5 Things You Learn Pretending To Be A Businessman In China

4

They Would Get A Fake Backstory, And Very Little Time To Memorize It

How much Donald and the other rent-a-foreigners would have to actually interact with Chinese attendees varied, but often, merely smiling and looking white wasn’t enough. They’d need a fake name and backstory, which they would have to play up in conversations … information they would often be given just minutes before. “Sometimes we were told before we left, ‘You’re an investor from Florida. This company makes silicone products. This is your name. Here are your business cards. Hand them out.’ Other times, I would get an email with flight info and who to meet. That’s it.”

You might think that leaving all of that for the last minute sounds like a terrible idea and/or a comic relief bit in Ocean’s 12. You’d be right. On one job, Donald had two hours to prepare on a car ride from the airport to the factory, learning a new identity and all sorts of facts and figures about the metal industry and U.S.-China trade. Oh, and to memorize a speech without cards.

“Inside, we all messed up. The speeches were all over the place. I got part of my name wrong — I used my real last name by accident, and I had to pretend it was my middle name. We mistook some workers for bosses. One of us even bowed terribly in the Japanese style because he thought it was universal across Asia. He even asked about sumo wrestling [a distinctly Japanese thing] to THE MAYOR, which was bad, because our host had told us like ten times to not say anything unless spoken to.”

And yet it worked. “We pulled it off. They were impressed. I knew enough of the language to know that the mayor and people from the factory were excited.” It usually didn’t matter what they said or did, as long as they said and did it as white people.

Usually.

“So to the question, ‘How much investment can you guarantee?’ I would say, ‘We plan to invest a good sum of money.’ Then the host, who knew exactly what to say but couldn’t, translated my words to the company line.”

Knowing that, some of the other phony businessmen would take the opportunity to entertain themselves. “I know of one guy who bragged about going through a meeting saying things like, ‘My favorite breakfast includes an egg McMuffin and hashbrowns’ to the question ‘What will growth be like in the next five years?'” It didn’t matter — the translator just says what the crowd needs to hear, and everyone nods their approval.

“This executive asked about new markets, and I totally blanked on the answer, so I said, ‘New markets can be everywhere you want to be.’ Like that Visa ad. My host looked confused and instead rattled off places like ‘Vancouver.’ And the executives seemed fine with it.”

Still …

2

This Leads To Some Ridiculous Near-Misses

Donald has come close to exposure a number of times. He was able to list incident after incident from peers that ranged from “cultural insensitivity” to “How are they not in prison?” One rent-a-foreigner asked at a gathering of local officials if Mao Zedong was coming (he’s been dead since the Ford Administration). Others praised China’s democratic government (it … isn’t).

“There was an American coming from San Francisco we met at the airport in Beijing. He said he had ‘loaded up’ on Chinese to impress everyone … they always appreciated a few words of Mandarin. It was the average mayor meet and greet, but we all also had to give a few sentences in a speech. He had lines he translated the night before without checking with our host. He said them correctly — in Taiwanese.”

If you didn’t know, China and Taiwan have a complicated history. The Republic of China was started by the capitalists who got pushed out by Mao Zedong, and there has been ill will and near-war between the mainland and the island ever since. “The room was silent after he said his piece, and he was smiling and everything, not even knowing he did anything wrong.”

This sort of thing is bound to happen, though, considering how often these guys are forced to just wing it. Fake Westerners have had to do everything from pretend to play instruments to pretend to be celebrities. Donald had to do an Australian accent on one occasion (which, according to a Australian colleague of his, was godawful), and has also had to fill in his own background when he wasn’t given one. On one occasion, he was only given the name of a company and where it was based, but was asked questions about himself. He had nothing … except the fact that he had recently read a Kurt Cobain biography.

“So I was like, ‘I’m from Seattle and I like playing music in my spare time. The guitar.’ That was the first thing that came into my mind. I remember I had his high school’s name at the ready in case they asked that.”

His closest call came with a local reporter, justifiably suspicious of an American investor with a sketchy background from a company he’d never heard of. This reporter not only knew English, but also knew about the industry Donald was pretending to be a part of. After Donald was asked a particularly difficult question, “My host started saying something, but the reporter looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘No, from him.’ This went way past social niceties, and I could see in his eyes that he knew I was bullshit.”

This was at the meeting about ball bearings we mentioned earlier, so Donald went off-script and “started talking about how ball bearings usage in the U.S. could reflect China’s growing need.” He knew some stuff about ball bearings from having worked on cars, and rambled about that for a bit. When another American waved him over, Donald took the opportunity to escape, and he managed to duck the reporter for the rest of the night with his hosts’ help.