Serendipity
Progress in developing the new rented space is slow. The main problems are the lack of funds and
the lack of a clone. I am overwhelmed
with work. This is a limiting factor, to
state the obvious.
I have vague notions of using all the shelf space to display
items for sale, items that foreigners find it hard to find. But that would mean wholesale bulk purchases,
which requires large cash reserves. Then
there is the pickiness of the foreigner.
If I carry mustard, and it’s not the kind of mustard the foreigner
prefers, will they walk away empty handed?
Expat A: “Mustard?
Here in Changzhou? Well, there’s
Metro.”
Newcomer: “But what about Grandma’s Nook? I hear they have imported stuff.”
Expat A: “Oh, they only have Gulden’s Spicy Brown; you have
to go to Metro to find German Dijon.”
Newcomer: “is that the store an hour away on the bus? But
Grandma’s is a ten minute walk.”
Expat A: “Well, if you want Dijon, which is what I always
use at home in *pickacountry*….”
Another idea floating in my brain is to create a deli. Imported cheeses, cold cuts, sausages,
salads.
DuoDuo (dwo dwo),
also known as Louisa, has been coming around for coffee since back in the day
that Tina worked for me. They would talk
up a storm, they became fast friends.
After Tina left we didn’t see that much of her.
In those days, once she walked in and gave me a message from
my vet who, it turns out, is also her vet.
That was when the cat-on-a-string had a litter of kittens in my
home. The vet said that the next spay or
neuter is on the house. You know, like
buy four and get one free.
To share a vet is to have a special bond. We discovered that we both had a deep love of
animals. It took some months after Tina
left for Louisa to start coming back, but she did. One time she brought her boyfriend to sit and
have coffee. It was like she wanted
another opinion about him.
Louisa is tall and thin.
Black rimmed glasses hide her eyes on a long thin face. She dresses conservatively, Town and Country
style. There is a gentle air about her,
in her voice, in the way she carries herself.
When I put the VIP sign up in June, to try to raise enough
money to pay the rent, she approached me. “I’d like to help,” she said. She offered me ten thousand yuan. She said she could make that twenty if
needed, she could ask her sister.
I took the ten, while I was waiting for my funds to arrive
from the States. I returned the money a
week or two later.
One day I was delivering an order to a German customer at a
complex less than a kilometer from my shop.
As I was riding along the store fronts looking for the access door to
the complex, I saw DuoDuo. I stopped, we
chatted. She waved vaguely towards the
stores and said her office was on the third floor above these shops. These storefronts are usually two or three
stories. I had been hoping to run into
her, because I was ready to ask for an investor. I was stumped how to go forward with the new
shop without an infusion of cash. And so
I asked her. Would she be able to help.
A few days later she came to the shop. Could I use 20,000 or maybe 30,000? This was coming not just from her, but from
her mysterious family. They want to
invest in my business. Who are these
people? Have I ever seen them in my
store? I remember one time a woman,
older than Louisa, said over the counter ‘My father is obsessed with you, I
don’t know what that’s about.” Could
this have been Louisa’s sister, referring to their Dad? I never found out. This time DuoDuo phrased it to mean an
investment.
This led to a series of talks. She and her fiancé came the next Sunday, we
sat down in the empty salon, and we discussed the serious matter of giving and
receiving money.
On what terms am I receiving this money? Is it a loan?
Is it an investment? What is my
obligation?
After some back and forth it became clear this was not a
loan. They wanted to be part of the
business, backers.
“We can offer you 20,000 yuan. It would be more, but my father is taking
care of my wedding in October. “
This is the first I’ve heard of the wedding. You would think she would have mentioned that
earlier.
“That would be a very timely sum. I am most grateful. Now, what are the terms of this investment? “
She looked at him, he looked at her, she looked at me, I
looked at him, between us was a benevolent cloud of unknowing.
“We’ll figure it out.”
And that is how we left it.
A day or two later she came in with the 20,000. She apologized that it was so little, but she
said her father would send another 30,000 after the wedding.
My jaw virtually hit the ground. My eyes popped out on springs, boing. Fireworks came out of my head, pop pop pop.
We discussed the structural modifications that would make
this almost perfect environment better.
The sink space needed to be expanded, the wash room was too large,
wasting space. The electric outlets were
clustered on one wall in each room.
She said, we have workmen at our place right now, we are
doing some remodeling. We can send some
to you tomorrow to begin work.
The next day, two men came and started knocking down the
wall between the sink and the wash room.
I took a break from baking to check it out. She told me I needed to give them 300 rmb. I asked if they would start the new wall
tomorrow. She said no, that would
require other skilled labor. As these two dusty men were carrying out the
debris, she extended her hand towards one of them and said, ‘this is my
father.’ He nodded and smiled as he
carried a load of smashed drywall past me.
Later in the week she brought a contractor in. We walked around the place and discussed what
needed to be done.
Days went by. Weeks,
even. She came by for coffee, and said
that she had called the contractor, who told her he was waiting for her call. She told him she thought they had agreed he
would call her when he was free. At any
rate, it took another week before he actually showed up.
In two days he and his team had built a new wall and frame,
built a cabinet for the new expanded sink area, laid a raised floor that
extended out from the bathroom to the hall so that the wider sink area was all
on one level, and left the café floor an utter mess with powder from plaster
and cement and dusty shoes.
We are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays in August, and this
was Tuesday, the second day of work.
They were clearing away the trash, he the contractor was doing his best
to wipe up the debris from the floor.
The security guard caught my eye and pointed to the wooden scraps
leaning against the trash can. He said
this stuff could not be discarded here, it had to go to the large trash bin
that was a bit of a walk away. This
brought to my attention two lovely pieces of veneered wood, left over from the
cabinet making. I brought them back into
the store, and suggested that maybe the contractor, whose specialty was
apparently wood work, that they be used to make a shelf in the cabinet he
made. He looked a little chagrined,
scratched his head, but in the end assented.
In the blink of an eye, my new cabinet had a shelf in it. Nice.
The only thing lacking was a slab of faux marble for the
counter top. I fussed over a chunk of
wasted space behind the cabinet where the wall jutted out, but in the end could
find no way to make use of it. I fretted
on it for a while, jealous of every square meter I was paying rent on, but in
the end there seemed no easy way to access it.
Sigh. The counter top will be
laid, covering it forever.
I fed Mother Goose, cleaned up her litter box, and went
home. I would have to return later, to
begin the bread for the next day.
I had a 12:30 appointment with Emily Wells, a Taiwan lawyer
friend. She and her British husband, the
headmaster at the international k-12 school (OIC) had a six month old son,
Jack, who would come along. She had
arranged a meeting with an investor friend.
We had clarified that my business was too small for his company to
invest in, but I wanted his advice on how to determine the terms of Louisa’s
investment.
They were almost an hour late. I was able to get a head start on the bread I
was making, and begin the sponge that we would use over the next few days. Xiao Lan and Julie had been resisting my
efforts to have the bread shaped into loaves at night and baked in the
morning. They insisted on stopping before
the shaping, and leaving the bulk dough in the fridge for the next day. They said the loaves rose too much and would
then fall, and it was a mess; it just didn’t work. I was
going to see for myself whether this method I’d read about could really work. After Emily left the dough would be ready to
be shaped, and I would seal it well in the fridge. Instead of using the lids for the pans, I
would cover them with well-oiled plastic wrap and encase them in a garbage
bag. The next morning I came in at 6:30
and sure enough, the loaves had risen perfectly and were ready to be popped
into the oven. I was a little nervous
about baking cold dough, but it worked perfectly. I just needed to add five minutes to the
baking time.
The young man with Emily spoke English. I had assumed she would be needed to
translate. There were times when Chinese
was needed for clarification and confirmation, but it was easy to speak with
him. We tossed around a lot of ideas on
how to evaluate their contribution in terms of the larger picture of my
investment in the business. We
considered not only the money I’d put in, but my sweat equity and my
‘intellectual property’ , my term not theirs.
In the end, I decided on offering them a ten percent
interest in the business, and giving them the revenue from the first
franchise. The latter would pay back in
full whatever investment, current and future, they made. Chinese entrepreneurs love franchises. They prefer a proven commodity over creating
something new, and risky. Admittedly, it
would be a long uphill climb before that day would come. It might be a stretch to say that Changzhou
could support more than one deli, or even one for that matter. But time would tell.
