Quotes of the Day
Twelve years ago Shu Yin Lee was a young American who pretty much thought life couldn't get any better. He was a vice president at Goldman Sachs, working in Hong Kong. He had a $10,000-a-month housing allowance, a paid-for membership to a fancy club, a private Mandarin tutor coming to the office every day, and a princely investment-banking paycheck. And he was all of 27 years old. "I remember thinking once, what's wrong with this picture," he says. "And the answer was: pretty much nothing."
In the coming years, Shu, like so many other Americans of Chinese descent, watched the economic rise of China with keen interest. He had been born in Hong Kong but left for suburban New York City with his parents when he was just a toddler, making him, as he puts it, "thoroughly Americanized—more Woody Allen than anything else." The stint with Goldman in Hong Kong had rekindled his interest in China, however, and though his career brought him back to the U.S. in the mid-1990s, the lure of what was happening on the mainland proved irresistible. Two years ago he accepted an offer from U.S. hedge-fund manager James Rosenwald to set up shop in Shanghai, where Shu runs a China fund for Rosenwald's firm, Dalton Investments. He is also director of Dalton affiliate Grand River Investments, a private-equity firm that, among other things, invests in and manages high-end real estate in Shanghai, a city crawling with the new rich. Shu himself recently bought and has been refurbishing an elegant old house in central Shanghai. He's now 39, and, he says, "I don't have a lot of complaints with this picture, either."
Chinese Americans have been part of the economic fabric in China since the country began reopening for business in 1978. And though no one has good statistics on exactly how many are now working in China, suffice to say there are so many that they tend to lump one another into an alphabet soup of classifications. There are: ABCs (American-born Chinese); NCAs (native Chinese Americans—those born in Taiwan, Hong Kong or elsewhere in the diaspora); and even, Shu jokes, "ABAs—Americans born in America, who just happen to be Chinese." They all come to China for obvious reasons: cultural familiarity, language skills, personal connections through friends or relatives.
The growing opportunities for Chinese Americans in China act as a useful barometer of the country's economic progress. A decade ago, Chinese Americans were to be found mainly in the big consulting firms, or in management positions at the joint-venture operations that were a foreign company's only way into the market. Now, they are almost everywhere, including prominent positions in high-profile Chinese companies.
Take Cynthia He. The 30-year-old Beijing native—her parents moved to New York when she was 15—is now the manager of investor relations at Baidu, the search company that recently went public in New York and is taking on Google in the red-hot Chinese Internet market. (Google's China chief, Kai-Fu Lee, is among the more prominent Chinese-American executives in the country.) How He found her way back to the country of her birth is not unusual. After graduating from New York University she got a job at Standard & Poor's as a derivatives analyst. She had been "very happy," she says, living in New York's East Village after college, but a few years of "numbers crunching" at S&P bored her, "and I suddenly began thinking that I'd had this previous life, my life growing up in China, that I wasn't really tapping into." She quit S&P, got an MBA at Columbia University and headed back to Beijing without a job after graduation. She immediately hooked on to a big American public-relations firm, and less than two years later got head-hunted for the top investor-relations job at Baidu.
But looking Chinese and being American can bring some particular stresses in China, even for poised professionals like He. "There are cultural differences that you have to become attuned to," she says. "I've been at meetings when I've been very blunt in pointing something out, and there will be an awkward second or two of silence, and then someone will politely say, 'Well, that's a very American way of looking at it,' which is another way of saying, hey, will you tone it down a bit!"
He thrives in China's growing economy by offering professional skills that are—even in a country of 1.3 billion people—in relatively short supply. But as China continues to grow, and the country continues to educate its people to meet the demands of a market economy, the window of opportunity for Chinese Americans will begin to narrow. Daniel Shih believes that has already started to happen. A Taiwan native who became a U.S. citizen in 1984, Shih, 54, was president of Motorola China from 2003 till last year, managing over 10,000 people. He says the days when Chinese Americans could go to China and write their own tickets are close to being over. China is now a much more competitive job market even for well-educated, highly skilled workers. "The question to think about now is, why me and not a local?," says Shih. "What's the value added that I'm bringing? Companies, no matter where they are from, are going to hire a local person more cheaply unless you're really bringing something to the table." And with China's growth still at a breakneck pace, "there are more and more people with more and more skills. It's already happening." Who knows, a few more years and there may be another acronym added to the alphabet soup: CASH—Chinese Americans who Stayed Home.
- Bill Powell | Shanghai
- Seeking Roots—and Fortunes