My chronicles reflect my experiences starting a cottage industry in a remote part of China and my experiences as a very small producer.  When in China, I live as the Chinese do in order to keep my expenses down.  This means that I eat with taxi cab drivers at local lunch spots, I claw my way through public transportation, and I am treated as a Chinese woman who acts and dresses strangely compared to the locals.
In 2003, I decided that I wanted to start something.  Something all my own that combined a few of my passions: art, helping the underserved, and travel.  I had collected a few indigenous textile art pieces in my travels through Southwestern China in 1999.  Those textiles were my inspiration to start Red Gingko (www.redgingko.com).  My mission is to create job opportunities for hill tribe women in Southwestern China through the revitalization of their textile art tradition.  I commission hill tribe women to hand embroider designs that are inspired by their traditional textiles on contemporary clothing.  As one might expect, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome when doing business in China.   

I’m happy to report that gender does not seem to be an issue in China.  When dealing with ‘lao bai xin’ (the mandarin term for average people, as opposed to the educated and/or wealthy), I have never felt like I am treated differently or given less respect because I am a woman.  At least half of the business people I deal with on a regular basis are female entrepreneurs.  In fact, my main contacts in Southwestern China are all women.  I have found that in remote parts of China, women are more likely to be the breadwinners of the family.  This is because the men are more likely to squander away money on alcohol, cigarettes, and gambling.  The women are the ones who take care of the children and so are the responsible ones. 

I feel lucky that I have found several people that are trustworthy and responsible.  I believe this to be one of the largest hurdles when doing business in China.  Unless you are a Walmart or Gap where you can stipulate any thing and Chinese businesses will cower to your demands, I expect that whomever I deal with will drop my order, procrastinate until I have no choice but to find someone else, or promise a level of service that he or she is not capable of meeting.  In one extreme situation, I found myself working in a sewing shop for three nights cutting fabric.  The sewing shop owner procrastinated so long that I had no choice but to step in for fear that I would go home without one completed product.  It was eye opening.

The other hurdle that is just as problematic as trustworthiness is quality assurance.  I am often confronted with the term ‘cha bu duo’, which effectively means ‘about the same.’  The lady that heads the effort to hand embroider my clothes has learned that in terms of color, there is no such thing as ‘cha bu duo’.  After I’ve painstakingly found and set aside a certain color combination for a certain fabric, she will change the color of the embroidery floss without letting me know, thinking that it is ‘about the same.’  There is a common cultural expectation in China that ‘cha bu duo’ is acceptable.  If something is off by 20%, it is ‘cha bu duo’ and the Chinese cannot understand why I make a big fuss over what they perceive is nothing.  These days I try to make things fools proof so there are no mistakes.  Of course, this is impossible, but there’s no harm in trying. 

Finally, I have come to expect that in some cases no business is good business. You would think that people are interested in making money.  However, I have found that is not always true.  I remember trying to persuade a woman in Southwestern China to embroider a design that she has never embroidered before.  Her answer was to decline saying that she was not willing to try.  It seems that if I pose an inconvenience to some Chinese people, they are very happy to decline my business all together.  I find it quite interesting that her attitude seems to be the polar opposite of many Chinese entrepreneurs who accept work that they are not skilled enough to produce.

I still go to China every half year or so.  In the nine years of living and visiting China, I have seen improvements in their attitude and behavior.  There is light at the end of the tunnel.  However, they have a long way to go to fulfill Western business expectations and etiquette.