A journey from despair to triumph

SHENZHEN, China - Pulling open a heavy glass door, Terri Sun enters the cool marble lobby of Phoenixtec Power Co., one of many new factories in this runaway metropolis near Hong Kong.

She hurries past a bank of clocks set for Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, Paris, and Cleveland - the last a nod to the factory's new owner, the Eaton Corp.

Terri has a long day of meetings. She needs to talk to the plant manager, a transplant from Taiwan; an Eaton colleague from New Jersey; and the on-site Chinese controller.

As I tag along on this July morning, I marvel as my cousin navigates the global workplace.

When I first met Terri nearly 30 years ago, she was mopping floors and cleaning toilets at a Shanghai hospital. Disillusioned and dejected, she was convinced at 27 that she had no future beyond menial labor.

Today, at 55, Terri is working in finance for a $600 million business with 5,000 employees in China. She shuttles between an office in Taiwan and four factories in Shenzhen, and will earn more than I could ever imagine.

My cousin's journey from despair to prosperity shows more clearly than any statistic how the Chinese people have rebuilt a nation by reinventing themselves.

More than the billion-dollar stadiums for the Beijing Olympic Games, which will open tomorrow, the lives of people like Terri tell the real story of China's progress.

China's leaders will use the Olympic spectacle to herald the nation's economic achievements. Since 1978, when Deng Xiaoping prescribed a capitalist cure for the moribund socialist economy, China's domestic economy has grown by more than tenfold.

Exports have shot from a meager $21 billion to $1.2 trillion last year. Average annual income improved from $293 in 1985 to $2,025 in 2006. In 1978, China was wired for only two million telephones; today, 461 million consumers have cell phones.

Terri's career has been on its own trajectory since she moved to Australia in 1987 and then, at 42, earned a degree in accounting.

She returned to China to work for a British joint venture before transferring to South Korea and Japan for a U.S. multinational. In 2004, she returned to China again, this time for Eaton.

But it's the years before Australia - the turns in her life that aren't on any resume - that make the present seem like a hallucination compared with the past.

Or vice versa.

Like her peers, Terri stopped going to school at 15. Mao Tse-tung had other plans for China's youths during the 10-year reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution. Students like Terri were banished to the countryside to "learn from peasants."

Her lessons lasted seven years.

Back in Shanghai, she took the only job she could find: assembling cheap toys for 70 cents a day. Her mother had to retire early as a physician to free up a job for Terri as a janitor at her hospital.

"I remember when I was nine months pregnant with my daughter, Jean, I was cleaning floors with my big belly," my cousin tells me.

Terri, who has thick, wavy black hair and a square face wonderfully free of wrinkles, says none of her coworkers knows her story. It's not something that readily comes up over lattes at Starbucks, she says in her clipped way. They see her only as a crisp, efficient colleague.

But the deprivation of those years fed Terri's fierce desire to succeed.

Indeed, it is what motivates all of China.

"I have to say that over the past 13 years, all of my efforts have been to prove I can do better," Terri explains. "And when you look at the Olympics, you can see the Chinese government making a similar effort to show the world that we are doing better."

The old house in Shanghai smells the same - a damp mix of kitchen smoke and mildew - but it looks nothing like what I remember from 1979.

I follow Terri up a narrow staircase that spirals through the center of the brick rowhouse. The house is set on a longtang, a distinctive Shanghai residential alleyway that reminds me of the blocks of colonial-era houses in Philadelphia.

An old neighbor who remembers Terri from her childhood has let us in to look around.

Any trip I take to China has to include a pilgrimage to this house. This is where my father and Terri's mother grew up and where, at one time during the Cultural Revolution, more than 10 relatives were crammed into five tiny rooms.

It's a far cry from the big three-bedroom apartment in a Taipei high-rise where Terri lives alone today.

When I visited this house with my father for a family reunion in 1979, it seemed frozen in time. All the furniture was unchanged from the day in 1949 when he fled Shanghai for a new life in Philadelphia. I remember an old-style wall phone in the stairwell and the big cast-iron tub in the bathroom.

One by one, my relatives moved away: an uncle to San Jose, Calif.; a cousin to Los Angeles; Terri to Sydney.

Now two new tenants with no family ties have changed the place. The old phone was ripped out and probably sits in a stall at a Shanghai antiques market. A balcony on the uppermost floor, where my uncle kept pots of succulents, has been enclosed and tiled in white for a new kitchen.

As we reach the top of the stairway, one room remains sealed off from the other tenants. The neighbor fumbles for a key and opens the door to a dusty alcove below slanting eaves.

Terri used to sleep here with her mother and older sister. A dressing table with a smoky mirror has been pushed to the side. In a corner are two antique leather trunks - our grandmother's from Fuzhou, Terri tells me.

"This still looks the same," Terri says as her eyes dart about the space.

She seems uncomfortable, anxious. There are memories in here, bad ones. She bends to show me a smudged aqua sliding panel that covers a crawl space. She explains that during the Cultural Revolution, every time the house was raided - either by Red Guards or police interrogators - intruders threw open the panels to search for anything incriminating.

In Mao's utopia, my relatives were pariahs. Terri's father came from a long line of "capitalist roaders." Even worse, our great-uncle was a jailed Christian leader named Watchman Nee who was tarred as a "counterrevolutionary."

The house was ransacked so repeatedly that Terri cannot remember how many times. "When we would hear noises from downstairs, we'd jump," she tells me.

I take pictures. We leave.

How did she do it?

How did she overcome the trauma of her youth?

It wasn't just that Terri lost out on schooling or job training. The abuses went deeper. From the time she was a teenager, everyone around her reminded her that she was bad, that her whole family was a black mark on socialism.

She started to believe it. She turned on her grandmother, whose brother, the preacher, was a lightning rod for attacks.

Her classmates ostracized her. Going to the countryside at 16 was actually a welcome escape from Shanghai's isolation.

The first time I met Terri in 1979, I remember how withdrawn she was. She spoke no English; I spoke no Chinese. Even so, she hung back more than the others, who also couldn't communicate with me and my family.

By the next time I saw Terri, in 1986, she had changed. She seemed in a hurry to catch up for lost time. Luckily, she held one of the keys to future success in China: a command of English. She had taught herself, working every Sunday with a tutor.

It was as if she had flicked a switch, deciding it was time for the victim to become an avenger.

She grabbed opportunities whenever they presented themselves. At the hospital, she was taken off the custodial staff and trained as a statistician. Not satisfied, she went after a plum bookkeeping job with a foreign company, a new Sheraton hotel.

"Over all these years I had lost so much," Terri says. "On the surface, it appeared that I was poorer, less educated. But that created desire, a feeling that I can be as tall as you, I can do anything as good as you."

In 1987, when she left for Australia with the help of her father's relatives there, Terri had no intention to return.

But the irony was that China's evolution from the sick patient of Asia to a forceful global player needed people like Terri. She understood the cultures of China as well as Western business.

"I did not think I'd come back, until I realized the opportunities were here," Terri says.

By then divorced from her second husband, she left her teenage daughter in her mother's care and returned, beating out dozens of younger contenders for a job as a financial manager with a British joint venture.

"If I had been born in Australia or the United States, I doubt very much I would have had the same level of variety in my life or the same desire, the same drive for success," she says.

"I believe part of the reason I have achieved so much is the life I have been through."

On the third floor of the Phoenixtec building, we pause to put on plastic booties and blue caps before stepping onto the bright assembly floor.

Rows of young women, migrants from China's poorest regions, stand at tables and guide tools over panels of circuitry.

Eaton acquired the Taiwanese business in February, and Terri's new job requires integrating all the finances of the new factories with the parent corporation.

She takes me on a quick tour of the assembly lines before I leave Shenzhen for Hong Kong, just across the border.

I had asked her earlier, as we sat in a conference room she was using as a temporary office, if she has given much thought to her next move.

Her answer surprises me. Terri says she might like to become a consultant or a career coach, counseling younger professionals in China or Australia.

"At this stage of my life, I don't have to prove myself anymore," Terri says. "I don't need to. I've already done that."

This is such a contrast from a decade ago, when every job was another step up the multinational ladder. But as she explains, "the past 13 years have all been work, work, work. Not much quality of life."

I heard similar remarks from other Chinese friends during several weeks in China this year. People's material lives are better, but the world around them has been degraded to a level that many find troubling.

Unbridled industrialization has fouled China's rivers and air. Beijing has three million cars on the roads - triple the number of a decade ago.

Many people told me they want to slow down, enjoy life more, take better care of the world around them. Are the Chinese going soft? Hardly. But if Terri is any indication, they want more.

She says she probably won't leave the office today until close to midnight. She shows me a photo on her cell phone of her home in Sydney. She bought the house for her mother and daughter before she returned to China. It's an old stone structure with tall ferns and mature trees in a big yard.

It's time for me to go.

At the train station, Terri and I joke that we see each other only every 10 years. We promise not to allow such a long lapse again. I wonder where our next meeting will be.

The centrifugal force of China's economy pulled her back, but I suspect other forces will start to pull her away.

Jennifer Lin has written about her cousin Terri since 1979. See an interview, past articles at http://go.philly.com/terrisun

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