Wang opens this chapter by reflecting on his parents’ difficult choice to emigrate from China to the West in 2000, leaving behind their lives in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. Both of Wang’s parents came from families with complicated political histories during Mao’s era. His paternal grandparents descended from wealthy merchant and Nationalist backgrounds, which brought them suffering during the Cultural Revolution. His maternal grandfather survived the Great Famine and served in the People’s Liberation Army, while his grandmother came from a family labeled as minor landlords. Despite these challenges, Wang’s parents were fortunate to attend university during Deng Xiaoping’s reform period and became educated professionals—his father a computer science instructor and his mother a radio and television news anchor.

The family emigrated to Canada amid China’s economic uncertainty following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. They arrived in Toronto during winter 2000, just as the dot-com bubble burst, severely limiting job prospects. Wang’s father struggled to find programming work, while his mother took menial jobs as a janitor, garment worker, and massage therapist—a dramatic fall from her previous career. The family faced persistent financial hardship. After Wang’s father found software work in Pennsylvania, they moved again, narrowly avoiding the 2008 financial crisis. Wang attended college at the University of Rochester on financial aid and worked to support himself.

Wang examines what life would have been like had his parents remained in China. Many of their classmates prospered during China’s economic boom after joining the World Trade Organization, either through real estate ownership or entrepreneurship. Even salary workers accumulated wealth through state-allocated housing. His parents acknowledge they would have enjoyed stronger social connections, lived near family, and had more fulfilling careers. However, they recognize their classmates envy their American life because of the anxieties Chinese citizens face: arbitrary government interference, environmental concerns, economic uncertainty, and precarious property rights.

Wang shares that he has asked his parents to move to Sunset Park in Brooklyn, a vibrant immigrant neighborhood with Chinese and Latino communities, walkable streets, affordable housing, and the Sunset Play Center—a swimming facility built by urban planner Robert Moses in 1936. Wang to critiques Moses’s portrayal as a villainous figure, arguing that while Moses made mistakes and harbored prejudices, his infrastructure projects enabled New York to thrive as a global city. Sunset Park itself has flourished with new immigrant communities despite the expressway Moses built through it.

Wang contends that America has lost its capacity to build infrastructure efficiently. He cites examples like the painfully slow implementation of Biden administration projects: $42 billion allocated for rural broadband connected zero homes in four years, and $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations produced only seven operational units in two years. New York’s subway construction costs five times more per kilometer than Paris, making meaningful expansion impossible. This paralysis stems from lawyerly society—excessive proceduralism and litigation that prioritizes process over outcomes.

Wang concludes by arguing that both China and the United States share transformational ideologies but express them differently. China’s top-down engineering approach achieves impressive physical results but suppresses human creativity and freedom. America’s pluralistic values position it to find better solutions, but the country has abandoned its engineering heritage and lost faith in ambitious public projects. Wang believes America must balance legal protections with the capacity to build, drawing inspiration from figures like Moses and Admiral Hyman Rickover, who delivered complex government projects successfully. The ultimate competition between the superpowers depends not on factory output or corporate valuations, Wang suggests, but on which system works better for its people. He argues that America must recover its building ethos to address climate change, housing shortages, and infrastructure decay while maintaining the pluralism that remains its greatest strength.