Part 3 - Great Experiences with My Dad

It has been more than difficult to choose a final chapter in describing my 3 greatest experiences with my Dad. As I have said repeatedly before - I was blessed to have so many wonderful or teaching experiences with Dad. However, I would have to say that in this installment I will focus on the the six or seven times he joined me during 2-3 week trips to the Orient. Over probably four years I was privileged to have him accompany me several times each year. His last trip with me was in October 1989, just one month before his death. I had been traveling for several years to the Pacific Rim, South America, Europe, and the Caribbean basin on business - buying raw materials, components and finished goods for personal leather accessories.

Dad had asked if he could accompany me on one and it started from there. These trips were superlative in that we not only got to see the wonders of the Orient, but he got to participate with me in business meetings, factory inspections, and negotiations in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines. It was, as he described it, "wonderful to see my grown Son run his business and develop relationships and product half way around the world". He got very excited in seeing all of the variety of goods available in the wholesale showrooms in Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, I dealt directly with factories in mostly China, Hong Kong and Taiwan - with a few in Macau and Thailand - so he really got his eyes open when we took the jet foil to Macau or the long train / plane ride into mainland China and personally visited the factories making my stuff. If the creative side of things got too long or boring, we always had one of the office personnel in the factory take Dad on an extended tour of the city or countryside where ever we were at. In many ways he got a much better and more personal view of the Pacific rim than did I. About a year before his death, I also paid for Mom to join him on a trip and they both had a real adventure. Their plane got diverted to Alaska - a place of certain family Heritage (her Uncle found Will Rodgers and Wiley Post after their plane crashed after leaving Point Barrow) that she had always wanted to visit. They then were delayed in Tokyo and had to spend an extra night there. So Mom and Dad were really flush with excitement when they finally got to Hong Kong. They both took some Thomas Cook tours across the border into China (Hong Kong was at that time still a British colony), went to a Chinese grade school, shopped (there is no more dynamic place for shopping and negotiating than Hong Kong in all the world), ate, and enjoyed their suite at the Sheraton-Kowloon. We three had a ball for over a week and I don't think they really wanted to go home, when it came time.

On Dad's last trip there (I related this story at his funeral), he and I had both walked out of a negotiation session (not an unheard of tactic in Occidental / Oriental price negotiations) in a factory deep in mainland China. It was a very small hamlet and we were sitting on some concrete steps at the front of the factory. Those steps opened up to a small maketplace (if you can call it that in this small village). It was late in the afternoon and we watched all of the few other vendors pack their stuff up and to home. There remained only one guy with a rudimentary weight scale and a few scraps of what minutes before had been a chicken. His final customer and he haggled over what was really just fat and skin of what remained. We both found the scene poignant and funny.

It was humorus watching them haggle over the price. But it was poignant as well, because neither the proud chicken butcher or his customer would relent. They finally reached a bargain and left the square. We both sat there and jokingly compared the experience we had just witnessed to the scene inside that we had earlier left behind and laughed at the fact that our own haggling was not much different that those two proud citizens who had so sublimely entertained us!