![]() “I became a believer because of my wife,” says Zhang, who remains active in his San Clemente church. He recalls her as a pretty missionary, someone who had studied the Bible in great detail. Zhang first saw Ling, a Taiwanese immigrant, at a Chinese-language Christian church that he visited with a waiter friend. In 1984, he met the person who would support him in the decades to come, Ling, whom he married the next year. A neighbor suggested he change his Chinese name – Xianghua – to something Americans could pronounce: Charlie? Zhang shrugged and went with it. He observed what plates came back empty and what lay untouched. “So I realized it’s not going to happen.” “I tell you, when you’re cutting chicken and almost cut your finger off? A musician with no finger? How are you going to do that?” he says. He holds up a finger bearing a long scar. I realized that, and I went to the restaurant with no other choice.” And also, you come to the United States and you have to make a living. “Music, you need a lot of money,” he says. He applied for nearly 20 jobs before he finally found afternoon work as a busboy at a Chinese restaurant and night work as a gas station attendant. Music school, however, didn’t last he ran out of cash and needed a job. But he got on the plane, with his clarinet and about $20 in his pocket. Zhang remembers his mother’s face, damp with tears. Across the world, in Los Angeles, a tiny music academy on Wilshire Boulevard had offered him a scholarship. Seven years later, he returned to Shanghai, where he faced few prospects.īut he had his passion – music – and that offered an escape. With two small suitcases, Zhang reported to the countryside rice paddies at age 17. “I even wore my sisters’ clothes at times,” says Zhang. His mother and older siblings kept multiple jobs to survive they ate little and recycled one another’s clothes. “He was a businessman who was not fully cooperating with the Communist system,” explains Zhang. When Zhang was 2, his father, who owned a successful coffee-roasting company in Shanghai, was tossed into prison for 20 years. Don’t let the past put chips on your shoulders.”īut it’s his past that inspired the rest of his life.īefore he was sent to the countryside to work, Zhang’s family of nine children had already suffered under the Communist regime. “You have to focus on the present and what you can do now. “Honestly, the past is the past,” he says. The distant past is a more difficult subject. “Same size as the one in the White House,” he says. He is particularly proud of his office desk, modeled on the one in the Oval Office. He discusses the aesthetics of the bamboo screen walls in a conference room, the size of the fish in the koi pond downstairs, the heavy table imported from Asia: “It took seven men to get that up here!” ![]() Zhang relishes talking about that which can be summed up in a series of matter-of-fact details. He started, and later sold, the Pick Up Stix chain and Aseptic Solutions, a beverage-manufacturing company in Corona. He started the company – upcoming projects include a 299-unit condominium complex in downtown Los Angeles – after making his fortune in the restaurant and beverage-manufacturing industries. ![]() Zhang, now 60, was sitting in the board room. Yet the work amounted to forced hard labor, subjecting many youths to privations and loneliness that lingered with them the rest of their lives. The communist government promoted the journeys of the “sent-down youths” as ones of adventure and education, missions that would bind them to rural peasants and sharpen their skills. Part of China’s so-called lost generation, Zhang was one of 17 million urban youth sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. We didn’t know what else life had for us,” he says. He played for hours, contemplating little but the melody. He taught himself a few Chinese songs – “the classical Western music you weren’t allowed to play,” he says.Īnd he stole away to the fields at night so he wouldn’t bother the other workers. ![]() When he was working for seven years in the rice paddies of rural China, digging trenches and seeding soil, and eating grass to fill his empty stomach, young Charlie Zhang possessed a single treasure: his brother’s old clarinet. ![]()
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