A Comfortable Life, Born in 1967: He Caught the Good Times | Housing and Our Lives ⑯

Housing is the largest commodity a person can buy, and one of the witnesses to how an individual life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that follow housing as a thread, to see what happened in the years behind us.

It is 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 belief in progress and development; a conviction that society will keep opening up better and bigger space for the individual; that effort earns its reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These are simply universal values.

When a word like "history" is put in front of us, it tends to disappear under grand narratives. We would rather use interviews at the small scale to sort through what we can.

We begin this record with the thing people watch most closely in their own lives: housing.

Liang Ming has had a remarkably smooth life. In his own words: "I never knew what sorrow was, growing up. There was nothing to be sorrowful about."

He was born in 1967 in Taizhou, Zhejiang, and for his first 30 years happily called himself a wenyi youth — an arty young man devoted to literature and music — and a well-fed one at that. The smoothness went like this: a little effort got him into college, and he caught the last years of state job assignments and welfare housing. The work bored him, but it left him plenty of time to do what he wanted. He formed a band, tried his luck in Shenzhen, started a business that made good money, and to this day wants for nothing.

Seen that way, housing was never going to be something Liang Ming worried about.

The arty streak has stayed with him. He says his favorite singer is Ed Sheeran, who won this year's Grammy for best pop solo performance. Earlier, when he was building the business, he and his wife, Haihua, rented a 20-square-meter attic at Zhejiang Agricultural University. They nailed blue-and-white and gray-and-white striped burlap over every wall, so the room looked like a tent pitched in open country, and they liked to lie side by side under the sloped roof and let the sunlight in. This was their idea of "life in Paris." Later they bought a big house, and the reasoning was simple: "Haihua was pregnant, and she wanted somewhere bigger, a place the whole family could live in together — you could play basketball, you could sleep, like a loft, exactly what we'd dreamed of. We drew up a plan and worked out we'd need something like 700 to 1,000 square meters."

Liang Ming's title today is president of Haiming Holding Group, which owns six clothing brands and a 2,000-mu farm (about 130 hectares). His success came from starting a business exactly where the market had a hole in it: in the mid-1990s he founded a clothing brand with a style unlike anything then in fashion, and caught the golden age of brick-and-mortar retail. Apart from the farm, which he set up out of food-safety worries after his daughter was born, his company has barely expanded beyond apparel. Making no mistakes may be one of the surest guarantees of wealth.

The couple had planned to be DINKs — double income, no kids — but once their daughter arrived they took on every anxiety parents take on. He trusts the Western approach to education, so when she turned 5 they moved from Hangzhou to Shanghai, where they now live in a two-story villa inside the Xijiao State Guest Hotel, the place Shanghai has long used to receive heads of state and government from around the world.

Liang Ming's daughter is 10 this year. Later on he plans to send her to college in the United States, and to go and study there himself alongside her.

What follows is Liang Ming's own account. This is one way to get to know him:

The Old House by the Sea

My grandfather used to have ships — big cargo ships, ocean-going ones. They could sail from Shanghai to Fujian. "Yiyuan" was our family's trade name — the road of righteousness runs long. That was the ship Yiyuan, and there was another called the Chunhe. The two ran opposite routes, one carrying goods out of Shanghai, the other bringing goods back, doing trade. Our family was fairly wealthy then.

The old house I lived in stood right by the dock. My grandfather built it, and when I was born you could still see the sea from there. I still remember the fishermen on the boats. Fishermen from the islands would moor in front of our house, come in as guests, leave things with us for safekeeping, and I would go out to greet them. When the islanders came they would also buy chickens and leave them with us. My cousin and I would sneak the chickens over the embankment and drop them into the sea. We got caught eventually. There were minnows and crabs right outside the old house too; we would catch crabs and mudskippers and let them slowly dry out.

Jinqing Harbor is where the river meets the sea, and Jinqing Harbor was our front door. In front of the old house there was a tree stump for tying up boats, and the whole row of houses along South Street belonged to our family. I wasn't born yet when my grandfather was in shipping. Right after Liberation, both ships were requisitioned. My grandfather gave away all those houses of his, one after another — just handed them over. Our family had land and a business, and in the end the houses vanished bit by bit.

Only the old house was left. It had a front and back courtyard, with something like a skywell in the middle. There was no running drinking water then. We used the water that fell out of the sky, which we called sky-fallen water. Under the roof there was a big beam, with tiles set to channel the water down and fill several large vats. That was what we drank.

The old house had two floors, and two floors was considered very good back then. The floor was dirt at first, then wood planks, and later stone slabs.

That house was on the Taizhou coast, and the typhoons came every year. When one hit, since the house was wood, tiles would fly off the skylight, and a strong enough wind could knock the whole thing over. We would huddle together and hold up quilts to block the wind, and the house would shake hard.

My grandfather had two sons — my father and my uncle — and three daughters, and all of them lived in the old house. By my generation things had shifted. The harbor became a main road, and the port moved out toward the sea. I lived in the old house until I was seven or eight, and then the family split up household by household, each one going independent. The houses got narrower and smaller, and new concrete ones went up on the same ground.

I was always a poor student, but in my second year of high school I suddenly became good at studying and transferred to a high school run by the Huangyan county government. Huangyan High School was a key school at the time. After I transferred I got into a fight with my desk-mate in class. I was unruly then, always in the very front row or the very back. There was a chemistry teacher named Liang, a very good one, and he used a clever method. In class he said I was one of the smarter kids, that with a little effort I would certainly do well. He encouraged me like that, and the next day he made me class chemistry representative. That teacher had an enormous influence on me. I spent a week reading straight through the whole chemistry textbook, and came first in the school on the midterm.

Where we came from, getting into college was like coming first in the imperial exams. Our middle school had several hundred students, and if one got in during a given year that was already a big deal. In my first year of middle school we went through three English teachers, because not many people knew English. Before I transferred to Huangyan High School in my second year, everything was taught in the local dialect — even Moonlight Over the Lotus Pond we recited in dialect. I didn't learn standard Mandarin until college.

My parents never put any pressure on me about schoolwork. They always thought their son was the best, and all they ever did was praise me. Being bad at studying didn't matter, since nobody in our family had ever gone to college anyway.

So I was always happy. I never knew what sorrow was growing up, because there was nothing to be sorrowful about.

As a child I loved growing flowers and plants. When I was seven I went to an offshore island and saw narcissus there, so I dug up two sacks of them and hauled them to the front of the Xinhua Bookstore in Huangyan, which was where the flower market was. There were two old "capitalist roaders" there, intellectuals who had been denounced, one from Beijing and one from Shanghai. They had rented a lot of courtyards in Huangyan to propagate and grow flowers for sale. They were both in their seventies or eighties, and I was seven when I started spending time with them.

I sold all my narcissus to one of them. On weekends I helped him sell flowers: he pedaled the tricycle in front and I pushed from behind. After the flowers were sold he would give me plenty of them, and every flower in our courtyard at home was one I had planted. He and I were friends across the generations, and I remember it vividly. You know nian gao, the rice cake? Handmade — once it's steamed you cut off a piece, put in pressed tofu, meat and bean sprouts, fold it up, press it flat, pour a little hot soup over it, and we'd have one each.

I seem to know by instinct what family a lot of plants belong to. Even now, wherever I go, the first thing I do is get down on the ground, take a look, taste it, try eating it — and I'm usually pretty accurate. I loved growing flowers and plants so much that when I applied for college I wanted to study horticulture. Back then you had to write down your choices before sitting the exam, and I wrote down the horticulture department at Zhejiang Agricultural University. Through some mix-up I was admitted to agricultural engineering instead — farm-produce processing, engineering machinery — which I didn't like at all.

So once I got to college I went and formed a band and did music instead. I started college in '85, and all the way to '92 I played drums in that band. We performed on campus and outside it; every night we played at the ballroom dance halls. There were no bars then, and ballroom dancing was extremely fashionable, extremely new. Youth League branches, every company and work unit, put on a few events a year, and they would usually ask us to play the dance numbers. There were basically two kinds of songs: the Taiwanese Chiung Yao repertoire, like "In the Water's Embrace," and the Western music I had come across, like the Beatles.

I only started learning drums after the band formed. Drumming wasn't hard for me, because I had a natural sense of rhythm, and I even became head of the school's arts department. That probably comes from my parents — both worked in the local arts scene. My father played the clapper drum, small but loud, and when I was little, whenever my parents' troupe performed, I would tap along to the beat.

"I Didn't Want to Sit All Day With a Cup of Tea and a Newspaper"

When we were in college we had endless free time and no pressure at all. Jobs were assigned by the state, and everyone became a civil servant. In those days you were a cadre the moment you graduated, and if you had been a student cadre you got assigned to an even better work unit.

I graduated in 1989 and was assigned to the Agricultural Machinery Training Center under the Hangzhou Municipal Bureau of Agriculture, as a lecturer. The unit had built only a handful of apartments in all, and they had all been handed out already. With none left, where was I supposed to live?

The agricultural machinery school had a big storage building, huge and rather grand, with two doors you could push open and walk through. But the place was too big and it was drafty. One year it was especially cold and the water in my enamel bowl froze right there in the room, that's how cold it was. Because of the drafts I secretly used an electric heater to warm the place, since I didn't have to pay for the electricity. A year or two later an old Party secretary was moving out and gave me his apartment, since he couldn't hold on to two. The one I got was 60 square meters, up two flights of stairs, two entrances, four households, with a bicycle shed underneath and a small garage room on the ground floor.

At the training center I taught one class a year. There was genuinely nothing to do, and it made me miserable. I felt lost, with no idea what I could do with my future. Leaning on the band forever was no long-term plan either; that was a young man's game. The workplace didn't suit me. I didn't like being a civil servant, sitting there all morning with a cup of tea and a newspaper, all day.

I felt there weren't many opportunities in China, and abroad there seemed to be plenty, so I started preparing to leave. A lot of people around me wanted to take the TOEFL and go overseas, and many of my Zhejiang University classmates and friends had already gone. People from our band went to Australia. Everyone had the idea.

So the year after I graduated I signed up for a TOEFL class and scored above 500. Reading and writing were no problem, but where did I fall down? Listening. I couldn't understand it, so in the end I never made it to America. I went to Shenzhen instead.

A friend of mine was CFO at a company called Xihu Dali in Shenzhen, and he brought me in to do accounting and finance. I had no qualifications at all. He bought me a book called Principles of Accounting, green cover, and told me to read it for a week and then start work. I finished it in one night and said, "This is simple — it's addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, you just balance the books."

The day after I finished the book I started work. Xihu Dali's general manager had me keep the books, clacking away on the abacus. It was pretty funny. He said, "Here's a red pen," and I said, "No need for a red pen, just use a minus sign, negative numbers are fine." That gave me away, because I had genuinely never done it before. But once I owned up, they let me stay anyway.

I hadn't been in Shenzhen a full year before I got dragged back.

I hadn't actually resigned from the training center. I had gone off to Shenzhen in a fooling-around spirit, figuring I'd sort it out later. Before I left I went for a health check and arranged with the doctor to write me up with "liver disease," asked him for a stack of sick-leave slips, and mailed them to my work unit. I told them my health was bad and I had to go home to recover. Then it went wrong: the sick-leave slips had consecutive serial numbers. Ha ha ha ha.

A leader called me and said, "Little Liang, the bureau found out about this. The sick-leave slips got you in trouble. Come back and lie low for a while." So I went back. The bureau chief said, "Coming back makes you a good comrade, doesn't it?" Afterward they even put me on a research project and nominated me for an engineer title, but it was genuinely boring, and I often skipped work, so I drifted into resigning.

700 Square Meters, and We Never Lived There

I hadn't been back in Hangzhou long before Haihua and I started our business. We had known each other since middle school. We set up the company in '96 and married in '98.

The business worked in its first year. We opened a clothing store called Gumu Xiyang on Fengqi Road in Hangzhou. We rented a plain 20-meter-long building with six storefronts, each about 4.5 meters deep and 3.3 meters wide, and half the block ended up being our shops. At first we didn't know what to use for the storefront. I thought the bark of the ash wood at the lumber mill was beautiful, so I hauled several tricycle-loads of bark to Fengqi Road and pasted up the four characters of Gumu Xiyang in bark, strip by strip. Very wenyi.

We opened on July 28, 1996 — I remember it clearly. We took more than 3,000 yuan on the first day, which was lucky, since clothes were cheap then, a dozen-odd yuan apiece.

Honestly, I have been very lucky, blessed even. I don't feel I've suffered much or been cheated. Just good luck.

I think setbacks are tied to the goals in a person's head. If your goal is big, you're more likely to feel let down and take a beating. My goals were never especially big. I never had to hit some figure in the hundreds of millions. Whatever comes, comes; keep your goals reasonable.

Put it simply: if you're a tiger and somebody tries to turn you into an elephant, that ruins the tiger, doesn't it? But raising you like a cat would wrong you too. So some things just are what they are: a tiger is a tiger. The right stage, the right team, results that fit — I think that's enough.

Why did we name it Gumu Xiyang? Because back then every brand was some "Nu" — "slave" — all foreign-sounding names, so we used the radicals from people's names, split into four characters, instead. And there was a lot of Taiwanese womenswear then, a lot of Taiwanese style. Haihua felt you couldn't even buy a nice, simple white shirt, so she made a very plain brand: wenyi, simple living.

Gumu Xiyang is still going, more than 20 years now, still simple and clean. It's only the way people express wenyi that has changed. Back then there was Bei Dao, Shu Ting, poetry, contemporary literature. Now the wenyi expression is "I dream of opening my own café, ideally one with a courtyard." I use my eyes to see the world, so I take photographs; I use my ears to hear the world, so I listen to music. People no longer express it through literature the way they used to.

During the years we were starting the business we rented an attic and stayed more than three years. It was in an experts' building at Zhejiang Agricultural University, about four stories, with a sloped roof. Why an attic? Because we longed for that Paris feeling.

There was a skylight above that opened, and sometimes we would stick our heads out to look — it was beautiful. We would lie down under the sloped roof, and sometimes we forgot and banged our heads, but it felt wonderful all the same.

The room was twenty or thirty square meters. We couldn't touch the outside, so inside the attic we cleared everything out and nailed striped burlap over every wall — coarse striped burlap, blue and white, gray and white, very pretty. Floor to ceiling it was all one material, so walking in felt like stepping into a striped burlap tent with a skylight showing through.

We often went with classmates from the agricultural university to eat at Xiaoyang Restaurant across from the attic — soft-shell turtle, snails, loach, edamame. One day it snowed heavily and we had nowhere to go, so we ate at the restaurant. The transformer had broken down, so we lit a coal stove, got some liquor and grilled things to eat. As we ate I started to feel a bit of pain — it was all fire, and our wool socks had scorched through. That feeling, that attic life, was the way we wanted to live as young people back then.

Later we bought an even bigger place. Haihua was pregnant then, and she wanted somewhere bigger, a place the whole family could live in together — you could play basketball, you could sleep, like a loft, exactly what we'd dreamed of. We drew up a plan and worked out we'd need something like 700 to 1,000 square meters. Our idea of home wasn't most people's: freer, a place and a space with more possibilities, not the idea of a mansion, just something in our own key. We wondered what to do with a house that big, and figured we'd buy a couple of tents, pitch them, and they'd be rooms you could sleep in.

As it happened, a place came up with 350 square meters per floor, 700 across two floors — and after we bought it we never lived there.

After that the clothing business kept getting better, and we bought a place across from the Ninth Middle School — an attic again, but a bigger one, over 100 square meters. Wow. Seventh floor, no elevator, a small two-room layout. There was a big terrace outside too, really fine. The 100-plus square meters was the apartment proper, not counting the attic. The attic was about as big as the apartment itself, just too low in places to stand up in — you had to crawl in — with several triangular windows. That was, in the real sense, the first place I bought to live in.

"A Western, Free Education"

After Haihua got pregnant, my father-in-law came over once, and what stuck with me was that he thought the place wasn't good enough. He said, "This house won't do. It's so high up, you can't be climbing like that" — because that seventh floor was really more like an eighth, with a mezzanine on the ground floor for parking bicycles.

I think in my parents' generation's traditional idea a house belonged to the ancestors, generation after generation, and it stood for status and standing. That's why houses in the countryside keep getting built better and taller, even though in practice it may be just the two old people living there with the young ones all gone. But they feel it shows the family has means; they want that kind of dignity. To my father-in-law's generation a house was also a form of self-respect.

Later, once Haihua's belly got big and she really couldn't manage the climb, we bought a place nearby in Lüyuan, a bit over 250 square meters. You could see West Lake from it, on the 22nd floor, walking distance to the lake, five minutes from the botanical garden. Across from us was a mountain, and next door was Zhejiang University. We tore out all the interior walls there too and left it bare — we wanted to keep as much open space as we could.

After the baby was born and I held her, my mind went completely blank for a few minutes. I understood nothing, I was anxious, on edge — responsibility, safety. I thought about how meat has toxins in it, vegetables have toxins too, drinks have artificial coloring, food safety is such a headache. By the time I came back to myself the baby had been wheeled away, into a room.

Before she was born we had planned that she wouldn't live with us but with her grandparents, so we had also bought an apartment across the way in the same compound, and all of the baby's things went to the grandparents' place first.

In fact we had never wanted children — we thought it would be too much trouble, which is why we had her so late. But once she was born everything changed. Right after the birth I called at once to have all the baby's things moved into our own room.

When our daughter was 5 we moved from Hangzhou to Shanghai. She spent two years at the Shanghai Soong Ching Ling Kindergarten, considered the best kindergarten in China, run under the China Welfare Foundation. Many of the teachers were British, and the kindergarten had a huge lawn.

For primary school we had her spend a year at Soong Ching Ling Primary School to strengthen her Chinese, then in second grade moved her to Wellington (note: Wellington College International Shanghai; Wellington College was founded by Queen Victoria in 1856, and its Shanghai branch is considered the most expensive international school in the city). She's just over 9 now, about to turn 10.

I sent her to these schools because I identify more with a Western, free education, not the force-feeding kind. I've watched education in China wreck children's bodies, and they aren't happy.

I think letting a child grow up healthy and happy matters more than learning facts. When we were bad students we could still catch up on our studies later; a child's body can't wait. They say character at three decides you at eighty, so I wanted her open and happy, going after nature — which is why when she was small I took her to the farm every week to run around in the rice paddies.

My daughter draws very well, and she could compose music by six. At seven she went to an Asian piano competition as Shanghai's top-scoring representative.

Competition in China drives children to feel they must get into Tsinghua, Peking University, Zhejiang University, schools people say will shape your working life enormously, so everyone fights their way in. But I didn't graduate from any great university and I've turned out fine. Just be yourself.

I think a parent's biggest job is to find a child's potential, and once you've found it, keep supplying the conditions for her to grow along it. Not everyone has to get into whatever school or major their parents demand. That's studying for your parents' sake, which is unfair to the child and disrespectful.

My parents never demanded anything of me. My father often says, "I'm satisfied. I never imagined my son would build up a company."

My parents' generation felt it was good enough that I had a job. In their era there wasn't much money. Everyone was quite equal, no family especially rich. Their values had no place in them for accumulating a set amount of wealth.

They didn't even think about escaping poverty, because there was no chance to strive in the first place. You couldn't go into business then; that was a "tail of capitalism." Now it's different. People get pulled along by certain things in society, and they show it as naked greed for things.

What worries me most right now is Yiyuan Farm, which I run, because it still hasn't turned a profit, even though we've put in a great deal of energy and passion. Some of the young people on the team hope to find success here, but in reality it doesn't come that fast, and I feel I've let them down somewhat. It weighs on me.

The achievements young people want don't match the rhythm by which success in farming actually arrives. They expect two or three years to be enough, but we've been at it seven or eight and still haven't made a profit. For them, agricultural production and raising crops feels like work with nothing to look forward to.

I've explained to them that everything grows to its own rhythm. Take a rice seed: we sow it in April and it isn't harvested until November; there's no harvest in between, and that's the rule. If you break the physical conditions — hormones, chemical fertilizer — that isn't natural or organic, and it isn't good. Everything has its own rhythm and tempo. Nature is the best at this; the growth rate it gives every living thing is scientific.

Sustainable, profitable, and still holding to this idea — we probably need another two or three years.

I've thought about it: if I weren't running the farm I'd probably still be doing something with plants. I love natural things, I love flowers and plants, it's in my bones. You have to understand, I was digging up narcissus at six or seven, learning from men in their seventies and eighties how to take cuttings and grow flowers.

To use a line from Out of Control: when you've stored a lot in your head, one day it all comes surging out together. If you haven't accumulated anything, if you have no curiosity, nothing surges out. Starting a business is something that surges out too. It isn't deliberately designed to a road map; it's natural evolution. Put a lot of species here, and whatever forms, forms. What's man-made isn't necessarily best.

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

Cover image: Unsplash