Annie Wang - The People’s Republic of Desire

CHUZHANG: Department chief.

YOUHUA ZUHE: Optimization.

I first met Mimi when she joined the Jeremy Irons Club I started on the Internet. We became acquainted after she came to our events a few times. Like most of my other friends, Mimi is a successful young woman with a strong Western education. Unlike my other friends, she is much more family-oriented and stable, with a loving husband named Lee and a quiet home. She is also a lawyer who pays special attention to social issues and civil injustices – maybe the furthest thing from the world of entertainment and fashion that most of my other friends inhabit. These days, I get to know her very well through working on an article that Hugh has me write about returnees and their experiences in and impact on China. Hugh is very passionate about this for some reason, so I want to do the best job possible. I am always especially proud of myself when I can make Hugh happy with a job I have done. Mimi's husband, Lee, is a well-known IT personality in China, and everybody knows that he worships his wife and has abandoned the United States to follow her around. Many in the media want to interview Mimi, but she is a very private woman. Perhaps because of Jermey Irons, or the fact that we both graduated from Cal Berkeley, she agrees to an interview.

She invites me to her home at the East Lake Villa's Dongzhimen, where I know the rent is $10,000 per month. The house is huge, full of wood carvings and bronzes she and her husband have collected from all over the world, and with a garden full of palms, bamboo, orchids, Japanese red maples, and roses. There is a conservatory, with a Persian carpet on the floor, and some soft-colored cushions. Mimi explains that this is Lee's meditation room, and he often sits in here. This house would be considered extremely expensive even by American standards, so you can imagine the status that it brings them in China.

On the living room walls are photos of the couple in places all over the world, skiing, rafting, camping, climbing, water-skiing, diving, and horseback-riding. There are also some of Lee's still-life photos, photos of broken pottery and wildflowers, and portraits of Mimi. Mimi has an oval-shaped face, olive skin, spirited eyes, and full expressive lips. Wandering around barefoot, she brings me a cup of peppermint tea, and then sits down on a Qing dynasty style bed and begins to chat with me. Celtic music floats through the room.

Standing out among the wooden and metallic art objects and expensive antique furniture is a colorful plastic baby's crib and several stuffed animals in all sorts of colors. Mimi explains that she and Lee are expecting a child, so they have been extra busy preparing the house for the new arrival.

After Mimi graduated from Beijing University in 1994, with a degree in sociology, she went to the United States to study. There she completed her law degree at UC Berkeley in 1997; she went to work at a law firm in San Francisco and quickly became one of the most successful lawyers in the company. Mimi met Lee through a friend she had in the high-tech industry. Lee was a senior manager at a nearby high-tech firm in Silicon Valley that was hugely successful. In 1998, when they were married, his stock options went through the roof. They used the money they had earned on the Nasdaq to buy a house facing the sea on a hillside in Silicon Valley. They both drove late-model sports cars, and had a holiday home at Lake Tahoe. The young, hard-working Mimi comfortably realized her American dream, and also traveled all around Europe.

Suddenly one day, Mimi was driving her car along the highway to work when she asked herself, Why did all those fairy stories she read when she was a child always end with "And they lived happily ever after"? Why didn't anyone ever write exactly what "happily ever after" meant? She thought and thought, and unconsciously drove to a nearby national park. That day, she didn't go to work but sat alone in the forest for a day, until she thought of the answer.

The next day, she resigned.

The third day, she said to Lee, "I want to go and work in the third world."

Unlike many of the other Chinese returnees, Mimi did not come home looking for new business opportunities, but instead to help better the lives of her countrymen. This was something about her that I admired immensely.

"What does China mean to you?" I ask Mimi, eager to learn why she came back to China.

"That is really very complicated. I don't know where to begin."

"Then try speaking stream-of-consciousness style," I suggest.

Mimi closes her eyes, like she is being hypnotized, and begins to speak her feelings.

"Throbbing with energy, Great Leap Forward, warmth, tears, blood, quintessence, intense, natural, transforming like a demon, unknown, crossroads, anxiety, friendship…"

"I like your description, 'transforming like a demon.' It's exactly right."

"It's true. It feels like, having been overseas for nine years and coming back to China, one can see more clearly than those who have always stayed in China. You have a comparison, a contrast, with the West, and with your own impressions of China."

"Culture shock coming back to China!"

"Right."

"Do you like this feeling of looking in from the outside?"

"I really like it. There is an ancient Chinese saying; 'I can't tell the true shape of Lu Mountain, because I myself am in the mountain.' The truth is incomprehensible to one too deeply involved to be objective. So you often have to leave to be able to observe. You should do the same for the United States."

"Then what does the United States mean to you?"

"It is the crystallization of order, the rule of law, rules, credibility, reason, and justice. It is a kind of ideal, created by humankind. This piece of land gives people hope, gives people space, lets people discover their own potential. To me, the most fascinating thing about it is that it gives people a path of struggle. This path of struggle is far more stimulating and enriching than the path of enjoyment."

"You left China in the 1990s. So did I. What do you think the differences are between this generation and the generation who left China in the 1980s?" I ask, and then go on to tell Mimi about my experience with Professor Wang Xiaoyuan, and then add, "He left China in the 1980s."

"In the United States I met many people who had left China in the 1980s, and they were all like Wang Xiaoyuan, not assimilating into the country, especially the culture, and at the same time defending themselves by saying American culture was shallow. They even still sang old Communist songs like, 'The Proletariat Is Powerful.' However, our generation is different. We read books like The Catcher in the Rye and The Old Man and the Sea growing up. When we were in China, we had tasted Coke and hamburgers, and were already familiar with English songs. So after we left China, there was not such a great contrast, and we didn't have a big problem communicating with Americans. Because of this we didn't feel particularly out of place. When I was studying at UC, our chancellor was Chinese. He said, when you are with Americans, you should be an American. When you are with Chinese, you should be a Chinese. I like that. Furthermore, wherever you are, you should treat things and people with a common heart."

"True. So many people have got it the wrong way around. It reminds me of those old movie stars from the 1980s who married foreigners and went to live overseas, only to find they were lowly housewives over there. So they always felt they had to return to China to show off their superiority as overseas Chinese." I agree with her. "You just mentioned that America is an ideal. In the beginning did you leave your native land and go overseas to pursue this ideal?"