The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [392]
On the tenth day they visited the site of the Three Gorges Dam project, then boarded the M.S. East Queen, a huge, five-deck cruise ship, with a ballroom, a barbershop, a masseuse, and a musician on the deck in formal clothes who played “Turkey in the Straw.”
The boat passed into the first of the three gorges, the Shennong Xi, where many of those onboard donned orange life vests and climbed into longboats that were poled and pulled by river trackers along an upstream tributary of the river. A group of ten men using ropes dragged each boat against the current, while young, supposedly virginal girls sang to encourage the men at their grueling work.
Buffett cracked jokes about the virgins. But that night during the Cantonese dinner, his mind obviously flashing to the implications of the Ovarian Lottery, he said, “There could have been another Bill Gates among those men pulling our boat. They were born here, and they were destined to spend their lives tugging those boats the way they did ours. They didn’t have a chance. It was pure luck that we had a shot at the brass ring.”
From Shennong Xi, the boat steamed on to Outang Gorge, passing villages where schoolchildren came out to bow at the strange Americans. Past a silk-reeling mill, between sheer, mist-shrouded peaks, alongside a traditional cobblestone village, the boat slowly wound its way down the Yangtze. Finally, they arrived in Guilin for a private Li River barge cruise through one of the most scenically beautiful spots on earth, a pristine river lined with thousands of limestone pinnacles covered in a mantle of green, “like jade hairpins,” according to the Tang poet Han Yu. Many of the Gates party bicycled along the riverbank to experience the long waterside parade of two-and three-hundred-foot-high untouched prehistoric stone shafts. Warren, Bill Sr., and Bill Jr. had obtained permission from their wives to have an hours-long bridge orgy on the boat as the barge floated through the magnificent pine-forested landscape.
When they finally arrived in Hong Kong at the end of the trip, Buffett towed the Gateses straight to McDonald’s to buy hamburgers in the middle of the night. “And all the way back from Hong Kong to San Francisco and then on to Omaha, I just read newspapers.”
But long after that journey through China, for years afterward in fact, Buffett’s mind kept returning over and over to one of its moments. It was not the scenery, which he had barely noticed, or the camel ride, memorialized in a photograph. It was not the endless meals of french fries during the Chinese banquets that everyone else had enjoyed. He was thinking about the Three Gorges Dam project and the longboats on the Shennong Xi. But it was not the singing virgins that had beguiled him. It was the fate of the men who spent their lives ceaselessly dragging the longboats upstream that stayed with him, haunting his thoughts about individual destiny and fate.
51
To Hell with the Bear
Omaha and Greenwich, Connecticut • 1994–1998
Through the bridge, through the golf, through Ireland, through China, as late as 1994, Buffett devoured the Wall Street Journal every day looking for stock to buy for Berkshire Hathaway. But it was growing steadily more difficult to find a wonderful business at a fair price. He was still putting money into Coca-Cola, until he had spent a total of $1.3 billion on 100 million shares. He bought another shoe company, Dexter. Here he was a little outside his “circle of competence,” making a bet that demand for imported shoes would wane.1 A jeweler named Barnett Helzberg Jr., who knew about Borsheim’s, saw Buffett in New York in a conversation on Fifth Avenue, and sold him Helzberg Diamonds almost on the spot.