Imagethief

Month: August 2005

  • Dark table tennis match of the soul

    The Western stereotype of Chinese people, and Asians in general, is that they are inscrutable.

    This is balls. They are as scrutable as anyone else. Thick face, black heart; Art of War; it all feeds the mythology. As one of my colleagues, an experienced China hand, has pointed out, the Chinese themselves and the consultants who make zillions brokering deals for foreigners in China are happy when Westerners see the Chinese as indomitable super-businessmen who cannot be beaten at the negotiating table.

    But it turns out that what many people took for amazing business prowess was simple cultural ignorance, poor preparation and a shaky legal framework that could be exploited by those who knew the ropes. Anyone who thinks the Chinese aren’t emotive has never walked down a street in Beijing. And it turns out that there are plenty of situations in which Chinese people will reveal their inner character.

    One of these situations is during a ping-pong match. This was demonstrated to me during our Autumn company outing yesterday, during which I was challenged to a game by Wendy (not her real name), one of the more recent arrivals to our company.

    Wendy is one of those tiny, irrepressibly cheerful, twenty-something Chinese girls who chirps around the office like a pony-tailed swallow leaving a trail of sparkly effervescence and gossip in her wake. She radiates the kind of relentlessly happy mood that I had previously thought was limited to the hosts of Children’s television shows. But she revealed her inner character to me across that ping-pong table. In reality, Wendy is the The Merciless Serpent Lady.

    The transformation began the moment I stood at the opposite end of the table to receive her first serve. Wendy’s smile remained, but her eyes narrowed dangerously and took on a steely glint as she evaluated me: 85 flat-footed kilos and clutching my paddle the way a three year old might clutch a large lollipop. I was dismissed as unworthy before the match had begun. Wendy, forty kilos dipped in concrete and rolled in chocolate sprinkles, went onto the balls of her feet, folded her paddle oddly behind her wrist, with the face parallel to the ground as though she was hiding it and planning to prestidigitate it mid-swing, turned from the hips so her left shoulder was facing me, and bounced the ball off the table.

    From the moment the ball hit the table, things happened very fast but with stunning clarity, like they do in a car wreck, which is pretty much what I had. The ball floated up from the table. Wendy’s left hand extended out from her body, palm towards me like awuxia master. Her front shoulder dipped and she uncoiled from the hips. Halfway through the turn, the paddle flicked into being from behind her wrist, turning flat towards the ball. When she hit the ball, it ceased to be round and stretched out into an orange blur with a crack that sounded like the noise a housefly might make if it broke the sound barrier on the way from the window to your half-eaten Danish.

    Newton’s second law of motion settled over my body like one of those lead aprons the dentist drapes you in just before he goes and stands behind a concrete wall in the next county while shooting your head full of X-rays so he can justify why he’s going to charge you $500 to drill into your skull. By a coincidence, a lead apron would have been useful to me as the ball drilled into my sternum and dropped to the floor. Wendy’s point.

    And so it went. Wendy, flinty eyed and nimble, slid and shifted like an oiled cobra while I flailed like the Michelin Man on an Army obstacle course. The ball went past me. The ball went through me. The ball ricocheted off my paddle and went into the squash court, onto the foosball table, onto the pool table and into the sink on the far side of the cocktail bar. Final score: some astronomical number to one. I think it was a “face” point so I wouldn’t have to resign from the company. Doubtless that point was thrown to me to prevent inconveniencing the team rather than out of sympathy. During the process, Wendy’s outer personality of “bubbly office girl” was stripped away and I was treated to a glimpse of her real self. The resolve, the pitiless calculation, and the iron will to dominate at all costs. She still had the sparklies, though.

    So I learned a valuable lesson. I’ll never go head-to-head with Wendy across a negotiating table. There is no mercy in her soul. And, when I want to appraise Chinese business partners in the future, I’ll skip the karaoke lounges, godawful banquets and all-night baijiubenders — the usual arsenal of Chinese character tests — and head for the ping-pong table.

    Ping-pong doesn’t lie.

  • Why I empathize with the WSJ’s American expats in Chongqing

    An interesting discussion broke out today on The Peking Duck, in Richard’s post on a Wall Street Journal article on the travails of an American expatriate family living in Chongqing. There was a fair bout of criticism of the family for insulating themselves from Chongqing and China and for moaning about the difficulty of living in Chongqing even as they live all-expenses-paid luxury.

    It’s worth reading the article, posted here on Howard French’s “A Glimpse of the World Blog”. You can also go read the extract on Richard’s blog.

    It made me think a bit about how I perceive “expats” and the expat lifestyle. I spent nine years in Singapore, where only my first job, which lasted for one year, was on an “expat package”. I was pretty well localized by the end of my stay (married to a Singaporean with more Singaporean than foreign friends). In Singapore I became completely contemptuous of foreigners who isolated themselves. But Singapore is a completely accessible city: wealthy, modern, English-speaking and with all the Western comforts you could ever hope to find. (In fact, Singapore often comes in for the opposite criticism, that it isn’t Asian enough, although I think only people who don’t know where to look make that claim.)

    But when I think back to my arrival in Singapore, even it was difficult enough at the time. I remember how thrilled my business partner and I were when we discovered a mass-market Italian restaurant. I remember how akward I felt on public transportation for many weeks. I remember how long it took me to feel like I knew my way around the city. I remember how many dumb mistakes I made managing my staff, and how long it took before I started having good, Singaporean friends.

    And that’s the thing about culture shock. It doesn’t really matter what the amenities are, or if the language is the same. There are degrees. You could be an American moving to England and still be culture shocked. You could move from California to New York and be culture shocked. You could damn well move from San Francisco to Iowa and be culture shocked. It might be less severe than coming to Asia, but it would still happen. And different people with different motivations will react differently to the experience.

    I came to China because I wanted to engage with it. I wanted to feel what it was like, and talk to Chinese people and “have a cultural experience”. I specifically sought out the feeling of discomfort and displacement that I first had when I got to Singapore because I missed the thrill and challenge of discovering someplace new. It has been tremendously rewarding, but also difficult. I invested two years in learning Mandarin before I arrived. I quit a good job to come here and arrived with no guarantee of work. My long-term future will be in Asia, and I will need to have some experience in China. I had every incentive to get into China.

    And yet, even as an Asiaphile with nine years in the region, it was difficult when I arrived. Classroom Mandarin got me almost nowhere on the street. I was scared of the bus, scared of the supermarket, intimidated at the thought of trying to speak to people and generally completely overwhelmed. And I was in a language program surrounded by other Westerners.

    Even today I still seek my Western comforts. I live in an international apartment with cable TV. The Internet is my lifeline. I damned well beat a path to the local Jenny Lou’s because I am incapable of giving up Western breakfasts. And I consider myself pretty culturally resilient.

    Now, what if I had no experience in Asia and no emotional investment in getting under the skin of China? What if I was here solely for professional reasons and knew I was going to leave in two years? And what if I was in Chongqing, a city far less accessible to foreigners than relatively cosmopolitan Beijing? And what if I was desperate to socialize my young Children as Americans?

    I’d probably grow a bunker mentality as well, and concentrate on emerging unscathed. And that’s why I find it hard to criticize the woman in the story.

    Sure, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to come to China and not engage with it as deeply as possible. I love it here. But not everyone seeks the same opportunities and experiences as me. And I can’t be too critical of that.