Out From Under The 'Bamboo Ceiling'

Silicon Valley is losing talented Chinese engineers to, well, China

- David Ramli

Even before Wang Yi learned that his wife, Cao Jing, was pregnant, he’d started to feel another kind of clock ticking. Since graduating from Princeton in 2009, he’d spent two years working at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., attending meeting after meeting as a product manager shepherding projects from search ads to YouTube upgrades through the company’s mammoth bureaucracy. I can’t do this anymore, he told Cao soon after the pregnancy test came back positive. Let’s go home. Back to China, for good.

It was a fight. Cao was happy in the spacious condo she and Wang had just bought in nearby Sunnyvale, and they loved touring America’s national parks in their new Subaru Outback. Together, they were making more than $200,000 a year and had a stable future to look forward to. China seemed like a big question mark. “It was a very uneasy few weeks before we made our decision,” Wang recalls. A lot of pacing, a lot of tense hours long debates with graphs of the pros and cons. “But in the end, she came around.”

The couple left the balmy Bay Area for Shanghai, and six years later Wang’s startup, Liulishuo (also known as LingoChamp), has raised more than $150 million in venture funding for its English teaching app, which has 60 million users and 1 million paying subscribers and is planning its expansion into other markets. Wang says he and his wife still miss the parks.