From Peasant to Microsoft Director

United Flight #897, Washington to Beijing

I'm heading for a two-week reporting trip to Chengdu, my first trip to China. The best thing about being moved to an exit row is that I find myself sitting alongside a friendly, talkative man named Hesong Tang. We start chatting and, even before takeoff, I've scribbled down pages of his life story.

Hesong Tang is from a small peasant village in eastern Jiangsu province — Xiang Yang — which is squeezed into a narrow valley in the Mao Shan mountains. He figures he's the 30th generation of his family to live in that village. Just about everyone in Xiang Yang shares the same family name: Tang. He's 42 years old, one of six children, and his trajectory out of the village is remarkable.

A Medieval Life

Hesong Tang's village, Xiang Yang, is nestled into the mountains covered with bamboo forests.

Courtesy Hesong Tang

 

Picture this: Hesong Tang grew up drawing water from the nearby river, carrying it home in buckets on his shoulders. He would hike with his father into the mountains to cut bamboo, carrying heavy loads on his back. He says, "it's like medieval life, 300 years ago." In hard times, his family had little food, and would live for three days on a small bit of rice and pickle.

Hesong Tang would walk 10 miles to high school, stay there for the week, then walk the three hours back home on the weekend. Neither of his parents can read or write. But he was bright, and studied hard on his own ("I didn't listen to the teacher," he tells me. "If I followed the teacher I wouldn't get to university. To succeed you have to rely on yourself.")

A Knock on the Door

One afternoon in 1984, there was a knock on the door and Hesong Tang got news that made him jump up from his nap, sure he was dreaming: He had been accepted into China's most prestigious university, the intensely competitive Tsinghua University in Beijing — it's considered the best in engineering and sciences, the equivalent of MIT. This was unheard of, unthinkable; no one in the history of his village had ever gone to university, much less an elite one. So off to Beijing he went, a kid who had never seen a car or train or running water.

Hesong Tang benefited from a lucky break in timing: Until just a few years before, admission to elite schools had been the exclusive preserve of the elites, the children of party officials and cadres. But under Deng Xiaoping's policy of reform and modernization, access to education was widened. And so a smart, driven young peasant — Hesong Tang — was able to pass an entrance exam and go from his "medieval" village to one of China's top schools, all expenses paid. He looks at me, pointing for emphasis:

Deng Xiaoping

Wally McNamee/Corbis

"So, this is why I think Deng Xiaoping is a great person." He adds, somewhat wistfully, that his older brothers and sisters were just as smart as he, and if they'd just been born a little later, they too could have gone to university and led radically different lives. His older siblings are still cutting bamboo and working in factories back home.

Long story short: Hesong Tang graduated from Tsinghua University with a degree in electrical engineering, went on to grad school at Stanford, then decided to get an MBA at the University of Chicago. Now he works in private equity, mergers and acquisitions, for Microsoft in Beijing. He figures he makes 100 times what his brother makes, and helps his family out financially.

"I got a chance to change their life and I'm proud of that," he says. And there's one last thing Hesong Tang wants me to know: "It doesn't matter where you come from. It matters where you go."
- - Melissa Block

9:21 AM ET | 04- 1-2008 | permalink

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