Mao to Now

III. Time to Get Rich
Until the Tiananmen bloodletting, I had been planning a big family reunion. My parents, my two U.S.-born brothers and I would meet in Beijing for a visit with my father's sister and other kin. (Guangyuan had to stay behind again, this time in the States; he couldn't get leave from his job at a Taiwanese-run factory near Los Angeles.) But my parents canceled Beijing, choosing instead to visit faraway Yunnan. The province's capital, Kunming—China's "City of Eternal Spring"—was where my father wooed my mother in the 1930s. After the massacre in the square, we expected Kunming's residents to be sullen and defensive. Instead, they acted as if Beijing—and what had taken place there—had had little impact on their lives.

Kunming bustled with commerce. Roads were lined with small-scale private entrepreneurs pumping up bike tires, mending shoes and cooking up local delicacies like fried cheese. At the Stone Forest tourist site, exotically dressed tribeswomen swarmed around my diminutive mother, trying to sell her bits of intricately stitched embroidery they'd sewn at home. She nearly fell off a chair trying to escape their clutches. Her main complaint was that Kunming's sky was not the brilliant blue she remembered from her youth. "The communists have ruined the weather," she said. I laughed.

Today, living in Beijing's perpetual haze, I see the truth in what she said. Tiananmen only sped up the process. Internationally ostracized and worried that his economic reforms might stall, Deng pushed industrial growth at any cost, short of giving up one-party rule. Investors kept pouring in from Hong Kong and Taiwan, unfazed by questions of human rights, to build factories and take advantage of cheap migrant labor from the hinterlands. In 1992 the "Paramount Leader" made a whistle-stop tour of Shenzhen and other economic zones to advertise the boom at home and in the world's financial capitals. His unspoken message: forget the past and concentrate on the future. As he said, "To get rich is glorious."

Millions of Chinese needed no urging. I visited Suzhou with Guangyuan and his wife in 1992, their first trip home since moving to California. For his friends—many of whom he'd known ever since they were all sent off to work on farms together during the Cultural Revolution—the hot topic was the trend they called "jumping into the sea": quitting cushy state-assigned jobs and taking the plunge into private business. His best friend was excited and busy, darting around the country selling wool material. By phone, I talked with a cousin who had found work with a foreign oil firm in Hainan. Watching my brother joke and chat with his friends, I was nagged by the suspicion that he had lost out twice: first by getting stuck in China during the hard years and second by immigrating to the United States in the '80s, just as his generation was starting to prosper at home.

And the changes kept accelerating. In 1995, passing through Chengdu, the capital of Deng's home province, I barely recognized the place. The gigantic white statue of Mao still stood in the central square, but it was now surrounded by multicolored hot-air balloons and billboards advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, Fuji film and cigarettes. PERSIST IN REFORM AND OPEN POLICY, urged an English-language sign just under the Chairman's outstretched hand. Beijing was hopping, too. Friends dragged me off to a nightclub where a manager bragged of a new $2,000 lighting system, three foreign DJs and a cutting-edge Western feel, "like going to the U.S.A." (The club's owner had links to the PLA, natch.) I returned?to Lhasa on the same trip and found it transformed. The neighborhood below the Potala Palace teemed with hair salons, Chinese hookers and karaoke bars blaring tunes like "Material Girl." For the first time, I heard a Tibetan friend say he wanted his children to learn Mandarin so they could get better jobs. He hated himself for it.

Even some Tiananmen leaders went establishment—those who could flee into exile, anyway. Chai Ling, who in 1989 declared that "only when the square is washed in blood will the people of the country wake up," focused on her career, enrolling at Harvard Business School in 1996. I caught up with her that year while she was visiting Taiwan as a presidential-election monitor. More mature now, Chai even looked different. She had been criticized for taking some of the cash donated to student leaders in 1989 and spending it on plastic surgery to make her eyes "rounder"—and thus, she said, less recognizable during the 10 months she spent on the run in China before she escaped to the West. "I was too young back then," she told me, reflecting on the confrontation at Tiananmen. "What we really needed was dialogue." She now runs an Internet software company in Cambridge, Mass.