I Stand Corrected (7 page)

It was a dazzling performance. I followed her husband to her dressing room to tell her so. Rows of tassels—circumnavigating all aspects of her blindingly spangled costume—had only recently come to rest after swirling through the last song she’d belted out while dancing in front of a chorus line of deliberately gay-looking sailors. That she was wearing a hat in the shape of an aircraft carrier didn’t mitigate her concern that Gilliam might be making a wrong choice in attire.

You will never go wrong if you wear appropriate clothes for the occasion
. Man or woman, being well-dressed is the result of asking yourself:
Where will I be today (or tonight)? What will I be doing? Who is it I am meeting?

B
efore doling out advice on topics more complicated than shaking hands and proper grooming, I thought it would be wise to understand China’s perception of itself.

Any preconceived notion of China by the West is a falsification, for China is infinitely more complex a place than can be imagined. And since the Chinese people take their cues from their government, a better understanding of China’s government seemed a logical place for me to start.

A diagram of China’s governing bodies has the strangely reassuring look of a corporate management chart. The almost three-thousand-member National People’s Congress elects the Central Committee of some three hundred. The Central Committee selects an elite council of twenty-five, the Politburo. The Politburo nominates the Standing Committee, the innermost core of the Chinese Communist Party’s power, currently consisting of seven members. Each has a portfolio covering a major area of concern, including the economy, internal security, and propaganda. It is believed that the Standing Committee, led by the president and general secretary, meets once a week and that its decisions are made by consensus.

Though the Communist Party has a precisely defined hierarchy, it functions within an oblique decision-making process, one that strengthens the conviction among Westerners that there is an over-catheterized relationship between China’s
policymakers and its business leaders. Westerners are right in their belief, for not only do China’s state-orchestrated policies subsidize Chinese companies, but the very regulators who arbitrate business approvals and contracts in China are often conducting business within the same sector they are meant to be regulating.

Having learned costly lessons from the disastrous decisions made unilaterally by Mao, the party has since ensured that no single leader be in a position to arbitrarily push through his own agenda. Despite the fact that the top of its governmental pyramid can be depicted by a streamlined flowchart, at its base, China is a collection of decentralized municipalities forming a massive political organism. The Standing Committee sets direction, but it leaves the implementation of policy to the party’s bureaucratic apparatus. Policy approval requires the right stamp—and I do not mean this in the figurative sense. Those wielding power within the labyrinthine administrative systems hold stamps of approval that are kept in tightly guarded safes.

The size of the Chinese bureaucracy and the kinds of contradictory edicts it issues often send bolts of panic through foreign investors. China’s policies—by Western standards heavy-handed and often coming out of the blue—are considered routine realignments in China.

Sixty-five years ago, the People’s Bank of China became the nation’s major operating bank. It reported directly to the central government, and its city branches acted as both a central and a retail bank for the entire country. Though commercial functions for the Bank of China were transferred to other state-owned banks in the 1980s, its clout remained squarely in place, the result of broad monetary policies granted to it by the central government on the all-important issue of liquidity—a liquidity that fed growth on the municipal level and, until recently, relied on relatively little debt.

Like most foreign businesspeople eyeing China’s growth—which averaged some 10.5 percent when I arrived in the country—I envisioned large multiplications. And like most foreign businesspeople, I failed during my early years of attempting
to do business there to sufficiently take into account that the country’s government and its businesses are conjoined.

So extensive is the relationship between executives and government officials that it is not uncommon for the latter to claim a part of the assets of the former. My business dealings progressed only when I abandoned my blind adherence to a Western perspective and acknowledged the reasons it was not unusual for the CEO of the state-owned firm with which I was dealing to also hold a ministerial rank in the party. Within that context, the high level of respect China’s government officials command from its business leaders remains a pervasive indication of the Confucian principle of top-down control of “leader and subject.” It also illustrates the jigsaw puzzle aspect of the country’s localized authority.

To mitigate my financial worries while writing my book in China that summer, I took on some consultancy work. One of my clients was a successful Chinese businessman for whom I arranged a meeting with the CEO of a French company. At first, the meeting went well—both parties exchanged information and pleasantries—and everything seemed to be progressing smoothly. But in the middle of the French CEO’s presentation, the Chinese businessman’s cell phone rang. He took the call. The phone conversation went on long enough for the French CEO to feel he was being insulted.

Afterward, I talked to the Chinese businessman and politely asked him what he was thinking. He explained that the call was from a local government official who—though in a minor position—was considered a higher priority, far more important than the possibility of a relationship with the French CEO. Someone as successful in business as I was, he suggested, must surely have learned how to demonstrate the proper respect to my superiors? His rhetorical question underscored a fundamental but recurring misunderstanding between Chinese and Western businesspeople: both might well be bowing in deference, but not necessarily in the same direction.

WHILE AMERICANS ARE eager for independence in virtually everything they do, the Chinese have been instilled with humility. Deference—no matter its cultural provenance—demands outward observance. And despite my often-vocalized opinions, I long ago learned to demonstrate the appropriate level of deference to those to whom I reported.

A business not thought of as entirely businesslike in the 1970s, book publishing granted itself an extremely relaxed attitude toward the issue of hierarchy and provided me with a rapid rise up the ranks to become the head of a company at twenty-nine.

My age seemed to have made it easier to forgive my gender. It was as though one improbability canceled out the other and became a reassurance to my male colleagues that I was more anomaly than threat.

Authors are a mercurial lot who do not take to casual interlopers. With no real experience but a great deal of determination, I began to build my professional relationships on trust. Trust was made easier by demonstrative traits of empathy and consideration—etiquette by any other name—deployed especially when it came to the older men with whom I worked.

Rather than meeting in my office to confront Anthony Burgess about his overdue manuscript—and knowing how much music meant to him—I took him to a jazz club to hear Mel Tormé and persevered the next day. After successfully bidding on Richard Nixon’s book—but sensing he would be uncomfortable with all that I appeared to be—I asked the company’s older and extremely Republican-looking editorial director to attend the introductory meeting.

And so it went. Comportment took an early lead in my career. What held the middle distance was an increasingly mature sense of when to stand my ground and when to defer. Along the way, I learned not to allow my personal grievances to hinder progress. I also learned that the only thing a man likes less than being wrong is hearing that he is wrong from a woman. My managerial approach invited collaboration, but I was bluntly direct in expressing what needed to happen on behalf of the profit margins. When the dailiness of being surrounded
with a male staff threatened my sanity, what restored reason proved to be a decidedly female trait: patience.

Committed to succeed, I worked through my twenties without stopping, until the preconceived notions about my age and gender became secondary to my accomplishments. Only then did it dawn on me that, as a businesswoman, I was at my most effective when I knew enough to let go.

Strangely, that realization did not occur in the office.

It came to me in Africa.

Y
ou have no business going there,” warned Candida.

I offered no defense.

“Of all places, why Rwanda?” she asked.

“To track mountain gorillas,” I told her.

“You’re kidding,” was her reaction.

I didn’t answer.

“Well, you’ve obviously made up your mind, so take someone who knows what they’re doing and go,” said Candida. “Have your adventure. Africa is the one place I’d liked to have seen.”

“When do we leave?” asked my brother.

My older brother had a history of traveling as only a man could: alone and to remote places. After laborious research—and without the modern-day benefit of the Internet—we managed to locate a British safari company willing to coordinate the logistics. At the time we planned the trip, there were fewer than four hundred mountain gorillas. The safari company couldn’t guarantee a sighting, but agreed to drive us across Tanzania and make arrangements with the local trackers to lead us into the rain forest.

Foraging mountain gorillas were known to cross from Rwanda into what was then called Zaire. To make matters more complicated, there was an armed rebellion in the Kiva Province of Zaire.

“That’s the least of it,” warned my brother, sitting across from me at a restaurant table. He’d come to New York the week before our trip; we were discussing our plans over lunch.

“What do you mean, that’s the least of it?” I asked. “I can’t imagine anything outperforming abduction or murder.”

“Schistosomiasis,” he replied.

Schistosomiasis is a disease caused by the minute eggs from an insidious parasite, he explained. Streams and lakes in Africa are often contaminated.

“No need to delve into just how the eggs get into the water. Suffice it to say it has to do with a lack of sanitation,” said he between mouthfuls.

“The eggs hatch on contact with the fresh water. The free swimming parasites infect snails and emerge as larvae. And, here’s the thing … the larvae move in the direction of isolated motion—for example, a person wadding in the stream. What’s even more remarkable is that they’re stimulated by chemicals found in human skin. They enter through the skin’s pores and migrate to the liver where they develop a kind of oral sucker in order to feed from red blood cells and become worms. The worms produce eggs that pass through the bladder … and a next generation of parasites is eliminated into the fresh water by their host.”

I stared at him with disbelief. My hand—frozen in midair—held one-half of a tuna salad sandwich.

“Too much information?” he asked me.

“No, no … Listen, I can’t thank you enough for your thorough explanation,” I said sarcastically. “I’m especially pleased to have heard the details during my meal.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he suggested. “Neither the worms nor their eggs have been found in the brain or spinal cord.”

“What proof is there of that?” I asked.

“Autopsies,” he said without a trace of concern.

“Wonderful.
Very
reassuring,” I said. “Have you considered the fact that autopsies are fairly strong indications that deaths were involved at some point?”

“Listen, Eden, this trip isn’t going to work unless you change your attitude,” suggested my brother.

The nurse at the Centers for Disease Control was all about efficiency. She reached for a clipboard, affixed a single-spaced sheet of diseases, and—after reading the travel itinerary I handed her—began to check off an unsettling number of the little blank boxes: yellow fever, typhoid, poliomyelitis, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, and rabies.

“Are you a journalist?” asked the doctor as he was preparing to put me through the series of vaccinations.

“No,” I told him.

“I don’t understand,” he said, unsheathing the first syringe. “Let’s start with your right arm and we’ll switch to the other halfway. Why Rwanda? It’s a dangerous place—especially now.”

“I’m tracking mountain gorillas.”

“So, you’re a scientist.…”

“No.” I winced with the second injection.

“Sorry.… A researcher?”

“No.”

“Let’s have that one.” He pointed to my other arm. “I don’t understand,” he repeated.

I explained that I was tracking gorillas for no reason other than to track gorillas. The doctor pointed his syringe up, like someone who’d decided to hold off firing a pistol. The cotton ball he held in his other hand began to ooze alcohol.