It was my fourth trans-Pacific flight. Back in the early 80s, I had imagined myself to be a promising martial arts student. I went to Taiwan to study kung fu, and it took three months for me to be so thoroughly humiliated that I limped back to the US with my proverbial tail between my legs.

That failed experiment did give me some exposure to Chinese culture, and I did learn a bit of Mandarin. Twenty years later, I exaggerated my language skills to swing a business trip to mainland China. The boss’s ex-wife was still with the company, and her ex made sure that she spent a lot of time on the road.

Leslie was a nice-looking woman, but she had a bad attitude about travel and frankly made a pretty lousy representative for the company. She knew no foreign languages and was proud of that fact. She dissed the locals constantly and seemed oblivious to the fact that they could usually understand English.

I took two trips to visit our manufacturing facilities in China with little-miss-ugly-American. By the second trip, the reps were ignoring her and talking to me since she was rude and really didn’t give a damn about her job. We let her go on a shopping binge and finished the actual work.

By the late 90s, the boss had finally dumped the bitch completely, and I was able to take over her job. About every six months, I’d endure a flight to the other side of the world and keep our production affiliates in line. While I couldn’t operate business transactions without a translator, I learned how to deal with the egos, corruption, and incompetence of our business partners.

In 1999, I had my first “solo” business trip. I needed to delay the shipment of several cargo containers of electronics because we’d wound up with too much inventory. Sure, that was the golden era of the tech boom, but a lot of the companies that were raking in the cash didn’t actually do anything, and hence they didn’t create as much demand for hardware as we’d anticipated. At the time, it seemed like no big deal, but in hindsight...

At any rate, I flew into Shanghai and was met at the airport by the head of the factory and by a hired translator. The head of the factory, Mr. Wen, was a balding, middle-aged man in a suit who had a chronic cough because of a respiratory infection. The air quality around Shanghai was nasty, and lots of people smoked; lung ailments were especially common.

The translator was a college student named Mei Hua (“Rose”). She was bright and spoke English with a delightful Chinese-British accent. Physically, she was plain and wore her hair in that ghastly institutional Maoist style that kids in early grades were required to wear. I got along well with Rose right away, and I chatted with Mr. Wen as best I could. A trans-Pacific flight will really mess with your biological clock, and the flight over was packed solid, so I didn’t sleep much.

I was picked up at 8:00 a.m., and I started sucking down sodas to try to get enough caffeine in me to make it through the day ahead. When we got to the factory, I noticed that I was being treated with greater deference than usual, which meant that the mood was positively cloying. After an hour of niceties, I started to figure out what was going on. In dribs and drabs, it was explained to me that Mr. Wen’s company had purchased an old factory from the Communist Party, and within a week, a low-grade earthquake had reduced it to rubble.

The factory wasn’t going to be able to meet our production schedule, or rather, our old production schedule. I was tempted to explain right away that it wouldn’t be a problem, but I remained silent and learned, through Rose, that more bad news was coming. Evidently, Mr. Wen had put himself in a bad financial situation, and he was going to need my promise that we weren’t going to run to his competitors in order to get a loan to rebuild the new property.

Once the picture became clear, I started to feel pretty good despite my fatigue. I could do them a huge favor and make my boss happy at the same time. I had my best poker face on and said that I’d have to call the company that evening (local time) to see if I could help them. By the early afternoon, I left the factory’s office with Rose in tow and headed to my hotel room. It was supposed to be a four-star hotel, but it was basically just nice.

Rose had to leave me in the lobby, as the law was very strict about men and women going to a hotel room together unless (and I’m not kidding) they can produce a marriage license. She took me to one side and asked if I needed anything at all. I knew that I could ask for damned near anything, and Mr. Wen would pay for it to butter me up, but I try not to mix business with pleasure; well, at least not when I’m in the middle of negotiations.

I took a nap, called my boss in the middle of my night, and told him that I thought I could get us our delay without much trouble. After that, I got caught up on my sleep.

I awoke early and had a western-style breakfast. I was looking pretty sharp and feeling pretty good by the time that I was scheduled to meet Rose in the lobby. Mr. Wen was supposed to be there too, but he had a doctor’s appointment. Rose asked me about American culture, and I politely corrected the inevitable misconceptions that folks have in other countries because they watch “Dallas” and “Baywatch” and think that’s how Americans really live.