Age of Ambition

Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos

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Authors: Evan Osnos
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nation that wastes time,” he wrote, “will be abandoned by time itself.”
    Some of the strivers achieved extraordinary fortune before they knew exactly what to do with it. In 2010, China was experiencing “Foreign IPO Fever,” and in May of the following year, the dating entrepreneur Gong Haiyan took her company public on the NASDAQ. By the end of the day, her shares were worth more than seventy-seven million dollars. Her husband left his job researching fruit flies.
    She invited me over for dinner. They had bought a place in the suburbs north of Beijing. The sun was setting as we pulled off the highway. We passed a Pet Spa and a compound called Chateau de la Vie, and turned into a lush gated community that evoked New Jersey more than Hunan. Her house was beige stucco with Tuscan details. Her two-year-old daughter, in pajamas, bounded out the front door and hugged her mother’s legs. Gong’s husband ushered us to the dining room, where her parents and her grandmother, who lived with them, were sitting down.
    I was struck by the presence of four generations of women in the house. Gong’s grandmother, who was ninety-four, had been brutalized during the Cultural Revolution because she was classified as a well-off peasant. She was born just after China ended the practice of foot binding, and while we ate I made a mental inventory of all the drama that she had survived in China’s twentieth century, on the way to her granddaughter’s mansion in the suburbs. “Women used to say, ‘If you want clothes on your back and food to eat, get married,’” Gong said, poking at her rice with her chopsticks. “As long as you had the most basic requirements, I’d marry you. But not anymore. Now I can live a good life, an independent life. I can be picky. If there’s anything I don’t like about you, well, you’re out of luck.”
    For years, the family had bounced between rented apartments, six people in two bedrooms. Now they were in a home sandwiched between European diplomats and Arab businessmen. Nine months after they moved in, the walls of the villa were still bare and white. They had yet to buy any art or decorations, but those would come. A moped was parked in the front hall, in the village tradition, to protect the bike from thieves, though I didn’t expect Gong’s neighbors posed much of a threat. It looked as if the family had packed up its belongings from a farmhouse in Hunan and unloaded them at a CEO’s villa in Beijing.
    *   *   *
    The age of ambition demanded new skills and knowledge. To help rookie entrepreneurs navigate the heavy toasting that comes with building a business in China, a night school called the Weiliang Institute of Interpersonal Relations, in the city of Harbin, offered a “drinking strategy” course. (One tip: after a toast, discreetly spit the liquor into your tea.) What could not be learned could be bought: Zhang Dazhong, a home electronics tycoon, employed a three-member “reading staff” to summarize the books he wished he had read.
    Long before Westerners were reading about the habits of hard-driving “tiger moms,” the most popular Chinese parenting guide was Harvard Girl , in which a mother named Zhang Xinwu documented how she got her daughter into the Ivy League. The regimen had begun before birth, when Zhang forced herself to eat a high-nutrition diet, though it made her sick. By eighteen months, Zhang was helping her daughter memorize Tang dynasty poems. In primary school, Zhang took her to study in noisy settings to hone her concentration, and kept her on a schedule: for every twenty minutes of studying, five minutes of running stairs. To build fortitude, Zhang had her daughter clench ice cubes in her hands for fifteen minutes at a time. It was easy to see it as absurd, but for a population still fighting its way out of poverty, virtually any sacrifice sounded

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