The Hotel on the Roof of the World (8 page)

Fortunately, the marriage between Party A and Party B in Lhasa was not as tempestuous as those in Beijing and although there were quarrels, tiffs and trial separations, there was also the occasional honeymoon.

Jig Me was well suited in his position of Deputy General Manager and head of Party A. In common with several of the most influential Tibetans in Lhasa, he was from noble stock and had been sent as a five-year-old child to commence his education outside Tibet at St Joseph's School in Darjeeling. This was before the days of air or vehicle routes over the Himalayas, so the torturous voyage along narrow mountain tracks took him well over a month. He travelled in convoy with other young children of noble families, strapped to their horses as they were led on the 300-mile journey across the highest mountain range in the world. He spent five years in India and returned to be with his family in Tibet just before the Chinese took over in 1951.

With the Chinese eager to show the benefits of Communism to the Tibetan population, Jig Me was sent to Beijing for further schooling. He survived the Cultural Revolution as it raged throughout the country and, despite Tibet being foremost in his heart, he emerged afterwards as one of the successful Communist Party members who would be used for positions of power in the New Tibet. After a succession of minor jobs in the town of Gyantse, Jig Me became the Deputy General Manager of the major foreign enterprise in Lhasa; in charge of 800 local staff and cooperating with ten foreigners who would live on the premises and be his total responsibility. Along with power came social status and opportunities for financial reward but also one of the most difficult positions in Lhasa.

But the intricacies of local politics could wait. Jig Me had rushed into the coffee shop kitchen to support his Party A member over the argument that had erupted again over live yaks. Chef was screaming at the Food and Beverage Manager who in turn shouted at his Deputy. A few guests remained in the dining area, still chewing their way through Giant Yak Burgers.

They gazed up at me as I tiptoed past the coffee shop entrance. Only a thin partition wall separated the dining area from the kitchen and every word of the kitchen fracas could be heard by the embarrassed guests, who hastily chewed on to the end of their burgers. Jig Me's voice soared above the rest as he shouted to defend his Party A man and to point the finger of blame at Party B incompetence. His man from Party A spoke little English, but knew that Jig Me would be defending him, so shouted ‘Yes!' where he thought appropriate and nodded continually whilst Jig Me was speaking. Chef bellowed out a lengthy and colourful description of where the Food and Beverage Manager could try to fit the live yaks if bovine creatures ever came into his kitchen on the hoof again. It is at moments such as this that you realise just how much imagination Chefs have. The kitchen door flew open as the Food and Beverage Manager stormed out and the waitresses who had been trying hard to suppress their giggles now stood firmly to attention. The guests looked down to their burgers and decided that they had eaten enough.

‘Never work with a German Chef!' the Food and Beverage Manager called out to no one in particular. He turned to the kitchen door; ‘They are only good for
bratwurst
and
sauerkraut
!'

The guests were already leaving the restaurant and he ran after them so that he could hold the door open and wish them all a pleasant evening.

‘Ah, hello Alec,' he called out after me, ‘I am going to pack. You won't see me any more. Good-bye.'

I continued along the corridor to the peace and quiet of my room.

My suitcases had arrived from the airport while I was out at the Barkhor and I spent the rest of the evening unpacking them in amazement. The effect of the altitude on some of the items in my 20 kg of luggage was startling. It appeared that someone had attached a bicycle pump to my toothpaste tube and inflated it to double size. My tube of shaving foam had changed shape from flat to nearly spherical.

I made the mistake of flipping the top open. The force of air pressure inside the plastic bottle spat a jet of shaving foam across the room, scoring a direct hit on the suit I had unpacked for Monday morning. I opened the toothpaste and the shampoo bottles in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and they too produced spectacular results. I had been warned of many of the effects of high altitude but no one had told me to expect my toothpaste tube to explode.

Worried about what effect the altitude could be having on my body I followed the General Manager's orders and gulped down three large glasses of water before going to bed. I dreamt of Barbara and her American tour group blown up like giant helium balloons floating around the lobby. The tour guide had tied strings to their ankles and was pulling them back down to ground level to squash them through the door and onto the tour bus.

There is something about high altitude that causes vivid dreams. Sleepless nights are also experienced by many guests but this is more likely to be from the pack of wild dogs which keeps up a howling chorus under the hotel windows throughout the night. Sleeplessness also arises from the natural side effect caused by drinking three litres of water a day.

I was very pleased to wake up the next morning with a clear head and to find that I was not floating around the ceiling doubled in size. When I met Dave in the Coffee Shop at lunchtime he was not quite so fortunate. Holding his head in his hands he was looking for a cure for an almighty hangover.

‘The TMA banquet,' he winced taking a sip of coffee.

I was not sure if he winced because of the hangover, or because he had tasted the hotel coffee for the first time. It had a most peculiar taste which seemed to have no connection whatsoever with coffee. The General Manager had explained to me that we imported it from Shanghai, as we could not afford to import real foreign brands. To make up for the lack of coffee taste it was used in large quantities and boiled for hours, which left it so strong that you felt it was just as likely to dissolve the spoon as the sugar.

Greg arrived at the coffee shop and wisely ordered tea. He spread maps and photographs around the table top and they immediately started enthusing over possible deviations to their planned route. They should have been at Base Camp well over a week ago – if they left it much later the weather on the north face of the mountain would have deteriorated too far to give them any chance of ‘hitting the top', as they called it.

I too had my preparations to make. Not for the bleak rock face of Everest but on Monday morning I would be at work for my first day in what the Hong Kong press had dubbed ‘the most unlikely Holiday Inn in the world'.

LOSING FACE

I was woken from a dream-filled sleep on Monday morning by the sound of shouting and doors slamming down the corridor. The clamour was approaching my room.

‘Housekeeping!' shrieked a voice from outside the door.

I leapt from my bed as I heard the scraping of a key in the lock and I arrived just in time to find a small Tibetan girl standing in the open doorway demanding my laundry. I asked if she could come back later.

‘May-oh,'
she replied, shaking her head and beaming a Tibetan smile at the same time. I packed up the clothes I had been wearing on the trip in through China and added the suit jacket that had been hit by the exploding shaving foam. The chambermaid kept smiling throughout, nodded and walked off down the corridor with my bundle, stopping in front of the next door to shout ‘Housekeeping!' at the top of her voice.

It was still early but I could not get back to sleep. A dog from across the road had strayed onto the strip of wasteland between my window and the staff quarters. The inappropriate planting of dwarf conifers and stunted weeping willows along the edge of the land had done little to beautify the area but the bushes did provide excellent cover for the resident pack of dogs, who now lay in wait, watching the intruder. They considered the wasteland to be an integral part of their home territory and defended it fiercely (and extremely vociferously), against dogs from other packs. Approaching strays were either attacked or mounted or both. Anyone trying to separate the dogs was growled at menacingly, presumably being accused of interfering in their internal affairs.

The intruding dog made the mistake of wandering too far into the residents' territory. The hotel pack gave chase with a war cry of barks and howls that was guaranteed to waken any hotel guest who had not already received a surprise wake-up call courtesy of the Housekeeping Department.

I set off for breakfast and found my reserved place at the management dining table in the coffee shop. I was greeted with silence. Mr Liu looked up at me and quickly back to the large Danish pastry filling his plate. There was a similar pastry at every place around the table except where Gunter, the Food and Beverage Manager, was sitting. The atmosphere was tense.

‘I didn't want one anyway. I'm not hungry,' Gunter said defiantly. He looked around the table and snarled at the other expatriates; ‘The Chef is an ignorant pig!'

The waitresses giggled. The General Manager reacted firmly, hissing an angry whisper in reply.

‘Not in front of
Party A
. Don't make us lose face!'

He made a quiet but forceful smack on the table to show that he meant business. The public fight between Chef and the Food and Beverage Manager could go on no longer.

Wherever members of the animal kingdom live close together in confined areas there are always problems. Holiday Inn Lhasa proved to be no exception to the rule. For the expatriates living in the hotel, business life, social life and in fact all forms of life altogether revolved only around the concrete walls of the compound. The sense of loneliness and isolation is brought home by the reminder that outside the hotel there are only a dozen or so other foreigners resident in Tibet; an area two thirds the size of western Europe. While this creates an interdependent bond between the expatriates, it also leads to the smallest differences being exaggerated out of all proportion.

There are traditional quarrels between hotel departments that are found in every hotel in the world: Housekeeping fight with Front Office, Food and Beverage fight with the Kitchen, but with the extra strain of a hardship posting, the management team also tends to disintegrate along lines of seniority and experience. The new recruits resent the ‘old China hands', who never listen to fresh ideas, only dampening their enthusiasm with wet blanket ‘that won't work here' replies to any new suggestions.

For their part the expatriates with years of experience in the field resent the naivety of the newcomers, who habitually come out with ridiculous ideas before they understand the constraints of working in unreal and illogical surroundings.

Mr Liu, the Controller from Hong Kong, had worked many years in mainland China and was particularly intolerant of naive new recruits. He had printed out a world map from his computer with a large arrow pointing to a speck in the blank area above the Indian sub-continent. The words ‘YOU ARE HERE' were printed in heavy bold type across the top of the page. Whenever he was asked a question by a new expatriate he would produce an A4 copy of the map from his pocket, pass it to his new member of staff and chuckle. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody found it very funny, but as Mr Liu was the Controller, and therefore in charge of the payment of salaries and reimbursement of expense accounts, everyone laughed when he attempted a joke.

The responsibility for minimising the disputes between the departments and between the management staff is one of the least popular duties of the General Manager. But in Lhasa, even more important than actually keeping the foreign management team together, is keeping up the appearance that the team is together. Any dispute amongst the expatriates is considered to be a ‘loss of face' for Party B.

‘Losing face', and the contrary, ‘giving face', were new expressions to me. Mr Liu rose from the breakfast table, leaving his Danish pastry untouched, and signalled that it was time to move on to the morning meeting.

Harry remained seated, finishing his pastry. ‘Without understanding
face
,' he said to me, ‘you don't have a chance here.' I stayed to listen.

‘Losing face,' he continued, ‘happens when you make a mistake, you screw up, you fight with one of your friends. You know, you just do the smallest thing wrong and they come along and make a big deal out it. That's loss of face for you. It puts you in an inferior position. If you lose face, they get stronger and they can do what they want. If we lose face in front of Party A, Jig Me starts trying to run the hotel his way and then we can all go home.'

He gulped down the last dregs of his tea and stood up from the table.

‘Now,
giving face
, that's the very opposite. You heap praise on someone for what they've done to make them think they're the world's best.' He paused for thought.

‘It's all a game,' he continued, ‘but you have to understand how to play, if you get the rules wrong then you have to leave.'

‘Face' explains why a tour guide wishing to please will never admit that he doesn't understand what you are asking, or will never say that he doesn't know the answer to your question. To avoid losing face, he will just give a reply that he thinks you will want to hear. This can be very difficult if you are asking a question that needs an accurate answer such as; ‘What time should we leave for the airport?' If in any doubt he will just say ‘Yes' to every question.

As we left the coffee shop, Harry brushed aside the waitress who came up to me demanding my meal voucher.

‘This is Mr Alec. No meal voucher. He works here.
Yin Yi Bu Jingli.'

Apparently this was my title. ‘Yin Yi Bu Jingli.' I quite liked it. ‘Mr Alec. Yin Yi Bu Jingli,' I repeated to the waitress. We hurried down the corridor after Mr Liu and the other expats.

‘We mustn't be late for the meeting or Party B lose face,' explained Harry. ‘Jig Me has all his Party A staff there ten minutes before the meeting – if they are late he fines them!'

We ran up the set of stairs to the meeting room, puffing and panting in the rarefied air. Although I had only suffered from a headache on my first day, breathlessness over the slightest exertion was an effect of the altitude that never went away. Trying to give an impression of respectability upon entering the meeting room is difficult when you are shaking and openly gasping for breath, and I decided to get there earlier in future.

A morning meeting, officially called the ‘Operations Meeting', takes place, in some form or other, in all the foreign-managed hotels in China. It is held every working day, from Monday to Saturday, and is the decision-making time that sets the mood of the day. The management team and department heads discuss the business results and problems of the previous day, the forecasted results and problems of the day ahead and any special activities that may be taking place.

Seating arrangements at the morning meeting in Lhasa were even stricter than around the management dining table. Party A and Party B sat together in a complicated pecking order that descended down the sides of the long table. The General Manager and Jig Me sat at the head of the table, with the General Manager's secretary, Heather, perched uneasily on the corner, between the General Manager and Mr Liu. Thirty people crowded along the table edge; all of the expatriates, their deputies and other Party officials with dubious functions that none of us understood.

Heather had the delicate task of translating and taking the meeting minutes. English and Mandarin Chinese were the official languages used, although the full range of mother tongues around the table stretched from Tibetan to Cantonese, Hokien and other forms of Chinese, and a selection of European languages; German, Italian, French and Flemish.

Despite her very English name, Heather was decidedly Chinese. She had been given the name ‘Heather' by her English teacher at school and had kept it for use with foreigners. An outwardly frail girl, she had an inner core of steel that could withstand the severe discipline of the General Manager. Her lank black hair fell flat down the sides of her face and over her thin shoulders. Shampoo and make-up would undoubtedly have been of great benefit to her, but instead of spending time on her personal appearance, she selflessly devoted herself to her work, putting in far longer hours than the majority of local staff. It was rare to find someone so good. Like the other Han Chinese, she yearned for her own country and like any 18-year-old girl in a strange place, a long way from her family, she was homesick and lonely. She lived only for the day when she could return to China.

But Heather had made a mistake; being good at her job meant that she was likely to stay in Lhasa for a long time. This was a fundamental problem in motivating the staff. The Chinese actively held themselves back, so that they could be released as soon as possible and return to their homeland. The Tibetans, after forty years of Communism, were generally very laid back, without much of an interest in doing anything. Salaries were virtually the same for every level of employee and promotions were more dependent on Party status than on job performance.

The waitresses were typical of staff throughout the hotel. They tried their level best not to be promoted to Restaurant Supervisor. For practically no more pay, this new position would mean that suddenly the waitress would lose her friends, be responsible to the management and would inevitably lead to shouts, tears and the embarrassing demotion to dish-washer.

A colossal total of 560 staff were employed by the hotel. It was never very clear exactly what all these people did, and some of the names on the staff register appeared to be on permanent leave. Annual vacations were saved up and then claimed for months on end. The vacations would not include travelling time, which could amount to an extra month either side of the normal holiday. Maternity leave lasted twelve months (without travelling time) and any good staff falling pregnant, although a great cause for celebration, would seriously impair the running of the hotel.

Leave for abortions was also commonplace, as the Chinese government, desperate to avoid the catastrophe of overpopulation, effectively limits the number of children that Han Chinese may have to a single child by imposing financially crippling tax burdens on families with two or more children. Tibetans, as a minority race, are permitted to have two children, but Tibetan officials in Lhasa and practically all Tibetans in the countryside have no such controls imposed on them.

‘Take a seat, Alec,' the General Manager said to me, pointing to the only vacant chair around the table. The rest of the expatriate managers sniggered. Gunter, who was sitting four places further down the table from the vacant seat, laughed out loud when he saw where I would be sitting. He gave me a thumbs-up sign, and even exchanged glances and a laugh with Chef who sat opposite him along the table.

I sat down cautiously, waiting for some practical joke to unfold. Or perhaps there would be an induction ritual for my first Morning Meeting. Were we all going to put on aprons and exchange funny handshakes?

Sitting on my right was a Tibetan lady, Mrs Qi Mei, whose title nobody really knew. She looked normal enough. Apparently she was something high in the Party but beyond that, none of the expats had been able to tell me what she did. Mrs Qi Mei smiled to me as I sat down. So far, so good.

On my left was a Chinaman, Mr Pong, the Deputy Controller. His nickname, I had been told before by Harry, was
Alien III
and now that I saw him for the first time, I had to admit that he did bear an uncanny resemblance to the futuristic being. He squinted through wire-framed spectacles at me and opened his mouth in a small spherical smile to reveal a mass of contorted teeth in various states of decay.