

His way of handling the fear is to keep studying. Xu has collected four degrees. He began with a junior-college diploma from Hangzhou University, then, while working, took a bachelor's program in economics and trade that Peking University ran in Hangzhou with the Radio and TV University. Posted to Beijing, he lived in a 60-square-meter old public-housing flat near the Asian Games Village, and every weekend traveled ten kilometers to Peking University's campus to work toward a bachelor's in Chinese language and literature.

His most recent degree is an MBA from Zhejiang University, finished in 2010. He was living in Shanghai then, and for two and a half years he shuttled between Shanghai and Zhejiang every weekend — the drive alone took four hours. On weekends he stayed in his parents' old work-unit compound. "I gritted my teeth and got through it," he says.

Xu never got the benefits his generation's elders had — an assigned apartment, an assigned job — but he still calls himself "a beneficiary of reform and opening-up." In 1981 Deng Xiaoping made his first southern tour, and for the next 30 years the Chinese economy grew fast. In 1992, when Xu was 23 and right in the middle of that stretch, Deng made his second southern tour and set the goal of reforming China's market system. "If it had still been a planned economy, I'd probably be a factory worker," Xu says.

In the 1990s Xu lived through the most dazzling years of the foreign-company halo, joining first Wei Chuan and then Kraft. He has now been at Kraft for 18 years, and in the work of opening new markets he has been to nearly every city in China. In recent years he has mostly stayed in Shanghai, where the market is relatively saturated.

And the halo around foreign companies faded long ago.

Xu and his wife now live in a 140-square-meter apartment in Qibao, in Shanghai's Minhang District, bought for 2.7 million yuan when he moved to Shanghai in 2007. His son has just started 11th grade in the United States, which means that for the next six years Xu will be paying his son's American tuition and living costs, through college. To fund it, he sold his first and only apartment in Hangzhou last year. He doesn't regret it: he believes that sending his son to study in "the most powerful country" will let him "share a little of that power."

The couple also plan to buy a house in the United States, and lately the currency controls have been giving them headaches.

What follows is Xu Chuangxin's account, in his own words:

"Outside Qingchun Gate"

As a boy I lived on the edge of Hangzhou, in what we called "outside Qingchun Gate." Chinese cities used to be ringed by walls, and outside the wall was the moat. Hangzhou had Genshan Gate, Qingchun Gate, Yongjin Gate — seven or eight gates in all. We lived by one of them: go out through the gate and you were in the countryside, go in and you were in the city.

Back then that area was mostly farmland. My parents worked for the telecommunications bureau, which had a unit outside Qingchun Gate. We lived in the staff compound, with the work unit below — all of it welfare housing. My parents still live there. The only difference is that after the housing reform they paid a little money and the property became theirs.

The compound had several buildings of different sizes. With my younger brother there were four of us, and we moved from the smaller flats to the bigger ones as we grew. I lived in that compound until I graduated from college — more than 20 years — and only bought a place of my own after I married. At its smallest our flat was 40 or 50 square meters, with no private bathroom or kitchen; three or four households shared a kitchen. As we grew, we applied to the work unit and were given somewhere a bit larger. What my parents have now is about 60 or 70 square meters, rather like today's old public-housing apartments.

The building wasn't like now, where every household has its own balcony. The corridor, as I remember it, was continuous: you opened your door and stepped straight onto a shared balcony. It was lively. The kids all played together, running up and down. Neighbors across five floors, above and below — there were no secrets, everyone played together. It was like the way people talk about the old courtyard compounds now: if one family cooked something good, they shared it.

The roof was pitched, like a temple's Mahavira Hall, so that's what we called it — "the Mahavira Hall." Buildings then were all like that: four stories, tiled roofs. Seven households to a floor. We lived on the top floor, right by the stairwell, and several of the flats ran into one another.

Housing wasn't good then. Forty square meters, two rooms, no living room. There was a table and a TV; my parents had the front room, my brother and I the back one. Past the back door, the kitchen and the bathroom were separated by a narrow passage shared by several families, two households to a bathroom.

I was happy there as a child, free of worry, with plenty of other kids to play with, all from the same building. Around us it was mostly farmland, and over the summer holidays we caught cicadas, caught fish, caught crickets. We were mad about crickets. We'd go out at night to catch them, and the next morning all of us would gather to bring out our crickets and fight them, to see whose won. Those were happy times.

Sometimes we went into the city too — school outings to the Children's Palace, spring and autumn trips, trips to West Lake. Hangzhou is small, really; you could walk to West Lake.

My father was with the telecommunications bureau. They often went out of town for construction work, and he was the driver. My mother was a textile worker at a mill. Both of my parents were completely ordinary workers.

Back then it was called the "Telecommunications Engineering Corps," and after the reforms it became the Telecommunications Engineering Company. What did we say at the time? Telecommunications, railways and electric power — those three were the iron rice bowls. There was a saying, "Rail is the big boss." The railway was the most powerful, and a railway job was a wonderful thing: good benefits, all run by the state. Second came the power bureau, then telecoms — telecoms meant installing phones, and hardly anyone had a private phone then.

Back then — oh — the railways, the power bureau, telecoms, the banks: getting into any of them was very good. Because it was secure, the pay was higher than at an ordinary factory, and the working conditions were better.

For ordinary people at the time, beyond the few dozen yuan of wages you took home, what mattered were the benefits. The biggest was an assigned apartment; the small ones were the things handed out on holidays. I remember my father's unit giving out watermelons in summer, basket after basket, and mooncakes at Mid-Autumn. There was something for every holiday, all year round, and sometimes an allowance as well. The railways and the banks were especially good at it. These were benefits you could see and touch, and ordinary people care about what's real.

By the time I was 13 or 14, private phones started to appear. What I remember most is how expensive installation was — the fee alone was 1,000 yuan, so a phone was fairly extravagant. And even after you applied and paid, they wouldn't necessarily install it right away: you needed connections, favors, and a place in the queue. When the telecom workers came to run the line and put the phone in, you had to give them cigarettes.

So telecoms really was a sought-after industry, and it bred a kind of inbreeding — sons taking over their fathers' jobs, because working inside the same unit and the same system, there were always connections of one sort or another. The older boys in our building, as I remember, almost all found work in telecoms, and some of them simply stepped into their fathers' posts.

Ours was an ordinary family. The old four must-haves — sewing machine, radio, watch, bicycle — we had basically all of them. My parents worked for state units, so there was always food, and the apartment came from the work unit; it was just small. Back then people's material lives were not very different from one another. The most that drew attention was someone buying a bicycle, or a family being the first to have a phone put in, and that was it. Nothing like the gulf you see today.

Even the cadres who lived above and below us just had a slightly bigger flat and maybe a slightly higher salary. Today they'd be buying villas and we could only afford an apartment.

Clothes came in two colors then, blue and army green. At school it was white shirts, red scarves, blue trousers, so there was nothing much to compare. I think it was because goods were relatively scarce and there wasn't much to choose from.

"Seven Parts Mountain, Two Parts Water, One Part Farmland"

I did badly in the college entrance exam the first time, so I repeated a year and sat it again. I got into the public relations program at Hangzhou University, a three-year junior-college track. Hangzhou University has since been merged into Zhejiang University.

Public relations had just become fashionable. There was a TV drama, PR Girls (《公关小姐》), about a corporate PR woman in Shenzhen. PR was new then and not yet a major of its own, so it was called a "public relations specialization" and sat under the politics department. That's because PR started out as government relations before it spread into business — diplomacy, basically.

In Zhejiang, Hangzhou included, the scores you needed for university were very high, and that's still true today. Take getting into Peking University or Tsinghua: I saw that in 2017 a top scorer from another province, dropped into Zhejiang, might have ranked only 40th or 50th here. Even Jiangsu's top science scorer would rank only 40th or 50th in Zhejiang.

The character of a province, the traditions of its people — these really are shaped by the natural setting. Zhejiang has more than 40 million people in a small territory. We say "seven parts mountain, two parts water, one part farmland": the land is mostly mountain, and flat ground is one percent of it. So Zhejiang ended up with many people and little land, and packing that many people into that small a place forces them to work harder, forces them to push themselves.

Elsewhere they plant rice once a year; we plant three crops. From the same piece of ground our output is two or three times theirs. Because land is short, a lot of Zhejiang people have had to leave home to make a living. People from Yiwu and Jinhua, for instance, spread out across the whole country. Yiwu people used to talk about "trading chicken feathers for sugar" — you carried a peddler's load around the country, swapped chicken feathers for sugar, did small trades like that to keep going. Yiwu is now the world's largest wholesale market for small commodities. That's why Zhejiang people have a reputation for hard work.

Zhejiang also has a tradition of valuing education — "he who excels in study becomes an official." To get ahead you had to study well, because there was no natural advantage to lean on. You could only rely on yourself, and the more learning you had, the more ways there were to make a living. Chengdu doesn't need any of that; people there play mahjong, because Chengdu is the land of abundance, rich in what it produces, with nothing to fear. We live in fear every day, afraid that one day there won't be food.

Back then, if you got into college your job was guaranteed. They assigned you work, and it was better than anything you'd find yourself. Everyone assigned in through the university track became a cadre; everyone else became a worker. I was at college from 1988 to 1991 — three years — and by the time I graduated the assignments were gone. If your parents were cadres they could place you at a work unit they had ties to, but mine were ordinary workers, so I was on my own.

So I went and applied for a sales job at a state-owned department-store wholesale company in Hangzhou. Department stores were considered good places to work then. I mainly handled wholesale of daily necessities and cosmetics within Zhejiang province. Distribution channels weren't as varied as now — it was basically still the state channel. Shops needed stock, and their suppliers were state-owned too. They bought from factories and wholesaled to the shops below them; some of the planned-economy framework was still there.

By the time I joined, the reforms had begun and there were private wholesale companies as well. Inside the state-owned company, individuals could take out contracts. The shell was still the Hangzhou Department Store Wholesale Company, but underneath it there was a household-chemicals subsidiary or a daily-necessities subsidiary, and those were contracted out to their managers — already something of a private business.

"The Foreign-Company Halo"

Wages were low, three or four hundred yuan a month, low to middling. I worked there a bit over two years, then went to a foreign company. At the department store I did sales; at Wei Chuan I did sales too. I had no other skill. Sales, dealing with people, was all I could do.

Foreign-invested companies were gradually multiplying, and their advantage was that they paid far more than state-owned firms — quite attractive. I even applied to Coca-Cola in Hangzhou; beverages were riding high then. We called it Hangzhou Zhongcui, which was actually a joint venture between Coca-Cola and a local beverage plant. Coca-Cola killed off beverage plants all over the country — it either formed a joint venture with them or simply swallowed them whole.

The day I went to apply there were, if not a thousand people outside the factory gate, then several hundred, all for one sales post. Coca-Cola must have been expanding its sales force and wanted to hire ten; several hundred turned up, and the competition was fierce. We just stood there at the gate, dumbstruck. You could see the crowd swarming, thick as anything. There was a first round, a second round, a third round, and a written test as well.

The foreign-company halo then was dazzling, seductive. There was also the Huanglong Hotel, Hangzhou's first five-star hotel. Hiring a single waiter drew a huge crowd. These were all Sino-foreign joint ventures.

Hotel pay was good then too. Doormen earned well, because the tips were generous. When reform and opening-up began, Chinese hotels built these places to receive foreigners and overseas Chinese, since our own hotels were in poor shape; building hotels like that was a way to attract foreign investment. You could pay in US or Hong Kong dollars, and foreigners had the habit of tipping — you'd open a door and get a few US dollars or a few dozen Hong Kong dollars. Sometimes they were showing off and gave freely. I heard a doorman could make more in a month than the lobby manager. The Huanglong Hotel is still there, renovated.

Foreign companies don't have that halo now. There are too many of them, sales work is exhausting, and the pay gap with state-owned firms isn't what it was. People's attitudes have changed too; there are more choices. Private companies now pay better than foreign ones, and they've become properly run — not like before, when the boss alone decided everything. Now they bring in professional managers and have modern corporate governance.

These days it's the foreign companies that can't find people.

In '93 and '94 the salary at Wei Chuan was, as I remember, just over 1,000 yuan; with bonuses it could reach 1,500 or 1,600, which was decent — an ordinary wage was around 500 to 700. I was there for nearly five years and was posted to many regions. After joining Wei Chuan I rarely worked in Hangzhou again; it was always somewhere else.

The longest stretch was in Guangzhou, where I ran sales for southern China. That market was built from nothing: I did the development, built the team, set up the sales office. After two or three years I went to Jiangsu to open a sales office and develop that market too. I was there less than a year, went back to Hangzhou, and not long after joined my current company, Kraft — a joint venture with Nestlé in China — where I've now been for 18 years.

I've changed sales postings a lot — Guangzhou, Beijing, now Shanghai, always somewhere outside Hangzhou, because in sales you expand geographically, expand into markets; they send you out to build new teams and open new markets. I adapt well, and I think it's my fate to move around. My parents named me Jianxin, "build new" — always a new city, a new field, a new business. There's some quiet harmony in that, I feel.

Kraft hired me as regional manager for Zhejiang. I worked in Zhejiang for a year, then moved to Shanghai, and less than a year later was transferred to Beijing to run the north. The north was a new market. I spent five years in Beijing, from August 2000 until 2006.

I lived in the Asian Games Village, renting for a bit over 3,000 yuan a month; since it was a company posting, the company covered the rent and the car. I had it much better than today's "Beijing drifters." I never really had the Beijing-drifter experience at all — the mark of that is living in a basement, and I never did.

Working for a foreign company, I had the standard benefits. I lived alone in a two-bedroom flat, 60 to 70 square meters, an ordinary old public-housing slab building with an elevator. I remember our building: the block in front was for ministers, and the block behind, more than 20 stories, was staff housing. My landlord worked for the Government Offices Administration of the State Council. Walking in the compound I even saw Wang Meng, then the culture minister, and Zhu Rongji would come by at Chinese New Year to visit the retired cadres.

Once I made sales manager I started managing people. Management is really the work of handling people, and that is an enormous subject; no one can teach you in a class or two how people are managed. It has to rest on your grasp of history, the humanities, economics, and on what you've learned about people from dealing with them. People are creatures of self-interest — you have to understand them from that direction.

I've managed people from Beijing, the Northeast, the Northwest, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai. So many people, and every region has its own character, its own culture and habits. Only by knowing the local history and culture can you get hold of local people's temperament and what they actually value. If I managed people from Beijing the way I manage people from Shanghai, I'd run into serious trouble.

Beijingers mind their face; they see themselves as lords of the manor. Don't name their faults in front of a crowd, don't take their face away. If you think someone has done wrong and it needs fixing, call him into the office and say it to him there — then he can take it in. I learned that the hard way, a few times, before I understood why my way of managing was backfiring. Once we were all out at a street-food stall and they told me: "Boss Xu, that guy minds his face. You said it in front of everyone, he had nowhere to go, he can't take that."

If you hear someone from the Northeast say, "Boss Xu, no problem! Don't you worry!" — in a 30-day month you'll be happy for 29 days and spend one of them crying. Because it's never as good as they promised; people from the Northeast like to talk big. It isn't that they're bad people. That's just how they live and how they talk.

Shanghai people, generally, are shrewd, and they're willing to keep to the rules as long as everyone has spelled the rules out. If the rules of the game aren't clear, they won't necessarily do it your way.

But Beijingers go by feeling and put the rules behind them. If we're on good terms today, we're buddies, and I'll help you no matter what. If you rile them and become an opponent, they stop looking at the rules; it turns emotional.

People from Guangdong are practical and like a tangible return. As long as there's money in it, something real in it for them, they'll rack their brains to get it done. So you motivate them with money. In Guangdong we'd run sales contests — a reward for the top few that month, a sum for whoever took the quarter — and that gave them drive.

Get to Chengdu and no amount of incentive helps. A modest comfort is enough: this is fine as it is. There you need another method.

"I Generally Never Let Myself Sit Idle"

I started with a junior-college diploma from Hangzhou University. At the time I felt that, as credentials go, a junior-college diploma was worth nothing, so later I also did a bachelor's in economics and trade from Peking University. Peking University had opened a class in Hangzhou, run with the Radio and TV University, for upgrading a junior-college diploma to a bachelor's.

Later, working in Beijing, I went and studied in Peking University's Chinese department, part-time while working. By then I wasn't after a diploma at all; it was purely interest. I'm very interested in literature and have loved novels and classical poetry since I was a boy.

Peking University's most famous department is Chinese. I studied there for more than three years and took a bachelor's in Chinese language and literature. Classes ran both days of the weekend. I was busy every day, out early and back late. I had a family by then, but at first I was alone in Beijing, and on my own I felt that if I didn't use the time to study it would simply go to waste.

My classmates at Peking University were all working people coming back to study. A diploma mattered a great deal to them for promotions and raises. Many of them came from the Forbidden City, People's Radio, China Central Television — a lot of them worked in culture and media.

After five years in Beijing I went back to Guangzhou for a year, then moved to Shanghai, where I've been ever since.

I've always thought a college diploma in itself means nothing, but the courses and the education you're exposed to at a university do quietly shape how you think and how you look at a problem. Graduating from Peking University doesn't mean I must be impressive; there are fools who graduated from there too. It only means a man has an expertise in one particular field.

A junior-college program isn't a complete university education. I felt it was a real loss never to have had a complete one, so all I could do was make time afterward to study.

After I moved to Shanghai I again found time to keep studying: two and a half years of an MBA at Zhejiang University. Honestly, it didn't help the job much. What mattered was improving myself. With a background and a history like mine, only by recharging do you have even a small chance at a future. I generally never let myself sit idle: I worked during work hours and read during the rest, and that's how I got through.

There was also a benefit at the time — once you finished the MBA the company would reimburse the tuition. Tuition was still cheap then; the whole two and a half years came to just over 70,000 yuan. Now it's probably close to 200,000.

Classes were Saturday and Sunday. Since I worked in Shanghai, I'd drive over on Friday, sit two days of classes and drive back, staying at my parents' place in Hangzhou over the weekend. Shanghai to Hangzhou is a bit over 180 kilometers, about two hours' drive each way. Two and a half days a week, every week; I gritted my teeth and kept at it. My parents and I are alike that way: whatever we do, we want to do it well.

I feel work alone isn't enough. Work is specialized, but the range of what you know and can do stays narrow. Sales is a profession, you could say, but it asks for an all-round set of abilities — negotiation, analysis, building and keeping client relationships, positioning products and brands strategically in a market — and those alone aren't enough.

The real professional ability lies outside the profession.

What counts is how you think, how you treat people, your sense of proportion. That sense comes from a liking for literature and history and a familiarity with them, because history repeats itself in startling ways. What good can historical events do for sales today? Does handling the figures and events that thousands of years of history have played out help you sell now? I think it helps a great deal.

If you have that knowledge and that sediment behind you, it shapes you quietly.

"Moving It Like Ants"

In 2003 I bought a 100-square-meter apartment outside Beijing's Fourth Ring Road, not far from Chaoyang Park, for 600,000 yuan — 6,000 yuan a square meter.

I bought partly because I'd been in Beijing a while, and a rented flat isn't stable: the lease ends and the rent goes up, it went up every year, but the company's housing allowance didn't. Old public housing also had poor amenities. And the company hadn't decided when I'd move on, so I thought I might be in Beijing for the rest of my life.

I assumed prices would rise after I bought, but I never imagined this much. Had I known, I'd have sold everything I owned and borrowed money to buy several more; I wouldn't have to work now. As it happened, in 2006 they told me I was being moved back to Shanghai, so I sold the flat and said goodbye to Beijing. I sold at 10,000 a square meter, nearly double what I paid. Last month I went back to the old place and asked around: it's worth more than 6 million yuan now.

In Shanghai I bought the place I live in now, in Qibao. I bought it in 2007 at just over 20,000 a square meter, with a 1.5-million-yuan mortgage; all in, it came to a bit over 2.7 million. It's worth 9 million now. But we still have to live somewhere. Even at 90 million we'd still have to live here. We can hardly throw ourselves out.

The way prices have gone up is frightening. They're bound to keep going up, so buying beats renting. Even if I end up back in Hangzhou one day, selling this place would bring in more than my salary. Sold or not, this apartment is money made.

My first apartment, actually, was one I bought in Hangzhou in 1999, a 100-square-meter two-bedroom. That one is a milestone, because I bought it for my own wedding. Back then nowhere near as many people bought a home to get married as now — these days you have to buy one to marry, don't you? A lot of people still lived with their parents and fixed up a room at home as the bridal room. We pooled 200,000 yuan of savings from ourselves and both sets of parents, and paid for the flat in a single lump sum.

I started working in 1993, and by the time I married in 1999 six or seven years had passed. At first buying wasn't a clear plan; gradually, once I had a girlfriend and marriage came up, the idea took shape. My family was poor then, so I lived very carefully, all to save money. If you're going to take a wife, you'd better economize.

Most of my money still went to my parents, though — that was the traditional way — and I kept about a tenth for myself. We hardly had expenses anyway. I don't smoke or drink, eating out and going out were both cheap, and we tried to eat at home as much as we could. Saving was one reason; the other was that I didn't socialize much, and wasn't good at it.

Going into sales later was really because I couldn't find another way; sales was what was left. I don't much like socializing — it's my temperament. I'd rather read on my own. I don't need many friends, a few good ones I can talk to is enough. I don't like running around too much.

Some of that probably comes from how I grew up. My parents were plain, honest people who didn't like socializing; they didn't pass any socializing gene down to us. My mother worked rotating shifts and my father was busy, so they had no time to look after us or take us out. We were mostly on our own at home.

It's always been that way and I can't change it. I can meet plenty of new people, but only for work. For work I can do many things, but by nature they aren't necessarily what I like. Work isn't my hobby; to be precise, it's how I make a living. I've done it long enough that I'm used to it.

Most people, I think, work in order to work. For me, reading, writing a little, wind and flowers — that's the good part. But I need material means, so most of the time I still have to work.

My son was born in 2000 and even went to kindergarten in Beijing. The piano you see here was moved down from Beijing. He went to the Liu Shikun Music Kindergarten; Liu Shikun is a pianist. He studied piano in Beijing but stopped after we came back, which is a pity. It was never about passing the grade exams — playing the piano in your spare time beats sitting around staring into space.

Going to high school in the US was a decision he made in eighth grade: high school in America first, then college there. Studying at home really offers only two routes. The first is exam-driven schooling, but for the college entrance exam you need a good school, and here in Qibao the good high school is Qibao High School, a municipal key school. He couldn't get in, so that route closed.

That leaves the second route, a private school, which really means going abroad. Getting into a good Chinese university from a private school is probably hard — private schools aren't as fierce as the public ones and don't treat the entrance exam as seriously.

So we chose America. I think the most powerful country in the world is the United States, and if you study in the most powerful country you share a little of that power.

Last year, to pay for his studies in America, we sold that Hangzhou apartment. We bought it for 200,000 yuan in '99 and sold it for 2 million last year. We really did sell everything for his American schooling, because America is so expensive. A year of high school costs 500,000 yuan, homestay included; with tuition it comes to more than 70,000 US dollars. And there are probably fees, travel, plane tickets on top.

You have to pay the tuition before he can even go. Americans are pretty cocky about it.

I don't worry much about him; a boy has to go out into the world on his own anyway. Though the recent news out of Illinois — Zhang Yingying, the 27-year-old Chinese visiting scholar abducted by a white man and later confirmed dead — must have frightened the life out of parents with daughters. How can that happen in America?

His mother says she wants to move to the US, but I think that's up in the air. There's no clear plan for looking after him, and there are plenty of obstacles, chiefly the current controls on money leaving the country, which stop you wiring it out. I looked into it before: in the US, 500,000 dollars buys a very good house. I thought about changing money on the black market and wiring it straight over, but you can't wire it out directly now — the banking channel on this side has been choked off.

So all that's left is moving it like ants, a little at a time. The other day the agent even said we might send it over gradually as living expenses.

In China today, materially speaking, people my age are out on the crest of the wave. At this age everyone depends on you: those above you, those below you, and you have to depend on yourself as well. One misstep and you could be pulled into the undertow, down to the bottom. If tomorrow the company says don't come in, you're out of work, aren't you? Finding a job isn't hard for us, but as you get older, starting something new isn't easy either.

Illustrations: Lin Yuyao

At the interview subject's request, company names in this article have been slightly altered.

Both the cover and inline images are from Unsplash