A Race Against Time

Nigel, far more experienced in the East than I, was rubbing his wooden chopsticks together as if to sharpen their business ends.  Nigel is tall, about six eight, and has put on a lot of weight in the last few years.  He is a visible sign of Australian prosperity.  I’m not sure what the collective gasp I heard signified.  Was it a gasp of delight at an oncoming treat or a gasp of dismay?  Probably delight!  From behind my shoulder the waiter placed a platter on the table.   I looked into the gaping mouth and accusatory eye of another large fish cooked whole and this time served in a thin brown sauce speckled with spring onions.   Mine was a jaded eye.   Fish again!  I enjoy eating fish but it seemed as if every meal for several days  had involved a similar dish served as the centerpiece of the meal in Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and now Hanoi.

In Beijing, Nigel and I had spent one evening on our own and decided to eat in an Italian restaurant not far from the hotel. This had not been a success.  There was a Tibetan restaurant upstairs and when the Tibetan chef started singing some loud, slow, lament, as is apparently typical of homesick Tibetan chefs suffering from angst while preparing yak butter tea, the Italian restaurant responded by putting on a CD of Italian tenors singing famous arias while serving us steak and fries. This cultural war escalated for some time.  A memorable evening during which a main topic of conversation had been corruption, and its prevalence in the countries we were visiting where the common refrain is: “You just don’t understand how business is done.”  It was the same phrase we heard used in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in Bangalore.

They serve a lot of seafood dishes in Vietnam; but, according to Lionel, our host, the Vietnamese food is much better in California, ever since many Vietnamese refugees settled there after fleeing the Communists.   I’d been told that Lionel left Vietnam aged 19 and took three months getting to Hong Kong by small sailboat with three others, often landing at night on the Chinese coast.  He had subsequently made it to the U.S. where he became a U.S. citizen and a prominent scientist.  Now he was back home in Hanoi with big plans to distribute American  computers in Vietnam and improve Vietnam’s scientific computing infrastructure.  I tried to guess his age.  If Lionel had been 19 in the late 1970s at the time of the boat people he must be about 50 years old now.  His black hair was cut short and graying at the temples, but his face was unlined and his physique that of a younger man.

Lionel’s sister and his associates had stayed in Vietnam and not fled the country after North Vietnam conquered the South.  They understood Russian but not English and so the conversation was one-sided.  They had taken us to a local seafood restaurant where we were plied with beer, roasted peanuts, soup, clams, oysters, crab cakes, fish and green vegetables.  If Lionel typified a type of mad scientist prone to making outrageous statements about the veracity of colleagues with competing approaches to computational modeling, his sister beguiled with business acumen.  She spoke only in Vietnamese but probably understood a lot of the conversation in English.  She looked much younger than her brother.  She had a full head of dark hair and fashionable glasses and wore a blouse that showed a hint of cleavage, a knee length skirt and high heels.  She wore a ring on her right hand but no other jewelry.  She sat demurely watching the two foreigners talking to her brother and his business partner.  From time to time she would elegantly reach out with her chopsticks and put a morsel of something onto her plate.  As we got to know them better it became clear that she was the decision maker.  At our final meeting, this became very clear and she seemed to swell in size with our recognition of that fact, thrusting her shoulders back to emphasize her bosom as she commanded attention.  Sitting next to her at dinner that evening was a tall, quiet, mysterious, fellow who turned out to be the financial strength of the proposed venture.  He actually lived in Hong Kong to run his business involving Chinese medical instruments imported from China for sale in Vietnam.   We didn’t see him again after that evening because he flew off to China the next day on business.  It was his large Mercedes car that picked us up outside the restaurant to return us to his hotel.

Lionel explained that the fish were not as good as they used to be in his childhood when there were fish in the rice paddies and every farmer could be self sufficient year round with rice and fish from his own farm.   I got the impression that Lionel remembered his childhood before the American bombing of Hanoi as an idyllic time.  Now all of those organic rice paddies were poisoned with fertilizer that had killed the fish.  Yet from our spanking new hotel situated on the edge of a lake I saw somebody catch a fish from the bank and reel it in.   A lot of anglers had lines out into the water and so, even there, in the middle of Hanoi in September 2009, fresh fish were still to be had.  That first evening I enjoyed the clams the most.   Some deftness with chopsticks is required to ease a clam from a steamed-open shell, touch it to a little salt in a saucer and then raise it into the mouth.   This is also true when eating peanuts, often served as a side dish in Vietnam.  Etiquette dictates, I learned later, after leaving Vietnam, that food should not be taken from a serving bowl such as a bowl for clams, or peanuts, and put straight into one’s mouth; nor, and this was given especial importance, should you rub your chopsticks together as if to sharpen them.  I think on reflection that when my dining companions were complimenting me on my use of chopsticks and my rapid consumption of food, they were actually covering up their embarrassment at my poor display of table manners.

At least the Vietnamese chopsticks were wooden and much easier to manipulate than the stainless steel chopsticks used in South Korea.  My host in Seoul had been another self-made businessman, Mr. Kim.  I had concluded Kim was an honest, if a difficult, even cantankerous, individual.  As the days passed it seemed there was something fishy about our prospective Vietnamese partners.  Comments made during our visit indicated that they had paid money to arrange the most important meeting with Government officials that we were to have.   Lionel let this slip on the last morning and was rewarded with some sharp sentences in Vietnamese addressed to him by his sister.  There was also the unexplained reason why we had been driven out to a new business park outside Hanoi in order to be briefed by a senior Government official on the attractions of investment in the park.  We were visiting Hanoi to set up Lionel and his colleagues as a reseller for an American company’s products.  By what stretch of the imagination was he going to succeed at such a rate that we would be leasing prime development land outside Hanoi for a factory?  It could be that our hosts misunderstood the size of our company.  The exchange rate of dollars into Vietnamese currency quickly produced hotel bills in the millions of dong.  Perhaps we had been mistakenly given the attributes of a company 10 or 100 times bigger than we were.  When one dollar equals roughly 5.6 times ten to the minus 5^th power Vietnamese currency, mathematical mistakes are easy to make.

We knew we were having an important meeting two days later when we were conducted into an imposing building that had big rooms.  The standard building size in Hanoi appears to be a narrow, tall, building with rooms that measure three meters from side to side.  It is a healthy country where climbing upstairs to the top or fourth or fifth floor of a building is normal.  Lionel’s office was on the fourth floor of such a building.  Now, we found ourselves in a large conference room with a table that easily accommodated ten people on each side sitting with lots of elbow-room.  This shiny wooden table had a central, sunken well that ran almost its full length.  Five large bouquets of fresh flowers spaced well apart had been placed in the well in beautiful pots.  They were large bouquets, but because of the tables’ design, they did not interfere with eye contact between parties on either side of the table.  Instead, they contributed almost to a feeling of sitting around a small, intimate garden.

It was in this ambience that we began Nigel’s presentation.  Lionel had requested we give a strong product presentation about our computers being the best for weather forecasting and about our dominant market position worldwide.  In particular, he wanted Nigel to stress why we were so much better than IBM!  Instead, Nigel recycled a talk he had given before.  Its theme could be summarized as: “It’s About Staying in Front! – Every R&D Project is a Race against Time.”  He would speak a few sentences and a translator would then summarize what he had said in Vietnamese.  The audience’s attention quickly waned.   These were bureaucrats, hydrologists, and meteorologists.  They were not interested in R&D.  They wanted to know how to better track the typhoon that was currently ravaging the Philippines and was even now headed towards Vietnam.  Perhaps this was why Lionel interjected himself in the midst of Nigel’s oratory, when Nigel was still up at geosynchronous weather satellite level giving a high level global overview and had yet to descend to mundane specifics.  Once started, Lionel hogged the floor for a good ten minutes and we had little idea of what he was saying.  I assumed it was all of the things, not necessarily true, that Lionel had hoped Nigel would say.  When Nigel was finally allowed to proceed, he continued with the interrupted talk full of generalities leading to the point that: “it’s a race against time!”

I sat quietly, noting the bad signs evident from body language and the occasional remarks being thrown at the speaker.  A group at my end of the table far from the screen had started to make disparaging comments.  They were the mostly young, computer experts who had been especially invited to the meeting.   The Director smiled benevolently at them.  It appeared to me that they had taken umbrage with Lionel’s remarks and were now getting ready to send out for rotten fruit to throw at Nigel and Lionel.  They were the proud users of a recently acquired IBM computer. 

Finally, a woman scientist, the head of the meteorology applications group, could stand it no longer.  She stood up and asked a specific question in excellent English: “Please tell us: What size system would be able to run a 5 kilometer regional weather model with 60 levels, 37 time-steps and a 20 minute time to completion?”  In other words, how can you solve our problem?  If a typhoon is headed towards Vietnam and you want to forecast its likely track and where and when it will hit the coast you need to quickly run many instances of the type of model she had just described.  I felt chagrined.  This was a real race against time and what we were talking about was irrelevant.  Lionel was furious about the question.  Next day when we were wrapping up in our final meeting before heading for the airport, he let slip having paid for the meeting and told us that we should not worry about her question.  “She is an unimportant person.   You just don’t understand how business is done in Vietnam.  The decision will be made above her and you don’t need to worry about it at all.” 

Nigel far more experienced in the East than I sighed wearily at this and tried to explain how even if what Lionel said was true, the users could ensure any new system coming in was a failure if they were not supportive and inclined to be antagonistic.  It would be much better to deal with the distinguished lady scientist’s objections and win her over.  In fact, Nigel knew how to do this.  He had checked and found that she was working on a PhD from a university in Australia and that her advisor was somebody that Nigel knew well.  “Yes,” said Nigel, sitting back in his chair, “that guy owes me a big favor.  I’ll get him to put her straight.”