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<\/a>The shameful headwear, now on its way home: crisis averted.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Our Chinese employee, Jackson, said, \u201cwhat about those green hats in Kirk\u2019s suite?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI brought them from the States,\u201d I said. \u201cSomething to give to clients.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know about green hats in China,\u201d Jackson asked, \u201cwhat it means?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The three gringos in the room–Kirk, Steve and I–shook our heads.\u00a0\u00a0No one even had a guess.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a man wears a green hat,\u201d Jackson said, \u201cit means his wife is a treat.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTreat?\u00a0 \u00a0What do you mean, ‘treat.’\u00a0 \u00a0Like, good-looking? Like a flight attendant?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike she enjoys being with other men. It\u2019s not a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now<\/em> we got it.\u00a0\u00a0 But why, we all wondered, would any Chinese man ever wear a green hat if that\u2019s the cultural message?<\/p>\n“Is it\u00a0like a sympathy play,” Steve wondered?\u00a0 A woman sees a guy in a green hat and thinks, “that guy is a sensitive soul and he’s suffering.\u00a0 Maybe I can console him.”<\/p>\n
“I don’t think so,” Jackson said, looking a little sideways at Steve.\u00a0\u00a0“No one wears a green hat.\u00a0\u00a0We can\u2019t give them to anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019re now trying to figure out how to make a trade with the our\u00a0Russian colleagues, who have a lot of white hats left over from a trade show in March. I am feeling an abbreviated version of what I imagine George Bush might have felt like in the years after the \u201cmission accomplished\u201d photo op as US troops continued to suffer casualties in Iraq\u2014like George, I thought I had done a good thing in hauling all those hats to China, but it turned out I had merely done a dumb thing. Where in the books on doing business in China does any expert caution against handing out green hats in China?<\/p>\n
Over the next several days, Jackson enjoyed telling people about the green hats.\u00a0 It alway got a good laugh, or at least sly grins–even from the women.\u00a0 Steve in the meanwhile\u00a0did a Google search and directed me to\u00a0a piece by Marcus Gee in the Toronto Globe and Mail, which provided an explanation:\u00a0 “The phrase ‘wearing a green hat’ in Chinese sounds like the word for ‘cuckold,'” Gee wrote.<\/p>\n
The lesson is, I suppose, that you cannot assume that you ever know anything in China unless you\u2019ve vetted it with someone who really does know, and there are no innocent gestures in a culture with thousands of years of experience in mediating, calibrating, and measuring every aspect of human behavior. In the west we say, \u201cdon\u2019t look a gift horse in the mouth.\u201d In China, that\u2019s the first place one would look\u2014how can you assess the quality of the gesture if you don\u2019t determine the value of the gift?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last\u00a0Saturday morning\u00a0I arrived in Beijing after several days in Spain and Italy, lugging a suitcase full of polo shirts and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,176,18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-golf","category-business-travel","category-lifestyle","category-courses-and-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2010\/06\/green-hat.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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