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I couldn’t sleep at night.

Those guys were entirely devoid of irony. Billy’s dad had the power and the means to force me into paying his son, and he could do so with an impunity that felt almost casual. They could destroy my business in a heartbeat, or they could have someone harm me physically. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

When I told Yin, she suggested I negotiate a reasonable 分手费 fen shou fei, a “separation fee”, and just move on. Sharon agreed. There was no point in waging a war I couldn’t win, a fight that would sap the very energy I needed to survive. I was working ten hours a day on projects, and the industry was heating up. Which meant that the competition was multiplying at the same time. The first batch of extremely smart and talented Chinese professionals was beginning to leave the multinationals they had joined in the early 90s to set up their own shops. Fighting Billy’s dad wasn’t an investment to secure my success, it was a destructive distraction.

So, when they arrived the next day, I was ready to offer a face-saving exit fee and be done with the whole absurd theater.

After smoke-massaging the inside of his cheeks for a full minute, Tough Guy made his announcement with the weight of a funeral director. “You and Billy agreed on a fifty-fifty partnership. He wants his money for the past two months, right now. And he’ll stay on board. As an investor partner. That means every quarter, you pay him 50 percent of the profits.”

There was no need to negotiate.

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.

Here is a list of key characters that appear in this epic story, and as they appear in chronological order. This list is updated with every new chapter:

Zhang Bin: my first close Chinese friend, a student at Beijing university, who I meet as a student in Beijing, who takes me to his home in Sanming for Chinese New Year 1989. He t…

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I was now keen to 下海 xia hai, to put out to sea. In the context of the 1990s, this meant quitting the safety of a paycheck to dive headlong into the Chinese shark tank of private enterprise.

Two clients provided the courage for this plunge. One, a crop protection firm, gave me a choice: “Join us as an employee or start your own shop. Either way, you’re our guy. We want to keep working with you.” The other, an American car giant entering a Shanghai joint venture, needed someone to decode the mysteries of the Chinese consumer and help them find a compelling brand positioning in a market that had not existed before.

I would be thirty the following year. Confucius famously declared, 三十而立san shi er li, at thirty, one should stand on one’s own feet. I took the Sage at his word, though I suspect that two and a half thousand years ago he didn’t have to deal with the Shanghai Bureau of Industry and Commerce.

I had to move fast: register a company, flip my residence permit, and find a way to feed myself and my wife before the last few remains of my dignity evaporated. I relocated to a cheaper downtown apartment, a cramped space where a spare room served as a temporary headquarters. It smelled of tea, instant noodles and ambition.

Billy invited me to dinner to meet his parents. And to propose a partnership. I would be the “Face” of the company, the high-level research and client-facing magician, while he handled the back office, the gritty, unglamorous fieldwork operations. His father, a mid-level executive at a state-owned enterprise, promised a golden key to urban industry leaders and rural communes alike. We brought Sharon in with a five-percent stake.

With the limited resources we had, the plan had the structural complexity of a house of cards, but in 1997, that passed for a solid foundation. We needed the equivalent of around ten thousand US dollars to get started, and Billy and I would each invest half. “I just need a week for my dad to liquidate some stocks,” he said.

I had no reason to doubt him. He’d been a reliable colleague, and I was busy playing the role of the visionary. I emptied my savings to buy three computers, a printer, and a fax machine. And, of course, the first month’s salaries for the three of us.

“New projects are coming in fast, Billy," I reminded him a week later, adding that the execution of these projects had to be financed in advance. Customers didn't pay until one or two months after a project was successfully completed. "Which means the bills are piling up. Where’s your share?”

“No worries!” he chirped. A phrase that, in China, usually foreshadows problems.

When the car client dropped two more projects in my lap, the panic set in. I needed a business license, tax invoices, and a corporate bank account. Cash flow is the only thing that matters when you’re playing for keeps, and I was already bleeding out.

“Another couple of days,” Billy said when I pressed him again.

“Problems?”

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Yin moved to Shanghai, and we began the daily routine of being husband and wife for the first time since picking up our marriage certificates on the 清明 Tomb Sweeping Festival eighteen months prior.

The friction started almost immediately. It wasn’t the long hours I spent at work that caused the problem. It was a simple imbalance of needs that we hadn’t yet learned to understand and manage. I had few expectations for our marriage, but Yin had a specific list of what she required from living as husband and wife. Since we were both new to the city and lacked a social circle, she looked to me to fill every gap in her existence. She expected me to be her social life, her entertainment, and her primary mood regulator. Since leaving London, I had grown accustomed to the reflective quiet of living alone. Now, the constant pressure of her emotional demands felt stressful. Claustrophobic.

Within a few months, Yin was spending most of her time in the guest room. One evening, I walked in and found her sitting on the windowsill of our twenty-fourth-floor apartment. The window was wide open. Her legs were dangling over the edge, swinging out into the smog. When she turned to look at me, her face was a strange collage of anger and grief. I didn’t recognize her.

“Shall we go and have dinner at the Sichuan restaurant downstairs?” I asked. I kept my voice flat and calm, the way you might talk to someone standing too close to the abyss.

Her face twisted into a wide, mirthless grin. She swung her legs back inside, climbed off the sill, and fell onto the bed with a laugh. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m having fun.”

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Shanghai felt like an oven when I arrived. A layer of burnt construction dust trapped the air, staining the sky like a bloodshot sponge.

It had been an emotionally brutal year in Taipei. I had spent it in a state of low-level apprehension, about my wife’s thinning patience, the money I owed my mother, the small apartment mortgage in Foshan, my life, my future, my everything. But perseverance was finally yielding tangible progress. The Taipei HR head had handed me a new contract: Director of the Shanghai office, complete with a generous raise. Signing it felt like opening the door in a windowless room and walking out into the fresh, sun-filled air.

I spent my first few days in Shanghai marking my territory, firing off faxes to regional clients to signal a change in the guard: mainland China was now my jurisdiction.

[Photo: the author in Shanghai, summer 1996]

I knew, however, that Randall would not surrender what he considered “his” territory without a fight. He was seething. Rod had gutted his influence by blocking him from the Shanghai lead and appointing me to spearhead the China expansion instead. Randall knew he was fighting a losing battle. Once I settled in and the revenue began to flow, Rod would “consign him to the dustbin of history” as Jimmy joked, echoing a CCP propaganda phrase.

By then, my Mandarin was native-fluent. Randall’s Chinese was decently fluent, but having only ever lived in Taiwan, he couldn’t hold a candle to my grasp of Mainland thought and culture. Yet, he clung to his legacy clients in Taipei as an excuse to lead their projects across the Strait, which allowed him to haunt us in Shanghai as often as possible. More for play than work: he would fly in, delegate the moderation of his focus groups to whichever junior assistant he’d dragged along, and spend his days and nights with Lily while scouting for cracks in my armor. He was looking for any opportunity to derail me. Randall wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight, but he possessed the narrow-minded cunning of the vindictive. “Lowlife scum can be dangerous,” Shine, the entertainment mogul in the Wild South, had once warned me. “Never underestimate the reach of a small man in a corner.”

Shanghai in 1996 was a chaotic theater of era-defining transformation. The metropolis had just opened its first metro line, spidery flyovers were still skeletal shadows over endless construction sites.

[Photo: Shanghai in 1996. A never-ending flow of humanity. Bicycles and buses dominate the streets, while private cars are still a luxury of the few. At every collision, a mob would instantly materialize to offer a collective verdict on who was to blame.]

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Taiwan didn’t allow mainland Chinese citizens to visit the island at the time, so I spent a decent part of my salary on monthly flights from Taipei to Hong Kong from where I took the train to Foshan to see Yin. I was supporting my wife and remitting money to my mother. I myself lived on air and ambition.

Yin was managing an acquaintance’s small restaurant in Foshan, her home town, to stay busy and avoid her father’s nagging questions. One weekend night, I carried her home on my bike through a sudden monsoon-like thunderstorm. The rain was warm, blurring my glasses, but Yin was a delicate, breathing weight clinging to my back. It was a moment of profound intimacy, one that made me feel invincible, one that made me feel like a husband capable of carrying his wife through any storm. Those weekends spent together during my year away from her would turn out to be the most wonderful days of our entire marriage.

One evening, Yin called to tell me that a new residential compound was being built near her parents’ home in Foshan. China was in the beginning throes of a decades-long brick-and-mortar fever, and Yin had already signed for a one-bedroom unit. Our conjugal home. We needed to make the down payment immediately. It was a modest amount, but I wondered how I could shoulder the additional financial burden. “No more beers at the Green Bar for a while,” I told Jimmy. “Until I get a promotion and a pay rise.” A husband who cannot house his wife is not considered respectable. Not in a Chinese family at the time, before real estate prices grew out of reach of the ordinary young salaried person within the short span of a decade. “I’ll buy the drinks,” he laughed. “I don’t want you to lose your wife.”

I realized that a salaried career is just a more comfortable set of shackles. I needed to bide my time, sharpen my blade, and move to Shanghai by summer.

The problem was Randall.

Every time I requested to lead or at least get involved in a mainland project, he would find some “urgent” task in Taiwan to anchor me there. My frustration grew, like a slow-acting poison.

Then, one evening, the fax machine in the office began to scream. A deluge of handwritten faxes from Shanghai, decorated with hearts and arrows and tears. “I love you, Randall!”, and “I can’t live without you!”, and the like. Signed by “Lily”. The receptionist had already left and those love letters fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves for everyone to read. Jimmy picked up one of them, chuckled knowingly, pulled me into his office and poured a whiskey.

Randall had been dredging the gutters of Judy’s Too, a notorious Shanghai dive bar, for a year or so before he snagged on Lily. He thought he’d scored a permanent convenience, when in reality he was just a fly settling into the center of a carefully spun web, oblivious to the spider sharpening her blade. Lily was a junior employee at an ad agency then, playing the long game. She understood that Randall’s greatest weakness wasn’t his lust, but his ego, his vanity. She built him a mirrored room where he could admire himself until she decided to lock the exit: After half a year of playing his mistress, she wanted marriage. Randall must have forgotten to mention that he already had a wife, kids, and a mortgage back in Taipei.

Now the latest grapevine dispatch from Shanghai was that Lily was pregnant. And that she intended to keep the baby.

Explosive news.

[Illustration: 美人计 mei ren ji, or Beauty Trap, the warfare part of Chinese Black Heart philosophy, and which functions by weaponizing the target’s ego and sexual impulses to trap him. By presenting a facade of curated submissiveness, the shrewd practitioner allows the target, a man like Randall who is blinded by his own greed, to believe he is the predator in control. In reality, he is being led into a position of total vulnerability. A masterpiece of asymmetrical warfare executed by simply giving the target’s vanity exactly what it demands. Read more about it in ‘Black Heart Power Hack #3’]

“Does Rod know?” I asked Jimmy.

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A weird sense of apprehension snaked up my throat as the plane began its descent into Taipei.

An absurd fear that Chairman Liu’s loan sharks might still be waiting to retrieve their losses. They had let me go after that brief, sharp scare in Tainan, but in the cold light-headedness of a descending aircraft, I wondered if they had concluded I was in cahoots with Liu, a silent partner helping him smuggle suitcases of cash out of the country. I forced my breath deep into my lungs, reminding myself that Liu’s problems weren’t mine, that I was lucky to have found this job, that I was a man who could handle whatever waited on the tarmac. I told myself to stop shitting myself.

No goons were waiting to hack me to pieces with machetes, like they did in Taiwanese and Hongkong gangster movies. No cinematic violence, only the indifferent bustle of the terminal.

I took a cab to Heather’s apartment. Heather was my direct superior, a Scottish woman in her late thirties with the brittle energy of someone who tried too hard to stay young. She had kindly offered me a guest room until I found my own apartment, an eager gesture of hospitality. She was one of those people who loved to laugh at her own jokes, a preemptive strike of humor that didn’t wait for the listener’s reaction.

It felt great to be back in Taipei, this time with a clear direction and hungry ambition. Theresa’s ghosts had finally faded. I had archived the memory of her love into a closed chapter of a bygone life. It was now a place I could look back on with tender affection, but I no longer lived there.

My new colleagues were mostly Taiwanese, and a few laowai with varying degrees of Chinese linguistic competence. The office was spacious and smelled of professional comfort. Randall, the country boss, was an aging Canadian hippie hooked on nicotine-laced chewing gum, a habit born from the ultimatum his wife had given him to quit smoking. “Make yourself comfortable here,” he said, his voice flat as he leaned back in his large leather chair, feet up on the desk as if marking territory. “I heard your Chinese is excellent. I want you to get up to speed with focus groups. We do a lot of them, three or four each day, at least.” He chucked another piece of gum into his mouth, his jaw working rhythmically. “And, I’ve got plenty of projects in Shanghai. Market’s exploding there.”

Good, I thought. Mainland China was my goal. I then met Jimmy, the deputy boss, a gay Taiwanese man whose constant good mood felt like a well-maintained suit of armor. He was smart, a workaholic, and he possessed a voice that could break a heart. He worshipped Leslie Cheung, the Cantopop superstar. We became fast friends, spending Friday evenings at our preferred local joint, the Green Bar, where he would take the stage to move a room to tears with Chinese love songs.

Determined to become so indispensable that they would have to send me to Shanghai, I worked with a feverish intensity. Within months, I was running projects for international clients. Randall and I were the only laowai who could handle focus groups, but while Randall merely spoke the language, I inhabited it. I studied the original transcripts, analyzed the nuances, even wrote Chinese versions of our research findings.

I was so consumed by work that I forgot to look for my own apartment. Heather didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she began sending signals that were impossible to misread: 'accidental' touches, a bedroom door left suggestively ajar as I worked late into the night. Later, a colleague told me she had even checked our astrological compatibility before I arrived and, apparently, the stars had declared me a 'perfect fit.' She reminded me of the frustrated Western expat women I’d seen in Hong Kong, women whose romantic currency had devalued in a market where Western men sought Asian beauty and Chinese men saw Western women as aliens. Her unsolicited advances were an irritation, even an insult to my status as a newly married man. I was singularly focused on making my new career start as seamless and successful as possible. I took a day off, found a suitable place, and packed my bags that same night.

“You know I have a wife in China, right?” I asked her as I stood in the doorway, about to move into my new place. “Everyone in the office knows.”

“She’s there, you’re here,” she said.

“I’m glad I’ll be moving to Shanghai soon,” I countered.

“As long as Randall’s running the show?” she snorted, the door slamming behind me like a gunshot.

I didn’t understand the venom nor the subtext then. I assumed it was just the sting of rejection. But Heather was a woman of stalled trajectories, as I would find out. She had been sidelined years earlier when Jimmy, a natural rainmaker, was made deputy boss over her. She had trained him, and now she sat downstairs with the foot soldiers while her former student occupied a nice large office above. The bitterness was palpable.

Heather’s professional expertise was equally brittle, clouded by hair-raising ignorance and prejudices toward the Chinese. When Jimmy began funneling her projects to me, I began to openly compete with her. I provoked “friendly” differences in opinion, public demonstrations of the shallow nature of her expertise. Naturally, she began a campaign of slander, whispering to colleagues and, eventually, to clients.

I didn’t react directly. I chose the Black Heart route, a particular stratagem called 欲擒故纵 yu qin gu zong, loosen the reins to capture your prey. I let our professional differences grow, watching with delight as her efforts to destroy my reputation intensified. Until she began telling a major client that they should block my involvement. She wanted me fired.

Which placed her exactly where I wanted her.

[Photo: illustration for a Chinese story on the “Yu Qin Gu Zong” stratagem, from Sunzi’s Art of War: to capture, one must first let loose. The art of maneuvering where you grant your opponent a false sense of security. By “loosening the reins” you allow them to become arrogant and, importantly, careless enough to expose their own weaknesses, to eventually fall into a trap of their own making.]

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Lunch with my mother and Hugo became a theater of the absurd.

Her emotional crisis had morphed into a grotesque and dangerously sparse Ayurvedic diet. She shoved spoonfuls of half-cooked grains and what looked like raw grass into her mouth, with a bitterness that radiated off her like angry heat. She looked ten years older, obsessed with a statistically promised life expectancy of one hundred and twenty, which to me seemed like a long time to spend being that miserable, though I didn't share that particular thought with her. She blamed her past husbands for having wasted her life, accompanied by a threatening undertone, as if even her children were time thieves who owed her back the years she had spent raising us.

“You really think this shit is going to make you live longer?” I asked, gesturing to the brown-green glob in her bowl.

“It’s Ayurveda!” she shrieked, tapping a book featuring a wiry old man in Lederhosen.

“That hillbilly looks like a carny huckster selling erection sprays to incontinent pensioners,” I replied. “Why are you falling for this?”

She burst into tears and fled the dining room, her body bent like a life-worn old woman. Hugo slammed his serviette, probably because that’s what heros do, and followed her.

I continued with my lunch, listening to the fading rhythm of her sobs on the stairs, wondering how their marriage was faring. They had been together as not-so-secret lovers for almost twenty years before she finally disposed of my stepfather. It was a dark irony that she had pursued a career as a divorce lawyer, spending her days dissecting the corpses of other people’s unions, yet never found the courage to perform the same necessary surgery on her own. My brothers and I had spent our youth breathing the air of her second failed marriage, a toxic haze that should have been cleared decades ago.

When she finally did get rid of the guy and married Hugo, she had announced it like a press release: “The start of the longest and happiest chapter of my life!” But standing there in the kitchen, surrounded by the smell of boiled grains and stagnant resentment, it was clear that her new chapter was written in the same ink as the old one.

Looking back, the math was simple and pragmatic. My stepfather had been a high earner and with four young mouths to feed, my mother considered her social dignity as something she couldn’t yet afford to cut. Hugo was her lover, but he was also her employee, thus another mouth to feed. I guess she hadn’t considered him eligible husband material until the kids were grown and the financial pressures had subsided. And so she had traded two decades of her life for a sense of “safety” that had eventually rendered her pathologically future-averse.

I had quizzed her about those choices during my teenage years, but she’d always retreated into a prickly, embarrassed silence. It wasn’t just a lack of courage. It was a fundamental fear of the uncertainty that change requires. Even now, in her supposed “new life,” she remained stuck in her own hated past. I briefly considered telling her about the Piece of the Sky idea, that there was a version of the world where she wasn’t a prisoner. But my intuition stopped me. My mother saw the world in immutable, static compartments. The one she had claimed for herself was labeled “Wronged Victim” and the suggestion that she might need to change herself before her circumstances would shift reeked of yet another unfairness she couldn’t tolerate. I saw no point in debating a woman who found more comfort in scratching her wounds than in allowing them to heal. And in any case, the silence between us had become a relief.

Because I had stopped caring.

She didn’t care that I was down to my last few hundred dollars. I had to decline some interviews because I couldn’t afford the train fare. When I finally made it to one in Frankfurt, my cheap gray shirt and semi-shiny Chinese pants made the headhunter, a man in a sharp Italian three-piece, look at me as if I were a vagrant who had wandered into the wrong building.

I realized my mother was consciously decoupling from life. I began to view her through a detached, unemotional prism. I saw the cracks in her porcelain and wondered how many of them I had inherited. It was a terrifying thought. I now wondered if, at every critical crossroad in life, I should simply do the opposite of whatever she would have chosen. It made my urge to return to China feel overwhelming. I needed its crazy dynamism, its resilience, its Black Heart logic to keep my own fissures from deepening.

A week later, Rod, the Hong Kong boss for the American market intelligence firm, called. “Impressive. Not many gweiloh survive the trenches in China,” he said, using Cantonese slang for foreign devil. “You’re just what we need. I’m offering you a position in Taipei, to gain some experience there for a year or so, and then join our fledgling team in Shanghai to expand our business on the mainland.”

The relief was like breaking the surface of the water after being held under for too long. For the first time, my 动乱时期 dong luan shi qi, my own Years of Chaos and Turmoil (a euphemism used in China to describe the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution) felt like an asset rather than a liability.

[Photo: Cultural Revolution propaganda poster. My own ‘Years of Turmoil’ took place in the Wild South of the 90s, as described in preceding chapters. I felt, however, emotionally ‘persecuted’ more at home than in China during those years]

I left a week later, and I would not see my mother again for thirteen years.

By the time I did, those two painful months in the summer of 1995 had become a distant memory rendered opaque by ensuing upheavals and transformations none of us would have thought even possible back then.

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I arrived at my mother’s place in the late afternoon of a balmy summer day.

Ten minutes later, I was seated in her smoke-filled study to be subjected to the familiar liturgy of my own inadequacy. I said nothing. I kept my head low, letting my eyes sweep the length of the room to count the floor tiles, a silent, stupendous motion to keep from looking at the two people who regarded my return like a fresh smudge on a clean window.

“Dreaming of getting rich,” my mother said, her tone as punishing as that of a judge detailing the crimes of the accused to a courtroom that had already decided on the gallow. Trying to make ends meet, went through my head as I continued tracking the tiles.

She took a hurried drag from her Marlboro, the tip glowing with a predatory intensity that matched her gaze. “When you were barely two years old, I remember it so clearly: you took a candy, unwrapped it, and put it in your mouth. Then you saw another candy on the table, a different color. You decided you liked that one better, spat out the one in your mouth and shoved the new one in. A shocking experience!” She almost choked on her own smoke.

My crime was simply being. According to her, I was born with a rotten core, a diagnosis she had arrived at when I was still a toddler. I felt a sudden, dark temptation to ask why she hadn’t simply outsourced me to a foster home or a church-run warehouse for stray children to be “corrected” by a bunch of pious pedophiles. She could have saved a fortune on that failed investment of raising me. Instead, I merely nodded, wearing an expression of guilt-laden gratitude that was as hollow and shiny as the cheap polyester pants I’d bought in China.

I saw no point in offering any explanation, the challenges I had faced, how things worked in China, the theft, how embarrassed I felt about being forced to borrow money from them. Or the fact that I now had a wife waiting for me.

To them, China was not a nation or a culture, but a Rorschach test of their own prejudices. It was an unfathomable, alien world, an abstract concept stitched together from fragments of a dead Communist utopia and the outdated slogans of Mao’s Little Red Book. In their minds, “success” meant a steady salary, a title from a century-old conglomerate, and the quiet security of a predictable path. They applied the benchmarks of a structured society, the only ones they knew, to someone who had been fighting for oxygen in the center of a hurricane. To explain the Wild South, the theft, or the brutal man-eat-man realities of Guangdong would have been like trying to describe the color of fire to someone living in an ice cave. My silence wasn’t driven by shame, guilt or some sort of defense. It was the realization that their ignorance was an impenetrable fortress. My mother didn’t see my struggles as a battle for survival. She saw it as a moral failure of the character she had already judged when I was two years old.

Hugo studied me with a profound distaste, that I-always-knew-it glint in his eyes that belongs to people who have never risked anything in their lives. “Traders are economic parasites,” he proclaimed, sounding like a bigoted rural preacher reciting the sins of the city to a congregation of cows. “Unlike farmers and workers who produce real value.” A rich observation from a man who had ditched his own farming roots to trade legal advice, but I wasn’t about to defend the service industry or anything that I had tried to accomplish. I murmured something about getting a job as soon as possible and speedy repayment of the money I owed her. I went upstairs and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, the kind of sleep that comes when you’ve finally reached the bottom and realized there’s nowhere left to fall.

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Months bled away.

No income, just phone calls from my mother asking for repayment. Wushu suspected Shine was using me as a trophy. “I think all he wants is to hire you full-time so you can be the foreign face to make his company look international,” he said. “He doesn’t really care about the laser tag thing.” It was likely the first time Wushu had stepped out of his fantasy world and managed to see reality for what it was.

I decided to force Shine’s hand. “My partners in Shanghai are moving fast,” I told him, testing my fledgling 厚黑学 hou hei xue, the Black Heart elements of cunning. “They’re building amusement parks in Pudong. They want an exclusive distribution deal.”

There were no partners in Shanghai, of course. Just me, a fax machine, and a growing sense of desperation. Shine scrutinized me, looking for the tell. He smiled, lit a cigarette, and suggested we’d work together as national distributors for the laser tag system. “We’ll sell dozens, maybe hundreds of them to officials who need to invest their cash. But first,” he said, “I need a demo system here in Guangzhou.”

We signed the contract. Shine would pay the UK supplier directly, and I’d get a commission that would wipe out my debts. I felt like a genius, a survivor of the jungle. I returned to Foshan to wait for Shine’s bank to open a letter of credit to the laser tag system supplier. 天时地利人和 tian shi di li ren he, the stars had aligned. Or so I told myself, while the sand beneath my feet continued to shift.

My younger brother Patrick arrived for a visit. He loathed the construction dust, the shoving crowds, the smog, the frantic, animal struggle for survival. “Why are you wasting your life in this shithole?” he asked.

“I’m building something,” I said, aware that what I was trying to do felt like building a sandcastle in a hurricane.

“Yeah, well, make it work. Mom and Hugo have decided to disinherit you. They’re done with you, want to cut you out.”

It was a cold, precision-guided blow. To my mother, I was an irredeemable failure because I hadn't become a diplomat or a cog in a German conglomerate. She saw me on a downward trajectory, certain to end up in the gutter.

What shook me to the core wasn’t the loss of some future inheritance, but the realization that our bond was as fragile as a dead leaf. I had entered her life when she was just twenty-one, still a kid in many ways. She had walked away from my biological father before I was even born, and for the first four years of my existence, it was just us. A closed circuit, two castaways against the world. I believed those years had welded us together into something indestructible, despite the natural ups and down of a parent-child relationship.

Apparently, I was wrong. Now, as I was drowning in the foggy chaos of my young adult life, she watched me sink and decided to banish me from her narrative entirely.

The pain was sharpened by the sight of Ah Chun, Yin’s brother. He was a crook who had stolen my survival, a lowlife who had squandered his mother’s savings on brilliant plans such as trying to sell fancily colored Japanese condoms in a country where they were given away for free as part of the one-child policy. That was the level of his genius. And yet, he remained the untouchable, deified son. “He’s their only son,” Yin told me. “They don’t care what he does. What sort of damage he causes. He is family.”

It was a brutal lesson in the Chinese fortress of kinship in the dog-eat-dog society of China, the 人吃人, ren chi ren, or ‘man-eat-man’ world, as the saying goes. Theresa had taught me about filial piety, Ah Chun taught me how Chinese children ruthlessly exploit their parents’ unconditional protection. In China, kinship is a fortress. Confucius had taught the nation that a son must never turn in a law-breaking father. In this world, you could murder your parents and the relatives would help you dig the hole.

But that theft steeled me.

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The ceiling was a slab of grey porridge that refused to stay still.

Like a gooey swamp it moved above my head until the world finally clicked into a hard, unforgiving focus. I turned my head and squinted into the piercing morning sun.

Yin and her mother were perched on creaky wooden chairs beside the hospital bed, looking at me with the weary patience of people who have seen too many bad plays. They’d found me passed out in the rattan chair. When I didn’t respond to their prodding, they called an ambulance. The hospital had pumped my stomach, a clinical reset. A nurse drifted in, checked my pulse with a touch as light as a leaf, and told me I was fine. There were only a few pills in my stomach, the strong alcohol had put me to sleep. I was released an hour later, light in the gut and still heavy in the head.

I didn’t waste any energy on the why. I hadn’t acted with some grand, romantic intention to end my life. I had just reached a state of terminal indifference. I felt nothing. No shame, no sorrow, no anger. My heart felt like a vacuum and that suited me fine. Emotions felt like an expensive waste of time after Ah Chun’s theft had rendered me bankrupt.

As soon as I got home, I called my mother. I didn’t mention the theft, the rattan chair, or the stomach pump. In the volatile theater of our relationship, I had to focus on my next step now.

“I’m being squeezed, and it is affecting my cashflow,” I told her, my voice flat and business-like. “Clients are slow to pay, but the supplier won’t wait. I need a personal loan to tide me over.”

She wasn’t happy. Naturally. “The settlement money from my mother, Hugo and I were going to use it for farm renovations.”

Weighing her son’s survival against a new roof for a man who looked down on me because he couldn’t read me. She agreed to the loan, but it came wrapped in a layer of resentment that felt like barbed wire. I didn’t care. I needed the money to pay the bills. I told myself I’d try and ask Jacky to squeeze his brother for bigger orders. I was still trying to negotiate with an illusion.

There is a Chinese phrase for this: 骑虎难下 qi hu nan xia, when riding the tiger, it’s hard to get off. Every nerve in my body was screaming for me to jump, to run while I still could. But China has a special way of handling those unfortunate riders: if you try to pat the beast goodbye and ask for empathy, it offers you a choice between death by a thousand cuts or immediate disembowelment. So, you stay on. You cling to the fur of an animal that doesn’t care where it’s running, while all you have left is a fast-diminishing figment of hope.

The tiger bit back a few days later. Jacky called, but not with an order. “The Germans, your supplier, contacted our sourcing manager in Hong Kong,” he said, his voice dropping into a register of pity that made my skin crawl. “They offered to sell to Antonio directly. They’re trying to cut you out.”

It was a blatant breach of our exclusivity contract, a move so cold it made my heart sting. Even worse, Jacky told me they had offered Antonio Leather prices lower than the ones Rita and I had spent months haggling over.

I called Kurt. He sounded bored, the way people do when they’re holding all the cards. “The bosses say you’re not moving enough volume. China is a big pond. They don’t see why they should stay in a small boat with you.”

“Try explaining that to a judge,” I snapped. “You sabotaged me with inflated prices.”

Kurt chuckled, an annoyingly smug sound. “Here’s a little revelation for you. We can offer Antonio lower prices because we don’t have to pay Bernie his consultation fee on those sales to you.”

“Bernie? Consultation fee?”

“Your loyal employee’s husband,” Kurt said, almost whispering now. “He approached us last year. Said he knew a guy in China who could move our tannins. He negotiated a nice little kickback for himself. 500 Deutschmark per container. Just like the old days before the Wall came down. You didn’t hear it from me, ok?”

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I had a few thousand dollars left.

I turned to Rita, who had seamlessly, and happily, transitioned into her new role as my right hand in Germany while I scouted for existential opportunities in mainland China. I asked her to squeeze the German tannin supplier: we wanted exclusive China distribution rights. And a lower price.

Hu, Foshan Leather’s import manager, visited the same day to collect his “administrative fee” in cash and ask for a “favor.” His nephew, a seventeen-year-old dropout named Little Huang, needed a job. When I argued that I didn’t have a registered branch in Foshan to hire anyone yet, Hu just smiled. “He doesn’t need a contract, just a salary. Customs can be difficult even if your papers are in order. Little Huang doesn’t need much, I suggest you give him two thousand yuan a month, and I’ll make sure the inspectors don’t fine you twenty times that for wrongly declared goods.”

I understood. The law was an irrelevant piece of paper, used for origami in the back office to kill the boredom. Relationships were the only currency that carried real value.

I welcomed Little Huang as my first employee. He spent his first paycheck on a small motorbike and a haircut and occasionally showed up for work. I didn’t assign him any responsibilities, didn’t check on him, just accepted his superfluous presence. He was a human tax I had to pay to stay in the game.

[Photo: my first laptop, a small, slow, crash-prone IBM machine on which I typed out business faxes and product introductions. China had already developed Chinese character input software in 1994]

Before the containers arrived in China, I flew to Germany to sign the contract with the tannin supplier. I never actually saw the two new CEOs of the revived company, though I did notice their identical BMW 7 Series limousines. In a country where social envy is a national pastime, right up there with beer and soccer, keeping up with the Joneses is a fundamental obsession. To these two, parking matching slabs of Bavarian steel side by side seemed the ultimate manifestation of shared power: a synchronized display of status that proved they had reached the top, even if they considered themselves too important to actually show their faces.

Instead, I met Kurt, the export manager, who spent the meeting complaining about how he’d been cheated out of the company during the turmoil of reunification. Shackled to his regrets, he was a man wasting his life agonizing over a past he couldn’t change.

It made me realize how much China had changed in just a few years.

After Tiananmen, the nation performed a collective lobotomy. It simply stopped debating the past. By the early nineties, the nation had traded ideological purity for a cold, kinetic pragmatism, a frantic rush toward anything that worked, anything that built, anything that paid. Past failures weren’t resolved, they were just declared irrelevant, scrubbed from the public mind like a bad debt. It was a brutal and at the same time supremely fascinating journey, full of grotesque detours, but thirty years later, the divergence is bone-chilling.

Today, Germany feels like a museum piece, paralyzed by a narrow-minded system that worships the past, a country trapped in a compartmentalized, geriatric logic, unable to even imagine a future-proof existence. A nation that has grown blind to a changing world. The most haunting part isn’t that Germany (like other countries in “The West”, for that matter) failed. It’s that the writing was on the wall a long time before anyone seemed to notice.

I registered a small company in Germany to handle exports. Bernie was so proud putting up the copper plaque that I expected the neighborhood dogs to go into a frenzy. I visited my mother for day before flying back. Hugo drily observed I was “too young” to be my own boss.

I didn’t care. I felt in control of my fate.

A month later, the containers arrived. Hu moved them through customs without a glitch. Ah Chun, however, ruined half the tannins because he insisted on driving the forklift himself to unload the stuff from the containers, a skill he possessed only in his imagination. When he asked for a regular salary the next day, I refused.

“Why pay the kid from Wuhan then?” he asked.

“You know why,” I replied.

We settled on a commission for him if he found a client, and I paid him a flat fee to be my driver. My plan was to use him until I could afford someone better. But when I called Mr. Ren, Foshan Leather’s top boss, for the trial results, his tone had chilled. “Not as good as the other brands we use,” he said.

“The quality is A grade. Certified by the German authorities,” I replied.

“I don’t give a shit about German authorities. Talk to Ke. If you can offer us a major discount, we might use it for lower-grade leather.”

Ke, Foshan Leather’s procurement manager, informed me that since I wasn’t an “official” supplier, the administrative fees for using their import quota would have to go up. I realized then that they never intended to buy from me. They just saw me as a source of squeezable income.

A wide-eyed foreign idiot to be bled dry.

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I arrived in Guangzhou the following afternoon and didn’t recognize the world.

In early 1994, barely two years since my last visit, the city had morphed into a commercial powerhouse on steroids. Advertising was everywhere: colorful billboards choked the windowless sides of residential blocks and spilled over balconies. Every square inch of sidewalk concrete was plastered with crude stickers hawking services ranging from clearing blocked pipes to “liberating the spirit” (and certain bodily fluids) via massage.

[Photo: downtown Guangzhou 1994, local and foreign outdoor advertising, such as P&G’s shampoo brands by the sides of the flyover, had begun to drastically change the look of the city]

The streets were a collision of motorbikes, red cabs, and creaky public buses, all swerving around elderly people on Shanghai Phoenix bicycles who were doing their level best not to be martyred by capitalism with Chinese characteristics. The traffic cops, once decorated model workers, now looked like men trying to hold back a tidal wave with their bare hands.

The permanent din was physical: drivers shouting, bus ticketers screaming at cyclists, and the deafening, distorted screech of Cantopop blasting from monstrous shopfront speakers. The air was a heavy soup of gasoline, sweat, and cheap perfume, but beneath the smog was the irresistible, fatty scent of Cantonese dim sum cuisine floating from alleyway kitchens that stayed full twenty-four hours a day.

A few years earlier, China had felt like an impoverished relic of a long gone ancient civilization. Quaint, quiet and slow. Now, it was pulsating with a predatory energy, an impatient, collective drive to incinerate an unwanted yesterday and build a glitzy tomorrow out of stacks of cash. The place had turned into a vortex, and I was being sucked in with a mesmerized smile on my face.

Wushu’s apartment was on the top floor of a hideous low-rise that some developer had plonked into the old city, driven by the frantic greed to squeeze a profit from every inch of ugly concrete. The entrance looked like a factory gate, there were no lifts, and the windowless corridors felt like a prison, thick with the stale stench of rotten fish from the wet market below. But when we stepped inside his front door, a brilliant new world unfolded: a luxuriously spacious living room, a private bar, and a long balcony featuring an artificial waterfall and a collection of delicately pruned bonsai trees.

That was his life now: raising miniature trees.

Wushu had gone broke a few months earlier, and this apartment was the only thing of value left, along with his “brick”, an enormous Motorola cellphone he’d owned since I first met him four years prior. Back then, it drew envious stares in dim sum restaurants. Now, it was just a stage prop, an oversized plastic monument to better days. But Wushu clung to the wreckage of his former glory with a desperate grip, refusing to believe the party was over.

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The cost headache remained.

Rita, our new employee in Germany, obtained better shipping rates, but factory prices were still too high for us to turn a profit. Another baffling phenomenon was that as soon as we brought in new products, other East German brands in the same categories would appear in Taiwan, of the same quality but cheaper than ours.

It was something I would observe again and again: once a new product hit the market, a dozen similar competitors would appear out of nowhere with the dedicated goal to undercut and squeeze you off the shelves like a bruised fruit. Profit margins were razor-thin, and we wondered how other importers sustained their obvious losses.

Chairman Liu remarked that no Taiwanese businessman would sell at a loss unless there’s another cash cow to subsidize the obvious suicide, which was not our case. Their acquisition costs must have been considerably lower than ours. It made no sense to me, but then again, very little did.

I started putting pressure on Rita to do her East German best, to essentially hold a gun to those manufacturers’ foreheads and force them into serious discount mode. But then a more serious issue plonked from the heavens, with the hard thud of reality.

Liu came into my office one evening and placed a thin wad of cash, his Motorola TAC cell phone, and the keys of his white fin-tailed Cadillac on my desk. “Take this,” he said. “I already closed all bank accounts, I’m afraid you won’t be getting any more paychecks. Sell the car, it’s only a year old. I’m taking a flight to Venezuela tonight. Won’t be coming back for a long time.”

Through the glass partition, I saw Yijun, the young accountant, frantically shoving stacks of documents in cardboard boxes. She looked like she was trying to win a race against a clock that had already stopped ticking. I was dumbfounded. “What about Rita?” I asked. The fact that she was a “relative” suddenly weighed heavy on my mind.

“You’ll figure something out,” Liu shrugged, a look of casual indifference on his face. “Cab’s waiting. Good luck.” He shook my hand and left, and that was the spectacular end of my first full-time job.

Chairman Liu’s real estate empire had imploded. While there were plenty of businessmen with plenty of mistresses willing to purchase plenty of apartments, his projects didn’t sell. Love makes blind, they say, but it didn’t blind those businessmen to the fact that my boss was selling shoddily built crap. He lacked real estate experience, the construction companies had fleeced him, and those BMW-driving loan sharks were charging suffocating interest rates. In the end, he took whatever was left in the safe and ran.

He would never be able to return. Taiwanese gangsters were pragmatic businessmen, they had no time for maudlin emotions such as forgiveness. Forgiveness was also absent from the emotional repertoire of the Chairman’s mistress. The morning after his vanishing act, she called me on his cellphone, screaming, demanding to know where he was.

“I have no idea. I’m trying to find him myself,” I said. My standard answer for anyone who asked.

I wondered why he hadn’t told her. Perhaps it was a final, reflexive application of that misogynist male trope in Taiwan: 女人如水 nv ren ru shui, women are like water. To a man of Liu’s generation, water was something to be admired for its beauty but never trusted with a secret, it was inherently fickle and prone to changing its course with the slightest shift in the wind. In Liu’s mind, sharing a flight plan with his mistress was like trusting a current with a heavy secret that would inevitably wash up at the feet of his creditors.

She called a few more times, her voice increasingly jagged and desperate, swearing until I finally stopped taking her calls.

Half an hour later I received a call from someone else. “Houjia. Is Liu with you?” I recognized the voice: the boss of the mahjong gambling den. It turned out it was his money the Chairman had liberated. “What you doin’ with his cellphone?” he wanted to know.

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After another two months of drifting and living in a mental cocoon, I received a letter from Tommy, a boarding-school student from Taiwan whom I had met via friends a few years earlier in London.

He was a product of the island’s elite, sent abroad to acquire a posh accent and a degree while the family’s copper pipe fortune generated the required cash. He was back for a short vacation and invited me to a party at his home in an affluent suburban district in Taipei where the houses looked like the architectural fever dreams of people who had seen a picture of a French chateau in a magazine and decided to improve upon it with excessive marble and hubris.

There, I met his father. To the world, he was “Chairman Liu,” a self-made man who had turned industrial plumbing into a money-spinner. Like so many wealthy Taiwanese in the early nineties, he viewed his own nation’s future as a terminal illness. He had already bought Venezuelan passports for his family and shipped his sons to England, hedging his bets against a country that the world didn’t recognize as one. He had just gone bankrupt, though, for reasons Tommy didn’t quite understand. Likely a murky cocktail of bad decisions and murky math.

But Chairman Liu was a rags-to-riches virtuoso, the kind of man who would always land on his feet, even if the floor was made of glass. He was careful to appear grounded, wise, and reliable, a man who could see potential in a stone. He saw something in me, though I wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

I suppose my fluent Chinese and the strange trajectory from London University to the Stanford Center to a local night school import & export certificate course gave me the sheen of a useful, slightly desperate tool. He was moving back to his hometown, Tainan City, in Southern Taiwan.

It happened to be Theresa’s hometown, too.

“Join me,” Chairman Liu said, his eyes bright with predatory optimism. “I wanna do some trading, it’s quick and easy money. Let’s import German stuff.” He offered me a ‘Taiwanese chewing gum’, a lime-laced 槟榔 binlang betel nut. It was a mild psychotropic that produced a slight buzz as the red paste dissolved in your mouth, turning your saliva into a sludge that looked like a fresh crime scene. He was always chewing one, and over the years, his teeth had turned a permanent, dark crimson. I had tried it once with his son and hated the way it made my skin feel hot.

“What kind of products are you planning to import?” I asked.

“Whatever sells. As long as it’s made in Germany. Your country reunified recently, right? I heard East German stuff is cheap.” He wanted me to start immediately, sourcing products that would fit the Taiwanese market. There was nothing keeping me in Taipei anyway. A change of scenery felt like a necessity, and the memory of Theresa provided the final push. She was gone, but I told myself that spending time in the city where her ashes were buried would somehow bring me closer to her.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had a salary, a rent-free apartment, and a business card that identified me as an “Import Manager.” Liu rented an office and bought me a white, rattling Chunghwa minivan. It was a humble chariot, a vibrating little box, but it made me feel like a path was finally unfolding beneath my feet.

I developed a fantasy that Theresa had become a benign ghost, like the leads in some of the Hong Kong movies we’d ravished together in Taipei. I imagined her watching over me, nudging me in the right direction, ensuring I stayed in the Chinese world because she had looked into a netherworld crystal ball and seen that my destiny, my Piece of the Sky, was waiting right here.

[Photo: still image from the 1987 movie “倩女幽魂 A Chinese Ghost Story”, one of my favorite Hongkong films, also because female lead Joey Wong looked like Theresa]

My title made me feel important. Liu’s friends, whom we sometimes drank and sang with in cramped, smoke-filled karaoke bars, quickly corrected that delusion. They called me 小朋友 xiao pengyou, little friend, a term reserved for children and teenagers. I was twenty-four, looked nineteen, and had done nothing to justify my position. It didn’t dampen my drive, though. I worked with a frantic energy, keen to make something happen and not disappoint the Chairman.

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A week into my import & export management course, the tutor approached me with a potential part-time job.

A friend of his, the middle-aged heir to a shipping fortune, needed to pass an English proficiency test to emigrate to New Zealand. The pay was triple the standard rate for white trash tutoring. The catch was that the student didn’t speak a word of English and had no real intention of starting now.

He was a man suffocating in a life commanded and steered by others: uninspiring work, vapid social obligations, and the slow suicide of business dinners with plenty of alcohol. We were supposed to meet three nights a week for intensive study. In reality, I spent those hours as a highly paid ghost in his living room. I’d arrive early, chat with his family, watch soap operas, and eat delicate Japanese snacks while waiting for him to stumble through the door an hour late, smelling of expensive Japanese whiskey and resignation. He’d mumble a blurred apology and disappear into the bathroom for half an hour or so until his wife’s patience evaporated.

“I don’t want to leave Taiwan,” he told me during one of his rare sober moments. He nodded toward his wife, whose eyes were glued to a talk show on a screen the size of a billboard. “In New Zealand, I’d have nothing to do but watch TV with her all day. Here, my life is boring, but at least it’s my boredom.”

He’d pay me double just for showing up, compensation for the time he’d made me wait, though we both knew I was really being paid to witness his quiet rebellion. It suited me. I was making a truckload of money for doing absolutely nothing. I paid Li Juan back for the course, covered my rent, and bought rounds for my friends. It wasn’t a career, but it was a sturdy enough raft for this new project called “Independence”. I felt I had space to breathe.

Until Theresa took my breath away.

She was a vision of immaculately carved features and high cheekbones, her eyes hooded by lashes that suggested a deep, internal mystery. We met in the library where I’d been studying the mechanics of trade. We were the same age, and we shared a visceral sensitivity to each other’s hidden wreckage. Soon, our nights were a psychedelic blur of making love and reading classical Chinese 武侠 wuxia martial arts hero novels, those sprawling epics of chivalrous knights and ancient honor, penned by Hongkong author 金庸 Jin Yong, the undisputed God of the genre.

[Photo: cover of Jin Yong’s most famous novel, “笑傲江湖 The Smiling, Proud Wanderer”, my favorite Wuxia story]

We watched golden-era Hong Kong cinema, the kind where triad bosses ordered intimidatory (or worse) hits on their daughters’ boyfriends as a form of fatherly “protection.” Those silver screen stories mirrored our own scars.

“When I was eighteen, my father hired street goons to ‘have tea’ with my first boyfriend,” Theresa told me. Her father, a restaurant owner in Tainan, had used violence as a blunt instrument of paternal love. “He thought he was protecting me from getting hurt. He didn’t realize he was the one doing the damage. But that’s how families handle things here.”

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First Class Honours.

I graduated from the University of London in the summer of 1991 with a heap of praise and a cash prize. “You need to ferment,” my Chinese literature professor told me through his wildly crooked teeth, making me sound like a jar of cabbage left too long in a dark cellar. “Go to Taiwan. Mature. Then get a PhD in the States and become a professor. Chinese Literature. You’ve got what it takes.”

The idea of becoming a professional ghost haunting the silent stacks of a library and arguing over the placement of a Tang Dynasty comma felt like a slow death. But I had no vision for a life. I applied for a scholarship at the Stanford University Center in Taipei, a high-end way to kill time while waiting for some vision of a feasible life path to crystallize.

I arrived in a tropical heat that tasted like scooter exhaust and frantic ambition. The Stanford program was a linguistic meat-grinder designed to turn my already fluent Chinese brain several levels up into a native-level mastery of the language, leaving me too exhausted for existential plans.

Outside the classroom, Taipei was a captivating, schizophrenic fever dream: a fortress of classical Chinese tradition, a lingering Japanese colony, and a neon-lit vassal of American pop culture, all fueled by a brand of unbridled capitalism that made the Western world look like a sleepy retirement home.

By day, I perfected my Chinese. By weekend, I was on an Easy Rider motorbike, blurring through the tropical greenery with my Taiwanese friends.

[Photo: The author traveling along the Taiwanese east coast with his buddy Yazhen, Spring 1992]

It was a demanding, albeit aimless year. I was waiting for a sign, some cosmic flare to light up the horizon.

Nothing came.

A year later, I had grown tired of studying and waiting for some cathartic insight into my purpose. I avoided thinking about the “future”. My Taiwanese friends treated long-term visions as an expensive illusion. They were practical, training their focus on 现实 xianshi, reality, and 实在 shizai, groundedness, and not much else. Every weekend we’d get smashed at the 躲猫猫 Duo Mao Mao Cats Bar, our usual hangout, where the conversation never drifted past the next week or the next project.

“In Taiwan, imagination is just another word for a mental health problem,” a friend laughed over a glass of warm beer. “Doesn’t help you get ahead. We don’t think about tomorrow because we don’t own the rights to it. After all, we’re a country whose sovereignty nobody is willing to recognize. Not even the future.”

I was happy to sink into that collective myopia, but my mother’s slim wallet had reached its limit. She arrived in Taipei in the summer of 1992, ostensibly for a vacation and to “help” me find a job with a reputable German firm.

The woman I met at the airport, however, was not the steely divorce lawyer who had raised me. She was an emotional wreck held together by a forced smile and inner desperation. My younger brothers were throwing teenage grenades at her back home. She’d caught my stepfather in the middle of an affair. Most dangerously, she had surrendered to a self-help book, some psychological self-analysis bullshit that convinced her that her entire life was a botched experiment. It was a destructive, shallow verdict, rendered even more hazardous by the fact that the author offered no map out of the ruins.

She was so psychologically frayed that when she woke up one morning to find I’d forgotten to buy instant coffee, she collapsed into a heap of tears. She sustained herself on a pack of Marlboro and nothing else that day, and flew back home that same evening. The coffee was just the final insult in a life that was now on the verge of falling apart.

A few weeks later, she decided to reboot her existence. She filed for divorce, locked away her old life and announced that she was moving to a farm to live with Hugo, her trusted employee and the man who had been a silent fixture in her life for years. The reboot included the casual abandonment of her offspring.

“You have a university degree, Holger. Go feed yourself,” she said. It wasn’t a conversation, it felt like more like an eviction notice from the relationship we had spent almost twenty years building. She was focusing on herself now, “before it’s too late”, which also meant that my younger brothers were to be taken from high school and sent into apprenticeships.

Job hunting with German firms was a revelation. I sent out dozens of applications. Three firms sent polite rejections. Six others mailed back my resume with rejection slips stapled so perfectly, the corners aligned to the millimeter, that you knew only a truly bored, soul-dead German clerk could have achieved such symmetry. The subtext was clear: Congratulations on your degree in Chinese and Law from a British university. It’s entirely useless for any position at our company.

Fine, I thought. I’m not going back to Germany anyway.

The Brits were different. The old colonial dinosaurs like Jardine Matheson and HSBC loved London Uni and Oxbridge graduates. They took high IQ weirdos who had tortured themselves with Mandarin and recycled them into expensively dressed, sycophantic cogwheels. They either thought we were geniuses or so detached from reality that we were easily molded into whatever shape the remnants of the British Empire required. I suspected the latter. Either way, the expat bubble in Hong Kong was a gilded, pretentious cage I didn’t want to enter.

I was now an “independent adult” with a unique education that appeared irrelevant to the Western business world. The default for white guys in Taipei was teaching English, a profession populated by white trash who were there for the cheap booze and the perceived docility of the local women. I’d rather have starved than been mistaken for one of them.

Enter Li Juan. She was one of my tutors at the Stanford Program, a 31-year-old sharp, extremely well-read and mesmerizing woman trapped in the vacuum of a hollow marriage. With no children and a husband who had retreated into total indifference, she directed her academic and romantic interest toward me, offering a curriculum of literature that migrated inevitably to the bedroom. It was a fleeting adventure, but Li Juan became the mentor my mother had ceased to be.

Sensing my panic about the “real world,” she introduced me to 厚黑学 Houhei Xue, the Study of Thick Skin and Black Heart. It was Machiavelli with an (arguably more sophisticated) Chinese pulse, developed centuries before “The Prince” came off the press.

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The 1982 Chinese Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, and demonstration. A lovely piece of fiction, the kind of prose that looks majestic on a mahogany shelf but dissolves into a gray slurry the moment you touch it with a warm, inquisitive finger.

On the Square, the famed 大字报 da zi bao, the protesting students’ big character posters, weren’t really screaming for the abstract poetry of Western-style liberty. The students weren't dying for the right to vote for a different flavor of the same disappointment. They were demanding a future that didn’t feel like a dead end. They wanted the freedom to breathe without asking permission, to build a life that wasn’t a pre-assigned dark cubicle.

I identified with that hunger for choice. Back in Germany, choice had been an abstract concept to me. When I was four, I was handed an ersatz father like a faulty piece of disciplinary equipment. He came with the order to call him Dad and perform affection on cue, while my legal right to be safe from his emotional wreckage was quietly filed away as null and void.

To me, China was a different taste of oxygen, a vast, chaotic stage where I could imagine a version of myself that didn’t have bruises. The more I mastered the language, the thought and the culture, the more I realized that my Chinese friends didn’t give a damn about any lofty Western values. They were busy building livable lives out of the rubble of a century of madness.

A Chinese friend once told me: “In this country, your most precious freedom is that whenever they take something from you, you are free to go and do something else.”

He wasn’t being cynical. He was a profiler of reality. Life in China was an art form born from a century of being terrorized by foreign boots and domestic madness. By the time Deng Xiaoping took the reins of the Party, the nation had developed a taste for the practical: the freedom to chase riches and build a meaningful career, to buy a decent pair of shoes, to have passionate sex, to be left the hell alone. Nobody had the energy for the laowai missionaries who arrived with the holy intent of “changing China”. China never felt like a cage to me. It felt like a massive game of chess where, if the board was flipped, you just walked to the next table and started a new game.

Two days after my friend Zhang Bin returned to the green hills surrounding Sanming, I met my crush, Xiufen, the young woman I had met in Beijing before the massacre. We sat in a park and watched birds, a scene of urban serenity that felt like a well-rehearsed lie. Her hair was thick and fragrant, a dark silk that made the depressing atmosphere of Beijing almost bearable.

I asked Xiufen if she’d like to visit my dorm the next day. She said yes. As we walked back to her campus, we noticed the shadows following us. They weren’t trying to be discreet. They wanted us to know that our little bird-watching session had been duly recorded in the Chinese secret service’s files.

The next evening, I sat by my window like a gargoyle. The gate guard, an ancient man who looked like he’d been synthesized from the dust of his own hut, was busy drinking beer and playing cards with a couple of African students, diplomats-in-training. I saw Xiufen approach. We’d agreed I wouldn’t meet her at the gate, as a local girl with a laowai was a headline the guard didn’t need to read.

Or so I thought.

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I took the train back to Beijing one week after our evacuation.

Hong Kong had been a fever dream of luxury and safety, and I found I had no taste for it. I had three months before London reclaimed me for my final two university years, and I wasn’t about to spend them in Germany, watching my mother drown in what appeared to be a midlife crisis, gasping for air in a life she no longer seemed to understand.

“They’ll throw you in a gulag!” she wailed into the receiver. The Western media was a flood of “witch hunts” and “summary trials”, a narrative of police meeting arrest quotas like factory targets, and innocent people vanishing into the gears of the state.

“I haven’t done anything illegal,” I said, letting out a dry, brittle laugh. The laughter of the untouchable, the kind only the young and the profoundly ignorant can afford to make.

“You were on the Square. Hitler had people arrested just for knowing Jews!”

“China’s not the Third Reich, Mami. Can you wire me some cash?” I’d already made up my mind. My books were in Beijing, and I needed to find Zhang Bin.

And I needed to find someone else.

A few months earlier, I’d met a Chinese student from another campus. To me, she was attractive in that petite, innocent way that fit every cliché I’d ever nursed about Chinese women. She didn’t have my contact details, and I decided I had to see her before my return to London. And, in hindsight perhaps, to see if the fantasy held up under the new, darker light of a city under martial law.

The forty-hour train ride was a study in boredom. No handcuffs. No midnight interrogations. The hard sleeper carriages were empty cathedrals of worn and torn vinyl, and at every stop, uniformed soldiers checked my papers. When I told them I was a student returning to collect my books and other belongings, they beamed at my fluent Chinese.

It was a lesson in the theater of respect: by returning while the rest of the world was busy erecting sanctions and moral high grounds, I had signaled that I wasn’t there to judge. To them, not just my efforts at mastering their language, but my presence at this time of history was proof that I respected their reality, that I apparently auditioned for a part of the Script, even though I was far from understanding all its intricacies as yet.

[Photo: the author on the train, 1989]

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English (Deutsch unten)

Chai Lei wasn’t a fan of the ‘Goddess of Democracy’, that ten-meter-tall plaster statue that Beijing art students had slapped together at the end of May, looking like a Statue of Liberty that had lost its way in a crowd. He found the “white lady” too loud, too provocative.

Still, he held onto the hope that she might shock the government into a conversation with the protesters. A previous meeting between a feisty, pajama-clad student leader named Wu’er Kaixi and a stiff, elitist Premier Li Peng had been a dialogue of the deaf.

“Maybe they’ll take us seriously now,” he said.

They did.

The response arrived the following weekend, delivered with a chaotic, albeit lethal determination. Shortly before midnight on June 4, the campus air curdled: “They opened fire!”.

We assumed it was just another ripple in the sea of paranoia and rumors that had been drowning the capital for weeks. In our idealistic Western student logic, the idea of a government emptying magazines into its own people seemed like bad Hollywood fiction. Axel, my fellow student from London, and I couldn’t sleep in the heat, and so we grabbed our bikes and pedaled toward the center to see if the world was indeed ending.

Halfway there, we hit the first wall of overturned buses, a wasteland of broken bricks and mangled, broken three-wheelers. We locked our bikes to a tree and walked into a night that seemed unnaturally dark. Only then did we realize that the streetlights had been turned off, as if they wanted to close the city’s eyes for what was coming.

[Photo: charred buses and assault tanks on the Chang’An Avenue near Tiananmen Square]

The air tasted like a cocktail of gasoline and melted plastic, a nauseating, chemical sting that snaked into the back of the throat. As we reached a major intersection, the world suddenly narrowed down to a single, impossible image. A human body hung from the overpass, suspended over the empty, warzone-like lanes.

It looked like a person, but it was no longer a person. It was a charred husk of black and raw red, with thin tendrils of smoke still curling lazily from the head and extremities. The smell hit us then: the heavy, sweet, and cloying stench of burning human flesh. It was a predatory odor, worse than anything we had experienced in our young lives so far. To us, it was the smell of a total breakdown. Of life, of law and order, of civility. Of the universe.

Later, the state-controlled newspapers would call these lynchings the work of “Western-sponsored mobs” and crowning the dead soldiers as “Martyrs of the People.” But standing there in the heat of the intersection, there was no ideology, only the silence of the scorched remains and the lingering scent of a slaughter that nobody was supposed to remember.

My Chinese friends told a different story: of citizens watching unarmed bystanders get mowed down, losing their minds with rage and hauling hapless soldiers (farm boys who had never never seen a city building, let alone a revolution) from their vehicles to burn them alive.

[Photo: image of a soldier’s charred corpse, published in Chinese newspapers in the days after the massacre, selling the false narrative of an “armed rebellion”]

We hit the southern edge of the Square an hour before dawn. It was empty. The makeshift tents and buses, the plastic-and-canvas city of the protest, were gone. Vanished like a dream. To the north, along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, something that sounded like rhythmic rifle fire punctuated the dark, and flares bled light over the Forbidden City, making the ancient walls look like they were weeping.

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