I Was Simon Song

This is the first installment of the China Chronicles (aka the Last of the Laowai or any other twee alliterative pair that you'd care to substitute). In Part I, I introduce elite higher educational consulting in China, a dizzyingly disproportionate world in which teams of Ivy League grads sit around conference tables in sleek skyscrapers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing, earning doctors' salaries for reviewing the homework and planning the futures of "clients" who have only recently sprouted body hair.

In Parts II and III (forthcoming), I discuss what it was like to live in China during the pandemic, as well as the ominous shift in mood after President Xi bypassed the two-term limit in place since Chairman Mao's disastrous latter days, deciding instead to star in an IRL adaptation of 1984. In addition, I recount some wild stories stemming from my relapse into prescription opioid and benzo addiction during my time in China.

Skyline of Shenzhen, my Chinese hometown. It has a population of almost 13 million and is located just across the border from Hong Kong in Southern China. Shenzhen was a fishing village until the 1970's, at which point the Mainland Chinese government began building it up as a rival to HK. Due to the preponderance of finance and tech companies headquartered in the city, as well as its balmy weather, it is often referred to as China's Silicon Valley.

I. 

The cursor blinked uncertainly over the Student Name field. Are you sure that’s your name? It seemed to ask. Positive that you want to go through with this? “Student Name: Simon Song,” I began typing; “Date of Birth: 11/14/2006.”

At the top of the page was a banner for Northfield Mount Hermon, an elite boarding school in Massachusetts whose campus and endowment could be mistaken for those of a liberal arts college. NMH was a place of chapels and uniforms, French Crops and brahmin noses. It was the kind of preppy institution that my public high school classmates and I would have snubbed our decidedly un-brahmin noses at. (We would still have sold them weed, of course).

“Hey, Simon. We’re in the Yale Room today,” I called from the corner of the lowlighted, luxe waiting area five minutes later. We walked down the hall, a gauntlet of American luminary portraits – Oprah and Michelle Obama, Tom Brady and Steve Jobs. We passed rooms named after each of the Ivies. I had been trying to get Cici, my boss and the CEO of Pinnacle Education, to add someone cool to the portrait collection, maybe a Joan Jett or a Jonathan Franzen or even someone so badass that she only had one name, like Gia or Madonna. So far, no dice; no dice.

The fact that these portraits and these rooms were on the twenty-second floor of a skyscraper in Shenzhen, a city of 12.6 million people on the southern coast of Mainland China that some called its Silicon Valley, never failed to drag me out to sea on a riptide of jamais vu. Then again, despite the jarring juxtaposition, there was an underlying logic. Many of these famed figures had risen from obscurity to immortality, just as Shenzhen – an undeveloped fishing port into the 1970s – had grown up to not just rival, but surpass Hong Kong, the city across the border. It was now home to Tencent, Huawei, China Merchants Bank, Ping An Insurance, and more top-flight tech and finance companies than I could list on two hands. 

This afternoon, Simon was aflutter with talk about a trip that he had taken with his science club. They had traveled to Guilin in nearby Guangxi Province, a place of twisting mists and oddly shaped mountains that reminded me of those unfortunate penises that look like tree roots. There, they had taken geological core samples from a set of caves bearing inscriptions from as long ago as the Tang Dynasty (619 AD - 906 AD). It was reassuring to see Simon restored to his usual animated self. Last week, he had fallen asleep during a bathroom break in the middle of our two-hour lesson. (As he had offered his mortified apology, all I had been able to think about was how you fall asleep while using a squat toilet). 

Simon had several interviews coming up, first with a company called Vericant that recorded a generic preview interview to send to multiple schools. Later on in the application season, he would meet with admissions staff and alumni interviewers at the high schools themselves or when they were visiting China. 

I remembered what Cici had told me when we signed Simon: “He’s a great kid. Second place in a national mathematics competition and first place in an international robotics competition. Ninety-two TOEFL, Exeter hopeful. But he’s a little shy. Some of these students, Brian, they need some time to catch up with the American kids in terms of personality…” 

“What do they do, order that shit from a factory?” I had responded; I was the poster child for Western personality. 

Cici had a big head atop a yoga body. Her eyes were large and somehow self-illuminating, and she had the lush lashes and oval features that the Chinese coveted. She also had several million followers on WeChat, the Chinese social media, payment, and transportation app. Cici never wore the same outfit twice. On the day that we had discussed Simon, she had been wearing a black velvet villainess pantsuit. Cici claimed that she had studied at Harvard, always in those exact words: “I studied at Harvard.” Occasionally, I struggled to understand her English. Basically, I thought of her as the Gatsby of Shenzhen. 

Back to Simon and his interview prep. Adolescent acne was digesting a third of his face, hopefully to pave the way for something better to come. Simon was a self-contained kid with the soul of a scholar. He noticed small alterations, like when I switched colognes or changed my sock color. As we took our seats in the Yale Room, Simon pulled a rock from his pocket, a gray-black, postmodern glob about the size of a life-threatening tumor. This one was ugly, marred by tiny pocks and larger, cream-colored splotches. Simon had regurgitated rocks and their histories before; I thought of him as a geologic Napoleon Dynamite. 

“See this?” Simon asked. 

“Yup. It’s a rock,” I affirmed. 

“It’s a kind of shale. See these tiny holes? They’re from cyanobacteria, maybe from 3.5 billion years ago. Only 300 million years after the Earth cooled down! And there’s another kind of rock in the caves, which has calcite in it. If you hit it with UV light, it glows red. During the Tang Dynasty, they thought these caves were holy, maybe because they saw them glowing at night…” 

Simon, too, was aglow. He sounded confident, enthusiastic, knowledgeable; I knew that we had it. I asked Simon to tell me about his visit to the caves, this time in a more organized and succinct way. Then, we ran through how he could adjust the story to accommodate multiple angles of approach. (What’s your favorite subject? Science → science club → rocks. Tell me about an extracurricular activity? Science club → rocks. Tell me about a trip you took? Science club → Guangxi → rocks). 

I had discovered that successful interview preparation didn’t require anticipating every possible question; it had more to do with developing a few strong, versatile responses to form the core of the conversation. I liked interview prep, and I was pretty good at it (just ask any of my bosses from the jobs that I never should have gotten). 

“Simon? One more thing, okay?” I asked him as the end of the session drew near.

“Sure, Brian.” 

I employed my best it’s our little secret tone.

“Cici is going to tell your mom that we practiced this answer, and your mom is going to tell you to run through it 157 more times,” I warned him. “Promise me that you won’t do that, okay? The schools will know that it’s rehearsed, they’ll assume that it’s inauthentic because of that, and boom, we’re done. The way that you said it today was perfect. Understand?” 

“Got it, Brian,” Simon said. He really was a solid kid. 

Pictures of my second apartment in Shenzhen, which was located in the city's Grand Theatre district. It was a two-level, two-bedroom affair with a spiral staircase (!) and interior windows in the bedrooms (!!), which allowed me to torment my fiancé and poodle with my laser collection. Note the absence of sheets underneath the comforter, a classic junkie chic design element.

II. 

For his thirtieth birthday, I gave John Friedman a T-shirt that said “All my dreams are dead.” He was my coworker at Pinnacle, a Tisch School stoner with brooding good looks who had moved to LA after graduation. Friedman had gotten one big break, a Taco Bell commercial that ran during the Super Bowl, in which he played himself as a stoned, aimless boyfriend. Then, he blew the thirty grand on coke and came to China to advise our students on how to walk the path of success. 

Tonight, we were dining al fresco at a restaurant called Azurro, run by a Florentine couple, where tortelloni, osso buco, and Malbec would quell Friedman’s malaise for a time. It was a Friday evening in late October, and the stifling humidity of the long, searing summer had finally lifted. A playful breeze tousled Friedman’s unwashed hair, and Shenzhen was verdant with bushes bearing pink and white flowers that were all the more beautiful because I would never know their names. 

As our appetizers arrived, Isabel joined us. Izzy was a poem and an incantation: Pink and black, a brazen Brazilian beauty who looked like a sophisticated Shakira. We had met during undergrad at Cornell, after which Izzy had finished an M. Ed. at Harvard while I dropped out of medical school. If it weren’t for Izzy, I would still be sleeping on a mattress on the floor of my Williamsburg sublet, which was stained with the acrid sweat of opioid withdrawal. During the five months before I left for China, the stain had become increasingly defined, differentiating into a head and torso, then sprouting stumpy arms and legs. 

The three of us were the elite of the American educational consultants in China, a group smaller and more inbred than my high school class in the Ewok Upstate New York town that I grew up in. Together with Dora, another Harvard Grad School of Ed aluma; Josh, a chemical engineering doctoral student at Cambridge; and Izzy’s sister Sofia, who had graduated from U Mich - Ann Arbor, we had founded a loose confederation of higher education consultants known as College Nation. We were wanderers and misfits, and we were now in the profitable but unenviable position of selling a dream that, in one way or another, hadn’t panned out for us. 

We had colleagues from Penn and Yale, MIT and Amherst. Then there were the Oxbridge alumni and the other UK grads, plus a handful of consultants from continental Europe, Canada, and Australia. These were all significant study abroad destinations for Chinese students, but in terms of prestige, American schools had always been number one. 

Between Friedman, Izzy, and I, we pulled in an easy half a million USD a year, and that number was growing. In a city where I could eat three takeout meals for 80 RMB (10.99 USD) a day and rent on my swanky apartment near the CBD was only 7000 RMB (961.58 USD) a month, it went a long way. 

“Hey, guys,” Francesca, the owner’s wife, greeted us. Tanned and taut, in a short, golden dress plated like body armor, she was as sleek and shiny as Shenzhen itself. 

“Chi è l’uomo triste?” (“Who is the sad man?”) She asked me sotto voce. 

“This is my friend John,” I responded in English.

We were living well, and we had two whole months free after the March 15 transfer application deadline each year, during which we strolled along boner-optional beaches in Thailand and took in continental Europe at horse-and-buggy paces. All of this was true, and yet what we were pulling in wasn’t even a drop in the bucket of the Chinese private education market, an industry valued at 500 billion RMB (78 billion USD) a year when I arrived in 2017. 

It had started in the ’80s and ’90s, when a burgeoning Chinese middle class sought to provide its children with supplemental tutoring as well as alternatives to the brutally effective state educational system, in which high school culminates in a comprehensive exam, the Gaokao, which constitutes a single-variable admissions system. 

In pursuit of competitive advantages, the Chinese middle and upper classes began to send their sons and daughters abroad for college. The Chinese often compare themselves to water – ancient, ubiquitous, changeable, and, properly harnessed, unstoppable. What began as a trickle in the ’80s and ’90s had become a deluge by the time I entered the industry, with over 350,000 Chinese students matriculating at US colleges and universities per year by 2018. 

As competition intensified and it became increasingly difficult for Chinese students to attain top-tier acceptances at American universities, an entire sub-industry of summer programs in China and the US, led by American faculty specializing in every conceivable subject, popped up. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, an increasing share of the most competitive students further improved their chances by attending high school in the US. Of course, as the Chinese secured US and Canadian residency or citizenship for their children, many additional students who had been raised in China and were morally, culturally, and intellectually Chinese matriculated at US institutions as citizens or residents of the US and other Western countries.

New Oriental is the flagship Chinese educational consulting group, a listed company with a market capitalization of 14 billion USD in 2017. It has been plagued by cheating scandals virtually from its inception in 1993. The company’s consultants have been accused of writing personal statements for their clients; duplicating certificates from huge national contests so that multiple students applying to different schools could bolster their applications with the same achievements, a problem compounded by the long and often generic titles of these competitions in Chinese; and forging transcripts with the attention to detail of currency counterfeiters. In one instance, a female educational consultant allegedly put her head in the lap of a young man who was being interviewed via Skype, whispering answers to him as each question was presented; the interviewer initially mistook the black hair visible at the bottom of the frame as cat hair until a round hairline and smoky eyes entered the picture. 

I had to give it to Cici: Pinnacle prospered on the strengths of its students and programs. Cici required each contract student to take lessons on prose and poetry, science and history, and speaking and writing, all led by native-speaker consultants like me. A yearly contract with Pinnacle cost a minimum of 250,000 RMB (34,112.00 USD), with substantial bonuses contingent upon acceptances. Many students engaged with the company for two-year terms to afford themselves more preparation time. The hourly lessons, of course, were extra – at a rate of 1500 RMB (206.11 USD) per hour.

Cici sidestepped the worst of the industry’s problems by creating an elite, boutique consulting firm that accepted only those students who were so competitive that it was virtually impossible for them to fail in the admissions process. How could a motivated middle school or high school student who had access to an entire team of Top 20 college grads for support and enrichment for years prior to the admissions process, who would spend a dedicated summer preparing for the SAT, and who had essentially unlimited funds for extra programs, projects, and preparation, not end up competitive at the highest level? 

By the time that they were accepted into America’s best colleges and universities, my students were walking refutations of the stereotypes about Chinese students. They were bold, innovative thinkers who transcended geographic and disciplinary boundaries. They were refined and worldly, having lived in multiple countries with dramatically discrepant social and political systems. And they were humble. I was invited into their homes for thank-you dinners, where I would often find a pair of clown-sized indoor slippers awaiting my big laowai boats. It was my most fervent hope that, returning from their studies after having absorbed the best that Western democracy has to offer, my students would act as a critical mass of intellectuals who would transform Chinese society according to the freedom, equality, and justice that they had seen we Westerners fumbling toward. 

Of course, there were bound to be a few exceptions. The day after my dinner with Friedman and Izzy, I was meeting with another new student named Jack Lian. Unlike most of my students, who came from families based in first-tier cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai, Jack was a provincial princeling whose father had made a fortune as the owner of one of China’s few wine labels. I remembered Jack’s sharp features and anchorman hair; he had distinguished himself by his lack of participation in my personal narrative writing workshop. When I had tasked his group of students with writing a short story about values in action, he had rolled his eyes and said meiguo (“American”), as though only an ingenuous American could be dumb enough to believe that people really had morals. 

Jack’s father, a portly man wearing alligator loafers that weighed in at at least a grand, was with him today. I asked my Chinese colleague to translate for me as we consulted Mr. Lian about his family’s preferences regarding his son’s high school. Elaine and I asked about size and location, educational philosophy and extracurricular offerings. We were met with the same response each time: “Rank,” Mr. Lian directed, “we will go by the school’s rank.” 

I changed tactics and asked Jack to introduce himself in English. 

“I like racquetball,” he offered. 

“Do you practice at school or in a gym?” I followed up. 

“My dad built me a court in our basement,” Jack answered. 

I was so alarmed by Jack’s strained, garbled responses that I considered walking across the hall and telling Cici that I refused to work with him. Cici did this with a couple of students per year, usually offering some explanation calculated to produce sympathy for the student. 

“Please write the first couple paragraphs of Jenna’s personal statement for her, Brian. She’s having a hard time with mental health, and I’m really worried about her.” Sometimes she’d say something more direct, like “Brian, his dad is head of this company or that government division.” Still, I stuck to my guns. All of my students had to take my weeklong personal narrative composition class. The ideas and language for their personal statements had to be their own. I would not ghostwrite. 

That didn’t mean that Cici wasn’t up to other shady shit, of course. She regularly advertised deceptively, such as when she marketed Friedman’s summer drama camp as “NYU Drama Camp.” Her WeChat was full of innuendo about backdoor connections with American admissions officers, and she had once shown Izzy an email from an admissions director at one of the top two U.S. prep schools asking which two of her students they should accept that year. (Cici being Cici, she had chosen two of her VIP students, both capable but not nearly at the top of that year’s cohort, because they had paid extra for their contracts). 

I knew that Cici was courting former admissions officers from Duke and Harvard to develop “a more systematic program,” which set RICO bells ringing in my head. I had begged for two years now for her to allow me to take on a couple of pro bono students per year, perhaps a talented kid from a rural province or an Uyghur, a member of the much-persecuted Muslim minority in Xinjiang, many of whom were allegedly being detained in forced labor and cultural indoctrination camps.

“There are too many good students whose families have money to work for free,” Cici had chided me. 

At times, I was able to assuage my conscience by telling myself that I wasn’t providing much more help than I had gotten with my own application from my mother, a criminal lawyer whose wordsmithing was legendary. And my students were already at such a disadvantage in so many ways. After all, they came from a culture in which academic writing of this sort wasn’t valued, which considered the type of introspection necessary for narrative writing to be uncomfortable and vaguely narcissistic. My kids had had to master two languages as different from each other as languages can be, one of which (Mandarin, of course), was reputedly the most complex of them all. 

Still, every time that a student, parent, or colleague asked for a favor and I let a boundary slide a little, I felt a tug that was all too familiar from my past: The feeling of losing something as insignificant as a single feather, which, ignored often enough and over a long period of time, would eventually result in losing my ability to fly. By teaching my students that money and connections were essential to advancement, reinforcing external metrics of success, and participating in a system that hopelessly favored the rich, was I really helping to seed China with students who would have the faith and idealism necessary to transform our world? 

Pics from the drone shows commemorating the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China (October 1, 2019). I highly recommend viewing this one-minute video of the joint show put on by Shenzhen and Hong Kong, which I attended. I don't have adequate words for how privileged and proud I felt in those moments.

III.

If you had told me in 2018 that in two short years, my concerns about undue influence and unfair advantage would seem minor, almost trivial, within the bigger picture, I would’ve called you crazy. 

I had arrived in China at the tail end of a golden period, during which Chairman Deng Xiaoping and his successors presided over unprecedented economic and social opening up, which resulted in the greatest economic expansion in history. The 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, celebrated in October of 2019, was one of the most powerful moments of my life. I sat with a group of friends from the U.S., U.K., Poland, Iran, and Egypt as the Ping An Tower, the world’s fourth tallest building, flashed through a rainbow of colors; the rest of the buildings of Shenzhen’s CBD lit up in unison. In the next moments, 800 drones rose into the night sky, executing complex whirls and pirouettes as they, too, blinked brilliantly as stars. I watched awestruck as the squads of drones formed images of Chairman Mao and the buildings of Beijing’s Forbidden City. In potent crimson, they spelled out the revolutionary slogans that had motivated the Chinese people as they built a new country after the collapse of Imperial China in the early twentieth century, which had been followed by a brutal Japanese invasion and a civil war that rent brother and sister apart. 

These slogans had been the sustenance of those who had survived the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, during which as many as 36 million Chinese died due to inclement weather, ineffective agricultural policy, and Chairman Mao’s desperation to establish China as a grain exporting power. No doubt there had been countless times when these words rang hollow, conjuring vivid dreams destined to dissipate into the gray fog of reality. But here I was, 70 years later, witnessing what I intuitively recognized as one of history’s great inflection points as these promises came true. With little more than peerless tenacity and cunningly leveraged late-player advantage, the Descendants of the Dragon had once again established their country at the forefront of history. 

Lying in the soft grass of the People’s Park as a kaleidoscopic firework show capped the evening, I felt ineffably proud of my own modest contribution to this great effort. Let’s face it: Chinese society had a leanness, a cohesion, and a focus that contemporary America lacked. They’ve got us beat, part of me wanted to begrudgingly admit. 

Still, there had been ominous signs from the time of my arrival. President Xi advocated a return to austere, restrictive Maoism, reversing the tide that had carried China forward throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, when China’s rulers had envisioned China modernizing and liberalizing until it achieved some optimal hybrid of Eastern and Western social and political characteristics. In November 2018, mere months after I had arrived in China, President Xi effectively abolished the two-term limit that had been in place since Chairman Mao had made disastrous mistakes during his latter years in office. 

It began with the arrest and imprisonment of artists and lawyers who spoke out against the government, deemed to be spreading corruptive Western influences. Next, there were crackdowns on “sissy boys” and the VPNs necessary to bypass the Great Firewall, without which Chinese citizens can only access state-approved websites, effectively preventing them from viewing the vast majority of Clearnet content. Then, as the pandemic raged, I was confined to my apartment for months at a time under the “two points, one line” system that forbade me from going anywhere other than my place of employment and my apartment. Even a quick detour to the grocery store was forbidden. I went a little mad in my solitary confinement; I perfected the skill of isolating a single grain of rice with my chopsticks.

In October of 2022, I texted my friend Jing an offhand comment about the Bridge Man of Beijing, a lone protester who had ignited a wave of dissent when he hung a banner bearing anti-government slogans off a bridge in Beijing. Jing, who had been educated at China’s prestigious Wuhan University and Heidelberg University in Germany, was a corporate lawyer whose lively, openly critical political commentary had formed the basis of much of our dialogue during my early days in Shenzhen. 

“What are you thinking, Brian,” Jing hissed down the telephone line. “They will be monitoring for keywords. You are jeopardizing us both.”

Through this and similar incidents, I became acquainted with autocracy not just as a textbook term, but also as a novel element in the air, a highly reactive species that stifled conversation and suffocated hope. Unexpectedly, it opened doors rather than closing them: In hotels and apartment complexes alike, I noticed more and more doors left open throughout the day and early evening, a throwback to Cultural Revolution times when the Chinese did this to demonstrate that they had nothing to hide. My Chinese friends assured me that their people had endured imperial rule for centuries. We know how to survive under dictatorship, they assured me. Besides, our country is too big to be democratic. Their poorly cloaked despair frightened me more than I can articulate; dread became my constant companion.

Inevitably, the educational sector was targeted. Beginning in July of 2021, when President Xi decried the private education industry as a “stubborn malady,” there was a sweeping crackdown on companies like New Oriental, English teaching centers, and boutique consulting firms like Pinnacle. Although Pinnacle avoided problems by rebranding as an “educational technology and innovation company,” a change in title that had no effect on operations, hundreds of similar companies shut down as the government sought to ensure that the only voice that its young students heard was the monotone sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. 

Elsewhere on the chessboard, Beijing began to encourage a series of mutual recognition agreements between Chinese universities and their western counterparts. Supposedly designed to facilitate transfer of credit between equivalent educational tracks, these programs are often entirely financed by Beijing, and they allow it to exert the same influence on Western curricula that it already has on Hollywood cinema. Given the enormous importance of Chinese students’ tuition dollars to the colleges and universities that enroll them each year, it is unlikely that these schools would risk disrupting such accords by teaching content deemed verboten by the CCP, which would jeopardize the competitiveness of their programs. And, as China seeks to attract leading Chinese-American businesspeople, intellectuals, and athletes, these agreements provide one more means for reabsorbing talent that might otherwise remain in the West. 

Foreigners like me, who had intended to stay in China long term, began reevaluating our plans with our Chinese spouses. Expat friends departed in droves as the government continued its campaign against foreign influences, which inspired rabidly xenophobic TikToks about “Why I’m Proud Not to Be an American'' and “How to Avoid Diseased Foreigners.”

Against this ominous backdrop, I no longer had the luxury of worrying about the ethical nuances of my strange profession. More students than ever were seeking to study in the US, and I simply wanted to get as many out as possible. I was terrified to consider a new China in which entire generations would never be able to browse the internet to make contact with conflicting viewpoints, much less to participate in open dialogue about governmental policies and failures. 

In my blackest thoughts, though, there lurked an even deeper fear. Western democracies were unprecedentedly besieged by corruption, doubt, low participation, and efficacy challenges. I was shamefully aware that I was part of the problem. When my Chinese friends charged that there was “too much freedom” in the United States, I couldn’t help but feel that they were referring to people like me: I had taken liberties with my liberty, setting my compass to whatever ephemeral desire entered my mind, leaving chaos in my wake. I had forgotten one of the first principles of democracy, namely, that freedom is commensurate with responsibility, and that to have one without the other spells personal and societal disaster. 

Most of all, I feared that President Xi might actually be making the correct decision in closing the country off to destabilizing influences. In a world where technology allowed both information and disinformation to travel at lightspeed, in which our thoughts and actions are increasingly subject to manipulation by parties with technological advantages and nefarious intentions, perhaps a top-down, rigorously controlled system was necessary. Maybe they’ll beat us after all, I considered during my darkest moments. Maybe it’s better this way. 

As I glanced through my Facebook contacts one day, scrolling through the Jays and Peters and Tonys who I had taught, I came upon Jack Lian, the wine heir. After a year of intensive English lessons, he had improved enough to attend a boarding school in Virginia. Now, three years later, I was surprised to see a rainbow filter applied to Jack’s profile picture. It showed him beside a bright-faced, blonde young man in black tie finery, their hands around each other’s waists. 

Had Jack remained in Mainland China, I knew, he would likely have been disowned for this photo. He would certainly have found it difficult to secure housing and impossible to gain employment with this as his WeChat avatar. Instead, like many of my queer Chinese friends, Jack would have been pressured into a marriage of convenience, probably with a lesbian, and they would have turned to adoption or surrogacy to provide the grandson demanded by the Confucian family pyramid. In the U.S., by contrast, Jack had been given a little grace, some extra space in which to discover himself. In Jack’s sure smile and steady gaze, I saw that, for one student, at least, it had made all the difference.