What Do Chinese Billionaires Talk About at the Dinner Table? 中国的亿万富豪们在晚餐桌上都聊些什么? (Yicai Global) Dec. 18 — What topics do Chinese billionaires discuss in their dining table conversations, is it new business models, using more robots to resolve the issue of spiraling labor costs, or is it just private chitchat before deliberating on a proposal from the board of directors? 逸彩全球—12月18日—中国的亿万富豪们在晚餐桌上都聊些什么,是新的商业模式,使用更多的机器人代替不断上升的人工费用,还是只是在商讨董事会决议之前的私人聊天? The pity of it is, none of these is correct, as I have heard with my own ears. 很遗憾的是,以上没有一个说对了,至少我亲耳听到的都不是这样。 (Yicai Global) :第一财经的英文媒体 chitchat:闲谈,聊天; My dad came from a large family in Zhejiang — the wealthiest province in East China — while my mom was the scion of a clan of senior communist party cadres. These two circumstances notwithstanding, I did not become rich, but became a journalist instead. The confluence of these three factors has, however, afforded me the chance to hobnob with many people on the Forbes World’s Billionaires List. 我的父亲来自于浙江的一个大家庭 — 浙江是中国东部最富裕的省份 — 我的母亲是共产党高级干部的后代。尽管有这两种背景,我也没有发财,却成为了一名记者。然而这三种因素在一起的结果,是我能够和福布斯亿万富豪榜上的那些人有了推杯换盏的机会。 hobnob:对酌,共饮,(亲切)交谈; My mother and I once had dinner with her friend, a billionaire from Nanjing (the capital of Jiangsu, another rich East China province), who ranked in the hundredth percentile or so on the Forbes China Rich List and owned two listed companies. When my mother and I praised his achievements, he said he merely held the wealth in trust. He spoke no more about money thereafter, discoursing instead about his experiences of rearing ducks as a youngster. He had only a grade school education. When he finished primary school, he had had to make a living by raising meat ducks after the untimely death of his father. He was fortunate to have later broken into real estate and become a billionaire, whereupon he bought a hill and turned it into his own farmstead. He said owning a large farm, planting vegetables and eating only the meat of the pigs and ducks he raised himself had been his dream as a lad. 我母亲和我有一次和她的一位朋友,一个南京的亿万富翁(南京是江苏省的省会,江苏省也是中国东部的富裕省份),他是福布斯中国百名富豪之一,拥有两家上市公司的人一起吃饭。当我母亲和我称赞他的成就时,他说他只相信财富。此后,他就再也没有谈起过钱,而是大说他小的时候养鸭子的经历。他只有小学学历。当他小学毕业后,他因父亲过早的去世而不得不去养食用鸭子来为生。后来他非常幸运地进入了房地产行业并成为了亿万富翁,之后他又买了一座山并把它建成了自己的农场。他说拥有一个大农场,种植蔬菜,并只吃自己饲养的猪和鸭子,是他年轻时的梦想。 listed companies:上市公司 On another occasion, a billionaire relative of my father returned from a trip to Tibet and invited us to dinner. He talked at the table about a master he found in that land of mysticism, a living Buddha about 50 years of age, in whose presence his spirit felt uplifted, so he donated CNY5 million to rebuild a temple for the monk, with whom he regularly met. This billionaire had made his pile by loan sharking, but had done time for fraud before making his fortune. He did not try to downplay this history, saying rather that the master had enlightened him and made him understand the meaning of his incarceration, an experience without which he would not have been able to achieve so much. He sent us home afterwards in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce. 另外一次,我父亲的一个亿万富豪亲戚从西藏回来请我们吃饭。饭桌上他说起了一位他在那块神秘的土地找到的一位师傅,一位50多岁的活佛,在活佛面前他会感到振奋,因此他捐了五百万人民币为他重修庙宇,并常与活佛见面。这位富豪是靠放高利贷起家,发财之前靠欺诈为生,并为此蹲过监狱。他并没有想淡化这段历史,而是说大师已经开导了他,让他明白了那段监狱生活的意义,如果没有那段经历,他就无法取得后来的成就。后来他让司机用劳斯莱斯送我们回了家。 incarceration : 钳闭; 监禁,禁闭; Billionaires who have invited me to dinner have sometimes also invited my colleagues. A famous anchorwoman and I were eating dinner with a financial firm’s boss when he asked for and received the beautiful young presenter’s telephone number and WeChat account (WeChat is a popular Chinese messaging app). Later the girl told me the moneybags was hitting on her. Now you may feel that this girl was quite upright, but she certainly didn’t stay that way for long as she soon became his mistress and was seen driving an Aston Martin. 请我吃饭的亿万富翁有时候也连我的同事一起请。一次一个著名女主持人和我一起,跟一个金融公司的老板吃饭。老板询问并得到了年轻漂亮的主持人的电话号码和微信账号(微信和中国流行的社交APP)。之后那女孩告诉我那富翁勾搭她。你这时会以为她很正派,但她当然不会总这样,没多久她就成了那富翁的情人,并被看到开上了一辆阿斯顿 马丁。 moneybags:富翁; 财东; 财主阔佬; hitting on:与某人调情; Another time I had dinner with the chairmen of three listed companies who gathered at the behest of another of my dad’s relative. Their discussion centered mainly on their gambling experiences in Macao and Malaysia. The casinos had even laid on a private plane for them, they boasted. Any time they felt the yen, even at 2:00 a.m., they could jet off to these dens to gamble. 还有一次我和一个有三家上市公司的老板、在我父亲另一位亲戚的要求下一起用餐。他们谈话的重点在他们在澳门和马来西亚赌博的经历。他们吹牛说,赌场甚至为他们安排了一架私人飞机。任何时候他们想赌了,即使是凌晨2点,他们也能飞到那些窝点去赌博。 boasted:吹牛 yen:渴望 dens:窝点; Foreign politicians have also dined with filthy-wealthy family familiars. Once in Hong Kong with my wife another rich relation treated me to Yung Kee, a famous restaurant in Central. I never expected that another guest who dined with us would turn out to be Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand who was there in self-imposed exile. Shinawatra clearly had big business to talk about. He had investments in Singapore and Hong Kong and was trying to channel funds from mainland China. I had absolutely no idea how he became acquainted with the mainland rich that I knew. 外国政客也和我家熟悉的富豪共同进过餐。一次在香港我妻子的一个富有的朋友在中环的一家名为镛记酒家的著名餐厅请我吃饭。我绝对没有想到与我们共同进餐的另一个人会是他信,他是泰国的前总理,正在那里流亡。很明显他信有大买卖要谈。他在新加坡和香港都有投资并且试图从中国大陆寻求资金。我完全不知道他怎么会和我认识的大陆富豪那么熟悉。 The often-intimate relationships allowed me to hear these moneyed people conversing on astonishing topics at dinner. On one occasion, as I was dining with a female billionaire — my relative at a certain remove — and others of her ilk, they talked about surrogate birth, saying they had recently found girls suitable for surrogacy in Cuba and that they would have the resulting children-by-proxy raised in the US until they grew up so that they could operate their businesses all around the world for them. They discussed these Cubanas appearance and the question of whether their children would look Chinese. They asserted their need for more kids, which they justified on the grounds of requiring sufficient successors to ensure the immortality of their family businesses. None deemed such actions contrary to morality or law, but felt rather that their money granted them infinite privileges and prerogatives. 这些亲密的关系能够使我在餐桌上听到那些有钱人聊些让人吃惊的话题。有一回,我和一位女富豪吃饭 — 我的一位远房亲戚 — 还有她家的其他人,他们谈论代孕,说他们近期在古巴找到了合适的女孩做代孕,这样他们会在孩子在美国长大后得到孩子,因此他们可以在全世界范围内有人能够打理他们的生意。他们讨论那些古巴人的长相及他们的孩子是否会像中国人。他们声称他们需要那多的孩子,他们认为他们有足够正当的理由需要更多的继承人来确保他们家族企业不断延续。他们不认为这样违背了道德或法律,但感到了他们的金钱给了他们无限的权利和特权。 prerogatives:n. 特权; 权利
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