As a child, Xiao Fei Zheng did not understand want. He was born in Guangzhou, in southern China, in , and grew up in a quiet neighborhood. Walking home from school, he often heard parents disciplining their children.
But he was pampered. His father was a political officer in the Army, and his mother, a former professional basketball player, was an accountant. Their apartment was large, with a dining room spacious enough for his parents to host parties where couples would dance to tango and cha-cha records. In the rest of the building, apartments of this size were divided among three families. In , the Zhengs decided to make the move.
Xiao Fei was twelve, his sister was seventeen, and his brother was twenty. On arriving in the U. She expected their new homeland to be full of robots and levitating cars, but she found it eerily desolate. After the sun set, their neighbors in Oakland stayed inside and locked the doors. Occasionally, they heard gunshots. Xiao Fei spent a lot of time with his grandfather, who took him aside one day and asked him to pick an English name out of the dictionary.
He chose Eddyβhe liked that it also referred to flowing water. Perhaps the greatest change was that they were suddenly in a world of Black and white. Even the Chinese Americans felt unfamiliar. They laughed; they were thirteen, too. His brother, who went by Peter, studied English and worked at Burger King with their father.
His sister, Lili, waitressed and attended community college. Eddy, who had been a decent student in China, recalls a day, during his first year of high school, when his teacher asked everyone to bring in a newspaper clipping.
