I disappointed Andrew again at the electronics mall, one of at least three within walking distance, several overbright floors of vendors, grouped by the items they sold, peddling an overwhelming array of consumer products from flat-screen televisions to coaxial cables. Everything, it seemed, except for voice recorders. Just asking vendors if they carried them required a long explanation from Andrew, and I deemed inadequate the few that we managed to find. Our circuit of the mall revealed that the sheer number of goods disguised their homogeneity. Neighboring shops sold nearly identical items, and I would never truly understand the provenance of their inventories. Every shopkeeper insisted that his or her products were bona fide, using terms like AA huo (think bond ratings) or shui huo (smuggled goods) and often pointing to the plastic-sealed packaging as evidence of its legitimacy. Andrew’s opinion was that I wasn’t buying anything expensive enough to worry about that; the dubiousness of Chinese goods rendered everything under a certain price point as disposable as the bottled water I consumed each day.
Before heading back to the living quarters—by subway, and unaided, as part of Andrew’s colloquium on Shanghai transportation—Andrew took me to an upscale Japanese-owned supermarket in the basement of a luxury shopping mall in the Jing’An district, the western border of the French Concession and which took its name from an opulent Buddhist temple dating back to 1216 that now sat atop a major metro station. We entered the supermarket at the fruit section, which displayed model specimens of lychees, dragonfruits, custard apples, and fig-shaped salaks, or snake fruit, named for their scaly skins. On the shelves stood pyramids of imported cherries, every flawless garnet fruit individually stacked with its stem pointing straight up, priced at nearly fifty dollars a pound. In the seafood section fishmongers wearing crisp white aprons, paper hats, gloves, and face masks sliced sushi-grade tuna to order. Under the fog of the open frozen food bins rested king crab legs, their joints the size of softballs. Almost everything was imported, sparkling clean, and very, very expensive. We exited through the perfume of freshly baked cream puffs. The scene was such a far cry from what I remembered of Shanghai, when it was nearly impossible to find a decent loaf of bread or chocolate chip cookie, much less a carton of Greek-style yogurt, that my awe left no room for hunger, which was probably the most un-Chinese part of it all.
Andrew surveyed the store with equal parts amazement and dismay. “Look at how clean this is!” he said. “The Japanese are superior to the Chinese. If I could renounce my family and everything about being Chinese, and be able to speak Japanese fluently, I’d do it.”
I found Andrew’s attitude toward his own ethnicity, including the liberal and unironic use of chink in his speech, a little disturbing. “You know, Chinese people are just not capable of innovation,” he said another time. “They’re just not. I’m not talking about the culture. I’m talking about the race.”
“I think that guy from Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, was pretty innovative,” I said.
“An exception that proves the rule.”
I was running out of Chinese innovators. “What about the guy from Wang Computers?” I said. “Wasn’t he Chinese?”
“Yeah, and his company went under. You know why? Nepotism! This is what I’m talking about.”
“You know, if you hate being Chinese so much, we’ve made a lot of medical advances so people can change themselves,” I said. “Michael Jackson wanted to be white too.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a reason why Chinese people have to copy everything.”
“Your degree of self-loathing is incredible.”
“I’m just talking facts here, man,” he said. “I’m a realist.”
As we left the supermarket, I asked Andrew who could afford to shop there on a regular basis. “The rich,” he said. We paused under an escalator and used a section of it to plot an imaginary graph. “Okay, here’s China.” He drew a horizontal x-axis. “And here’s their income.” He drew a vertical y-axis. “Here are most of the people.” He marked off 90 percent of the x-axis. The last 10 percent fit between his thumb and forefinger. “This is the middle class,” he said, referring to 90 percent of the space between his fingers. “They make, oh, two to five thousand RMB a month.” That was roughly what the local engineers made at the company. He narrowed his fingers. “Here is the upper middle class, who make more than ten thousand RMB a month. That’s you and me.” He brought his fingers together until they were almost touching. “And here are the rich.” Those were the ones buying up all the luxury apartments, driving Ferraris, and eating fifty-dollar-per-pound cherries.
“How do they get rich?” I said.
“They start their own companies and get contracts from the government.”
“Could I do that?”
“Sure, if you had the political connections. But you don’t.” Andrew shook his head. “Richard does. He could make himself a lot more money than he is.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
Andrew sighed. “Because he’s a Jesus freak.”
THE NEXT EVENING Andrew suggested we pay our respects to our uncle, the man enabling me to come to China for our family’s porcelain. I had always wanted to like Richard, the requisite rich uncle of the family. I bragged about him plenty: smart, successful, committed to his causes, wealthy without ostentation. But my family was too Chinese for my uncles to engage their nephews with the easy congeniality I saw in American families, so I mostly remembered Richard as overworked, stressed out, and as likely to explosively express his disapproval as he was to be affectionate. It was difficult to know what he expected, which made it difficult to relax around him. Even talking on the phone with him about the job had filled me with anxiety, as if I were meeting royalty without any understanding of the protocols.
I followed Andrew over the bridge to Richard’s three-story, five-bedroom, six-bathroom villa abutting the canal. Richard had filled every available spot in his garden with trees and shrubs—camphor, pomelo, peach, lemon, and rosebushes. His wife, Scarlett, who was as even-keeled and intuitive as Richard was impulsive, liked to kid that Richard’s designs had “no white space.”
The other half of Richard’s garden was given over to the chickens, ducks, and geese that he had received as gifts, and the groundskeepers collected their eggs every morning and placed them at Richard’s door. At the far end of his property, he had built an aviary to house the pheasants someone had given him. It wasn’t unusual for Richard to receive as gifts chickens live and butchered, sections of pigs, and even a year-old Tibetan mastiff, a massive creature that barked nonstop and terrified everyone for the few months that she stayed staked in a corner of his garden until he donated her to the company’s security guards.
I had last seen Richard three years earlier, when I finally visited Shanghai one summer during graduate school, meeting up with my mother on her annual trip to see my grandmother. Back then the company living quarters had yet to mature, staked with rows of camphor saplings that shivered like wet dogs, and fresh soil still ringed the apartment buildings, reminding me of anthills. The villas had not yet broken ground, and the other side of the canal remained a blanched tract of desolate land that appeared to be in a state of ecological shock. The company had made its initial public offering in the spring, but the stock had since dropped about 40 percent, which might have explained the lukewarm welcome I received from both Andrew and Richard. Richard was preoccupied with