China Has Gone Mainstream, But US Business Still Gets Excited
July 3rd, 2009 by Kent KedlAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Those of you who are regular consumers of this Podcast and associated blog may have noticed that I have been unusually quiet as of late. In fact, I’ve gotten email messages asking if I was alright. Was I sick? Did I break my fingers or lose my voice, rendering me technologically mute? Did the global economic tsunami finally reach the heretofore protected shores of China and was I, too, scrambling for an employment life-ring of support in my middle age? Nope. Although things were slower in the first part of this year, business is going great – everyone is interested in growing in China, the only place FOR growth these days, it seems.
No, the reason for my silence is much more simple, and yet more sinister. I don’t have anything to say! I sit down to write. I stare at the blank page, my mind empty as an honest man’s wallet. After nearly 25 years writing about one American’s life abroad, I’m out of ideas. I am all talked out (and blogged out and Podcasted out!). For someone who, as a child, thought his name was “For-the-love-of-all-that-is-holy-would-you-please-shut-up,” speechlessness is an altogether alien state.
Writer’s block happens, I suppose, but it happens to other people, those with less interesting lives. For instance, accountants hunched over the books under the glare of fluorescent lights – hydroponic humans in cubicle farms. What are they going to write… “Dear diary: today I struggled valiantly with that last entry until the T-account balanced, perched precariously on profit’s knife edge…?” I can imagine florists would have a tough time drumming up passion in their writing: “Dear diary, today I sold flowers. Just like yesterday. And probably tomorrow.”
This I can understand. But I am writing from Shanghai, the refurbished Pearl of the Orient, a city with 23 million people all doing things my mother told me never to do: crossing against the light, slurping their noodles, eating with sticks, fricasseeing the family pet. You’d think I could find something interesting to write about.
I wrack my brain, searching through the last month of my calendar. Surely something has happened that is worthy of comment. Some “ah-ha!” Some something that no one has noticed before. Suddenly, I have it, a golden nugget around which I can weave a perfect pearl of wise insight. I will blog about the traffic! Something odd is always happening in Shanghai traffic. I look out my window. Sure enough, drivers are playing their horns like a Swiss bell choir and are power-merging like Stevie Wonder in a demolition derby. But on second thought, this seems a bit lame. The traffic situation is no different today than it was last year and in fact it seems to work just fine, albeit with a few more fender benders. “Nothing to report here, Skip…back to you in the studio.”
Return to the calendar. Maybe I can write about something stupid I’ve done recently. Certainly I have pulled a bonehead move in the last month that I can write about … that seems to be a never ending stream of content. I must have committed a cultural gaffe. Messed up my Chinese tones and called my mother a horse, something like that. Yeah? So what? Everyone I know is already familiar with that scenario, though my Chinese friends and colleagues are far too graceful to point out my mistakes.
Yesterday I was sitting at a Starbuck’s on Huaihai Road in Shanghai, waiting for a client and trying to dredge up an idea for the Podcast…any idea…and it hit me: I am in a STARBUCKS on HUAIHAI LU trying to come up with something to say about a foreigner’s so-called crazy life in Shanghai! How crazy can it be…is the foam on my latte too frothy? Am I forced to use refined instead of raw sugar? Oh horrors, the swirl on my caramel Frappacio goes to the left and not the right??? However, this sort of middle-aged rant against the middle class in the Middle Kingdom might be considered the Grunge music of the new millennium; after all, those with nothing really to complain about favor a public forum. And I am already having trouble with middle age. Or at least my expanding middle in middle age … no one needs to hear about that.
So that’s it then: it’s not me, it’s China… China’s gone mainstream. We used to have to bring pizza in from Hong Kong and now we get it delivered from around the corner. Biking down to the Telecommunications Bureau to register an international phone call and waiting three days to actually place that call was ink-worthy in the 80s. Today? I miss a call from the States because I out was taking pictures, SMS-ing and playing music on my iPhone until the battery died.
So that’s my headline then: China is Not Interesting Any More. Officially hum-drum, day-to-day, not unique in any noticeable fashion. It’s not me, it is my subject: Shanghai, the Fargo of the Far East. “Move along, there is nothing to see here… go about your business.” How reassuring. I feared I was losing my edge.
Confidence recently restored, I then experience an epiphany. My client arrives, the president of a billion dollar multinational, he is barely 24 hours into his first visit to China. This is a guy who has seen everything, done everything… spent more money last week than most of us will see in a lifetime and will probably lose it just as effortlessly next week. His passport has more stamps than a Philatelic Society swap-meet. His is a Gold frequent flyer on five airlines and rates “Super Mother Bad Platinum” on two more. This dude has been around.
So he comes into Starbucks, sees me and nearly RUNS across the room. He drops into the chair across from me, breathless and wide-eyed, having just arrived in a taxi from the airport and his usual executive demeanor is displaced. “What is it with this place?” he whisper-screams, “I nearly lost my lunch five times on the ride over here…and these buildings…and the language…and…and… is this Starbuck’s!? I have no idea what to think about this place…it’s, it’s FANTASTIC! Where have I been all my life?!?!”
We proceed to talk about the work we are doing for his company and some of the growth opportunities we have identified. There are some very exciting things happening here in his industry. At headquarters, he is trying to deal with the rug getting pulled out from under him by the current state of the economy; here he is losing himself in the lush shag of the rug that has stayed put. He is petrified by what he sees here but he is intrigued as well. China, so ugly its cute. The Orangutan of global business.
A minute ago, I was thinking that I’d seen everything here. And now I meet a guy who literally HAS seen everything, and he says that China is making him think that he has seen nothing. And I have it, my new headline: “Big Pale Writer Thinks He Knows Everything About China: Film and Self-Criticism at 11.”
Note to self: my blasé attitude and road worn demeanor is not about China being boring. Far from it. It’s just me being me.
Thanks again for listening … and remember our motto “In China, everything is possible but nothing is easy.” We’ll see you next time on the China Business Podcast.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:49 am
Reading this post feels like I wrote it myself. Nice to know my experiences (or inability to see the marvel I used to in Shanghai anymore) is shared be…well at least one other.