bankruptcy of Chinese businessmen. Shahpour seemed slightly more alert.
“You’re just in time,” Miles said with mock weariness.
“In time for what?”
“In time to hear me tell young Shahpour here that China will never succeed on the international stage until the guys doing business learn some manners.”
“Manners?” Joe said, placing his napkin on his lap.
“That’s right. The people here have no respect for us, no interest in our history, no understanding of our culture.”
“Which culture would that be?”
“Mine.” Miles swallowed an inch of wine and wiped his beard. “Let me tell you something about the Chinese, Shahpour. Joe, back me up here. For every man, woman and child in this country, it’s about making money. Nothing else matters.”
“You’ve changed your tune.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ten years ago you were all for it. Let’s make as much dough in China as we can, and to hell with the consequences.”
“That’s because ten years ago I hadn’t experienced Chinese business practices at first hand.” Miles didn’t look too pleased to have been tripped up by forgotten memories of Hong Kong. He directed his next remark at Shahpour. “Fact is the Cultural Revolution stripped out individuality as you or I would understand it. So what are we left with? An organized, upwardly mobile, dedicated workforce that will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
“The American dream,” Shahpour muttered. Joe was beginning to like him.
“Don’t be a smart ass.” Miles gestured towards the glistening gold facade of the Aurora building. “Look at this place. Look at Pudong. What’s it built on?”
“Marshland?” Joe suggested. The vodka was beginning to take effect and he had decided to try to enjoy himself.
“I’ll tell you what it’s built on. Corruption and lies.” Shahpour caught Joe’s eye and there was a shared beat of understanding between them. Both had sat through Miles Coolidge monologues many times before. “A Chinese real-estate developer comes along, he pays a bribe to a city official, then the police forcibly remove all the residents from the area on his behalf. Any people refuse, the developer sends in hired thugs who break their hands. This is happening right across China. Farmers ordered off their land with no compensation. Peasant workers who’ve been farming the same ten acres all their lives suddenly told to move fifty kilometres away where there’s no agriculture, no community, no jobs. If they complain, they get fined or jailed. Then up goes a high-rise development built on soil they’d been working for generations. And who gets the profits? The developer.”
Joe was stunned. In Hong Kong, Miles would have described such injustice as the natural consequences of rapid economic growth. Is that what TYPHOON had done to him? Had he developed a conscience?
“Is this your standard line at the moment?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“In the old days, you always had a theory on every subject. You were like a politician on the stump, trotting out a favourite speech to anyone who would listen.”
Miles did not seem offended. “You wanna talk politics? You wanna talk about capitalism with Chinese characteristics?” Most of Miles Coolidge’s questions were rhetorical and he certainly wasn’t expecting an answer to that one. He gestured towards the infinite skyscrapers of Pudong. “This is what it looks like. It looks like apartments that sell for a hundred dollars per square foot and fuck the men that died building them. Modern China is an entity of supercities built on the sweat of migrant workers who get paid less than ten bucks a day for doing it and told to sleep in a room the size of my bathtub. That’s what they call progress here.”
“What’s your point?” Joe asked.
“My point, Joe, is that morality, the Judeo-Christian principle of love thy neighbor, is an alien concept to the Chinese.”
“Well, I should be OK then,” said Shahpour.
“How’s that?”
“I’m Muslim.”
That stopped the conversation dead. Joe sipped his wine and grinned at the Bund. Miles made an embarrassing remark about “how we’re all trying to forget that” and struggled on. “Will somebody listen to what I’m saying, please?” He drained his Chablis. Their starters arrived and Joe began eating. His tuna had been rolled in sesame seeds which crunched between his teeth. “The Chinese have no natural sympathy for their fellow man. Once you understand that, anything is possible.”
“If you say so, Miles. If you say so.”
In Joe’s experience, there were two default conversations whenever groups of Western men gathered for dinner in China. The first, which usually took place in the earlier part of an evening, was a complex if largely theoretical discussion about the future of the country. Would China become the great economic superpower that the West had long feared, or would the economy overheat and go the way of the other Asian tigers? Had Beijing been wise to buy up $300 billion of US debt, and could America afford to pay it back? Would the country’s increasingly well-educated, Westernized middle class eventually topple the communist government, having tired of the endemic corruption and repression of the one-party state, or were the great mass of Chinese too obedient, perhaps even too savvy, to undermine the political status quo? Miles ticked almost every one of these conversational boxes as the dinner continued, and Joe eventually realized that little had changed: the man who had taken Isabella from him was just as stubborn, just as confused and cynical about China as he had always been. One minute he was writing off an entire race on the basis that they didn’t think like Americans; the next he was siding with disenfranchised Chinese workers because their plight handed him a convenient stick with which to rail at Beijing. Close his eyes and Joe could have been back at Rico’s, defending Governor Patten against the latest Coolidge onslaught, or listening to one of his stock speeches about “the fucking futility of communism.” Yet was there really that much difference between their two positions? Joe was equally jaded about the government in Beijing. He despaired for a country so contemptuous of its own citizens. But at least he loved China; at least he could see that to impose Western values on a country as complex and as historically damaged as the Middle Kingdom was a policy every bit as lunatic as the invasion of Iraq. Miles, on the other hand, had nothing but contempt for the place: his enthusiasm for TYPHOON, for example, had not been born of a desire to free the Uighurs of Xinjiang, or the migrant workers of Gansu, from the shackles of totalitarian repression; it had been born of a desire to undermine China, to bring bloodshed to the streets, and to profit from the ensuing chaos.
For his part, Shahpour remained on the periphery of the conversation, drinking heavily and offering only the occasional contribution to the intellectual slanging match taking place in front of him. At first, Joe put this down to a younger man’s natural reticence in the presence of two age-old rivals. As the evening progressed, however, he began to sense that Shahpour shared few of his master’s beliefs; indeed, he referred affectionately to his “many Chinese friends” and spoke with admiration of the way the country had “pulled itself up by its own bootstraps” in the previous fifteen years. It simply didn’t make sense that Shahpour could be fighting alongside Miles on the same fool’s errand as TYPHOON. Besides, surely Langley would have preferred to have one of their few Farsi-speaking officers operating in Iran? Maybe Shahpour was Microsoft after all.
The second default conversation, which usually takes place towards the end of dinner, concerns sex. Unsurprisingly, if unwittingly, it was Miles who instigated it when the mobile phone resting on the table beside him lit up and produced the opening bars of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Joe had just finished eating his main course. He could hear a woman’s voice at the other end of the line when Miles picked up. He was certain that it was Isabella until Miles began replying in Mandarin and aimed a conspiratorial look at Shahpour.
“I gotta take this. Work,” he said, and stood up from the table.
As he walked off the terrace, Shahpour leaned forward and said, “You know who that was, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“His ernai.”
Ernai is a Mandarin term for mistress or concubine. Shahpour’s candour surprised Joe but he maintained an expression of vague disinterest. “Really? How do you know?”
“Her name is Linda. She has her own special ring. When she calls, you get the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’
