In an age of “experts” we often find that few individuals have the proven experience to live up to the title once you scratch the surface- especially when it comes to China. Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨)- Executive Vice-President of top rated Asia-focused multicultural advertising agency Kang & Lee, founder of a popular LinkedIn group for Chinese-speaking professionals, mentor to budding Sinophiles, gifted storyteller and a scholar in his own right- is approaching thirty years of connection to China. And, while he may not call himself a “China expert,” his history and intensity proves otherwise. I sat down with Mr. Gitlin, who is currently working on a memoir about his early years in China, to learn more about a life transformed beginning with a Mandarin class. Part I of this two-part interview highlights a few stories from Mr. Gitlin’s initial ties to the Middle Kingdom; Part II will detail his career in domestic Asia-focused multicultural marketing, his LinkedIn group Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives, and what it means to shape one’s profession around a particular theme- China.

The Chinese Challenge…
”Pretty early on in elementary school, I discovered that I had an unusual aptitude for learning languages. I had the fortune in New York City public schools to be given the opportunity to study foreign language beginning in the fourth grade and was placed into a French class. This was in the early 70’s, before Spanish became the language of choice. I continued to excel in foreign languages throughout high school, studying French and Italian, and then decided that I would major in foreign languages in college. My initial thought was that I’d be a French major. However, by the time I hit my junior year of high school, I decided that I was going to take another language when I got to college- one that was completely different from French and that would really exercise my perception that I had an ability to learn languages. So, I decided upon Chinese. This was in 1978 and there was a lot going on in the world at the time- the end of The Cultural Revolution, the nascent opening up of China, Deng Xiaoping coming back, and the establishment of diplomatic relations that was finally concluded by the Carter Administration… I knew about none of that; none of that had any impact or relevance to the decision I made- it was purely about my perception that Chinese was the most difficult language in the world. Part of it was also an ego thing- I knew of no one else who was studying Chinese and my sister was studying Russian while my brother was in college studying Latin and Greek. I needed to be different from them and I wanted to tackle what I thought was the most difficult language in the world.
In the end, I decided to go to a school that had a great French program and a very strong Chinese program- Cornell. When I walked into my first day of [Chinese] class, which had about 20-25 students, I noticed that only 3 were non-Chinese. Most students were in the class to satisfy foreign language requirements; they were Chinese Americans and many of them spoke Chinese but didn’t read or write. It was all about, “if I have to take a language requirement, I’ll study my family’s language.”
Outside of the classroom, I was really ridiculed and made fun of. Everybody wondered, “what are you studying that for?” However, I discovered that my perception of Chinese being a very difficult language was really off target. Grammatically, it is one of the simplest languages in the world; there are no verb conjugations, a syntax that often mirrors English, and a non-redundant grammar that, when compared with French or Spanish, is so much easier. Of course, the flipside of that is that pronunciation is difficult and the writing system is challenging. Within a month of studying Chinese, I called my parents and said, “I’m going to major in Chinese.” I became very passionate about it, but had no idea what I was going to do with it. I became an Asian Studies major…and I focused everything on China- I took Chinese history, Chinese government, Chinese linguistics. The only thing I didn’t take was Chinese literature, but I focused on that in graduate school. I ended up winning a Presidential Scholarship (Harry S. Truman Congressional Scholar), which funded my last two years of college and my first two years of graduate school.”

Fudan and Qiqihar…
”During my undergraduate studies lots of students were going to France and Spain, so I decided that I was going to go to China. No one from Cornell had done that since 1949. I went to China in 1982 as a cross-registered student at SUNY Albany (Cornell did not have a foreign exchange program with China during that time) and joined over a hundred students at Fudan University from all over the world. [During college] at Cornell, I had lecture three days a week for an hour and an hour and a half of drill every day; in addition to that, during my freshman and sophomore years at college, I spent on average three and a half hours every night in the language laboratory at Cornell. So, when I arrived at Fudan, [I had to take a Chinese language exam for placement]. I passed the exam with flying colors and decided to study 近代历史- modern history.
I can’t even begin to describe to you how different it was in China overall in 1982 and how we were treated as foreigners, as compared with today…Imagine standing at the end of Nanjing Lu on the Bund in Shanghai and looking at Pudong. As far as the eye could see, there was farmland- there was nothing on the other side of the river. Today, Shanghai residents themselves don’t pay any attention to foreigners, and anyone in Shanghai who does is immediately recognized as a domestic tourist. It was the post-Cultural Revolution and xenophobia was still in place; foreigners were monitored very carefully. When you were in China those days as a foreigner, you really felt that you were cut off from the rest of the world. If you wanted to buy foreign goods, you had to buy it at The Friendship Store and you had to buy it with a special Chinese currency that you received when you exchanged foreign currency- you couldn’t spend RMB in a Friendship Store.
I spent a year at Fudan and took every opportunity I could to visit the countryside. On the weekend and on school holidays, I would hop on the train. I basically went everywhere in the country except T1bet. Back then, anytime you wanted to take a trip in China via airplane, train or bus, the person selling the ticket would demand to see your “foreigner’s travel permit,” which said that you were permitted to travel to a specific destination during specified days… During one trip, I had permission to go to Harbin and went to see the ice-sculptures, but when I got there, all the locals were saying that the ice sculptures in Qiqihar were worth seeing. So, I bought a ticket to Qiqihar and took the train there with two fellow students. The minute we arrived in the Qiqihar station, a plain clothed policeman asked to see my travel permit. I said “I don’t have a travel permit,” and they took us to the public security station and left us there for about an hour, during which time we [assumed] that they were verifying our identification with Fudan. When the security officers returned, they told us that, up until a week or two previous, Qiqihar had been a closed city to foreigners; we later surmised that it was because it was in close proximity to an air force base. So, we were dealing with a local public security apparatus that was inexperienced and perhaps even paranoid about foreigners in their city. They asked us to write a self-criticism in Chinese explaining why we had done what we did and then they gave us permission to leave, provided we would return to Harbin the next day…
We made our way to a hotel, got to see the ice-sculpture exhibit, and pushed our way into a sugar factory- something that I should never have done, in retrospect. From the moment we exited the police station to when we stepped off the train in Harbin the next night, there was a guy following us very conspicuously the whole time- someone who had been assigned to watch us. We observed him when we’d left the police station, he followed us all through the city, got on buses with us, showed up at restaurants we went to, and only left us when we stepped off the train in Harbin.”

The First Documented Case…
”I decided to go to Yale for a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and from the moment I arrived there, I felt like I had to get back to China. I discussed this with my professors two months after starting at Yale and my fellow students were horrified because I was there with full-funding from a variety of scholarship sources. I received a transfer to a Master’s in East Asian Studies, [which allowed me to leave Yale] after a full year with a Master’s degree. I graduated in 1985 and came out knowing that I was going to go back to China. A friend of mine had been leading tours and offered to put me in touch with the company he was working for. [Two weeks after I contacted the company] they called me and said, “we’ve been asked by a French travel agency in Montreal to put a French-speaking guide on a tour of doctors of acupuncture going from Quebec to Beijing to do an international conference but they want to do a pre-tour of China. Can you do it in French?” I said yes, and then spent the next eight months as a tour guide taking groups to Asia and back…
As if fate handed me something, the travel agency called me up one day and said, “we have a tour leaving next week, Trans-Siberia for twenty-eight days, and our guide has just cancelled on us; you’ve already been on the Trans-Siberian. Will you take it?” I said “sure” and I embarked in May of 1985 on the Trans-Siberian tour. That tour really sticks out in my mind because something momentous happened. Three days into the tour, a thirty-five year old man from Los Angeles on the tour came to me one morning in the Nanjing Hotel and said that he was going to stay back because he wasn’t feeling well. The next morning he said, “I have leukemia. Before I left the states, I had some chemotherapy and because my immune system is down, I think I’m starting to get sick. I don’t want to alarm you, but I need some time to rest.” A day later we flew to Xi’an. By the time we got to Xi’an, he was having visible problems breathing. I spent half the time in Xi’an shuttling this guy to a few doctors, including one who said, “he probably should have some oxygen in his room.” At that point, I suggested that he shouldn’t go to Russia and that we should work on getting him home. This was mid-80s China and there weren’t foreign hospitals. We got to Beijing and by that time, he could hardly walk. We were in the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing and I started to work on getting him on a flight back to Los Angeles with Pan Am. Pan Am insisted that he come to their office and once their station manager looked at him, he said that they couldn’t sell him a ticket without authorization from his doctor that he could fly… At this point, I had been urging this guy to let me hospitalize him in Beijing, but he absolutely refused to do that… [Following this issue with Pan Am], I’d gone up to his room and he said, “listen, I really need a tank of oxygen.” I said, “I’ll take you to the hospital” and I called an ambulance, which arrived about an hour and a half late. I was his interpreter to the Chinese doctors and explained that he had leukemia and was having difficulty breathing. I was scheduled to leave the next morning to the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian railroad with my tour group, but on that night, around 1:30am, he died. The Chinese doctors could not understand why such a young man who was under their care would just die. They called his doctor on the phone in Los Angeles and his doctor said, “oh, I diagnosed him a year or two ago with full-blown AIDS.” This was the first acknowledged AIDS death in China, and within three weeks it started to make headlines all over the world…”

Hebrew and Mandarin…
”After about three years in China I was getting a little burned out. I was in my mid-twenties, single and China was still a quasi-hardship place to live. So, I decided to take a break and spend a year traveling around the world. I bought a ticket back to the United States, spent a summer traveling around Europe by train and then went to Israel with the intention of spending a few weeks there. When I got there, however, my language bug kicked in. I decided to put down some temporary roots there and I enrolled in an intensive Hebrew language course designed for immigrants. I’d been to Israel once before and was profoundly embarrassed that I could speak Mandarin but not Hebrew, which was a language connected to my own ethnic roots…
Israel is a very small country and by my assessment there were probably no more than two or three people there at the time who spoke fluent Mandarin. Israel was already taking the first baby steps towards trying to normalize relations with China and I became known within a community of people who cared about China and Israel, one of which was an Israeli diplomat who worked in the foreign affairs ministry and had studied some Chinese. At just about the time that I was going to leave Israel, she called me up and said, “I just want to let you know that in the newspapers in Tel Aviv they’re advertising that a major international Israeli company is searching for people who speak fluent Asian languages.” So, I applied to this company, which turned out to be the company of the richest man in Israel at the time, Shaoul Eisenberg. I was made a job offer and in the summer of 1989, I started working for the Eisenberg Group of Companies at his headquarters in Tel Aviv. He was looking to create a national network of his own company’s offices in China, as well as a few other places in Asia… About six weeks into working for him, he came to me and said “one of my resident managers of Beijing needs to take a home leave. I’d like to send you over there to fill in for him until he gets back.” So, I was shipped off to China and, even though that manager eventually came back, they kept me there. Between 1982 when I went to study at Fudan until 1992, I spent a total of seven years in China as a student, then in the hospitality industry and then with this international trading company. That was my residence experience before coming back to the United States to pursue an MBA.”

This concludes Part I of this two-part interview with Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨). Mr. Gitlin is Executive Vice-President of Kang & Lee Advertising and Founder of the LinkedIn group, “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives.” To learn more about his professional background, please visit his LinkedIn profile. Part II of this interview with Saul Gitlin will focus on his career in Asia-focused multicultural marketing, his LinkedIn group, and what it means to shape one’s profession around a particular theme- China. Stay tuned…

Interviews china, first documented AIDS death in China, interview, Kang & Lee, Qiqihar, saul gitlin, Shoul Eisenberg