“How is your Chinese?” I ask Stuart Fuller, the Hong Kong-based global managing partner of King & Wood Mallesons, the Australian-Chinese law firm. “It’s terrible,” he says. Chinese is a tonal language. The key to learning it, he thinks, is being musical. “I am terrible at music,” Mr Fuller says. “If I ever sing, my four children say: ‘Stop it!’”
All the same, at the firm’s last partners’ conference in Shanghai, Mr Fuller, an Australian national, delivered the first five minutes of his speech in Chinese, relying on the lessons he has since stopped through lack of time. “It was fairly high risk and, I have to admit, as I walked on to the stage, I had this voice in my head going ‘what are you doing?’.”
After his first sentence, the lawyers applauded. They did the same after his second sentence. “I looked up and said: ‘There’s a lot more to come. Just settle down’.” It went well after that, he says. “They laughed at some of the jokes, because I had some jokes in there.”