Maiden Shanghai
by
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CHAPTER 1
Bianca and I sat at the bar in the back of the smoky, antique-furnished room.
"You know the Chinese character for crisis, Little Sister?"
Bianca frowned in mid-flirt with a man across the room, "Weiji?"
"That character combines the characters of opportunity and danger."
My sister sighed tolerantly, "So?"
"So, that character also defines a lot of the characters I see here tonight.” I gestured at the knots of Yuppies and Chuppies networking the room between sets. "Yep. Characters who can be an opportunity or a danger depending on how you handle them," I gestured to the crowd before me. "In English they’re called men."
Bianca chuckled, "The Chinese word for man is ren, Big Sister."
I nodded, "And the ancient Chinese pictograph for man evolved from an anatomically correct line drawing into a two-stroke character with limbs, but no head." I took a long swallow of my drink and saluted the crowd with my empty glass. "In my experience, Little Sister, the evolution of that character also describes Western man's transformation when he arrives in
G's
"People!" God yelled at the BJ-3 TV monitor. "That character means people! You see a putz on that symbol?"
God's grid of TV monitors, lined up in numbered rows and stacked in alphabetical ranks for easy reference, presented a video mosaic of humanity so the Almighty could keep an eye on things between sports seasons. God had gotten the idea from the wall-mounted TV screen George Burns had checked periodically to stay one step ahead of Gracie on the old Burns and Allen Show. The Almighty decided to have the multiple monitors installed after, as God growled, 'the yutz in charge of programming at NBC switched from the Raider-Jet game to Heidi in 1968.’
Tsi-Ku Niang, the fortune-telling Goddess of Outhouses, turned the sound down on Jeopardy and leaned over. "Who are you yelling at?"
"Kate Minola," God groaned. "Blames men for her problems."
The Outhouse Goddess inspected her huge jade ring and chuckled, "You think she might have a point?"
God gestured impatiently at the TV, "But she's twisting my words around."
Tsi-Ku Niang frowned, "She a journalist?"
"Public Relations."
"Same-same," the Goddess shrugged, "So what is she complaining about?"
"How men treat women in
Tsi-Ku Niang smirked, "This is news to you?"
Blues & Jazz Club
"Yep," I shrugged.
"Man . . . opportunity . . . danger . . . crisis. All parts of the same hole, if you'll forgive the pun."
My sister smirked at me, "You have found something better?"
"Oh, don't get me wrong, Bianca. I love the guys. And they love me if they get their chance," I chuckled, "but I get tired of 'em, too."
Bianca shrugged, "You must learn to use patience to get what you want."
I felt the alcohol dull me into agreeability. "As Shakespeare said, and I raise my glass to him, 'there’s the rub.'"
"I do not understand." "
When men rub me the wrong way, Little Sister, I chafe," I pointed a drunken finger at her. "Now while my Chinese half can take a lot of friction, my Italian half tends to get burned up," I shrugged. "And when that happens, my Shanghainese side plots revenge." Bianca nodded, "As it should."
"But whatever lights my fire, be it passion or anger, the kind of heat I give off is directly proportional to the kind of heat they cause," I chuckled. "Of course, at age thirty-two, I'm beginning to find a definite difference between those fires."
"That is too bad."
"And I'm beginning to wonder whether there's a man out there who can light a fire I can live with."
"A match is a match," Bianca smiled at a passing man. "It just depends which one strikes your fancy."
"Yeah, well," I took a slug of my third bourbo
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About the Book
Businesswomen in China get even less respect than they do in the US. Katarina Minola doesn’t like it. When Kate discovers someone stealing power from her firm’s Xinjiang Province NAP site in China’s and disrupting China’s military communications, Kate’s father Bennie and his old Army buddy Luca, who started the Shanghai company together with Kate’s ‘Uncle Mike’, decide to bring in Luca’s son, Pete, to help solve the problem. Kate doesn’t like that either. Kate and Pete are two halves of a critical mass. As Kate wrestles Pete’s Bull-In-A-Chinatown personality through Chinese social and business customs, Pete wrestles with Kate’s problem. Kate’s two new clients are even stranger than her NAP site problems. Set in Shanghai and Xinjiang Province, the novel weaves the very real possibilities of a plot to control China’s future based on the knotty relationships of duty and business that bind China’s social and business worlds.
About the Author
In 1974, the author left New York City to sell his paintings on the West Coast of the United States. In 1976, with a Pong championship to his credit, he accepted a job in Iran where he met his wife. After the Revolution, the author, his wife and the Shah all left Iran for Egypt. Two of them got jobs...the other one died. The author has since lived in and written about Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, Haiti and Shanghai. His novels are ‘The Missionary Position’, about Angela Benedetto’s adventures in Irian Jaya, ‘My Enemy, My Friend’, about a love affair during the Iranian Revolution ‘Shanghai’d’ about a Chinese/Israeli plot originating in 1930's Shanghai, ‘Maiden Shanghai’, about Shanghai’s Green Gang’s covert aid to China’s Xinjiang Seperatists and Something Came Up about a young man's search for self. He has written published articles for Channel East Magazine, West-East Magazine, Media Magazine, Asian Hotel and Catering Magazine, www.zingasia.com, www.chinaOnline.com and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He now writes while out-dodging drivers who don’t signal and waiting on telephone trees when he wants to communicate.