Alibaba Page 5

  As a boy, Jack fell in love with the English language and literature, particularly readings of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that he listened to on a shortwave radio. Later it was the arrival of foreign tourists in China that provided Jack with his opening to the outside world. In late 1978, when Jack was fourteen, China launched the new “open door” policy, initiated by Deng Xiaoping, in pursuit of foreign trade and investment. After a decade of turmoil the country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and desperately needed hard currency.

  In 1978, only 728 foreign tourists visited Hangzhou. But the following year more than forty thousand came to the city. Jack relished any opportunity to practice his English. He started waking up before dawn and riding his bicycle for forty minutes to the Hangzhou Hotel to greet foreign tourists. As he recalled, “Every morning from five o’clock I would read English in front of the hotel. A lot of foreign visitors came from the USA, from Europe. I’d give them a free tour of West Lake, and they taught me English. For nine years! And I practiced my English every morning, no matter if it snowed or rained.”

  An American tourist whose father and husband were named Jack suggested the name and Ma Yun became known in English henceforth as Jack. He is dismissive of the quality of his English: “I just make myself understood. The grammar is terrible.” But Jack never dismisses how much learning the language has helped him in life: “English helps me a lot. It makes me understand the world better, helps me to meet the best CEOs and leaders in the world, and makes me understand the distance between China and the world.”

  Among the many tourists who came to Hangzhou in 1980 was an Australian family, the Morleys. Ken Morley, a recently retired electrical engineer, had signed up for a tour of China offered by the local branch of the Australia China Friendship Society. He took along his wife, Judy, and their three children, David, Stephen, and Susan, for whom it would be their first overseas trip. For Jack, their visit would change his life.

  Today, David runs a yoga studio in Australia, where I managed to track him down. He kindly shared his memories and the photos of his family’s visit to China and their enduring friendship with Jack.

  On July 1, 1980, the Morleys’ Australian tour group arrived by plane in Hangzhou from Beijing and was transferred by bus to the Shangri-La Hotel on West Lake, the same hotel (then the Hangzhou Hotel) where President Nixon and his entourage had stayed eight years earlier. David recalls being shown the suite where the First Couple had stayed, allocated to their tour leader, complete with “plush, red velvet toilet seats, which we three children were fascinated by.”

  The next day the Australian group’s itinerary included a boat trip on West Lake, followed by a visit to the nearby tea plantations and on to the Liuhe (Six Harmonies) Pagoda before returning to the hotel for dinner at 6:30 P.M. Taking advantage of the “free evening,” David and a young woman called Keva whom he had befriended on the trip snuck across the road from the hotel to the park opposite, overlooking West Lake. There they proceeded to play with matches, practicing the art of “match flicking” that she had taught him. This involved standing a match upside-down with its head on the striking surface and flicking it with your fingers and watching it spiral off to, David recalls, “hopefully an uneventful extinguishment.” Fortunately that day, the park didn’t catch fire. But David and Keva’s antics did catch the attention of a fifteen-year-old boy—Jack Ma.

  David recalls, “It was on that free evening, flicking matches in the park, that I was approached by a young man wanting to try his newly acquired English skills on me. He introduced himself; we swapped pleasantries and agreed to meet in the park again.”

  On July 4, their last day in Hangzhou, David introduced Jack to his sister, Susan, and invited him and some other local children to play Frisbee with them in the park. David described the scene to me: Marking out a playing area with shoes and other items “we were soon surrounded by hundreds of Chinese spectators.” Jack’s father, Ma Laifa, took photos of the game.

  David’s father, Ken Morley, once described his first impressions of Jack as a “barrow boy,” or a street hawker. “He really wanted to practice his English, and he was very friendly. Our kids were very impressed.”

  David described how the family stayed in touch: “What followed that meeting was a pen pal relationship that I kept up for a few years until my father started to take an interest in helping this young man.” Jack would correspond regularly with Ken, referring to him as “Dad,” who asked him to “double space his letters so that any corrections could be sent back in the spaces.” David explained, “The original with corrections was returned for learning purposes with the reply letter. I believe this greatly helped and encouraged Jack to continue with his English studies.”

  Jack Ma, age fifteen, with his new Australian friend David Morley by West Lake. David is wearing his Australia China Friendship Society ID card. The Morley Family

  Armed with his improving English, rich knowledge of the history of the area, and a knack for storytelling, Jack embraced the opportunity to show more foreign tourists around the sights of West Lake. He relished visiting Hangzhou’s teahouses, where locals would play Chinese chess and cards and recount “tall tales.”

  Jack would often accompany his grandmother to Buddhist temples to burn incense and worship the gods. He developed a passion for tai chi and reading The Water Margin, a classic Chinese tale that features 108 heroes—the number of employees he later would set as an early head count target for Alibaba.

  But by far his favorite works are those of Hong Kong author Louis Cha, who writes under the pen name Jin Yong. Born in Zhejiang Province in 1924, Jin Yong cofounded in 1959 the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, which published many of his early works. In total, he authored fifteen novels, all in the wuxia genre, which blends historical and fictional tales of martial arts and chivalry. Jin Yong is highly popular in the Chinese-speaking world. Worldwide sales of his books have topped 100 million copies. There have been more than ninety television series and film adaptations of his work.

  One of Jack’s childhood pen pal letters to David Morley. The Morley family

  Set between the sixth century BC and the eighteenth century, Jin Yong’s works contain strong elements of Chinese patriotism, pitting heroic peoples against northern invaders such as the Mongols and Manchus.

  Yi Zhongtian, a well-known writer and a professor at Xiamen University, summarized the popular appeal of traditional stories and martial arts as follows: “In traditional Chinese society, people have three dreams. The first is a wise emperor. People hope to have a good leader so that they can have peace in the country. The second dream is clean officials. If there are no clean officials, then comes the third dream, chivalrous heroes. People hope that the heroes could stand for them, kill the greedy officials, and bring justice back to the society. However, if there are no heroes, people can only seek comfort from martial arts fiction. That’s why many Chinese people like kung fu novels.”

  Jin Yong’s writing is suffused with traditional elements of Chinese culture and arts, as well as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Jack found inspiration in Jin Yong’s legendary warrior Feng Qingyang. Feng was a teacher. His martial arts moves were never performed to any set plan.

  In his own practice of martial arts, Jack was trained in tai chi2 by a woman in her seventies who, according to Chen Wei—a former student of Jack’s who is now his personal assistant—was so skilled that she could defend herself against two or three younger men. Every morning she would close her eyes to meditate before practicing tai chi, “listening to the sound of flowers blooming.” Today Jack often travels with a personal tai chi coach.

  But these skills were of little use against one of Jack’s earliest foes: math. In China, all high school students hoping to go on to higher education have to pass a merit-based national higher education entrance exam, commonly known as the gaokao, literally the “high test.” The gaokao takes place over two or three days. Math, along with Chinese and a foreign language, is
mandatory.

  The gaokao is widely seen as one of the most challenging in the world, requiring a huge amount of preparation and memorization. Today there is growing criticism of the exam’s negative social consequences, including depression and suicide.

  Jack took the gaokao but failed badly, scoring 1/120 in math. His hopes crushed, he took to menial labor delivering heavy bundles of magazines from printers to the Hangzhou train station on a pedicab, a job Jack managed to land thanks only to his father’s connections. Jack was rejected from numerous other jobs, including as a waiter in a hotel. He was told he was not tall enough.

  Chen Wei relates in his biography of Jack, This Is Still Ma Yun, how his boss found inspiration in the book Life, written by the Chinese author Lu Yao. Published in 1982, and made into a film in 1984, the book relates the story of Gao Jialin. A talented man living in a village, Gao struggles but ultimately fails to escape the clutches of poverty. Jack resolved to have a different fate, and took the gaokao again. This time his math score improved slightly, to 19/120, but his overall score dropped considerably.

  Jack once again set about applying for jobs to make ends meet. He sent out eleven job applications but all met with rejection. Jack likes to tell the story of how even KFC turned him away, the only one of twenty-four candidates they didn’t like.

  Undeterred, Jack became a regular every Sunday at the library of Zhejiang University, where he committed to memory the formulas and equations he would have to master to pass the test.

  Jack never gained admission to a prestigious university in Beijing or Shanghai. But in 1984, when he was nineteen, he raised his math score sufficiently to win acceptance to a local university, the Hangzhou Teachers College. On his third attempt at the gaokao he scored 89 in math. His score was several points below the normal acceptance rate at other universities for a full four-year undergraduate degree.3 Normally he would have been relegated to a two- to three-year associate’s degree course,4 but Hangzhou Teachers College had a few spaces left for male students, and Jack squeaked in. The college was not a prestigious one. Jack recalled that “it was considered the third or fourth class of my city.” In his public appearances, Jack often speaks of his twice failing the gaokao as a badge of honor.

  Teacher

  In his sophomore year, Jack was elected president of the school’s student union, where he launched a Top Ten Campus Singers Competition, and was later president of the Hangzhou Students Federation.

  In 1985, Jack also received an invitation from Ken Morley to stay with his family at their home in New Lambton, Australia, a suburb of Newcastle in New South Wales. It was the first time Jack had left China. He stayed for a month and returned a changed man.

  “Everything I’d learned in China was that China was the richest country in the world,” Jack later said. “When I arrived in Australia, I realized it was totally different. I started to think you have to use your own mind to judge, to think.”

  Jack has never shown any hint of shyness toward foreigners. During his trip to Australia, Jack gave a demonstration to a local tai chi group gathered in a suburban hall, showing off his skills at monkey- and drunken-style kung fu. “I’d often request he do his drunken boxing routine, it was great to watch,” Stephen Morley recalls.

  Stephen Morley, Jack, and Anne Lee, a cousin of the Morleys. Louis and Anne Lee

  Jack’s friendship with the Morleys blossomed. After Jack’s trip to Australia, Ken Morley made a return visit to Hangzhou with Stephen. As the Ma family home was too small to host guests, Jack arranged accommodation at a student college for the Morleys. “We would have dinner at the Ma household and cycle to the college after dinner,” Stephen recalls. “Jack would always help prepare and cook dinner, always making us feel special.”

  Louis and Anne Lee

  During their holiday, Jack planned a trip out to the countryside for his two Australian friends, and they got their fair share of Chinese adventures. For transportation, Jack secured the use of a pickup truck. He and the driver sat up front in the cab while Ken and Stephen sat on two loose chairs that Jack had placed on the open-top cargo bed. On their way out of Hangzhou one day, the driver had to break suddenly to avoid a cyclist who had fallen off his bike, sending Ken and Stephen hurtling forward into the rear of the cab. Fortunately they escaped injury. Back in town later that evening, Jack arranged a banquet for his Australian friends with some local officials and VIPs, looking out over a street below where a festival was taking place. Stephen recalls, “I’d never seen so many people congested in one place. It became clear then that Jack was a bit of a networker, organizing a vehicle and a dinner with the mayor required connections.”

  Back in Hangzhou, Jack’s university life was not carefree. Money concerns were pressing. Once again Ken Morley stepped in to help. While the tuition at the college was free, the compulsory live-in fees were beyond the means of Jack’s family. “When we came back to Australia we thought about it,” Morley recalled, “and decided we could help. It was not much—five to ten dollars a week, I think—so I would send him a check every six months.”

  At Hangzhou Teachers College, Jack met and fell in love with Zhang Ying, a fellow student and Zhejiang-native who had taken Cathy as her first name. The relationship was kept secret from Jack’s family. During a dinner one evening in Hangzhou with his father, Jack, and his parents, Stephen Morley recalled, “I blurted out ‘nü peng you’ [girlfriend] and gestured towards Jack. Jack looked mortified and probably wanted to kill me at this point. This led to a discussion in Mandarin between Jack and his parents. Jack still reminds me of the time I blabbed on him as a kid.”

  Ma Yin (Jack’s sister), Stephen Morley, Ken Morley, and Jack in Hangzhou. The Morley family

  Jack inside the kitchen of the new apartment that Ken Morley helped him purchase in Hangzhou. The Morley Family

  Despite being outed by their young Australian friend, the relationship between Jack and Cathy endured and they were married soon after. The Morleys once again showed their generosity and gave the couple 22,000 Australian dollars (about $18,000) to help finance the purchase of their first home, two apartments on top of a tower block that they combined together to make a penthouse.

  Jack later said that words could not express what Ken and Judy Morley had done for him.

  Ken Morley died in September 2004 at the age of seventy-eight. His obituary in a local newspaper records that he had taken “his children to China and Cuba and encouraged them to get an education, travel and have a political point of view. This broad-minded, generous approach extended outside the family and Ken is well-known for befriending a poor young Chinese boy. This boy is now a man who heads a successful company in China.” At the funeral, a clergyman read out a message from Jack to the Morley family in which he disclosed a plan he had to one day travel the Trans-Siberian Railway with Ken, whom he described as his “Australian ‘Dad’ and mentor.” His son David wrote to me, “It may be a fantasy now, and with his celebrity status something difficult to achieve for Jack incognito, but I would like one day to fulfill the idea of that trip on behalf of my father.”

  Jack and a fellow lecturer prepare to host a talk by Jack’s mentor, Ken Morley, in April 1991 at the Hangzhou YMCA. The Morley Family

  The irony is that Ken Morley, who was instrumental in unlocking opportunities for a man who would become one of China’s richest capitalists, was himself a committed socialist. Born the son of a miner and a seamstress, he was a longtime political activist and member of the Communist Party of Australia, presenting himself as a candidate in local elections for the Socialist Alliance. In the years before he died, he would witness some of Jack’s early success, expressing his embarrassment at the money and gifts Jack and Cathy liked to shower on him. Instead he treasured most, he said, the honor that Jack and Cathy bestowed on him by naming their eldest child after him (calling him “Kun,” an approximation of Ken). China impacted the Morleys, too: Susan Morley went on to study Chinese in Sydney for several years. The Ma and Morley f
amilies remain close friends to this day and continue to vacation together.

  Jack and Ken Morley sharing some beer. The Morley Family

  To Get Rich Is Glorious

  In 1992, Deng Xiaoping undertook his famous “southern tour,” immortalized5 in his pronouncement that “to get rich is glorious.” For the country’s entrepreneurs, relegated to the margins of society, Deng’s endorsement was an unambiguous invitation to return to the fold.

  But Jack was not yet an entrepreneur. Upon graduating in 1988, with a bachelor’s degree in English, he had become a lecturer in English and international trade at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Engineering. While his fellow students were all assigned to teach English in middle schools, Jack was the only one among five hundred graduates to be assigned to teach in an institution of higher learning. But he had started to think of a future beyond teaching. Jack recalled the lesson he drew from Deng’s southern tour: “You can be rich; you can help other people be rich.” Although he was keen to serve out the remaining two years of his contract, Jack began to pursue opportunities outside his school.

  After his day job at the institute, he started teaching English classes at the Hangzhou YMCA. According to Chen Wei, who first attended a class in 1992, Jack’s English classes were popular because he spent little time teaching grammar, vocabulary, or reading out texts. Instead Jack preferred to pick a topic and engage in conversation. His students came from a wide variety of backgrounds, from high schoolers striving to study overseas, to college students, to factory workers and young professionals. Jack would often spend time with them after class, “drinking tea, playing cards, and chatting.”

  Hangzhou had a regular “English corner,” a gathering of local residents keen to practice their language skills on one another, which met every Sunday morning in the Six Park beside West Lake. Jack would take along his students from night school, but as they were eager to go more often, he decided to launch his own English corner. His sessions were held every Wednesday night, with Jack finding that the anonymity that darkness conferred made his students less self-conscious in practicing their imperfect English.