Meetings

This past Friday I had five meetings, each with a distinct tone, each presenting a different picture which together represent my China.

The first meeting was a lunch meeting; I invited one of the members of my team to go eat so that I could find out more about her in a less formal setting. She picked a sushi restaurant and we sat at the counter, speaking English, about my history and her history. She’s almost done with her ASA and I gave her some gentle encouragement to take the last set of modules and finish. It was a low pressure situation, conversational, easy.

Number two was the monthly leadership call for China H&B- Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing and Hong Kong were all represented. This meeting was also in English and my role was to absorb current state and client lists and names for future reference. It lasted a little less than an hour which then flowed into meeting #3.

Meeting #3 was the monthly H&B practice meeting. All offices were represented again but the major difference here was that almost the entire meeting was in Chinese and it lasted 2.5 hours. My boss had told me before the meeting that it just didn’t make sense to conduct that meeting in English. I agreed with him – I’m one person in a group of about 40. In theory this is what I need to do to improve my Chinese. It also made it a very long meeting for me. I was able to follow what was going on and probably understand about half of what was said. I also learned a new word (yin xiang – impact/effect). To add to the pressure I had a speaking role, I had been asked to give a short presentation on the importance of peer review and peer review under company policy (in English). Talk about a tough crowd: 1) I’m speaking English, 2) it’s 6:45 on a Friday, and 3) there was cake to eat after I had finished. It went really well (thank you Kaien and my teaching training) all told, so after eating my cake I hurried to the basement of the office.

In the basement is a large health club which had been running a promotion for membership. I had stopped by earlier in the week to check it out and was supposed to have met my sales rep around 6:30 to sign a six month contract. He was still there and he and this personal trainer guy gave me the final sales pitch. All in Chinese, relatively low key, except that I was already running late for my last meeting. We ended by scheduling an appointment with the trainer on Sunday (his English name is Hero) to measure my baseline, discuss my goals and see how much I want to train.

I raced home – 18 minutes flat— and made it to my apartment at five minutes to eight. I was supposed to interview a prospective ayi (maid) at 8pm. Luckily, she was a little late. It turns out that she cleaned this apartment before, under the previous tenant last year, and she lives five minutes away. We’ve arranged for a test cleaning on Tuesday to see if we get along and then tentatively set up a schedule going forward. I had a little trouble with her accent (she’s from Anhui province) and she had a little trouble with mine. There was a lot of pointing involved, especially when it came to talking about tools that you need for cleaning, but I remember the first time Mollie (our ayi at the old apartment) came and how I couldn’t say anything to her. I’m also proud because I set up this meeting by calling her and actually talking over the phone, which would have been impossible a year ago. She left about 9pm.

Five meetings. What a day.

Question: Do you have a marathon meeting story? Share.

G