Nobody Needs A China Hand
Chapter 15. On being told your expertise is worthless, and the watercolor scroll that suggested otherwise. Germany, Summer 1995.
Chapter 15: Nobody Needs A China Hand
English (Deutsch unten)
I arrived at my mother’s place on a warm summer afternoon.
Ten minutes later I was seated in her smoke-filled study, being subjected to the familiar liturgy of my own inadequacy. I said nothing. I kept my head low and let my eyes sweep the room to count the floor tiles, a private act of self-preservation that had served me well in that house before.
“Dreaming of getting rich, that’s what brought you down,” my mother said, her voice carrying the particular authority of someone delivering a verdict they have spent years preparing. Trying to make ends meet, went through my head as I tracked the tile count.
She took a drag from her Marlboro 100, the tip glowing with a focused intensity that matched her expression. “When you were barely two years old, I remember it so clearly. You took a candy, unwrapped it, put it in your mouth. Then you saw another candy on the table, a different color. You decided you liked that one better, spat out the one in your mouth, and shoved the new one in.” She almost choked on the smoke. “I was shocked.”
My crime, apparently, was being who I was. According to her, I had been born with a rotten core, a diagnosis she had arrived at when I was still a toddler and revised upward with each passing year. For a dark moment I felt the urge to ask why she hadn’t simply outsourced me to a foster home, or a church-run institution for children who had strayed beyond correction. She could have saved a fortune on a failed investment. Instead I nodded, wearing an expression of guilt-laden gratitude that was as hollow as it needed to be.
Hugo studied me from his armchair with profound distaste and the particular glint of a man who has been waiting years for his judgment to be confirmed. “Traders are economic parasites,” he announced, with the conviction of a provincial preacher addressing a congregation of cows. “Unlike farmers and workers who produce real value.” A rich observation from a man who had abandoned his own farming roots to sell legal advice, but I was not about to defend the service economy. I murmured something about finding a job as quickly as possible and repaying the loan. I went upstairs and fell into the kind of deep, dreamless sleep that arrives when you have finally stopped falling and landed somewhere solid, however hard.
I saw no point in offering any explanation. The challenges I had faced, how China actually worked, the theft, the reasons I had been forced to borrow money from them. The fact that I had acquired a wife. To explain the Wild South, or the brutal mechanics of Guangdong in 1994, would have been like trying to describe the color of fire to people who had spent their lives in an ice cave. Their ignorance was not a gap to be filled. It was a position. My mother didn’t see my years in China as a battle for survival. She saw them as a moral failure of the character she had already assessed when I was two and exploring candy.
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