Humans Inspired – Chapter 2: Shanghaied
I could see the famous waterfront “Bund” across from the port terminal in Shanghai as we arrived. It was a sunny August morning and I lit a cigarette on my way off the ferry from Japan. As I walked over to the port authority officials to show them the tourist visa in my passport, I thought about how I had absolutely no experience with China. I also had little to no experience with Chinese people. The way things were being conducted reminded me a lot of their consulate in Houston where I’d gone to get my visa. The humid clamminess reminded me of Houston as well. Both cities share a similar latitude and both were built on top of a swamp. The official in green, crisp khaki stamped my passport. It more or less felt like they would be equally happy to just waive me through.
My friend Rami from Austin was planning to meet up with me as soon as I arrived in China. Rami had been hired by some wealthy entrepreneurs back in Texas who were in the business of supply chain management and he was splitting his time between Dongguan and Shanghai working as a sourcing agent. Rami spent his college years studying international business and a year abroad studying Mandarin in Beijing so I supposed that’s how he had gotten such a fancy job. He was also the one who told me that I could make good money teaching English in China. I was eager to meet up with him for some advice on how to get all of that going. Originally I thought it would be a few weeks until I would see him but there was a Wifi connection on the boat and I had received a Skype message saying he would be in Shanghai when I got there. Seriously, what were the odds? He was even bringing a bag of my clothes my Mom gave him in Austin.
After taking out about 50 dollars’ worth of Chinese Yuan from an ATM, I made my way outside where the taxis had lined up. When I jumped into the first taxi in line, I found there were touch screens attached to the headrests with Chinese characters indicating games that you could play while you rode to your destination. I couldn’t speak any Chinese nor could the driver speak any English. I had no idea where I was going so I ended up typing “city center” into a translator on his phone. I was quite literally “fresh off the boat” and I needed a Wifi connection to get in touch with Rami. When I got a sense that we were in the city center I asked the driver to stop the car.
It was around midday when I began wandering around People’s Square. It had seemed like such a clear day in the morning but loud thunder began echoing off the many buildings downtown. Those tall buildings topped with blinking red lights and metal lightning rods were apparently equipped for the kind of storm I was now right in the middle of. So far, China was nothing like I thought it would be. I had the idea that because China was so old there would be a mixture of old and new world architecture but I felt like I had just landed in the future.
Walking down Nanjing road past all of the typical global brands of fast food, I spotted a Starbucks sign outside of one of the metro entrances and I went in to see if I could get an internet connection. I was alone and unsure how the day would turn out, but in all honesty I felt safe surrounded by all of that familiar corporate infrastructure. I ordered a sugary blueberry muffin with a Chai Tea latte and opened up my laptop. There was an interface for the Wifi that required you had to pay for but for some reason Skype worked anyway. I hadn’t received a response from the last message I had sent my friend Rami, so I sent him another one attempting to describe where I was in the city center. I had come a long way so I felt great about sitting for a while and waiting for a response. As I looked out the window it started to rain, and for the first time I watched a sea of Asian people open their umbrellas simultaneously. Never before had I been surrounded by so many people and felt so by myself. From a quiet corner inside a Starbucks in the middle of Shanghai, I became an outsider looking in, and I was fascinated.
Rami and I went to the same high school and came from a familiar social circle back in Austin that involved a lot of partying. I think he was happy to have a friend to hang out with in China where he would otherwise be living alone in a hotel room. The former CEO of Walmart and the guy who started Stubb’s BBQ restaurant and music venue in Austin were the main partners in the company he worked for. He spent his days talking to clients on Skype and taking occasional trips to negotiate price points with Chinese factories, but the vast majority of the time he was sitting awaiting orders from his high profile bosses back in the US. He had followed my posts on social media about the Arab Spring Revolution and it seemed clear that he admired what I was doing with my life just as I was curious about his successful beginnings in the business world.
Eventually Rami got my message and took the metro down to the cafe. It felt great to see another familiar face in the sea of Asian people. He led the way down into the central metro station and bought us tickets from the ticket machine to ride the subway. Lines 1, 2 and 8 all converge in the city center beneath People’s Square. The trains were fast, efficient, smelled new, and ran on time. It reminded me of the metro system in Barcelona, only newer and cleaner. The famous basketball player, Yao Ming, is from Shanghai. Clips of him playing basketball were on all of the flat screen TVs throughout the station and people were stopping to watch.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that metro station would soon become a very familiar place. I had no idea where I was or where we were going. I was just grateful to not have to think about it so I didn’t question any of it. We took the train to the outskirts of Shanghai and checked into a Motel 168, the Shanghai equivalent of a Motel 6. Rami had gotten to Shanghai that same day and was supposed to be working nearby in an office space that his company was renting. With my worrisome lack of spending capability, I was truly happy to have landed somewhere with a free bed.
The blue and orange suburban motel was minimal but functional. The hotel chain is essentially a newer, better version of where you might find business travelers parking their rental cars back in the States. In the morning I had the idea that I would physically go out and look for a job, but by the time I could get my bearings, Rami was already on his way out to work. I still had relatively no idea where I was. He said he would be back in a few hours so I just went back to sleep. When the door reopened around midday I woke up to noodles in Styrofoam containers for lunch and some rather questionable hashish to roll spliffs. Rami was always nervous, talking about what his next move would be alongside dreamy future projections of wealth and luxury, happy to share whatever substance he was medicating with at the time. In this case he was speculating about moving to a more centrally located Motel 168 so that he could be more situated to meet with clients and travel to factories. After the first of many nights of unfiltered spliffs rolled with Chinese Marlboro reds, cheap noodles, Tsingtao beer, and a few pirated episodes of ABC’s Modern Family, that’s what we did.
Once we had relocated to a more central Motel 168, I found a restaurant downstairs where I could get a bowl of noodles with beef for about 2 dollars. That became my staple diet until I could get a job and make some money. The hotel was located beneath a large highway overpass but was relatively quiet despite the ongoing traffic. Every time Rami would come back from work he would order some kind of cheap fast food to go and happily shared that with me. There was even a Papa John’s pizza in the neighborhood. Truly, if it weren’t for him being there when I showed up, things would have been a lot more difficult and not nearly as fun.
I sifted through job listings posted on the Chinese versions of LinkedIn, Craigslist, and Shanghaiexpat.com over the following week. Eventually one of the schools I had applied to responded. Despite the pay not being what I was looking for I was pretty desperate and I had always been good with kids so I decided to go in for the job interview. I still didn’t have proper shoes so Rami offered to let me borrow an extra pair of New Balance tennis shoes that he was traveling with.
I scribbled the address of the school down on a piece of paper and rode the metro for the first time by myself to an area that looked just like the one I had come from. After fumbling around outside the building looking for the right place for about a half hour, I noticed a black guy walking into the lobby. He was the first black person I had seen in China and he really stood out among the hundreds of Chinese people walking past. His name was Marcus and he was from Kenya. It turned out he had been teaching English for 3 years at the school I was trying to find and when I told him I was there for a job interview he led the way to the administration office.
The hiring process was so informal that I was basically hired the moment I walked in the door. I had no idea what I was agreeing to do and the principal of the school seemed highly uninterested in answering any questions I might have about the job. Within 20 minutes I was given a handful of teaching materials, including but not limited to ABC flashcards, and I found myself in a classroom standing in front of about 25 Chinese kindergarteners after a hasty introduction. It was obvious I would have to essentially figure out what to do on my own after that.
When I realized every single kid in the classroom spoke absolutely no English, I was overwhelmed at the thought of how to teach them. I had shown up for a Job interview and by the end of the day I was a teacher with a contract, struggling to communicate even with the parents who were there to pick my students. I had just completed a post grad crash course in Journalism in the Middle East by conducting interviews in Tahrir Square and now I was teaching a classroom of 6 year olds in China. Their parents were very excited to meet me, but I had no idea how to meet them.
Over the next few weeks I spent my days in that classroom trying to develop my stance as a kindergarten teacher. I wrote lesson plans, made a schedule each day, and made the best use I could of the English teaching materials that the school provided. Sometimes when I was executing a lesson plan I would realize what I had come up with was completely over their heads. I could always tell when I wasn’t getting through because they would just start talking in Chinese amongst each other while I was mid-sentence. I sometimes felt like a jester fearfully performing in front of a bunch of little kings staring back at me with foreign eyes. Often I would just point at a picture of something and repeat the word in English and then individually ask each student to repeat the word back to me. I had no idea what I was doing, and I knew that it wasn’t going to last. One day I walked into the classroom and there was an envelope with two weeks’ pay in it on my desk. I stuffed the 400 or so dollars worth of Chinese Yuan into my wallet, and breathed a sigh of relief as I walked out of the building for the last time.
It wasn’t much but it was a serious relief to have 400 dollars in my wallet. It was the first time I had made any money in a very long time and I wanted to spend some of it immediately. When I got back to Motel 168, Rami wanted to celebrate my first pay day and it was time to party. “Yungfu Lu, Fuxing Lu,” he said to the driver as we jumped into a taxi, directing him to take us to the French Concession. It was my first time in that part of Shanghai and it looked just like Paris. There was a mixture of old and new French style buildings with London style phone booths on each street corner. A lot of the consulates from other countries are located there and it has a very official international feel to it. Rami told the Taxi driver to stop in front of a place called Shelter, an old bomb shelter that had been converted into a well-known night club. The street was filled with Western expats, Uyghur drug dealers, and Russian tourists. When we walked into the club I ordered a vodka soda from the bar and began to feel that romantic sense of traveling again. After a few drinks, the night became blurry.
The next morning, we both woke up with a splitting hangover. Rami didn’t have much to do for work that day so he suggested we go get massages in the French Concession. He told me about a place called Double Rainbow, a well-known massage chain that mostly employs blind women. I had never gotten a massage before and I really didn’t have much interest, but when I found out it only costs 3 dollars I figured why not. I was expecting a relaxing experience but when I laid face down on the massage table the blind woman began an intense deep tissue technique. I struggled to endure what she was doing for about a half hour and eventually had to call it quits because it was so painful. When I walked out into the street I felt a little better, like she had loosened up my muscles, but just as I started to feel relaxed my knees buckled and I could barely walk. I’m not sure if it was the night of drinking before, or the previous weeks of smoking unfiltered spliffs, or the many cheap toxic meals I had eaten all over the world, but I as toast. This woman had tapped into my kidneys and liver, releasing all the toxins into my bloodstream simultaneously. My body was shutting down and I didn’t know what to do so we went to a nearby English pub called One For the Road. I went upstairs to the bathroom and after sitting on the toilet for a half hour in agony, I tried splashing water from the sink on my face and making myself throw up. Anything to recover from the intensity of whatever it was that I was feeling. About an hour later I stumbled out of the bathroom white as a sheet. Rami had ordered a bowl of French onion soup and for some reason when he offered me a sip of it I was instantly cured. I’m not sure how or why that helped me recover, but I drank the whole thing and never got another massage in China again.
I needed to find a better English teaching job and I was pretty exhausted looking for them online so I bought a cheap cell phone and started thinking about who could help me on my search. When I was in Japan, Mary had told me she wanted to get a job in Shanghai but I knew she didn’t actually need one like I did. I was still curious about what her experience had been like in Shanghai since I saw her in Japan a month ago. Rami and I decided to pay a visit to her and her mom in the French Concession. Mary’s mom was a lawyer in the US and had gotten a job working for a law firm in Shanghai. She was hosting Mary and her brother in a hip apartment with French windows and after making a meal we sat and talked about the job hunt. It turned out that it really wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be to get hired in most scenarios, but there were plenty of people looking for English tutors. Mary told me about three brothers who were also from San Antonio. Apparently they were living exclusively on English teaching money in a fancy apartment in the middle of People’s Square. Later that night we met the youngest brother in a restaurant down the road.
His name was Larry and he was a gear head who had studied to be a mechanic at Wyotech in the US. He was only 20 years old and he was tall and white like his oldest brother, Daniel. When he heard about the kind of financial luck his brother was having as an English teacher in Shanghai, he bailed on his mechanic career to see what all the fuss was about in China. Daniel had been living in China for 5 years and was using money that he made teaching English as capital in various money making ways, including renting rooms to expats in two luxury apartments in People’s Square. Their middle brother Andrew had decided China sounded interesting after graduating from Texas Tech and was living with them as well. After eating Tex-Mex food in Cairo, I can’t say I was surprised to meet more fellow Texans in Shanghai.
Larry had only been in China for about a month so he was still figuring it out. About once a week he would go down to the Lingua English tutoring agency and ask the women who worked there if there were any available contracts. Chinese people were always looking for a white American English teacher so simply walking into the building would often yield him a couple new clients. These guys were all working on building and maintaining their own lists of private tutoring clients and when I saw how they were doing it I decided I would give it a try.
The next day Rami was headed out to a factory to negotiate a price point for a product and I decided to go with him. To get there, we took one of the subway lines to the very last stop. When we started to get to the outskirts of Shanghai I began to see how all of the natural resources had been stripped and replaced with various factories. We were on our way to one that makes things out of foam. When we got there we were greeted by a pretty Chinese woman in a colorful dress who represented the company, apparently a commonplace practice for most factories in China. She led us to their showroom where they were displaying various products that had been successful in the past. While Rami went to meet with someone to talk business, I started browsing their products and I immediately spotted a foam ABC’s mat that I recognized from back home. I remembered how I used to sit and play MarioKart on that exact same mat at a friend of mine’s house back in college. It was at that moment that I could see how a lot of the global economy really works. People with money research what other people bought last year at Walmart and basically come over to China to get factories like this one to make a bunch more of whatever that is. It’s actually really simple. We had come all that way that day so Rami could negotiate a price point for a little purple elephant toy made out of foam. 1 little purple elephant might make you 5 dollars but a couple million of them on the shelves of Walmart stores nationwide makes you 10 million dollars minus the cost of production and shipping. It’s just about making money, and it’s often done by producing a bunch of junk that will inevitably end up in a landfill or in the ocean.
At first I felt strange about the whole factory experience, but when I peered into the room where hundreds of people were making things out of foam, fearing I might find myself looking at a sweatshop, the people actually seemed really happy. Many of the workers were women and their children were sitting with them while they sewed pieces of foam by hand. One of the women smiled at me and I ended up leaving with a relatively good feeling about all of it. Though I’m sure it’s often not the case, I could really tell they were happy to have a job. On the train back to the hotel Rami explained that we needed to move again, this time to a luxury resort called the Sofitel. He was excited about it because of their high end breakfast buffet. His company was managing the supply chain for a woman who owned a pet clothing company and she was coming over from the US to establish a price point with a factory that he was handling. For him it was for work, but it was one of the perks of the job to be able to stay there on the company credit card. For me it was sheer luck that I was getting to stay in a place like that all. Little did I know, my luck was just beginning.
After about 6 weeks of jumping around from hotel to hotel with Rami I began to know the city rather well. A couple visits to the English tutoring agency and I had myself a few clients. I was privately tutoring a young woman who liked video games and wanted to learn how to play online with English speakers, a businessman named Arthur who wanted to travel in the West, and a brilliant teenager named Wang who was too smart to be anything but bored in school. I felt like a king among English teachers living at the Sofitel but Rami was about to go back to the US and I needed to find a place to live. On the last weekend Rami was in town, we heard the three brothers from San Antonio were throwing an expat party at their twin apartments downtown. Whenever they had a party, Daniel, Larry, and Andrew opened up the adjacent doors to make one giant space. When we walked in there was a projector that was connected to the internet playing the latest US college football game and an array of international people gathered around a game of beer pong. It was like I had walked right back into college, only there was a view of downtown Shanghai from the balcony. The two apartments had lots of rooms so I asked the oldest brother Daniel if I could rent one. He told me a room was becoming available in about a week but I could stay on the couch for a few days until it did. Without really trying, I had found a place to live and I was relieved.
I had been in China for about 6 weeks and it was time for Rami and I to say our goodbyes but we both knew we would probably see each other again soon enough. He was always back and forth from the US. So much had happened since I had arrived in Shanghai that I couldn’t imagine what might happen before I would see him again. The expat brothers from San Antonio were great resources for whatever I needed. The day I moved into the smallest, cheapest room in one of the apartments, I bought an older iPhone from one of them. As I programmed all of the numbers from my old phone into it, I admired the view of downtown Shanghai from the balcony. I really felt like I was moving up in the world and I was about to shift into higher gear with the English teaching experience. My only real goal at the time was to make enough money to keep traveling and learning about the world. In my mind I had already completed my mission, I just had to work for a while, and I was actually starting to enjoy that.
Teaching English to Chinese people in Shanghai was incredibly easy. Most of the time I would just ask them what they wanted to learn about and strike up a conversation about it in English. I would write down words that they were having trouble with and be as thorough as I could about answering their questions, but mostly it was like getting paid to simply hang out with middle to upper class Chinese people. I’m terrible at math, despite my musical abilities I can’t read or write music, but hanging out with people is something I’ve been doing my whole life. I was great at it. At the beginning of each week I would go down to the tutoring agency to see if they had any new contracts available. The agency would take about 30 percent of what you make teaching private English lessons in exchange for managing the contract so I began to see the need to cut out the middleman. I was always polite and humble when I talked to the young Chinese women who worked there and I began to develop personal relationships with a couple of them. It soon turned out that some of them were willing to take a cash payment outside of the agency in exchange for new clients. Oftentimes I would impress a new client enough to yield me one of their friends and pretty soon I found myself riding the subway all over the city teaching between 4 and 5 people per day. At the beginning I was driven to take on as many clients as I could but after a few weeks I had more clients than I knew what to do with.
Hanging out with people and speaking English for an hour at a time is an easy job indeed, but meeting with 5 people a day in all different corners of the city via the subway system had me working my ass off. Some days I found myself exhausted in the metro station, scarfing down a Subway sandwich for lunch in the 10 minutes I had between lessons. Other times the English lesson itself would involve a paid lunch on top of a skyscraper with the CEO of a big Chinese company. Most of what I know about China I learned from my students, and what I can tell you is that despite China’s reputation for suppressed freedom of speech, people aren’t afraid to tell you what they think. From the CEO to the teenager, when you ask them what they think about their government, they’ll tell you they can’t stand the notoriously corrupt Communist party of China, but they’ll also tell you that they understand the need for a strong central government. Their worldview isn’t rooted in individualism like Western people. They know that if there wasn’t a unifying language like Mandarin alongside a strong central government, many people from the 23 provinces of China would be fighting rather than cooperating with one another. They just want to feel like they’re part of a team and they approach reality from a collective place. At the end of the day they just want the same quality of life we all want and most of them are busy achieving some form of that from a collective place. Same-Same, but different.
One day I went to meet a new student at a Starbucks. When I showed up she was wearing a mask over her face. We’ve become accustomed to people wearing masks in the West nowadays, but at the time I really didn’t understand why someone would do that in public. In many parts of Asia like Shanghai the air is polluted, there is an incomprehensible number of people, and sometimes the flu is going around. Today none of those reasons had anything to do with the mask. Asian people often have an intolerant reaction to alcohol that produces various side effects beyond the hangover we all know. It turned out she had been out drinking the night before with some friends and when she had woken up that morning she had a pimple on her face. She was bashful in sharing that with me and when she removed her mask she was actually rather beautiful. Her name was Amy and there was something really different about her. By now I had met hundreds of Chinese people and she seemed to stand out among all of them. I could tell something was unique about her. She seemed to have a sense that she was aware of something I wasn’t. There was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on and I was curious about whatever that was.
A few days later we had our second lesson which happened to fall on my birthday, October 21st. When I showed up to that same Starbucks near Zhongshan Park Station, there was a gift there waiting for me on the table. I had never told her that my birthday would be on that day and I had only met her once before. I could only assume that one of the girls from the tutoring agency had mentioned to her that I had a birthday that week. The gift was a brand new Apple iPhone 4s sealed in the original box. Shanghai is easily the most materialistic part of China and people often worship big companies like Apple. I knew a gift like that was a big deal.
Wait a minute. First of all, despite the fact that Apple products are made in southern China, they are always released in the US first. I knew this phone had just come out earlier that same week in California. It was impossible to get one of those in China at the time, so for her to be giving me one as a gift showed me that she must have some crazy connection with the company or at least some crazy connections in general. The iPhone 4s was also the first iPhone to be released with Siri, which at the time represented one of the first commercial releases of artificial intelligence to the public. Everyone in Shanghai knew that it just came out. Of course my first reaction was one of resistance, insisting I couldn’t possibly take a gift like that from someone I barely knew, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Amy had somehow circumvented the entire global economy to give me that phone for my birthday and she knew exactly what she was doing.
On the subway ride back to the apartment in People’s Square I turned on the phone for the first time and activated Siri. When I said “Hey Siri” into the phone from where I was standing, the whole subway car stopped what they were doing and circled around me. It felt truly powerful, like Moses parting a sea of Chinese people on the train. When I got home I sat down on the couch and started programming my new phone with all of the numbers from my old one. Andrew, the middle brother from San Antonio and my favorite of the three, asked me what I was doing. When I told him I was just gifted an iPhone 4s from one of my students he was shocked. He and his brothers were always comparing how well each other were doing based on some form of material reference. Their big brother Daniel who ran the apartment sold me the older iPhone I had been using and when he found out I had that phone he was extremely jealous. In fact, his reaction was the first time I noticed how uncomfortable I felt around him.
The following weekend I received a message from Amy on my new phone. She wanted to know if I wanted to take a trip with her outside of Shanghai to the city of Suzhou. Of course I accepted her invitation. When I asked her which Subway rout to take to meet her she laughed. She said she would pick me up in a couple hours outside my apartment. When I got a message that she was downstairs I made my way outside to see her driving a brand new bright red Audi convertible. None of the English teachers I knew had access to cars of any kind. We all rode the subway to get around Shanghai, so getting picked up in that fancy car felt like I was stepping out of my world and into a new one. I didn’t even know where Suzhou was at the time and I thought we would for sure take a train to get there, but she knew the way and I had no reason to question any of it. We barely knew each other but we were already taking a road trip together and for me that was exciting.
Big signs on the neatly curated front lawns of factories read things like Fujifilm and Xerox as tall skyscrapers and densely populated apartment buildings faded away in the passenger side mirror. Amy told me sometimes they shut down the highway because of factory pollution but today was clear and sunny. We were going to visit a friend of hers who was pregnant that lived in Suzhou and I began to draw up a highly inaccurate mental image of what our trip was going to be like. My mind created a story that we would be staying at her friend’s house but about an hour later when we got to Suzhou we pulled up to a valet stand in front of a 5-Star luxury hotel. The hotel was brand new and the whole city seemed like it had been built within the past few years. She clearly had plenty of money to be driving a car like that and staying in luxury hotels. When we went to check in, I noticed she paid for two separate hotel rooms. As we walked down the hall from the elevator I was trying to figure out how to bring up paying her back for the room she had just paid for. I was so naive that when I tried to ask her about it she just laughed and went into her room.
I had never had my own room in a luxury hotel before. The first thing I noticed was that there was a door connecting my room with hers. Our plan for the day was unclear so after I put down my weathered backpack I knocked on the door to find out. When she opened the door I could tell she was putting on an act about not realizing the rooms were connected. After she invited me in I sat on the couch and stared out the window towards the massive lake outside. It was the middle of the day and the sunlight bouncing off the sparkling water made the thin layer of air pollution just visible enough to know it was there. I asked her when we were going to visit her friend and she told me we would meet her the following morning at the Humble Administrator’s Garden, a famous UNESCO world heritage site with canals and historic buildings. I was excited to see a new part of China but when I realized we were going to stay in this luxury hotel until the next day it was obvious that she hadn’t brought me to Suzhou just to visit her friend.
As we sat together next to the hotel window, I could feel that she was making herself available for me to show her some kind of affection. I didn’t know what to do. I had been with lots of women in college and had a number of tipsy flirtatious moments traveling around the world but this was different. None of my the casual experiences that I had up until then with any kind of women involved someone from the far East. Her energy was truly feminine and for me it was highly uncharted territory. Rather than believing all of the thoughts that raced through my mind about the right way to approach the situation, I started to feel a strong sense of masculine energy countering hers and I kissed her. She wasn’t expecting that, but her reaction told me everything I needed to know. She was instantly joyful, like she had just gotten something that she had been longing for for a long time. I tried to embrace the increasingly obvious fact that she was highly attracted to me, or at least the idea of me anyway. We had only known each other for about a week and I was a little nervous about what any of this meant, but the nearby king sized bed quickly swallowed any possibility of overthinking it.
After a luxurious room service breakfast the following morning we went walking around the lake and held hands. As we rode the Ferris wheel I could see that she could barely contain the joyfulness she was experiencing. She was genuinely excited about being with me. I had never felt so appreciated and despite still being naive about what was happening I was starting to enjoy that. When we finally made it to the historic gardens to meet up with her pregnant friend, I could see that the whole experience was intentional. For all I knew I was there because she was sizing me up to be the father of her children. I had no plans to have kids anytime soon but in my mind that didn’t matter because there was still plenty of time to figure out if that was in the cards for us. We had known each other for such a short time that I didn’t think much of it, but hindsight is 20/20 and that’s probably exactly what she was doing.
On our way back to Shanghai we didn’t talk much but there was a mutual feeling that we had just started something big together. For her it probably felt like the butterflies one might get if they received a kiss from the singer of your favorite band. For me the world of abundant luxury and unexplored culture had my inner child gleefully curious. I had all the freedom in the world and no money, a sharp westerner teaching English with a backpack and a camera. She was a beautiful Chinese woman with all the money in the world and as I would soon find out, no freedom. We were quite literally polar opposites and it only took showing up on the opposite side of the world to find each other. As she dropped me off in front of my apartment, I wondered when I would see her again.
When I returned to the world of expats and English teachers I was bombarded with their prying questions. The San Antonio brothers knew I had been away for the weekend in Suzhou with the student who had given me the iPhone 4s and they were dying to know what happened. I wanted to tell them all about it but I needed a moment to process the weekend I had just experienced. As I retreated into my room I found myself feeling like I had just taken a step backwards. I had already done the math and I was making about $60,000 dollars a year teaching English. In my mind I had achieved what I had set out to do and I really didn’t want to live around a big expat party every weekend anymore. I had every intention of working and paying rent there until my tourist visa would require me to make a trip over the border to Hong Kong, but I had just caught a glimpse of a different path. I knew my life was about to change dramatically. About an hour later I got a message on my phone that Amy was on her way up the elevator to my apartment. When she walked in the whole apartment knew who she was. She was carrying a bag filled with $15,000 in brand new luxury clothing, and all of it was for me. I was being showered with gifts and I really didn’t know how to feel about it.
At this point the oldest brother Daniel and I knew we didn’t like each other. He had become increasingly jealous of the luck and success I was having, taking every opportunity he could to corner me and talk to me about how I should help him with whatever his latest sleazy money making idea was. You would think I would have found some pleasure in his jealousy towards me after reluctantly paying him rent for 2 months, but I found myself feeling like I was going to have a panic attack. Where was I going to get the money for a new place? Despite always paying him on time, I didn’t fit into his idea of a submissive rent paying tenant, and I just knew he was going to kick me out. I had made friends with a very cool guy from California named Brandon who was well liked by everyone in the apartment. When I mentioned to him what had been going on with our landlord, he told me that a number of our flatmates were feeling increasingly uncomfortable around him as well. I was trying to maintain my privacy by avoiding Daniel but the following morning he came knocking on my door. My intuition was spot on and I was now officially being evicted by a guy who couldn’t stand the way my life was going.
When Amy dropped off all those expensive clothes, she had left our tutoring time card in one of the boxes with the entire contract signed off on. It was a full year’s worth of English lessons and I knew that if I took that card to the tutoring agency they would pay me around 4000 dollars. With that kind of money, I could rent whatever I wanted in Shanghai. It was the first time I had any real financial power since I had left Austin and I decided I was going to do some good with it. I knew there was a couple who were having a similar experience with our landlord, so when I found out I was being evicted I decided to take some of his tenants with me. Their names were Gary and Amanda and they were struggling to make things happen on the expat job hunt so I invited them to come and live with me for free.
A few weeks ago I was out with some of the expats from the apartment and after a blurry night of mixed drinks and house music at Shelter, I wound up going home with a blonde haired American girl I had just met. I was honestly just tired and looking for a nearby place to crash. When I woke up the next morning in her apartment in the French Concession I was thoroughly impressed by the place. It was elegantly decorated with a balanced confluence between modern Chinese and French architecture and there was a secret door on the bottom floor that led to a little Western restaurant called “Keven Cafe.” It was a historic building in the French Concession turned into a boutique service apartment/hotel and now that I had the money I was going to make it my home. I told Gary and Amanda to pack their things and to trust me. Amanda was disgusted by our landlord and more than happy to take me up on my offer. We all threw our luggage into a taxi downstairs within about a half hour of me being asked to leave. After a quick payroll stop at the tutoring agency, we pulled up to the boutique apartment building in the French Concession with a wad of money to negotiate with.
There were a few things I had trouble adapting to in Asia but haggling was not one of them. Oftentimes Chinese people who work in high end clothing factories take the raw materials home and put them together themselves. This is called a “third shift” product. I loved to negotiate the price of anything from pirated DVDs to third shift shoes, and I was still wearing a pair of third shift Armani shoes that I had recently gotten a good price on. I turned out to be good at it, and the Dior outfit I was now wearing gave me an appearance of agency and confidence that I didn’t have before. When I asked the people at the front desk about renting the nicest apartment available they offered me the penthouse suite on the roof at a monthly rate of $4000 dollars. I put down $2200, called it my final offer, and to my amazement it worked. Chinese people are all about “saving face,” or presenting themselves in a way that appears collected and respected. That day I had unintentionally “gained face” in how I had presented myself. For the first time since college I had my own apartment and this time it was in the middle of the French Concession.
The service apartment was laden with flat screen TVs and there was an enormous double king mattress in the master bedroom. I gave the big bed to Gary and Amanda and took the single king for myself. There was a glass chandelier in the living room and the terrace overlooked multiple embassies and hotels on Hengshan Road. As I walked out on the terrace I got a message from Amy that she was downstairs so I went to meet her. She had made a reservation for two at a famous French restaurant called Mr. and Mrs. Bund and it was the first time we were going out to dinner together. I had gone from broke and evicted to penthouse highlife in a matter of 2 days.
Amy left her red Audi convertible parked outside the boutique hotel I was now living in and we took a cab down to the river front restaurant. When we sat down the waiter had a bashful smirk about her and I wondered why. I ordered a bottle of Italian Chianti and as she walked over to the table across the room I noticed a familiar face. It was a table of three, and the rather obese man sitting in the middle was Bill Clinton. When the waitress came back over to take our dinner order I told her I would have whatever Bill was having. It was a French style chicken dish with a heavy cream sauce and it was delicious. At the time Shanghai was the epicenter of international business, and I had just caught a glimpse of some of that while living in hotels with Rami. I wondered what someone like Bill Clinton was doing in China and by the looks of the other two men sitting with him I figured he was probably there on business. As we chatted over dinner in the aura of nearby fame, I found myself struggling to keep up with how quickly my reality was changing. I had a million questions for Amy about the life of extreme wealth and luxury that she was living.
Amy already spoke perfect English and really never needed a tutor to begin with. We were both born in 1986 only a few months apart so I was imagining China in the late 80s and early 90s as she told me about her childhood. She said that her family didn’t have enough money to afford meat as a kid but apparently her father was a respected communal figure and businessman in Southern China. He became close friends with the sister of the Communist Party of China’s economic chairman. In the early 90’s when China was becoming the Western world’s factory and the economy began to grow exponentially, her father was essentially hand picked to become the president of China’s largest iron ore company. Iron ore makes steel and when I started thinking about all of the new steel construction in China, I began to realize the kind of money I was sitting across the table from was most certainly in the billions. She was heir to one of the wealthiest families in China and for some reason she was now my girlfriend. I had shown up in China with 100 dollars and no shoes and now I was dating one of the wealthiest women in the whole country. This is fucking crazy!
After Amy picked up the check at Mr. and Mrs. Bund I knew I wasn’t going to be paying for anything anymore but when I woke up the next day I still had a full schedule of English lessons. My now roommate Gary had hoped to use his business degree to find a more professional job in China but he was having trouble getting one and had shifted gears to teaching English as well. Over the course of the following week I began giving my clients to him one by one. By the middle of the following week he had a full schedule and I was scot-free. My youngest student Wang and I had become friends so rather than passing his teaching contract along to Gary I gave him a key to my penthouse apartment and told him to stop by whenever he wanted. My lifestyle changed completely. Every morning I would have breakfast at Keven Cafe downstairs, slowly read the Shanghai Daily, and then go to meet Amy for lunch at a fine dining restaurant. She had a lot of ideas about how to spend our time and I was happy to go along with whatever she wanted to do.
The parking garage at Amy’s building was filled with European supercars and she had brought a private chef with her from Southern China who would cook for us at her apartment. One afternoon I was eating some egg dumplings that she had made us and there was a certain flavor about them that made them really delicious. They were filled with little tiny shrimp and when I realized what I was eating I suddenly lost my appetite. I’m allergic to shellfish and was expecting an allergic reaction to begin at any moment but it never came. I felt totally fine but Amy insisted we go straight to the hospital just to be safe. I wasn’t actually having an allergic reaction so I felt like we were wasting time but she became very concerned so I went along with it. I was expecting the hospital in China to give me some herbs and send me on my way but the doctor was surprisingly Western. All in about 30 minutes I gave a blood sample and received an email containing a detailed list of everything I could possibly be allergic to. It turned out I am still allergic to shellfish but only certain kinds. I hadn’t seen a doctor in a long time and I couldn’t believe the kind of healthcare I was receiving.
Shanghai was a foodie paradise. Expats from all over the world had come there to start restaurants and we were eating everything from authentic Mexican food with margaritas to Russian caviar and fine vodka. One of the partners in the sourcing company Rami worked for even opened a Stubb’s barbeque restaurant as a monument to his entrepreneurial efforts in China. Amy and I tried everything together, often hosting groups of Westerners that I had become friends with to come eat with us. I found myself swimming in pleasure, slurping the salty pork broth from Shanghainese Xiao Long Bao dumplings at Din Tai Fung and washing them down with cold beer. I felt like Anthony Bourdain dipping congealed duck blood and tripe into the spicy boiling soup stock at high-end hotpot restaurants. I even had a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue checked in my name at the Sky Bar on top of the Pudong Ritz-Carlton, the tallest skyscraper in the city at the time. I had discovered hedonism in its purest form and it really was everything I thought it could be.
I was experiencing the full spectrum of what Shanghai had to offer while feeling admired and adored by a beautiful Chinese woman, but my visa had run out and it was time to take a trip to Hong Kong to renew it. I had booked a discount flight long before meeting Amy and knew I had this trip coming up. Wang’s father offered to take me to the airport and when I got on the plane I had the stark realization that almost everyone including the pilot were experiencing their first time on a commercial aircraft. China was growing so fast that it often required the smoke and mirrors of new infrastructure to mask the inexperienced human resources and manpower to keep up with it all. Despite all of that, the flight was considerably smooth.
This was my first time in Hong Kong. Rami had sent me a message that he had just gotten there the same day from the US. Seriously, what were the odds? While riding the high speed train from the airport to the city he sent me directions to the Island Pacific Hotel, a popular place to stay for Westerners and people doing international business. He had just gotten to the airport so I knew I would get there before him. After I checked in, the evening sun was setting on the Kowloon Bay outside the hotel room window and I plugged my phone into the iPhone dock. I started jamming some Tracy Chapman as I unpacked the Burberry suit jacket I had neatly folded in my backpack. Amy had told me she might be in Hong Kong that evening and though I didn’t know if she was coming yet, I had a feeling I would see her. When Rami showed up he had already gotten some hash from someone on the street in Wan Chai so we proceeded to the hotel stairwell to smoke a spliff. I hadn’t talked to him since he left Shanghai a couple months ago and so much had happened since then that I really didn’t know where to begin.
The view from the stairwell looked out onto the silhouettes of dozens of adjacent tall skinny skyscrapers pressed upon a green mountain background and it reminded me a lot of Rio De Janeiro. Once I felt a little stoned, I began to tell him about the life I found myself living back in Shanghai. Rami had spent so much time pursuing wealth and success in China that I think hearing about any of what had transpired since we last saw each other was actually difficult to hear. When I got a message from Amy that she had made it to Hong Kong I shut my mouth about it and decided I would just show him what I was talking about. Rami’s company had a new intern named Sam who joined us in the hotel lobby. Amy’s family owned the entire top floor of the twin towers across the street so she knew exactly where we were staying. She sent her driver to pick up the three of us and when we got into the Mercedes in front of the hotel, I could see Rami was becoming more receptive to what I was talking about.
Amy had made reservations for us to eat at the Dragon King in the World Trade center, apparently her father’s favorite restaurant in Hong Kong. When we showed up she had already ordered the Beijing duck and the kind of affection she was showing me in front of these guys painted a clear picture of what was going on. Over the course of our experiences in Shanghai Amy had really fallen for me and as much as I was starting to realize that, I was also feeling pretty overwhelmed by all of it. I wanted to talk about that with her but the cultural and language barriers coupled with the manic spending rendered me unable to approach her about it. None of that mattered. The kind of experience that we were having together was so interesting and valuable for both of us for different reasons that we both knew it would continue. After dinner we all went out on the Kowloon ferry and took photos in front of the impressive Hong Kong skyline. Deep down I had a feeling that made me wonder if I was beginning to experience true love for her. The next day I flew back to Shanghai alone.
When I got back to my penthouse in Shanghai I received a message from my friend Gabriel that he was on his way to Shanghai to do some traveling in China. We became friends back in Austin at the last South By Southwest music festival while he was there on business. Gabriel had worked on the BBC’s website and was a lead developer for Yahoo. He always had money but never the time to travel so he was happy to buy me a ticket joining him on a trip to Guilin. The night before our trip Amy wanted to go out to a nightclub called M2. By now I had gotten used to how much she loved to throw money around but it was Gabriel’s first time meeting her and it was a bit of a shock. In fact any time I would introduce Amy to someone new she would almost certainly start another round of manic spending in the following moments. While we were in the club she bought a table and ordered a big bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. After about an hour I started to notice she was getting a little out of control with the drinking. She weighed just over 100 pounds and had consumed almost an entire bottle of whisky by herself. I honestly couldn’t comprehend how that was even possible but pretty quickly she was making a scene and I thought she might have had alcohol poisoning. Gabriel and I decided to put her in a Taxi and head to a nearby hospital. While we were sitting in the waiting room I kept giving her water and sticking my finger down her throat to try to make her throw up. While I was doing that Gabriel noticed that the man across the waiting room had a close eye on us and we both recognized him from the club. Amy was too drunk to ask her about it but it seemed apparent that we were being followed.
Amy eventually recovered in the waiting room before we could even talk to a doctor and somehow she didn’t even wake up with a hangover. I had been so enamored by the whole experience of dating her that I really didn’t believe there was going to be a dark side to it but that night left me worried about the future. Once I knew she was ok Gabriel and I went to the airport to catch our flight to Southern China. On the plane we talked about the man who seemed to be following us the night before. Gabriel was super smart. His opinion was that Amy’s family likely hired this man to spy on what we were doing. If that were indeed the case he would have had a positive story about me taking care of her to report back with, but the feeling of being followed like that made me really uneasy. For all I knew, people with that kind of money could probably have me killed and get away with it. I didn’t want to experience another night like that again anytime soon.
After our flight we took a taxi into the city and began to see the iconic limestone hills that Guilin is known for. They seemed familiar because the backside of the 20 Yuan note has an image of them on it. The whole area looks a lot like Hao Long Bay in Vietnam and though I was just now finding out about it, Gabriel had been wanting to travel there for years. We checked into a hotel room with a view and went out for some Thai green curry. The atmosphere reminded me of images of southeast Asia that I had seen in movies like The Beach. There were Chinese people running tourism businesses catering to all forms of Western hedonism and I kept hearing young bar musicians covering Bob Marley songs. I felt a little out of place with my Gucci sunglasses and Dior outfit riding down the river on a raft made from PVC piping, but it was a nice break from the big cities I had been in for months. It was also a nice surprise to be traveling with Gabriel because it gave me a minute to process everything that was going on with Amy. Before I ever had a chance to talk to her she invited us to go on a trip with her and a couple of her Chinese friends to Beijing and we both knew that was up next. When we got back to Shanghai Gabriel and I were already booked on a first class flight with China Southern.
On the flight to Beijing we felt a little bit like outsiders while Amy spoke Chinese with her rich friends. They seemed to follow her and it was obvious that the kind of money she came from far exceeded any of theirs. Walking into the luxury hotel lobby Amy pointed out the Hermes store selling 10,000 dollar purses called Berkin Bags. She had a collection of hundreds of them in her apartment that was easily worth millions and as we stood outside the storefront windows looking at them I began to realize how disinterested I was in luxury in general. I had traveled around the world because I was genuinely curious about other cultures and current events. Luxury fashion had nothing to do with any of that. After last week’s dramatic drunk episode and now the entourage of materialistic money worshippers, I was feeling annoyed by all of it.
Amy paid for everyone’s rooms and got a separate room down the hall for my friend Gabriel. When Amy and I were finally alone in our room we immediately started arguing. I don’t even think we knew what we were arguing about, but it was becoming obvious that opposite ends of the spectrum we were operating from weren’t compatible. That needed to be expressed. When I started to realize we might be on the verge of breaking up there was a knock on the door. A man walked in wearing a business suite and handed her a stack of documents that he needed her signature on. Without reading them she promptly signed all of them and the man was back off to wherever he came from. After another 10 minutes of arguing another man knocked on the door in need of more signatures. It turned out that she was technically serving a formal role in her family company that she was completely disconnected from and would regularly sign papers that likely dictated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers without even glancing. When she finished the second round of documents and we were alone again, we started talking about breaking up. I was quickly becoming aware that the life of luxury I had fallen into could disappear at any moment. I was also becoming aware that I didn’t care.
I didn’t know what I would do if we were to break up at that time. I had already passed off the English teaching career I had built to someone else and I really couldn’t imagine going back and doing any of that again. My first instinct was to take a break from Amy and walk down the hallway to Gabriel’s hotel room. Unlike the many Western expats faking their way into success in China, Gabriel was an authentic self-made man. I felt like if I needed to figure out an alternative to the life I was living he would at least have some ideas. I also knew if I just sold the clothes on my back I would have more money to start off with than I did before I began traveling a year ago. While we talked about the reality of how unhealthy my life was becoming and how to strategize for getting out of it, Amy came knocking on the door. She wanted to apologize and for me to come back to our room. I was honestly ready to pull the plug on the whole thing but we already had plans to go to the Great Wall of China in the morning and I figured we ought to see that through. Who the hell wants to keep fighting anyway? I quickly got over it and went to bed with her.
In the morning we went to a boutique store that sells medicinal mushrooms called Verygrass. I had never heard of anything like it but she explained to me that these mushrooms cure cancer and are essentially the fountain of youth. A friend of mine’s Mom back in Austin had cancer and I thought I would try to get a bottle of them for her if I could. Each bottle of 60 capsules was being sold for about 2000 dollars and the guy in line in front of us tried to buy the entire remaining supply in the store. While Amy talked him into letting us buy 3 bottles I could see that these Tibetan Cordycep mushrooms were highly sought after and hard to get. She gave me all three bottles, a 6000 dollar gift, and told me to keep one for myself, give one to my mom, and to give one to my friend’s mom with cancer. She was always a little manic, but she had a big heart.
That afternoon we went to the airport to catch another flight to Shanhaiguan, the Eastern coastal city where the Great Wall of China begins. This time the flight felt really dangerous. The old Boeing 737 that had been retrofitted to look new combined with cold turbulent weather created the conditions for a truly terrifying experience. I was almost sick from the turbulence and was truly grateful when we landed without crashing. When we arrived, I recognized the driver who picked us up from the airport because it was the same guy who drove Rami and I around Hong Kong. Amy had flown him up to this part of northern China just for this trip. It was December and when we got out of the car to check into our hotel I nearly froze from the cold. After we checked in we went to the hotel restaurant where there were private dining rooms and a chef that would cook in front of you much like Benihana in the US. The chef cooked a bunch of things together and I ended up having an allergic reaction to some of the shellfish on the grill. I was cold, nauseated, and ready to go back to Shanghai.
After drinking a gallon of bottled water to get over the reaction I was having to the food I eventually passed out. Early the next morning the driver took us to The Great Wall of China. I was unimpressed. The iconic pictures I had seen of it in the mountains always amazed me but this wasn’t like that at all. The area was desolate and cold and the flat landscape didn’t seem to be attracting many other people either. When we got back to the luxury hotel I found out that we were the only people staying there, a typical reality that I was getting used to. China was always a billion people living in poverty alongside primarily vacant luxury infrastructure. Come to think of it, it was kind of like the West.
A couple days later, Amy and I flew back to Beijing and Gabriel returned to London. I needed some alone time so that same day I took the bullet train back to Shanghai by myself. As the quiet train reached speeds around 320 kilometers per hour I looked out the window at the passing cities and thought about how fast my life was moving. I needed to slow down and I was feeling sick from going too hard for too long. When I got back to Shanghai I met up with Wang and talked to him about what was going on. I always felt like I was able to relate to smart young people and despite being a former student of 19 years old, he was able to give me a better perspective than anyone else I could think of. As we talked on the penthouse terrace, I told him that my girlfriend was sweet and rich but kind of crazy. I told him I loved being able to be generous to everyone around me but I was becoming annoyed with materialism and superficiality. I even told him the ultimate truth that I really didn’t know who I was anymore and I was experiencing a serious crisis of identity. I had been traveling for a year, gone from rags to riches in China, and was thriving in my pursuit of seeing as much of the world as I could, but now I was now questioning all of it. He told me to go home and see my family and that suddenly became the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know who I was anymore and I missed my dog and my Mom. It was almost Christmas and it was time to go home to Texas for the holidays.
When I told Amy I wanted to go home she was surprisingly supportive. She suggested we go spend a weekend in Hong Kong together before I head off and was happy to book me a first class round trip ticket to the US. I was feeling like I was a commodity and a resource for her accompaniment, a poor boy at the whim of his rich girlfriend, but her response to telling her I needed to go home for a while allowed me to see that wasn’t the case. She genuinely wanted me to be happy and despite our recent fighting, I could feel how much she hoped I would return to China. We had Champagne and a light meal in first class on China Southern traveling to Hong Kong from Shanghai and checked into the top floor of The Ritz-Carlton when we got there. I really didn’t know if this was going to be my last time in this reality so I took some video clips of the hotel just to be able to prove to myself any of this had actually happened. As we said our goodbyes in the Hong Kong airport I almost canceled my flight out of fear of not seeing her again. All the way up to the boarding gate I could feel that she really loved me, and despite the opposite ends of reality we had come from, I found myself loving her back. For the first time I kissed her with authentic reciprocity as I reluctantly boarded the top floor of the Cathay Pacific 747 to Los Angeles.
