A Violin and
Twenty Dollars

Prologue

Dawn

It was 1979. I remember the bridge was falling apart.

That is the first thing. Not the soldiers, not the river underneath, not the sky. The Lo Wu bridge between Shenzhen and Hong Kong was shabby, patched, worn down by all the feet that had crossed it before mine. It did not look like the door to anything.

I had bags in both hands. Big bags, small bags, the kind of luggage people carried in those days. Nobody had a suitcase with wheels. I don’t think I had ever seen one.

And against my chest, the violin.

I walked to the middle of the bridge, where the line was, and I stopped. It was a border. A real one. On one side was everything I had ever known. On the other side was a place we had always been told would “devour people, bones and all.”

I stood there with my bags and my violin and I did not move my feet.

I looked back once. On the bridgehead behind me there was a couplet, big characters, the kind you saw everywhere then: Love your hometown. Defend the motherland.

I have told this story more than once, and I have not always put the two halves in the same order. Maybe it was “Defend your hometown. Love the motherland.” Nearly fifty years is a long time for an old man’s memory. But I remember reading it. I remember thinking it was a strange thing to read at the exact moment you were leaving.

A soldier of the People’s Liberation Army stood on our side. Grass-green uniform. His clothes looked thin and poor, and so did his patience. He barked at me to hurry up and get moving.

On the other side stood a policewoman in a black wool uniform. She smiled at me. Then she pointed, very calmly, at the way I was supposed to walk.

I want you to picture this, because I still can. One uniform shouting, one uniform smiling. Same bridge. A few steps apart.

I didn’t have the words for it then. I only knew which way my feet wanted to go.

So I went.

The thickest paper in the world

In my hand I held a travel pass printed in both Chinese and English. The Chinese was in traditional characters, which I hadn’t seen in a long time.

And the paper. I had never, in my whole life, held paper that thick. Back home, paper was thin and grey. This was a document from another world, and I handled it with great care.

Was I a visitor? Officially, yes. People in my situation went to Hong Kong “to visit relatives.” Some went “to claim an inheritance.” Those were the words that got you through the stamps and the offices and the waiting. I’ll tell you later how the inheritance turned out. (Laughs.)

I had twenty Hong Kong dollars in my pocket. That was all the foreign currency a person like me was allowed to exchange. I had run around for days, to several different offices, collecting several different red seals, to get those twenty dollars. I remember the exchange rate exactly: twenty-six fen of Renminbi for one Hong Kong dollar.

Note — In 1979, HK$20 was worth approximately US$4.

I didn’t know yet what twenty dollars could buy in Hong Kong. I would find out within a few hours.

Before I left, people who cared about me came to see me off. Everybody had heard that RMB was useless in Hong Kong, so they gave me what they thought was useful. Somebody pressed national grain coupons into my hand. Somebody else said no, no, in Hong Kong you would need the international grain coupons. Nobody knew. I certainly didn’t.

Note — Grain coupons were required, along with money, to buy rice, flour and other staple foods in China.

I honestly could not tell you whether Hong Kong people needed ration coupons to buy rice. That was how much we knew about the place on the other side of the bridge. We had heard of it. We had seen, at most, a few photographs. And we were sending a young man there with a few grain ration coupons in his pocket that nobody would accept.

I also had a slip of paper with a name, a telephone number and an address. The name belonged to my maternal grandfather. I had never met him. Until a few years before, I hadn’t even known he existed.

And I had the violin. German-made. Mother-of-pearl flowers inlaid on both the fingerboard and the tailpiece. Even if nobody ever played it, it was a beautiful object. In Shanghai it was worth more than a thousand yuan, which in those days was a number that made people go quiet.

It was not there as a souvenir. It was my insurance. If Hong Kong didn’t feed me, I could play in a bar, or stand on a street corner with the case open and hope people dropped coins in it. My father had put it more simply. If you can’t make it, sell the violin and buy a plane ticket home.

All through the long train ride south, and all through the endless business of crossing the border, I held that violin in my arms. I didn’t trust a rack. I didn’t trust a stranger. I didn’t trust myself to put it down.

A name I didn’t recognize

On the Hong Kong side there was a big waiting hall, and it was full. People from every part of the country sat there with their bundles and their papers, all waiting for the same thing.

I arrived very early that morning, and by noon I was already very hungry. Luckily, at lunchtime someone came round and handed everyone a boxed meal. A free lunch provided by the Hong Kong government. I ate it, and I kept waiting.

The afternoon went on. People were called, stood up, and left. I started to feel the officials would be going home soon and I still hadn’t been called.

Then I found out why.

They had been calling my name for a long time. Over and over, on the loudspeaker. But they were calling it in Cantonese, and I didn’t speak a word of Cantonese. The sounds coming out of that speaker had nothing to do with me. As far as I was concerned, “that person” was somebody else.

I think about that a lot now. The first thing Hong Kong did was call my name. And I didn’t know it was me.

What I didn’t know yet

I have had a long time to think about what happened on the other side of that bridge. If you asked me today to sum up Hong Kong in one line, I would give you the one the Hong Kong people gave me: No one asks where a hero comes from (英雄不论出身). A person’s worth is measured by what they can do, not where they come from.

In Hong Kong, nobody cares how you arrived. Did you hide on a freight train? Swim across the bay? Climb over the hills? Walk across a broken bridge with a pass on thick paper? Doesn’t matter. You are here, so you are a Hongkonger. Nobody asks who your father is or which school you went to. They ask one thing: what can you do?

But I didn’t know that rule yet. That morning I did not feel like a hero of anything. I felt like what I was: A young man from Shanghai, already an adult, holding too many bags, who could not understand his own name.

I had no diploma. I had no family money. I had no connections. I had a violin I was not allowed to sell unless things got very bad, and twenty dollars I was about to lose.

In my head, the questions were very simple. Where do I sleep tonight? What do I eat tomorrow? How long can a person live on twenty dollars? Could someone like me actually make it here?

Chapter Nine

The Free Coca-Cola

I remember the day of the interview very clearly. Mostly because of what I was wearing.

A light-coloured suit, all one colour. The trousers were flared, and below them was a pair of pointed leather shoes. My hair was permed into tight little curls. So much hair, so curly, it looked like I was wearing a big hat. It was drizzling a little that day, so I carried a long umbrella, and I used it like a walking cane. Tap, tap, down the pavement.

There is a photograph of me in my album from around that time. Every time I look at it, I laugh. By the standards of the time, I was right on trend. Very “in,” as young people used to say. The Boy from the round-windowed tower had come a long way, at least from the neck down. (Laughs.)

Choosing each other

In those days, applying for a job at a foreign company meant a cover letter, and I had worked on mine with great care. But I knew the letter only got you through the door. After that it was what you wore. Then how you talked. And how you talk is not something you can prepare in a day or two.

There was one more thing I wanted them to understand: while you are choosing me, I am also choosing you.

The company I was going to see that day was an American company’s wholly owned subsidiary in Hong Kong. Wang Computer. Wang Laboratories, the Americans called it. Everyone in Asia called it Wang Computer.

It had been founded by Dr. An Wang, a Chinese man who graduated from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and then later earned a doctorate at Harvard. He started the company by himself in the 1950s with six hundred dollars. By 1984, Forbes would say he was worth 1.6 billion US dollars. The company employed 33,000 people and had annual sales of more than three billion. He owned fifty-five percent of it.

Wang’s word processors were everywhere. Besides all the business customers, American embassies and consulates around the world used them. At that time it was the third-biggest computer company in America.

I knew what kind of company it was. I knew they valued individuality. So my cover letter was written specially for them, carefully targeted. No formulas. No stock phrases. If you went to the Commercial Press bookshop and bought one of those books of sample cover letters and copied it out, you would ruin your chances for sure.

Who is the interviewer?

The man who interviewed me was not a department manager. There was no one from personnel there either. So who was he? He turned out to be the head of Wang Computer’s operations across the entire Asia-Pacific region.

The interview was in English. All those evenings on the Pearl channel, the church confessions, the matchbox ad, the bars in Wan Chai. This was where all that practice had to pay off.

Near the end, he asked me a question I have never forgotten.

“What kind of people really annoy you?”

I didn’t think about it very long. I gave him the true answer. People who keep asking you what you studied, and what diploma you have.

No diploma. No family money. No connections. I had carried those three things across a bridge and through every job advertisement since. Now someone had asked me what annoyed me, and out it came.

He looked at me and said: “Guess what I studied?”

Before I could answer, he told me. “Drama.”

The “big boss” interviewing me hadn’t studied business or computing at all. He had studied drama. Acting.

I almost laughed out loud. A man who had studied acting was running the Asia-Pacific region of a computer company. A young man with no diploma at all was sitting across from him, asking to be let in. Maybe the two of us were proof of the same rule.

Please stop looking

Then he said he had one request for me. He hoped I would stop looking for other jobs. But he hadn’t yet decided which department to put me in.

During the interview he had seen how much I loved computers. My hobby was writing programs in BASIC. I’d been to the Golden Computer Arcade and bought Apple II parts and soldered them together myself. And I was stubborn about getting things done; I always followed things through. They liked people like that.

Nobody asked about my diploma. Nobody asked who my father was, or how I had come to Hong Kong, or which school I’d gone to. He asked what I could do and what I cared about, and what annoyed me, and when he heard the answer, he hired me.

That was the moment I understood Hong Kong’s first rule. Not as a saying. As a fact. No one asks where a hero comes from.

I wasn’t a hero. But nobody asked.

Done

I walked out of the building and found a public phone. I called a good friend of mine at the time.

“Done,” I told him. “I’ve got it.”

“How do you know?” he said.

Let me be modest here. The big boss had grown up in Shanghai. So had I. So that interview was really decided in Shanghai. (Laughs.)

And then it hit me. “Oh no,” I said. “I forgot to ask how much the salary was.”

He had told me my position and my grade. But I had never asked about money. Not once. A young man who had arrived in Hong Kong with twenty dollars and lost all of it in half an hour, who had eaten Life Bread on the street with tears in his eyes, who had counted out a week in seven loaves: I walked out of the most important interview of my life without asking what they would pay me.

But I wasn’t worried. Not really. Because while I was sitting there waiting for the interview to begin, I had seen it.

The Pantry. A big one. Coca-Cola. Nescafé. Everything to eat, everything to drink. All free!

In the tower with the round windows, I had been the one preparing coffee and tea for everybody else. Milk or no milk? One sugar or two? Here, the drinks were waiting for whoever wanted them.

The room with the free Coca-Cola

I want to stay with that a moment, because it means more to me than it might to you. On my first day in Hong Kong, the thing I had heard about foreign companies, the one detail that stuck, was that room. A room where you could get yourself a free Coca-Cola, and a cup of Nescafé, and nobody would charge you, and you could chat with the pretty girls from the office. That same day I had cried over an eighty-cent loaf of bread.

And here it was. A big Pantry, stocked with everything, in a Fortune 500 company. And they wanted me to stop looking for jobs so they could keep me.

I didn’t know the salary. I didn’t know the department. I knew I was going to get a key to that room.

Sometimes, when people ask me what success felt like when I was young, I think they expect me to say something about money, or a title.

Honestly? It felt like a free can of Coca-Cola.