I Stand Corrected Page 14

  Obtaining a passport in China has only recently become routine.

  In 1994, the government allowed travelers access to non-Asian countries in a “planned, organized, and controlled manner.” Since more and more Chinese travel abroad as part of organized tours, my editor requested I write a separate chapter on the logistics of longer journeys.

  Why and how one takes a journey is inextricably linked to one’s circumstances and age. Taken when I was very young and on my own, my first trip entailed enough planning to slip away from an attentive grown-up charged with my care. I must have considered the possibility of a long journey because I brought a loaf of bread. The milkman forced my journey to its premature conclusion when—spotting me walking purposely down the road—he returned me to my keeper.

  Only now do I wonder what prompted me, at the age of five, to forfeit my childhood familiarity of place for the unpredictability of the unfamiliar. There was nothing in my life from which to run away, nor had there been a confrontation that morning that might have provoked me to punish the offending adult by leveraging worry over my disappearance. I can’t say why I set off for a discovery, but it was urged on by a curiosity about what was being offered beyond the driveway, and like any journey, it required me to put my trust in Providence.

  Writing travel tips for the Chinese fifty years later, I suggested that unexpected things can happen during a trip. My advice began with what to do before leaving on one. I was especially alert to the matter of passports and visas, so much so that I asked the editor to highlight the passage “Be sure that your passport is in order and that you have the proper visa to enter the country to which you are traveling.” I had a personal reason for providing this advice.

  IT TAKES REMARKABLY little to convince me to visit a place I’ve not yet been. A four-line passage written by Kipling was reason enough for a trip to Burma, a country now known as Myanmar.

  Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon—a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire.

  Built before Lord Buddha died around 483 B.C., the Shwedagon Pagoda is a 326-foot gold-gilded stupa on a hill overlooking the banks of a river in Burma. Kipling’s description of it reverberated with such figurative and literary appeal that I suggested to W. we see it for ourselves.

  At the time, Burma’s constitution was suspended by a military junta.

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Jonathan after hearing my plans. “Do you have a death wish? Because I have to tell you, you’re playing it out in a weirdly global way.”

  Jonathan is an investigative journalist so inclined toward suspicion that his desk area is referred to by colleagues as the grassy knoll. It is best to be direct with him; anything less encourages more of his questions.

  “The pagoda we want to see happens to be located in a country with a history of internal struggle,” I told him.

  “ ‘Internal struggle’? ‘Protracted warfare’ comes closer to describing its history,” he suggested.

  It was difficult to argue his point; at the time I decided to make the trip with W., the closest Burma had come to any semblance of stability was during its golden age in the eleventh century. Its last royal dynastic era was spent invading—or being invaded by—neighboring countries, until the English put an end to the warring by doing it better. The British eventually acceded to Burma’s demands for independence, but internal disputes and political divisions challenged a democratic process. Things went from bad to worse.

  That’s where I came in—or, more accurately, where I did not.

  W. decided to spend more time in Burma than I could afford out of the office; he left a week before I was to arrive. Chaos ensued when, at the last moment, the Burmese Embassy in Washington embargoed my passport without approving a visa. Both were returned in a frayed manila envelope that looked as if it had made the trip to Asia in my stead.

  A single word derailed my chances of Burma.

  “Publisher” was what I had written where the application asked for my profession. “Cartoonist” was how W. filled in his blank space—an obscure word with a vague enough definition to pass. At the last possible moment, I was denied access to a country in which W. had already been welcomed and was now waiting for me to arrive. The absurdity of our situation was a legacy of Orwell, who’d worked as a colonial policeman in Burma and would later write about his experiences.

  Today’s telecommunications make the most remote location instantly available. Back then the only means of communication was a landline, and there was virtually no time left before our scheduled rendezvous in Burma. I frantically tried locating W. When, finally, I was able to speak to him, the crackling static left our phone conversations pockmarked with missing words. “Can you … in India?” I asked. “I’ve looked on the map, and Madras has the closest airport.… I’ll … next Wednesday.”

  Anxieties were allayed once we were able to realign our coordinates, but after hanging up the phone, I felt physically drained and terribly alone. I tried to remember previous times I’d been purposely kept from where I wanted, or needed, to be. The closest I’d come to rejection on the grounds of an arbitrary rule was when I was turned away at the door to a private club in New York where the publishing company I was running was holding a sales conference. Unfortunately, no one on the company’s all-male sales staff was alert to the fact that my gender was not welcome at the club.

  Had I arrived at the door with a communicable disease, I might have been greeted with more hospitality. Furious personnel—put off by the need to deal with an unexpected and unpleasant situation—isolated me in a remote corner of the lobby while they consulted the management. Thirty minutes later, I was allowed to walk a few yards beyond the area in which I’d been sequestered and into the room where my colleagues had also been kept waiting.

  Being turned away at the door of a private club in New York was inconvenient but not noteworthy. My reaction to being prevented from traveling to a country—one that, ironically, had allowed in my notoriously unedited husband—forced me to admit I was an egregious example of entitlement. For me, access had gone without saying. I assumed the right to come and go, and when that right was withheld, it left me stunned.

  My rejected visa application included its own interpretative Rorschach marks: there were smudges from what must have been a leaky pen and splatters of what looked to be coffee stains. How many hands had my application passed through before the decision was made to deny me Burma? I examined my returned passport; its earmarked pages were evidence of unrestricted travels. Each stamp on each page had allowed me a country and countless memories. But it was my own port of passage that had granted something far more profound than the possible view of an ancient pagoda. No matter how remote my journeys, that passport had steadfastly returned me to my country—a country whose foreign policies oftentimes run amok, but a country nonetheless unafraid of the word that named my profession.

  → LESSON 17

  If you are going someplace you have not been before—especially if that place is a foreign country—read about its history and culture beforehand. Plan ahead as much as possible; gather as much information as you can online or through travel agencies. Find out if the country has any national holidays that fall during your visit. Confirm your plane and hotel reservations well ahead of time and again a few days before your departure. Before you pack, check with your airline to see if there are any limits on the size and number of bags allowed. Learn at least a few words of the native language, starting with “hello,” “yes,” “no,” “please,” and “thank you.” Don’t be loud in your speech. Understand the currency used in the country you are visiting.

  The Chinese government, stressing that travel companies are now responsible for creating a good image of Chinese traveling abroad, has issued new tourism laws. The results have fallen short.

  My lesson on international travel included the topic of pedestrian behavior on city sidewalks, for I cann
ot say just how many times I have emerged from a metro stop or made my way down a busy street in a Chinese city and smacked into someone in front of me who has come to a dead stop to check something or speak to someone in the coursing flow of a forward-moving crowd.

  Taxis were also a subject of review. My advice there was not to push your way in front of someone who is already waiting for a cab—although that is very much the routine in New York.

  Western tipping was a necessary but difficult subject for me to cover. As long as I can remember, I have suffered tremors of self-doubt from this arbitrary custom and cannot explain why, other than to point to the divide between what is expected from men and women. Over the years, and out of necessity, I have become fairly comfortable around a tool kit, but I am hopelessly mired in confusion when it comes to how much—and exactly when—I should tip. A bifurcated upbringing is to blame. My father demanded self-sufficiency; my mother insisted I hold to a stiffly defined code of conduct. Encrypted into her very being was a control panel that specified what to do and—just as important—what not to do in order to remain ladylike. It was acceptable to paint one’s toenails during summer months. It was unacceptable to reach for the serving dish on a table unless it was one-half the distance of an outstretched arm. A lady didn’t carry her glass of wine from a restaurant bar to the table. Under no circumstance was she to handle the logistics of tipping.

  Business travel forced me to recognize the importance of how to tip, but truth be told, I remain at a loss even today. Can tipping the night manager at a hotel be misconstrued as condescension? Does one tip the porter at a similar level as the doorman? More to the point, is tipping a bribe to acquire good service, or a reward?

  Happily for me—other than in Hong Kong and Macau—there is no tipping in China. That is certainly the case in Japan, where, during my first trip, a waiter ran after me in the street to return the money I’d left on the table. In most European countries, waiters are fully compensated by salary. Their service charge is featured on a separate line above the bill’s total. The gesture of a gratuity comes from rounding up the bill’s total with loose change left on the table. That is also the case in Britain, where, in Tudor times, the outstretched palm originated.

  Americans, however, continue to hold fast to the ineffectual practice of tipping—ineffectual because in most restaurants tips are pooled, which leaves the person being served no opportunity to reward the person who has given good service and prevents an expression of displeasure if the opposite occurs. The best I could do with my advice on tipping for Chinese traveling to the United States was to recommend 20 percent in both restaurants and cabs, unless one’s physical well-being had been threatened by partaking in either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Publication of my book was scheduled for six months after I set foot in Beijing.

  Gilliam stood in as my assistant and translator for the critical first three months. When he returned to England in the fall, I was left on my own with dangerously little fluency in Chinese, a tight book deadline, and an offer from Chairman to work for him as a part-time consultant.

  Acutely aware of my need to function at full tilt and reminded on a daily basis of my inability to speak Chinese, I thought I should consider Chairman’s offer, primarily because his Beijing office was in the same building as the St. Regis Hotel and my contractual arrangement with his company would include a residential apartment in the hotel.

  There was, of course, another, overriding reason to accept the assignment. Given what I’d already seen of Chairman and his empire, I’d be a fool to walk away from the dramaturgical possibilities of remaining in his orbit.

  Chairman’s unbridled success could have happened as it did only among the Chinese in China. Americans doing business in China are hobbled by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It spells out the illegality of securing “any improved advantage” with an exchange of favors, which is the very definition of guanxi. In plain language, that which is considered common business practice in China is considered collusion in the West. The view that China will eventually adjust to the West’s moral code is an unworldly one, for the two cultures are not built around the same block of values.

  “If not your family and friends, who else would you trust in business?” was the sensible-sounding question posed by a Chinese colleague when we were discussing guanxi.

  Whether East and West will someday be capable of conducting business in the same way, I do not know. But I am convinced that observation moves us nearer to what is not necessarily known, and by proposing that I work with him, Chairman was offering a closer look at—what was, for me—the extreme unknown.

  THE ST. REGIS HOTEL sits comfortably within the diplomatic district, an area in central Beijing that is home to foreign embassies. I missed the local color of Dongzhimen, but moving my base of operations was a necessary concession. The hotel’s computer server is located in Hong Kong rather than mainland China, which enabled a relatively problem-free Internet connection. Its office center provided what I took for granted outside of China: a fax machine and a photocopier. Just as important, the hotel doormen spoke English and so would be able to explain to the taxi drivers where I needed to go.

  The view from my apartment was of a block-long hole in the ground. Within six months, it would become a twenty-floor commercial building. From my vantage above, the construction site took on the appearance of a frenetically productive anthill. Scores of men—living in trailers on the rim of the hole—worked in shifts, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day; at night, they wore hard hats with spotlights.

  In my costly apartment above the fray, I was not unlike a guest on a luxury cruise ship with little need to disembark. Having been relieved of the nitty-gritty logistics required during my previous three months in China, determined to take advantage of the English-speaking, full-service aspects of living in the hotel, and refusing to be thrown off course by the fact that I had no real expertise on the subject of a book I was contracted to write, I kept to the same Calvinistic routine I had in Dongzhimen. Several hours of early-morning writing would precede laps in the hotel swimming pool, followed by a breakfast in the hotel restaurant of congee, a watery rice porridge, during which I read my way through the English-language China Daily.

  Given my media background, I was impressed by the state-sponsored China Daily. Launched in the 1980s, at the time I first came to China, the newspaper is a single-minded publication that first tells you what your prejudices should be and then confirms them with carefully crafted anecdotes. I admired the perseverance of the editors, forced to comment day after day without a single piece of substantiated information, but I was also grateful for the more accurate debriefs of events in China during my periodic lunches with Jaime.

  Jaime FlorCruz is his own remarkable story. Born in the Philippines and a vocal activist as a college student, he was forced into exile when Marcos—having declared martial law—decided to round up his detractors. Jaime was on the list of those who were to be arrested, but as fortune would have it, he was touring China at that very time. Stranded in China, he worked at a state farm in the Hunan Province to make enough money to travel to Beijing. Fluent in Chinese by the time he arrived in the city, Jaime was able to complete a degree in Chinese history from Peking University, after which he embarked on a career as a broadcast journalist. At the time we first met, he was the Beijing bureau chief for CNN.

  As I was droning the obvious about China Daily during one of our regular lunches, Jaime made a suggestion.

  “Read between the lines,” he told me. “You’ll learn that way.”

  He was right. By reading with a skeptical filter, I was able to gain a better understanding of the party’s domestic policies, its attitude toward countries considered allies, and—more fundamentally—its take on right and wrong. Especially revealing was the paper’s coverage of the 2012 London Summer Olympics, specifically when it came to the Chinese badminton team. They had been disqualified for deliberately losin
g one in a series of games by taking advantage of a technicality. To ensure that they advanced to the next round, they threw a game against a competitive team in order to win the next game against another, less formidable one.

  Simply put, they cheated.

  But the Chinese did not see it that way. They did not see it that way at all.

  Outcry came the next morning from China Daily, which insisted that exploiting a loophole was not wrong.

  My Talmudic-like concentration on China Daily during breakfast was occasionally interrupted when the word “joint venture” could be heard from the next table, proposed by an animated American to a tomb-faced Chinese businessman sitting across from him.

  Other than me, there were two regulars at the St. Regis breakfast room. One was an elderly Chinese man who spoke impeccable English and eventually introduced himself as a onetime interpreter to Deng Xiaoping. The other was a Buddhist monk in a saffron-colored robe.

  Why a Buddhist monk was eating breakfast by himself at the St. Regis Hotel every morning was a mystery that prompted me to consider the larger issue of religion—or, more precisely, the lack thereof—in China. While religions in most Western nations are significant cultural currents, that is not so in China, where the only native religion is Taoism. I doubt whether Taoism would even be considered a religion in the strict evangelical sense of the word, since it is an amalgam of philosophical concepts. When Mao called on individuals to sacrifice for the greater good of the people, it was not to instill altruism in the Judeo-Christian sense, but to strengthen the Communist Party.

  Religion more than any other area has enjoyed the liberation of the post-Mao period. But at the core of contemporary Chinese society is a commitment to life as it is, not as it theoretically should be. That functionality has been what has allowed the Chinese to survive devastation after devastation borne by the twentieth century: the fall of the last dynasty, the chaos of the warlords, two brutal and overlapping wars (the Japanese occupation and a civil war), the disaster of Mao’s utopian idea of the Great Leap Forward, and the murderous horrors of the Cultural Revolution.