Any review of this book is bound to begin with the story the author begins with. In the early 1980s she was in Shenzhen, aged 29 and representing her American company, when a Chinese business executive asked for her price. “You mean the price my company’s asking?” she said. No, her translator replied. He wants to know how much you as a woman would cost if he wanted to possess you on a permanent basis.
I Stand Corrected tells the story of how the author, an experienced and successful magazine editor and publisher in the US, went to Beijing to join her son who was studying at a university there. It had been suggested to her that a book written for Chinese businessmen about what they should expect from Westerners in the way of etiquette would be popular. Many Western habits, after all, from the handshake to the presentation of business cards with no Chinese text, had consistently proved baffling to people in China.
First, she relates the well-known difficulties of taking up residence in the Chinese capital. People didn’t like talking about the past, she discovers, and it took one close friend nine years before she told her she had watched her father being beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution. But her son comes to her aid, explaining how, among other things, everything is slightly illegal in China (including, she later explains, building a golf-course, though many exist). It’s best to do what you want to do and hope for the best, the son suggests.
And so she sets off on her book. “Under no circumstances ask questions about a guest’s or the host’s wealth,” she advises, and then “baseball caps are not appropriate attire in a business setting.”
But Westerners, she learns, also have to learn to respect Chinese dislikes, such as whistling, blowing your nose into a handkerchief and then putting it in your pocket, pointing, snapping your fingers, discussing business at a first meal and, most important of all, causing someone to lose face.
She frequently indulges in digressions. She tells of having a large bat fly into her abundant hair in Africa, having her marriage ceremony conducted by the captain of a small Peruvian boat on the Amazon and recounts many incidents from her former professional life in the US, such as confronting Anthony Burgess about a late article. She refers to the disdainful attitude of “virtually every” waiter in France, but there’s also an extended account of her son’s educational experiences at a French school in LA. And the mere mention of the alleged Chinese fondness for squirrels is sufficient trigger for her to embark on a lengthy account of a problem she once had with a squirrel in New York.
She also writes at length about anything and everything in China, such as a super-luxurious resort in Guangdong that was all-suite and employed 1,000 people. A chapter on China’s new middle-class leads inevitably to one on the new Chinese freedom to travel for pleasure. Several paragraphs on Chinese street-food veer off into memories of LA during her son’s childhood until the book begins to feel like a compendium, albeit an occasionally entertaining one, that will include anything at all that increases its word-count.
There are dubious statements such as “At the time I decided to make the trip…the closest Burma had come to any semblance of stability was during its golden age in the eleventh century.” The old story of a waiter in Japan running down the street after you to return a tip is repeated. (Her section on tipping, incidentally, is flawed by her failure to understand that a tip is essentially to show how affluent the giver is, and not to reward anything. “I’ve paid a lot, and look, I can afford to pay even more.” What else explains why we are expected to give a tip, say, to a taxi-driver, but not to a bus conductor, in an expensive restaurant but not in a cafeteria?)
This, in other words, is an endlessly bifurcating narrative that ends up looking like a patchwork quilt. First maybe comes an extract from her book on etiquette, then perhaps some paragraphs on a feature of life in China that differs from life in the US, then some historical background, followed by a memory of the author’s from her earlier life, and then, when her own experiences threaten to run dry, something about her son’s experiences. Eventually, you come up gasping for breath from a narrative that’s nothing if not a tribute to the supposedly brief modern attention-span.
So I Stand Corrected, though partly a book about China, is to a rather greater extent a book about Eden Collinsworth. Potential readers in Taiwan will understandably tend to be rather more interested in the former than the latter. So what is the value of her Chinese analysis?
I have to say that it appears to me more conventional than original. All the usual facets of life in China are there. They are far too many to list, but they include Beijing’s attempts to control social media, CCTV (but it’s not long before we’re off to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the author went once), Chinese trains, Chinese toilets (with a digression on Japanese toilets), the length of China’s history, the one-child policy, Xi Jinping (習近平), deference, the Monkey King, and Weibo.
Her Chinese-language book, The Tao of Improving Your Likability, which eventually became a best-seller, was adopted as a textbook for Beijing University’s MBA program, and led to Collinsworth being invited to write a course in deportment for China’s public school system.
I Stand Corrected, it could be argued, is a book devised to please the conventional American reader. If it didn’t end up pleasing me very much it was because I prefer the trenchant odd-ball to the smoothly successful corporate executive. It reads like a spin-off of The Tao, and indeed incorporates significant chinks of it. But I doubt if there’ll be a translation into Chinese.
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