The Red Packets

In Chinese and other East Asian societies, a red envelope or red packet or red pocket (known as hong bao in Mandarin, ang pao in Hokkien and lai see in Cantonese, and lì xì in Vietnamese) is a monetary gift which is given on holidays or special occasions.

—Wikipedia

Excerpt from a journal entry

Last night, at an artists’ gathering, we talked about Guangzhou, of all places, and I heard two stories of what had happened to two of the artists while they were there. Louis was a man of good features. Tall and broad-faced, he had a sonorous voice. His words produced an odd effect on the three male and three female artists alike, but the female more so than the male. All the artists are of the same ethnicity, from the same country originally, and all have acquired foreign citizenship. There was only one writer. Rod is his name.

Louis’s story

I am walking down a street in Guangzhou. A sunny day. People throng the street. I need to get to a meeting with friends but I get lost on my way. I stop a pedestrian to ask directions. He starts speaking Cantonese to me, which I do not understand a single word of. So I say to him, “Mandarin please!” He switches to Mandarin immediately.

As I turn to walk down the street in the direction he has pointed out for me I bump into someone. Actually, I don’t know if I bump into him or he bumps into me. As a stranger in a strange place, it doesn’t hurt to apologise first, but in this case my apology is to have an unforeseen after-effect. As I turn to go, this man grabs hold of my collar and says, “Why did you bump into me?” and points to his knee. I see something there that I had not noticed before: a patch of mud. I set about to dust it off while apologising profusely but he remains adamant that this is not enough. “These are new trousers but they’re ruined now,” he says.

I look up into a face that does not show any inclination to make jokes. I look around and realise that the street is now deserted except for a number of strange faces that seem to have sprung up from nowhere, all approaching me. “Eight hundred dollars,” the man says. “Eight hundred dollars and we’ll let you go.”

I am surrounded. On my right is the man who has made the demand. On my left is someone else scowling into my face. Behind me I can feel the hot breath of a third person on my nape. And in the periphery of my vision there appear to be three or four people closing in on me. The first thought that comes to me is, “I’m in deep shit.” The second is, “There is no escape.” I am carrying a large amount of cash on me, more than ten thousand. If I take eight hundred out of this, they’ll pounce on me and take the rest.

Seeing that I am hesitating, the person behind me thrusts something hard against my lower back and mutters under his breath, “Let’s finish him off.”

I regain my composure and say, “I’m terribly sorry but I’m sure your trousers are definitely worth that much and I am more than happy to pay you for the damage. I don’t have that much cash on me, though.”

“Five hundred dollars is okay,” the man who bumped into me says. It is not till then that I notice something unmistakable, something resembling home. These people are speaking with my hometown accent!

I switch from Mandarin to my broad north-eastern accent, in a much more relaxed voice. “Brothers. Aren’t we from the same place? We are all friends of the same stock, aren’t we? Even though I have been overseas for many years, you can tell I speak exactly the same accent as you guys. I am in Australia, Melbourne, you know. If you don’t believe me, I can show you this.”

My matching accent seems to have produced the desired effect in reducing the tension: the hard object is withdrawn from my back as the scowling man, obviously the head of the gang, relaxes his facial muscles and takes my passport in his hand.

“Look,” I point at my photo. “Doesn’t this look like me? My face is as square as any one of yours. I know it’s all in English but my name is in pinyin. See? Zhuang, my surname, fair dinkum, you know.”

“They didn’t do badly,” the scowling man says as he waves the other fellows away like flies. “The Australians, I mean, in the Olympic Games. They could swim! How’s your life there?”

* * *

Louis paused here, sipping his Red Gown tea with an appreciative noise, and said, “Despite my emphatic invitation that we all go to a nearby restaurant to treat them to a sumptuous meal they said no, as if they were afraid of hurting me. I think my accent saved my arse.”

The journal keeper

When the artists had arrived, they brought gifts. D brought a whole roast duck. Z’s gift I didn’t take note of because I wasn’t there when he arrived. Y brought a dish she had prepared. When K finally arrived, after an hour or so, she put down a bowl of candies on the long wooden table. As for L, he gave each of us a copy of his art magazine that had Chinese characters accompanied by moderately good English, such as “introduction of someone’s work” instead of “to someone’s work”. No big deal, though.

Rod’s story

“It’s your passport,” Rod said to Louis, “not your accent that did the job. Something happened to me in Guangzhou, too.”

As Louis and Rod talked, the others were absorbed in their own chit-chat, occasionally lending an ear to what was being said but losing attention as soon as they realised they had lost track of too much of the story to understand what was going on. This is what happened, in Rod’s version.

* * *

A couple of years ago, around the Spring Festival, when I was in Wuhan on a tour, I had purchased a number of red packets in order to put gift money in them for the kids of my friends. There were two left over, which I kept with me without knowing why. I just thought I might have some use for them one day. Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I thought I might use them as souvenirs once I arrived back in Australia, but I’d forgotten that as soon as I packed them in my suitcase.

When I arrived in Guangzhou I chose a hotel I’d never stayed in before, a four-star that provided free breakfast and cost about 400 a night. It is my experience that five-star hotels in China are only there for show. They charge a hefty amount. They don’t give you free breakfast. On the contrary, they charge heaps for morning meals; 100 bucks a meal is not out of the ordinary. On top of that, they have heaps of problems of their own. In a hotel that cost me 1188 a night, as soon as I checked into my room and turned the hot tap on, I waited half an hour without getting a drop of hot water while cold water of a rusty colour poured out. When I complained, the hotel gave me a larger room that cost 1888 a night. I remained unhappy. It took me a day to find out why. As few could afford such prices, these rooms were left unoccupied for long periods. You could smell the mouldiness everywhere. You found the power points hard to plug in because they were shoddily made and had never been used.

Worse still, these hotels were dangerous. In one five-star hotel, when I took a shower, I accidentally dropped the glass plate that was meant to hold the soap. It smashed to smithereens. On checking out, I was told that I had to pay thirty bucks for it. “That’s absolutely atrocious,” I said to the manager. “You should thank me for not getting hurt. Just imagine if someone gets hurt on those breakable glass plates while taking a shower. Please pass my advice on to the manager that the hotel replace the glass plates with steel if they do not want to see their legal costs soar.”

Anyway, I stayed in this quite comfortable four-star hotel for a few days till I began to tire of Guangzhou. One hour’s bus journey away, Shenzhen was a good option after Guangzhou’s hard-to-understand lingo and lack of variety, so much eye-shopping, so little new to see in its various museums, and its mediocre food. It was after the night I had the eels that I decided to go. I had always enjoyed food in that particular restaurant in Shamian, a colonial island inhabited by Westerners more than a century ago, but the eels turned my stomach as soon as they were served. At first taste, I found my brows knitting into a knot. I said to the waiter, “Get your manager to come.” When a young man turned up, presumably the manager, I said to him, “Have a taste of this yourself.” It tasted like nothing eely and it seemed days old, with an underlying smell of rot. As soon as he took a bite, the manager apologised and withdrew the plate of eels.

I went back to my hotel and gave my friend Henry a call in Shenzhen. Henry was a businessman who ran a successful business in Cairo after deciding against Australia a decade or so ago. He had thought of expanding into Australia entirely on his own after he decided to run his company like a family business instead of employing more and more people and always growing. The thinking that lay behind this was based on his unhappy experience. Only a few years into his business, his staff had begun quitting. It didn’t take him long to find out why. Once his guys acquired enough knowledge and experience in the business they would quit to set up shop for themselves, taking part of his clientele with them. He had been running his business like a school to train staff for free!

After he set up his family business, Henry found it easier to run it with more profit than loss. As he cast about for a place to expand into, he set his eyes on Australia, a country that he heard was friendly towards foreign business investment. His trips to Melbourne and Sydney left a strong impression on him but, in the end, he decided not to because he could not find a friend to share the venture. I mean, I was his friend but I wasn’t into business. Eventually, he took his business to Egypt.

I’ll tell you that story later but let me finish with my red packets first or else I’ll forget it. When I thought of Henry and his two kids, I thought of the two red packets, each with a hundred Australian dollars. Years ago, when an uncle of mine visited China, he gave each relative of his a hundred US dollars. Now, that tradition is carried on. Although one Aussie dollar is not as much as one American dollar, it’s still a lot if it is converted into Chinese People’s Money.

You may wonder why Henry had two kids but you can probably guess. Despite the one-child policy, people can have more than one if they choose to. The downside of this is you have to pay a big fine. Henry wasn’t happy with having one daughter; he wanted a male heir to his fortune. When the boy was born, he paid a fine of 600,000 yuan, slightly more than 110,000 Australian dollars. I heard the story later when I met him over dinner. According to Henry, it was a “small fee, quite manageable”. Sounded like a piece of cake to him.

I took two banknotes, a hundred dollars each, from my black waist bag, folded them and put one in each packet, carefully pulling the flap-ears down over them. On the outside of the packets was printed a pattern of loaded boats with gilded sails, symbolising a trip bringing treasure from overseas. Well, a hundred Australian dollars for each kid—not too bad, I thought.

Normally, if I went out, I’d leave all my important documents, such as my passport and credit cards as well as bunches of banknotes, in my waist bag in the safe in my hotel room, and key in the safety code. But the morning of my departure, when I went to the dining hall for breakfast, I left the door of the safe ajar, as I knew I’d be back soon. When I went back to my room and put everything together, I gave Henry a call. “I’m checking out now and I’ll catch the midday bus for Shenzhen. When I arrive, I’ll give you a call.”

It was not till I reached the front of the queue at the tiny window in the long-distance coach station that I took out my wallet from my pocket and saw that the red packets had gone. I apologised to the ticket officer, left the queue, and searched my black waist bag and my suitcase. I couldn’t find the red packets. I rang Henry. “Sorry, Henry, but I can’t come now as I’ve lost something important.” I didn’t tell him the details but just told him that I might be a while.

Back in the hotel, I had a session with the hotel security manager. He listened carefully to my story, produced a piece of paper, and asked me to write it down for him. When I’d finished, he got me to sign the paper and photocopied it for me, saying, “Mr Rod, that’s all we can do so far. If we find your lost property, we’ll give you a call.”

The words may sound innocuous, but they hurt. Inherent in them was the message that they would dismiss the matter as soon as you were out of sight. All I could remember was the interval between when I had left the room for breakfast and the moment when I had stepped back into it. And the importance of my loss: my Australian passport, my three credit cards and 1000 Australian dollars, plus the two red packets!

Sitting on a sofa in the hotel foyer, I dwelt upon my loss. The more I thought of it, the less I liked it. I decided to book myself one more night and have it out with them. As soon as the booking was confirmed, I dialled 110, the emergency number. A male voice appeared on the line, speaking Mandarin with a Cantonese accent. After he heard my story, he said it might take about half an hour as the police station was a fair way from the hotel.

I waited, and thought of my loss—the first time something like this had happened to me in years of visiting China. The numbness of my mind was punctuated by people walking in and out of the hotel. The security man was nowhere to be seen.

A man and a woman in police uniform turned up, both young, both armed with pistols, half an hour later as promised. I took them to my new room, right next to the one I had checked out of this morning. They sat down, the woman police officer on the edge of my bed, and I started telling them the story. Soon the security man reappeared, followed by a stocky man he introduced to me as the “manager”. Their arrival interrupted my description of the incident to the police, as they wanted to talk to the “manager” first, outside in the corridor.

I could hear the muffled conversation in the corridor but could not understand a word of what was said in Cantonese. I recalled something and waited till the policeman came back into the room. Then I said to him, “You must get them to check the videotape recorded this morning for that particular time.” Then the “manager” put his head through the door and said, in Mandarin, “Mr Rod, can you come over for a minute please?”

Curious, I went outside. He beckoned me to follow him to the next door. At the door, he stopped and said, “Did you say you left your bag in the safe?”

I said, “That’s right.”

“Now let me go in and have a look,” he said, and went in. There was a sense of elasticity in his words as well as in his steps. Almost immediately he said, “Look what’s here!”

I stepped into the room, just in time to see him withdraw his hand from the safe. In the room’s suspicious semi-darkness I saw a mass of something darker than the rest. My heart gave a wild jump. Could it be true? I reached out and touched something familiar, cloth-like and bulky.

In the description I had given the police, I emphasised the two red packets. I had stressed the fact that I realised I had lost something because I found the red packets missing at the last minute. Now I unzipped the waist bag in a single movement, impatient to get the red packets out. The contents splashed onto the made bed in a mess, and what stood out was neither my Australian passport nor the bunch of credit cards. It was the redness of the packets, filled with Australian money. Holding them high, one in each hand, I said to all present, including the “manager” and the security man, “Didn’t I tell you? The packets! They are both here, just like I said.” 

The journal-keeper’s entry continues

People had different responses to Rod’s story. Louis dismissed it as nothing surprising, as internal thefts were rife these days. Hotel staff steal and carve up the proceeds among themselves. Sean, who had been quiet, pinned it down to the all-powerful Australian passport: “If you were a Chinese citizen, they would never give back the bag to you even if you called the police. They would have resolved the issue by giving the lion’s share to the police.”

I don’t know. I have no idea what is truth and what is falsehood. I held back from telling them anything because I did not want to share with them my misery, a loss I had once incurred when travelling in the Netherlands. I think Rod told us his story because he had successfully got back his stolen property and Louis told us his story because he had succeeded in getting out of a robbery unscathed, whereas if I had told them about my irretrievable loss I would not only have shamed myself in their eyes but I’d also have caused them to look down on me as someone incompetent and inexperienced among Europeans. I’ll hold back till I meet someone who is willing to share his or her failure with me one day.