By Laurence Collins, Globe Correspondent, 4/14/2002
HANOVER - The delivery vans that pull up to the Route 53 strip mall across from Building 19 routinely disgorge mundane merchandise - mattresses for the bedding store, bread and cold cuts for the sandwich shop, plastic-sheathed garments for Rocket Cleaners, birdhouses and cracked corn for the bird feed store.
But on this crisp spring afternoon, a 12-wheel tractor-trailer rig hauled a giant container that up to a few days ago had been lashed to the deck of a freight vessel bound from China to New York City.
After traveling thousands of miles from Alex Bai's former homeland, the not-so-routine inventory had arrived at his shop, Feng Shui, a name that also describes a Chinese practice of arranging a room's furnishings to achieve spiritual balance, or chi.
From the front of the nearly empty trailer where he'd been helping the truckers unload, he spotted a familiar face, and, throwing his hands in the air, said, ''Lots of stuff!''
A kaleidoscopic cache of Chinese decorative artifacts, Bai's stuff ranges from tiny fisherman mud carvings crafted in South China factories to rare hand-carved window screens and other treasures rescued from doomed villages in the path of China's mammoth Three Gorges hydroelectric dam project, which is being built on the Yangtze River.
Twin marble temple lions sit outside the shop, joined by a venerable wooden farmer's pushcart, while inside visitors are greeted by a colorful pagoda festooned with paper lanterns and ladened with jade jewelry and carvings, vases, and stone visages of Buddha. Pieces of reproduction and antique furniture press in from the walls, some yet to be unwrapped. Out back, in the storeroom, more merchandise needs to be unpacked.
''If I were in China, all my neighbors and relatives would show up to help. Here I'm alone. Here it will take me two weeks!'' Bai said, laughing.
A solid, compact man, with a ready smile and a quip (''What do I do for exercise? This!'' he exclaimed, waving at the heavy statuary and furniture), Bai is from Beijing, where he was born and brought up in a fairly prosperous family. He lives in Hanover with his wife Mary and their 7-year-old son, Kevin.
Mary Bai (her maiden name was Sheehan) grew up in Mansfield and was graduated from Tufts University. After college she went into the travel business with Grand Circle Travel in Boston, where she has worked for 15 years.
In 1987, Mary was leading a tour group of senior citizens in Beijing when she met the young entrepreneur who one day would be her husband.
''Whenever I had a group over there we would stop at a government-run shop where they could buy custom-made chops,'' a seal or stamp usually carved from marble or wood, Mary said. ''They were inexpensive, so they'd buy quite a few for their grandchildren. ''One of the tour guides told me about a privately owned shop, and it turned out to be owned by Alex, so we started to go to him for our chops.''
Within two years the business relationship blossomed into romance, and the couple was married in a civil ceremony in Beijing in 1989, the year Alex left China for his new homeland. Three days before they left, Alex and Mary were swept up in what seemed at the time a gigantic party, as if the joyous citizens of Beijing had spilled out into the streets to bid them bon voyage. When they joined the thousands of mostly young people, it was like a joyful New Year's Eve in Times Square. Only this was Tiananmen Square at the beginning of the ill-fated pro-democracy demonstrations.
''Two or three days after we arrived in America, we stood before the TV watching the soldiers and the tanks,'' Alex said. ''We were crying and holding each other, because we couldn't believe what we saw.''
Mary shook her head in bewilderment at the memory. ''We thought it was a peaceful demonstration,'' she said. ''I mean, everyone was laughing and having a good time. We had no idea it was going to turn violent.''
This was not the first time that Alex had experienced the fury of a repressive regime. Fourteen years before, at 16, he had been uprooted from his urban home and dispatched to the countryside in the waning days of the Maoist upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution.
''They would wake us up every morning at 4 or 5 a.m., and we'd spend all day picking vegetables and loading them on carts to take to the city,'' Bai said.
The hard work didn't trouble Bai as much as another legacy of the Cultural Revolution: He belonged to an entire generation whose formal education was cut short by its rabid anti-intellectualism.
''I never went to college,'' he said. ''When I turned 18 years old, I was assigned to work in a factory, making watches for domestic use. I had no choice, because that was what the Communists did back then.''
By 1980, a more moderate leadership had taken over the government and a liberalization of China's social and economic life took root. In that year, Bai learned the rudiments of English in classes taught on TV and radio, studies he later continued in night classes.
In the early '80s, Alex operated a souvenir booth in the lobby of a Canadian-owned hotel in Beijing before starting his carving business in 1985, the business that ultimately led his wife to him and brought him to America. Shortly after they arrived in the United States, Alex opened a Chinese giftware business from a pushcart in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a thriving business he still operates. He also has expanded into the wholesale business, and supplies 10 retailers with products he finds on his annual buying trips to China.
The next stop in Bai's entrepreneurial journey will be Independence Mall in Kingston, where he'll move his exotic inventory into a larger space in May. Enough space to achieve maximum chi.
|
