ACT DRUNK: A tactic known to most high school girls, this one is obvious.
As Coach Yan and I played for hours, night after night, my lubricated brain started to see Playing Hands as a grand metaphor for China. Between rounds, I pulled together pieces of the argument in my head.
Earlier European and American writers called the Chinese fatalistic and passive. This was a mistake. They aren’t passive; they are introverts. They study the patterns and wait for their opportunity. But if opportunities were continually deferred, they exploded. This was the reason why luan (chaos) was the most feared word in the language.
Consider the first thing that China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, did after he’d conquered and unified the various competing kingdoms in 221 B.C.: He built the Great Wall, the only introverted Wonder of the Ancient World. The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death (the Pyramids), the Greeks with exploration and trade (the Lighthouse of Alexandria), the Mesopotamians with fertility and beauty (the Hanging Gardens of Babylon), but the Chinese just wanted to tend their own garden without any interference from the barbarians on the northern steppe. This was the society, after all, that invented gunpowder but preferred to use it for fireworks. This was the society that arguably discovered the New World seventy-one years before Columbus (according to Gavin Menzies’s book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America) but didn’t think it was worth the trouble to colonize. The introversion is even enshrined in the country’s name: Zhong guo literally means “center country,” or, if you are more poetically inclined, “Middle Kingdom.” That is why laowai like me were literally “outsiders.”
While China had some extroverts, like Deqing, introversion was the masculine ideal. You could guess who was the most powerful man at any banquet in China by seeing who talked the least. Unlike in America, where having power means everyone else has to politely listen to your blather, in China power means those lower on the totem pole play the clown while you observe the patterns.
One day when Doc was working on my leg, he gave me some advice. “Every man has two faces. The outer face he presents to the world, and the inner face he saves only for himself and his family. Your feelings are too obvious. You must hide them.”
As we played the Hand Game, I came to the conclusion that the Chinese were not, as early Western observers had pejoratively termed them, “inscrutable.” In truth, they were poker-faced. The first European visitors had simply not been interested enough or spent enough time to learn the tells. The forced smile, the wandering gaze, the subtle shifts in vocal tone, these were all calculated gestures to bluff or sucker or misdirect an opponent in order to achieve a particular goal. The contemporary American obsession with “keeping it real,” “being true to yourself,” “conveying a sense of who you are” was not only alien to them—it was anathema. (The Chinese don’t tend to write confessional memoirs.) The reason why Chinese interaction so often seemed stilted to me was because both parties were trying to get one over on the other. The instant group topic of conversation after one person departed was not whether he had lied, but why. What was his angle?
In this sense, the Hand Game was more than a metaphor; it was a training regime for the skills a Chinese man needed to succeed.
After a month of nightly training in the Hand Game, Coach Yan waved me over to a table where Deputy Leader Jiao was entertaining five VIPs—one politician (brown suit, bad shoes), two army officers (green uniforms), and two police officers (oversize sunglasses). The reason for my invitation was that they were discussing America. A tour promoter had booked the Wushu Center monks to perform in America, and these were the men the Wushu Center was going to pad the tour list with to curry political favor.
Coach Yan had been crushing them in the Hand Game, so the VIPs had reached that point in all-male inebriation rituals where the conversation turns to sex, or in the case of corrupt, ugly old men, prostitutes.
“What do American women charge to wan yi wan?” one of the police officers asked me. “Party.”
When I said I didn’t know, Deputy Leader Jiao ribbed me, “Oh come on, I know you love to party, young guy like you. I see the way you look at these waitresses.”
The rest of the table joined in.
“Okay, okay, okay, I don’t know myself,” I said finally. “But I’ve heard it is around $300.”
This set off a round of exclamations of surprise and concern.
“So much!”
“How can it cost so much money?”
“Are they all that expensive?”
And then Deputy Leader Jiao said something I’ll never forget, because it perfectly encapsulated the difference between our two countries: “Of course, it’s that much. America is so wealthy the poor people are fatter than the rich.”
“Deputy Leader Jiao,” Coach Yan interjected with an expression of complete innocence, “you should play hands with Bao Mosi.”
He said no, until the pleas of the VIPs changed his mind. This was entertainment of the first order.
“Bring out the snake alcohol,” the VIPs shouted.
A waitress was sent to fetch a large glass jar filled with four poisonous snakes fermenting in baijiu. The Chinese considered snake alcohol medicinal. Doc had several jars in his home under the staircase. But the VIPs wanted it just to fuck with me, because it tasted much worse than regular baijiu, if such a thing was possible, and looking at the jar sent a chill up your spine.
As the waitress poured ten shots of baijiu into thimble-size shot glasses, I tapped the table with my index and middle finger three times. It was the modern Chinese custom for saying thanks. The reason, according to my favorite version of the story, was that in ancient times you had to stand when a waitress served you. But when a long-ago emperor’s legs had been severely wounded in battle, his underlings started tapping the table with two fingers as a symbol for standing because they didn’t want to remind him of his injury.
After I tapped the table, the politician nudged the PLA officer. “Ta dong shi,” he said. “He understands things.”
It was also the custom that the first four shots in the Hand Game are toasts. Deputy Leader Jiao and I clinked our thimbles. I made certain that the lip of my thimble touched the bottom of his. It was a polite custom that signified, “You’re higher, and I’m lower.”
The VIPs shouted their approval. “Hey, the laowai is a China expert!”
I choked down the shot and chased it with a swig of Coke, which I had discovered was the only way I could drink baijiu without gagging.
As we raised the second shot, the PLA officer tested me, “Why do we toast twice?”
“Because a man cannot walk on one leg.” I said, repeating the traditional Chinese saying.
More cheers, as the four shot glasses were refilled.
As the game began, Deputy Leader Jiao took the early lead, but I figured out his pattern toward the end—he tended to follow five fingers with one. I evened the score at 5-5.
Deputy Leader Jiao was upset and wanted to play another ten shots. I tried to beg off, saying it was a little early in the day for me. The only thing worse than waking up in the morning with a baijiu hangover is waking up in the evening with a baijiu hangover and knowing you’re going to be up all night alone battling suicidal thoughts.
Deputy Leader Jiao was having none of it.
“See, I told you,” he said to the rest of the table. “Americans can’t outdrink the Chinese.”
The Chinese had a firm belief that they possessed the highest tolerance of any people on earth, a rather bold claim considering the competition (my money is on the Russians). While normally I find this very male tendency to try to turn a vice into a virtue charming, it annoyed me that Deputy Leader Jiao was trying to egg me into playing him again. And even more that he was going to succeed.
“I’m Irish-American,” I said as I poured the ten shots.
I crushed him, 8-2. To rub it in, I drank his last two shots, a courtesy usually performed for an opponent who has had too much to drin
k. In this case, I was patronizing him.
Deputy Leader Jiao was furious. Watching Coach Yan try to stifle a smile, it hit me that he had been planning this little revenge since he had started training me in the Hand Game. He was Deputy Leader Jiao’s little martial arts brother and owed his position at the Wushu Center to him, so there had no doubt been multiple slights over the years. To him, I was simply an arrow in his quiver.
6
CRAZY NEGOTIATIONS
As my skills at the Hand Game grew, I also found myself improving in the most important survival skill in China: negotiating. Almost everything in China was subject to a negotiation because the Chinese believe all situations are contextual. The price depended on who you were. There was the Chinese friend price (deep guanxi), the Chinese friend-of-friend price (shallow guanxi), the Chinese stranger price (no guanxi), the smart laowai price (he knew what the Chinese price was), and the sucker laowai price (usually 100 to 200 percent higher than the smart laowai price). Taking their cues from the government, which had instituted different prices for Chinese and foreigners at tourist attractions, hotels, and friendship stores, the local merchants felt no unease in gouging a laowai like me.
It was part Marxian “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and part postcolonial revenge. The Chinese expected the white man to pay more for his burden because the British, the Pablo Escobar of imperialists, had forced them to buy opium from India in 1850 and had stolen Hong Kong. Even the most uneducated merchant had the most obscure details of the Opium War at his fingertips if I asked to pay the Chinese price. Merchants would actually get offended at the suggestion: “But, but, but…you’re a laowai!”
Having come from a fixed-price culture (a late nineteenth-century American invention), I spent months being gouged so frequently I felt like a pincushion until, finally, I had my first successful negotiation. Being a serious Cokehead, my biggest daily expense was to get my sugar, caffeine, and carbonation fix. Every couple days I’d go to Grandfather, who had sold me my first can at Shaolin, and drag a half-case back to my room. My addiction was such that I had singlehandedly created a Coke market in the village. As the other merchants, who sat in stalls right next to each other with almost identical merchandise, watched me walk by day after day they started stocking up on Coke.
By the time I left Shaolin, the merchants had converted almost all of Shaolin’s other students from Jianlibao to Coke—making me a bona fide cultural imperialist, an army of one. But in those early months, I was the only buyer, and there were dozens of desperate sellers. I liked Grandfather, but he was charging me 4RMB a can, and with other suppliers to choose from I had the leverage. For days I’d stroll slowly in front of these other merchants, swinging the two bags of cans I’d just bought tantalizingly, waiting for one of them to break the Coke cartel. It was a social taboo to undercut the prices of your neighboring merchants.
Finally one day it was too much for one of the women. She called out, “You see, I have your American drink now. You can buy from me.”
This elicited a hiss from the other sellers. It was the moment for a reverse auction.
“Grandfather is charging 4RMB,” I told her. “Will you sell to me for 3.5RMB?”
“Yes.”
I turned to the merchant to her right. “She says 3.5RMB. What will you sell it to me for?”
“3.2RMB?”
Stepping back and addressing them all I said, “Who will sell at 3RMB?”
Four stalls down I had a willing seller. From that point it was tougher, but I eventually found a seller at 2.7RMB, the floor for a smart laowai.
From that day on, Grandfather would shake his head and call me “China expert” whenever I walked by. And he never forgave me.
My other major expense was the $1,300 a month I was paying the Wushu Center for room, board, and tuition. It took four months before I learned I was the sucker laowai. A German karate instructor had visited the Wushu Center for two weeks of training. As he was leaving I asked as nonchalantly as possible what he had paid the Wushu Center. I’d grown suspicious. For two weeks he paid $225, which meant that $550 per month was the smart laowai rate. Leader Liu and Deputy Leader Jiao had been away when the German had arrived, so he’d had the luck to negotiate the price with Vice Deputy Leader Me, the number three man and the one honest broker of the bunch.
It is one thing to overpay a poor peasant merchant for a can of Coke—it is almost like charity. But when I discovered I was being ripped off by members of the Chinese Communist Party, something in me snapped. It might not have been so bad if I hadn’t been feeling so intensely guilty about being just another overprivileged Gen-X twit spending daddy’s hard-earned money trying to find himself in some exotic locale. There is nothing as sharp as the shards of hate that have first been ground on the whetstone of one’s own soul. These turtle eggs had been stealing from my family and had made me their unwitting accomplice, or so I told myself over the next two weeks as I stirred the poison in my heart and waited for my monthly visit from Comrade Fish to collect my fee.
When he finally came to my room that day, instead of paying him right away as I usually did, I sat him down and poured him a glass of tea, which is what the Chinese do right before they reopen negotiations.
“Do you have the money?” he asked nervously.
“I have $550 for you.” I said, sitting down.
“Then you can go to the bank in Zheng Zhou to get the rest of the money tomorrow, right?”
The only way to get American cash was to go to the Bank of China in Zheng Zhou. On the second floor, they had a machine connected to the American Express office in Beijing. After an average of four hours of fiddling with the machine, taking tea breaks, and filling out multiple forms, they would dole out thirteen U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills. It was like spending an afternoon at the DMV every month.
“I have the money,” I said. “But I’m only going to pay the Wushu Center $550 per month from now on. That is what the correct price is, right?”
Comrade Fish put down his teacup. “But you agreed to pay $1,300.”
“Yes. But the German only had to pay the equivalent of $550 per month. And he only stayed for two weeks. I am staying for a year. Besides, my guanxi is much deeper than his. It’s not fair.”
“But you agreed to $1,300 a month.”
This set the pattern for the negotiation. I was using the Chinese value system: price depended on guanxi, and agreements are frequently renegotiated even after a deal has been struck. And he was using what he perceived to be the Western value of keeping your word, honoring a verbal contract.
This went on for an hour. He tried all the possible emotional combinations: friendly cajoling, abject pleading, angry threats. He referenced obscure “regulations”—a favorite tactic of Chinese bureaucrats. I remained monotone. It wasn’t fair, because my guanxi was deeper. I wasn’t going to pay more than $550, I insisted, leaving unstated: And what are you going to do about it?
He couldn’t do anything about it. He and I both knew he didn’t have the power to renegotiate the fee. He grew increasingly agitated as it became obvious he was fated to be the messenger of bad news to Leader Liu.
“Then you will have to leave,” he said angrily as he walked out of the room.
This was the calculated risk. I had nowhere else to go. (Taguo still couldn’t accept foreign students.) But I assumed his threat was a bluff. The Chinese pride themselves on being good hosts, which they are, and they find it shameful to kick a guest out. I was also counting on the leaders’ greed. Even at $550 a month, I was bringing in steady revenue to cover operational costs of the hotel and restaurant and support the expense of the new sanda team. Many nights and many meals I was the Wushu Center’s only paying customer. And the monks didn’t get a bonus for teaching me. So my tuition fee was pure profit for the party leaders.
Word that the foreigner had refused to pay spread quickly at the center, probably because Leader Liu screamed at Comrade Fish so lou
dly that everyone in the hallway outside his office could hear. Leader Liu also called in Vice Deputy Leader Me to chew him out as well. In Communist China, honesty was not the best policy. Leader Me’s punishment was to join Comrade Fish in a tag-team negotiation to persuade me to pay the $1,300.
Deputy Leader Me and Comrade Fish arrived at the same time the next day. Their approach was to play the victim card. Didn’t I understand that the Wushu Center in particular and China in general was very poor in comparison to a wealthy country like America? Didn’t I think it was my duty to help out my new friends and teachers?
I replied that Leader Liu did not seem so poor to me with his Toyota Santana and chauffeur. But I’d be happy to pay my teachers the original amount of tuition money if I were allowed to pay them directly instead of the Wushu Center.
It was hard to tell, but I think Leader Me smiled slightly when I finished.
Comrade Fish did not. He knew he was in a more vulnerable position in the hierarchy and would receive the bulk of Leader Liu’s wrath.
“That is unacceptable,” Comrade Fish said. “You must pay the money now!”
“Okay, I’ll give you $550.”
“Unacceptable. You will pay $1,300.”
“No.”
And then we repeated the scene, Comrade Fish playing the bad cop, Vice Deputy Leader Me the good, and me the belligerent criminal. After an hour, they finally left. That was the last I saw of Leader Me on the subject, but not Comrade Fish. He showed up every afternoon for the next six days with someone new. One day it was Deqing looking uncomfortable and unhappy to be there. Another day it was Coach Cheng. On the fourth day it was Coach Yan. Comrade Fish was trying to find the right combination of guanxi to unlock my wallet. If I didn’t care about helping the school, surely I didn’t want to disappoint my instructors, he’d say.
But I knew that the monks agreed with me. I had made certain to invite all of my teachers out to dinner after the first confrontation in order to pick their brains. They had all advised me to hold firm. Chinese negotiating strategy is based on patience and persistence. They will try to outlast the opponent, banging away at a single point until the other side gets frustrated and agrees to the unfavorable terms. This is particularly the case with laowai, who are more anxious to make deals than the Chinese. Every foreign investor in China has experienced the first-night banquet where they are cajoled into drinking as much as possible, but few understand its underlying purpose: Nothing increases the desire to cut a quick deal so you can return home like a vicious baijiu hangover. But I wasn’t going anywhere, so I had the longer time horizon. They’d need my money before I’d need to leave.
American Shaolin Page 19