Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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

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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

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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 families remain close friends to this day and continue to vacation
together.
Jack and Ken Morley sharing some beer. 
The Morley Family

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