Photo: Simon Ridgway
The empire is crumbling. Subordinates rail at each other in the open. Takeout boxes litter the trading floor. Pierpoint, the 150-year-old financial titan at the heart of HBO’s Industry, is plunging toward bankruptcy after a series of calamitous investments. It’s like ’08 all over again, except this time daddy government won’t bail them out. Sleepless, the bank’s top brass shut themselves into a conference room to scramble a rescue plan. Tom Woolsey, Pierpoint’s Yale-graduated young CEO, spots an interloper: “Who the hell is this?” It’s Eric Tao (Ken Leung), grizzled elder statesman, institutional loyalist, and, at this moment, Asian American outsider around a table of posh white men.
Season one introduced Eric as a top dog at Pierpoint, an apex predator prowling the trading floor. Subsequent episodes have probed the naked underbelly of his ferocious persona. Now, at the third season’s end, he stands exposed as Industry’s most contradictory and fascinating character. He’s a factory worker’s son chasing the American Dream in a class-stratified United Kingdom, a racial novelty at a firm founded by slave owners yet also “the face of the status quo.” He’s a negligent girl-dad and overreaching corporate father, bully and victim, alpha male and cuck. And in the end, after 30 years of service, he’s fired.
As the managing director of the Cross Product Sales (CPS) team, Eric ruled by intimidation, barking tough love at Industry’s scheming young associates and arm-twisting the billionaire clients whom he guarded as his own. His status as one of the bank’s best moneymakers afforded him the freedom to be foulmouthed and toxically macho. Slacking on office dress codes, he left his collared shirts unbuttoned and rarely wore a tie; he issued directives in his boxers, demanding his team justify the slow trickle of flows. “Does he always change on the floor?” asked one of his underlings in season two. “It’s an MD power thing,” another answered.
But Eric also looked out for vulnerable talent with something to prove. It is he who took a chance on the state-school college dropout Harper Stern, seeing in her a kindred spirit — a capitalist believer from the States who, as a biracial woman raised by an abusive single mother, didn’t grow up with the advantages of privilege. “People like us, born at the bottom, where would you ever put our chance at making it to the top quintile — that’s intimidating,” he told her. Eric is a tenacious Chinese American man whose father labored on the line for 50 years making widgets. His parents likely immigrated before Hart-Celler, meaning Eric, now in his 50s, had to learn how to climb the American social and economic hierarchy alone — unlike some of today’s young, well-to-do second-gens who’ve defined “Asian American” in their own image, with highly educated parents who came over on H-1B visas, elite degrees, and enough collective awareness to call out the “bamboo ceiling.” We learn Eric’s government name when he’s finally promoted to partner in the third season; his parents so believed in the promise of their new country that they named him Alvin America Tao.
Photo: Simon Ridgway
Eric started at Pierpoint as a trembling associate. During his first-ever client dinner, at Nobu with a British hedge-fund manager, he vomited on the table from gastroenteritis. He had a problematic mentor of his own, a white man named Newman, who abused him while teaching him the rules of the trade. “I did hear him compliment me once: ‘That little chink’s a born salesman,’” he informs Harper in season one. Later, after Newman dies, Eric dines with his widow, Holly, at a Chinese restaurant in New York they used to frequent as associates. After the owner alludes to the climate of anti-Asian hostility in the States, Eric relays a Chris Rock joke to her: “Being a minority in America is like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but molested you.”
At times, though, Eric seems to have overcome his minority status, exhibiting predatory behavior of his own. He has learned the arcane codes of old money — that it’s gauche to ask “how many” while hunting pheasants in the countryside, for example — and what rules to break to win respect. This is no easy feat in a social setting where it’s déclassé to show hunger, ruled by blue-blooded Oxford graduates who turn their up noses at working-class kids with affordable suits and no work-life balance. Eric enjoys the trappings and impunity of a man in power, which he is, trampling over the wishes of his second-in-command, Daria, and raging at Harper in a locked conference room. He’s fired for the latter offense, but then reinstated because he’s just too valuable to the company. He’s married to a white woman, Candice, a high-powered tech executive who he openly calls a c- – – at the office holiday party. After she divorces him, he forgets to coordinate child care for his kids and dumps them on Pierpoint’s young female staffers.
“In the U.K., we talk about social mobility, the erosion of class divides,” Konrad Kay — who, along with Mickey Down, created Industry — told Vulture. “But Mickey and I think it’s more entrenched than ever.” The show also illustrates the stubbornness of racial hierarchies, which its Asian characters have particular difficulty overcoming. Eric slips into the executives’ room as the biddable deputy of Bill Adler, whose career Eric launched when he hired him years ago. “I’m sure it’s not lost on you how late this partnership has come in your career. I lobbied hard for it,” Bill says after Eric’s promotion to partner — before insinuating the promotion was for diversity optics. “I said, look around the room, it’s a bit monochromatic, right.”
Post-divorce, Eric pursues a string of younger white women — his employee Yasmin’s lawyer, an escort, and eventually Yasmin herself — to prove his own virility, a classic impulse among Asian men who feel emasculated by the culture. But Eric is no Newman, and his male authority isn’t enough to convince his underlings to screw him. He succeeds in sleeping with Newman’s widow, whom Eric dated before she moved onto his boss. But not before she brushes over the revelation of her Trump-supporting husband’s racism with some weak liberal platitudes: “In 28 years of marriage, I’ve never heard him speak like that — I’m sorry, that’s not who he was.”
Photo: Simon Ridgway
Eric becomes more feeble, pathetic, and desperate as the show progresses. His initial habit of wielding a bat on the trading floor starts to read as the panicked defense of someone who knows they’re vulnerable. Allergic to any show of weakness, he instructs a traumatized employee, Robert, to bellow, “I am a man, and I am relentless” after Robert’s client and lover dies. But the mantra rings hollow, especially so when Eric screams it to himself after rashly firing a director in the midst of a crucial IPO. His crisis of masculinity is only matched by that of Rishi, another asshole who goes after younger female colleagues and can’t escape the reality that the white people whose community he’s bought into will never see him as one of them. Rishi, who is also Asian, gets shit on by an Arab nepo baby, Ali, who’s placed on the CPS desk because his parents are investors. “Habibi, you’d be cleaning my house back home, by the way,” Ali scoffs at him.
It’s Eric and Rishi who meet the most tragic fates at the end of season three. Rishi’s downfall is his chauvinism; Eric’s is his belief in a capitalist institution that always saw him as disposable. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re a useful idiot,” Pierpoint’s CFO Wilhelmina Fassbinder says to Eric of Adler, prompting the former to betray his friend by weaponizing his cancer diagnosis against him in the boardroom. Once staunchly opposed to anything that would compromise Pierpoint’s brand, Eric rings up Ali and brokers an acquisition by the Saudi-backed Al-Mi’raj. Dispatched as a sacrificial messenger to quell the bank’s hostile rank and file, he then recites his origin story as a child of immigrants. “Money is peace,” he orates, not wisdom from his father but bullshit from a Denis Johnson novel. For all that, Eric receives a mere text-message thumbs-up from Woolsey; shortly after, he’s dismissed. The last employee Eric encounters on his way out of Pierpoint’s offices is an elderly Asian American janitor. “Good-bye, Peter,” Eric says, seeking solidarity from a brother whose contributions have also been overlooked. But the farewell he receives is impersonal, businesslike: “Good-bye, sir.”
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