130531 One Thousand Ounces of Gold: Chapter 11, Australia 1958 (1962)

Chapter 11

 

Australia, 1958 (and 1962)

 

In September 1957, a bid was opened for 360 head of young pregnant Holstein (Friesian) heifers, eighteen to twenty-four months old and ready to produce milk on arrival, and for two head of bulls. The heifers didn’t need to be stud bred and have pedigrees; they were to be “grade heifers,” meaning they were still purebred Holsteins , which could be judged by their distinctive black-and-white markings, but they had no pedigrees. Heifers with any other colors or with black spots below the knees would be considered a “crossbreed” and would not qualify. The bulls, on the other hand, needed to be stud bred and to have pedigrees.

Linmark won the bid. Not only were our prices better, but we gave the department a complete description of how we would carry out the procurement, including the proposal that two government-appointed delegates would accompany me on a four-week trip to inspect the heifers before shipment. All the other offers came from U.S. or Canadian companies. They had experience in exporting livestock, but their costs and freight were far too expensive. Thus Linmark became the first trading company in Taiwan with the know-how to import dairy and beef cattle.

Eventually, in 1959, we imported ten head of Santa Gertrudis (beef bulls) for the Taiwan government. My first contract with the government purchasing office (CTC), however, wasn’t signed until January 1958. Because this was the first purchase of its kind, bureaucratic problems emerged after the bid was opened. Finally, on May’s thirtieth birthday, according to the Chinese calendar (the twenty-fifth of the twelfth month in the lunar calendar, which fell in January the following year, that is, the New Year of 1958), I got a call from the purchasing officer to say that we had won the bid. May and a Parker dealer’s wife, Mrs. Hu, organizing a ladies mah-jong game for May’s birthday party that evening, were standing next to me when I got the news.

After the agreement was signed and letter of credit opened, we made arrangements with William Jones’s company in Melbourne to ship the animals. Three months after the receipt of the letter of credit, a three-man delegation would arrive at the end of April. By then we would expect the heifers to have been gathered on one area of farmland prior to quarantine. There we would inspect the cattle head by head to make sure they were purebred and pregnant. We were to stay in Australia for four weeks, so all preparations would need to be completed on time. The Japanese vessel would make two trips, picking up half of the cattle on each trip.

At the end of April we flew to Australia . There were no jet planes in 1958, so we had to fly to Manila in the morning and at midnight board a four-engine propeller plane to Sydney . The three-man team comprised S. H. Wong of the Taiwan dairy farmers’ association, a veterinary surgeon who would inspect the heifers; S. W. Chua, a manager of Taipei Dairy Farm and the money man representing the farmers who would ultimately buy the cattle (and who would report that we had done our job in their best interest); and me, who would negotiate with Jones.

Wong, in his early forties, was an overseas Chinese from a large family in Manlong, an industrial city in Indonesia . He had left home to go to school in China in 1936 and could never go back to join his family. He graduated from university and then worked in government, following it all the way to Taiwan . He couldn’t communicate with his parents and brothers and sisters because Taiwan was so underdeveloped and isolated. But still he knew many things about overseas Chinese.

We had a long night flight ahead of us. After leaving Manila , we stopped in Darwin for an hour to refuel. By the time we got to Sydney , it was evening. Mr. Jones had arranged for us to stay at the Hampton Court Hotel at King’s Cross. In 1958 Australia still had the “White Australia” policy. The “new Australians” were mainly Greeks and other Europeans. After we arrived, we went for an evening walk and saw very few Chinese on the street. The following day we flew to Melbourne on Qantas Airlines. The plane was new and in much better shape than the airlines flying in the Orient in those days. Singapore Airlines and Japan Airlines, now famous for their service, didn’t yet exist. In Melbourne we stayed at the prestigious Federal Hotel on Flinders Street (now the BP [British Petroleum] building).

The next day, S. H. Wong reported our arrival to the Chinese consulate. We were greeted by a vice-consul: “There’s a cocktail party and buffet dinner at the consul-general’s house to welcome Mr. Liang, chief officer of the labor department of the Kuomintang Party in Taiwan . He would also like to welcome you, our first trade delegation from Taiwan .” When we arrived, a middle-aged man with a familiar face was welcoming guests at the door. “Mr. Liang,” I said, “remember me?” He paused for a minute, “Ah! Denis Jen.” He was none other than my roommate at FOCC, the mysterious Mr. Liang, the underground representative in Hong Kong in 1952–53 and one of my “English teachers”!

To begin our inspection, Jones took us to some fenced farmland he had rented to quarantine the livestock in Dandenong, a suburb of Melbourne . It had been more than three months since he received the letter of credit in payment of the 360 heifers and 2 bulls, so we assumed the animals would be ready. Jones had fewer than 50 head. Where were the other 300? Jones assured us that they would be come in lot by lot and that we didn’t have to worry.

Wong began to inspect the cows by their body shape and size. Some were really too small and not in good enough shape to be classed as “grade” heifers. A “grade” heifer should look as good as a “stud” heifer and be pure Holstein . Unfortunately, the number of heifers was too small for Wong to make a decision. The deadline for the first shipment of not less than 180 head was only eight weeks away and the Japanese vessel was already on its way to Melbourne ! He then spent two days checking that the heifers were pregnant. We were unhappy. Following this initial inspection, Jones decided to take us on some of his buying trips outside Melbourne . We drove almost 200 miles a day, stopping at three or four farms. He bought fewer than a dozen the first day and we saw that he, too, didn’t have any choice but to take whatever was available.

After two days, we decided that Jones would be better off doing his buying without us. He agreed that he must go to better farms. It turned out that Jones had no experience with such a large shipment. He was used to stocking limited numbers of racehorses. He didn’t have to worry about a vessel coming to pick up his shipment and that any delay would cost him, the buyer, and the shipping company a lot of money. With his racehorse shipments, if he missed a ship, he would just wait for the next one. His also didn’t have to select or reject any animal; the “stud” horses were from breeders with certified bloodlines. This time, however, he had landed a large, lucrative contract. The grade heifers from ordinary farms were cheap in Australia compared to stud heifers from breeders, but Jones didn’t do his homework in the first three months.

We killed time for these three or four weeks by sightseeing and going to parties, movies, and shows. Knowing that we could inspect twenty or so head a week, Jones arranged for the Australian Dairy Board to show us around for three days. A car picked up at 8:00 a.m. and took us back at 6:00 p.m. at their expense. We saw dairy farms, milk-processing plants, powdered-milk plants, and beef and sheep farms. We also saw a lot of the State of Victoria . We enjoyed ourselves, but we still worried about our shipment.

At the end of the fourth week, we decided to extend our stay to seven weeks so we could at least inspect enough cattle to make the first shipment. We explained the consequences to Jones. Neither of us could afford the loss and the claims that would be imposed on him or on my company as the agent. The shipping company wouldn’t let us go easily either. He finally agreed to contact other companies to help him collect heifers, especially for the second shipment, because within five weeks the vessel would have come back to pick up the second lot. During our last two weeks, young heifers came in at a faster rate. Gradually we reached the 180 head for the first shipment.

The Japanese vessel arrived and we were invited on board for dinner with the captain. We were relieved. However, nothing can be kept secret in business, especially a large shipment. Jones had asked for help from one of Australia ’s two largest livestock dealers, the New Zealand Loan Company and Dalgety. (Later the two merged into Dalgety & New Zealand Loan, making it the largest livestock company in Australia .) We left in the seventh week, agreeing to leave everything to Jones.

Apart from these problems, we had a good opinion of Australia . It was a rich country. Wool, wheat, meat, and agricultural and mineral products were abundant and commanded good prices in the world market. Australia had enough money to support its eleven or twelve million people living on this small, resource-rich continent. People ate well, drank a lot, and took holidays. There was no comparison between our quality of life in Taiwan and that in Australia . We also noticed that people from all walks of life seemed to be treated equally. Even more than today! If my recollections are correct, the salary earned by a nonprofessional laborer and that earned by a professional executive officer of a company were not too far apart. What impressed me was that when I went to a meeting at the Rotary Club of Dandenong, I found that the speaker was a Rotarian who owned a small barbershop in Dandenong. “I used to speak to you Rotarians behind your backs,” he started his speech, meaning when he cut their hair. “But tonight I am going to talk in front of you!” In the Orient, a barber and the company manager would never socialize! In those days, however, the Australians took things easily, too easily. They spent too much time at morning tea—and they drank too much beer in the afternoons!

The Chinese community in Melbourne in 1958 was small, about 50,000 people. Our consulate introduced us to three Australian Chinese leaders and each took turns showing us around. The most famous was Mr. Windam. His Chinese name was actually Mr. Chen Win Dam, but his Australian friends called him Mr. Windam. He was the richest Chinese in Melbourne and he had the largest Chinese business in the State of Victoria . It was only a small factory making spring rolls for restaurants. About twenty young women rolled out the thin wrappers and filled them with chopped meat. On the other side of the factory, some young women operated a small motor-driven mixer, which made a large pot of boiled oil move slowly so that the spring rolls inside of the pot wouldn’t stick together. The spring rolls were lightly fried before being packed into cartons and frozen for shipment all over Australia . Chen was very proud of his business: “My sales are more than one million Australian pounds a year!”

By the time I visited Australia again on my textile export business ten years later, Chen had passed away and his children had closed his factory. According to his brother, “Times had changed and our old-fashioned factory didn’t keep up. Now factories have automated equipment. We had to do everything by hand!”

Apart from some Chinese community leaders, the average Chinese in Australia quietly operated restaurants, engaged in vegetable farming, or had small groceries or little shops. They were an insignificant minority, a humble group of people far away from their homeland!

 

<1> Back to Taiwan

 

The two shipments of dairy cattle arrived in Taiwan one after another in July and August 1958. After the quarantine period, we distributed the cattle to dairy farms and individual farmers according to a plan worked out a year earlier by the JCRR and the department of agriculture. This was the first time Taiwan had encouraged farms to raise dairy cows on margin lands. Just as the project was about to get under way and the cattle were bought and ready to be distributed, unexpected problems came up.

To start, Jones didn’t really “select” qualified “grade” cattle to ship. He had ended up having to buy whatever he could to make up the numbers for the order. As a result, among the 180 head in the first shipment, the quality between the best heifers and the worst was far apart. Wong objected, but Jones shipped them anyway. He had no choice. What made it worse was that S. K. Wong mentioned to Jones that he and his friends had organized a small farm. The upshot was that he obtained a permit to buy twelve heifers from this shipment. Jones wanted to do Wong a favor, so he chose the twelve best and largest and marked their heads with a dark yellow “W”, thinking that Wong could pick them up himself.

Jones didn’t know that the cattle would be numbered and distributed to different buyers by means of a lot. No one could pick or choose. And the mark “W” served a reverse purpose. Everyone noticed the difference in quality between the good heifers and the bad. Farmers started to complain about the quality of the shipment. Fortunately, a few heifers had given birth on board and some more gave birth during the two-week quarantine in Taiwan . These cows started to produce abundant amounts of milk.

In the meantime, old Mr. Chua stood up and defended me and Wong. He told the farmers that the three of us had worked hard in Australia to get the cattle shipped on time. Because he was a respectable community leader in Taiwan , he was able to calm everybody down.

Three heifers distributed to Hwa Lien (the east coast mountainous area in Taiwan ) died during the quarantine as a result of traveling from the cold Melbourne winter to the tropical Taiwanese summer. When the insurance claim was submitted, the local Lloyd’s of London agent had to issue a death certificate. But they could only find some bones and three pairs of ears, which still had the original earmarks that had been put on them in Australia . What had happened to the bodies?

The truth was that the illiterate mountain farmers had butchered the cows and eaten them. Not only was this illegal, it was harmful to their health (since it was meat from sick cows) and certainly against the insurance rules. The Lloyd’s agent was the famous English company Jardine Matheson. The general manager and I were friends and we both knew the truth about the cows. And we had to tell the truth to the insurance company even though we had no proof. So it was off the record. Fortunately, the insurance company decided to pay the claims.

During the time the animals were in quarantine on a hilly farm in an especially isolated area, May and many of her friends went to see them. They were such a cute group of cows, in their beautiful white coats with black spots. Never before in Taiwan had anyone seen so many beautiful animals in one place. Unlike in Australia , each cow had a stall, with sixty animals housed in the one building. The animals spent most of the time in their stalls, facing the walls. They were very smart. They each knew their own place, so each cow was given a name and the nameplate was stuck on the wall. The cows always went back to their own stall. Not one of them made a mistake. The farmers also noted that, immediately after they were put in these quarters, the sixty cows somehow selected a leader. In and out, the leader would always go first to lead the way.

During the quarantine, quite a few calves were born. Everybody was happy when a female calf was delivered as she would be kept to produce milk and for future breeding. A male calf would only be kept for a few months before being sold to the slaughterhouse. Very sad for the male calves!

Fortunately there were no problems with the two bulls. They both had pedigrees. One was only eighteen months old and already had won the Junior Championship at a Melbourne cattle show. Within two years they proved to be very good bulls indeed, and had each sired several female calves, which produced over 35 kg milk a day, breaking Taiwan’s records. In fact this outcome was instrumental in the government decision to award my company a second contract to make another buying trip to Australia in 1962.

After all the matters concerning my first dairy cattle business had been settled, I went back to my normal trading business, struggling for limited foreign-exchange allocations to buy Parker pens and to make Parker Quink ink locally. I moved my home from the third floor of my small office building to a house in Taipei’s residential area and converted the now-vacant space into a small factory to make the ink. The manufacturing of the ink was profitable and an important source of income that kept our office going.

We had made profits from the cattle business sufficient to cover our shortfalls for a year, but we still had to find a regular main business. Parker alone wasn’t enough, and another dairy cattle contract might never happen. By now the market in Taiwan had become increasingly sophisticated.

Meanwhile my two assistants, Ma and Chen, decided to resign because of our small business and our inability to compete with large companies for contracts. By now I had fought my losing battles for close to ten years. Shriro’s recognized that our office wasn’t losing money for them, but we didn’t make any money for them either. Although the professional smugglers bought their supplies in Hong Kong and sold them in Taiwan, which indirectly benefited Shriro’s Parker and watch businesses in Hong Kong, such benefits were invisible and couldn’t be counted as the Taiwan office’s profit. For the other purchases we made from England, the United States, or Germany, Shriro Hong Kong entered the margins into their own office’s books and each year these were absorbed into their profits. Taiwan got no credit.

Along with the difficulties in finding a stable business, I also realized that personally I still hadn’t accumulated any business experience. In 1960–61, however, when I made practically no progress, I attended two business training courses that would contribute to my success in later years. The Chinese government in Taiwan, helped by U.S. aid advisers, was running business training courses. Fifty people joined the first course. We began by learning to write effective business letters in English. We were all in our thirties and forties and had learned English twenty years before in school with textbooks written twenty years before that. We would begin our letters with “We beg to inform you that we have today sent to you a sample of a men’s dress shirt,” instead of a simple “We are sending you a men’s dress shirt sample.” No need to beg, to inform, or to say “today”!

The English teacher, an American, asked us to submit our company letterheads. Ours were dull and old-fashioned and had no company logo. Beside the company name were listed a lot of old formalities such as Bantley’s Code (a type of code to shorten sentences to save telegram costs) and the names of other codes that no one used anymore. With the teacher’s help, we simplified our English and learned the “American way” of communicating.

Another course, taught by a retired American professor, Mr. Sears, from New York University, concentrated on “sales.” As Sears explained, in Chinese society, a vocal salesman or sales clerk who tried to attract attention was often looked down on. Mr. Sears’s point was just the opposite: we are all salesmen and nothing happens without a “sales pitch”!

I followed Sears’s advice and conducted a “show-window competition” organized by the Parker Pen’s marketing division in 1961. I organized the dealers and put them onto creative advertising agents to set up their window displays for the contest. Then I looked for a panel of judges. Taiwan was a small market and a small country. Everybody knew everybody else, so I invited three men from the Rotary and the American clubs: Norman Getsinger, from the American Embassy; Y. K. Chang, from the Ministry of Education; and T. S. Pai, president of the American Chamber of Commerce and manager of Mobil. Everyone accepted my invitation.

Today, such important men would never have taken the time to help a small merchant like me. And my dealers too were cooperative and showed good sportsmanship in the competition. I put to good use all these sales techniques and public relations tips I had learned from Mr. Sears only a month before. We made a photo album of the displays and sent it to the Parker Pen Company. The company was impressed!

 

<1>Australia, 1962

 

In 1962 I won a second contract from the Chinese government in Taiwan. It was for the same number of heifers and another three registered stud bulls. I had based my offer on one obtained directly from Dalgety & New Zealand Loan, whose head office was in Sydney. When I first asked them to make an offer, they wrote back saying that they knew of my company’s reputation from our first shipment. They had also followed up on that shipment to determine the condition of the cows when they arrived in Taiwan and noted how smoothly we had handled everything after their arrival. They would be happy to deal with us on an exclusive basis.

And we were happy to deal with them! Mr. Jones had quoted us a price about 12 percent higher than our first contract with him—and we found out that he had also quoted our competitors a price about 10 percent lower. Dalgety’s price to us was about 20 percent lower.

Our relationship with Jones during our inspection trip had not been good, which was why he gave a cheaper quote to our competitors, a trading company run by a German friend of mine who was a longtime resident of Taiwan. However, according to the ethics we had been taught for generations—and according to Confucius—we should be loyal to the other, especially after our unpleasant experience the first time! But in modern society, such loyalty and ethics have disappeared.

In my later years, after I had developed a sizable export business, many unfortunate things happened to me. People I thought were my friends would betray me! I always tried to learn a lesson from these experiences. In business, knowing who is honest is important.

In 1962 there was always a long waiting list for the jet flights from Hong Kong to Sydney. This time we were going to Sydney, not Melbourne. And this time, instead of three, five of us went: myself, S. H. Wong, J. T. Wong (vice president of the Weichuan Foods Company, who would supervise, taking the place of Mr. Chua, who had died), as well as T. Y. Chow and M. K. Wong, my two old friends who had been officers under Mr. Soo in the agriculture department. We couldn’t get a direct flight. Instead, we got seats on a propeller plane and, after stopping at Hong Kong, we changed planes to go via New Guinea, stopping again at a tiny airport for about an hour. The whole trip must have taken thirty hours.

We checked into the Oriental Hotel in Kings Cross, close to the Hampton Court, where we’d stayed four years before. Every day we took a cab from the hotel to Dalgety’s office on Bridge Street in downtown Sydney. The Dalgety company was a small business empire in a country of livestock and animal products. It was owned by two wealthy elderly woman who lived in London ; twice a year the managing director, Mr. Goff, had to go to London to report to them.

Our contact was Jock Taylor, an easygoing gentleman, not as serious as Jones, except for his strict mid-morning tea, when everyone in the office, including visitors, had to stop at 10:30 and have a cup of tea! He coordinated our schedule with his young assistants in three different work stations near Sydney to decide where we would do our inspections. Mr Taylor liked to do everything very much at ease.

For three days we had no work so decided to take a night train to Brisbane. We got there in the morning and went to the Taiwanese consulate. A senior Chinese businessman, Mr. Chen, acted as the Honorary Consul. He took us to his small shop on Queen Street, where he sold antique Chinese porcelain.

“Mr. Chen,” called an assistant who was packing a porcelain vase to ship to a customer in Melbourne. “The customer wants to know what dynasty this is.” “Put Ming Dynasty,” Chen answered.

We looked at the vase and the merchandise displays. Everything was imported from Taiwan and had been made by a porcelain factory using imported clays from Japan. The Ming Dynasty had lasted for more than two hundred years. Saying “Ming Dynasty” was a vague way of describing antiques and imitations alike, but was usually enough to satisfy customers who lived thousands of miles from China and who had a lot of imagination about the mysterious Chinese, especially in ancient times!

Chen took us to his house for afternoon tea and dinner. He was in his mid-fifties and his two sons were away at university. His wife was charming and they had a beautiful house and garden near the University of Queensland on the west side of Brisbane . “You’re in your golden age,” Mrs. Chen told me, when she found out I was only thirty-six.

“Mr. and Mrs. Chen,” I said, pointing toward the endless land that stretched from the garden with grasses and trees and nothing else in sight. “Buy all the land in this area. You’ll make a fortune some day!” At the time, seven or eight years after the war, Taiwan was short of land and land prices were beginning to skyrocket. Likewise for Hong Kong . “In Australia , land is plenty!” said Mr. Chen. “I don’t think I’ll make a fortune.”

That was 1962. I wasn’t only innocent but very ignorant. I had been struggling to find new business opportunities in Taiwan . If I’d made an effort, I may have teamed up with a few friends such as Y. T. Chow or S. H. Wong and been able to develop such industries in Australia . Both were agricultural and animal husbandry experts and had graduated from the best universities in China . Both witnessed Taiwan ’s take-off in agriculture.

In both Melbourne and Sydney, I had conversations with visa officers at the immigration department. The impression I gathered from them was that Australian immigration still operated under the “white Australia ” policy. However, if you had entered the country, even on a temporary visa, and wanted to stay, you could request an extended visa. If you were young and had the expertise and know-how to make a contribution, you could have a chance. It might be difficult—but not impossible.

My impression of Australia this time was even more positive than on my first trip. My two trips, although four years apart, were the only times I had seen and experienced a large Westernized city since I left Shanghai , which was much like New York . During the ten years I spent in school in Shanghai and the few years when I was working there, many things had become Westernized. Western-style roads and transport, Western-style houses. Even the trees in the French concession came from France and the streets looked like streets in Paris . Sydney looked more like the common concessions in Shanghai , which the English had built about the same time Sydney had been developed. I started to appreciate the friendship extended to us by Mr. Goff and Jock Taylor and their associates and secretaries. The people in the Oriental Hotel too had been friendly, even the holidaymakers. People were easy, open, and equal!

On this trip each of us brought back a beautiful, heavy king-size cotton bed cover and a well-made woollen sports jacket. Australian textiles then were much better quality than those made in Taiwan . We also brought back Australian pears, the juicy ones that are popular in the Far East . And we brought back preserved plums packed in wooden boxes.

This was my last experience in agriculture and livestock. When I got back to Taipei , Taiwan started to take off industrially. Shriro had financial problems and began to go through some heavy turbulence. My life went in another direction, as did my business career. I had to close Shriro’s office in Taiwan and find my own future.

After signing the agreement to leave Shriro’s, Mr. Krouk told me that I could still ask for help and use the facilities of all the Shriro companies as if I had not left the family. He told me that Walter Shriro’s final message to me was, “Tell Denis to be careful or he’ll cry and come back to me and I’ll have to take care of him again!” Both my bosses had been more than kind to me. I appreciate it full-heartedly to this day.