Tiger Woman on Wall Street: Winning Business Strategies from Shanghai to New York and Back

CHAPTER 6An American Education

Vermont, 1996

MAKING THE 20-HOUR JOURNEY FROM SHANGHAI TO BURLington, Vermont, may have been the most important event in my life, but my grand arrival to the United States was greeted with silence. It was the middle of the night when I landed, and the airport was nearly empty.

The cultural differences I encountered at Middlebury College presented far greater challenges for me than learning a new language and living a different campus lifestyle. The hardest changes lay in the social and ethical rules that governed the campus. At Middlebury, there were different expectations of how to behave in and contribute to the classroom and community.

Everything ideological that my Chinese educators had taught me about America—that ...