Fragrant Harbour

by John Lanchester

  ‘Five per cent,’ said Vogel.

  ‘Ten is the minimum we need.’

  ‘Five is all I can offer. I will have to clear it with Düsseldorf.’

  ‘We may not be in business to claim it in six months’ time.’

  ‘Five per cent dated to cover outstanding invoices.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you.’

  We shook hands. I wondered what the real maximum figure was and whether I should have held out for seven and a half. As Vogel led me out of his office, Tommy Cheung came in from the left. He looked surprised to see me. We said hello and shook hands. There was small talk.

  ‘Matthew, have you transport arranged? You can share a ride, yes?’ said Vogel. I saw a moment of hesitation in Cheung and then he said:

  ‘Sure. I have a driver. I’ll drop you.’

  ‘I’m heading for Golders Green. It’s near the A41 into central London.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  We all went down together in the lift. Cheung and I said goodbye to Vogel. Again he squeezed my hand too hard. Outside an Englishman wearing a tie opened the door of a Mercedes for us. I got in first. Cheung followed.

  ‘Driver, can we please go via –’ He gestured at me.

  ‘Golders Green.’

  ‘No problem, sir.’

  As the car moved off, Cheung took out a Palm Vx and made a note before slipping it back into his jacket pocket. Then he yawned. He undid the top button of his shirt and sat back.

  ‘When did you get in?’ he asked.

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘I got in on Monday. The third day is often the worst, isn’t it? I take melatonin but it doesn’t seem to work as well as it used to.’

  ‘My wife forbids me to take it. She’s a dentist. She says it interferes with too many important chemical processes in the brain.’

  Cheung looked interested.

  ‘My Dad says the only known cure for jet lag is tiger-penis wine,’ he said. ‘My daughter said, did he have any idea how that is made? She’s nine. He says, of course, they kill a male tiger and cut off his penis. She says, that’s disgusting, you’re disgusting, someone should cut your penis off. Then she slams the door and disappears. Nine! They push all this eco stuff down their throats in the States. It’s like a religion. The old man pretended not to mind but he was really upset. What can you do?’

  ‘My daughter is six. I hope she doesn’t know what a penis is yet.’

  I found it difficult to imagine Cheung as a father. He seemed too young and too smooth. But he looked happy as he talked. He took out a photograph of a buck-toothed girl with pigtails and glasses.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ I said. ‘Strong character in her face. Lovely eyebrows.’

  ‘She’s been driving us crazy about contact lenses. We say, not until you’re in your teens. Not until the oculist says it’s okay. She has a tantrum. “You’re the worst parents in the world. I’m going to run away and hide in the woods and get eaten by a bear and then everyone will know how horrible you are to me!” My father is Chinese, I’m Chinese–American. My daughter is American– Chinese. It’s the way it goes. Again, what can you do?’

  We talked about our families all the way back to London. When we were past the Underground station he said:

  ‘Wait a minute. I know this place. There’s a great Japanese restaurant here. Want to take some lunch?’

  I had nothing to do until the next day. I was flattered. I said yes. The driver pulled up and let us out.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ Cheung told the driver. ‘About ninety minutes.’

  We went into the restaurant. Two chefs shouted a welcome in Japanese. It was a narrow, crowded place like a noodle bar. But they had a table.

  ‘London’s okay for food, but good sushi is hard to get. You been to Japan much? The sushi there is unbelievable. Go to Kyoto, they say, no, don’t bother with sushi here, it’s too far from the sea. That means forty kilometres.’

  I understood: Cheung was not quiet at all. He was shy. When he began talking he talked all the time.

  ‘I feel funny eating raw food,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’re more Chinese than I am, I guess. I can’t get enough of it.’

  ‘Please order for both of us.’

  This gave face. He was pleased. When the waiter came he spoke Japanese to her. When a man speaks to a woman in Japanese it always sounds as if he is giving orders.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ I said. He shrugged.

  ‘I spent two years in Tokyo after Stanford. I speak it okay. My Chinese completely sucks. In fact my daughter speaks it better than I do. She talks to her grandfather in Putonghua. They do all this ethnic pride stuff in school now.’

  The waitress brought us two beers and a plate of raw soybean pods. I was surprised. Cheung did not look or act like a drinker. He picked up his glass:

  ‘Here’s to a free afternoon.’

  ‘Yum cha,’ I said.

  ‘I try to take at least one afternoon or morning completely off when I’m on the road. I don’t always make it but I feel better when I do. Catch up on sleep, do some shopping, make family calls, do my email. Otherwise the walls start to close in. Everything gets out of balance.’

  The waitress began to bring food. Cheung had ordered spider-crab rolls; maguro sushi; eel teriyaki; a dish of pork stir-fried with baby Japanese asparagus; a dish of tofu stuffed with sushi rice and deep fried. We switched from beer to cold sake. He had flushed bright pink. We talked about business. It was clear that his Weigen franchise was at the moment more lucrative than ours.

  ‘But I think we’re going to take a bath in China,’ he said. ‘The business grows and grows and we still don’t make any real money out of it. Plus you never know when they’re going to change the rules. It’s like you run on the field dressed for basketball and expecting a basketball game and they come out dressed for baseball and so you think, okay, it’s baseball, and then one of them comes over carrying a bat and hits you on the head.’ He giggled.

  ‘We have the same problem,’ I said. ‘In Vietnam too. Good factory, good prospects, growing economy. Everything looks great. Trouble is we’re being stolen from and there’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘There’s never nothing you can do,’ said Cheung, holding up a sake flask in the direction of the waitress. We were by now the last customers.

  ‘In principle I agree. But –’ I explained the situation. Cheung nodded.

  ‘No problem. Sell us the factory.’

  ‘Good joke.’

  ‘Not a joke. We’re expanding so fast in Vietnam we’re tripping over our own feet. We’re looking for a new factory anyway. Cholon is perfect. All we have to do is retool. Weigen will kick in some help with that. We did it before in Singapore. We’ll buy out your share for a fair price and give the crooked partners nothing. We’ll use the threat of exposure. Hold a gun to their heads. It’s perfect. Everybody wins.’

  ‘If we thought it was that easy to expose them we’d do it ourselves.’

  Cheung, flushed and drunk, composed himself.

  ‘Look. You know the Americans have these stories. “What do you call a nine-hundred-pound gorilla with a machine gun?” “Sir”. These jokes. Well, it’s like that. How do you get the attention of a nine-hundred-pound gorilla? You turn up with a twelve-hundred-pound one.’

  ‘I don’t think gorillas get that big.’

  ‘They do in Vietnam. We’ve got one. Our Vietnamese partner is a member of the President’s family.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s a good business rule for Asia. When in doubt, get a bigger gorilla.’

  We swapped cards. I took the bill.

  Chapter Nine

  My grandfather will not allow any publication from the Wo empire in his house so I keep the magazine cutting in a plastic folder in the office. When I got back to Hong Kong I took it out.

  Astronauts by Dawn Stone

  You see them in planes all over Asia. For them flying is the same as bus travel, and shares its main
defect: it takes too long. They’re the people who’ve spent so much time flying that the last flicker of emotion about travelling at six hundred miles an hour in a pressurised metal tube has been expunged. They’re the people who stay on their mobile phones until the last possible second. They’re the people who never look up when the flight crew go through the security drill; in fact, they’re the people who spend more time in the air than flight crew do themselves. They’re the people who spend so much time in the sky that the Chinese have a new nickname for them: astronauts.

  When you meet an astronaut, there’s an easy way to tell whether they still work for somebody else, or whether they’ve founded their own companies: if they’re spending their own money, you’ll find them at the back of the plane, in Economy.

  Matthew Ho, a young businessman who is planning to make a mega-huge killing in industrial machinery, is one of them …

  The piece went on to talk about the subject of astronaut syndrome, using me and a number of other young Chinese entrepreneurs as examples. Miss Stone and I had met in a plane, which is why I suppose she thought of me as a possible interviewee. As it happened we had met in business class, thanks to my air miles. But there were many other inaccuracies in the piece also. When it was published in Asia magazine I did not recognise a single remark attributed to me.

  My partner was angry when he saw the article.

  ‘Industrial machinery!’ he said. ‘What does that mean? Does she know nothing? It’s no use as an advertisement for our business! A waste of time! You should send her a bill for the time she wasted! A thousand dollars an hour, minimum!’

  Perhaps because he was so angry he had not remembered Dawn Stone’s name. But I had. She was often mentioned in the business pages after she moved from journalism to an executive post in the Wo media company. She was much in the news at the time of the handover. Gossip about her said that she was having an affair with her superior, an Englishman called Oss. After the handover he moved to run Wo’s entire overseas operations, and not long afterwards Miss Stone became the head of the Wo media company. Wo himself ran the Asian businesses. He was also supervising their expansion into China.

  I had kept in touch with Miss Stone through the exchange of Christmas cards, this being one of the ways in which Westerners maintain guanxi. I had on one or two occasions been able to help her, when she was still a journalist, with factual information and once with an introduction to some contacts in Guangzhou. Relations between us were cordial, even though I had met Miss Stone in person only on three occasions. The first time was on the flight to Kai Tak from Heathrow. She had never been to Hong Kong before. She seemed young and eager, and she wanted not to seem innocent. At the same time she asked lots of questions. Also she listened to the answers. I liked the fact that she was not a typical expatriate. She was dressed well but not expensively. I could see she was nervous. I talked about my business. At Christmas we sent each other a card.

  The next time I saw her was for the interview. It was half a year later. She was much more confident. She had many opinions. Her clothes were more expensive. Her eyes looked different. She behaved like an important person. She was more aware of questions of status and face. But I still got a Christmas card every year.

  I next met her in 1998, at a drinks party she gave to celebrate her promotion to head of the media company. The party was in Felix, the restaurant at the top of the Peninsula hotel. The fact that she was able to take it over for an evening was a big sign of her status. There was no mistaking that she was a senior executive of a powerful company. She was wearing a red suit. Her hair looked very expensive. She was still friendly on the outside. But everything about her expressed an interest in power.

  ‘Matthew,’ she said when she met me. ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave without having a pee. Apparently in the gents you wee on a glass window, looking down on the whole of Hong Kong. If it doesn’t make you feel like a Master of the Universe, you need to get your serotonin levels checked.’

  She turned away to talk to someone else. I didn’t know anyone at the party so I didn’t stay for long.

  *

  The Sydney flight arrived at eight in the morning. At customs, the sniffer dogs stopped an old Chinese woman, a grandmother, who was trying to bring some sausages and wind-dried meats into the country, wrapped inside many plastic bags. She was arguing with the customs officers. She was not going to win the argument.

  There was no queue for taxis, which there often is at Sydney airport. It was a beautiful day. I sat in the front of the car.

  ‘Come from far, mate?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Hong Kong.’

  ‘Visiting?’

  ‘I live here.’

  ‘Ever been to the sashimi auction at the fish market?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d love it.’

  The taxi driver dropped me at Circular Quay. I like to arrive home by ferry.

  People were streaming past on their way to work. The fact that they were at the start of their day made me feel tired. I bought a ticket to Mosman and stood at the railings. The harbour has a smell nothing like that of Hong Kong. There were commuter ferries, container ships, private yachts. The ride was short, and we came into Mosman bay. Quite a few Australians got off and began walking in the same direction as me.

  I stopped at the little shop beside the quay and bought some mineral water. It is an expensive way of drinking water but it was a way of reminding myself to rehydrate. I walked up the hill. I was glad I had only my hand luggage. Two Australians ran past me.

  ‘… the teacher hates it if you are late,’ one of them was saying.

  When I turned the corner and could see our house there were thirty or forty people in the front garden. All of them were standing with their arms in the air. My father-in-law was facing them. He was in the same position. It took me a moment to realise they were doing t’ai chi. I walked up the driveway. My father-in-law smiled and nodded at me but did not stop speaking.

  ‘Now push away! Slow hands! Push away! Repulsing Monkey!’

  I let myself in the front door. My wife came out of the kitchen wearing an apron and embraced me.

  I said: ‘There are many Australians in the front garden doing t’ai chi under the instruction of your father.’

  ‘Yes. I was going to tell you. People observed him doing his exercises. They grew curious. One or two asked him to teach them. It developed from there. Australians are very fond of outdoor pursuits.’

  I drank some mineral water. We went into the kitchen where my wife did some small tasks and I stood and watched her. Mei-Lin was at school. Our mothers had gone shopping together. Through the open window I could hear my father-in-law.

  ‘Little baby – give him your finger. Try to take it away. Very difficult! Baby very strong! Baby have good chi! No blocks! Grown people many blocks! Weak! Bad chi! Must be like little baby! Good chi! Strong!’

  I always try to stay awake during the day after I have been flying because it helps to adjust the body clock. But I did not want to be too tired when Mei-Lin came home from school so I lay down for an hour after lunch. When my wife woke me I felt as if I was rising up from deep under water. The Australians in the front garden had gone away. I went to collect Mei-Lin and arrived just in time. A flood of small girls was coming out of the gates and being met by their parents.

  ‘Dad!’ she said. She ran up to me and gave me a hug.

  ‘You are taller.’

  ‘I know.’ Mei-Lin did a comic curtsey. A blonde girl carrying a recorder and holding her mother’s hand walked past. The mother smiled at me. She was very elegant.

  The girl said: ‘See you tomorrow, Mi.’

  ‘See you, Ali. Tell Deb I’m sorry she’s feeling crook.’

  A frowning Chinese woman walked past with her daughter without looking up. Both of them were wearing sunglasses. They got into a Mercedes. Mei-Lin made a face at the girl’s back.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked as we walked away.

  �
��That’s Michelle. She’s jealous.’

  ‘Because you’re prettier?’

  ‘And better at swimming.’

  We walked home. That night my wife cooked a special meal. Mei-Lin stayed up late with us and her grandparents. After dinner my wife and I talked. I told her about the difficulties with the business and what it meant.

  ‘So the conclusion is,’ I said, ‘we are going to go out of business, unless we secure the contract in Guangzhou.’

  ‘And that means we lose all our money, and the house, and the apartment in London, and our citizenship status in Australia is possibly compromised also, because bankruptcy would imply that we did not tell the truth about our solvency.’

  ‘We would lose everything.’

  My wife shook her head.

  ‘And you don’t know what this whole Wo thing is about?’

  ‘He won’t tell me. He just says, “the future is more important than the past.”’

  She shook her head again. ‘Then you had better go and talk to Miss Stone.’

  Chapter Ten

  I made an appointment to see Miss Stone through her secretary. I wrote a letter and then called twice. I could tell that there were layers of importance surrounding her now. Eventually I managed to set a time.

  When the day came, I went to her office. The building was a new block right on the harbour, in Admiralty. It was Wo’s latest development. The bottom five floors were a shopping mall. There was a hotel in the building. One whole floor was given over to a swimming pool, with glass walls. Miss Stone’s office was on the fifty-sixth floor. The lift travelled so fast that when its acceleration slowed there was a brief moment of weightlessness.

  Outside the lift a secretary sat at a big desk. There were offices with glass walls on either side of her. People were working. Beyond the offices were windows with views to the east and west. I gave my name. The secretary asked me to wait. I sat on a red sofa and looked at the magazines and newspapers. There were many of them from many different countries and it took me a moment to realise that every one was part of the Wo empire. There were two television screens above and across from where I sat. The sound was turned down but I could see they were showing footage from a recent Hollywood film made by the studio Wo part-owned. The screens showed a car chase followed by explosions.