After a long sleep and a visit to the hotel health club, I wandered over to the China World to check out the conference. The lobby was as lavish as that of any hotel in New York or London: rich Chinese carpets; gleaming brass and stainless-steel fixtures that had been polished and buffed so well they were like mirrors; teakwood furniture that had been oiled and stained to a deep, lustrous red. At the Unetat hospitality desk, a lithe young Frenchwoman handed me my credentials. Her name was Lisette, and she seemed to know all about me.

“I knew you would come,” she said.

Her eyes were a sharp cerulean blue, and her blond hair was gathered up on her head, exposing a beautiful neck. I gazed at her appreciatively. Somebody at Unetat had taken the trouble to assign her to me. Don’t even think about it, I told myself. My life over the coming week in Beijing was already complicated enough.

Lisette gave me a conference program. Most of the sessions sounded numbingly dull, on topics like “China and the Fiber-Optic Future.” But one item caught my eye. It was a breakfast discussion of “Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in the New Asia.” I asked Lisette to reserve me a place.

“Do you have plans tonight?” she asked. “We have tickets for the Beijing opera. Perhaps you and I could go, and then have a late dinner afterward?”

Fortunately, in this instance I did have another engagement. Before leaving Washington, I had made arrangements to have dinner with an old friend from Hong Kong, a Chinese-American lawyer named Michael Wee. He had worked for many years with one of the big New York firms and then launched his own legal business.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’ve made other plans.”

“Then, we will do it another night,” she said. She looked so tempting. There was a way her blue eyes caught the light—you wanted to look more closely, to see what made them sparkle so.

“We’ll see,” I said. “It’s going to be a busy week.”

Michael Wee picked me up at my hotel in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed in a beige Armani suit and a black cashmere turtleneck; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he was wearing a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses that made him look like a Chinese owl. The man I remembered had been a hardworking associate in his firm’s Hong Kong office, a geeky Chinese-American kid who was great at managing the legal minutiae of international joint-venture agreements. Now he was a superstar.

“Hey-hey-hey, Eric,” he called out to me through the window of his Rolls. He shouted something in Chinese to his driver, who hopped out to open the door for me.