In these early stages my new SIS handler had calculated that I would be a useful support agent for Joe from my base in Beijing. My first task was to put him in touch with one of the most pop ular and well-connected expats in Shanghai, an old friend of mine named Tom Harper. I had no idea that the two of them would go on to hit it off as resoundingly as they did, although Joe’s natural affinity for flawed mavericks should have tipped me off.
Educated in England, Tom had inherited a small fortune at the age of twenty when his parents had died within six months of each other. He had spent the next fifteen years bouncing around the globe, earning an undergraduate degree at Berkeley, an MBA from INSEAD, marrying-briefly-a French television actress and bewildering a long line of expensive psychoanalysts. He was a man of almost limitless good humour and generosity, about whom one rarely heard an unkind word spoken. He also knew everything there was to know about having a good time in Shanghai. In three years living in the city, Tom had been a male model, a nightclub impresario, a yacht broker and a restaurateur. He was at every dinner party, every movie premiere and every bar and club launch worth mentioning. He didn’t seem to sleep more than four or five hours a night and survived on a diet of caffeine, alcohol and illegal recreational drugs. He did not know Miles Coolidge personally, but that hardly mattered; the way things worked in Shanghai, there would be a maximum of two or three degrees of separation between them. On that basis, it would only be a matter of time before Tom led Joe to his quarry.
Sunday brunch at the Westin seemed an ideal place for the two of them to meet. The Westin is the Indonesian-owned hotel on the junction of Henan Road and Guangdong Road that spoils a certain view of the Bund: look behind the old HSBC building and it’s the fat high-rise, two blocks back, with an illuminated metal crown sprouting from its roof. On Sunday mornings the hotel lays on an opulent buffet attended by wealthy Western families and twenty-something rich kids keen to impress their latest girlfriends. For around 400 renminbi-the equivalent of?25 in 2005, or a week’s wage to the average Shanghai Chinese-guests can help themselves to limitless quantities of sushi, Parma and Serrano ham, Russian caviar, roast rib of beef, freshly made tortellini and as much Veuve Clicquot champagne as they can swallow. The Westin brunch has become an institution in the city, not least as a place where people can catch up on the latest gossip, a commodity-both social and commercial-on which the overseas community thrives.
I had given Joe Tom’s number and they had arranged to meet in the lobby at midday on Sunday 30 January. Rather than describe the brunch in detail, I’ll quote from a couple of letters that Tom sent to me, both of which help to paint a picture of Joe’s first few weeks in Shanghai.
Will-
One of the things I like about China, and about Shanghai in particular, is that it’s completely meritocratic. That may sound like a strange thing to say about a city where obscene wealth and obscene poverty exist side by side, but it always seemed to me, at least from a foreigner’s point of view, that you get nowhere in China on the basis of reputation alone. Ex-Yale, ex-Sorbonne, a double-starred First from Cambridge-none of that really matters here. This place is immune to class or background. If you can’t do what you promised to do, you’ll get found out. It’s not like, say, Hong Kong or Singapore, where a lot of really average people have been making a lot of really easy money for decades. If you come to China expecting the locals to roll over and say how grateful they are, you’re in for a big shock. Only the best people succeed here. It’s completely ruthless.
So whenever I meet the latest Jardine Johnnie fresh off the plane who wants to “try his luck in Shanghai,” I’m always a bit suspicious. Do they think China owes them a living? Have they got the slightest idea what they’re getting themselves into?
All of this is a roundabout way of thanking you for putting me in touch with Joe, who I’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few weeks. For a start, he didn’t arrive with any illusions about China, which always helps. He also seems to know a hell of a lot more about China and the Chinese than most people who’ve been living here for five or ten years. Where did you say you knew him from?
We met at the Westin, as you’d recommended. There was the usual scene there: guilty investment bankers finding a three-hour slot between meetings and hookers to spend “family time” with their wife and kids; underage Chinese gymnasts turning themselves inside out in the lobby while a live band played the best of Carly Simon; a guy dressed up in a Spiderman outfit, attached to the roof by a harness, cleaning the glass windows 100ft over our heads. I’d been out clubbing all night and hadn’t been to bed. At about 10 in the morning I was sitting in Dragon with two girls from Barcelona, one of whom was coming down off a bad pill, when I looked at my watch and saw the time. Gave serious thought to cancelling the whole thing but because Joe was a friend of yours-and because I’m an extremely decent, upstanding person-I grabbed my jacket, had a shower and took a cab down to the Westin. Was at least twenty minutes late, knackered, etc, but Joe couldn’t have been nicer about it. He was in the lobby making conversation (in fluent, very old-school Mandarin) with an octogenarian cleaning woman who had bags under her eyes like Huan Huan the Panda. She looked as though nobody had bothered to speak to her since the Cultural Revolution and was busy telling Joe stories about all the old buildings in her neighbourhood which had been knocked down by developers. He took one look at me and must have realized what a mess I was in because he did most of the talking for the first twenty minutes. He also paid the bill for both of us as we went in and before long we were three-quarters of the way through a bottle of champagne, I’d forgotten all about my hangover, and it was as if we’d known one another for years.
This is the second of them. Tom Harper is one of the world’s last great letter writers, but the first half of the following email was mostly a 1,500-word account of a trip to Thailand. The section which was relevant to Joe began about halfway through:
What’s funny about Shanghai is how quickly word gets round that there’s an interesting new face in town. The other day I took Joe down to Babyface (that’s a nightclub, Will, just in case you’re too old) and introduced him to a few people I knew there, told them he used to work in the Foreign Office, etc. For some reason, this piece of information spread around town like the clap. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least a dozen random people subsequently asked me about Joe in the space of a few weeks. “How did you meet him?”
“Is he single?”
“Did he really leave the Foreign Office as a protest against the war?” One (predictable) rumour going round is that he used to be a spy, but I’m not sure about that. I can’t picture him doing the dirty. Also, he spends most of his time sleeping off hangovers at the Ritz-Carlton. Aren’t Foreign Office types supposed to behave themselves?