The whole curse is: "May you live in interesting times, and come to the attention of powerful people."
For some years I worked with a woman who was originally from Shanghai - from a family who had been upper-middle class bankers and so forth before the Communists took over. So she was pretty well educated, but she claimed that she had never heard the saying until she came to this country. She did think it was pretty funny though. Of course China is a big country, it would be quite possible that there would be an obscure saying that just wasn't current in Shanghai at the time she was growing up.