Chapter 40 - 1988 Epilogue

Chapter 40 Version 4

1988

John exited the car and walked out to the waterfront in front of the Bund in Shanghai. The Whangpoo River, where Stanley’s ship led the Allied fleet into Shanghai in 1945, was the traditional heart of Shanghai. He looked out upon the moorings in the river and felt a faint familiarity with the place. He went inside. The banquet hall on the second floor was old but well kept. The celebration was for the progress made in constructing the feasibility study or the “FS” that would determine whether the joint venture that was already seven years in negotiation would be financially viable.

For the task of constructing the FS, John had brought to China a state of the art Grid 386 chip based laptop computer. The US State Department was consulted to see if the laptop could be brought into Red China in July of 1988. The two color screen was halloween orange plasma on a black background. There were no financial templates available for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program so in the six working days they were in Shanghai, John had produced a P&L, balance sheet , cash flow and capital spending model for the joint venture going out 10 years. Sales were adjusted to make the numbers work out to an acceptable level. John worked on the model as numbers were defined by members of the negotiating team during the day and he worked into the nights in his room on the 17^th floor of the new Shanghai Hilton overlooking the city of an estimated fifteen million people housed in buildings three and four stories high stretching in all directions. The high-rise developments were islands of new construction in a sea of older urban sprawl. Fifteen percent of all the high-rise construction cranes in the world were currently in Shanghai.

“Everyone has an interesting story” said a member of John‘s team who was the Asian general manager. “If you get a chance, ask Mr. Li about his time being rehabilitated in the countryside during Mao’s Great Leap Forward”. Mr Li was the accounting and finance specialist representing the Chinese government in the negotiations. The translator assigned to do the translating between the teams decided not to show up for the week. To avoid a totally unproductive trip, the Asian general manager from John’s team assumed the role of translator. The GM spoke mandarin but he could understand a passable Shanghainese. He also spoke fluent Vietnamese from his time working for USAID during the Vietnam War and enough Korean to get by. One morning the GM was quite haggard from lack of sleep. He later explained that he had a 3 am meeting with Deng Xiaoping’s son the night before.

With the FS well on its way to done, a banquet was held the night before they were to leave for Seoul South Korea by way of Japan. There were no direct flights from China to South Korea as technically, Red China and South Korea were still at war from the 1950’s. At the banquet at the Bund, a number of delicacies were served. John ate a number of frog’s legs that were very tasty. His Chinese hosts watched John intently as John tasted a gelatinous blob. He decided it had the texture of a Polish dish that his mother Jane made for the holidays called studzienina that was jellied pigs feet. With studzienina as a reference, he downed the rest of the Chinese delicacy. The Chinese told John that he had just eaten sea slug. John declined a second helping. Other Chinese food tried during John stay was grilled eel, tastes like trout, and goose liver pate which though quite good stained his tongue brown.

Had he known that his uncle Stanley was on the first ship into Shanghai after the Japanese were defeated in World War II, the banquet at the Bund would have been a good time to offer up this interesting family story. Unfortunately, John did not discover this story until well after his uncle Stanley’s death in the mid-1990’s.

John returned that evening to start packing for South Korea. Shanghai’s new airport allowed the large 747 airplanes to land in Shanghai. It had one terminal building with nine gates but only three gates were operational. There had been no downtime for any shopping and John ended up buying gifts at the airport shop using up as much renminbi yuan as he could at the 3.5 exchange rate. Having some trinkets to bring home to Mary and his two daughters, John put on his Sony Walkman and listened to Tracy Chapman’s album containing “Fast Car” and “Revolution”.

Wife Mary and children Brookye and Sandy took John’s absence to travel home to Louisville for a few weeks. Mary had taught first grade in Cairo West Virginia for two years while John finished up his MBA at Ohio University in Athens Ohio in the late 1970’s. She had finished up her bachelor’s degree at Marietta College in 1976 after attending the University of Louisville before she married John in 1974.  With all of her credits in art from her associate degree from Green Mountain College and her education classes from U of L, Mary had a double major from Marietta and dual certification in elementary education 1-8 grades and art K-12. She taught art in Worcester City Schools in the late 1980’s. For a while she had her own art studio on Main Street in Holden when schools cut back on art and music programs to save money in the early 1990’s. Mary supported her daughter’s high school interests in art, music and theater including when she led a group of students to construct and paint a giant castle set for their annual madrigal dinner complete with a large painted rose window.  She taught first grade in a private school in North Brookfield for a few years in the late 1990’s before getting a job teaching art at Notre Dame Academy, a private Catholic girls high school in Worcester.

“How many people live in Taegu?” John asked the leader of the company delegation as the aircraft prepared to land in south central South Korea.  They had a meeting with some lawyers in Seoul before heading to Taegu.

“Taegu is about the same size as Worcester” was the response. That would be about 160,000 thought John. The city below seemed much larger than Worcester.

“About 3 million” responded the president of the company that John’s group was there to review as a potential acquisition.

“Let’s go to dinner to my favorite restaurant. I have not had Chinese food in a while” said the company president.

Korean Chinese food turned out to be garlic with Chinese food added. The real Korean food was much more interesting with John trying grilled octopus, kimchi and grilled garlic later in the trip.

Going over to Asia, there was no perceived jet lag for John. Coming back, John was OK until the next morning when he could not stand and walk across the room without falling to one side. He was worn down going into the financial closing for the quarter and yearly budget process. He also needed to finish up the FS. He was on overload working from 7am to 7pm as a normal day and added hours during “crunch time’. He made some inquiries and arranged a transfer back to the operational side of the business from corporate. He had only planned to work in finance for a few years starting in 1981 because that was the weakest area of knowledge getting his only B in his MBA in the Accounting and Finance class. He stayed in finance as his personality suited the job of analyst but the schedule wore him out.

Back in operations in 1989, he worked on activity based costing, simplification of the complex pricing methods, two computer ERP conversions to MacPac software and then ten years later to SAP software. Outside of work John joined the Episcopal and then the Congregational churches and had the time to assist in his daughters high school interests in art, music and particularly theater set construction. John served as the treasurer of the high school theater booster group. The theater department took a trip to Broadway in NYC to see the play “Jekyll and Hyde” that John and Mary were fortunate to tag along in 1998.  The trip took a side visit to the top of the World Trade Center. Outside at the top of the WTC, Manhattan stretched out below but the noise of the city was too far away to hear. The quiet was unexpected. At work John also had a stint as manager of production planning & inventory control for an $85 million abrasive division. Finally he served as the accounting and finance overseer of the million dollars per month Worcester works utilities and the half billion dollars of abrasive’s North American fixed assets before retiring in 2015 after 36 years with his company. The excessive work load done by corporate personnel in the 1980’s had become normal for all exempt employees by the time John retired and John along with many of his coworkers were far exceeding the nominal 40 hour work week. Retirement to pursue digital photography, reading, writing, yoga and walking in the woods was a welcome option for a 63 year old.

Daughter Brookye had an assignment from school to do some family tree work in the late 1980’s. Where were our grandparents and great-grandparents born? Mary’s parents were doing family tree work to see if they could get into the DAR and the SAR so they provided their colonial Virginia to Louisville roots for Mary’s mother. Mary’s father’s South Carolina and Civil War roots were being researched. As far as John’s Polish side of the family, he would have to check with relatives as he was clueless on his grandparent’s hometowns or interesting stories in Poland or their coming to America.  John did remember some of his uncle Stanley’s stories about World War II.

“We will have to check on that.”