Helen Wang's Chinese Dream

Helen Wang’s Chinese Dream is a new middle class dream, an attitude toward life, money, fashion and social status. She depicts how the recent changes in China contributed to raise hope, investments and wealth. Through people’s eyes and testimonies, she tells us the stories of young entrepreneurs heading to a bright future.

I was particularly moved by Yi Fan’s story, a peasant whose parents could not even afford to pay the $1 tuition fee to give him proper education. He wanted to see the outside world, and consequently set off for Guangdong province, as many other migrants did at that time, to find a job in a factory. Then he worked as a waiter in a local restaurant and sent all the money he earned to his family. He soon moved his way up to become the general manager of the restaurant. After that, he started a mobile phone business in Guangzhou which guaranteed him huge profits.

Yi Fan’s life changed when he met a foreigner on the train to Shenzhen and was not able to talk to him as he could not speak English. He decided to learn English straight away and, in several years time, came to own a branch of an English language school, Gateway Language Village. He was then able to give his sister and brother a job and a resident permit in Guangzhou. His project for the future is to head to villages tn order to teach rural kids.

Helen Wang describes him as “spirited and confident, radiating incredible positive energy”. All these nouveaux riches’ stories she reports seem to convey a sense of extreme positivism, from inspired Yi Fan to grinning Jack Ma, Alibaba’s CEO who defeated eBay on the Chinese market. Jack Ma making his employees standing upside down on top of their head in order to “see the world from a new perspective” made me think of Dead Poets Society’s charismatic Mr. Keating who told his students while standing on his desk: “I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. The world looks very different from up here. You don’t believe me? Come see for yourself!”

China has everything American once had: positivism, energy, money, youth, a strong sense of family, an ideal to make up. Young Chinese have dreams, endless possibilities. They still need to find a way to make sense of it all though. A good friend of mine said: “Rich people in China don’t know how to spend their newly earned money. They would buy anything to enhance their social status: a bag, a house, a car. They’re acting like inexperienced kids”.

Let alone what money cannot buy, “the unquenchable search for meaning” to quote Wang. The quest for religion, spirituality and happiness couldn’t be better expressed than by Yolanda's words (Wang’s quote): “To me, […] if I don’t have religion, my soul feels empty. It is horrible. But I have been to Christianity and other religions… now I am looking into Buddhism. If I can access Islam, I will investigate it, too. My central question is: why are we living – what’s the meaning of life?”

I remember answering this question some months ago. I said: “There is no meaning but the one we give to things”. Now, my greatest fear is not that young people might not find a meaning in life, for they will find it fast enough, maybe too fast. My greatest fear is not about the answers that will fill their eyes with peace and satisfaction, for the answer is never original, seldom interesting.

My greatest fear is to be unable to predict who will be China’s top provider of faith, happiness and dreams in the years to come. Multinationals and companies worldwide are already competing fiercely to win the exclusive right to fill Chinese bags and empty their wallets, but they won’t have much power compared to the one who will win the exclusive right to fill their minds. Mao is dead. The ideology is dead. All the old values and ideals China had built for generations are dying (yes, they are). Here is a vast open battlefield and unthread paths for any preachers to come. Is everybody in? The competition is about to begin. Wake up.