The Secret (31 page)

I looked back as the cab pulled away. The girl turned and went immediately back into the club.

48

From Shenzhen we went on to Guangzhou, the old Chinese port city Europeans called Canton.

Charlie Han had hired a car with driver to take us there. We drove along a superhighway as modern as any I had ever seen in the States. The signs were in English as well as Chinese. From the car as we drove we could see Chinese villages that looked like Pearl Buck villages, except for one thing: Over the roofs of what we would have called hovels stood television antennas, the kind that used to rise from the roofs of American homes before we got cable. God knows how people lived inside those structures, but they did watch television.

I wondered what kind of television they received. I knew that in Hong Kong we received Hong Kong stations, Chinese stations, and cable services such as CNN and the BBC. I learned later that those flimsy antennae above those flimsy hovels received only Mainland China stations. Why not the others? “The others send out too much false news,” a man explained to me.

Well … I am sure the Chinese of Guangzhou Province worried little, if at all, about the news they received on their television. I’d watched their stations in Hong Kong and had seen what the kind of programs they saw: a diet of colorful drama and opera—incomprehensible to me—that must have been immensely adventuresome and satisfying to the peasants living in those drab villages. Charlie Han pointed out to me that those very same peasants in their hundreds of millions were a market for western-style clothes—the sweaters we were talking about to Bai, if not the scanties we sold as Cheeks clothes.

“China is a great and wholly confusing market,” he said. “Hey, Len. In the back country they
sell girls.
I mean they sell them, as brides. They display them with placards around their necks, naming their prices. Girls dressed in Western clothes fetch the best prices. A girl put on sale hopes to be able to stand in the market in a black skirt and a white blouse, European style. She gets a better price, and a husband who will respect her more for what he paid for her, if she looks like she came from San Francisco or New York—which of course none of them did. It’s a great market for black skirts and white blouses.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” I said. I must confess I would have liked to see one of those markets, but seeing was as much as I wanted of it.

“Me neither. I’m trying to say something to you about Chinese reality.”

*   *   *

Guangzhou, not Shenzhen, was a typical Chinese city. I have seen Los Angeles smog. I never before saw anything of the like before I saw Guangzhou. It was apparent from ten or twenty miles out. It hung above the city like a low cloud, and when you got into the city it limited visibility. You had difficulty seeing tall buildings a mile or more away.

I remember an imposing television broadcasting antenna on a tall hill. The big clock on the railroad station. Traffic, traffic, traffic. Homeless living under overpasses. Guangzhou was a magnet for rural Chinese, who flocked there to work. The government had essentially given up trying to regulate people’s movements within the country; the Chinese pretty much went where they wanted, and coastal cities were where they wanted to go.

And—as at Shenzhen—endless strings of motorcycles and motorbikes, most of them with helmeted, miniskirted girls riding behind helmeted young men, white panties often showing. Vinyl microskirts. Izod shirts—knockoffs or not.

Then sweaty laborers in vest undershirts and straw hats. Jobs being done by sweat labor that in the States would have been done by machines. Little, steel-muscled men. Grim. You wondered where they went when the workday was over. What kind of lives did these slim and wiry guys live? I guessed they were the source of China’s out-of-control population growth.

Our hotel was as fine as the one in Shenzhen, and in fact had the same name: Guangdong, the name of the province. Guangzhou knew how to take care of the foreign businessman. I learned to drink ginseng tea. A carafe of hot water, not ice water, waited for me in my room when I returned at night, with assorted tea bags, including ginseng. To this day I would rather have a cup of ginseng tea at bedtime than a cup of coffee.

But we were not there to study China or to enjoy hotels. In the lobby of the hotel the first evening we met another businessman, this one by the name of Zhang Feng: a small, muscular man at least twenty years younger than Bai Fuyuan, meaning he was much over thirty. He had been educated in the States, he said, at Oberlin College, in Ohio. His English, though perfect, tended to sound Midwestern. He smoked heavily.

We would have dinner together. Guangzhou, Charlie had suggested to me, was a place to sample authentic and exotic Chinese cuisine. I confessed a curiosity about something, and Zhang took us to a restaurant where I could satisfy that curiosity by eating a snake.

The restaurant was busy and rather noisy. On the way in I had noticed cages of chickens, tanks of fish, and great plastic tubs, like kiddie wading pools, containing shrimp and crabs. To the Chinese—the Hong Kong Chinese, too—fresh means
alive
when you order the meal. If it’s already dead, it’s not fresh.

We sat down at a round table with a large pot in the center. Our waitress, a pretty little girl in blue blazer, white blouse, and blue microskirt, squatted to turn the valve on a propane tank under the table and lighted a fire that would shortly have a gallon or so of water boiling briskly in the pot.

When I said I was interested in a snake, she beckoned me to come outside. There, in cages I had not noticed before, was an assortment of squirming snakes. I could not have chosen an individual snake; my choice was simply of one of three sizes displayed in the three cages. I chose a medium-sized one. The girl spoke to the attendant, and he reached in and grabbed a snake some three feet long. I suppose it was not venomous, but it might have been.

As we returned to our table we came upon Charlie and Zhang Feng looking at the fish in an aquarium. Zhang pointed at one: a big, dull-colored fellow. An attendant dipped a net in the tank and captured it. It would be another part of our meal.

Bottles of beer, white wine, and mineral water were on our table when we sat down again. The Chinese do not favor hard liquor.

“I understand you are seeking investments,” Zhang said.

“Not aggressively,” I said. “But we are looking around.”

“Let me suggest one,” said Zhang. “In Houston there is the remnant of a technology company called Sphere Corporation. It assembled a desktop computer it called the Sphere. Unfortunately, it also decided to write its own operating software, also called Sphere. It rejected everything Microsoft, including, of course, DOS and Windows. It wrote its own spreadsheet program, its own word-processing program, and so on. Its software was rather ingenious, but it was incompatible with everyone else’s. Well … In the course of time it shared the fate of so many little start-up companies in the computer field. Today you can hardly find a Sphere computer—though many who once used them have fond memories of them, and the name is worthy.”

“So you want—”

The conversation was interrupted by the delivery to the table of plates of vegetables and meats. The drill was that you picked up bits of vegetable and meat with your chopsticks and loaded the little wire basket provided each diner. The basket, the size of two tablespoons maybe, was on a handle, and you used it to dip your food in the boiling water. It would be ready to eat in half a minute or so, and then you took it to your plate, where you would add your choice of the sauces that had also been brought, and eat. I watched Zhang and Charlie to see how it was done.

Zhang and Charlie called it “hot pot.” They identified some of the meats for me: squid, octopus, hare, beef, pork. The vegetables were more difficult to identify. They were Chinese. I did boil some mushrooms. I recognized those. The others were kinds of cabbage and the like, and root vegetables such as radishes, each with a distinct delicious flavor. They dumped whole plates of vegetables and meats into the pot, and soon we were boiling our food in a savory soup. From time to time the waitress added water from a teapot.

Everything was eaten without salt, of course.

“I want the Sphere name,” said Zhang, returning to our business conversation.

“You are going to make computers?”

“Nothing so glamorous. Nothing so consuming of capital. Nothing in so competitive a field. What I want to export to the States and elsewhere is a variety of microprocessors. Microprocessors are the future. You know very well that your automobile engine is governed by microprocessors. They receive information from sensors and adjust the engine accordingly, for heat and humidity and a dozen other things, including altitude. All manner of things will be governed that way in a few years: air conditioners, furnaces, every type of appliance.”

The snake was brought to the table. The head and tail had been cut off, and it had been slit end to end and gutted; then it had been washed out with rice wine, cut in three-inch pieces, and deep-fried. The pieces were drenched in a sauce. The platter of snake was put in the center of the table to be shared by the three of us.

Some people say eating a snake is something like eating chicken. I would say it is more like pork spare ribs. You have to use your teeth to separate the meat from the ribs and spine, and the meat you get is lean and a little tough and has a perfectly agreeable flavor. There is nothing nauseating about eating snake. If you did not know what it was, you would eat it without hesitation.

“Sphere still has a very positive reputation in the States,” Zhang went on. “Many people who once used the Sphere computer remember it very fondly.”

“I know people who deeply regret the demise of some old names that used to be important,” I said. “Talk to someone who used to drive a Studebaker or Packard.”

Zhang nodded. “So what does all this have to do with you? What I want is a license to use the Sphere name and the Sphere logo. I am looking for a respected American company to buy a controlling interest in Sphere. I will supply money to buy the stock, most of it anyway. You would have a minimal investment in it. You will recover your investment from my licensing fees.”

“Why don’t you buy it yourself?”

Zhang smiled. “Texans don’t like to sell their stock to Chinese investors. It goes against the grain, so to speak.”

I nodded. “So to speak.”

“Something more,” he said. “I will ask you to represent our product to American buyers. The Chinese involvement can be minimized. You will be able to label our products ‘Made in U.S.A.’ Sphere has the capacity to attach components to circuit boards. That the components come from China need not be emphasized. Do you see?”

I did. But at the moment I was seeing something else. The gas in our propane tank had run out, and our fire had gone out. Our waitress brought a new tank and hunkered down to replace old tank with new. As she squatted beside my chair her microskirt crept up and up. She was wearing no underwear, and soon she was hiding nothing at all. For a full two minutes she stayed there, intent on unscrewing and screwing the hoses. She was showing everything she wanted to.

“There are details to be worked out, but I wonder if this proposition has any interest for you,” said Zhang. “If not, I have other ideas to present that may have more appeal.”

“I reserve judgment on the Sphere idea,” I said. “Tell me about your other ideas.”

“We can manufacture Cheeks merchandise in China,” he said smoothly. “We can do it to your quality standards. I know, however, the difficulties you might have with American law, at least with the American news media, if it should get around that you were selling products made according to
our
standards of labor relations. So? Suppose I were to suggest to you that we manufacture Cheeks products in China for sale only in China?”

“You can do that without my approval,” I said. “It’s being done to hundreds of American companies.”

“Yes,” he said. “I could. But there is a great enthusiasm in this country for authentic American goods. Our people know knockoffs from real.”

“So what is the proposition?”

“We manufacture here, according to your designs and standards. The merchandise goes out to sea as if it were being exported. But the ship goes only from Guangzhou to Shanghai, say. It enters the port of Shanghai with papers saying the garments were made in the States. Then—”

“But what have
I
got to do with this? You can do it without me. Chinese companies do, all the time.”

“Except…” he said with a new smile. “Except that you, sir, and maybe your father, make appearances in our stores, bringing American models, and you endorse this merchandise as if it had all been made in the States.”

“Which makes me a shill,” I said. “And my father. I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“He’s gone for a number of things in his day,” said Zhang. “Do you want to refuse for him?”

“What’s in it for us?” I asked.

“We can negotiate,” said Zhang. “Obviously you are going to get a percentage off every sale of every item. Let me assure you right now, I can sell twenty million pairs of crotchless panties in one year.
Twenty million!
That’s only one pair for every thirty women in China. Mr. Cooper, I can sell more than that. Look at those girls riding on the backs of motorbikes. How they’d love to be wearing Cheeks panties instead of Sears ones! We’ve got a hell of a market here. What would you want? Five percent? Six? Seven?”

“Ten,” I said.

Zhang grinned. “We can negotiate.”

“Frankly,” I told him, “I am more interested in your microprocessors than I am in this. There is too much politics involved in it.”

Zhang nodded. “Let us, then, focus on technology.”

The fish he had chosen in the tank came now. I’d had more than I wanted to eat, but the tender white meat of that fish was irresistible. I was glad I’d tried the snake, but the fish was superior.

When we had finished, Zhang leaned across the table toward me. “Mei-ling let you see her pussy a little while ago. Would you like her for dessert?”