I Stand Corrected (9 page)

“You mean someone else’s wife? She looks terribly young for that.”

“No, I mean she’s his other wife. A second wife. It seems he traded one of his pigs for her. To make matters even more amusing, the pigs were the original wife’s dowry.”

“I don’t find that at all amusing,” I said.

“My dear, not only is it amusing, it’s a tribute to ingenuity. And did any one of them look unhappy to you?”

I had to admit they did not. Not only were they happy, they were the most civilized people I had ever met.

PART THREE
The Dichotomy of Personal and Public

A fox barks not when he would steal the lamb.
—
Chinese proverb

L
eery of providing the corporate officer to whom I reported reason to believe my professional commitment would be diluted, I withheld the news of my marriage.

A year later, the same executive was deliberately kept unaware of my pregnancy until it became obvious. But attitudes in business change over time and with geographical location.

There has always been a cultural disconnect between the two biggest U.S. coastal cities, condescending New York making self-invented Los Angeles defensive. I was a devoted New Yorker who never lingered longer than a week at a time during my infrequent visits to Los Angeles. I had a respectable career in book publishing, had absolutely no experience in the magazine business, and had never before raised capital. Ignoring both the bleak statistics on the failures of new magazines and the risk-averse premise of impending motherhood, I decided to launch a magazine in Los Angeles. In other words, I made the deeply insane decision to leave a business I understood and start another from scratch in an industry about which I was completely ignorant and in a city I didn’t know.

Why I did this, I could not tell you, but I was willing to accept the responsibility for my decision and held stubbornly to it.

With a husband who was a walking definition of the word “freelance” and a baby on the way, I relinquished the security of employment. I would either successfully secure funding for the magazine or go through my limited savings trying.

W. was a cartoonist for
The New Yorker
, and his cartoons became the currency that paid for consultants I couldn’t compensate in cash. I took on two partners: an editor and a publisher.

Chance was not unkind.

A fateful seating assignment on a flight the magazine’s publisher took to San Francisco got us to what was next. She’d been bumped up to business class. Sitting beside her was Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, who would become our primary investor. With two more investors, there was enough seed money to launch the magazine.

Living as I have in so many places, I’ve come to the conclusion that a geographical environment has a marked effect on the emotional and psychological characteristics of its inhabitants and, thus, on their social customs. L.A. resides on shifting tectonic plates where the ground has a startling habit of moving. This very well might be the reason people in L.A. operate with a loose interpretation of acceptable behavior.

Unlike my East Coast colleagues, those on the West Coast brought their private lives to the office. Histories of substance abuse were revealed and then revisited during staff meetings, as were details of surrogate birthing options. It wasn’t only the office that invited sharing: personal information flowed freely between near strangers. The most staggering example introduced itself at a dinner party when the man seated next to me, late to the table, informed me that he had been in the bathroom checking the color of his urine.

My slack-jawed reaction did nothing to stop him from sharing more.

“Clear urine is a sign my system is prepared to digest another meal,” he wanted me to know.

L.A. is a place thought foreign even by its own countrymen. In many ways, life there was my preparation for the eventual experience of living in China. Like people in Hollywood,
people in China seem unable to explain what is wrong with what the larger world considers cheating. And both places required me to function in an elliptical state wherein I was never entirely certain about the direction things were heading, especially in business.

In L.A., business lunches give the misguided impression that all at the table are friends who happen to be doing business. In China, people bring strangers to business lunches who have absolutely nothing to do with the business at hand. This might explain why, during the summer I was writing my book in Beijing, I was asked to a lunch with ten people I didn’t know.

A Chinese friend had come from New York on business. She is a financier. One of her clients is a major Chinese cell phone company. As a favor to her, I joined the lunch in honor of the company’s president. He arrived at the restaurant with a retinue; never more than a foot away was his young, vividly alert vice president. The president spoke no English. The vice president did. He was what is known in China as a
haigui
, or “sea turtle,” a young Chinese who comes back to China after being educated in the West.

The lunch conversation unfurled in Chinese, making it difficult to understand if the person who was talking to me was the same person I should be paying attention to. So I sat, smiling and silent, until the end of the meal, when the president said something obviously meant for me.

“Our president has asked if you know Angelina Jolie,” translated the young vice president.

The question was hilarious, but I understood enough about
mianzi
, or “saving face,” to know that even a fleeting appearance of levity would be a serious mistake.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” were my carefully measured words.

The time it took the young man to translate my answer far exceeded the brevity with which it had been conveyed. Without the benefit of linguistic reference points, I was reduced to watching facial expressions. It looked to me that whatever was being said on the other side of the table had already set in motion circumstances in which my no was not the end of something, but its starting point.

“I understand you lived in Los Angeles,” said the young vice president.

“That’s right.”

“But you don’t know Angelina Jolie.”

“That’s right.”

There was more discussion on the other side of the table.

“Do you know anyone who knows her?” asked the vice president.

“Do you?” pressed my friend. “Take time to think,” she instructed.

After more thought, I remembered that the producer of one of the actress’s earlier movies was an acquaintance from L.A. That obscure piece of information caused a rush of activity. Several at the table made phone calls; others took notes.

“Our president would like you to write your friend and ask him to tell Angelina Jolie that we want her to represent our new smartphone,” said the young man. “It comes out next month.”

He was serious.

“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine Angelina Jolie would agree to promote a smartphone,” I told him. “And in the unlikely event she would, I doubt she’s available in the next two weeks.”

The silence that followed made obvious that the young man had no intention of translating what I said for fear that his president would lose face. It was my misstep. In the West, candor does the work for honesty; in China, it results in a humiliating loss of face.

My friend suggested that I go to the ladies’ room.

“But I don’t have to use the ladies’ room,” I told her.

“Just go,” she insisted in an anxious whisper that left no doubt it was what she needed me to do.

I excused myself for the ladies’ room, where I waited for a few minutes before returning to the table.

When I took my seat again, my friend told me something that required repeating.

“They’ll pay twenty thousand dollars to write the letter.”

“What?”

“They’ll pay twenty thousand dollars to write the letter,” said my friend again.

Hearing the absurdity spoken for the second time released my disbelief at having heard it at all.

A riot of thoughts swarmed my head, but the only conclusion I could come to was fairly rudimentary: that something I probably would never understand had happened in the short time I spent in the ladies’ room.

“You’re looking at me as though I’m suggesting something illegal,” said my friend.

“Well, are you?” I asked.

“They’re just asking you to write a letter.”

“No one is paid twenty thousand dollars just to write a letter.”

“In this case, you are.”

“Let’s say I write the letter. We both know Angelina Jolie won’t do it.”

“That’s not our problem. And on the off chance she can, I’ve negotiated a percentage of the take.”

“You did all of this while I was in the ladies’ room?”

“Yes … but don’t write the letter until they wire the money.”

“This is insane. Are you sure I’m not breaking a law?”

“This has nothing to do with the law,” my friend pointed out. “This is about
guanxi
.”

How, why, when, and with whom things are done in China depends, on a certain level, upon
guanxi
. Like most idioms,
guanxi
is not easily translated into a single word that mirrors its meaning. “Relationships or connections outside the family” is the closest one might come to the meaning of what is at the very core of Chinese society and culture.

In China, the systematic reciprocity that is
guanxi
produces a never-ending cycle of favors. Among its obligations is to uphold the idea of
mianzi
, or “face.”
Mianzi
cements the relationship in place with an acknowledgment of each other’s personal dignity—a dignity based on status and prestige.

Even in neocapitalist China, dignity is infinitely more important a commodity than money. Keeping face is paramount;
losing it, disastrous; taking it away from someone else, unforgivable.
Any
form of refusal costs face, which is the reason one should not be direct in saying no in China. Conversely, one should never assume that a yes in China is reliable, for the Chinese yes is a transitory, flexible concept.

Since
guanxi
is the tangible result of connections, wealthy Chinese who wish to display their social advancements are increasingly seeking direction on how to entertain Westerners in their expensive houses. Well and good, but after the host and his guests are seated around the dining table in his home—no matter how expensive—all are expected to know table manners.

T
he first book devoted exclusively to table manners was written by Bonvicino da Riva, a Milanese monk, in 1290.

It suggested that “a dinner guest should not blow his nose through his fingers; nor should he scratch himself in any foul part while eating.”

Not a bad start. But for most of us, some more direction is needed.

Table etiquette is important to the Chinese. They believe luck is brought with good table manners and shame is the result of bad. Since rudeness can occur without the utterance of a single offensive word, Chinese traditions that govern dining begin with the placement of guests at the table and then address how they are welcomed once they are seated. It remains universally accepted that the most honored position is to the immediate right of the host.

Stationed at the top of ancient China’s social pecking order was its imperial court. Next were the grandees and local ministers, followed by members of trade associations. Last—if they made it to the table at all—came the farmers and workers. The post–Cultural Revolution simplification of the four-tier system reduced it to only two: the host and the guest of honor, with the seat of honor reserved for the guest.

Dining tables in China are circular. The lazy Susan—a rotating tray positioned in the center of the table—is employed
so that all are an equal distance from the food. The guest of honor starts the meal by serving himself, then turning the lazy Susan clockwise. In a show of hospitality, the host forfeits his place and serves himself last. From the start of the meal until its end, deference is shown to the guest of honor, who is offered the last bite of the most coveted dish on the table.

Imagine, if you can, how bewildering it must be for a Chinese guest at a Western dinner in a private home. Rather than being seated at a round table, which would enable him to observe the other guests, he is flanked with blind spots created by an unyielding, right-angled table. He is expected to know how to help himself with unfamiliar implements to food he cannot identify each time one of the several dinner courses is served by someone who mysteriously appears from behind or to his side.

While writing my chapter on dining for
The Tao of Improving Your Likability
, I put myself in that same lost place of confusion.

When you are invited to dinner, immediately inform your host whether you are attending
. If you delay your response, you prevent your host from planning ahead. A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a responsibility not to be subsequently subordinated to a better offer. Never ask who else is attending; although the host might volunteer the information, it is not obligatory to do so. Arrive on time, or only slightly late (no more than ten minutes). Do not, however, arrive early. When your host announces it is time for dinner, go straight to the table. If you have not yet met the other guests, introduce yourself to the people sitting near you. There are usually four courses to a Western meal: a first course (customarily soup or an appetizer), a main course, a salad, and a dessert. With the exception of the first course, you are often expected to serve yourself from a platter that is being passed or is placed in front of you. Take a portion closest to you, put the serving
fork and spoon back together on the serving platter, and wait for your host to begin before starting to eat.