By Frank Shyong/Los Angeles Times/TNS
LOS ANGELES—Rudy Rong took a seat at a table in the Commerce Casino’s poker hall, his legs jigging with nervous energy.
The son of Chinese video-game billionaires hadn’t come here to gamble. Rong was launching a virtual-reality start-up, and he had arrived hours earlier to videotape a musical performance in the casino’s ballroom for an investor demo.
But as Ping An, a pop star and former contestant in the singing show Voice of China, took the mic, Rong grew anxious, left the camera running onstage and retreated downstairs to the poker tables.
As he tossed a $100 bill on the green felt, his phone’s glow illuminated bags under his eyes. His start-up’s app would be launching in a month, and he had been pushing himself hard, packing his schedule with coding sessions, media appearances and investor meetings.
As one of China’s fuerdai—the scions of the country’s new wealthy class famous throughout the world for flashy spending and fast cars—Rong wants to prove he can do more than inherit money.
A stack of chips appeared in front of him.
Common sight
THE game is No Limit Texas Hold ’Em, and when it came time for Rong to make his last bet before the dealer showed the final card, he took another look at his hand.
The odds of Rong getting another spade, completing a flush and winning the hand, were low.
But so are the odds of a 22-year-old University of Southern California (USC) student launching a successful startup. To win at anything, Rong believes, you must gamble.
He pushed “all in.”
The dealer flipped a queen of clubs. Another $100 gone.
Rong frowned and reached for his wallet.
In recent years, Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris have become common sights outside certain hot-pot restaurants in California’s San Gabriel Valley.
Behind the wheels of these cars are fuerdai like Rudy, a generation born in the aftermath of China’s economic miracle, with every imaginable resource at their disposal.
Mad dash
FOR many in China, the fuerdai symbolize the values lost in the modernizing country’s mad dash for economic growth: diligence, humility and restraint.
Their exploits make headlines across the world and read like a cautionary tale of new wealth—“The Great Gatsby,” but with China-size fortunes:
• The son of one of China’s richest men buys two Apple Watches, fastens them around his dog’s forepaws and posts it on social media to wild public outcry.
• A local official’s son tries to use his father’s name as a get-out-of-jail-free card after killing two students in a car crash.
• Rumors of wild orgies in coastal cities periodically surface through Weibo, China’s Twitter.
• And in Los Angeles, where many rich Chinese families send their kids to school, an 18-year-old University of California, Irvine student from China was arrested in Malibu after leading police on a 122-mph chase across the city in a BMW 750i, unaware that he was being pursued.
The fuerdais’ antics have inspired such national anxiety that last year the Chinese government ordered 70 of these second-generation nouveau riche to attend an education camp on Chinese values.
Social compass
THERE’S widespread concern in China that wealth is warping the social compass, said Xiaofei Li, a political science professor at York College of Pennsylvania. In the new China, morality is often measured by how much money someone makes, not how they make it.
“There’s a saying in China: People will laugh at someone who is poor, but they will not laugh at a prostitute,” Li said.
Rong, a second-year student at USC, rents an office in a downtown skyscraper, spends weekends in his family’s 5,900-square-foot house in Newport Beach and, depending on his mood, drives a Bentley Continental GT, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Porsche Turbo Cayenne, a Cadillac, a Mercedes or a Range Rover—a fleet he keeps parked around town, some in spaces that go for up to $2,400 a year at the downtown Los Angeles high-rise where he has his apartment.
He freely identifies as fuerdai, but with one caveat.
“It just defines you as someone’s son,” Rong said. “We want to be known for ourselves.”
Chaotic extravagance
FIVE thousand dollars in cash fluttered over the dance floor at Lure, a Hollywood nightclub, like overpriced confetti. Rong raised his phone and hit “record.”
His video of that night in 2014 shows dancers ignoring the thumping bass beat, crawling after bills and leaping to snatch money from the air.
Beyond the dance floor, he says, bikini-clad models rolled cigars and lay on tables inviting patrons to suck body shots of expensive alcohol from their navels. Outside, late arrivals pulled up in gleaming sports cars and strutted along a red carpet.
When police responded to reports of underage drinking, Rong and his friends rented two buses and moved the festivities down the street to Cosmo, where, he says, actors James Franco and Seth Rogen made an appearance.
The party’s chaotic extravagance was the product of Prime Union, a leisure club for young, wealthy Chinese nationals in the US that Rong and his friends created as college freshmen.
Born differently
IN exchange for a membership fee that eventually swelled to $20,000 a year, Prime Union organized private jets to Las Vegas, threw parties where members could eat sushi off the nude bodies of models and rented out mansions in the Hollywood Hills to show off their flashy cars and throw more parties.
Rong says he started the club because he wanted to “change the image of Chinese people” in America—an image, he believed, that consisted of little more than infrequent, unflattering roles in film and television, like Ken Jeong’s turn as Chow in
The Hangover movies.
Prime Union members, Rong says, didn’t need to wait for acceptance and respect—they could buy it, and they could buy the clubs that wouldn’t admit them and throw parties where Chinese guys get all the girls. Their slogan reflected an almost nationalist ethos: “You were born differently. It’s in your blood.”
But that part of his life, Rong insists, is in the past. He quit the club a year ago. It wasn’t making very much money, and after police shut down the October event, the club lost its credibility with members.
Image change
THE parties had also left Rong jaded. He began to see that many of his friends—the sons and daughters of politicians and industry titans—were unhappy.
“I’ve seen so many second-generation rich who are craving to fill emptiness inside of them and their hearts,” Rong says. “Every day is about the next party and the next girl. I don’t want that to happen to me.”
Last November he withdrew $100,000 from an account his parents help fund and launched Magic Cube. He resolved to change his image.
On his Wechat feed, a photo stream of movie premieres, first-class-seat selfies and yacht hangouts has given way to photos of his employees coding late into the night and snaps of his economy-class accommodations, a laptop jammed between his knees and the seat. A few weeks ago, working late at his office, he went online to post a late-night view of the dimming lights of downtown LA and captioned it with an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote:
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”
American dream
SOON after coming to the US as a high-school student, Rong says, he lost faith in the American dream and began to subscribe to the notion of the Chinese dream.
If the American dream is the promise of prosperity in exchange for hard work, the Chinese dream, in Rong’s view, is the chance of immortality—the belief that anyone can become the richest man in the world, so long as he places the right bets.
Rong’s bet is Magic Cube. His idea is to merge aspects of virtual reality, reality TV, live-streaming video, online gaming, the social-influencer economy and big data for a product that Rong hopes is tailor-made for the Chinese economy: ever-changing, astronomically ambitious, and with a payoff of billions.
Users will participate in live-streamed games and television shows cast with social-media stars and bid money in real time to influence the cast’s actions. Data scientists will analyze the movements of users wearing 3-D goggles to optimize the VR content. Users can buy watches, clothes and jewelry to own in the game, and eventually, virtual reality filmmakers will be able to create their own games and television shows for the platform.
Rong has spent the last few weeks making a demo for investors and trying to model the frugality that is required of a start-up founder. The money once spent on fancy restaurants and flashy clothes he now invests in the company. The last time he went to a club was to gather footage for an investor demo. He’s thinking about selling his Bentley.
Image credits: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/TNS