I woke up the next morning in a dreadful state and scrambled to cram all of my belongings back into my suitcase and meet Xiaowen in the hotel lobby.
During the hour-long ride to the airport, I carefully played back the events of the previous night in my head and panicked when I realized the full scope of what I promised Bo. I started to recall a training session on intellectual property theft I attended during my first week at General Motors. There were fifty of us packed in this big conference room in Detroit and they’d brought in the Head of Worldwide Security, this portly ex-FBI guy with a crew cut who kept his hands folded behind his back while he talked. The format of this presentation was “scared straight.” The security head walked through numerous examples of cons who had stolen from the Company and had their hands proverbially chopped off. Corporate espionage, especially from overseas, was on the rise, he said. As employees of General Motors, it was our duty to remain vigilant against the constant threat of espionage from rival companies, hacker groups, and unregistered foreign agents—he looked right at me when he said this. Remember, intellectual property theft is a federal crime; everything you do here at GM belongs to the Company and if you steal from the Company, I will call my former colleagues at the FBI and you will go to prison.
As I remembered this session, I started to feel increasingly resentful. I knew that if any of this ever came to light, I would be cast as the treacherous, ungrateful thief who tried to walk out the door with his pockets stuffed. But what about the years of unrecognized effort that General Motors had stolen from me? My invention of multinodal aggregation was a completely independent venture; no other engineer at GM had contributed to or was even aware of the project. I’d spearheaded it entirely on my own and devoted my time, energy, and ingenuity to this project; the only GM resource I’d used was a company laptop. All of this for it to be summarily buried without even an explanation. For a breakthrough that could impact the lives of billions of people, wasn’t it a greater crime for me to let it go to waste?
In addition to this, I realized only as we neared the airport, that I didn’t even know for sure whether or not Naveon was a real company. I frantically googled the word Naveon, which pulled up several pages of results, most of which were in Chinese. LinkedIn showed 250 employees, all of whom were based in China. One of the English-language results described Naveon as “one of the most promising autonomous driving start-ups emerging from Asia, led by visionary CEO Peng Liu,” then listed a number of venture capital investors that I’d never heard of but seemed to be big in China. Apparently the company had already secured approval from the Beijing municipal government to conduct unmanned road tests in 2022—but that was three years from now. I couldn’t find any information online about what Naveon’s unique angle was or how their technology was different from their competitors. It all seemed very early stage, very risky. The last thing I looked at was a profile showing Peng on the cover of Forbes China. In his portrait, he was wearing glasses and standing under high-contrast lighting that made his round, bald head look significantly more angular and mature than in real life. The profile described Peng’s stratospheric trajectory from attending an unknown engineering college in Chengdu to leading the autonomous driving team at Baidu and overseeing a team of five hundred engineers—all before the age of thirty. This made me feel a lot better, though it was difficult to square with the sweaty, skittish man I met this weekend—maybe he was just bad at parties.
Xiaowen dropped me off in front of the United Airlines area at departures, brought my bags out of the trunk, and wished me a safe journey. The hangover hit me right as I pulled up to the gate, manifesting my anxieties into corporeal reality. As we took off, I closed my eyes and brought myself back to those final moments with Vivian in the Tsinghua basement café. In that moment our future together seemed to stretch out before me like a green valley, but now dark clouds were creeping over the mountain range. Why had I summoned them, instead of just starting over with her? The painfully obvious explanation was that I knew I wasn’t good enough for Vivian. That’s why she could text me and summon me at a moment’s notice. If I wanted a chance at keeping her, I’d have to become somebody—and for me, that was worth risking everything.
To put these torturous thoughts to rest, I browsed through the in-flight movie options and selected a documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I usually don’t watch documentaries, especially the smirky ones about business and the abysmal state of modern capitalism, etc., but something about this one caught my eye. The story was about a band of nerdy corporate misfits that managed to turn the unsexy Enron corporation into their own frat house/pirate ship before driving the whole operation into bankruptcy. I was fascinated by one character in particular, Lou Pai, who doesn’t get much screen time but whose presence looms over the film. Lou Pai, born in Nanjing, who, according to video testimony, no one really knew that much about, other than the fact that he was really quiet; who also regularly blew millions of dollars in shareholder money on catered lunches and strip clubs, fled ship with nearly $280 million, and became the second largest landowner in Colorado. Oh, and I forgot to mention: he emerged as the only one of the bunch who managed to escape prison time or personal tragedy. The way he pulled this off appears to be the fact that his divorce with his then-wife served as a convenient alibi for him to sell his hundreds of thousands of Enron shares early, before the inflated price bloomed to criminal heights. The reason for the divorce: Lou’s wife of two decades (and the equivalent number of children) had caught him in bed with a stripper named Melanie Fewell, whom he later married and had a child with.
I considered it criminal that the saga of Lou Pai was relegated to the status of side story, when in fact it should have been the main plot, if not the subject of its own documentary. The profound depths of this Quiet Man’s fraudulence was nearly biblical and instantly elevated him in my mind to a kind of postmodern mythical hero of Asian America. There was such a sweet spite to his brazen version of the American dream. I relished the fact that he cheated on his own (presumably loyal, unsexy) Chinese wife with a literal stripper. Doesn’t get much more American than that. Even his humble and somewhat folksy given name, “Lou,” is subterfuge; a Chinese character transliterated, the Yellow Peril hiding in plain sight.
That night I had a strange dream. I was staggering across the barren Colorado desert, dying of thirst, when the shadow of a man on horseback grew long on the distant horizon. It was Lou Pai, wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and bolo tie with a green jade centerpiece. He invited me to his enormous ranch, “Mount Pai,” where his Caucasian stripper-wife, wearing a tight red qipao dress, welcomed us inside and served us chrysanthemum tea in blue china cups. Lou and I sat cross-legged on the floor and conversed in a fluent, native-speaker Mandarin, and he told me he was my dad.