It is with his family, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren that he takes the measure of his life. His relations with his parents may be strained, with his wife distant, and with his children formal. But without these people, he would be the object of pity and of no small amount of suspicion. He will be pitied because ha has no parents to help him and no children to support him in his old age. . . . A man not thoroughly embedded in a network of kinship cannot be trusted because he cannot be dealt with in the normal way. . . .
Money has no past, no future, and no obligations.
For example, in a business relationship between a Chinese entrepreneur and one of their clients, they would want to know more about one another than what each of them does professionally. A Chinese woman is looking for a job at a television station, and this woman's mother knows the Secretary of State's wife, because the mother's other daughter is a friend the Secretary of State's daughter. The Chinese woman's mother would go to the wife, and the wife would go to her husband, who would put in a call to the TV station. The TV station would give the woman the job so that the station would not lose the Secretary of State's face. Once the woman starts her job, if she did not perform well, she would lose her mother's face.