Our coffee shop is in its fifth year. Business has been good, better than expected. We only set it up to keep ourselves in noodles. It has given us fried rice with extra prawns. This year, at last, someone else is starting a coffee shop in the village—two more in fact. Both are backed by the local government. I’m not worried by competition, as we could use an alternative for our customers when they can’t get a seat in our place. The problem is the local government wants me to manage the new shops and to pay them a fee for the privilege. The pressure has been gentle but relentless. Whenever I meet officials they ask me: “When are you opening the new places?” I mumble that I am still discussing the idea with my wife, and run away. It is hard to say no to the officials. It would be even harder to explain that I don’t want to expand our business because I came here to live a quiet life and write. The former is offensive in terms of “face,” the latter incomprehensible. The last time I was in the government offices, a man I didn’t recognise said to me, with a hint of menace: “Mr Mark, I hear you do not like co-operating with the government.” Now I’ve started worrying. Foreigners need not apply Our customers are mostly Shanghai-based foreigners who work in a wide range of industries. The new topic of conversation is the growing impression that we expats are coming to the end of our usefulness. The pace of “localisation” is accelerating, it’s becoming harder to do business as a foreign individual or company, and markets are being shut off to foreigners, despite the WTO agreement. I suspect Shanghai’s imminent World Expo has something to do with this. It is billed as the city’s answer to the Beijing Olympics—and it’s well known that the capital obscured the foreign contribution to its progress during that event. So securing a work visa for our foreign staff at the coffee shop, prompted by the attention from local police I wrote about in my December column, was looking increasingly unlikely. But we desperately need a foreigner. I could never ask a local to face the impatient demands of some of those expat wives. It wouldn’t be fair. We filled out the forms by hand, in our childlike Chinese characters, and sought support from officials. They obliged, partly because I visited the site of the new coffee shop and discussed the layout. We had to sign up Emily, our manager, who qualified as a pastry chef in the US, for a Chinese cookery course and exam. We gently made the argument that if we wanted a Chinese cook then we wouldn’t be applying for a permit for a foreign one, but it fell on deaf ears. Then, amazingly, we were given approval. Our other permit request was denied—but it seems the Chinese pastry industry is in need of foreign assistance. Going postal Just as China jumped to mobile phones without embracing landlines, the postal service has been skipped by email. Courier services are remarkably cheap too. We can send a package to Shanghai for less than £1, guaranteed next day delivery. It’s a good thing couriers are so cheap, because I would never send by post anything that can’t be emailed. The service is slow and unreliable. And stamps come in such small denominations that you need to plaster them all over the back of the envelope with the rice glue provided. There’s no room for words on a postcard if it’s going farther than Hong Kong. But then you can’t fit the address on either, so it’s irrelevant. There’s one post office in town that will send letters abroad. The others refuse point blank. “Don’t know how,” they say. As for receiving mail, this is still a lottery. I bumped into the postman this morning. “I’ve got your mail,” he said. “I’ll drop it by tomorrow.” He used to slip our letters into a newspaper that we received at the lodge and no one read. The stacks grew and grew. I asked the staff to check them for post but it was easy to forget. Last winter I was scrunching up old papers to light a fire and found a letter from my godmother from last June. God knows what else had gone astray or up the chimney. Little wonder, then, that the nice people at the work visa bureau refused to post the approval documents for Emily. They themselves said the mail was unreliable, and we’d have to come and pick them up in person. I am still so happy that we got the permit, I’d carry it home if it was on fire.
