In the terminal building of Indianapolis International Airport, I picked Jason from his car seat while we were waiting at the gate. I held him so tightly as if somebody was about to take him away from me. In fact, an invisible hand was about to take him away from us. I had lost the first set of battles to secure a job, the type of job average Americans can’t comprehend, to hold the family together. Nora was going to graduate school at Western in the fall. I would have to go to San Francisco to fight the next set of battles for that job. We had reached the heartbreaking decision to send Jason back to China for the grandparents to raise.
I waited until everybody had boarded, then walked to the gate until I could not go one step further and put Jason back in his car seat. I could not hold back tears and took a last look at him before I saw him again a year later. He seemed to realize that something was happening. He frowned as the car seat was picked up from the floor. On the way back to Bowling Green, I felt so distraught that I lost part of my body at the terminal gate. The past six months had cast a painful shadow in my mind as Nora and I would soon head in different directions for a life without Jason around us.
Six months earlier, while I was helping out with the Chinese restaurant in Nashville, the clock started ticking on my one-year work permit through Optional Practical Training(OPT), an employment authorization by US Immigration & Naturalization Services for foreign nationals with a student visa. If I could not find a job within the year, I would have to leave the country as my student visa expired.
The typical career path for an accounting graduate is to start with an accounting firm, ideally one of the Big Four: KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst Young and PwC, pass the CPA exams, and labor from dawn to dusk during the audit peak season for a few years before working for companies in various industries.
While my classmates landed job offers from the Big Four to local firms, my job search went nowhere.
I did interview with the recruiting partners from these firms when they descended on campus in the fall of 1995. During the interview with a partner from KPMG, I told him that I was an international student. He asked how KPMG could hire me. I explained to him the one-year work permit, called “Optional Practical Training”. After the first year, employers will need to sponsor my employment visa: H1B application. He told me that KPMG US had never hired accounting graduates on student visas. They did not know what obligations they would get into, both financial and legal. They did not know what the process would look like, or where to find the lawyer to handle the application. There were just too many unknowns. He liked my background and recommended that I should try KPMG Hong Kong. Did he say Hong Kong, I wondered. Hong Kong would be returned to China in less than 2 years? Who knew what would happened under the Communist rule? Would the Communist Central Government in Beijing infringe the autonomy and the judicial independence enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and turn it into another Chinese province? Also, I wasn’t the same kind of person as I was just a few months ago. I am now the father of an American-born son. I must do whatever I could to protect his future and provide him with the opportunity that every other American child would enjoy.
If International accounting firms like KPMG did not sponsor H1B visas, it made no sense to interview with regional firms. I had to chart my own career path. A phone interview with Cargill, the largest privately held company in the United States, started the shift in strategy. Cargill was looking for internal auditors to audit their vast international operation around the world, including some Chinese-speaking countries. The job required foreign language skills and international background. Even though this opportunity did not pan out, it did sharpen my focus on companies with international operations. Recruiters from these companies go to job fairs, rather than campuses to recruit.
In late March, I attended a job fair in Nashville. While I was making the rounds to hand out my resume, a recruiter from Luby's Cafeterias, Inc. approached me. He asked me what kind of job I was looking for. He showed me his name tag and told me that he was recruiting for store management trainees. He asked me if I would like to hear about a career in the restaurant management. I said "sure."
After he briefly talked about the history of the restaurant chain, he started playing the money card. He showed me his past paychecks, and said that if someone reached to the store manager level, he/she would have equity in the company with annual earnings up to $200k. I handed him my resume before he said he was going to play golf after the job fair. I had my own calculation. I told myself "Why don't you give it a try since you are working in a restaurant any way?” I thought if I could get your feet into the door, the company might have accounting job openings some day.
A few days later, I got a message on my my answer machine. I called back to schedule an interview.
The interview was in a high-end hotel in Nashville metro area. The Regional Vice President made the final call which candidates would be invited to one of their stores to experience what the job was like as an assistant store manager. I was selected and showed up at the nearest store a week later. During the store visit, I was pulled aside by the associate manager. He showed me his last paycheck, too. I received a job offer as assistant store manager a few days later.
I knew I was wasting my previous time on my one-year work permit. But, I had no alternative. We had already decided to send Jason back to China. We had agreed to buy airline ticket for a Chinese Visiting scholar in Bloomington, Indiana in return for her care of Jason during the flight. We needed money for Nora’s tuition in the fall as she started her MBA program. We packed our limited belongings and left Bowling Green after signing a six-month lease on an one-bed room apartment in Hendersonville, a suburb of Nashville, about three miles from Luby's.
Luby’s was founded by a military guy in San Antonio, Texas. Command and control was the management style in all Luby's stores. Employees addressed each other by Mr. or Ms followed by last names. Store managers sat at the top of the pyramid and had the absolute say in terms of raises and promotions for associate and assistant managers.
As an assistant manager, you got to do the heaviest and dirtiest things, got blamed for anything that went wrong even though you did not make any decision. Each shift was from 7:00 am to 10:30 pm. I worked three days in a row, took a day off, and then started all over again. We were always on our feet. We had little time for conversations about families or to build personal connections. It was so depressing that I felt like I walked into a giant cooler whenever I started my day at the store. The happiest moment for me during this period of time was when I returned home, grabbed Jason from bed, put him between my legs while I was sitting in the bathtub to give him a bath.
One night, about 30 minutes before the store closed, the Associate Manager asked me to clean the air vents. I took a screw driver and grabbed a ladder to get started. The vents must had not been cleaned for years. Dust and grease covered the screws. I had to scrub them clean to see them. After I loosened one screw, I began to work on the second one. The second one was kind of defected and came off right away. Luckily, I caught the vent in the air. It did not hit me, but the dust ball engulfed me.
I did not rush to the bathroom to clean myself. I took a chair near me, sat down and let the dust sink in both literally and metaphorically. As the dust was sinking into my hair and my skin, I let the meaning of this job sink into my mind. I withheld my tears and asked God:"Is this the job you want me to do?" I then remembered Roman 5:3-5 “But we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” I told myself if I make any achievement someday in life and career, this was the price I must pay now. After a long while, I picked myself up, walked to the bathroom, came out to finish the cleaning. Later I was told that such cleaning was usually done by restaurant services company, using professional equipments.
I believed that the associate manager did this to me when I was so tired after a long day, as a way to punish me. Over a week earlier, the store manager took some food from the buffet table to his office. When he was done, he apparently put the dirty plate on the counter where the associate manager walked back and forth. I could tell that he swallowed his pride to take the dirty plate to the sink. A few days later, the associate manager did the same to me. I pretended that I did not see his plate. About thirty minutes later, he took it away himself, giving me a dirty look.
One day, when I was in the kitchen, a man in his fifties talked to me from the grill. He asked me if I graduated from Western. I paused for a little while, wondering if he meant Western Kentucky University. Only in Bowling Green was I certain that people mean Western Kentucky University when they said Western. I said to him: "I graduated from Western Kentucky University". He replied "me, too, some twenty years ago with an undergraduate degree in economics". We never got a chance to carry on the conversation for me to ask when and how he ended up flipping burgers at Luby's. My only hope was that my life trajectory would be different from his. I reminded myself to look for traps, either temptations or misjudgement and tried to avoid them.
While I worked the back-breaking day job at Luby's, I still hoped and tried to locate a job I was trained for.
Peterbilt, the heavy truck manufacturer, had a plant just a few miles away from our restaurant. They were looking for an entry level cost accountant. I really like the job. So, I submitted my resume and landed an interview with the Plant Controller. I told him that I preferred cost accounting to financial accounting. The interview went very well. It seemed that the plant controller really liked my background. He told me that part of the job responsibility for the new hire would be implementing Activity-based Costing(ABC) at the plant. I told him that I wrote a term paper on ABC back in Western. He said he would like to read it. I went to a Fedex store to print the paper from my disk and dropped it at his office a few days after the interview. When its HR called me to ask about my work eligibility, I told them that I was on a one-year work permit as an international student. Employers would have to help me secure a H1 employment visa after the permit expired. I never heard from Peterbilt again.
Clearly, my student status was the impenetrable wall on my way to employment no matter how much employers wanted to hire me. At this time, I had to look to both coasts where there were not only more job opportunities, but there were companies that had hired international students like me and knew what it took to sponsor a H1-B visa.
Charles, a close friend from graduate school in China came to visit the United States as member of a delegation of business executives. When the delegation arrived in San Francisco in February 1996, he decided to stay in the United States. He had been telling me that the job market in San Francisco bay area was going like gangbusters not only for IT engineers, but for accounting and business services professionals. This firmed up my plan to go to the west coast after we sent Jason back to China in August.
I survived the brutal three-month training at the store in July. I received a congratulation letter from the Regional Vice President, and was asked to prepare for the two-week management training in the headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. I had to prepay for the airline tickets, hotel reservation and other travel expenses. I would be reimbursed three months after the training was over. This arrangement obviously was not fitting to my schedule. I resigned the day before the training started.
We terminated our lease on the one-bed apartment and moved back to Bowling Green as Nora was about to start her MBA study at Western. We put everything together to send Jason back to China, his US passport, his entry visa and his immunization records, etc. In mid August, we drove to Bloomington, Indiana to meet the lady who was going to take Jason back. She shared a mobile home with an elder American woman. We slept on her sofa for the night. The next morning, the American lady drove her van to take us to Indianapolis International Airport.
After we returned to Bowling Green from Indianapolis, I had to prepare my long journey to San Francisco. I went to the bank to withdraw $900 after leaving enough for Nora’s tuition and rent.
On September 3, 1996, I drove the damaged car and left Bowling Green to head to the west coast. Under a normal circumstance, this trip would be an extremely exciting journey. It crosses 11 states from the rolling hills of central Kentucky, through the great plains, the Rocky Mountains, over the Sierra Nevada ridges all the way to the Pacific coast. Along the way, natural beauties are mixed with rich history, and geologic wonders overshadows the mystifying legends. But the urgency to land a job and the uncertainty lying ahead weighed heavily on me.
I made my first stop at the Illinois welcome centre after I just left Kentucky behind me. It was one of the best welcome center I had never seen with a fresh look and many amenities in a sprawling landscape. I took out the map I obtained from AAA Bowling green office and planned where I would stay for the night. This was before the age of Google Map and Priceline. By estimating the distance of cities ahead of me and the speed I could whip my car, I would spend my first night near Kansas City, either on Kansas side or Missouri side.
I drove on I 64 West in Illinois and soon got to St Louis, MIssouri. As I passed the many steel bridges on the outskirt of the city, the skyline suddenly became wide open to me. I could see the The Gateway Arch, towering over the office skyscrapers and residential highrises. Under the setting sun, I saw a road sign that points to Truman Presidential library in the city of Independence as I gradually saw the beautiful state of Missouri in the rearview mirror. These are the places I would very much like to make a day trip to visit. But, I did not have the time and money to stretch my trip. My singular sight on the AAA map was San Francisco.
After I passed Kansas city on Missouri side, I started looking for the signs for cheap motels near every exit I was approaching. I finally saw a sign with more motel choices. I took the exit and stopped by each of the motel to check the rate before I finally made a reservation at the counter.
As I 80 West goes further into Kansas, the terrain is as flat as a pancake. Driving on the endless road was extremely boring, even more so when my car did not have a functioning cassette player, and the radio was spotty, if not silent. Suddenly a seemingly little town, with low buildings, some windmills and farm silos rose to the horizon on my right side. When I got closer, I saw a huge white billboard in the corn field with words in red: “Russell, Kansas, the hometown of Bob Dole welcome you!”. I suddenly realized that there was a US Presidential election going on. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee for President was a US Senator from Kansas. He was a decorated World War II veteran, a fearless fighter in his entire life. He finally secured Republican Presidential nomination in 1996 after a series of losses to Ronald Reagan in 1980, 1984 and George H Bush in 1988. But with a booming economy and Bill Clinton's political triangulation, he was locked in an uphill battle against Clinton. I remembered that I just watched the Republican National Convention less than a month earlier. Former Republican President Gerald Ford ridiculed Bill Clinton at the Convention in a hilarious way. He said:"I am not a Lincoln. I am at least a Ford. But, Bill Clinton is a Dodge Convertible!" He used the popular car brands in America to allude to the allegation that Bill Clinton evaded military service during Vietnam War and to his "Anything goes" liberal inclinations.
When I reached the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains after Denver, Colorado, the road is straight uphills. My car sounded out of breath initially, and then got progressively worse. No matter how hard I pumped the gas, it could not get to the normal speed to stay in a traffic. I pulled over to the right lane for all the traffic to pass. When I hit a section of the road under construction, only the right lane was open. I could get my car to 30 miles per hour at the best. When I looked at the traffic behind me on the rear-view mirror, I could not see the end of it. They all drove patiently at 30 miles per hour. I felt sorry for them. As soon as I saw the end of construction zone, I quickly pulled over to the slower lane. For the next 15 minutes, trucks, cars, and SUVs all whizzed past me.
Driving on the remote sections of I 80 requires extra caution and thoughtful planning. Often, I felt like that I was entering a no man’s land, without seeing any traffic for as long as 30 to 40 minutes on both ways. There could be no gas station on a stretch of 100 miles. I constantly was on the look for gas stations. I would stop to fill up even the tank was half full.
Wyoming is a huge state. Its driving speed limit is 80 miles per hour in some sections. It’s also an awe-inspiring state with stunning vistas. Everywhere you look, it comes out of the post card.
With a speed limit my car would never reach, I soaked in more of the ever-changing views outside of the window than the endless stretch of asphalt through the windshield. When Salt Lake City is 60 miles away, I saw the ramp off I 80 to local 189 that leads straight to Yellowstone National Park, another legendary place that pumps my heart. I told myself that everything had to wait
But, I did not wait to see the Bonneville Salt Flats, a densely packed salt pan in northwestern Utah. It is right off I-80. The vast dazzling plain of the salt crust under the September sun would attract anybody’s immediate attention from the interstate. "What the hell was this?" I wondered. I pulled over to the nearest parking lot. According to the introduction, it is the place where land speed records had been set. While, it offers a special and desolate landscape in September, ground water floods the Salt Flats several inches deep during winter months. Utah is also known for its amazing rock formations. They come in all sizes and shapes, including spires, pinnacles, and arches, as well as buttes and canyons. I could see many of them in the distance in fiery red.
Nevada is the most mountainous state with many north-south ranges. One moment my car puffed up the steep hills, then it took a plunge the next. The elevations drop so fast that I tried stay on the right lane and constantly looked for runaway truck ramps if my car brake stopped working. I took me a whole day to get out of the Silver State.
When the California grizzle bear flag waved in the gentle breeze ahead of me, I was excited to finally to get to the west coast. To enter California, all vehicles must passed wood inspection to make sure no foreign insects would do harms to its forests. Right after the inspection, I saw a welcome center perching on the top of the hill. I pulled over and climbed to the highest point to take my first look at this state which for over 150 years had attracted countless people to seek opportunities to make better lives for themselves . I wished myself to be one of the few lucky ones who could make it.
The welcome center holds a commanding view of the deep valleys, filled with dense forests and snow-capped mountain ridges in the distance. Suddenly, I saw a large body of water to the south. It must be one of the shimmering alpine lakes I had read about. Later, I learned it was the world-renowned Lake Tahoe, the Northern California wonderland for ski enthusiasts in winter and other pleasure-seekers in summer.
When I finally cross the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, it was raining so hard that my windshield wipers could not keep up. I stopped on the side of the road under a wall of rock. The police came over to check on me. After he knew that I was fine, he asked me where I was going. I told him Charles’s street address. He was able to give me a detailed direction.
The rain stopped when I finally parked across the street from Charles’s apartment. San Francisco has a mediterranean weather with mild, dry summer and cold, wet winter. It rarely rains in September. It turned out that the rain was the prelude to the darkest and the most helpless months in my life.
I slept on Charles’s sofa for a week while I was looking for my own place. Gas, motel stay and meals during the five-day trip had taken a big bite out of the $ 900 I took from Kentucky. I could not put up the deposit and the first month rent for an apartment. I ended up with a room on the second floor with a Chinese family from Taiwan. There were two other tenants on the second floor who were doctors in residence in University of California at San Francisco(UCSF) hospital.
The decision to come to San Francisco, the epic center of Information technology was the right one.
The job market was steaming with strong demands for both hardware and software engineers, accountants and business services professionals. For every three resumes I sent out, I could get at lease one telephone interview, or even office interview. I did not have the luxury to look for jobs full-time. I had to work to pay rent, gas and grocery. I got a night shift job at McDonald's so I could go to interviews during the day if one came up. I went to University of San Francisco library to print resumes and cover letters.
The first interview came from UT Starcom in Alameda, an island 3 miles away from downtown Oakland. The company was a start-up in the telecom industry in early 1990. They marketed the personal handy-phone system, a technology that gave the landline phone some mobility within half mile radius. It took China’s market by storm in mid 1990s when a mobile phone was the size of a brick that only corporate executives could afford.
After the initial phone interview, I was invited to the office interview with the Director of Finance and the Controller. I went to City Library to search for articles on how to prepare for an office interview. I gamed out a plan in my mind on how I would walk into the office, give a firm handshake, keep eye contact, think out of the box and ask intelligent questions, etc.
Near the end of the interview, I told them how the two miles of all vehicles were following me when I could only drive my car at 30 miles per hour on a single lane in the Rocky Mountains. They both got a laugh out of it. I wanted to show that I am a different kind of accountant who could tell funny stories and crack jokes from time to time. The interview went so well, the Director of Finance was talking about H1-B visa. I told him that my OPT expired in three months. He assured me that it would not be a problem. The company had successfully sponsored many H1-B visa applications. The job would required multiple trips a year to China. That was the job I had been dreaming about. I could get a chance to see Jason. As for compensation, the director said to me that the pay would not be very high, but I would received equity, ie. stock options.
I was so confident that I would get an offer in a few days that I told McDonald’s store manager I would not be able to work there any more. When they finally told me they would go with another candidate who had similar background, but was just married an American woman, I was devastated. He wouldn’t need a H1-B visa, he probably had got his green card through marriage. My entire world collapsed. For more than a week, I felt distraught and lost appetite for any food.
I picked myself up and had to move on. I went to the nearby Burger King to get a night-shift job since I could not return to McDonald’s. One late morning, I walked out of my room to get some grocery from a store only two blocks away. I noticed that my car was the only vehicle on one side of the street. I walked toward my car and saw a ticket on the windshield. It was a $30 fine from the Sanitation Department for blocking the street sweep that was scheduled for that morning. I had never paid any attention to the sign.
As the saying goes, “Bad things never come alone.” For the next three weeks, I received two parking tickets. San Francisco streets are very hilly. When you park on the street, you have to turn the wheels 45 degree against the curb. That is to prevent your car from slipping and hitting other vehicles in front of or behind.
The final blow came when I left another heartbreaking interview in San Jose. I was invited to an office interview in Silicon Valley with a leading enterprise Resource Planing (ERP) software company. The hiring manager was a Filipino. He liked my background and even asked me where I lived as he was thinking about car-pooling with me. When he took me to meet his boss, the Controller, everything fell apart because the company only sponsored H1-B visa for engineers.
When I was ten miles away from home, I noticed that my car lost momentum and saw the sign “Time Belt”. I had no idea about what time belt was. Nonetheless, I quickly pulled over to the right lane. My car stopped before it completely got on the shoulder. I got out of the car after I turned on the emergency light. Luckily, I was very close to an exit. I walked about half miles to a gas station to report to California Highway Patrol(CHP). They quickly sent a towing truck to pull the car off the road and picked me up at the gas station. When they dropped me and unloaded my car, the driver asked for $80 for towing. I had to ask my landlord to write a check for me. I borrowed $200 from Charles to fix the time belt. For the next three weels, I worked my tails off to repay them back.
Before the Christmas break in 1996, I asked Nora to come to San Francisco to visit. She had never been to the west coast yet. I would not stay here for too long, as the prospect to secure a job became dimmer. My F1 student visa was expiring in less than 2 months. I would have to go back to China or tried to change visa status to F2, the visa for the spouse of international students.
Bracing the cold and rainy winter wind, I took Nora to the Golden Gate Bridge, USF campus and Chinatown, the places I had not been able to visit even after having lived in the city for over three months. I did not have the mood to enjoy any of the holiday festivities. The year of 1996, the toughest year in my entire life ended on a very gloomy note.
I had come to the end of the road. I had done what a human could have possibly done. It was time for God to reveal His plan for me. I would be at peace whatever that plan might be.
发表于 2025-3-7 10:07:05