Paul Midler - What′s Wrong with China

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Two weeks before boarding my first flight to Asia, a friend of my mother's wished me well, letting me know she was jealous.

You're so lucky, she told me. Wish I was going.

She had never been to the Far East but was enamored by its ideas and traditions, especially medicine.

Just think about it, she said. They've been practicing medicine for thousands of years. They know all kinds of things we don't.

It was an unintended send-off as I found her words echoing back to me two weeks later in Taipei. I had been invited to join a group of office workers on a day trip their company had planned, and on the returnat the drop-off pointI managed to get my hand smashed in the door of their van.

Duibuqi! cried the woman who injured me.

I was frozen in pain. A colleague offered that she had something. Chinese medicine, she said enthusiastically, before bolting.

A glass jar was presented, upon which were some handwritten Chinese characters. The lid was removed, revealing a dark, viscous liniment. And as it was applied to my hand, I held out hope.

Three women stood around me now, concentrating fully on my paw and taking turns offering commentary.

That's better, one assured.

Much better, another confirmed.

While everyone stood around waiting for something to happen, my hand continued to throb and a strange thought entered my head: Was this Chinese traditional medicine? Was this how these people thought the human body worked? Broken bones healed in a jiffy with a magic salve?

I was in my twenties then and somewhat embarrassed to have such rude thoughts. But the scene struck me as comical, and I had to suppress the urge to laugh. Thanking everyone for an otherwise lovely afternoon, I lied and told them I was feeling better. I then made my way to an area hospital, where I received a set of X-rays for the hand, which luckily had not suffered any fractures.

It was a strange beginning to a career in Asia, and perhaps an unproductive one. Westerners in it for the long haul were supposed to arrive mesmerizedenchanted at leastand that condition was meant to carry them through the several years it took to pick up the language. The bloom would come off the rose eventually, but it was meant to do so only after a fair amount of time had passed.

The effect of having my bubble burst almost upon arrival put me in an odd disposition: Chinoiserie and other Orientalia now struck me as daffy. I had little interest in studying anything Chinese in the traditional sense, and along with that ennui went any intention of taking my time in this part of the world seriously.

Thankfully I was youngthis was twenty-five years agoand I didn't need much of an excuse to stick around. A reliable old motorcycle, a rooftop apartment in the mountains outside of the city, an assortment of colorful characters for friends, and the odd job would suffice. I spent no time on language training and managed to pick up a fair amount of Mandarin in spite of myself. Wrapping up three years in Taiwan, I returned to the United States and entered a graduate school program that began by sending me to Beijing for the summer.

And that was how I wound up in my first proper Chinese language course with a woman named Miss Zhang.

In our first one-onone session, Miss Zhang tossed me what she must have thought was a softball question: Why are you still in China? She was taking the American government's dubious view (it was Beijing's as well) that the years I lived in Taiwan should be clocked as time spent in the People's Republic of China, and she asked because few nonnatives ever returned after a stint. Although foreigners were arriving in significant numbers, when they finally went home, they rarely boomeranged back.

Why had I returned?

In making my way to graduate schoolit was a business program with an international componentI had to explain in an application why I had wanted to study such things as discounted cash flow and conjoint analysis. On this other motivation, I was drawing somewhat of a blank.

On the surface, Miss Zhang appeared a serious woman. She considered me for the briefest moment and then broke the silence between us by saying, You know what you should tell people when they ask you that question? Then she giggled. You should tell them, Wo shangle zeichuan. I'm on the pirate ship.

It was a twist on an old idiom, one that suggested it is easier to jump on a tiger's back than to dismount. I got the reference but wondered: Was the ship meant to be China? Who were the pirates? In the back of my mind, a light bulb went off, one that would take me years to identify. Only later would I conclude that Miss Zhang had picked up on somethingthat I was lostand what she ultimately offered me was not a conversation starter but a hint of where I ought to be looking for inspiration.

Not long after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to Guangzhou, a sprawling metropolis located two hours north of Hong Kong, and from there I began a career representing American companies that had manufacturing interests in the region. The work put me in contact with Chinese factory bosses who were indeed pirate-like in their approach to commerce. And I appreciated that they shared a similar brand of humor to Miss Zhang's.

In the middle of the boom in export manufacturing, I found myself riding a train in Guangdong, seated facing two questionable-looking characters who were dressed head-totoe in black. My reputation as a fixer was established by this time, and they easily appeared to be the sort who traded merchandise for a living.

Almost as soon as we pulled out of the station, the man seated by the window began eyeballing me, so I thought I would break the ice.

Nimen cong nali laide? I asked him.

You wouldn't know the place, he said.

I've been around. Try me.

It's a small city, he demurred.

Ni shuo ba, I insisted. Where are you from?

Chaozhou, he said, finally. We are from Chaozhou.

I had worked in Chaozhou, with a factory there that made majolica-style pottery. It was an out-ofthe-way place, and though I had never experienced trouble there myself, I was familiar with its nasty reputation. Putting on an air of familiarity, I told him that I knew his fair city wellbecause I had once been swindled there.

Wo zai nimen Chaozhou bei pianle, I said, deadpan.

He caught the joke and laughed. That a foreigner would be cheated in his roughneck city was a given. That the laowaioutsidershould take such abuse as the normal course of events made it hilarious.

His partner, who wore a cap, was considerably less amused.

Cheated in Chaozhou? he said, sounding incredulous. That is impossible. The people of my city would never cheat a fine foreigner such as yourself. Whatever the circumstances of your dealings, surely there must have been some misunderstanding.

His partner, the fellow by the window, was no longer smiling. I couldn't quite catch the relationship between the two but knew at least which one could be trusted. China was a rough-andtumble world all right, and there were those who were frank about the place and those who put on airs and graces. You appreciated the ones who gave it to you straight, because you knew that you could work with them. The other sort was nothing but trouble. Imagine standing under an awning in the middle of a downpour, commenting on the weather, only to have some stranger next to you respond: Rain? What rain?

China brought many meaningful lessons, but only in great retrospect. It takes time for the subconscious to process the unfamiliar. Patterns form only slowly, and then you have to wait as certain realizations bubble to the surface and become points of awareness. Along the way to enlightenment, it is also necessary to let go of preconceived cultural notions, which often impede understanding.