My Good Fortune by Lu Chi Fa & Dr. Lorin Lee Cary

Author:Lu Chi Fa & Dr. Lorin Lee Cary [Lu, Chi Fa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / Asian & Asian American
ISBN: 9781644386118
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
Published: 2019-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

11

ADAPT TO THE UNEXPECTED

I returned from China tired, grateful and overconfident about my successes. My business dreams caused me to make a big mistake. I believed I was smart and intelligent, yet what I did next was neither. I split my energies even further, and in 1988 bought a third food-court restaurant.

Au Chocolate was a kiosk with a sink, espresso machine and gourmet chocolates. The concept was good, especially for upscale Manhattan Beach, but this time I hadn’t done my market research. There was a See’s Candies store within a block of the mall. I just never had seen it because I’d always been too busy to explore the town! See’s had cornered the chocolate business with low prices and a strong reputation. I couldn’t compete with them and my classy little Au chocolate kiosk didn’t do well.

This situation reminded me of an old Chinese proverb: “There are no mistakes, only lessons.” But what were the lessons? That’s the question I needed to ask, and answer. By this time I had been living for several years in a beautiful gated community in Manhattan Beach. I’d believed that being in a “white” area would improve my language skills, especially the idioms that I found so hard to understand and the many exceptions to the rules of grammar. That hadn’t happened; I just worked too many hours to socialize much with neighbors. Still, the way that you know if you’ve really learned another language is when you start to think in it. And by this time, to my amazement, I had actually begun to do that.

But my ability with the English language actually wasn’t the lesson I needed to examine. The truth, I had to admit, was that my two successful businesses and one flagging chocolate kiosk had not come easily. In my aggressive pursuit of success I had overextended myself and was totally exhausted, physically and mentally. I’d been working non-stop for seven years. In reality, I’d been working without a break since I was four years old. I felt stressed and had gotten too thin. Now in my mid-forties I had a twenty-eight inch waist, below normal for a man my height, no matter how much American culture admires slimness. If I kept going at this pace, I fretted, my health would decline quickly.

I decided that this was a sign and that I needed to listen to my body and trust my urgent need to get away. I put all three businesses on the market, hoping to sell quickly. Croissant USA and China Express both did, and for a good price. I had offered China Express to a restaurant owner I knew, but he’d declined and bought another place closer to the ocean in Manhattan Beach. As it turned out, he had to pour a lot of money into remodeling it, and then it failed. He was, I concluded, a smart man, but not wise. My wisdom was to basically give away the kiosk. I was delighted to get rid of it! I now felt free from the self-inflected pressures of my own success.

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