The New Gate Keeper, I Am

I visited China for the first time in the summer of 1992 when my wife and I were part of an ESL camp working with some middle school English teachers in Dalian.  For some reason, the story of “the gate keeper” has stuck with me all these years – not that it’s a particular interesting story. But I’ll tell it anyway because it has some relevance to the contemporary publishing industry.

I remember listening to one seasoned veteran who had been in China teaching for quite a while, talk about the concept of the gatekeeper – the one person in charge of holding onto the key and wielding its power to open, for instance, the library or the sports closet. So if you wanted to go to the library and it wasn’t open, you had to find the person with the key. That person might be on lunch or he might be (sorry, it was almost always a man) just not in the mood to make the key accessible for your use at that time. In this one tiny realm, whatever it was, this person wielded a large power and coveted the fact that to get a badminton racquet that you had to run through him. I remember times having to wait for the gatekeeper to come and open some classrooms; even the headmaster of the school would have to wait too because he also didn’t have a key. So to survive, you had to practice patience. You had to go through the right channels, bow your head and smile at the right person, bring a basket of fruit on the Chinese New Year to wish the gatekeeper health, wealth, and long life. You were, in essence, at the mercy of the gate keeper.