FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Thank you for the lesson and the spirit in which it is given,’ I said, standing, silently pleased with the pun. ‘Lead on, McDuff.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s “Lay on, McDuff”,’ said Ronnie with a grin, landing the final verbal punch.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MY FIRST MEETING WITH Sidney and Johnny Wing was at a cocktail party to meet the staff at a modest hotel across the road from the agency, although neither was present when I arrived. Ronnie, I quickly learned, was a true enthusiast and it was simply impossible not to like him. He was a lovely bloke and the only Wing I grew to trust – that is, when he wasn’t conveying explicit messages from his oldest brother or making judgements on creative work. He was the director in charge of print production and, as a shareholder, was technically senior to me. This was, of course, a matter of face and I accepted that things had to appear to work that way, even though in practice, as the creative director appointed by New York, I called the creative shots.

  Sidney Wing was the ringmaster in the Three Wing Circus; middle brother, Johnny, was the animal trainer who acted as staff manager and media director; while Ronnie, for want of a better description, was the clown. Johnny Wing kept a very low profile and affected a permanent scowl and an irascible manner to ensure that he had as little contact as possible with anyone. I never really got to know what was going on in his head. Whatever it was, it had arrived there via a detour to Sidney’s desk. According to Ronnie, his middle brother never made a move without Sidney’s consent.

  Sidney Wing was, I was later to learn, ‘Mr Squeeze’. If Ronnie cared enormously about advertising, Sidney only had one motive and that was to make money any way he could. Samuel Oswald Wing existed to make Mr Squeeze rich and powerful, and I often wondered if it ever occurred to him that the company made a product called advertising.

  As soon as we arrived at the party, Ronnie busied himself by introducing me to the staff. Their obvious ambivalence and divided loyalties made it a mostly awkward experience. Was I to be their superior or did they still answer to the Wings, who were free to order, rebuke or fire them at a moment’s notice? Consequently, they laughed nervously at everything I said and nodded even when it was fairly obvious they had no idea what I was talking about.

  This was especially true of those from the production department who made the print advertisements: the Chinese language copywriter and layout man (there were no women), who had never for one moment thought of themselves as creative. For example, I attempted to describe the independence and integrity of a good creative department, but soon realised that it had never occurred to them that their point of view had any value. It was the wrong choice of subject, introduced at the wrong time and in the wrong manner. I was displaying Australian and American attitudes that were completely alien to them. I was to learn that these people had no independence and that integrity wasn’t a word in the lexicon of the Chinese office worker. They obeyed orders and did what it took to keep their jobs. It wasn’t that they licked arse, there simply wasn’t any other way to behave. What we might regard as sycophancy was simply normal behaviour. What we considered personal initiative they considered reckless.

  I began my time at Samuel Oswald Wing by asserting myself when I should have been tiptoeing through the proverbial tulips. It proved to be my first mistake in a disastrous evening, a bull-in-the-china-shop preface to perhaps the worst two hours in my professional career. I can’t imagine what they must have said to each other the following morning at work, but the consensus would probably have been that a mad foreigner had arrived in the agency and was about to cause chaos and threaten their jobs and their livelihoods.

  Most people fear change, but the Chinese have learned from bitter experience that anything that disturbs the status quo inevitably leads to further suffering. Persecution was a frequent visitor, while restitution seldom if ever knocked on the door. My arrival wasn’t an occasion for celebration. Their rice bowls were reasonably full and if they didn’t rock the sampan, their jobs were comparatively safe. The changes I talked about so enthusiastically would have filled them with dread. ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ was never more appropriate an axiom.

  And then, half an hour or so into the welcoming drinks, Ronnie tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Time to meet my brothers, Simon – a short meeting in Sidney’s office.’

  ‘Right.’ I excused myself and followed him out of the hotel and across the road. Singaporean buildings at the time were low-rise rococo Victorian or more austere Edwardian red brick, and the Samuel Oswald Wing building was typical of the latter. The foyer looked as though it had recently been renovated or, rather, tizzied-up. High-gloss maroon paint on the walls picked up every tiny fault in the plaster, and two chrome and black leather couches bracketed a glass coffee table on which rested a neatly folded copy of the Straits Times, which seemed more like a prop than something meant to be opened and read. In lieu of the usual bowl of flowers, a large and perfectly splendid aspidistra that would have done justice to a Noël Coward set rested on a stand in a blue and white porcelain bowl. With its carefully polished leaves it was quite the most handsome object in the foyer. The wall-to-wall carpet was chocolate brown and just beginning to wear near the base of the reception desk. Across the entire maroon wall behind reception, polished chrome letters almost a foot high announced:

  The letters were much too large for the proportions of the foyer, and Braggadocio, the name of the typeface, was fat, lazy and complacent. Its original Art Deco style was redolent of a different era and these days it was more commonly found on cheap chocolates or fake Cuban cigars. An advertising agency in a sense tells you who it is – modern, traditional, professional, young, established – by the typeface it chooses. Braggadocio sent all the wrong messages. It was the fat boy eating his lunch alone in a corner of the schoolyard and not the kid dancing around his mates with a soccer ball at his toes in the playground.

  On the left-hand wall as you entered the foyer were two truly bad oil paintings in identical ornate gilded frames: the first of Lee Kuan Yew, the second of President Lyndon B. Johnson with rather more hair than he really had. Sidney Wing was making his bilateral loyalties known to the world without any subtlety at all.

  In retrospect I can see that this first reaction to the agency sounds a bit precious. My advertising training had taught me that every object and product has a personality, and so first impressions are important; what you see is what you can expect. For instance, if you see a grossly fat man waddling towards you, you reach a whole set of conclusions that are quite different from those associated with a trim, upright man striding purposefully. I’d barely set foot in the agency and already I had a sinking feeling in my gut.

  I now realise I had jumped to a conclusion that was quite wrong and simply unfair. There were very few advertising agencies, in any meaningful sense of the term in Singapore at the time. Most were simply a couple of scruffy back rooms along dirty corridors in old buildings. Chinese-owned advertising agencies were seen simply as an opportunity to make a little easy money.

  For the most part a business, if British owned, wrote its own copy and sent it off to the printer for typesetting and layout. The resulting stereotype plate was then sent to the various newspapers for printing. Some of the larger organisations, such as Jardine Matheson, the great British shipping and trading house, and Robinsons, the department store, Singapore’s equivalent of Harrods and established in 1856, maintained their own advertising departments, with a manager to buy space and a layout artist with more versatility than talent, a jack-of-all-trades – or more rarely a jill – who could do a bit of everything.

  Significant British accounts were serviced by Cathay Advertising, owned by Elma Kelly, a legendary female figure who held most, if not all, of the big accounts for British industry and business in post-war Singapore and the rest of South-East Asia. She, or rather Cathay, together with recent entry Jackson Wain and, of course, Wing Brothers Advertising, were the only decent-sized agencies in
town.

  Then there were the mostly Chinese-owned ad agencies in narrow, rat-infested, garbage-choked lanes, up dank, dirty stairs in old buildings that smelled of bad toilets. These looked after the Chinese businesses, producing small print ads for the newspapers and magazines in languages other than English. Incidentally, I was to discover that plumbing was not high on the list of priorities for most businesses run by the Chinese and was, with few exceptions, one of the worst aspects of being in Singapore and South-East Asia. The stench of faecal matter and urine from toilets that were almost invariably blocked invaded most stairways – often, perniciously, entire floors. This fundamental public-health issue seemed to be the one most neglected. I was to learn that, among employers, staff welfare was of little or no significance.

  In advertising, Sidney Wing was to the Straits-Chinese what Elma Kelly was to the British. He’d attended the Raffles Institution, a posh private school for the sons and daughters of elite families, and inherited generations of good connections, or guanxi (pronounced guan-see), going back a hundred years or more to China, which allowed him to exert enormous influence. There is a Chinese proverb that covers obligation and the matter of associations: ‘When drinking water from a well, one should never forget who dug it.’ While this appears to refer to anyone who has been helpful, gratuitous help is rarely forthcoming from a stranger. The Chinese help each other not so much as a matter of goodwill or kindness but as an acknowledgement of mutual obligation in an association that can reach into both the past and the future. This means you are a part of their guanxi.

  Advertising wasn’t Sidney’s main game but simply a convenient front for investments and associations that were, it seemed, widespread and extended into most aspects of Singapore and Hong Kong’s financial worlds, both legitimate and dodgy.

  Of course, I was still oblivious to all this, charged as I was by my American masters with building an effective creative department. I was single-minded and naïve, but I should have paid more attention to the ad world around me. Mercy B. Lord helped me get an idea of the social environment in the two weeks of show and tell I spent with her, but I assumed that the advertising business was much the same in Singapore as in Australia. I’d forgotten one of the most important rules: know your competitors in the business.

  As it turned out, Samuel Oswald Wing was a veritable palace compared to most of the other ad agencies, and despite my high-handed criticism, the Wing brothers had every reason to be proud of it. They’d deliberately created it in the image of a Western advertising agency to appeal to potential international partners and had succeeded. To criticise this makeover in even the smallest way was unwarranted, except for criticism of the staff toilets, which were atrocious shit holes. Fortunately, the one reserved for management had been upgraded and was kept under lock and key. But of all the staff battles that lay ahead, and they were many, the one that caused me the most anxiety was the simple matter of preventing the staff toilets from breaking down. Sidney Wing, who owned the building, would simply refuse to replace the ancient and inadequate plumbing.

  But all this lay ahead, with the agency décor currently the least of my problems. Now, with Ronnie leading, I proceeded up a short flight of brown-carpeted stairs to Sidney’s office on the first floor.

  Ronnie ushered me into the ringmaster’s office. Well, what can I say? I had been expecting Chinese décor – stout, heavily carved, bandy-legged dragon chairs upholstered in yellow silk brocade surrounding a coffee table with similar dragon-clawed legs. Sidney Wing would work from a large and grotesque glass-topped ebony desk with, again, the same fat dragon legs. I’d even pictured a beautiful Chinese silk carpet on the polished teak floor. I’d imagined the entire wall behind Sidney Wing’s desk would be occupied by a gigantic aquarium containing five enormous golden carp, a vivid aquascape of living coral and gently waving weed set in motion by belches of bright bubbles. The fish would be grandly suspended, their tails and fins barely moving, their scales glinting gold and silver, the colours of wealth, their bulging jet-black eyes staring, each seeming to say, ‘No, you could not afford me.’

  This wonderfully detailed vision evaporated in the face of the unbridled bad taste of Sidney’s large office, which took its inspiration from the foyer, except that the foyer had been done on the cheap whereas this décor was ugliness done with an open and bulging purse.

  The furnishing was Scandinavian modern, the desk made of yellow polished pine with a smoked-glass top, behind which Sidney sat in a very large high-backed chrome and black leather swivel chair. In front of the desk were four bright-yellow leather and chrome chairs. The wall-to-wall carpet was brown, the wallpaper a deep green with gold fleur-de-lis, which picked up or exacerbated the yellow theme of the décor so that the room throbbed with chocolate and yellow, accentuated by the high-gloss yellow of the ceiling, venetian blinds, window frames, doorframe and skirting boards.

  During Mercy B. Lord’s familiarisation program, she had taken me to several backyard furniture-makers with a view to furnishing my flat before we finally settled on one. What struck me about them was the craftsmanship. While some of the furniture wasn’t to my taste, it was all beautifully made and you could commission just about anything you desired from cabinet-makers as good as any in the West. Why, I asked myself, would Sidney Wing pay through the nose for Scandinavian furniture when such beautiful stuff was so readily available locally? I later questioned Mercy B. Lord.

  ‘Ah, Simon, there is a saying among wealthy Chinese: “Local chilli – not very hot.” It means anything Chinese is by definition inferior, unless it is antique, rare and expensive. By contrast, expensive imported Scandinavian furniture is about as far from Chinese as it is possible to be, so it would be seen as the epitome of fashion and good taste.’

  Instead of the aquarium I had imagined on the wall behind Sidney Wing’s desk, there was a large painting of Sidney wearing an Arnold Palmer cap, white monogrammed open-necked golf shirt, red windcheater and black trousers with white golf shoes. His hand rested on the top of a leather golf bag with a full set of Dunlop clubs, the logo carefully painted on a putter. Over his left shoulder was the artist’s impression of a fairway with a sand bunker and putting green, the flag in the far distance. Sidney wore a heroic expression, his eyes narrowed as if he were looking into the distance. Like Ronnie, Sidney Wing was a tall, good-looking man and the artist, unmistakeably the one responsible for the paintings downstairs, hadn’t done him justice. The portrait was larger than life size and perhaps twice the size of the two downstairs, with an identical gilded frame. I could only think the paintings and the frames must have come as a job lot.

  Against the wall beside the window was a lighted display cabinet with a glass front, made from the same yellow wood as the desk, in which were displayed numerous silver golf trophies, most of them small silver eggcups with handles, of the kind you get for playing in a tournament rather than winning it.

  But then, in this citrus and chocolate Mixmaster mess, I found a pleasant surprise: a Victorian walnut cabinet with a softly lit interior stood against the far wall, filled with exquisite pieces of jade and antique porcelain. On top of this superb cabinet squatted a ‘happy Buddha’ wearing a smile of merry contentment like a happy bullfrog with a stomach full of dragonflies. He was carved from moss-green jade, his earlobes falling to his shoulders, his chubby legs tucked under his enormous belly.

  This cabinet and its contents, rather than the fish tank I had imagined, were the ancestors’ guarantee that not everything had gone to hell in a handbasket and that life and the pursuit of wealth was on course for the eldest Wing. The antique porcelain within the cabinet covered dynastic periods spanning 1400 years and was beyond anything I could value. I even saw one or two pieces that appeared to be from the Tang dynasty. I would learn that very few of Singapore’s wealthy Chinese could have afforded such a collection. To a knowledgeable observer, the contents of this cabinet would be sufficient to establish Sidney’s position in the big league. I was also not
to know at the time that he owned the golf course and that it was in Miami.

  Every Chinese, rich or poor, my mother included, believes with unshakeable conviction that their ancestors watch every move they make, most of the time with grim disapproval. The pacification of ancestors preoccupies the Chinese mind well beyond any religious zealotry we might exhibit in the West. No matter how switched-on or ‘Western’ a Chinese individual may be, he or she fears one thing more than any other: ancestors. The religion of the Peranakan – that is, the Straits-Chinese – is founded on the belief that gods and ancestor spirits exist and can influence people’s affairs. While a person’s fate is fixed, luck can be controlled with their help. Neglect your ancestors and you’re headed for big trouble.

  A further pleasant surprise awaited me in Sidney Wing’s office. I turned towards the source of a loud ticking and saw a large eighteenth-or nineteenth-century grandfather clock with a break-front panel revealing its swinging brass pendulum. Black Roman numerals etched and outlined in red enamel adorned the brass face, and directly within were two fat dragons, their noses meeting below the XII and the tips of their tails joining above the VI. It had probably been made in China from a British design and was a truly splendid and valuable timepiece. Whether this was also an ancestor pacifier I couldn’t say, although it would reassure them that Sidney had certainly provided amply for the next generation. I was later to learn that the clock’s face was in fact solid gold and the pendulum was gold-plated. Sidney Wing considered that if ever the pendulum stopped it would be extremely bad joss. He would wind the clock himself every morning, even though a single complete winding lasted for a week, and when he was overseas or away from the office he would phone each morning to ensure it had been wound.

  Sidney’s expensively furnished Westernised office was, I guessed, designed to give its owner appropriate face. Perhaps the clock, with its mixture of European design and Chinese manufacture, represented a link between China and the West, or perhaps it symbolised immortality. Ancestor-worship and the interpretation of signs and portents preoccupies most Chinese. I knew from my mother that the world’s most superstitious people are undoubtedly the Chinese, who see and read meanings, both good and bad, into almost everything – hence her preoccupation with Little Sparrow’s dream. These mysterious links between the future and dreams, events or symbols, which defy Western logic, enhance the inscrutable nature of oriental and, in particular, Chinese culture.