The Price of Tea in China
[The Price of Tea in China][A taste of Confucius][Condom conundrum][Chinese restaurant][Professor Wang obliges a foreign friend][Six thousand impossible things before breakfast]

 

 

1. Shanghai'd

or

The Price of Tea in China

This is the story of a bull in a china shop. Or more accurately, a cow of solidly built German stock. It emerged from the experience the size and mental state of an undernourished calf, with most of China left intact. It's hard to impress the Sons and Daughters of Heaven. They've seen it all.

I owe my fascination with things Chinese to two factors, the first one being my grandmother Märta. She was born in the dying days of the 19th century in emperor Wilhelm's Germany and never travelled much, certainly not to any remote destinations.  But she did have an aunt on the Swedish side of the family who had done an extraordinary thing: at the turn of the century she went to China as a governess for the family of a diplomat. She got to travel around the country; saw things new and passing strange; was evacuated during the Boxer uprising; and dined out on her adventures for many years afterwards. Her tales of braided queues and lily feet, snake wine and hundred-year eggs, jade buddhas, dragon robes and imperial splendour amid abject poverty and the stench of night soil captured young Märta's imagination and made their permanent home there.

Growing up in the First World War and raising her own daughters during the Second, Märta had other, more immediate survival concerns to think about, and any questions about the price of tea in China had to be relegated to the back burner. However, they came back in full force in the 1970s when Märta realised she had a granddaughter who could read. So she made me read The Good Earth by Pearl S.Buck, The House of Exile by Nora Waln, a well-known US writer and journalist between the 1930s and the 1950s, and of course Red Star over China by Edgar Snow. She was certainly no communist and like many people of her generation, deeply suspicious and resentful of Soviet Russia. Yet she totally approved of Mao Zedong's way, seeing it as China's salvation from famine and civil war. Accordingly, she subscribed me to the Beijing Review, a weekly propaganda magazine with improbably colourful photos showing eager peasants relentlessly toiling away in rice paddies and steel factories, and learning from each other in the process. Along with the rice seedlings in the pictures, the China seed was firmly planted in my mind.

The second factor was a documentary I went to see  at a cinema matinée in the late 1980s - 'From Mao to Mozart'. The film shows violin virtuoso Isaac Stern touring the People's Republic of China, freshly emerged from the Cultural Revolution. Through the magic of music, he manages to coax back to life Chinese musicians whom those nightmare years had reduced to mere automatons. He seemed to prove that it was possible after all for East and West to meet. That cultural, ideological and language barriers could be transcended. That the forces which unite people are stronger than those that divide.

I was on the point of finishing my language studies in Geneva - which at the time did not include Chinese - and ready for some field experience. By twelve o'clock that day I knew: to China I must go, by hook or by crook. I wound up settling for the crook approach, as nothing else would work: the Germans wouldn't give me a grant since I wasn't studying at a German university, the Swiss would give money only to Swiss students, and both required applicants to have a solid grounding in Chinese.

Enter l'avvocato

It is an unfair prejudice that fairy godmothers have to be clad in pink and carry magic wands. In truth, they come in all shapes and sizes. Mine turned up in the guise of a pinstriped middle-aged Neapolitan businessman, known as l'avvocato to his employees and associates. He was a formidable character who would fly into flaming rages every now and then, causing everybody, including his own sons, to run for shelter behind the nearest desk. He was as capable of great generosity, as, I suspect, of diabolical fiendishness. I never could make up my mind about whether his bite might not occasionally be worse than his bark. Or whether he would look more at home in a comedy act hamming it up as the classic stage Italian, gestures and all, or on a more sinister Godfather-type film set, settling accounts in concrete. Rather worryingly, he also had a Bolivian passport (as I knew from frequently booking flights to La Paz). But more than anything else, it was his incredible energy and resilience that commanded respect. Driving around Shanghai, just when one of his tantrums seemed to have sent him into a terminal apoplectic fit, he would raise a feeble hand to point to a new building rising from the dust and rubble, and croak: How  much? Duoshao qian 多少钱 ?One day he would surely expire with those words on his lips ...

In a place with a less colourful demographic fabric it would have been unlikely for our paths to cross. But then Geneva was the kind of city where you could get stuck in a lift all at once with suffering Russian writers in exile, multilingual Portuguese cleaning ladies, and excitable Hungarian refugees from both the Nazis and the communists (the unlikeliest part would have been finding an out-of-order lift in impeccably maintained Switzerland). At the time of my cinema experience I happened to have a job giving private lessons to an Italian girl who had recently moved to Geneva with her family and was now attending the American school. She was a thoroughly nice girl and quite unspoilt. From her lavishly furnished designer home I guessed that her family must be rather well off. Otherwise I knew nothing about her background, and I don't even recall why I so much as mentioned China to her. 'You interested in China ?' she said. 'I'm gonna tell my Papà. My parents have a Chinese shop, you know. They are looking for somebody to work,' Yes, do go and tell Papà, I thought to myself, picturing some pseudo-exotic setup selling overpriced artsy-crafty stuff to a snobbish clientele. She clearly meant well, but if she thought I was after a summer job on the High Street selling porcelain pugs made in Taiwan she was mistaken. I didn't give the matter another thought.

Oh ye of little faith ! Guess what: the following week Papà did indeed appear on the scene, a dapper stoutish gentleman in his fifties. He spoke an idiosyncratic brand of French, heavily influenced by his native Neapolitan, which made it hard for me to make out what he was saying. Whatever it was, it carried conviction. In the course of our association it crossed my mind that this was probably the secret of his success as both a lawyer and a businessman. By sheer force of personality he made people feel he was talking such evident good sense that it would have seemed slow-witted, as well as rude, to interrupt him at every turn with 'whats?' and 'pardons?' Not wishing to appear stupid or impolite just yet, I may have missed out on a few of the finer points. However, I did grasp the bit that sounded like 'you-wanna work-my--Shanghai office -import-export', and breathed 'I do'. 'When?' 'As soon as I graduate this summer.' 'Perfetto. Call me when you're ready to go.' He turned on his heel and was gone before I 'd even had time to decide whether this was a sample of Neapolitan humour, or possibly the briefest job interview in the annals of the Geneva business world.

The lighter side of prejudice

Looking back, the explanation strikes me as fairly obvious: I was the victim of prejudice. My prospective employer was banking on the legendary propensity of Germans to spread order, discipline and cleanliness wherever they go, if need be by force. The idea behind the Joint Venture was to export from China to Europe everything and anything that wasn't actually nailed down, ranging from tea, agrochemicals and broad beans to silk, shaving brushes, arts and crafts, and Chinese medicines, while trying to persuade the Chinese to acquire a few Italian wineries and oil refineries along the way. However, my mission - never spelled out, merely implied - had a distinct slant to it: I was to teach the Chinese employees to get their act together and mend their sloppy ways. It was one of those rare incidents where national stereotype worked to the victim's advantage, and I Iet it pass without so much as a blush. Only at times did my employer's misguided assumptions cause me acute discomfort. Such as when we found ourselves listening to the strains of Lilli Marleen, Marlene Dietrich's World War II marching song, in the rather incongruous setting of a Hangzhou hotel lobby with plastic-covered chairs. The irrepressible avvocato pointed to the loudspeaker, winked at me with a touch of complicity and said, 'Ha! Germans and Italians are always at their best working together!'

Putting aside unholy alliances of the past, what was in it for the Chinese partners ? It took some time for the chilling truth to dawn on me: far from being welcome guests from supposedly enlightened spheres, "foreign experts" were high maintenance and had extreme nuisance value. Having one in the office was tantamount to keeping a White Elephant, requiring all sorts of tiresome special accommodations, dietary, linguistic, diplomatic, hygienic and otherwise. Foreigners needed to be talked to politely  at all times (and in impractical foreign tongues at that), had to be fed information about office politics on a strictly need-to-know basis, but otherwise  politely kept in the dark; required all manner of modcons such as knives and forks, five-star hotels and taxis; and perhaps most annoyingly, because of their bizarre hang-ups about bodily fluids and excretions, they needed toilets with doors.

The benefits of Open Door policy

Word got round that a da bizi 大鼻子 , a big nose, was going to be, not just visiting, but working on a daily basis, in the Embroidery Corporation building (situated on the Huangpu, Shanghai's largest river, tributary of the Yangzi river, which eventually flows into the East China Sea).  This meant that doors had to be installed in the communal toilets, for the sole benefit of a single foreigner  among a 300-strong workforce. I quickly realised that toilet breaks were prime time for socialising among colleagues. Everyone continued their conversations, whether standing in line waiting their turn or squatting down attending to their no 1s and 2s, without anyone paying the slightest attention to any concomitant smells or noises. The queuers would helpfully pass along cut-up strips of newspaper when the incumbent had run out (toilet paper had to be purchased from the Friendship Store, and no-one in their right mind would have wasted precious dollars on so ephemeral a commodity). Toilet doors were obviously a hindrance to the flow of communication -  but concessions had to be made on account of my arrival.  So they  installed swinging doors such as found in a Hollywood-style Wild West saloon. They could be fixed to the wall so that they were permanently open - but could be pulled to with a sharp yank, if the user required it (I think I was the only one). The Art of Compromise!

In my defence, I can say that I proved to be a useful time- and labour-saving device in other ways : my Western passport endowed me with all sorts of magic. It meant I could access hard currency to facilitate business deals for the office at any time (Chinese citizens were not allowed to hold foreign currency back then, or only in very limited amounts); jump queues at train and air ticket counters; book hotel rooms, notoriously hard to come by during the Spring and Autumn trade fairs ; buy cow's milk (then rationed) and alcohol (from the Friendship store, where you had to pay in hard currency); and not to be sneezed at, the mere fact of my presence seemed to warrant the holding of more frequent and more lavish banquets and restaurant visits than were perhaps strictly necessary.

Successful Joint Ventures are all about give and take, and the two sides were supposed to learn from each other in the process. I am not sure what my colleagues learnt from me, other than playing badminton in the office when Managers Zhang and Chen were away on business. But I am still grateful to every single one of them for putting up with me in their midst; for sharing their sometimes heart-rending family stories with me, about lives scarred by the Cultural Revolution; and most of all, for watching over and taking care of me in ways so subtle that it took me years to understand that that was what they had in fact been doing.

© Alexandra L. Dale 2000

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