A little over 20 years ago, a man I respected offered me a job I was interested in. This sent me into a panic.
I had been living in Singapore for eight years and was going stir crazy. Following two imploded Internet startups and the collapse of the dot-com bubble, I had switched to public relations, where paychecks were more reliable. Singapore is great, but very small. In those days you could reach the entire Singapore technology press corps by standing on the right street corner and shouting, though this was frowned upon.
In the early 2000s, if you were casting around Asia for The Action, there was only one answer. China had just acceded to the World Trade Organization, was open for business and on a globalization rocket ride. A Singaporean friend of mine from startup number 2 had spent some time working in Beijing and came back with tales of adventure. It was big! It was booming! Keep one hand on your wallet!
Dazzled, I started studying Mandarin in 2002. Every ethnic Chinese child in Singapore gets rammed through Mandarin tuition by anxious parents, so tutors are abundant. After a quick search, I hired a mainland Chinese woman named Kuan Yu.
Tempered by the expectations of white-knuckled parents grappling with Singapore’s ruthlessly streamed educational system, Kuan Yu was no-bullshit. This was good. I was 34, an age by which the brain develops a hard patina to protect itself from novel ideas and languages. My weekly sessions with Kuan Yu were intellectual waterboarding. I had homework and textbooks, the notorious “Practical Chinese Reader” series. These books acquainted me with Gubo and Palanka, the Dick and Jane of elementary Chinese language instruction. I spent two years trapped with Gubo and Palanka. Gubo and Palanka can burn in hell.
Gubo: Good morning Palanka!
古波:早上好,帕兰卡!Palanka: Good morning Gubo! What are you doing today?
帕兰卡:早上好,古波!你今天在做什么?Gubo: Today I will burn in hell!
古波:今天我要下地狱灼烧!Palanka: What fun! Would you like to take some dumplings for your mother?
帕兰卡:真好玩!你想给你妈妈带一些饺子吗?
Learning Chinese characters is like blacksmithing. You just have to put them on an anvil and hit them with a hammer enough times. In this metaphor, the anvil is a sheet of grid paper and the hammer is the pen you use to write them for hours on end—with correct stroke order!—until they punch through your brain patina.
The first time I left Beijing to go back to Singapore for a visit, the cops x-raying my bag at Beijing Capital Airport got very excited. My Mandarin was just good enough to gather that they thought I was trying to smuggle cash out of the country. They opened my suitcase, fished out a plastic bag with blocks of paper rubber-banded together inside and triumphantly dumped 1500 Chinese character flashcards onto the counter.
If characters were brute force, tones were witchcraft. The bane of the CSL student, the source of much accidental ridicule. (Ha, ha! You said you write with a vagina!) Tones are also what makes Chinese dialects world-class for puns. Other than with my most stock phrases, I was never fluent enough that tones were an intrinsic part of words rather than an extra component layered on top like confusing linguistic garnish.
Me, trying to wrap my head around the third of Mandarin’s four primary tones: “Wait, down THEN up?”
Kuan Yu: “Yes, sort of, unless the next syllable is also third tone, in which case…”
Me: [Head explodes like that dude in Scanners.]
My wife, Olivia, typical quadra-lingual Singaporean, mocked me. “Good thing you’re not trying to learn Cantonese!” (Six primary tones, notorious head exploder.)
Kuan Yu scolded me, “Don’t speak Mandarin with your wife. She will not be patient and it will discourage you. Also, Singapore Mandarin is…” She trailed off and wrinkled her nose in linguistic disdain.
After two years of working with Kuan Yu I started to think about finding a way to get to China. The best scheme seemed to be attending a full-time language program in Beijing. But which one? How to engineer it? I found creative ways to procrastinate.
And then my friend Paul offered me the job. Paul ran a regional comms agency headquartered in Hong Kong. He and I had been talking for a while. I liked him and thought that they might offer more regional scope. I was home in San Francisco for Christmas in 2003 when Paul extended his offer in email. This trashed my vacation as I spent days pinwheeling on the decision.
I knew that if I took the job, my chances of propelling myself to China would plummet. New job. New commitments. Probably kids in the future. General inertia. Paul’s offer forced me to choose, and I chose to go to China. He was gracious about it, but now I was committed and needed to put a plan into action.
I started researching language programs in Beijing, the city I wanted to be in. The default move was to study at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), in the northwest part of the city. But there was a cloud of other programs that operated in the same district. Online, there was no consensus on the best program. Eventually, I decided on an outfit called Worldlink Education, which offered a three month, full-time summer program, with housing.
Worldlink was not BLCU. There was some hand-waving about BLCU. Some retired BLCU instructors? A vague aura of BLCU adjacency? They would parcel you out to BLCU for instruction, or you could elect to study through their in-house program, the Beijing Chinese Language Academy, or “BCLA” (cough).
Whatever. YOLO. I paid the deposit and told my employers that I would leave at the end of May. In early June 2004, I flew to Beijing, leaving Olivia behind with the cats. I’d never set foot in China. As I’d done when I moved to Singapore in 1995, I was hurling myself into the unknown.
As a language program, Worldlink was passable. There was a perfunctory, one-page “placement test.” The instruction quality varied wildly from teacher to teacher, and I had two false starts before they organized a class with a decent instructor at the right level.
As a way of getting to Beijing so I could get a feel for the city and explore opportunities, Worldlink was a gold-plated success. The apartment was decent and right next to the Wudaokou light-rail station. There were abundant amenities in the neighborhood. Worldlink had lots of useful advice for n00bs. “Don’t eat the one-kuai skewers they sell on the roadside,” said an Australian administrator during our orientation. “You have no idea what the meat is.”
Gubo and Palanka were great for “Let’s make noodles!” or “We’re going to the park!” But they were entirely useless for “I need to get Internet in my apartment,” or “What’s going on with my water bill?” or other real-life situations. Every aspect of daily life that I managed on my own was a triumph. Bought groceries! Rode the subway! Took a taxi! Ordered in a restaurant! Exchanged pleasantries! GOT INTERNET IN THE APARTMENT! I felt like a fish that was not just out of water, but that had landed on a planet where the very concept of water was alien. I loved it.
I publicly journaled all of this in what became a long-running blog of my life and work in China. My very first entry (June 12, 2004), was incisively titled, “Nothing here is in English.” This was obvious, but also the defining experience of my early weeks in China. One of the first things I did was steal a menu from a restaurant and laboriously translate every item so I wouldn’t starve to death.
Pleco, the great Chinese smartphone dictionary, wasn’t a thing in 2004. (Nor, for that matter, were smartphones.) The vanguard of electronic dictionary technology was a company called Besta that made criminally user-hostile devices that were like Chinese Speak-and-Spells for masochistic gnomes. Otherwise, it was a printed dictionary. Translation was very hard to do on the fly.
Smartphones and online translation engines killed whole swathes of movie complications. I am sad that we’ll never get a Mission: Impossible movie where Tom Cruise has to sweatily look up four Chinese characters in an 800-page printed dictionary while the clock on a nuclear detonator relentlessly ticks down.
Ving Rhames [nervously, over earpiece]: “Ethan…twenty seconds!”
Cruise [suspended on wires, mopping brow, frantically flipping pages]: “Uh…bow radical plus eight strokes. No, wait…nine strokes…uh…”
[Mushroom cloud]
My Worldlink classmates were great fun. Many were college students. Lots of Americans, some Brits and Australians. Everyone was excited to be in Beijing. Free time was devoted to exploring the city, especially its drinking spots. I heard whispers of mysterious places called “Houhai” and “Sanlitun,” and a bar called “The Tree.” We drank cheap, watery beer on hot evenings and recklessly pounded stacks of mystery skewers. With another student I started a habit of long, exploratory walks across Beijing that I kept until I left.
I had several of the defining experiences of the wide-eyed foreigner in Beijing. I was waylaid by the Tiananmen Square “tour guides” who touted cheap art. I was yanked into family photos with Chinese provincial tourists excited to meet exotic westerners. I appeared in a television commercial for a male virility tonic called Hotpop, apparently to help sell the idea that it was wildly popular with (ostensibly) virile Americans. For 300 renminbi in cold cash, sign me up! Pints of Beijing Asahi could be had for RMB3 at a neighborhood restaurant we nicknamed the Electric Cactus Garden due to its wild exterior decor, so this was real money.
I loved being in Beijing. Not the legendarily bad air, of course. But beneath the perma-haze of aerosolized heavy metals were energy, history, and colossal scale. Stalinist government blocks dominated the center of the city, but eccentricity and artsyness flourished at the margins.
As the summer wound down, I started looking for work in the city. An industry contact back in Singapore gave me an intro to the Beijing office of a global PR firm, which helped me to land an interview. On a sweaty, late-August day, I put on the one white business shirt and tie I’d brought to Beijing and flagged a taxi to town.
I’d blown all my virility-tonic ad cash on cheap beers and mystery skewers, so I hailed the cheapest possible taxi for the 40-minute ride downtown. This was a Xiali, a subcompact rattletrap that compensated for lack of air conditioning by funneling superheated exhaust fumes directly into the cabin. Beijing’s brutal August sun turned the Xiali into a toaster oven. By the time I got to the China World Trade Center, then the most glamorous business address in Beijing, sweat had leached a diagonal stripe of black soot out of the seatbelt and printed it across my chest like a silkscreen. The agency’s HR man was unimpressed. “Next time, take an air-conditioned taxi. We’ll pay for it.”
The head of the agency’s Beijing office—I’ll call her Carol—was a former Chinese diplomat and perhaps the only native Chinese then running the Beijing operations of a global PR consultancy. I confessed to her that my Mandarin was crappy and she laughed out loud. “I’m not hiring you for your Mandarin! I have 70 Chinese people who speak perfect Mandarin!”
Carol said that most of their clients were the China offices of global companies whose working language was English. Native English speakers were helpful for managing them and working with foreign press. My technology and media background were useful, and I’d been in the city long enough that I was unlikely to suddenly flee in frustration, which was apparently a risk with newly-arrived foreigners. Carol offered me a job as a manager in the technology practice. The agency would arrange proper visas for me and my wife. Amazingly, my elaborate stunt to move to China had worked.
There were a few foreigners in the office, but most of the team was Chinese. As a prestigious foreign consultancy, the agency could skim the butteriest cream of local applicants. All of my Chinese colleagues were bilingual and most had attended super-elite Chinese universities: BeiDa, RenDa, Foreign Studies and such. For a while I had an intern (BeiDa grad) who was rumored to have had the second-highest gaokao score in his province. They were hard-charging, creative and fun to work with, and they were the embodiment of China’s global aspirations in the post-WTO era. Many of them have since emigrated to the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
My Chinese colleagues were also very good at their jobs. I only had two years of comms experience and was still in learning (read: ignorant) mode. I look back on my six years at the agency in Beijing as my true education in comms and I owe a lot to my colleagues. In my first year on the job, they straight-up rescued me from disaster more than once. I was also fortunate to find a mentor in David Wolf, an American on the team who had already had a long career in and around China.
Carol had grown up in Mao-era Harbin and once told me, “the only things to do in Harbin in winter were drink and fight.” This explained a lot. At a regional retreat in Shanghai, a few months after I started, she boozily slapped me in the face for refusing to engage in a suicidal drink-off with a large man representing the agency’s Sydney office, causing her to lose face in front of the Australians! But she also taught me tons about Chinese public affairs and crisis work. I worked for her for six years until leaving to run APAC regional comms for Motorola Mobility in 2010.
In 2004, “blogging” was the bleeding-edge of the social web. The public journal I’d kept of my time as a language student had evolved into an ongoing blog focusing on communication in China and general wiseassery. I was early to the trend and grew an audience, including much of the foreign press corps in Beijing, then a plum assignment and way-station for future executive editors and editors-in-chief. I became a source on comms matters in China, including government communications. The blog also became the foundation of many of my friendships, as I plugged into a burgeoning community of China bloggers.
Carol hated my blog with rigorous consistency. On several occasions, she suggested that it would be better for everyone if I, you know, stopped. In one performance review, she noted that my key opportunity for improvement was political astuteness.
She was probably right. The early 2000s were a time of opening and foment, but this was still China and anyone’s visa could be mysteriously un-renewed if they were sufficiently annoying. More than once, after pushing the button on a post analyzing some element of government communication (the Songhua River pollution crisis; the contamination of the dairy supply with melamine; unrest in Tibet; etc.), I would wonder if this would be the time I’d get a knock at the door. Fortunately, the authorities were too busy worrying about actual journalists to pay attention to some idiot’s blog. Carol never gave me an ultimatum, and I never stopped writing.
My Mandarin got better out of necessity, but I was spoiled by my bilingual colleagues. I never developed the same fluency as friends who were either more disciplined or spent years as the sole foreigners in provincial backwaters where even Mandarin was the number-two language after some impenetrable local dialect. But I was self-sufficient and could travel, make conversation and manage my life. Not bad, given my robust brain patina.
I am sure Edward Said would have had something to say about this, but I have a theory that every westerner who lived in China thinks they were there at the best time. Perhaps we could call this syndrome “main-character orientalism.” Sometimes relative hardship is the yardstick. Sure, you had to bike three hours each way for cheese, but I had to sign a confession for failing to register the birth of my child with the police on time.
But I will make a case for the period between WTO accession and the Olympics as a great time to have lived in Beijing. The economy was capital-B Booming. There was a broad sense of optimism and engagement propelled by the approaching Olympics, growing integration with the global economy, and breakneck urbanization and development. Beijing’s art and culture scene was lively. Chinese citizens were starting to use the Internet to push back on official narratives and propaganda and the Great Firewall was still permeable. In my travels around the country, I was greeted with curiosity, warmth and hospitality.
A lot has changed in twenty years. I benefited from a time when the intersection of China and the west was a well of opportunity, even if many of the defining stories of the era were cautionary business calamities. It was a time when an American of modest experience and crap Mandarin could propel himself to Beijing and build a durable career. When I left China, in 2013, it was simply because I’d been abroad for a long time and Motorola Mobility offered to move me home to the Bay Area, which seemed like a nice place to raise my young son.
I’ve been thinking about the summer of 2004 because I find myself once again at a professional inflection point. The Bay Area has indeed been a great place to raise my son, and working at Intel for the past eight years has been fascinating, and a privilege. (Exciting times in the chip industry!) But I’ve grown restless again and I’ve always had one eye back across the Pacific.
Tomorrow I start a new job leading global media relations at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The chip industry is at the very center of technology and geopolitics. TSMC is the largest, most advanced and most important chip manufacturer in the world and therefore, I’d venture, the most important company in the world.
I’ll be based in the Bay Area until 2026, after which the plan is for me to work in TSMC’s headquarters in Taiwan. I’ve only been to Taiwan once, so this will be an all-new adventure. Time to get back into learning mode, dust off those Mandarin skills, and see if I can punch a few traditional characters through my even thicker brain patina. At least I have Pleco now.
It’s 20 years to the month since I started work in Beijing as a wide-eyed foreigner and relative PR newbie. It’s a different time, I’m at a different stage of life, and this is a very different job. But there is a pleasing symmetry to the timing and I am excited to leap into the unknown again.