Today, Hao is 34 and is one of China’s top national tour guides. He earns more money in a year than his wise grandfather earned in his lifetime. He travels all over China, and all over the world. He’s married, and he and his wife have their own flat in Beijing. They even have their own car. A family, for now, isn’t in the plans.

“We want them,” he notes “but we’re worried about the future.”

That’s the downside of so-called “freedom of choice;” the freedom to succeed means that there’s also a freedom to fail.

That’s why “we want everything now” states Hao. “I think we see this in the stock market, too. Most Chinese have had such rapid change that they don’t understand that the rest of the world takes time.”

“We don’t worry about ‘now’ he says, making quotation-mark signs with his fingers for emphasis. “We worry about the future. So we save, save, save.”

Hao is stunned when I tell him that American consumers have a negative savings rate - at a time when Chinese savers tuck away 40% of their income.

In a candid moment, Hao says he must look ahead, for he realizes he could be unemployed next year.

Indeed, he’s quick to point out that the plummeting U.S. dollar has clearly affected his business.

“I have to quote the trips I plan months in advance,” he notes. “As the dollar drops, I make less because the cost of making each tour is going up here in China.”

There’s an irony with current market conditions that make him feels as if his life has traveled full circle - at least a little bit.

“Now I worry about meat on the table at New Year’s, which was the same thing my family worried about when we were dirt poor and living in the hutongs” when I was small and growing up in Beijing.

With equal candor, Hao concedes that this realization means he’ll “have to get better at anticipating what will happen” next, in both the near term, and well ahead.

But to be part of China’s new economy is “exciting,” he observes. He wouldn’t change a thing - even if that were possible.

And it’s not. The fact that China is changing cannot be altered or stopped. After all, as Hao notes, quoting a famous Chinese adage: “Kai gong mei you hui tou jien.”

That means that, “once the arrow is released from the bow, it will not come back.”