Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

1.

 

I liked trains as a child. Beijing Railway Station, a Soviet-style landmark constructed in 1959—the year I was born—was just two bus stops southwest of our apartment. Beijing had few tall buildings then, so we enjoyed an unobstructed view of the station from our balcony. On a clear day, it looked postcard-perfect with the elegant twin clock towers carved into the blue sky.

Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight train piled high with lumber or coal. It would be gliding along, clink clank, clink clank, at low speed because it was getting near its destination. Not far beyond the road bend was a timber mill and a coal plant, where logs and the coal would be unloaded for processing and distribution. There was also a brick factory near the river. Some of my classmates’ parents worked in those plants.

Sometimes a passenger train would come by, empty except for the driver and the conductors. It would also be running at fairly low speed—slow enough that you could see the driver’s and the conductor’s faces clearly. We had no idea why these passenger trains were passing here, or where they were headed.

Freight or passenger, full or empty, to us kids they were all trains and, at the end of a long (and mostly dull) school day, no sight was more welcome. At the first sound of a warning siren we’d all rush toward the tracks. If it were a passenger train, we’d instantly break into three groups. First were the gazers: those who stood transfixed, staring at the passing train in silent salute. Second were the chasers: those who broke into a run alongside the train, racing it, shouting at it all the while. Then a third group, far fewer in number and mostly boys, were the hoppers. They would rush up to the tracks and then, as the train was passing (sometimes hooting to try to scare off the hoppers), they’d leap up to grab one of the handles affixed to the exit door of each car, swing their suspended bodies sideways so that one or both of their feet landed on the exit stairs, and voilà, they’d be riding on the moving train!

I was always among this last group. I was one of the best hoppers. A little ditty someone made up attested to my reputation:

Class squatter, Zha Jianying!
Number One, Train hopping!
蹲班生，查建英 Dun ban sheng, Zha Jianying!
扒火车，第一名! Ba huo che, di yi ming!

The comic effect of this rhyming couplet came from the contrast between the two lines. “Class squatter” is slang for a student who is ordered to repeat a year of school due to bad grades or bad behavior, often both. Failing to rise with their peers, a squatter, usually a boy, ended up the oldest and the tallest kid in the lower class, and was basically viewed as a dumb rogue. Well, I wasn’t really a squatter, but because my birthday was late (November), and no school in Beijing admitted new students in 1966 due to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, I didn’t become a first grader until I was almost eight. And I was by far the tallest girl in my class—I eventually topped out at 5’9’’—and I had shortish hair. How do you poke fun at such a tomboy? Call her a squatter, of course!

The ditty made the rounds at my school. Boys would chant it in unison when they saw me coming on the playground. I didn’t like being called a squatter, but the second line appealed to my vanity: The way I saw it, the taunt was a grudging recognition of my prowess. In any case, it didn’t stop me from hopping on trains.

Once on, I would ride as long as I could. I savored the thrill of motion and speed, of the wind blowing on my cheeks and neck, of scenery shifting and human figures receding rapidly into the distance. I’d jump off only when the tracks began to curve in another direction. By that point, I was usually alone and far from school. I’d have to take a different, slightly longer route to get home. With my school bag slung sideways across my shoulder, I’d walk home all by myself. I didn’t mind that at all.

Another thing I liked about trains was their night departures, especially on gloomy nights when the entire city was shrouded in a snowstorm or fog or rain. On such nights, I’d lie in my bed with my ears peeled for the sound of whistling from the railway station. It would break out suddenly, a hoarse siren tearing through the night sky, signaling that a train was pulling out of the station. The long, rhythmic succession of whistles sounded both lonesome and majestic, like a war horse neighing defiantly on the eve of some awful battle. My heart swelling with awe and longing, I’d wonder endlessly about the travelers in those trains. What sort of people were they? Where were they heading? Were they leaving their families behind, or maybe returning home after a long journey? Did they miss their children? Would children be allowed on such a train? No, certainly not. I had never met a kid who had traveled one. We might mooch a bit of a ride, but none of us would be allowed inside. No, trains were for adults only. And tossing in the darkness of my bed I could almost see them: a long row of strangers, all grave-looking adults, seated cross-legged inside those splendid shining boxes, calmly smoking cigarettes or sipping tea while the whistling train plunged headlong into an endless dark expanse. . .

Oh, enviable travelers, what incredible adventures (or maybe a sweet homecoming) must be awaiting them in the distant frontiers!

 

2.

 

Finally, when I was ten and my brother Jianming eight, we took our first trip by train.

For over a year before the trip, we had been latchkey kids. Our father had been sent off to a camp in rural Henan, which was more than 900 miles south of Beijing. He would be there for years, doing farm labor alongside a bunch of “stinky intellectuals and counterrevolutionary academics.” Our mother, meanwhile, was ordered to continue her “reform through labor” at a lightbulb factory on the other side of the city. She lodged in the factory dorm and her frequent overtime shifts meant she didn’t come home often. As a “Rightist” stripped of Party membership, she was in no position to raise the issue of leaving two minors at home to their own devices. This was quite common at the time.

In the summer of 1970, before our school break started, Uncle Guan came to visit us. He was the husband of one of my mother’s three younger sisters, Aunt Dongsheng, and he was in Beijing to attend some work meetings. He proposed an idea that made me instantly wild with excitement: He wanted to take me and Jianming with him when he went back home, so we could spend the summer in their house! Mother knew I would not leave her alone until she agreed to let us go. But she hardly needed my pestering or pleading to see the advantage of putting us into a house with full adult supervision during a long summer with no school. We were, as some neighbors had remarked to her, “getting a little wild.” Plus, Mother agreed with Uncle Guan, it would make Grandpa happy.

At that time, Grandpa, Aunt Dongsheng and Uncle Guan, and their two children all lived in Heilongjiang, China’s utmost northeastern province bordering Russia. Jianming and I knew we had two younger cousins. We also knew Grandpa lived with Aunt Dongsheng’s family. But we had never met any of them.

“What about Grandma?” I once asked my mother. “Oh,” she replied, “Grandma passed away before you were born.” End of the conversation. An elliptic reply was what I typically got from our parents concerning our relatives, especially the dead ones. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” seemed to be a tacit understanding in our family regarding the past. And if I occasionally asked a question and received a minimal response, I would not press further. Was I too young to want a fuller story? Or was I afraid, subconsciously, of receiving some unwanted information which might make my life harder than it was already? I’d learned that both of my paternal grandparents had died early, before my birth. Well, fine by me, I thought, two dead landlord grandparents were at least better than two live ones. Though maternal grandparents weren’t nearly as important as paternal ones (an odd thing when you think about it, gender equality being a Chinese Communist Party slogan), I definitely didn’t need more questionable characters as my grandparents. My mother’s folks, I was told, were “gentry,” a fuzzy word harder to grasp than “landlord,” which was portrayed as a pure evil species in all schoolbooks and children’s literature. But whatever “gentry” was, it didn’t sound exactly poor to me, and perhaps for this reason, I did not ask any further about grandma.

Nevertheless, I was eager to meet this grandpa, the only grandparent who hadn’t died before my birth. He was an engineer, a fine, honorable profession, contributing to the building up of our great socialist nation. Aunt Dongsheng, I learned, was a factory technician, while Uncle Guan was a factory manager. All three worked at huge state plants producing steel and heavy machinery; all lived in the same factory compound in Fularki, a celebrated new industrial area in the city of Qiqihar, modeled after the famed “Communist Youth League City” in the Soviet Union. It all sounded grand, so much better than our pitiful family situation in Beijing, and I was intrigued by the regional names, derived from Mongolian and Russian languages. A journey to reach Fularki would be long: more than a full night and a full day by train. Finally, I would be properly seated on a train and, whoosh, headed to an exotic frontier!

Today I can hardly recall anything from that first experience on the train. It was, alas, anticlimactic and uneventful. China is now a country full of bullet trains and children are a common sight on them. My first journey on the old slow train was followed by many more; I traveled in the cheapest and most uncomfortable class: “hard seat,” then by “hard sleeper,” and finally, when I had a little more money, by “soft sleeper.” But even with a hard sleeper ticket, until recent years Chinese railway stations were always crowded, filthy, and chaotic, the interior space of the trains was always crudely furnished, poorly lit, and claustrophobic, with loudspeakers blaring propaganda music. The food was awful, the toilets stinking, the service abrasive.

Nostalgia has tinged everything in my mind. But certain things from that distant summer have not faded and never will. A swim in the Tender River (Nenjiang), for instance, on one of the few swimmable days in Fularki: the shock of the first contact, of being engulfed by an icy deluge, and later, floating on top of that vast body of water, face and feet caressed by a million golden rays, a sense of heavenly incandescence. Playing galaha under a tall linden tree with my cousin and the neighborhood girls. In Beijing, we played the same game: We’d toss a small sandbag, and flip a set of pig bones. In Fularki, kids played with the more delicate lamb bones, either polished to a creamy ivory, or dyed rosy pink. And they didn’t call it yangguai, as we would in Beijing; they called it galaha, which sounded foreign to my ears. I did not know at the time that it was originally a Manchu children’s game: gachuha in Manchurian. It spread to Peking (Beijing) and to Han children only in the 17th century, after the Manchus from the northeastern steppes overthrew the Ming Dynasty in 1644, and formed the Qing, who ruled China until 1912.

Nearly all my other memories from that summer revolved around Grandpa. If I close my eyes now, I can still see his solitary figure in his room, lost in thought, frozen on his chair like a silent statue. And I remember exactly how those hot mantou (steamed buns) he made tasted—the thought never fails to make my mouth water. Why were his mantou so much tastier than the bland ones I was used to in Beijing? Then, later, I would discover that railway stations and trains had special meanings in grandpa’s life too. . . But I’m getting ahead of the story.

 

3.

 

Grandpa was a small, slender man. He had a lean, bony face, smooth, dark skin, full lips, white hair. He dressed plainly, like everyone at the time, always in shapeless white shirts, blue or gray pants made of cheap synthetics or coarse cotton. But he kept those nondescript, uniform-like clothes very clean and neat—even the patches were sewed on with fine stitches. His hair was always brushed back smoothly. You could tell he was someone educated because he wore glasses, and a pen poked out from his breast pocket. I was a little disappointed to learn soon after I arrived that Grandpa was not an engineer at the big factory; instead, he taught chemistry at a local workers’ school. When I mentioned what my mother had told me, Aunt Dongsheng said: “It’s true, your grandpa used to be an engineer at the big factory. But that was before. He is a teacher now.” She didn’t explain why.

Teacher or engineer, I was curious about Grandpa. I yearned for his affection, but I soon sensed an aloofness in his manners. His facial expression was usually somber, and rarely animated. His eyes seemed half hidden behind his black-framed glasses. I was 10 and didn’t know words like “melancholy,” but his eyes stirred in me a vaguely uneasy feeling. The feeling lingered throughout the summer, though by the end of our stay I could see that he was a kindly man, that he was even fond of indulging us in his own way—with those mantou, for example.

Mantou, steamed wheat buns, were a plain and very common northern staple. My father and mother, both from the south, preferred rice over wheat, so our family seldom ate mantou at home and none of us cared much for them. But grandpa’s mantou were different. The first time he opened the steamer lid, my brother and I were startled by those piping hot buns: so white, so large! Each was the size of a small loaf of bread, and after one bite, we were even more astonished: they had such a tender, soft, springy texture, such a smooth buttery taste—and they were sweet! I had never thought mantou could possibly taste this good. It was also a delight to see Grandpa smiling as he watched us devour them. He made this special treat for us many more times that summer.

But such moments were infrequent. He was a man of few words: I have never met anyone so taciturn, and I can’t recall ever having a real conversation with him. He clearly preferred using his hands to using language. He could fix anything broken in the house, he mended his own clothes, he enjoyed cooking—all of which made him different from my father, who had little interest in menial chores. Grandpa spent far more time in the kitchen and musing in his room than talking with his family. He seldom laughed. And when he did, it was never a full-throttled, jovial laugh: There seemed to be a ruefulness in his voice, and the hint of an intangible sadness hovered on his face, unwilling to leave him even for a brief moment.

No, my grandpa was not a genial, spritely old fellow. He looked too serious for a kid to horse around with him. Jianming and I were actually a little afraid of him, even though he was patient and never once lost his temper with us. I guess I was also spooked by his strange habit of sitting in his room like a silent statue. This happened often when there were just the two of us at home. I’d be reading a book or doing my summer homework in my room for what seemed a very long time without hearing any sound from Grandpa’s room. The apartment was so still I would think that he must have dozed off. But when I tiptoed to have a peep, I’d find him seated there, completely lost in his own thoughts, with his eyes wide open but not looking at anything in particular. Puzzled, I’d deliberately walk by his room, make some noise in the kitchen, turn the faucet on and off, open and close the pantry door, but he’d be totally oblivious. From the open door of his room, I could see him seated in the chair facing a wall, in exactly the same posture.

In short, Grandpa was a riddle to me during that first encounter. I was a shy, awkward 10-year-old. And regardless of age, to understand a man like him, one needs a few clues; some basic information about his past would have been helpful, but no adults around me offered any. So I remained a clueless grandchild, until several years later, quite by accident, a part of his past suddenly stepped out of the shadows.

By then Grandpa and Aunt Dongsheng’s family had moved back to Wuhan, where the family came from, and now Grandpa had retired. At my mother’s invitation, he came to Beijing to stay with us for a few months. I was then a middle-schooler and a pretty avid reader of any books I could get my hands on. But Grandpa was as reticent as before; he and I still never really talked. We’d be reading quietly in separate rooms without disturbing each other. One day, when he went out for a walk, out of curiosity I went to his desk to see what he had been reading. To my astonishment they were all foreign-language books, or more precisely they were all bilingual editions of Chairman Mao’s writing, one side in Chinese, the other in French!

That evening, I had a long conversation with my mother. Maybe she thought I was now of a suitable age to handle it, or maybe she was a little more relaxed because by then the political campaigns had lost a good deal of their earlier ferocity, and although we were still poor our life had become more tolerable. It was mostly just dull. In any case, she decided to tell me a few things about Grandpa.

That’s when I learned for the first time that he had enrolled in a work-study program and gone to France at age 17. He had been a participant in the so-called Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement in the early 20th century. He studied chemistry and metallurgy in Paris. He worked part-time and summer jobs at French factories. After getting his degrees, he was employed by French companies as an engineer. He lived near Lyon, rented an apartment, and dated the daughter of his French landlord. They married. She gave birth to a daughter. By then he had spent 10 years in France.

 

4.

 

In that first revelatory conversation my mother opened the door just a crack and allowed me to have a quick glimpse. She offered a flimsy outline of Grandpa’s decade in France with some basic facts. Selected facts. Later, after Grandpa died in 1975 and the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, I learned more bits and pieces, mostly from Aunt Dongsheng, who had spent far more time around Grandpa than my mother had. Still, even today, the story remains sketchy, with many fuzzy parts, gaps, holes. I know I’ll never get the full picture.

* * *

At the railway station in Lyon, France, late 1929, a 27-year-old Chinese man is boarding a train.

The train will take him to Marseille, where he will take an ocean liner back to his homeland. His young French wife comes to see him off; she is holding their daughter, a chubby-cheeked toddler, in her bosom. As they stand on the platform outside his window, the whistle blows, and the train starts moving. She takes off her white silk scarf and waves farewell with one hand, holding their daughter with the other. As the train accelerates, she keeps waving the scarf. He waves back. He gazes at them until they become a tiny quivering pale dot and finally vanish under the wintry sky. None of them knows that they will never meet again.

The scene was among the first things my mother told me about my grandfather’s life in France. She said Grandpa had described this scene to her when she was young. The image of this separation by the railway tracks has stuck in my mind with vivid clarity ever since.

My mother’s narrative focused on the theme of patriotism: Grandpa returned from the West out of love for his country. He wanted to fulfill an idealistic vision, she said, because he was of a generation that viewed industry and science as key to saving China from a fate of backwardness. It was why he had gone to France in the first place: to learn from the West in order to bring back new knowledge and skills to modernize his homeland. Idealism, I still believe, did play a part in Grandpa’s story. But it was only a part. His real life journey, and the journeys of all those Chinese students who went to France in the 1920s, were full of complicated turns and unexpected violence.

Grandpa came from an old land-owning gentry family in Daye county, Hubei province. His father, my great-grandfather, was a progressive technocrat who participated in the famous Wuchang Uprising—the crucial military event of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution which toppled the Manchu court of Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty. He then worked in the new Republican government in Wuchang, a city which is now a part of Wuhan—where a global pandemic would originate more than a century later. My grandfather was the eldest of three sons. He was a small boy, partly due to a premature birth, but he showed an aptitude for science at an early age and was always at the top of his class. When he joined 40 other Hubei youngsters in 1919 to go to France, he was the youngest of the group. The New Culture Movement, China’s 20th century version of the Enlightenment, was in full swing then, and the two key words on its banner, Democracy and Science, captured the imagination of an entire generation. Grandpa must have been fired up by the idealistic and optimistic spirit of the times, and soon he changed his given name to Xin: New. He was now Liu Xin: Liu the New. A new era loomed on the horizon for his ancient homeland; it was his generation’s mission to bring it to full fruition.

But the old era was not dead yet. While my grandfather toiled in a faraway continent—his early letters home described rising at 4:00 every morning to practice French, working long hours in a Saint-Étienne factory to earn tuition and expenses—his parents at home took it into their hands to arrange his personal future in the time-honored way: They picked a wife for him. She had bound feet and had been to school only a couple of years, but such things were quite common among girls back then. They didn’t matter much since her family, like his, were of well-respected landowning gentry in Daye county. The Lius and the Chens knew each other well. What was more, the two young people’s birth dates matched perfectly according to the horoscope numerology of the I Ching. So it was all settled by the elders: engagement gifts were exchanged, and the wedding was to take place as soon as the groom-intended returned from France.

It was not clear how much my grandfather resisted this arrangement from a great distance. My mother told me only that she knew that he had written a letter home expressing his displeasure about the bound feet, and that upon receiving the letter his betrothed immediately loosened her recently bound feet—in Chinese the result was called “liberated feet”—though the deformity would largely remain, and she would walk with a wobbly gait for the rest of her life. But this readiness to submit to her future husband, this sweet, pleasingly pliant disposition, was thus demonstrated for all to see.

What else happened during the ensuing years? Did love descend unexpectedly? Did my grandfather and the daughter of his French landlord fall madly in love? Did they marry before or after he knocked her up? Did he inform his parents that he had married a French woman and fathered a mixed blood child? Did his French wife know that her Chinese husband had a betrothed, with “liberated feet,” nearly illiterate, and waiting patiently for his return? At that time, well-to-do Chinese husbands regularly took in concubines with the consent of their wives. But this was a very different situation: His French wife couldn’t have been expected to share him with concubines, and his Chinese betrothed could not be a concubine—her gentry family would have never allowed their daughter to be placed in that lower status.

Whatever the case, the elders in Hubei grew alarmed and impatient with Grandpa’s extended sojourn in France. Breaking off the engagement was unthinkable; it would dishonor both families. So, they came up with plan B: they decided that the second Liu son, instead of his older brother, would marry the Chen daughter. But then Grandpa’s brother suddenly got sick and died. The third Liu son was far too young to be married. Mortified, desperate, the elders put their heads together and devised plan C. A telegraph was sent to France, informing the original groom-intended that his mother had just died, and he should come home immediately for the funeral. This, the elders knew, would work.

It did. My grandfather arrived back in Daye to find his mother alive and well, and an elaborate wedding all prepared and set up. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief. How delighted they were to see the return of a prodigal son: Welcome home!

He must have felt that he had no other choice. His extensive Western education did nothing to absolve him in his head from the duties of an eldest son in a Hubei gentry family. Before saving his country from unindustrialized backwardness, he had on his hands a more urgent mission: He had to save his own parents from dishonor, he had to glorify his ancestors with a respectable line of offspring.

So he put on the bridegroom outfit and married my grandma.

None of my relatives knows what happened to Grandpa’s French wife and their daughter. Did he write them to explain the impossible bind he was in, to ask for their forgiveness? Or was he too frightened to confront the guilt of bigamy? Too ashamed of his timid capitulation to tribal custom? Did he feel remorseful toward his first wife and first child? Did he miss them, and for how long?

He had to feel something, I am certain, for him to have described that poignant scene at the Lyon railway station to my mother—his first child in China, his second daughter. The unfurled white silk scarf under a wintry sky (was it a clear morning after snow or a foggy evening?), the clueless baby girl in the breast of her young French mother chasing a train speeding away from their lives. . .

But at the heart of it was an ensnaring lie, an unsuspected, brutal separation.

He abandoned them forever.

 

5.

 

My generation, born into the “New China,” took romantic love and marriage by our own choice for granted. In our eyes, arranged marriage was one of those absurd feudal customs reeking of a patriarchal order; it would always lead to unhappiness, we assumed. My grandparents didn’t fit this stereotype. Despite only meeting for the first time on the day of their wedding and the huge educational gap between them, they were apparently a happy couple. Good partners, in parenting and all domestic affairs. Grandpa never took in a concubine, never had a mistress. Their six children, four daughters and two sons, all testified to their parents’ harmonious relationship.

It was a very traditional division of roles: He was the breadwinner, she ran the household. He directed labs, managed factories, taught at colleges, and the family moved around with his changing jobs. But he always gave her every penny he earned, and he always earned more than enough to support a comfortable life for a growing family. “Papa’s monthly pay packet usually arrived before Mama unwrapped last month’s pay,” Aunt Dongsheng recalled.

He had many foreign habits and hobbies. His Omega watch. His Parker pen. A good camera and a full trunk of French books he brought back from France. Aunt Dongsheng can’t recall the camera brand, but to this day she remembers the exotic bookmarks with colorful drawings of saucy naked women. He kept on enlarging the book collection, buying French books on all kinds of subjects. Despite the challenge they presented, he was reluctant to abandon any of his French books during their not infrequent house moves.

Photography. A serious hobby. He had a dark room at home. He was always the group photographer on the weekend outings he organized with colleagues and friends. A black and white photo taken during one such excursion survives to this day. In the photo, the men are all dressed in smart Western suits and ties, their wives in elegant cheongsam. My grandma’s belly strains against the tight silk: My uncle is on the way, while my mother stands in front of her, a chit of a girl with round black eyes and neat black bangs, dressed in a knitted sweater and a puffy skirt like a little doll. The group seems to be taking a break from a walk through a wooded area; they are arranged loosely, standing by the trees or seated on the rocks. The lighting is gentle. The air is languid.

Dancing. Another hobby. Since Grandma could never dance with her wobbly feet, my grandpa would come home from an evening dance party and amuse her by putting on a record, waltzing and twirling around her holding a chair as his dance partner.

Food. Under Grandma’s supervision the family cook served classic southern meals. Pork ribs stewed with lotus roots. Pickled vegetables. Spicy dry noodles. Sweet dumplings. Grandpa enjoyed both Chinese food and Western food, but he was firmly convinced that the latter had higher nutritional value. All his children had to drink plenty of milk—his own habit of drinking a large fresh bowl each morning lasted till the end of his life. When his eldest son was 10 months old, he ordered him to be weaned and fed him only mashed potatoes and spinach and egg yolk. But this resulted in diarrhea, and my Uncle Hangsheng was saddled with lifelong digestion problems.

Aunt Dongsheng says Grandpa didn’t impose this early Western diet on my mother because a daughter wasn’t as important as a son. The genealogy books of the Hubei Liu clan demonstrate this bias quite literally: In keeping with convention, all female names are recorded in lighter ink and small sizes—at least five times smaller than the male names. As a result, I have trouble finding my mother’s name every time I open the book. Her brothers and their sons’ names tower over her tiny name. It is male domination literally writ large.

Which makes me wonder: What if Grandpa’s French wife had born him a son? Would he have abandoned a boy? Would the Liu clan have dropped male offspring from its family tree?

Grandpa enjoyed wine and whisky, but he loved French pastry. He was an excellent baker himself. His children grew up with croissants, which they called ram’s horn buns (羊角面包, yangjiao mianbao) or crescent moon cakes (月牙饼, yueyabing) , and their father’s homemade bread. French bread, he assured them, was the best of all Europe.

It now occurs to me why Grandpa’s mantou was so different from others and so delicious. He fermented the dough, he made it big and supple, he added sugar and butter. He made it into something between mantou and bread. It was fusion food.

But while he enjoyed life in many ways, his career when he returned to China was far from smooth. Though educated “returnees” were generally held in high esteem, my grandfather struggled in the beginning. He had degrees. He had worked for two major French electric metallurgy companies. An extremely impressive curriculum vitae. But weak in one crucial area: guanxi. Network, contacts, a mentor, social relations, membership in a club or an association or a party. Guanxi was key to all good jobs in China. Key, in fact, to one’s general wellbeing.

My grandfather had a guanxi problem. The problem could be traced back to certain choices he had made when he was a work-study student in France.