But those are only outside things. Now, as we sit in this elegant restaurant, I look like I belong, but inside I feel out of place. Maybe it’s the jet lag or the shock of encountering so many new things at once, but I feel myself beginning to spin with unwanted questions. Do I need to be changed this much by Jin for him to love me? Am I being as easily corrupted by his money as I was by Mr. Huang’s offer to buy leaves from my grove? How rich is my husband anyway? Village rich? China rich? America rich? Self-doubt and distrust are a bad combination.
As we wait for the mysterious dessert to arrive, I gently ask Jin about his business. Without hesitation, he answers my questions, saying, “You need to know everything about me, just as I need to know everything about you.” Some of what he tells me I already know. Jin was ten years old when he and his mother were allowed back to Guangzhou. His mother had a job, true, but they were allotted only a single unfurnished room in the worst of the faculty dormitories, which also served the most meager food.
“In the countryside, I’d learned to save everything I found, because we never knew when it would come in handy,” he explains. “Nothing could go to waste. Not even a scrap of paper.”
“I grew up the same way—”
“Which is why I love you.” He pauses for me to take in the statement I’ll never tire of hearing. Then, “So, as a boy newly arrived in the city, I began to collect paper trash, bundle it, and sell it to a recycling mill to earn extra money. It had to be completely under the table, because all enterprises were still state-owned.”
“Was it dangerous?”
“Definitely! But you have to remember that our country’s need for cardboard, lumber, and pulp was growing quickly. Where were factory owners going to get the materials when so many of our forests had been cut down during the Great Leap Forward?”
With the money he earned, he was able to buy necessities and extra food. He kept up with his classwork too. Armed with good test results, he got into a local college, where he studied engineering.
“Engineering?” How could I not know even that?
“All through those years,” he continues, “I kept my little business, hiring kids like me, who were poor and hungry, to collect discarded paper and cardboard. I would have been sent to labor camp if I’d been caught, but I had to do what I could to help improve my mother’s life after what I’d done.” His eyes flit off to the side for a moment, then return to me. “Besides, when you’re desperate, you’ll do anything to make life easier, even if it’s dangerous.”
When he graduated, his education and his own connections got him a job at the recycling mill, but still he kept his side business. The kids who collected paper grew up, moved on, and were replaced by new kids who were in such sad circumstances that they too risked being arrested for collecting and selling paper to him.
“When Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms in the mid-nineties,” he continues, “I was eager to participate, and I already had my own business. I easily got an EB-5 visa to come here under the U.S.’s Immigrant Investor Program. What better place to look for trash than in America—the land of consumption and waste?”
His laughter booms through the restaurant. The people at the next table glance in our direction. I blush and stare down at the tablecloth. Will I ever feel comfortable here?
“Of course, Zhang Yin had a head start. Have you heard of her?” When I shake my head, he explains. “She’s the queen of cardboard and the richest person in China. She’s the second richest self-made woman in the world, after Oprah.” (I have no idea who that is, but no matter.) “When I met Zhang Yin, she said, ‘Other people see scrap paper as garbage. You and I see it as a forest of trees to be utilized.’ I was only too happy to sell to her. I now send container ships filled with trash across the sea to China, where her Nine Dragons Paper Holdings turns it into cardboard. Goods are placed in those boxes, loaded onto other shipping containers, and sent right back to America to become trash again. The cycle continues day after day, and as Deng Xiaoping predicted, we’ve gotten rich. You’d be too modest to ask me directly, so I’ll tell you. If Zhang Yin is the queen of cardboard, then maybe I’m her two-hundredth princeling.”
I can’t begin to untangle in my head just what a two-hundredth princeling might mean.
When dessert arrives, Jin abruptly switches subjects. “I want to take you all across this country to see places for yourself, but do you already have an idea about where you might want to live?”
“Live?”
“We should buy a house here too,” he says matter-of-factly. “I already have a small house in Monterey Park—”
“A house here?” He needs to stop surprising me . . . “Why aren’t we staying there now?”
“Because this is our honeymoon! Later, I want us to have a new house, where we can start fresh together.” He hesitates before continuing. “But that’s not the only reason. You never know what can happen in China. Dog today; cat tomorrow. As entrepreneurs, we need to think about how to protect our money.” We. I like how he includes me as an equal. “So what can we do? Buy jewels and gold? Buy a hotel? Buy art? Buy wine? I’ve done a little of all that.”
“You own a hotel?” I need to break this habit of repeating what he says.
“Half the Chinese I know own hotels here.”
But that can’t possibly be right.
“I want to make you happy,” he goes on. “I want you to feel beautiful. I want us to have a glorious life together.”
When he puts it that way . . . Wow! I’m swept up. It’s very easy to be loved this way. I could even eat that dessert again too.
Mr. Kelly’s fifth-grade American history unit: Choose a person or event from the Revolutionary War to write about. Divide your report into three sections: background, the person or event, and how this person or event continues to have an impact on you, America, and/or global life today. Due January 10, 2007.
The Boston Tea Party
by
Haley Davis
Background
China is the birthplace of tea. The botanical name for tea is Camellia sinensis. It is an evergreen plant. In 782, during the Tang dynasty, China put the first tax on tea. In history, many other countries have placed taxes on tea. In the ninth century, bricks of tea began to be used as money. Some people thought this was better than gold or silver, because if you were starving, you could eat it. In the sixteenth century, tea was introduced to Portuguese priests and merchants traveling in China.
In 1650, the Dutch brought tea to New Amsterdam (what is now New York City) on sailing ships. When England acquired the colony, they discovered that the small settlement drank more tea than all of England put together! The colonists didn’t have very much to eat and drink, and they really liked tea, but in England tea was only for rich people. In 1698, the British Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on tea importation. Even though there was a monopoly, smugglers brought tea to the colonies at a much cheaper price. On May 10, 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which was supposed to help the English government pay for its wars with France and help the East India Company survive. People said that the East India Company would last forever because it was so big and strong, but actually it was failing. (My dad says that today we would call what happened a bailout.) Now the Thirteen Colonies and the colonists had to pay a big tax on top of buying their tea.