Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos Page A

reasonable.
    Nobody coveted the cultural capital of an elite education more assiduously than members of the Got Rich First Crowd. Many of them had come from nothing, and they knew that urban intellectuals considered them rubes. The size of China’s population made college admissions so brutally competitive that people compared it to “ten thousand horses crossing a river on a single log.” To create more opportunities, the government doubled the number of colleges and universities, in just ten years, to 2,409. Even so, only one in every four aspiring college students was able to earn a place.
    An American education carried extra cachet, and Got Rich First parents channeled their anxieties into their children. In the fall of 2008, I had lunch with a woman named Cheung Yan, better known to the public as the Queen of Trash. Every year, the Hurun Report , a Shanghai magazine, released a ranking of China’s richest people. In the 2006 list, Cheung was the first woman to rank number one. She was the founder of Nine Dragons Paper, China’s largest paper manufacturer, and had earned her nickname by conquering an obscure niche that tuned global trade to peak efficiency: she bought mountains of filthy American wastepaper, hauled it to China at cheap rates, recycled it into cardboard boxes bearing goods marked “Made in China,” and sold those goods to America. The 2006 rich list estimated her fortune at $3.4 billion. The following year, Cheung’s wealth ballooned further, to more than $10 billion, and the magazine calculated that she was the richest self-made woman in the world, ahead of Oprah and J. K. Rowling.
    Cheung, and her husband, Liu Ming Chung, a former dentist who worked as her company’s CEO, met me in the managers’ cafeteria at the largest paper mill in the world, one of Cheung’s factories in the southern city of Dongguan. At fifty-two, Cheung was an unreconstructed factory boss. She spoke no English, and her Chinese carried a heavy Manchurian accent. She was barely five feet tall; in conversation, she was propelled by bursts of exuberance and impatience, as if she were channeling China’s industrial id. “The market waits for no one,” she said. “If I don’t develop today, if I wait for a year, or two or three years, to develop, I will have nothing for the market, and I will miss the opportunity. And we will just be ordinary, like any other factory!”
    As we ate, she didn’t want to talk about business; they wanted to talk about their two sons. The older one was in New York, getting a master’s degree in engineering at Columbia. The younger boy was at a prep school in California, and at one point mid-meal, her assistant passed her a copy of a college recommendation a teacher had written on her son’s behalf. Cheung examined it and handed it back.
    â€œHis GPA is four-point-zero to four-point-three,” she told me. Then, with the pride of an autodidact, she added, “His head is full of American education. He needs to accept some Chinese education as well. Otherwise, he’ll be out of balance.”
    When I’d arrived in China in 2005, there were only sixty-five Chinese students in American private high schools, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Five years later, there were nearly seven thousand. I stopped being surprised when Communist Party grandees told me their offspring were at Taft or Andover. (Eventually, a group of elite Chinese parents cut out the commute and sent their kids to a lavish new prep school in Beijing. They hired former headmasters of Choate and Hotchkiss to run it.)
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    Of all the pathways to self-creation, nothing galvanized people as broadly as the study of English. “English fever” settled on waiters, CEOs, and professors, and elevated the language into a defining measure of life’s potential—a force strong enough to transform your