This is China! BLOG

The Curious American

Happily, I am in the fortunate circumstance that I love my job AND I like my customers (unlike Motorola’s chief executive Ed Zander). I spent the past week with one of them, a President of a distribution center in Ohio.

Steve (not his rea name) has been a client of our company, Silk Road Advisors, for two years now. We’ve been managing his China-side supply chain during that time. Also during that time he had not come to China. Just as well, as he might have told us how to do our job this side of the Pacific.

Actually, he had never been to China. In fact, the last time he had been out of the States was just after University, on a trip to Switzerland or some such destination. He’s now forty years old. He lives in a small Ohio town of 10,000, though his company is in Cincinnati. He is of German descent, as is his wife; their 3.0 children, like their parents, are all blonde-haired and blue-eyed. He and his family go to church every Sunday, with grandma and grandpa, who live just 50 yards away. The other set of grandparents, whom they see at the weekend, live 10 miles away.

Steve is the perfect American, from a stereotypical point of view.

His visit to China, then, required a special kind of attention. Full attention. From weeks before he actually set foot in China to the time he boarded the flight back to America, we found ourselves responsible for cuing him on a variety of items and ways of thinking. Such items as visas and sleeping pills and cash (remember, America’s is a “plastic” society) simply did not occur to him. Still, I have to say, the visit, just concluded, was a pleasure.

Much of the time was spent in or near Shanghai, though we did pull him away from the gravity well of the megalopolis and get him out to Suzhou and a township called Wujiang, near Suzhou, to visit suppliers.

In general, he enjoyed the week-long trip immensely: more a tribute to the dynamism of China than to our service as tour guides. He enjoyed the outing to Shanghai’s Yu Garden to buy gifts for his family; he liked going up the infinitely ugly Televison Tower in Pudong to overlook the city; he marveled at the late-night excitement of a stroll through Xin Tian Di.

Negotiations with suppliers were a bit wearing for us all; though getting to and from the Wujiang supplier was an exercise in extreme patience (the driver apparently got lost on the way to meeting Steve, on the way back to the factory, and on the way from the factory to Shanghai, during which he picked up a ticket from a policeman for not wearing his safety belt.)

But what fascinated me the most about Steve’s visit to China was that he seemed infinitely curious about the country: what the people thought; how they lived; what they were thinking when they were negotiating, when they were partying; he wanted to know what Chinese – and Asians in general – thought about America; what Asians thought about America’s role in history in Asia (he is a history buff). He wanted to know about the Chinese feelings toward the Japanese, and about the tensions between China and North Korea.

He never pushed his thinking on me or the friends in Shanghai and Suzhou I introduced him to, though he clearly held pretty standard American values: God and country; America seems to always be helping the world out of its feuds; America as a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world to follow and emulate.

He asked me once if I ever intended to return to the States to continue my life there. I said I didn’t. As a non-white, I explained simply, I simply have to prove myself to others too much and too often: as being bright or nice or a good neighbor. “My appearance is such that I can easily pass for South American – ‘oh, you want to steal my job’ – or for Black – ‘oh, you’re lazy and feel you’re entitled’ – or Arab – ‘oh, you must be a terrorist.” Basically,” I explained, “I’m tired of being hassled by the cops and by the ignorant, though the two at times are indistinguishable.”

“My worst offense in China,” I concluded, “is simply being American when America’s foreign policy wonks do or say something stupid.”

Steve understood my feeling and seemed to take American-style racism – along with God and Country and Freedom – as an axiom of American Life.

I deeply appreciated Steve’s comittment to understanding just how things work here in China. In the years I’ve been hosting company Presidents here in China, he was easily one of the most sincerely inquisitive. He understands that China’s rise will have a major impact on his children’s lives; it already has had one on his.

“Americans really don’t understand what’s happening,” this native of Ohio intoned, “they’re living in their bubble watching Rosie O’Donnel get personal on National TV” (he explained to me her latest controversy as we sat in the executive lounge of our Shanghai Hotel chatting, CNN’s Larry King on the TV in the background). “They have no idea how things are changing. I’ve got to open my own kids up to what’s happening in the outside world.”

One down: 299,949,999 to go, by my estimates.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China