Is This Even A Real Job? Faulty Memory China, Introduction
In which our narrator recycles some old writing from an abandoned book about living in China and passes it off as new material.
It’s the first of June, 2018, and the heat is unbearable in the mid-afternoon. This is usually a calm time around the Alibaba office, the slanting sunshine lulling everyone into a productive rhythm. The small courtyard in the centre of the seven modest buildings comprising the company’s headquarters is completely empty, the lawn and its morose, enormous, bronze nude statue forming a bizarre pastoral scene. It’s my favourite time here, as close as it comes to lovely, that hot sun and the green, empty lawn. It isn’t frenetic. It’s quiet, a rare commodity in any corporate campus, where to look busy—bustling from useless meeting to pointless presentation—is to be busy.
At this time of day, I usually take my 27th break, getting up from my desk to wander around looking purposeful, squinting at some place in the middle distance to avoid making eye contact with anyone lest they ask me what I do. There’s something about the lack of light that’s able to filters through the full-wall windows in the office that makes me perpetually sleepy, something in the low hum of 1,000 computers and the muted music coming from 1,000 headsets that gives me a constant headache. These little jaunts do me good, and around four o’clock in the afternoon I like to drift down to the courtyard to breathe in what passes for air here.
I’m sitting outside of the campus Starbucks under an umbrella with my teammate Cecilia, sipping one of Starbucks’ newest iced coffee monstrosities that’s unique to the Chinese market, some cold foam concoction that—like all import goods labelled as “luxury brands”—is staggeringly expensive here. Cecilia, a Beijing-born, naturalized American, is halfway through a string of expletives about another colleague. We are bonding over the mediocrity that surrounds us, about the oppressive heat, about the peculiar smell of everything, the way the breeze has a gross, chewy quality. We chat eagerly about greener pastures elsewhere. We vent, laugh, sip, repeat. It’s a normal day, except for a crowd beginning to swell across the little moat surrounding the Starbucks.
Two black SUVs are parked outside of the main entrance, and a spark is spreading through the office. A few people are perched on the edge of the broad staircase by the main door of the aptly named “Building 1,” then a few more join. Rumours swirl. A celebrity has been sighted, and everyone wants a glimpse.
Ten pleasant, sweaty, shit-talking minutes pass, all the while the crowd grows bigger. There must be 200 people squished into the 10 square meters between the doors of Building 1 and the SUVs. They are tense but orderly, a neat row five deep forming a pulsating processional guard between office and car. It feels fabulous to be far away from this scene, simply watching.
Every few seconds, the automatic doors of Building 1 slide open and a low, excited murmur starts. It soon erupts into an enormous, simultaneous sigh, a shared disenchantment. Red-faced and ashamed, some poor random person has walked out a door they use frequently and has disappointed the crowd, who desperately hoped they were someone else. It happens over and over, random employees coming out of the door, becoming confused, and rushing sheepishly past. Some, having deciphered the situation, join the ranks at the ends of the lines. Doors open, followed by more screams and sighs, and the crowd grows larger still.
Then, suddenly, it’s real.
The doors part, and the sound of pure glee fills the courtyard. A small man emerges, smaller than you’d expect, and from my comfortable patio chair at the coffee shop I can see the space around him close instantly. He waves to his adoring fans. They, in turn, try to swallow him whole. He’s flanked by bodyguards, sinister black-suited figures from an action movie, who stick tightly to him now. The crowd swarms closer to the man, cheering and gasping. People are visibly and audibly weeping. For a long moment it’s just a mass of humans in the sweltering courtyard, screams and laughs and cries and a steady jostling until the celeb-bodyguard axis burst through the funnel of limbs into the sunlight and heat. Blinking wildly, the man of the hour looks overwhelmed, and a bit disappointed. The screaming crowd circles tightly around the cars now. A bodyguard tries in vain to pry the SUV door open, then pulls more firmly to dislodge a few of the rabid fans from the space that now needs to be occupied by the open door. The man regains composure, turns, waves, smiles, and yells, “xie xie!” It looks like he tries to bow, but doesn’t have enough space to move. He disappears into the car and the doors close.
The car slowly pushes its way through the crowd. People breathe again, shaken and alive for what seems to be the first time in their lives.
This is Jack Ma, and these are his people: blissful, enraptured at having witnessed their god.
I spent two years working for Alibaba in Hangzhou, China.
I was hired as a “content strategist,” a silly title for an even sillier job. I was an awful employee, disillusioned and demotivated from the first week, but I grinned-and-bared my way through two years with the promise of stock options dangling, that thickest and roughest of carrots. I resigned the same moment the stock vested. I produced remarkably little of value in those two years, either for the company or in any kind of creative way. I wrote nothing. I gained 20kg from greasy food, too much booze, too little exercise. I made some friends and some enemies. I ate parts of animals that I didn’t know were edible. I was frequently food poisoned. These last two points are not unrelated.
It was a bizarre, sometimes hilarious, uniquely frustrating period in my life, a slow-motion spinning of the wheels of my career. But it also offered me a long, unbroken look behind the curtain of modern China, the world’s most populous and—as I’ll argue throughout this series—most technologically advanced country.
I’ll avoid leaning on the metaphor of “China at a crossroads,” if only because China moves so quickly and continuously forward that it never really considers turning left or right. Yet China is a country forever struggling to keep up with itself. It has only recently moved beyond its One Child Policy, and the parents of that One Child Generation are products of the Cultural Revolution, the great famine, living always in the long shadow of madman Mao. Some of those survivors and their offspring have become tech billionaires. They own great tracts of land in China and abroad. They buy islands and ancient French vineyards. They are communist China’s great success story, these brilliant capitalists.
I got to watch them work for two years, saw the gears turn on their lives, saw them fret over how to save for a new designer handbag or pair or designer shoes, saw them turn up to work in a new BMW or Tesla a few days after the annual bonuses came out, saw them work long hours and do very little and not particularly excel at anything and never especially fail. I saw some of the world with them, both on vacations and on business work trips, and witnessed their internal desire to have what they believed to be the best things in life; usually material things, like brand name expensive items, but when more intangible—a vacation, a wedding, a family—to likewise spare no expense. I saw them explode into being at the strangest of times and was sometimes unsure when their true selves were showing. I shared meals with them, learned of their struggles and desires. And yet I was never one of them.
The day-to-day operations of a big company, even one as important as Alibaba, are not particularly interesting. The company’s history has been painstakingly and fawningly recounted elsewhere, most notably in Duncan Clark’s The House that Jack Ma Built. Clark, was an advisor to Alibaba in its early days and knew Jack Ma closely and well. He details Ma’s rise to power with authority and the kind of affection that allows such a book to escape censure by Ma and by China. Books about Ma and Alibaba on the market today paint a curiously rosy picture of the company and its influential founder. For deep reading on the company, read that. For descriptions of the food and some weird stories, read this.
That said, we need to talk about Jack for a minute.
Jack Ma and Alibaba represent the great tech leap forward better than most figures, most companies. Alibaba came into existence at the time when China was just getting online, in 1999. Jack Ma, so his legend goes, was one of the first people in China to have a personal computer—one he essentially smuggled back from the United States in his checked baggage—and was an early advocate for the Internet. He saw its potential more than he understood how it worked, but delegated well and grew a company from 19 people in 1999 to almost 100,000 employees in 2020. Along the way, his original vision for Alibaba has mutated and spawned, having gone from a simple business-to-business website to a comprehensive empire, a gilded state within the state, of more than 1,000 individual businesses flying the Alibaba flag. And he then ran afoul of regulators and the central government, went suspiciously quiet for a few months, and re-emerged only in the depths of the pandemic to reassure the public that he, too, had contracted the virus. His story is the story of every Chinese tech entrepreneur, amplified by some degree.
Alibaba is important for other reasons, of course. It has played a huge role in China’s poverty reduction initiatives, giving an average Chinese person access to the rest of their own country (if not the world at large), to small business ownership, to financial services. Many of China’s technological and social advancements, now trumpeted by the Central Party, are Alibaba innovations.
But to focus purely on these is to overlook the company’s deeply cultish environment, its culture of sexual harassment, its demands on its employees to 70 or 80 hours per week, and its closeness to a government that commits grave human rights abuses, dutifully tracks all of its citizens at all times, and bullies its way to financial—and possible military—domination of most parts of the world.
China’s poverty reduction is real, but has been replaced by a form of capitalism and consumerism that would put America to shame, if Americans understood how China worked. Personal wealth is possible, but so is staggering personal debt. China, when I lived there from 2017 to 2019, had the highest debt-per-capita of any country, by some margin. Property values are absurd, yet owning a home is a central goal of all but a few young Chinese people. Marriage and children likewise, yet the cost of raising a child in China is mind-boggling. Nowhere in the world are luxury fashion and cosmetic brands coveted and purchased. In 2018, Chinese consumers accounted for one third of all luxury purchases worldwide. By 2025, according to McKinsey, that figure will rise to 40 per cent as the number of high-income households in China rises to some 350 million. Still, spending per household is nearly triple income per household: a statistic that Alibaba boasts in its yearly wrap-up of its enormous online sales event, Single’s Day.
Practically speaking, and most importantly for the purposes of this series, that creates a truly weird environment. Those two years in China were spent breathing foul air, being honked at by luxury cars and surrounded by people with Louis Vuitton bags and Prada suits eating cheap noodles and napping on any available surface.
For most people, two years of gainful employment at a leading company would be satisfying, one of life’s easier chapters to close and move on from. For me, there’s a lingering sense of unfinished business. A bad taste in my mouth. A sense of having witnessed something often unseen and a need to shout it from the rooftops, or at the very least a low soapbox or a comfy chair within earshot. Or a newsletter, whatever.
From the first day at Alibaba, things felt off, but only vaguely so, like a faint ringing in your ears or a persistent but very slight itch on your foot. That offness swirled around the edges of my life in China for a few months, only seldomly taking form.
There was something unsettling about the mania I saw on that June day in the sunshine: the fervour and passion for a leader, the cultish hero-worship. On the day of Jack Ma’s visit to the office, I’d already been in China and working for Alibaba for a year, and had grown used to the egomania at the center of the company and of its C-suite staff, but this was the first time I’d seen average employees reflect the egos of their great leaders back upon them. A company run by self-obsessed, self-important tech nerds is not new to the world, let alone to China. I’d laughed off the silliness when I saw Jack Ma dressed as Michael Jackson and rejecting the advances of the CEO dressed in drag at the annual party. I’d scoffed at the mandatory HR indoctrination sessions when I first joined the company, which seemed like run-of-the-mill company propaganda that had been cranked up to Chinese levels of bizarre. But seeing normal employees disrupt their days to stand in the blazing sun to catch a brief glimpse of their company’s founder: this unsettled me. I began to reassess the behaviour around me and suddenly saw this rampant enthusiasm for Alibaba everywhere, and not just within Alibaba.
The name Alibaba inspires awe within China. I only half understood that at first. From within, it seemed so incompetent and incoherent, and while it is both of those things, it is also tremendously successful and of huge importance to China. Why else would people become fevered and wild at the sight of an entrepreneur?
The easy answer is that Alibaba is different, that Jack Ma is different. He is—or was then—a wildly popular figure in China, both for what he has achieved and what he represents. He built, through great determination and hard work, one of China’s giant unstoppable internet companies. Alibaba touches some aspect of the average Chinese person’s life every day, sometimes every hour. Its apps have replaced traditional shopping and completely supplanted traditional banking. If you ride a shared bicycle or hire a shared car, if you order takeout or want grocery delivery, you’re likely using an Alibaba-developed app or one that it has invested heavily in. When you pay for something online, you’re almost certainly using Alibaba’s payment app, Alipay. Your modern life as a Chinese citizen likely depends on Alibaba. And since it has made your life considerably easier, made your family significantly richer, you feel a closeness to its founder, that slight, generally humble man from Hangzhou.
Beyond a sense of gratitude, the Chinese saw Jack Ma as a beacon. And in many ways, he is something of a posterchild for success in modern China. He’s the man who couldn’t get into a good university because his math scores were too low, the man who couldn’t even get a job at KFC (a story he used to tell often), the man who honed his English skills by speaking to tourists, the man who went from a struggling English teacher to China’s wealthiest person. He represents the generation who, encouraged to look outward for the first time in centuries, drove China to become the world’s largest economy. In the 20-plus years after founding Alibaba, Ma had amassed a net worth of $36-billion US, which is more than the GDP of Cameroon, or Iceland. It’s nearly double the GDP of Afghanistan. His is a wealth sufficient for the maintenance of several nations.
There’s a Chinese idiom that translates as “as rich as a country,” essentially meaning how rare and impressive it is for a single person in China to become very, very wealthy. It’s an old saying in need of updating to reflect the new China, in which incredible wealth is available on tap. And it’s not just Ma. He is not the only example in China of a person making the single-generation leap from the low-middle class to the super wealthy—nor is Alibaba the only company in the country to emerge out of the fertile economic landscape of the 1990s and become one of the largest in the world—but Ma had the perfect combination of hard-luck story and remarkable success to inspire those around him. When Ma came to his company’s office, the maniacs in the sun were no longer simply his employees—they were his worshippers. They are people who see in him the chance to become as rich as a country, as rich as many countries. Like any star-struck fan, they scream and snap photos and forget themselves for a little while, here in the presence of what is possible.
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Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):
Read more of The Faulty Memory Series:
