The China Syndrome - Part One (getting there)

Snow Festival in Hokkaido - We were in no hurry to leave Japan

Ten years ago this week my family moved to Shanghai, China. The fact that we were already seasoned expats with more than five years in Japan under our belts did not make the decision to move easier. After so much time in Kobe, Japan seemed like home. The kids were happy in school. We had an interesting life exploring Japan and many other places in Asia. 

My company sent me to Japan as their lone ex-pat in a city where they didn’t have a local office or any support services. After five years, my expat “report card” showed company sales in Asia had grown 300%, profits were up 400% and a troublesome joint venture had been restructured. My “reward” for success was being asked to move to China, for tax rather than strategic reasons. The company leaders did not like the fact that after five years in Japan the burden of my personal taxes in Japan increased significantly. The US has a barbaric "double payment" tax code for expats. Since my ex-pat agreement required the company to pay all taxes associated with my exp-pat status, I was asked to move to China. In typical fashion with corporate bureaucracy - the move actually cost the company more in taxes overall but that miscalculation is a story for a different day.

Living was easy on Rokko Island in Kobe

“No” means “Hell No”

Late in our fourth year in Japan, my boss visited and asked me to move to China. Since my division had limited sales and no infrastructure in China, I asked what the "mission" was. The answer was “keep doing what you are doing, just do it from Shanghai”. I reminded him that I had two teenage daughters who were happy where they were and a wife who was like the poster child for the successful expat. Why move if there wasn't a good reason?

I also had done some research before we moved to Japan about “expat landmines” and had an agreement that gave me more control than normal regarding how and when I returned to the US. I couldn't prevent the move back but I had some level of financial and geographic protection when the time to repatriate came.

My decision was made – if they were going to try to force me to move to China, I would use my “exit clause” and return to the US before my elder daughter started her junior year in high school. Despite my frustration at being asked to make what amounted to a "tax move" - I played the game, waited a week and sent a carefully worded email declining the assignment in Shanghai. I fully understood that decision could effectively end my career with the company. The response was swift: My boss said he “understood", but he also said that I was still the "top candidate for the China assignment".

“Let the Games Begin”

Normally, my boss was patient and savvy in his dealings with me. Rather than continue this conflict with me head-on; he arranged for me to meet his boss for breakfast at an upcoming company meeting in the US. Although I liked and respected my boss who was a long time ex-pat himself – his boss was another matter. The “Big Boss” did not like my independent streak or my lack of interest in being what he called “a good corporate soldier”. 

The "one on one" breakfast meeting in a private room with the Big Boss was brief. After the obligatory 10 seconds of pleasantries I was told: “there is nothing in the US for you and you just need to make this move”. My one word response was: “why?”.  After a pregnant pause, I looked over my untouched pre-ordered eggs and bacon and began to thank him for his time and excuse myself. This was clearly the power play I expected – “be a ‘good solider’ or find another job”. Before I left the room I was told “maybe we can think of something to make the move more attractive”. I decided to leave before I said something I shouldn’t and closed with “I’ll wait to hear from you”.

As luck (or good planning) would have it standing outside the door as I left was a tall, balding man I had never seen before. “Hi, I’m Tom”. “I am the new HR director and my first job is to get you to move to China”.  I looked up at Tom, shook his hand and said: “Best of luck with your first assignment, by the way did you know my wife and I are house hunting in Charlotte this week”. Actually the short conversation included a couple of four letter words that weren't "golf". 

The day got more interesting as the company arranged for me to skip the afternoon corporate session to meet a very expensive consultant who was an expert on Asia in general and China in particular.  The consultant was a breath of fresh air. He knew Asia inside and out. He asked about my experiences in Japan, my family, etc.  Before we ended the meeting he said – “look, China could be a wonderful experience for your family but it won’t be easy.  I have known your company for a long time - they don’t understand Asia and you will never get the support most people need to make an overseas assignment work.  On the other hand, you succeeded in Japan so you can probably make it work.” He went on to say “you should only move to China if every member of your family is committed to go because otherwise you will be miserable”.  At this point I wasn’t sure if I was getting his honest opinion or if my time with him was part of a strategy to use reverse psychology on me……

A few days later we were back in Japan. I continued to mull over what my future looked like moving back to the US – I wouldn’t be fired immediately because of my agreement and the fact that immediately axing returning expats was considered “bad  form". Likely I would be assigned to “special projects”  and advised that I probably should begin to look for “opportunities outside the company”.

The second morning back in Japan (a Saturday) I got an early morning call from the President of another Division of the company asking me what my “decision on China was”. He was calling from the US and knew it was very early in Japan.  Through the haze of jet lag; I just laughed and asked why he was asking. Apparently, my boss had enlisted another helper to get me to make the “right decision”.  I had spent my five years in Japan operating with almost total autonomy – suddenly there were several people trying to help me make a decision I had already made.

Family Meeting

My daughters were well aware that a decision about where we would be living in the next school year was being made. I picked a family dinner to break the news that we were "definitely" moving “home”. There were no outbursts but tears began to well up around the table. I asked why everyone was so sad. The bottom line was the girls wanted to stay in Asia to graduate high school. If Japan was no longer an option they were perfectly happy to take their chances in Shanghai. They wanted to stay in an international school until they were ready for college. I told them that China would likely be much tougher from a quality of life perspective and I thought it made more sense to go back to the US if we couldn't stay in Japan. I appreciated their desire to stay in Asia and knew it would be a much better financial decision.  I am no match for the tears of my progeny - so in the end my daughters really made the decision for us to move to China. My "wiser than me" wife thought staying in Asia would be good for the girls and better for me so she wisely let things play out slowly.

  

The Details

I knew that many of my peers back in the US had been approached about a China assignment if I refused to go. My division was based in a nice area of North Carolina. Most people asked to go to China had kids in school and nobody was willing to move to what they perceived as a "third world communist country". Of course the company could  have "hired outside" but the lithium business is a unique niche and hiring someone from the outside who could be effective immediately overseas was nearly impossible. Armed  with those facts, I was able to negotiate a great package for the move to China and a safety net for my return. I felt quite sure that no matter how successful I was in China, I would not be with the company long after I returned to the US. The independent streak and determination that enabled my success in Asia was poison in the halls of a conservative US corporation's HQ.

From a business perspective, I knew moving to China would be interesting. My concerns about quality of life were reasonable but in the end it was better to ask the kids if they were willing to risk it. As we finalized plans for the move it seemed that I was the only one worried about it.

Shanghai - one of the World's Great Skylines

We arrived in Shanghai on a rare, clear day in August. A typhoon the previous day had cleared the sky for us. Our adventure in China was about to begin but that is a story for another post.

Post Script: After some initial struggles my family flourished in Shanghai. Both my daughters graduated from high school there. The business  prospered, when I returned to the US, the person who replaced me lasted almost a year before he got fired. Of course after two years "home", I got fired (a mercy "killing") too and started Global Lithium.

Musings of a Gaijin in Japan

Twenty years ago I boarded a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Tokyo.  I was not overly excited at the prospect of spending 12 days in the “Far East”.  I  told my employer I wanted to get involved in “international business” and had been enjoying increasingly frequent trips to Europe and South America. The order to “visit Asia” seemed like a price that had to be paid to enable me to keep traveling.

Armed with a narrow world view and almost complete ignorance of Asia, I stumbled out of Tokyo’s Narita Airport and somehow managed to get to my hotel to meet the “mentor” who had arrived the day before and was supposed to teach me about the most populous continent on the planet. It took me a full six or seven minutes to realize my “culture guide” was almost as clueless as I was.

After a run and a shower I was ready to get my Asia business started so I could go home. Twenty years to the day later, I am staring out at the Osaka night from my perch in the Ritz Carlton reflecting on the love I have for my “second home”.  In 1995, I could not have imagined that my young daughters would attend school in Japan, graduate high school in Shanghai and that I would spend more time in Asia in the ensuing two decades than I spent in the US.

The local business partner my former employer had in Japan in 1995 was used to a steady stream of “clueless gaijin”. I was initially treated with what seemed to me to be a cool, condescending respect. In reality I was just another body in a long line of people that they had to babysit. Guests from the alleged superpower across the Pacific who were functionally illiterate and culturally ignorant when in Dai Nippon. 

The jet lag induced 1 am stroll I took through the Akasaka entertainment district on my first night was the beginning of my fascination with Japan. That bleary eyed walk through the neon lights and abject difference from anything I had ever experienced whet my appetite to learn more about the strange place I had only experienced via bad US WW2 movies.

When I got back to the North Carolina after my first trip I bought language tapes, read books on Japanese culture and prepared for my second trip which was only a few weeks later.  The bar was pretty low to outshine my colleagues with our Japanese partner.  I returned to Japan with a 20 word vocabulary which essentially enabled me to order green tea ice cream and beer with fluency unknown among my peers. I learned to enjoy small wins like not getting  lost on ten mile runs and being able to get a cab driver to take me back to my hotel without help – like I said low bar and small victories.  Our Japanese partners were well aware that Americans often fell in love with Japan in the short term but often did not have staying power. I soon lost interest in going to Europe. The business I was in was growing in Asia and I gradually became determined to see if I could become functional in a very different world.

After over 40 trips to Japan in five years, I was asked to move my family there and focus on growing the business in Asia. My wife was prescient enough to realize moving to Japan would be good for the family so we embarked on a three year assignment that lasted eleven years.  I knew our Japanese partners respected my efforts to learn the nuances of their culture but, the dark side was they also saw me as a potential threat and asked my employer to keep me in the US. After their request was rejected they welcomed me on an arm’s length basis  because they had no choice. I made the best of the situation.

Time and words are inadequate to explain how much our time in Japan meant to my family. Like any middle aged gaijin moving to Japan, my struggles and frustrations were frequent .  Despite my best efforts my language skills were at best “functionally fluent” which yields a lot of benefits in Japan but also left me feeling like a failure on most days when the meaning of so many of the words hanging in the air escaped me.

Our more than five years in Japan passed quickly. Suddenly we were living Shanghai – a new country, new experiences and new frustrations.  Many days found me longing to be in Japan but I rarely missed the US. Due to the nature of my business and proximity of Japan, I traveled there more than 70 times in the five years we lived in Shanghai. I never doubted my status as a gaijin but always felt at home in a way that never happened in China. I mean no disrespect to China as we also had a great experience there and the team we assembled in Shanghai is still the high point of my business life.  Finally, after an eleven year sojourn, we returned to the US.

After growing my business profits ten fold  in little more than a decade, my reward was getting fired less than two years after returning to the US. I took little solace in the fact my former employer lost 30% of their sales in Asia after I was fired. My victory was being bailed out of a tough spot by my Asian friends who quickly ensured my fledging advisory company more than replaced my prior income.

As I look at the late night traffic jam 28 floors below me and think about the last 20 years, I know I was fortunate to  be given the chance to live here and feel some measure of pride that I took advantage of the opportunity.

The Golden Egg - a Politically Incorrect Easter Story

Holidays have always been major events in our home.  My wife has a gift for going above and beyond on holidays and birthdays. Christmas always included elf sightings, various incarnations of live Santa in the neighborhood or Santa “accidentally” being captured by the family video camera for later viewing. Going to see the  “mall’ Santa was a generally lame kick-off to the season which my wife made sure got more and more exciting as the “big day” approached. Based on shared Irish heritage, St Patrick’s Day was also a big deal – through the magic of food coloring, virtually everything ingested in our home on March 17^th was green. Birthday parties included everything from animals brought in from a petting zoo to a local cop showing up to participate in a detective party and a “snow white” lookalike recruited from the frozen food section of the grocery store to wear a rented outfit at a Disney themed party.

Smiles were the norm at Easter 

Like most families with more than one child there was an implied “fairness doctrine” in our house – whether it was gifts at Christmas, candy on Halloween or birthday presents – the idea was each of our daughters would get their “fair share”. We employed the technique of letting one divide a shared item and letting the other one have the first choice. Sad to say - it sounds a little bit like we practiced  “Obamanomics” before the current regime was on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Our annual Easter Egg hunt was typical in most ways. A bunch of colorful plastic eggs with a piece of candy or two inside were hiding in plain sight around the house and yard. The girls happily picked them up and put them in Easter baskets. We labeled 80% of the eggs with one initial that could only be “found” by the initial holder  to ensure a “balanced outcome”. We left 20% of the eggs for open competition.  Each of our daughters wound up with a similar amount of candy but there was a more Darwinian contest within the hunt – the quest for the Golden Egg.

Cash in the golden egg made our hunt more interesting

The outcome of the golden egg hunt was binary. Winner take all. This special egg was slightly bigger than the cutesy colored eggs left for easy finding. The golden egg was -  full of cash and sometimes other treasure. Besides the dollars, Yen or RMB depending on where we were living, the golden egg  could include other things. Perhaps a “get out of chores” voucher or some other promissory note.  Running the golden egg  hunt concurrently with the regular hunt added a strategy element to the festivities. Was it better to ignore the regular colored eggs since a certain percentage were guaranteed to each participant? Or did securing a larger % of the unlabeled colored eggs potentially make up for losing the golden egg. Each year we arranged a different outcome of egg largesse to keep the hunt interesting.

We have two wonderful but very different daughters. The elder is more competitive and given to playing “hard ball”. Her negotiations in the street markets of Shanghai for North Face gear are the stuff of legends. Our younger daughter is a non-confrontational “peacemaker” - at least for 364 days and 23 hours a year. 

Cailin honing her egg hunting skills at age 2

In the early hunts, the three year age difference between combatants for the golden egg seemed an overwhelming advantage but like March Madness  underdogs often win. Once the crucible of the golden egg  competition began – the personalities of  each daughter was manifest. The elder energetically rushing around the house and yard hoping to quickly notch a victory over her seemingly phlegmatic, younger competitor. No quarter was given nor expected. No parental help forthcoming. The battle was on – it could last just a few minutes but in one case in Shanghai lasted well over an hour. We never had harsh words during the hunt or after although there were tears from time to time.

No harsh words but occasionally we had to edit hand gestures when the sting of defeat was too much

In well over a decade of golden egg hunts in three countries our younger daughter exhibited a mastery over her elder sister that is still hard to fathom. The longest losing streak was five years but our elder daughter (affectionately known as  “the biggest loser” at golden egg hunt time) never managed back to back winning years.  Never one to gloat (much), little sister often seemed  surprised by her success. Far from being scarred emotionally by her losing ways, our elder daughter (now 25) speaks fondly of the golden egg hunt and is insisting we have one this year – her little sister is in California so she is pretty confident of a win. But then again – she still has to find it.

Cailin completing her "five-peat" by finding the golden egg in a stone lantern in Shanghai

If you would like to read my daughter's view of "Golden Egg" events, click here.