by Gordon Gray
We arrived in Hong Kong and the next morning at breakfast, sure enough Eric barged straight in. “Well, have you decided? We can’t hang about, you know, as we need to get this sorted.”
“Eric, please explain what you think my role will be, exactly?”
Eric blustered on, “We need a good man who will oversee and report back to the UK, and will keep an eye on Vince.”
“A spy, you mean!”
“No, no, not exactly,” he said hesitantly. But that was exactly what they wanted: a tame man in Hong Kong to report back on what Vince was up to. “Eric, I am flattered at the offer but as I see it, it is a loser of a job and I don’t want it. Thank you.”
To my amazement and horror, Eric, without finishing his mouthful, said, “Quite right. You would have been an utter fool to take it. It is a non job but the chairman wants someone to do it.”
I was appalled at the stitch-up I had avoided without even the time to talk to my wife about such a life-changing decision. However, that was Eric, charging along at full speed.
Although I was based in the UK, I now spent half my time in Hong Kong on my way to other parts of the region. Over the next few years, I used Hong Kong as a base while I travelled to China, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, with occasional trips to Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines. It was a big region to cover and I needed to try to get to know the customers and agents personally and understand them, at least as far as the local culture allows. To do this, I needed to spend 100 to 120 days a year in the area. That meant spending half the working year in the territory. In Racal Decca, if a salesman did not spend that amount of time in territory, he was accused of not doing the job properly. Racal believed, quite rightly, that a salesman’s place was in his area and that no one has ever won an export order by sitting behind a desk in London. So I got used to long flights, jet lag and long trips, and spent about 120 days a year travelling in the Far East.
Although I always loved going on trips and was excited by the prospect, I still never really enjoyed leaving home for a long trip, especially at the weekends with a night flight ahead of me. I would spend the day just hanging around, not able to totally relax and constantly checking that I had not forgotten anything, then leaving home just as everyone else was relaxing and looking forward to a lazy evening at home. Doreen and I had been used to separations all our working lives, so it was not a problem – just something else to work through. After the first few days of the trip and knowing everything at home was OK, then it was fine and a couple of phone calls home during the week were enough to keep my mind at ease. I was always pleased to be heading for home at the end of a trip and counted down the days. I found that on five and six-week trips during the last week or ten days I was not really as interested in work as the prospect of home began to loom larger. Then, once I was home, it all started again; following up on the actions arising from the last trip and preparing for the next one.
Cathay Jumbo
Chaotic Kowloon
Mr G, Tony Brookes and Louis Foy in Hong Kong
Star ferry
The team relax. Doreen is on the right.
CHAPTER 3
China. (People’s Republic of China)
Guangzhou
China – land of mysterious, misty mountains; the fabled “Far Cathay” sought out by Marco Polo. It is a land of floods and vast rivers, home to china tea and the destination for the magical Tea Clippers in the 19th century for the first teas of the harvest. Home of bright-coloured silk, fabulous palaces, emperors and the Great Wall of China. These were my early thoughts of China formed from childhood books. In one prep school geography exam, the question was: “What do the Chinese people grow?” My two-word answer, which surprisingly received a severe rebuke was: “Pig tails”. (The correct answer was rice apparently, but I felt the question could have been phrased better). Now I was to see for myself what China was really like in the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao and now as home to over one billion people.
In those days, I was dubious about flying on China Airlines and was less than happy at the state of the plane in which we now found ourselves. The BAC Trident aircraft was probably as old as I was, the paintwork was faded and dirty, the inside looked grey and drab, and the padding in the seats had long ago lost its spring. The flight to Canton from Hong Kong was full, the luggage lockers above our heads were just open shelves and crammed with briefcases, coats and paper carrier bags full of the red boxes of Camus brandy that all Chinese seem to take home from Hong Kong. The in-flight service was one small tub of ice cream. Tony found a piece of metal in his. We landed solidly, but safely, in Canton, but checked our rattled teeth as we taxied to the terminal building. We cleared immigration and customs in a crowded, high-ceilinged room that seemed to serve as Immigration and Customs, Baggage Reclaim and Arrivals hall all in one. We found our bags and walked out into the night air.
One of our main Chinese customer contacts in Hong Kong was the resident director of the China Ocean Shipping Corporation or COSCO. COSCO was the government-owned, deep-sea merchant fleet of China (PRC). They ran literally hundreds of ships all over the world. The fleet was so big, it was divided into regions of China for management purposes and the southern fleet was run from their Hong Kong offices.
During the Hong Kong radar demonstrations, we were invited by COSCO to give the same demonstration to their technical and operational staff in Canton – or Guangzhou, as it was now called. We were asked to stay for three days as they wanted the electronics technical people from the local institute to attend as well and the institute kindly offered to host the presentations in their main hall. This was a big opportunity, so we asked Tony Tuthill, our R & D director, to come out and join Louis and I. COSCO arranged our visas locally and we set off for Canton. Immediately after the Hong Kong demonstrations in the Furama Hotel, I had packed up the radar in its crate and we nervously left it in Swires’ hands and they promised to ship it to Guangzhou. The best way to get the radar to Canton was to put in on a junk and sail it up the Pearl River – and that was what they did. They took it by lorry to the junk harbour at Causeway Bay for a Canton-bound junk that afternoon. The three of us, plus Ted and Mr Leung, were to fly up to Guangzhou on the following Tuesday. In spite of his past performance, we were forced to take Mr Leung as he spoke Cantonese and we definitely knew we would need an interpreter.
By the time we came out of the Guangzhou airport building, it was dark, but we were met outside by a senior representative of COSCO and by senior members of the Guangzhou Electronics Institute. Guangzhou is an ancient city – having been here since 200 BC – but outside the minibus window, all was darkness. There were few lights and those that we could see were weak and dim. The city is one of the five or six major cities of China and has a long history as a trading port. The Japanese took the city in 1939 and the Portuguese and British both have long associations with the city and the Pearl River.
We arrived at the hotel, which we were pleased to see was modern and looked pleasant enough. The rooms were functional, if not luxurious, and it was clean. The next morning we went down and met Mr Leung in the lobby as arranged. According to the information in the room, there was both a Chinese and a Western breakfast room. Our Mr Leung ignored this and said we must all eat in the Chinese room. Louis, Tony and I declined firmly as the Chinese breakfast seemed to consist mainly of fish congee. That was certainly not what I needed to set myself up for the day. We found the ‘Western’ breakfast room, where there were boiled eggs, toast, coffee and fruit.
On the way to the institute, it was clear that Guangzhou was not a rich place. A pall of black smoke seemed to hang over the town; the trees looked tired, dusty and grey, their leaves dull. The tarmac roads merged into the surrounding land through vast areas of grey mud and beaten earth. We saw few houses and those we did see seemed to be basic to say the least. None of the buildings we passed seemed to be more that two storeys high. There were very few cars, but a lot of bikes and the odd
agricultural motor tricycle pulling trailers of various sorts.
We finally pulled up at the institute. It was a magnificent building with tall columns and a high stone portico. A flight of steps led up from the mud and scrubby forecourt to the front doors. Inside, we were taken into a large hall; half of it set out as a lecture room the other clear of furniture other than two trestle tables. We were all amazed to find that the wooden packing case containing the radar and the other boxes had arrived and had been placed in the hall. Mr Leung had obviously got something right. I left Louis and Tony chatting to the Chinese while I set to work unpacking the radar and setting it up. We had been expecting about a dozen people at each of two or three separate formal sessions, but the hall in which we were to give the talks had chairs and desks for fifty or sixty people. I set up the equipment, checked it out and soon we were ready to roll.
An hour later, about fifty serious-faced Chinese in their ‘Chairman Mao’ suits filed in. They all carried notepads or briefcases. They all solemnly came up to us and shook our hands, then sat down. The room was soon full and silent as they all waited to see what these foreign people had to say. During the introductions by their director, it became clear that this group of fifty were with us for the whole three-day period. This called for a strategy review, so we called a break while we decided how best to fill the time over the three days with one audience, rather than three days with three or four different audiences.
Tony gave a technical paper on the history of the development of the ARPA radar and the computer tracking system and then I gave a product talk, showed the film we had made for the radar and then demonstrated the radar itself to groups of about six or eight at a time. They all pushed and shoved to get themselves clustered and crowded round the radar and I found that the only way I could demonstrate anything was to stand behind the radar and work it upside down. I was assaulted by a variety of Chinese breath scents that made me wonder what they had had for lunch. I decided I did not really want to know.
We finished at around 6 o’clock. The translation and questions more than trebled the time it would normally take to go through the presentation, so we had not got very far. The senior Chinese delegate made a short speech in good English. He was a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with a shock of white hair who clearly had the respect of the audience:
“Normally we would like to entertain our honoured guests on arrival to a special banquet as gesture of welcome to China. However, we are so sorry that due to lateness of your aeroplane arrival, we could not do that yesterday. Also, so sorry, today is the late Madam Sun Yat Sen’s birthday and banquet room is not open. So, tomorrow we would very much like for you to join us for special lunch.”
Dr Sun Yat Sen was a revolutionary nationalist who brought about the end of the reign of the Chinese emperors and set up the Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT. In 1912, the Republic of China was set up with the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and Sun Yat Sen became the first president. He and his wife came from a small village near Guangzhou, so their anniversaries are still honoured in the area. Sun Yat Sen died in 1926 but is remembered by a mausoleum in Nanjing, the former capital of China.
The Banquets
The next day after the morning session, the Chinese announced that there was no more sessions that day due to the lunch and we were now to proceed to the minibus. We were taken to an old Chinese building that Ted told us was a recognised formal Chinese Banquet restaurant. It was built of wood which was all richly decorated and painted in bright green and reds, and set amid lush tropical gardens.
Chinese Banquets are very special. They are only held to mark special events like New Year, weddings etc, so for us to have one in our honour was a good sign. Whereas at normal Chinese meals all the dishes arrive at once, at a banquet each dish is served separately in a succession of dishes. Banquets consist of ‘special’ dishes; no sweet and sour pork here. Each dish is made up of individual items like meat or fish. Rice is the very last dish served. Also wine, beer or liquor can be served and often in generous portions as glasses are refilled at each course, and there can be about twelve courses.
As we arrived at the banquet rooms, it seemed that the whole of COSCO and the Institute was there standing round the tables and chattering and laughing away to each other. There were six big tables, each seating about ten or twelve people. The Chinese all thought this was great. A formal banquet like this was the equivalent of a business dinner at The Ritz for us at home, so they were in good spirits. We three were split up and each seated at a different table. The meal began and the courses started arriving. At the same time beer was provided, then, what I thought were water glasses were half filled with neat brandy. So the meal progressed, with course after course and glass refill after glass refill. Luckily I could just about handle chopsticks, but had some way to go to match the speed of our hosts. I cannot even begin to remember what we ate as for most of the courses I had no idea what we were eating.
I know we started with cold meats, then there was soup, then meat and a shellfish course – abalone, I think – then pork. There was something whitish brown and slimy. It looked revolting, but the Chinese all seemed to think it was fantastic and lifted it to their mouths and let it slide down their throats. I could hardly get it to my mouth and when I did, there was no way I could get it down my throat without my stomach trying to come and meet it. Then there were other meats, small crunchy brown things that no one could find an English name for; as well as a few courses that I was rather glad I did not know what they were. Some I managed to eat, others I gave up on. I kept drinking the beer and sipping the brandy, but the brandy in larger sips as the meal went on. During the meal I was watching Louis, who seemed to be struggling as much as I was with all the dishes, but we both made it. Tony was sitting with his back towards me so I could not see how he was doing. Finally, a rice dish arrived and fruit appeared. The end was in sight, surely? After twelve courses, I was not sure whether my legs would work. Certainly my bottom was dead.
It seemed to be the end. Our tall director friend rose a little unsteadily to his feet and made a short speech. Then, there were a series of toasts and many “Gam Beis”. We all got up, goodbyes and thank yous were exchanged, and we boarded the minibus to go back to the hotel. It was getting on for 4 o’clock when we got off the bus and we looked forward to being able to relax for the rest of the day. Certainly no need for any dinner tonight!
As we staggered into the lobby, Mr Leung called us together and made an announcement: “We must all be back in the lobby at 5.30pm for our banquet.”
Louis glared at him. “What do you mean, ‘Our Banquet?’”
Mr Leung explained, “Yesterday, due to Madame Sun’s birthday, the welcome banquet not possible. Tomorrow night you go back to Hong Kong, so no banquet possible. Therefore, we must give return banquet tonight. It is arranged. It is at 5.30.”
“Why did you not tell us this before,” demanded Louis, “and why can we not do it at lunch time tomorrow?”
“Not possible,” said Mr Leung. Louis now was experiencing Mr Leung for himself and was not liking it one bit. Mr Leung continued, “It is arranged. You must be here in one hour and a half.” With that, he turned and walked away. We stared at each other. Not only were we angry at the bad planning and total lack of notice, but also wondering how on earth could we eat another twelve-course banquet? Mr Leung had obviously arranged this days before without consulting us at all. We went to our rooms for an hour, then groaning inwardly, we set off for Round 2. Back we went to the same restaurant and there were the same crowd all standing around waiting and still babbling away merrily to each other. I settled in for an ordeal of how to look as though I am eating lots but actually eating nothing.
As with the lunchtime banquet, Louis, as our senior man, was sitting next to the director of the Institute. He was a jolly, talkative man with a loud laugh who kept Louis engaged in conversation. As the courses progressed, I kept looking at Louis. He seemed to be suffering. His face was
not a happy one and his movements were definitely slowing. Louis was normally the soberest of men with a bearing of a naval officer, and the manners and behaviour of a diplomat. I could see that the host was piling more food on Louis’s plate as soon as he had finished what was there. I was having a similar problem, but the guy next to me was fairly quiet and thankfully did not force food onto my plate. I also noticed, though, that the waiters kept the beer and brandy glasses well filled so we had plenty of drink with which to try and wash it down. I began to lose count of the courses and tried to ask my neighbour how many more there were, but was met with big smiles of stained teeth encrusted with meat or fish. The next time I looked over at Louis, he was smiling. What is happening? A course or two later when I looked, he was laughing. Now that was odd in itself, for although he was a really good guy, wild laughter was not Louis’s forte. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the rice and fruit courses arrived and we had finished. We staggered out. Tony and I made a bee-line for Louis. As we got to him, it was clear what had happened. He was drunk. We got him on the minibus and asked what had happened.