by The Professor
HONG KONG DIARY:
ONE DOOR CLOSES
AND ANOTHER OPENS
While true of many endeavors, the old saw “One door closes, and another opens” is eminently fitting in the realm of global profiteering. To that, the Professor must add, “But it’s hell being in the hallway,” especially when the world happens to be your hallway. I should know: I find myself so often in the figurative hallway between buyer and seller, between merchant and manufacturer, East and West for that matter. But therein lies the profit for the profiteer, in the margins of a transaction — the hallway, if you will. And only in the course of advocacy for both sides can a profiteer find his way out.
It’s simple in a convoluted way; and luckily for me, it’s so simple that it eludes most fellow travelers to borrow from my Lord Buckley, the original Professor. But when I walk into a showroom in Hong Kong or a factory in China in search of opportunity, I am keenly aware that the buyer needs me to find the best deal at the highest quality level. Likewise, the seller awaits in his castle-keep, stymied without input on the buyer’s needs. Oh yes. I actually have a supplier who named his showroom The Castle (factories worldwide speak of hiring from the outside, getting feedback from the outside, etc) — in his case, Jerry’s Castle.
In fact, Hong Kong’s old textile mills and assembly plants have distinctly fortress-like facades. They are block-long poured-concrete monoliths, up to twenty stories, honeycombed with freight elevators and conveyor systems. Today, the lower floors are still used by local-market metal fabricators, motor re-winders, scrap dealers and other job-shops, while the upper floors are showroom spaces for all manner of merchandise, from textiles to furniture to candles to whatever it is you bought at the mall last week, America. In fact, I’m putting my profiteering shoulder to the wheel for you, America. And what do I have to show for it — I mean, besides profit?
Factories in China are built on a clean slate, in stark contrast to Hong Kong’s chock-a-block urban jungle, but rival their colonial predecessors’ utilitarian design. Although rarely over five stories high, they still foster that same fortress mentality. When I first appeared in southern China’s already-blighted landscape some ten years ago, many factories appeared as freestanding outposts off dirt roads. Today, they are likely to have Buick car dealerships next door, and the dirt roads are now crazily divided highways. Workers’ dormitories are usually separate structures. You can’t miss them: they are the buildings with approximately 1,000 pieces of underwear hanging on clotheslines outside to dry, often in the interstices between factory and dorm. Yes, America, I see you nodding: another hallway. But no; those clotheslines only connect the buildings. Workers remain billeted, taking their daily twelve-hour shifts and three meals (included in the employment “contract” — and once a week, one with meat) until they can find a place higher up on the vocational food chain.
The workers’ plight is of no concern or interest to a global profiteer, except in informed self-interest stipulating that a dirty shop is an inefficient shop, that a corner-cutting shop is a dangerous shop and thus prone to injury-related work stoppages. What’s that you say, America? A cold and calculating view? Yes, and when was the last time you put your soft shoulder to the industrial wheel, America? I came to be called the Professor not from my ability to parse a sentence but instead from operating a press in the blighted industrial landscape of my own youth. When I walk into a factory, the chances are high that I operated much of the machinery at some point in my life, and so I can speak to manufacturing process and material flow just as well as I can seek profit. Because, you see, America, to operate factory machinery is itself an exercise in self-interest. No one does so for pleasure or enlightenment.
China today is undergoing a transformation similar to post-World War II America’s but at light speed. Our steel and auto industries — and their unions — developed an American middle class from whole cloth in the fifties and sixties. China is doing the same but in a fraction of the time and from a starting point well below ours. Imagine an America before TVA, before social security and welfare, before interstate highways. In fact, imagine America going from 1900 to 1970 in fifteen years, and you have a snapshot of China’s recent history, much of it written in industrial development. And that’s where I have found myself, in its frenzied, if dusty, hallway.
There are other hallways, too. Many global travelers, and certainly all global profiteers, know the knock on the hotel room door, which, by definition, comes from the hallway. Yes, it is the unsolicited offer of companionship — succor if you will — that is in the hallway of every free enterprise system. I speak of the legions of young (and youngish) women who come to the burgeoning industrial regions of the world with few vocational skills and often with only their local dialect to serve them. Some are free agents, other have been shanghai’d (sorry) into an onerous arrangement. But I once witnessed an entire busload of ladies arrive at my five-star (sic) hotel in Zhang Mu Tou town (also known as Little Hong Kong, though not by me) and march straight up to the “night club” to prepare for an evening’s work. In a country where prostitution is expressly banned, they too seek — or are driven to — the margins. Much has been written about the plight of this breed of third-world worker, with diverse views from Nicholas Kristof’s to John Burdett’s, so I will only add to this complex issue that many in China today view such work as a step up.
And woe betide the global profiteer whose disbelieving glance at a crazily-attired bar girl lingers a bit too long, or who, with dropped guard, permits her to sit on his lap after serving his Tsing Tsao (did I mention that it’s lonely in the hallway?). Even if done in jest or jet lag swoon, it can provoke a knock on the door later that night, sometimes much later so as to induce a careless opening. And then the global profiteer must face his own world, in mirror image, for it is he who holds the door while another stands in the hallway of her own opportunity.
And then what happens? Even with a heartfelt nod to professional solidarity, hopefully nothing, at least for the sake of a profiteer’s health. As I mentioned, it is hell being in the hallway.
The Professor
bio: The Professor, as he is known to legions of business contacts throughout Asia, has been traveling to Hong Kong and elsewhere in the region since late in the last millennium. He is a native of Philadelphia, PA and maintains his permanent residence there. His poetry, fiction, interviews, and articles have been published by Philadelphia-area newspapers, magazines and anthologies, and he is currently planning another trip abroad. He is shown here at left, about to join the Maclehose Trail in Sai Kung.
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