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Business Lessons from an Immigrant Boyhood
PAGE 4 OF 6
We started using credit cards to help make ends meet. Between the two of us, we must have applied for several dozen. We filled out applications during those long breaks between customers. Each card had small limits, but collectively they kept us together, body and soul.
Unfortunately, they weren't quite enough to keep us together with our cars. My brand-new 325i was repossessed one night. The credit card bills began piling up. Creditors started calling the store. My girlfriend dumped me. My friends stopped coming around. Our existence was becoming a nightmare in which the harder we ran, the slower we moved. Our most loyal customers were my parents. They came by every week to buy something and refused to accept discounts. It was a thoroughly humbling and humiliating experience. I can't even remember how many nights I lay awake thinking about ways to commit suicide.
After a while Delong and I could both see that we were stuck. If we stayed in business, we could cover store rent and the line of credit but little else. Sooner or later the credit-card companies would file suit, get judgments and take our inventory. Our shaky credit would be completely ruined. But if we closed up, we would be on the hook for four more years on our store lease and have to default on our bank loan and credit card payments. Our credit would be ruined anyway. And of course no one was interested in taking over -- much less buying -- a new retail business that hadn't yet been able to turn a profit. There was no way out.
In the end it was my father who forced the issue. After a late dinner we were sitting alone in the kitchen. "Stop killing yourself with that store," he said out of the blue. "It's not too late to go back to college and make something of yourself." He would take care of repaying the bank and credit card companies. "We'll go to the lawyer tomorrow to talk about the store lease."
I didn't have the strength or the pride to argue. For the past couple of months I had really been functioning as a zombie, a living dead. In my heart I was finished as a businessman. I was only too happy to be given one more chance at a normal life. My father slapped me on the back, finished his beer and went to bed. I just sat there staring out the window through hot tears.
I enrolled in community college with the thought of getting myself back on track to attending a four-year college and doing something respectable. The problem was, I found it impossible to concentrate on my studies. My mind kept going back to my business failure. What had we done wrong? I felt like the stupidest guy in the world. Even before we closed up, Delong and I had started to blame each other for our failure. If only I hadn't listened to Delong about the location. If Delong had done a better job of buying the right merchandise. We had stopped talking to each other.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
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My father put me to work on the family orchard on weekends. He told me it would be a way for me to repay him on the bank loan and credit card bills he had taken over. I saw it as a way to earn back a little self respect and take a breather from everyone I knew.
It was a thirty-acre orchard a good drive from the city. My parents had bought it as a long-term investment. Someday they hoped to sell it to a developer for a fat profit on which they could retire. Meanwhile it needed a lot of work to maintain. I drove up on Friday afternoons and spent weekends weeding, spraying, fertilizing, pruning, mending fences and irrigation pipes. I compared it to being sent down for re-education like those intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. I could understand why the Communist leaders did that. Working by the sweat of my brow and losing myself in simple, honest labor was wonderful therapy. I was emotionally parched and brittle from my ordeal and failure. The sunshine, the air scented with cherry, lemon, orange and apple blossoms -- they were all reminders that life was much bigger than buying and selling things.
Slowly, as I toiled and sweated in the sun like an immigrant laborer, I felt my insides coming back to life. At the end of each weekend I returned to the city feeling a little more alive. But during the week, while attending classes, I felt as though I were under a cloud or maybe underwater. I had thought that over time, as I recovered from my business failure, I would find it easier to focus on my studies. Instead, it became harder.
Before long I was taking more interest in the orchard than in schoolwork. I found myself calculating the costs of keeping the trees watered and fertilized against the profits to be made once the fruit was picked. I felt good thinking that my efforts were contributing in some small way to my parents' income. So I was shocked to hear my father say that, because of the high cost of water and competition from cheap Latin American imports, the orchard barely made enough to cover costs. Property taxes and monthly mortgage payments had to come out of their pockets. It discouraged and depressed me to think that all my sweat was just contributing to another losing proposition.
That knowledge drove me back to the pain of my own failure. I felt as though I were doomed to spend the rest of my life wallowing in its ashes. PAGE 5
| "Working by the sweat of my brow and losing myself in simple, honest labor was wonderful therapy." |