But it wasn’t just our household. Fruit is China’s apple pie. Dessert in China most commonly takes the form of a plate of fresh-cut fruit. The phrase for “consequently” or “result” in Chinese is jieguo, or “bear fruit.” Even the humblest fruit shack in China offers dragonfruits with flaming petals and pink or bloodred flesh, like a sweeter, milder kiwi; strands of purple grapes, plump as roe and bursting with intense, bubblegum flavor; or crispy, refreshing starfruit. The native kiwis, known as Chinese gooseberries before New Zealand farmers rebranded them, are sweeter and more pungent than their exported counterparts. Bowling-ball-sized pomelos, like meaty, fragrant grapefruits, whose rinds my grandmother used to fashion into hats for her children. Mangos of all kinds, from the small champagne varietals to the leathery giants named “elephant horns.” Lychees, grown in southern China and quick to spoil, but the taste so ethereal that one emperor supposedly uprooted an entire tree and had it shuttled back to Beijing in horse carts. Sacks of tiny sha tang ju, aptly named “sugar mandarins,” that I peeled and ate whole, a dozen at a time.
As difficult as being an ABC in China could be, ABC women had it even harder. ABC men could dip into both local and expat dating pools, while I never met a single ABC woman who expressed interest in local men. But having witnessed the kind of nagging, overprotective dragon ladies that Chinese women could become, I never had much interest in dating one, and even Chinese people characterized Shanghainese women, though beautiful, as conniving and high maintenance. I certainly noticed plenty of attractive women walking the streets of Shanghai. Sometimes they were flocked two or three at a time under a foreigner’s arm, an implicit sex-for-financial-security exchange that universally disgusted female ABCs almost as much as the ankle-length nylons local women favored. It wasn’t just Western men who took advantage of their elevated socioeconomic status in China. Plenty of my ABC friends ran through local women with an exuberance that belied a sense of unshackledness; some admitted to having four or five different sexual partners every week. Part of the allure, as one friend explained to me, was that local women could be shaped into anything the boyfriend wished. They were open to acquiring new ideologies, new languages, and perhaps most important, new talents in the bedroom. An expat bartender in a swanky club summed it up for me one night. “Chinese girls, they don’t have the same sexual hangups as Americans,” he said. “They’ll do anything, you name it.” And just as the music paused between songs, he shouted, “Even anal!” I couldn’t help thinking this was one of the variables in some subconscious calculus that persuaded ABC men, despite all their complaining, to stay in China long after they had planned.
AS SHANGHAI ENTERED the rainy season, a typhoon always seemed to be spinning somewhere off the coast. Most of the time it just cleared the smoggy skies, but occasionally a wet tendril would inundate the city. One morning a heavy shower flooded the streets and drenched me as soon as I stepped into it. With the sidewalks and gutters under many inches of water, I walked along the crest in the middle of the driveway encircling the living quarters. As I neared the exit, a white Toyota sedan came up behind me. I knew the driver expected me to move. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, I probably would have, but he was dry and I was the one in the rain; I figured he could accommodate me for once. The driver honked. I kept walking. The driver lay on the horn, a long, unbroken proxy for his annoyance, which under the circumstances only irritated me more.
A local would have just given way, because in China the ones being honked at, not the drivers, controlled whether the honking continued. As soon as the pedestrian yielded, the driver would have gone by, and because Chinese seemed to lack object permanence for these types of exchanges, both would have ceased to exist in each other’s minds. A non-Chinese foreigner also probably would have moved, bemused, perplexed, and possibly upset with the driver but not wishing to appear as the arrogant foreigner. And then there was me, the American-born Chinese. I decided that I wasn’t going to move. I couldn’t disavow our common heritage, but being Chinese didn’t mean I had to be Chinese, too.
This was more than a traffic dispute or a cultural misunderstanding. The driver was the Chinese Red Army, a column of armored vehicles rolling over the principles of right of way and common courtesy, and I was the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, armed with nothing but an umbrella, staring down the machine for the millions of oppressed pedestrians and bicyclists forced to run for their lives to avoid vehicles blowing through stop signs and red lights, making left turns from right lanes, crossing medians, and diving into bicycle paths. The honking got louder, longer, and angrier. I put my head down and kept walking. Go ahead and run me over, I thought, because I wasn’t budging. I had rights.
I walked all the way to the gate with the car crawling behind me, its horn sounding a continuous, grating wail. When I finally peeled off, the driver pulled up to me, rolled down his window, and screamed, “Ni you shenme yisi?” Basically, “What the hell is your problem?” I had neither the energy nor the vocabulary to retort. For the rest of the day I indulged in violent fantasies of tearing the driver apart while berating him with immaculate Chinese and resolved to learn the Chinese word for “motherfucker.”
I INTENDED TO STAY IN CHINA FOR JUST A YEAR, BUT AFTER a few months I had learned nothing more about my family’s porcelain. I hadn’t even found my own apartment, despite Andrew’s frequent hints that I had freeloaded long enough. At work, Richard moved me to the corporate relations department, where I had marginally more to do, editing press releases, but mostly I waited for the delivery of the English-language dailies in the afternoon. On weekends I played basketball and poker with a group of ABCs, many of them former SMIC employees, whom I’d met through Andrew. Though my Chinese had improved as a matter of course and immersion, I still couldn’t really speak it outside taxis or restaurants, and I risked becoming one of the expat dilettantes whom I so readily impugned.
Having shaken the illnesses that dogged me when I arrived, I regained my weight by rediscovering Chinese food. My mother had eschewed many typical Chinese dishes that she found too greasy, so I knew what couscous was long before san bei ji, clay pot chicken cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and sesame oil and dressed with ginger and basil. Or yu xiang qiezi, spicy, stir-fried sweet and sour eggplant that was the platonic ideal for topping a bowl of rice. Though my family frequently ate dim sum on the weekends, it wasn’t until I moved to China that I discovered boluo bao, pineapple buns, named for the checkered crust of golden sugar on their tops and best eaten steaming hot with a slab of butter sandwiched in the middle. Or xiaolongbao, the famous steamed soup dumplings, delicate bite-size morsels that sagged like water balloons when picked up between chopsticks, were placed on a spoon with a splash of vinegar and shredded ginger, and were then popped whole into your mouth.
Despite the horror stories that street vendors cooked with oil reclaimed from sewers, or that the meat of the yangrouchuan lamb skewers was actually cat, I managed to eat street food with no ill effects, breakfasting on jian bing, a thin eggy crepe wrapped around pickled vegetables and a smear of chili sauce. For lunch or dinner, I gobbled shengjianbao, another type of soup dumpling, but larger, thicker skinned, and pan-fried to create toothsome sesame-sprinkled tops and browned bottoms with the crunch of a perfectly cooked french fry. These were rested on soup spoons in order to bite a small hole in the top to release the steam and suck out the minced pork juices, and then were eaten with vinegar in two or three meaty, doughy, oily mouthfuls.
As the vise of the Shanghai summer loosened, the air grew sharper, and autumn in the city brought blue skies and soporific temperatures. One afternoon at the office, a headline in the Shanghai Daily caught my attention: “Police Hunt for Treasure Trove of Old Coins.” A one-hundred-year-old residence in Nanhui, a transitioning rural