Intrepid Women: The Language of Currency
by Kate St. Vincent Vogl (New York City)
Traveling to another country is a bit like traveling to an alien planet. “Assume laws of gravity won’t apply,” international marketing guru Christin Walth says, “and just roll with it.”
With this attitude, no matter how strange the land, Walth has always landed on her feet. In charge of marketing for Microsoft in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, she’s worked in Stockholm, London, Paris and Shanghai. In all her travels, Walth has found one universal truth, even in the remotest reaches of China: the common language of currency. Even street vendors pull out foreign phrases as if another of their most precious wares. “Beautiful lady,” they’ll say, “for you special deal.” It’s small talk that’ll get shoppers to buy, these micro-entrepreneurs know.
You’ll find the same tactics along the Great Wall, on a climb beginning in Sumatai. This is not a tourist section of Mutianyu where vendors under red and white umbrellas sell Coke and trinkets in Chinese-laden English—and perpetuate the urban legend that this Modern Wonder of the World is visible from the moon. (That’s the equivalent of being able to see a human hair from two miles away. From a low orbit, though, if you know where to look, under the right conditions, it should be visible, according to astronaut Leroy Chiao. If someone tries to tell you it’s any clearer than that, she just might be trying to sell you something.)
On that 10 km mountain steep stretch to Jinshanling, stone treads crumble at your feet as you hold onto the steps by your face, in hopes of soon reaching the next sentinel station built two thousand years before, where guards staved off invading Mongolians.
In America, we’d rope off these shambled unsafe sections. In China, signs with transposed letters and other typos are the sole barriers to crossing.
Who could guess, then, that the passerby striking up a gentle conversation is but looking for a sale? When no one buys, the Chinese woman will scoot away from the wall and disappear into scrubby woods, running. Not in fear, but in determination to find as quickly as she can another customer, somewhere along that fortress wall stretching over four thousand miles—as if a scar along the mountain ridge, a reminder of the Herculean effort man will sometimes make to keep strange neighbors out rather than befriend them.
The modern Chinese iteration of the entrepreneurial spirit now lays at the feet of Chairman Mao himself.
Literally.
For a dollar, you can buy a bouquet of plastic flowers by a mausoleum entrance strikingly similar to the Lincoln Memorial. You’ll barely have time to place the flowers upon a cart by Mao’s tomb as you’re marched by. When the cart is full, guards will tote it back outside, where the flowers are ready for another round, another mourner paying respects. No one there demands fresh flowers, nor does anyone ask for the right to linger at the small glass case entombing a man who wrought tormented change for his people. It’s his people filing past at a pace dictated by stone-faced guards, armed with machine guns.
At home, the guards’ lives are driven as much by consumerism as ours. Given the billboards lining the roads and subway walls, it could well be their wives, too, who want nothing more than a product that can whiten their skin to look more like the Westerners—the ones who’ve brought values in as much as China ships products out.
As universal as the language of money, though, there’s often a local dialect. A means of distribution. And if you don’t follow these rules, you might as well be from an alien planet. When a Swedish colleague of Walth’s moved to the Philippines, she planned on pocketing all the tax dollars she no longer had to pay out. She didn’t understand the island nation’s custom of distributing wealth a different way. And so neighbors started talking: she wasn’t hiring local help, she wasn’t looking after her neighbor.
She finally got the message.
In Sweden, you pay your taxes. In the Philippines, you hire a nanny, a housecleaner and a driver. Even if you don’t really need them.
As Americans, particularly as American women, we should not be surprised in our travels by the universal nature of the entrepreneurial spirit. Witness China, a country willing to forgo a dollar to make more —as in its singular willingness to shut down factories if only to broadcast clear skies to Olympic viewers.
As if our familiar laws of science won’t ultimately apply.
