The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  Bai Fuyuan was a rather ordinary-looking Chinese man, with a great mole on his cheek a la Chairman Mao. I guessed his age as fifty, though I had difficulty judging the ages of Chinese people. He wore an impeccably tailored, tropical-weight, double-breasted white suit, with a maroon paisley handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  He ordered champagne, and champagne is all we had to drink throughout the dinner. The very finest French champagne, Dom Perignon Rose. Bottle after bottle. Bai was paying, and we drank it like water.

  “You have a highly successful merchandising operation in the States,” he said. “It is so successful that you have a large amount of accumulated capital and are looking for investment opportunities.”

  He then proceeded to review our financial position. A Wall Street investment banker could not have known more about us than Bai Fuyuan knew. He knew our gross sales, our net profit, the details of our balance sheet, the names and some of the characters of our officers and directors. He knew where we were most successful—the Northeast—and where we were least—the Southwest. He guessed why:

  “The Cowboy girls … how do you call them? You have just made a deal to outfit Cowboy cheerleaders. A very good move.” I was astonished. No one was supposed to know about that deal, which we had just made. “The Cheeks merchandise is not suitable for wearing under tight blue jeans. Incidentally, I would be interested in hearing from you an offer to sell me, say, a thousand dozen pairs of skintight blue denim jeans. I think I have a market for them. If you have not a good, economical source, then let us talk about a deal whereby we make the jeans here and sew in the Cheeks label. The label is not unknown here, you know.”

  Charlie Han spoke. “I understand there are Cheeks knockoffs for sale in Shanghai.”

  “You should be flattered,” said Bai. “Only the best is knocked off for the Chinese market. Gucci, Hermes, Versace … Hart, Schaffner & Marx … Rolex. The government tries to control that. It is not easy.”

  “I imagine there is little market for Cheeks merchandise in China,” I said.

  “Ah! Forgive me, but you are wrong. We are a nation of a billion and a quarter people. There are Chinese living in the hinterlands who still live as Pearl Buck described. There are men and women here and there who still wear Mao suits—though have you seen any on the streets of Shenzhen? Ours is a confusingly complex country. But I can tell you there are scores of millions of Chinese who make a market for Cheeks lingerie. Look at the girls on the streets! What are they wearing? Black vinyl miniskirts, Izod shirts. What do you think they want to wear under? There is a market here for your line.”

  I had to admit I had not seen a Mao suit since I arrived in China—though that had been only hours ago. I had not seen oppressed people trudging to their jobs. I had seen girls with helmets on their heads, clinging to the young men at the handlebars of motorcycles. This was young China. Somewhere, I suppose, there were girls wading in the rice paddies. Not here.

  “You were thinking about investment, Mr. Bai,” said Charlie Han.

  “Yes. Investment,” said Bai. “In the old days, the days of Mao Tse-tung, we used to hear on the radio the endless repetition of a … I suppose we could call it a mantra. It went, ‘A handful of Party persons in power, taking the capitalist road…’ They were criminals, as Mao would have had it. But today, Little Bottle—”

  Little Bottle was the meaning of Xiaoping.

  “—has turned us all into capitalists. I can offer you investments, gentlemen. For example, you considered investing in a little feeder airline serving three or four states in the American Midwest. Suppose I offer the chance to invest in a regional airline that will serve Guangzhou Province, with service to Hong Kong and Beijing?”

  “We know nothing about how airlines are licensed and controlled in China,” I said.

  Bai Fuyuan smiled. “Everything in China is licensed and controlled by … how say?… dollars.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Capitalism is a new idea for us—new, that is, since 1949. We run by no rules. The only rule is: make money! We have no labor rights, no women’s rights, no worries about pollution rules.… We make money the way your robber barons did a century ago. Today, China is the best investment opportunity anyone ever dreamed of.”

  “Difficulties in getting your profits out?” I asked.

  “Well … some controls. Like all others, they can be avoided. It is usually a matter of some money placed correctly.”

  “An airline,” said Charlie Han. “That impresses me as a very big commitment for a company just ready to dip its toes. What else can you offer, Mr. Bai?”

  Bai shrugged. “I own a company that copies American videotapes. Our government and yours has agreed that will not happen.” He shrugged. “If I don’t, somebody else will.”

  “I’m not quite ready,” I said, “to get into that kind of business.”

  “Or CD disks?”

  “Or CD disks.”

  “We weave wool and manufacture lovely sweaters. They are without labels. You can put in whatever label you like. I can sell you as many as you wish, quality assured.”

  I glanced at Charlie. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “It is something we can consider,” I said.

  “The label must, however, read, ‘Made in Hong Kong.’ There are certain, shall we say, prejudices to overcome. To Americans, ‘Made in China’ means made in Taiwan.”

  “Which means made in China,” said Charlie. He was a diplomat.

  Bai smiled and nodded. “There will be some small problems in getting the unlabeled sweaters from here to Hong Kong. We can overcome those. And we can negotiate a mutually agreeable price.”

  * * *

  After dinner and half a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon among the three of us, Bai suggested a visit to a nightclub. We went to a very expensive club, designed to separate suckers from as much cash as possible. The lighting, the décor, the furnishings, the food, the drink, the personnel: all were superb and conspicuously costly. That club compared to the Lido in Paris for elaborately staged shows. Businessmen—a few Europeans and Americans, but mostly Japanese—sat on couches with hostesses cuddling up to them, drank champagne and tea, and ate hors d’oeuvres, mostly fruit, from platters placed on low tables. Though most of the hostesses were Chinese, a few were Australians and even Brits. Blondes were especially prized.

  Though I didn’t ask for her, I found myself attended by a lovely Eurasian girl in a microskirt and halter. The other men were also attended to by Chinese beauties. We sat on a pair of facing, leather-upholstered couches, with a knee-high table between.

  “You American, yes?”

  “I am American, yes.”

  “My father American. GI. You believe?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Many do not. Many … well, you know. Where in America you from?”

  “New York.”

  “Ah, New York! Is the most American place!”

  She wasn’t there to make conversation. She never said her name. She let her skirt hike back until I could see her panties. They were not from Cheeks.

  Bai explained the whole deal. She could leave the club with me and go with me to a hot-sheet hotel, or even to the Guangzhou Hotel, if I paid the club a fee to release her for the evening and then paid her whatever we might negotiate. I would also have to pay the floor woman in the hotel a fee for allowing me to bring a girl to my room.

  “What a hell of a way to make a living,” I muttered to Charlie.

  He was not concerned. He had already made a deal with his girl, who was, oddly, a natural blonde, an Australian.

  “It’s the way the world goes, Len,” he said. “You may as well take advantage of it. If you don’t, somebody else will. You can’t change anything.”

  What kind of guy am I? I don’t know. Here was a pretty little girl available to me for not a lot of money. Did I handle it the way I did because of loyalty to Vicky? I’d like to think so.

  I paid the club’s fee for taking
out one of its girls. I took her out on the street, where I hailed a cab. Before she got in, I pushed into her hands a thousand Hong Kong dollars—say a hundred and thirty American—and I got in alone and closed the door.

  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 v
egetables 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.”