Weijian, thank you so much for joining us on Real Vision.
Pleasure.
So in studying your life, growing up in the shadow of Mao's China, to doing hard labor
in the Gobi Desert, to making your way to the US, earning your masters, your MBA, your
PhD, to becoming a managing director at JPMorgan, to now being CEO of PAG, where you oversee
$30 billion, you've led an incredible life.
But I want to hear it from you.
Talk to me a little bit about how you came up and how you became the success that you
are today.
I'm not quite sure if I would call where I am today as a success.
I'm still trying very hard.
But I didn't choose my life.
It was chosen for me, especially growing up in China during that period of time.
You know, I wrote this book.
It's a recount of history-- the most horrible part of Chinese history that I lived through.
And my story is rather unique, and also very representative of my generation.
And at that time, there was not much choice.
You just did whatever you were told to do, or you were assigned to do.
And I was sent to the Gobi Desert.
It was not until the end of the so-called cultural revolution in 1976 when everything
came to an end.
China, in 1979, opened up, established a relationship-- diplomatic relationship-- with America under
Jimmy Carter.
And the next year, I had an opportunity to come to America to study.
That's how it happened.
After that, I had some choices-- choices of which school to go, choices of what to study.
And it was in this country I find choices.
You oversee $30 billion.
You're one of the world's most respected investors out of Asia.
That's dwarfed by American private equity firms like Blackstone.
Fair enough.
And they are one of your backers.
Yes.
Along with several US pension funds.
We're grateful to them for their trust.
So I want to take a step back and talk about how you got to where you are, success or not.
Because I want folks to understand when I say the Gobi Desert.
And your book, Out of the Gobi, discusses, in large part, leaving Mao's China to have
to do hard labor in the desert.
Talk to me about that hard labor.
What was that?
What was that like?
How did that shape you to become the man you are today?
School came to the end for me when I was 12, when I finished elementary school.
The country was in chaos.
Schools were shut for about 10 years.
And when I was 15, I, together with my friends, classmates, were sent to the Gobi Desert.
We had to do very hard labor.
We were told to grow crops in the desert.
Now, you can imagine how hard that is.
And not surprisingly, we were not too successful, talking about success.
We had to build huts-- shelters for ourselves-- because there was no place to live.
I made bricks.
That was a backbreaking job.
We had to work 16, sometimes 18 hours a day.
Backbreaking.
And some people became sick and permanently disabled.
It was very cold in wintertime-- something like minus 10 in wintertime.
The bad part is that that's the temperature inside and out.
There's no heating.
There is no fuel.
The only fuel available was dried cow dung-- cow manure-- which we collected and burned
for 10, 15 minutes before we got into bed-- if you can call it a bed-- every night.
That was the only source of heating, and, otherwise, minus 10 inside and out.
If there's a blizzard, to go out to the outhouse was life threatening.
It was a big risk that you would have to take.
And don't ask me how we coped with that.
So when I first came to this country, I hear people talk about this expression.
If they don't agree with each other, they say, bullshit.
And I would think to myself, that thing used to be very dear to me.
And that was the only source of heating that we had.
So to this day, I like to sit by a fireplace, because we experienced so much cold.
And that life didn't come to an end until about six years later.
And of course, the worst thing during that period of time was starvation.
There was never enough food to eat.
If you looked at me, I'd probably look emaciated to you.
And that was the starvation from that time.
And then you were able to teach yourself math by candlelight, if I'm not mistaken.
I did, in an unsystematic way.
I just read whatever books I could lay my hands on.
And there was no school, as I mentioned, for 10 years.
So very few people bothered to read, to study.
And in fact, all the books were banned.
Reading was frowned upon.
I got into trouble by doing it.
But at the end of it, I was somewhat educated, because I didn't give up.
And eventually, I was able to obtain a formal education, including a PhD the from UC Berkeley.
So when I look at the kids today, especially in this country, I think they are so privileged.
They have the education.
Unfortunately, many people take that for granted.
We couldn't.
It was a privilege that we didn't have.
But studying, reading, got me where I am today.
Had I given up, like most of my peers at the time, I would not have had a job at this particular
point, as most of my friends have long lost their jobs.
When China opened up, they didn't have any skills to obtain any decent jobs.
Because for 10 years, there was no education.
So education, to me, is the most important thing.
It gets you to where you need to be, or where you want to be, especially in this country.