FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  She looked me in the eye. ‘You’re a greenhorn and have lots to learn, Simon. Singapore can be a dangerous place for amateurs.’ Whereupon she whistled up a passing taxi and worked her huge body into the back seat to arrive finally with a thud that rocked the small yellow and white Ambassador cab so that its springs squeaked in protest.

  Crimson-faced from the effort, she learned out the window. ‘When next we meet you may call me Elma and it will be your turn to pay for tiffin.’ Then, quite unexpectedly, she boomed, ‘Oh, and congratulations on your work with the Texas Tiger campaign. Regrettably, it’s first rate. I should know – we have the Shell account!’

  Then, turning to the driver, she commanded, ‘Onwards, my good man!’ The small engine revved furiously then, with a groan of protest, the taxi pulled slowly away from the curb. I watched as it turned into the busy Orchard Road traffic.

  I could have hugged myself. Apart from Mercy B. Lord, Miss Elma Kelly was the first piece of real luck that had happened since my coming to Singapore. I had somebody on my side to show me how to take on the two older Wing brothers. This enormous, charismatic, switched-on, extremely kind, larger-than-life woman was offering me her knowledge, experience and good mind, as well as her very broad shoulders to lean on.

  I checked the time as the taxi pulled away. It was precisely five minutes past one on Armistice Day, that is the 11th of November 1967. I did the mathematics in my head: five minutes past one, that’s sixty-five minutes past noon, 6 + 5 = 11, that’s two people meeting. Miss Elma Kelly and me. Furthermore, we’d met at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour when she’d stood me to attention. My obsession with the times and dates when important things happened in my life was working. I grinned to myself. And I had the temerity to think the Chinese were whacko!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DESPITE THE FACT THAT I still lacked a creative department with the necessary skills to compete successfully, we’d achieved a fair bit. I was essentially an art director, and although I liked words, my skills were primarily visual. I had never thought of myself as a copywriter, but this was Asia and you simply pitched in where necessary, whether the job involved words or pictures. We now had half a dozen big American international accounts as well as Texas Tiger, and I was buzzing around like a blue-arse fly, barely able to cope.

  I’d managed to hire a young Chinese calligrapher who showed some promise as a copywriter. He was brought in to replace Zi Gee Ha, the ancient calligrapher who had worked with the Wing brothers since the inception of their agency and had long since lost any zest for the business of selling – if, in fact, he’d possessed any in the first place. Already in his eighties, he spent most of the day with his head on his arms, asleep at his desk. He was finally permitted to retire after over forty years’ service, and while Sidney was vehement he receive no pension, Dansford got New York to approve a pathetically small sum of money that allowed him to buy the rented house in an outlying kampong where he lived with his daughter and grandchildren.

  The new copywriter, William Wong, was a university graduate recommended by the newly appointed Professor Kwan, his appointment having nothing whatsoever to do with our research program. He came from a good family (guanxi) and, surprisingly, spoke Hokkien and Cantonese as well as Malay, Singlish and of course English. He also produced beautiful Chinese characters.

  He was a cheeky, fast-talking, gum-chewing, 22-year-old hepcat with all the latest Stateside (his word) jargon, who loved chocolate, wore his hair as long as he could and was desperately trying to grow Elvis sideburns on his perfectly smooth face. He was also wonderfully enthusiastic and surprisingly ingenuous for someone who had taken his bachelor’s degree in sociology. Nevertheless, he believed himself to be ‘switched on’ and ‘with it, man’, which kept the usually timid production staff amused.

  We dubbed him ‘Willy Wonka’, after the character in the children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, which had recently come out in Singapore, a sobriquet he loved and even used when answering the phone. If you called him Willy or Willy Wong he’d pull you up. ‘It’s Willy Wonka, please. Every male has a willy and there are more Wongs in China than there are Wrights in England.’ It was a favourite joke.

  He proved to be a good sounding board, and his translations were a lot closer to what I was trying to say than those of nodding, smiling, toothless old Zi Gee Ha, who, I felt sure, hadn’t the foggiest notion what I was talking about, despite my rapidly improving Cantonese. With Mercy B. Lord’s coaching, I was almost completely fluent in street-level Cantonese, spoke Singlish passably well and had a few useful words of Malay. There may well be some truth to the old adage that the best way to learn a new language is in bed with a beautiful woman. It was certainly true of my experience with Mercy B. Lord, who had a touch of Chairman Meow about her. She wouldn’t go to bed with me unless I had mastered twenty new words in any of the local languages she’d chosen and was able to use them in a sensible sentence. I can guarantee that the old carrot and stick works. I carried either a Malay, Cantonese or Singlish dictionary around with me every day, allocating two days for each, and grabbed a new word whenever I had a chance, mostly in taxis where I could practise with the driver. Maybe it isn’t a very romantic notion but, I can assure you, it proved highly effective. Eventually, I could make love in a mixture of four languages, sometimes – mid-thrust – reducing Mercy B. Lord to tears of laughter.

  And then Sidney Wing brought us our first Japanese account, gained on the golf course while playing with Hercules Sun, the Singapore agent for Citizen Watches. Sun informed Sidney that the Japanese wanted to use television to sell their product and, despite the fact that no advertising agency in Singapore or Hong Kong had ever filmed, cut or edited a local television commercial, Sidney readily agreed. Hercules Sun demanded a price and a deadline for a sixty-second commercial on the spot, and Sidney, undaunted by his total ignorance of the costs involved, simply quoted the first figure that came into his head and the first date, working on the principle that you first secured the client and then worked out a way to keep him.

  Back at the agency he was ebullient. He called me to his office, indicating the chrome-and-yellow-leather chair. ‘Well, Mr Big Shot Creative Director, I have a job for you,’ he announced.

  As I’d never had a layout accepted for any of Sidney’s Chinese accounts, I’d long since given up trying to impress him. ‘Sidney, we’re pretty busy at the moment. I’m not sure I have the time to do another unsuccessful layout for one of your Chinese accounts.’

  ‘Not Chinese, Simon,’ he said beaming.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Japanese.’

  ‘You’re kidding! Japanese? Who? What?’

  ‘Citizen Watches,’ he replied, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  ‘Jesus! How? That’s big-time. And without a pitch?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied smugly. ‘There’s more. I’ve agreed to make them a TV commercial.’

  ‘And you want a script for the station announcer to read?’

  ‘No. Hercules Sun wants a proper commercial like the American ones, sixty seconds.’

  ‘What?’ I began to laugh. ‘You’re joking, of course.’

  ‘No. Budget and deadline all settled.’

  My heart sank. ‘Sidney, we’ve … Nobody’s made a TV commercial in Singapore. How can you agree to a budget or deadline? That’s ridiculous!’

  Sidney shrugged. ‘It was necessary.’ He fixed me with a stern look. ‘If you don’t deliver, I’ll have to assume that you are deliberately undermining my authority.’

  ‘Oh? Tell me the budget,’ I replied, feeling the first small hint of pique.

  ‘2000 dollars.’

  ‘That’s US dollars, of course.’

  ‘No, local, Singapore dollars.’

  ‘Sidney, that’s bloody ridiculous! I couldn’t hire a 35-millimetre movie camera and operator for that! That is, if there was one for hire in the first place.’

  Sidney let rip with one of his St V
itus giggles. ‘Your problem, Simon – I’ve given my word.’

  ‘And I’m stuck with it?’ I could feel myself growing angry.

  Another giggle. ‘You’ve got two weeks.’

  ‘Sorry, Sidney. I can’t do it. Not for the money. Even if it was sufficient – and it’s at least ten or fifteen grand short of the barest minimum – I couldn’t meet the deadline. You’ll have to go with a live spot by the station announcer.’

  ‘Johnny has already bought the time, sixteen sixty-second spots on STV starting two weeks from today.’

  ‘In that case you’ll have to tell him to cancel it.’

  ‘No!’ He thumped the desk with his fist. ‘You will do as I say!’

  ‘Please don’t do that, mate. I’m not one of your kowtowing lackeys.’ I was getting pretty pissed off but was still in control, just. ‘Sidney, you can’t get blood out of a stone. It’s too little money. It’s too little time. We have no camera, no production facilities. It takes a week just to process film in Hong Kong. I know, because I looked into it for Texas Tiger, but the logistics and lack of facilities made it impossible. Two grand in Singapore dollars probably won’t even buy a late-afternoon station presenter to flog the watch on camera.’

  Sidney banged his fist on the desk again. ‘No! No live on camera! A regular TV commercial like Pepsi-Cola from America!’

  ‘Sidney, that’s absurd. An American commercial would cost at least 40 000 Singapore dollars.’

  ‘You fuck up on this and we get no more Japanese accounts. I assure you, Hercules Sun will see to that! And you may be sure I will let New York know who is responsible!’

  I sighed, my patience running out. ‘Sidney, there’s nothing to fuck up. We can’t do it.’

  ‘Simon, you listen to me! I’m not going back to Hercules Sun.’

  ‘Why? You’ll lose face, is that it?’

  It was the wrong thing to say. He completely lost control and spat, ‘Don’t you fuck with me, Simon! You sabotage me on this and I’ll terminate your contract!’

  All the frustrations of the past months came flooding in. Sidney Wing threatening me was the last straw. I laughed sardonically. ‘You’ll terminate my contract? I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll personally roll it up and shove it up your scrawny arse!’ Shaking with anger, I rose to leave.

  Sidney jumped from his swivel chair, gripping the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. His entire body was consumed by rage as he roared, ‘Do as I say, Simon Koo, or I promise in the name of my ancestors that you’ll never see your girlfriend again!’

  A voice inside me said, That’s enough, Simon! Stop! Stop right now! But I couldn’t restrain myself. ‘Screw you, Sidney!’ Furious beyond belief, I walked to the door.

  I had almost reached it when he barked, ‘Stop!’

  I turned, still shaking.

  ‘Get on with it, no more money, no more time.’

  For years afterwards I told myself that was the moment when I should have packed my bags and left. But Sidney Wing had pressed exactly the right button. Mercy B. Lord meant too much to me; I wasn’t game enough to take him on, to call his bluff. Piss-weak, I suppose. She still disappeared every Thursday without explanation, and my frequent attempts to get her to come clean always ended in tears. The last time, she’d begged me tearfully, ‘Please, Simon, no more questions or you’ll lose me!’ Now I knew that the bastard was onto us (silly of me to think he wasn’t) and that he had some sort of power over her, enough to make good his threat to take her away from me. Sidney Wing was a bully, but not the type to lose his temper easily. He was imperious, secretive and sly by nature, more the slow-drip-of-acid type than the fire-and-brimstone type, the stab in the back rather than the punch in the face. He believed in keeping everyone disconcerted while he remained cool, aloof and superior.

  For instance, he used a lack of even the smallest courtesies to discomfit people: he never returned the morning greeting of a member of his staff and treated them all like dirt. He expected them to kowtow and, of course, to a man and a woman, they did, fearing for their jobs. His entire life had been conducted in this imperious manner until he sold to the gwai-lo, the Americans. Then Dansford and I, the drunk and the half-caste, both street dirt in his estimation, were appointed, and he deeply resented our familiarity and easygoing egalitarian attitudes. On more than one occasion he’d instructed us, via Ronnie, to ‘demand more respect’, and Ronnie had duly explained that treating staff as equals was ‘not the Chinese way’.

  For our part, we’d been careful not to invade his turf, to leave him with his Chinese clients and his ‘squeeze’ and get on with the American part of the business. Initially, I’d tried to improve the look of his Chinese clients’ advertising, until Dansford pointed out that hell would have to freeze over before one of my new and improved layouts would be accepted or even shown to Sidney’s clients. We’d also noted that his spontaneous St Vitus giggle occurred most often in our presence and, while he appeared not to notice it, I was convinced he realised it was a nervous affliction beyond his control.

  Now I’d had the temerity to challenge his hitherto unchallenged authority. He’d secured our first Japanese account. So what if the deal had been made Chinese-style, on the golf course, at the club or over the banquet table, in this case with an almost impossible promise. He’d nevertheless triumphed. His aim was to show us that he was an effective force in getting new business. I had now been given the task of cleaning up the mess. This was, after all, how he always conducted his life.

  Sidney must have known that terminating my contract was an idle threat. He’d have to go through New York and Dansford would certainly intervene. Besides, he’d been generous enough to let New York know that both Big Lather, a great success in the test market and about to be launched throughout Asia, as well as Texas Tiger, which had more than recovered the company’s lost Asian market share, were both essentially my initiatives. And New York knew Colgate-Palmolive, which stood to make tens of millions of dollars in a vast new market with Big Lather, would no doubt have demanded an explanation if their Mr Lather disappeared.

  Not that I would have been unduly concerned about being dismissed. Elma Kelly had begged me to join Cathay once my contract was up. Moreover, I had another project tucked into my back pocket. While Professor Kwan and the school of business had a good working research model ready to go, they hadn’t sold it yet, and it was time to do something about that. I was fed up to the back teeth with the Three Wing Circus and would have been glad of an opportunity to pack it in. It was only pride and my signature on a contract that held me. But when I’d calmed down sufficiently I realised that Sidney’s threat to remove Mercy B. Lord from my life, spoken in the sacred name of his ancestors, was real and not bombast. I was suddenly very scared, and not just for me but for Mercy B. Lord, who had nobody to protect her, no guanxi.

  I knew instinctively that Sidney would regret losing his temper and threatening me, if only because it would put me on the alert and turn dislike into loathing. Secret knowledge is power, and he’d blown it in a fit of temper. He’d used too big a stick to beat me over the head. It had been unnecessary. In the end, something would have been worked out. If it wasn’t and Hercules Sun was adamant, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. New York would recognise that I’d acted professionally. What had started as a storm in a teacup was now a force-ten gale.

  I left his office and stormed downstairs to the production department and into my office, but it was no sanctuary – the top half of the walls were glass and there was no door. I decided I had to get out, go home. The threat to remove Mercy B. Lord from my life was really worrying me. I needed to be alone to think. Colgate was bringing out a new toothpaste that claimed to harden tooth enamel and I needed to ‘Sinofy’ the American copy so that it could be translated into Mandarin. I threw the notes into my leather folder, telling myself I’d work at home but knowing I’d probably be too upset to do so.

  There was a sharp rap on the glass and I looked up to see Willy W
onka standing at my door and tapping the face of his watch with his forefinger. ‘You ready, Simon?’ he asked.

  ‘Not now, mate, please.’

  Willy Wonka looked surprised. ‘But we’re going to lunch, remember?’

  ‘Not today, mate. I can’t.’

  ‘But it’s all arranged, Simon,’ he said, clearly disappointed. Willy Wonka’s disappointed face was something to see. The Chinese are pretty good at hiding their emotions but he was an exception, wearing them like they were sergeants’ stripes on his sleeve. ‘My aunt Daisy’s restaurant, True Blue, remember? She’s cooked specially. Udang galah goreng sambal – lobster fried in spicy paste. I told her I was bringing my boss. She went to the markets early this morning to get fresh lobster.’

  Now I remembered. Willy Wonka had mentioned the name of the restaurant in passing and at the time I’d asked, surprised, ‘True Blue? An Australian restaurant?’

  ‘No,’ he’d replied. ‘Aunty Daisy is a Christian and she named it after St Francis of Assisi.’ When I looked blank, he explained that followers of St Francis wore blue, and that Aunty Daisy, who wasn’t his real aunty, had been the Wong family cook when he was growing up. After twenty years in their service, his family had rewarded her with the means to open her own Peranakan restaurant. He’d subsequently invited me to lunch and today was the day.

  ‘I’m not good company today, mate,’ I warned.

  ‘Think lobster, boss. Her spicy sauce is the best!’

  Unable to find a cab, we took separate rickshaws, a good thing because it allowed me time to calm down. I paid the rickshaw man double because, in the stinking heat of midsummer, it was a fair distance to the restaurant in an old shop-house in the Peranakan enclave of Katong.