"You can't make such generalizations. A Chinese man just won the U.S. national book award for writing in English. He's over forty."
"But he is in the States, not in China," Big Chen says, shrugging.
If age and beauty play such an important role in job seeking, what about finding a boyfriend? What are the fates of women who are neither young nor attractive? Looking at those starry-eyed young women, Baobao says good-bye to Big Chen and wishes him good luck.
She strides into the street, thinking, "What on earth are the Chinese thinking these days?" She enters a bookstore out of curiosity. On the new releases table, she sees several titles: I Say No to My Parents by Cold Mountain, age fourteen; Young and Wild by Chuchu, age eleven; and My Problems with Boys by Nuzi, age seven. Baobao can't help but laugh; there is a market for books by little rebels.
Baobao was a rare rebel in her generation. She abandoned her comfortable life for the United States at a young age. Now, a dutiful wife and mother of three, and an engineer who works nine to five and lives in a San Antonio suburb, she is not edgy or antiestablishment. Suddenly she feels old.
Walking out of the bookshop, she enters an art gallery nearby. In each painting, whether the subject is peonies or horses or monkeys or landscapes, all the painters signed their age along with their name. Yani, eighteen years old; Xixi, fifteen year old. The younger they are, the more expensive the paintings are. Since when has this old civilization become youth-obsessed? she wonders.
"Hey, Baobao. Is that you?" A woman calls her.
"Oh, Mimi!" Baobao greets Mimi, Beibei's lawyer friend, "What are you doing here?"
"I'm searching for paintings to place in my new living room," says Mimi.
"You bought another house?"
"My husband and I are expecting a baby. We bought a second home so our parenets can visit us and the baby and stay there."
"Can I go see the condo with you?" Baobao asks. "I'm thinking of buying property in Beijing as well."
"Sure," Mimi agrees.
In the Soho condominium, they and two other couples are taken on a tour of the luxurious "Manhattan-style" model homes by a young salesman.
"How old are you?" the salesman asks one of the young, fashionable-looking couples.
"Twenty-eight," the couple answer with pride.
"So young! You are from the new new generation. I admire you for having the money to buy a Soho. Are you also from the new new generation?" The salesman asks the other couple, who also look to be in their twenties.
Now Baobao understands how fast the generations change in China. The new generation used to mean the young revolution-aires, the generation that participated in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. During this time the "ideological purity" of the party was reestablished and the revolutionary spirit was rekindled. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the new generation meant those who became college students and gained Western influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were the ones who could look back at the Cultural Revolution and give it a fair evaluation with their knowledge and new ideas. Nowadays the 'new' new generation means the GenXers and GenYers who were born in the 1970s, who drank Coke at an early age, who don't have any painful memories of the Cultural Revolution, and who are more liberal in their lifestyle.
"Although we were born in the 1970s, we aren't part of that new new generation, we are the 'post-new' new generation, those born after 1976. We started to learn English in grade one. The 'new' new generation didn't start learning English until middle school. There is quite a difference here."
"So you're even younger and more successful!" says the salesman.
"That's correct!" The woman grabs her husband's arm, looking at the others triumphantly.
Baobao finds the conversation unbearable, so she speaks. "Talking about age and success, you are in no position to be competing with my friend's baby," she touches Mimi's belly. "He's already living in a big house and he's going to live here before he is even born! And Soho is only his second home."
CHUZHANG: Department chief.
YOUHUA ZUHE: Optimization.
85 Mimi and Lee
I first met Mimi when she joined the Jeremy Irons Club I started on the Internet. We became acquainted after she came to our events a few times. Like most of my other friends, Mimi is a successful young woman with a strong Western education. Unlike my other friends, she is much more family-oriented and stable, with a loving husband named Lee and a quiet home. She is also a lawyer who pays special attention to social issues and civil injustices – maybe the furthest thing from the world of entertainment and fashion that most of my other friends inhabit. These days, I get to know her very well through working on an article that Hugh has me write about returnees and their experiences in and impact on China. Hugh is very passionate about this for some reason, so I want to do the best job possible. I am always especially proud of myself when I can make Hugh happy with a job I have done. Mimi's husband, Lee, is a well-known IT personality in China, and everybody knows that he worships his wife and has abandoned the United States to follow her around. Many in the media want to interview Mimi, but she is a very private woman. Perhaps because of Jermey Irons, or the fact that we both graduated from Cal Berkeley, she agrees to an interview.
She invites me to her home at the East Lake Villa's Dongzhimen, where I know the rent is $10,000 per month. The house is huge, full of wood carvings and bronzes she and her husband have collected from all over the world, and with a garden full of palms, bamboo, orchids, Japanese red maples, and roses. There is a conservatory, with a Persian carpet on the floor, and some soft-colored cushions. Mimi explains that this is Lee's meditation room, and he often sits in here. This house would be considered extremely expensive even by American standards, so you can imagine the status that it brings them in China.
On the living room walls are photos of the couple in places all over the world, skiing, rafting, camping, climbing, water-skiing, diving, and horseback-riding. There are also some of Lee's still-life photos, photos of broken pottery and wildflowers, and portraits of Mimi. Mimi has an oval-shaped face, olive skin, spirited eyes, and full expressive lips. Wandering around barefoot, she brings me a cup of peppermint tea, and then sits down on a Qing dynasty style bed and begins to chat with me. Celtic music floats through the room.
Standing out among the wooden and metallic art objects and expensive antique furniture is a colorful plastic baby's crib and several stuffed animals in all sorts of colors. Mimi explains that she and Lee are expecting a child, so they have been extra busy preparing the house for the new arrival.
After Mimi graduated from Beijing University in 1994, with a degree in sociology, she went to the United States to study. There she completed her law degree at UC Berkeley in 1997; she went to work at a law firm in San Francisco and quickly became one of the most successful lawyers in the company. Mimi met Lee through a friend she had in the high-tech industry. Lee was a senior manager at a nearby high-tech firm in Silicon Valley that was hugely successful. In 1998, when they were married, his stock options went through the roof. They used the money they had earned on the Nasdaq to buy a house facing the sea on a hillside in Silicon Valley. They both drove late-model sports cars, and had a holiday home at Lake Tahoe. The young, hard-working Mimi comfortably realized her American dream, and also traveled all around Europe.