Allowing yourself to become an alcohol-poisoned wretch is not a sign of weakness. It is a badge of trustworthiness, conferring what some call the hangover of honor.
Wu shows up with a small entourage and makes a striking impression. She is a compact, prim, energetic, elegant woman who immediately impresses with her no-nonsense but not unfriendly manner. Almost as soon as she is introduced to Lee, she launches into a long, rapidly delivered monologue in English that somehow strikes me as both rambling and carefully constructed. It consists of a seamless series of microtales relating to both business and family—the line between them seems to blur—resulting in a complex web of vaguely interconnected details that include colleges attended by various characters, cities lived in, jobs held, government committees met with, partnerships formed, and more. Lee listens as if he is hearing the most extraordinary drama ever recounted. When Wu finally pauses, Lee points out that a few of his own family and business acquaintances have briefly intersected with hers. This leads to more detailed stories swapped back and forth about these mutual contacts. None of it seems related in the least to any business at hand.
While Wu and Lee continue on with great enthusiasm for several more minutes, Meyer is quietly briefed by a World Trade Centers Association executive. Wu, it turns out, is extremely influential with the Chinese government because of her own and her family's considerable success as entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, and she often serves as an adviser to Chinese officials in their dealings with Western businesses. Lee apparently discovered this and realized that Wu could be a powerful ally in keeping the Nanjing project on track, and in future projects. Wu's monologue, meanwhile, is essentially her way of uncovering mutual contacts. Doing business with friends and family is often considered unwise in the U.S., but in China, it is a cornerstone of dealings at all levels, and in fact it is hard to establish trust at all without a history of overlapping connections. The seeming snub the day before is just "part of the dance," says the WTC executive.
Lee obviously understands the ritual and has played it perfectly. After 10 minutes, he and Wu are acting like long-lost friends and have switched to Chinese. Wu finishes by brandishing a document with a flourish and handing it to Lee. It is a letter he is to present to the mayor of Nanjing.
"You see?" Lee gloats to me a few minutes later, as our car picks through chaotic traffic in a frantic race to the train. "In America, you need contracts; you need the law. Here, if the wrong person in the government doesn't like you, there will be no deal, and there is no appeal. Here, you need friends."
At the hotel in Nanjing, Lee immediately arranges to meet with one of the hotel management company's senior executives in the coffee shop. Lee asks the executive's advice about what sort of hotel Lee should build as part of the Nanjing project. This manager tells Lee to go big and upscale with the hotel and plan on losing a bundle doing it—he will get it back many times over on the retail, office, and condo side of the project from the branding that a ritzy hotel will splash on the project. Though Meyer has been telling Lee much the same, Lee, Catherine, and others in the company have been leaning toward keeping the hotel smaller and less costly. The manager insists that would be a big mistake—developers usually partly finance the construction by preselling fancy condos, but the condos won't sell well if the hotel is unimpressive; the Chinese are keenly brand conscious, more so than Americans. Besides, he adds, once the project is built, Lee can easily sell the hotel at a profit, but only if it's a class act.
Lee switches the conversation into Chinese and apparently makes the manager run through it all over again. "I can't be sure about someone's opinion until I hear it in Chinese," Lee explains to me afterward. That alone may help explain why so many Americans have difficulty making headway in business dealings in China—Chinese is a tonal language in which a slight change in inflection completely changes the meaning of a word, helping to make it a highly animated language and one of the hardest to learn, and relatively few Americans take the considerable trouble.
