Just after lunch, we drove over to meet Wang. He was staying near Hangzhou’s main railway station in a hotel owned by the factory. It was one of a string of hotels left over from the days of China’s planned economy, when everything was owned by the state. In those days, everyone belonged to a work unit that provided schools, hospitals, housing and, in this case, even hotels, where the factory managers could stay during the long and tedious meetings with the province’s Chemical Bureau.
Bundles of laundry hung from the upstairs windows of the rows of shabby shops around the station. Long loops of wires sagged between telegraph poles and the narrow streets were congested with traffic. The whole area was dilapidated and the heat was oppressive as we sat in a taxi lined up at some broken traffic lights. On the cracked pavements outside the hotel, hawkers sold bowls of fried bean curd and chives from under sheets of canvas slung between bamboo poles. Inside, there was a wooden counter at the end of a lobby, with a couple of bored receptionists playing games on their mobile phones. On the wall behind them, the name ‘Quintessence Hotel’ stood out in gold letters and a line of clocks told the time in London, Moscow, Sharjah and Beijing. On the end of the counter there was a stack of company brochures that advertised paints, dyes and adhesives, with photographs of the reactor towers in the factory at Quzhou.
We signed a slip of paper and went up to the fourth floor. Next to the elevator there was a little pantry where a girl was asleep over a table with her head cradled in her arms. Enamel mugs were piled up next to a big water boiler that bubbled gently in the corner with hot water to make tea. Down the corridor, the carpets were wrinkled and stained and around the doorways the paint was battered and scratched. Everywhere smelled of mildew. At the end of the hallway there was a sign in English that read ‘Holding Talks Room’. As we approached the door, Mina held back to let me go in first, but I took her arm and gently pushed her forward. It was important that she lead the discussions. I still knew almost nothing about the business, so I couldn’t negotiate with Wang. I planned to spend most of the first day invisible and listening.
Inside we found the familiar scene of a big circular table in the middle of the room with a bunch of plastic flowers in a dusty glass vase at the centre. The wallpaper was peeling away at the bottom of the walls and a row of badly fitting windows looked out onto a schoolyard below. The shouts and cries of a children’s playground rose up through the air. In the corner, a broken metal coatrack leaned against a huge air conditioner that had a notice pasted across that said ‘Under Maintenance’. The air was hot and damp.
Wang was waiting inside with a couple of assistants. He was plumper than I had imagined, quite short and balding. He leaped to his feet as we walked in and was obviously pleased to see Mina. He didn’t bother to ask who I was; I guessed that the team from IHCF had changed so much that his curiosity wasn’t aroused by just one more new face.
For the next five hours, I sat and listened, occasionally helping to straighten out the odd confusion with Wang’s translator. The table was big enough to seat at least fifteen people, so there was plenty of space; I sat away from Wang, near one of his assistants, who chain-smoked his way through the afternoon. Mina and I had agreed beforehand that she should run through the contract, clause by clause. That way we might nail down the differences between each side and start to trade them off. It was tedious work. Throughout the afternoon, there were constant interruptions as people came in, delivering messages and collecting bits of paper. I had to get up several times to clear the waves of jet lag washing over me and I wandered around the corridors outside. As Mina went through the contract, Wang seemed alternately distracted or overfocused on details. After his initially friendly manner, he quickly grew irascible and stubborn. I couldn’t tell whether it was because he was under pressure or he was just being deliberately awkward, pretending not to understand issues or dragging up old arguments that Mina thought had been settled months beforehand. He didn’t seem particularly interested in discussing price or payment terms but he wanted to increase the number of carbon credits to be covered by the contract. But that was impossible; the syndicate had been put together in London to cover the number of credits that had been fixed at the last meeting and it was far too late to change it. Mina just passed on the point without comment and moved on.
After the first few hours, there were frequent lulls in the conversation. Several times, Wang wandered over to a battered old sofa at the back of the room and stretched out, with his trousers rolled over his calves, slurping tea out of a big jam jar and fanning himself with a copy of the Hangzhou Daily. He had a bowl of roasted melon seeds on his lap and, leaning forward against the arm of the sofa, he sat cracking the seeds between his teeth and spitting the shells out into a wastepaper basket at his feet. On other occasions, he’d get up, yawn loudly, stretch, and push his hands deep into his pockets before wandering off down the corridor with a rolling, slouching gait for twenty minutes. By ten in the evening, the room was insufferably stuffy; my head was aching from the clouds of cigarette smoke from Wang’s assistant and I felt dizzy with jet lag. I moved over to the windows and tried to drag one open, but Mina yelled at me to stop. She had opened one on the first visit and been eaten alive by mosquitoes. Hot, tired, bad-tempered and hungry, we were getting nowhere so we decided to call it a day. We agreed with Wang that we’d meet up at eight the following morning, hailed a taxi to take us back to the hotel by the lake, and sat dejectedly on the lumpy seats in the back contemplating the day. We had achieved nothing, ended up with more questions than answers, and felt exhausted all at the same time.
Back at the hotel, we made straight for the bar and perched up on a couple of high stools. Through the pine trees in the hotel grounds and reflected in the lake, we could see the shapes of exploding chrysanthemums and shooting stars from an enormous firework display above the distant city skyline.
The hotel was originally built as a state-run training school for the Party cadres, so it occupied a prime position on the hill below the pagoda. It was built like an aircraft hangar, with echoing hallways and draughty corridors. I heard that a Hong Kong property group had taken over the management of the hotel just after China opened up and had tried to spruce it up with yellow wallpaper, thick carpets, and flouncy curtains. There were chandeliers in the hallways and gold fixtures in the bathrooms, but I noticed that sections of the hotel seemed cordoned off by dusty lacquer screens and lines of tired-looking rubber plants arranged in pots across the landings.
After the first beer, jet lag evaporated. I suddenly felt wide awake. Mina said she thought that the day had been hopeless but I tried to keep our spirits up. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘At least they agreed to meet us.’
It was true; if they’d reached an agreement with one of the other buyers, Wang wouldn’t have agreed to meet. Slowly, as we mulled over the day, the mood brightened. Halfway into the second beer, I began to take the measure of Mina. She told me that she had read law at Melbourne University, snatching the odd moment for study between her commitments to the Student Union, the women’s rowing team, and a punishing regime of daily exercise and training. On graduation, she joined one of the big law firms, before moving on to the Sydney Stock Exchange, where she worked on designing forestry credits, one of the world’s first financial instruments for environmental investing. By the time she was thirty, she had joined the World Bank. Based in Washington, DC, she travelled throughout Asia negotiating carbon deals.
She felt passionately about preserving the natural environment and her conversation often reverted to pet topics, such as water conservation,