Chapter 2
Chinese Food
Her office (and shop) was inside a building that I knew well from the time I rode the suburban train to and fro daily. It was at the first stop from the inner terminal of the train, opposite the building there stood the factory where I was working during summer after my first university year – already abandoned with no activity inside. She greeted me in English and I saw that she actually was Chinese – Taiwanese as she said proudly. Her European name (all Chinese living abroad take such ones beside their original name) was Linda. She told me all that was necessary to know about the firm, a very small limited company for import and delivery of food for special needs of Chinese people living in Hungary. My task would have been to organize this activity. I was to be a replacement of a man who left this job for a better one – at least he thought so.
I have not been very keen to take this job as I have never did anything with food. It is a very special field and full of traps because of regulation. Also, import is always a catch too, as when you find a fraudulent customs officer he or she can do anything and you are helpless. We parted with an accord that I was to call her soon. It was she who called me and urged to decide fast as she needed my help.
I accepted the job as there were no others in sight. My position looked dim as she wanted to pay only minimum wage and within my last years before I was to reach my pensioner age it was screwing down the sum I was going to get. However, my real salary was to be higher, only without the correct receipts.
I tried to be informed by reading through all the papers available in the cubby-hole to my office – it was her office as well as another person’s one later. Between periods of hard time leafing through company papers in thick files I tried to learn as much about my new environment as possible. L. was telling me various things about Chinese life and history, we were also discussing legends about the original living place of our ancestors. She knew well that several thousand years ago predecessors of the Hungarian tribes had been living on the plans in today’s China where the Uygur live at present. I was also interested in Chinese art, and she spoke about handicraft, painting, etc.
She let me use her PC, a 586 with a Chinese Windows 95 on it. Fortunately I was good in that software, in spite of all inscriptions being in Han Chinese I could use it, even some Chinese characters I learned by it. There was no Word, however, but she called the IT professional who was servicing her PCs, Stephen M., and he put it in order.
With that man I remained connected and he would be very helpful to me since. That time I asked him to install software on my own PC that I bought just days ago. My former colleague, Magdalene, called me as she knew I was to buy a PC second hand. Her daughter finished university and she purchased a new one for herself. The one I bought was a 386 made of a 286 by placing a new processor inside. Its hard drive had a capacity of 72 MB. The monitor was a 12-inch B-W one. Well, S. could only install 3.1 Windows, but about seven years I was using this small computer.
He helped us with our first online difficulties as well. There was only one ISP company then and I arranged that one of our phone lines had an Internet connection. The wiring within the office and the installation of software on the individual PCs was his work. After that we could send and receive e-mails, but most of our employees – and L’s co-boss – were reluctant to check if they had mail.
Linda was just extending her business. Her friend of childhood from their home country had been living in a neighbouring country and active in tourism. I remember her name as Jenny. She convinced L. that it was beneficial for them both to get into partnership in Budapest, because in a common facility both could do their own business and complement each-other’s activity. In a few weeks some young persons have been hired who all spoke English and their task was to organize programs for Chinese people coming here. J’s name was well known to them already and that business was good.
The young people were in no connection with me, they did their work and I did mine. However, J. was the actual boss already, because L. has not been very well financed. Also, the food business had its problems. About ten years before the company had been started by another Chinese person, who saw clearly that the provision of food for Asian was not developed enough here and for this reason that area had a lot of potential in it. Since that time, however, other Chinese firms had been formed and their managers had no scruples against stealing L’s customers. Food delivery is a service of trust and you must always be very cautious not to scare off any clients.
L. was a person not exactly typical among Chinese. She was naive, that is extremely dangerous in business. There were other positive characteristics in her also bad for business. She was honest, for example, and very kind. I am sure it has to do something with her mother’s having been living in America for a time. At the same time, she was Chinese at the roots. Taiwanese people are proud of their homeland, but L. gave the right answer when I asked her about real differences between them and mainland Chinese: those 50 years the citizens of Taiwan spent on that island is only 1 percent of the Chinese civilization of about 5,000 years.
In that small firm food business consisted mainly of the import of rice and special Asian items, as well as distribution of the goods and its sale in the company shop. At first that shop looked attractive to me until it became clear that there is no such thing here as discarding items over their ‘best before’ time. I have seen salted peanuts more than ten years over it. L. was munching on them little by little. At the shop over-the-counter sale has been done. The lion’s share of the goods have been sold through a distribution system. The company van was an ancient Ford Transit. L. had a rented store in the former flour mill to keep her stock. The van was loaded there according to schedule and delivered the goods at the clients’ restaurants.
A young man has been assigned storekeeper and there was a driver too. L. owned also two cars, her magnificent Volvo 144 and a 20-year-old BMW 318. The latter was mainly utilized by her son, a student in high school. She also had a daughter studying at the university of economics. About her husband she never spoke.
Ordering of import goods has always been done by mail and through prepayment. L. was very careful to order with delivery in container to avoid pilfering. During my 13 months with the company only rice has been imported, other item like bamboo shoots (in 10-pound tins) still there were in quantities. Sometimes rice has been purchased at domestic import firms because of the small quantity.
In the food business there was another employee of L., a young Chinese girl from Shanghai, Xie Rong, she didn’t use any European name, but the youth called her Shelly. She studied together with L’s daughter, she was very bright (and proud of her nationality almost up to nationalism), I feel she helped L’s not so bright daughter at her study.
My predecessor, Peter S., and L. had been to Egypt about half a year before my joining that firm, where they contacted a rice exporter. Egypt has made some developments in the field of rice growing. Its climate is the best in the world for that purpose, especially for round grain rice, it can be grown in two different ways. When planted twice a year rice can ripen, but it produces very ordinary small grain rice. However, when there is only one harvest yearly, the grains are large, transparent as glass beads, and their flavour is extraordinarily fine.
My first task was to contact the Egyptian exporter and organize the purchase of one full container of rice, i.e. about 10 tons. I did it quickly and in a month it arrived. I cleared it through customs with the help of my former colleagues. L. wanted to grab a segment of the Hungarian market with that fine produce, but it would have needed an infrastructure about two orders of magnitude larger than that L. had, as customer rice market is dominated by global companies. None of them accepted us their partners. Although I designed a PE bag of 1 kg and organized both its production and filling the rice in the bags all of the packages would have to be sold in the shop. This business was good, but no breakthrough as L. had hoped for. There was a similar attempt from our part with fragrant rice imported from Thailand. It took the same fate.
From the beginning in that job I sensed two big problems with company activity. One of them was the complete feature of Chinese ways, I mean everything has been done as if the firm had been an intelligence agency. Very secretly. With no paperwork done, all payments in cash. Even payments for import goods were paid in the bank and transferred as cash. This made me hard to get a clear picture about the actual financial situation of the company. Actually it wasn’t my field, it was that of L. as managing director.
The second problem was partly a result of the above mentioned secrecy, but, as I learned later, there was a much more important source of it: human greed. When I tried to make a store inventory I found that rice was inclined to evaporate. Otherwise how could you explain that there was a constant 5 percent difference between incoming and outgoing goods. But only with rice. I didn’t want to fluster L. by informing her, but wanted to find out what was going on.
The young storekeeper has been the son of an earlier driver and storekeeper with the company, without that connection he would have no chance of getting employed. He was fit for the job only physically, the 50-kilo sacks were no load for him. However, as slow persons sometimes do, he had a great finesse for things not wholly regular. He sometimes got phone calls from someone familiar to all others beside me, and always there was a discussion involving rice and money. As I was named import manager by L., thus I was a boss for him, I instructed him to account for the turnover of rice in recent time. He agreed, but it never happened, and I got suspicious glances on me.
I found the solution soon, but it was even more impossible to tell about it to L. Soon after that the fine Egyptian rice arrived at our store, a man appeared in the office and he looked to know everything about me. He was the person who left that post, my predecessor. He and L. sat down together and made a long conversation – in another place so as nobody would witness it – and soon after that L. told me our room will have another person, as P. would be working with us. She said P. had an excellent idea and it would be going to bring in a lot of money.
I didn’t stop monitoring the evaporation of rice and discovered that the phenomenon accelerated. I felt that I got into a helpless situation, because L. would have never accepted the suspicion about a person she trusted so much. I wanted to find a way for getting things right. Discussing it with the small firm that did accounting for our company, I became convinced that without making a default of the missing stock the company was not to become balanced, let alone have profit. However, when I tried to discuss it with L. she wouldn’t listen.
P. was a person many recent family films would picture as a loser. He was a chemical engineer, until the regime shift he had been working for the biggest cosmetics firm in the country. His field had been deodorant sticks. His wife was a sales executive with a small privately owned foreign trade company, a much more influential person than her husband. The wife was almost constantly on trips abroad, they had no children, only a dog named Ribizli (red currant). The man was completely content with this situation. His spheres of interest were old PC software preceding the time of Windows and garden basketball.
P. wanted to develop good connections with me, but, of course, in his own manner, patronizing and dominating me. He even gave me two bags of asparagus seeds, one white and one green, but they were out of time already at least by five years. He did it, as I told him I was to buy seeds and spare a small area in my garden to grow asparagus. Also I bought some saplings, because my cherry trees perished, they were quince apple and apricot. The latter died too. But the quince apples make me happy every autumn.
In a couple of weeks it became clear that P’s big idea cannot be planted in practice. There were two basic reasons for that: Hungarian stock breeders wouldn’t accept rigorous conditions at breeding ducks for Chinese in Hungary, and the latter wouldn’t accept ducks bred in this country. All the same, P. was drawing his salary from L. and his only activity was disc de-fragmentation on his PC – I had to share mine with L. – every day. At the same time nothing could happen without his oral contribution to it, especially as parliamentary elections came nearer, he always took the opportunity of telling us it was enough of the incompetent government – the left wing government had inherited a very bad situation from the first freely elected one in 1994, and had to pass tightening regulations to avoid the same fate as Mexico –, what we needed was those young titans of the party Fidesz.
He was almost wrong, because the governing parties got more votes at the first round. But the young lawyer at the head of Fidesz (who has deserved his nickname The Godfather since) realigned his means and by shifting candidacies with other right wing parties he managed to get a few more mandates than the governing side during the second round. What happened afterwards was a rampage, because he had to share the power with really hideous people, whose parties would be annihilated later by their bosses themselves. However, as I am trying to give some account of events since, it can be clear that it wasn’t his worst provision yet.
Summer in that year arrived late, but was extremely hot. In June L. organized a happy Saturday event for the employees of the company, both in food business and travel. The venue was in the village of Tök (it means squash in our language) at the western side of Buda hills. It was still cool and the program included round trip of the estate in a horse cart and dinner. My wife accompanied me, we drove there in our own car. It was freshly painted after having a complete body overhaul.
When the hot weather arrived all except me were unable to do their work. I still remembered Charles’s saying from Addis Ababa: “You only need self control to bear heat and smell.” Especially the young in the travel agency suffered. L. let them buy some ventilators. All caught cold, but the young got over it soon. However, L. couldn’t come out of it, she went on coughing till the end of the year.
In spite of all odds L. trusted me and was taking me with her sometimes. There was the so called Double Ten Day program at the consulate of Taiwan commemorating the uprising putting an end to the Chinese Empire. She invited me also and I never saw her so happy as her daughter was one of dancers at the performance. I have also been invited to a couple of Chinese restaurants, her chief customers, where true traditional Chinese food has been served. Some of them could cause me surprise. The world known Peking duck, for example. When I tried to cut off a small piece it began to bleed. No wonder, it was almost raw. Just like the fine carp in L’s office when she wanted to make us happy with a fine food. Well, it is a habit with us, to bake or fry fish before eating it.
There were some other surprises too. They gave me tremendous help in appreciating hygiene in our country in comparison with theirs. The young girl from Shanghai told me when I saw a bucket of dirty water and asked her why isn’t it possible to drain out dirty water after mopping that it wasn’t dirty water from mopping the previous day, it was algae being soaked for salad the next day. Well “When in Rome, do as the Romans do!”
When the round rice began to go out of stock L. wanted to order another container. Alas, something must have happened to the Egyptian partner, we could not contact him. I made a search for sources of rice all over the world. Even I contacted the woman I met in Moscow, my best friend ever, and she collected data about prices of rice in the USA. Unfortunately, I found that either we import long grain rice from Thailand or buy Italian semi-round rice from our domestic partner. In spite of all handicaps I haven’t given up. I called on the Egyptian embassy and got a short list of rice exporters from the councillor of commerce. However, he warned me that some of them could also be a fake. And there was another opportunity for me. The same Italian export company delivering rice to our domestic partner was coming to the fall exhibition of industrial products, and the saleswoman sent us a fax and invited us for a talk. The latter was dead end, because, although she looked interested in doing business with us, our domestic partner might have derailed it.
With the Egyptian firms I had more luck, at least, at the beginning. Two of them gave me offer and one of those sent us a sample. It was not the fine simple-harvest round rice, but it looked fine. L. wanted to get a container of it, as also the price was good. She always collected the money needed for the transfer of prepayment from her acquaintances, but this time she had difficulties. After a long hesitation I told her I had the necessary sum on my bank account, but it was tied down. Either I was to lose interests or she was to wait till its freeing. She said she needed it and was ready to repay my loss. I took out the money and handed it over to her (we made all without any written record). In about a month she was able to repay, but incidentally forgot my lost interests.
This deal was a complete loss to L. and it was P. the busybody who brought it about. Delivery of the rice was late. When I tried to call the partner by phone he said there had been a problem, one of his containers had been lost on route to Alexandria in a road accident of the truck. He asked for my patience. L. didn’t want to believe this story and said that man was a rogue. As the end of the year came nearer and I was home on a Saturday there came a phone from L. that I was to fly to Egypt at once and check the situation on spot. She said P. had advised her to write a fax using powerful language and send it to the exporter. P. had taken his wife to the office and she formulated this letter. L. had sent it. In a very short time the partner replied in the same manner and withdrew his promise to send the goods as soon as possible. I was very sympathetic with L., but said it was not my fabrication, let the person who caused it clear everything away.
There were other delicate situations about that time. I had seen the political circumstances go wrong in Kosovo, Yugoslavia during my short drive through the country in 1981, when I had been returning from Ethiopia. But at that time I am writing about, at the end of 1998, there was war in that region. Even bombing in Belgrade. And the Chinese embassy was hit by some of them because of lack of precision in maps of the American air force – or movements in the city precisely just in order to mislead the planes of the USA. We in the office could not stand not to discuss these events. Xie Rong, the girl from Shanghai could well understand Hungarian and chopped in. We said it was a great mistake of the Chinese to keep a crew of about forty in an embassy building when all other embassies were holding one or two persons in the war zone. She said it was a common thing to fully man embassies, it was the guilt of the American to bomb a zone of embassies. She told us there was no doubt who would win if there occurred a war between the two countries. We let her go without an answer, but we were very uneasy.