The Beijing Office

Yearning for adventure, Gem Chu, an ambitious Chinese-Australian lawyer in her early 30s, moved to Beijing to work for Potts & Crouch. She worked for Joe Chan, the managing partner of the Beijing office, a married Chinese man who had lived abroad for a decade before returning to China. Joe was a ruthless, narcissistic, self-serving and serial womanizer whose affair with his secretary, sexy Cream Ding, was an open secret in the office.
Believing Gem would be an asset to the firm, Joe put Gem on the firm’s signature projects, where she had the opportunity to work with senior associates, Sharon Ding and Desmond Pang, and the legal assistants. She quickly discovered her Chinese colleagues worked quite differently from her. Gem worked long and hard at her job, hoping to win Joe and Sharon’s approval, but felt that she was not meeting their requirements. Gem began to dislike Joe, who asked her to spy on the African lawyer sharing her room and seemed to base his feedback on her work performance solely on his unpredictable mood.
Meanwhile, Joe was preoccupied with the equity partners’ request that he leave the firm in the near future, negotiating his next move with other firms as well as sitting on a time bomb: Cream’s pregnancy. Upset by Joe’s demand that she have an abortion, Cream lied to her second-generation-wealthy boyfriend, Harry Su, telling him it was his baby. Harry agreed to marry Cream, much to his mother’s dismay, as she felt her son deserved better and she knew nothing of Cream’s background. When Cream told Joe that she was going to marry Harry and have the baby, instead of having an abortion. Joe flew into a rage and fired her on the spot.
Joe had been giving Gem less and less work and hardly spoke to her. Joe’s right-hand woman, Sharon, had become distant towards her too. Gem found out from the legal assistants that Joe was planning to leave the firm and had been approaching the staff he wanted to take to with him to his new firm. Gem had mixed feelings about Joe not asking her to go to the new firm.
Eventually, Joe told Gem she was not performing up to his standards and that he preferred that she resign rather than be fired. Gem had not expected Joe to do this. She went through a time of inner turmoil and confusion as she grappled with the implications of her leaving the firm in these circumstances. She confided in Nathan Adams, a British-Indian photographer working in Beijing that she’d met through the firm’s translator, Francis Wu. Gem had initially thought Nathan was gay and dating Francis, but Francis assured her that Nathan was, in fact, straight and interested in her. As Gem sought out Nathan to talk about her work situation, they began spending more time together and eventually started dating.
After negotiating with Potts & Crouch’s HR manager for a payout, Gem handed in her resignation. She accepted Nathan’s invitation to accompany him on a work trip to Tibet and they took off shortly after she finished up at the firm.
While Gem was away in Tibet, she received updates about the firm through chats and calls with former colleagues Charlotte Wang and Sheila Mbali. Charlotte received a suicide letter from Cream, in which she said that since she had lost her job and her fiancé, she saw no reason to continue living. Cream’s suicide was splashed across the gossip rags, which named the firm and Cream’s alleged relationship with Joe; this gave the head of the firm, the Empress, the excuse to insist Joe leave the firm immediately. Desmond, who was leaving P&C to join another firm as a partner, asked Charlotte to go with him as his secretary. She turned him down as she had turned down all his dinner invitations.