Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

WHEN I STARTED WORK, the first question many of my co-workers asked me was not “Where are you from?” but “Are you a Christian?” Thanks to Richard’s evangelism, his company could have been considered one of the largest ministries in China. He closed meetings with his inner circle with prayers, which sometimes included praying for the stock price to improve. Prospective employees were asked if they were Christians at job interviews. On my first visit to Shanghai, I sat in on a meeting held with about a dozen other ABCs in Richard’s office while he gave a presentation about the company’s evangelical aims, complete with a map of China, the company’s footholds on the coast, and arrows pointing inland, indicating the desired direction of the spread of the gospel and probably what a lot of Japanese army maps of China looked like during World War II.

On Sundays much of the living quarters population made the short walk to the twin churches, one Chinese and one English, that Richard had built nearby and where company security guards sometimes moonlighted at the entrances. While the English church, dubbed Thanksgiving Church, was between pastors, members of the congregation volunteered to give the weekly sermon. The service was standard, raised-hands-and-hallelujahs, clapping-to-the-music Chinese American evangelical. Song leaders with guitars strummed major chords and guided the congregation through contemporary Christian rock anthems, for which the lyrics were projected onto a screen, and everyone seemed to know the tunes except me. One morning the substitute preaching duties fell on an ABC from Texas. During the discussion of a scripture passage, he focused on the word therefore, explaining that it was important to pay attention to the phrases it linked, as it signified a causal relationship. “For example,” he said, “some people believe in evolution, therefore they abort their own babies.”

Richard didn’t have to hide or minimize his beliefs or his ministry. He had the government’s full approval, and he liked to point out high-ranking officials who were in fact Christians. So the company’s employees held weekday Bible studies and prayer fellowships at their homes without fear of incursion—it wasn’t unusual to hear hymns emanating from the high-rise apartments in the evenings. Nor did anyone bother them when they went to church—as long as it was a state-approved one. At the official churches, a pastor from the government gave a fifteen-minute sermon at the beginning and then left the congregation to hold the rest of the service as it wished, a convention that seemed rooted more in insularity than in oppression. The content of that sermon varied widely. One Sunday a young government pastor gave a message at the company’s Chinese church ostensibly about the importance of a life lived with joy. He gave an example: In photographs and in movies, Mao Zedong was always smiling and jolly while Mao’s mortal enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, was always somber and buttoned up in his Western-style suit, surrounded with American weapons. So it was no wonder Mao had won the civil war, because he was full of joy.

As job and life homogenized, SMIC employees worked together, lived together, worshipped together, and ate meals together at the nearby restaurants. My guess was that it stemmed from Richard’s desire to run the company—all twelve thousand employees of it—as a family. Though it wasn’t my style, I wouldn’t have minded if I had not had to deal with the widespread expectations to attend church and demonstrate proper missionary zeal. But I soon learned that even if the government wasn’t watching me, someone else always was.

Richard couldn’t persuade me at first, but he successfully lured many other ABCs to work in Shanghai, by “selling the dream” of proselytization, exoticism, and of course, stock options. Although that first wave of ABCs at SMIC consisted of just a few dozen men and women, they had apparently demonstrated sufficient entitlement, superiority, and disdain for the local population not only to rival China’s colonial-era occupiers but also to preemptively ruin the reputations of the ABCs who followed, which helped explain why I was greeted mostly with circumspection and, when I did anything correctly or on time, surprise.

There was nothing particularly unique about misbehaving foreigners in China—the Puxi party scene, replete with a full complement of recreational drugs, crawled with them. But the Chinese reserved a special scorn for ABCs, reacting with smug disappointment when we admitted we couldn’t speak Chinese, and monitoring us for putting on even the faintest of airs. A native term for overseas Chinese is huaqiao . Hua means “Chinese” and qiao is a homonym for “bridge.” When I first heard the term, I imagined myself stretched across the Pacific Ocean with my head in America and my feet in China (or vice versa, a fitting confusion for an ABC) and getting trampled on by people from both sides.

I lost count of how many times I was asked, usually by middle-aged men, if I felt Chinese or American. They wanted me to say, “Chinese, of course,” but I always said, “Half and half,” or “Chinese in America and American in China.” One man, unsatisfied with these answers, pressed me to the point of asking, “Let’s say the U.S. and China went to war right now. Which side would you fight for?” I told him I’d run away to Canada.

The same discomforts, corruption, and disregard for the environment and human life that bothered expats living in China exist in many developing countries. But unlike our non-Chinese counterparts, ABCs can’t just dismiss them as the novelties of an exotic place. While the Holy Grail for some foreigners living abroad is the day when they become native, I wondered if that was really possible for an ABC. It took so much effort, both psychic and physical, to maintain the bulwarks defending against Chinese culture that ABCs tended to be measured when I asked them how they felt about China. A frequent answer for how long they had lived in China was “Too long.” But for non-ABCs, assimilation didn’t necessitate acquiescence. I was reminded of that every time I watched a white guy part the crowds on a French Concession street wearing a collarless shirt, loose pants, canvas slip-ons, and a giant smirk, speaking bad Mandarin with a ridiculous Beijing accent while locals practically fainted in admiration around him.

Though ABCs enjoyed many perks as foreign students or workers, it often seemed that the Chinese took great pleasure devising complications to remind us where we came from. Whether it was not getting the discount for “foreigners” at happy hour, or having to produce identification before entering the international, foreigners-only church (a white face was the best passport in China), being ignored for jobs teaching English (nearly all the private language schools requested a photograph of the applicant to weed out those with Chinese heritage), or being complimented on our English by Westerners, ABCs got the Chinese treatment at foreigner prices.

This fetishization of Westerners was perhaps the most exasperating part of being an ABC in China. Crimes against foreigners, colloquially known as laowai, were taken seriously, and just being American was usually enough to deter criminals, but the Chinese still regarded laowai as an ethnicity, not a nationality, so we lacked the necessary skin tone and hair color. For Chinese companies, there was great value to bringing on a laowai in order to legitimize it, a concept explained to me as “the nose.” If one Chinese company was doing business with another Chinese company, it was better to bring along a white guy—any white guy—because it implied that the company was international, high profile, well run, and ethical. It didn’t matter if the nose was actually in charge. I met a Canadian-born architect whose fluent Chinese made a skeptical client spend an entire meeting making her prove that she had been born, raised, and educated in the West. There was only one white person at her company, and he usually gave all the presentations, even if he wasn’t involved with the project. The company even moved him to a window office, so passersby could see him.