EARLIER THIS YEAR, while he was organising the US premiere of his latest film, Together, the Chinese director Chen Kaige met Geoffrey Fushi. Fushi is the chairman and founder of The Stradivari Society in Chicago, and in that capacity he had arranged for Li Chuanyun, who plays the violin on the film's soundtrack, to borrow a 1714 Stradivari violin, which the young Chinese musician played at the film's opening nights in Los Angeles, Boston, New York City and Chicago.
Chen was evidently, and understandably, dazzled by Fushi, a Gitanes chain-smoker who likes to affect custom-made, monogrammed shirts, self-designed cufflinks and cowboy boots. 'Chen Kaige kept looking at me and then he said, 'You're a real interesting guy',' says Fushi, who is today clad in chocolate-brown crocodile boots, a black Chinese-style outfit and chunky, violin-shaped cufflinks. 'He said, 'Would you consider acting in a movie?' He said that in a year he was going to do a movie called Gangs Of Shanghai, which would have some Italian mafia in it. He said, 'Would you do it? I'm serious. You'd be perfect as the godfather'.' Fushi, a large man who is amply spread out on one of the Hyatt Regeny's sofas, laughs softly. Every now and then, his cheerfully large son, Alec - who will later say to this newspaper's photographer, 'What's your name? Dickson? Dickson, I have to tell you something, when you photograph fat people, you have to photograph looking down' - re-emerges from another room and with varying degrees of intensity ('It's a circus in there') encourages his father, throughout the afternoon, to meet some unseen clients. Father calmly introduces son thus: 'He works with me. He's also a salesman of instruments.'
This is the bald truth. Fushi, 59, may be the founder of The Stradivari Society, in which capacity he has played godfather since 1985 to many a young musician by blessing them with the arranged loan, through a donor, of an instrument of divine tone and stratospheric value, with only a few strings (in the other sense) attached.
But he is also the co-founder, with Robert Bein in 1976, of Bein & Fushi, 'one of the world's premier violin dealers and restorers', as its catalogue says, and the two entities are now as inseparable as the coats of varnish on an 18th-century school of Cremona violin. Indeed, the curlicued front cover of the brochure for The Stradivari Society (a registered trademark - tiny encircled Rs stud each and every page) bears the microscopic golden words: 'A Division of Bein & Fushi' at the bottom.
Fushi Senior, an amiable conversationalist with shrewd eyes, makes no bones about both his passion for music and this commercial state of affairs. While Li Ling, formerly of the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing and the Hainan Asia-Pacific Brewery, latterly of China Star Media Corporation in Chicago, and now a director of The Stradivari Society, trips daintily around the room taking photos of this interview and occasionally fetching Fushi's papers, Fushi addresses vulgar questions with perfect, and apparently imperturbable, aplomb. Asked, for instance, why he's visiting China and Hong Kong, he says, 'We're coming to show instruments, more the lower-priced ones than the top ones.' Lower prices, in this context, mean US$100,000. The top price - well, if you quiz Fushi about how much the seven Stradivari Society violins he's currently travelling with are worth, he replies, after some muttering and finger-tallying, 'In the vicinity of US$20 million.'
The lower-priced instruments are being shown to music students 'with wealthy parents who are interested in acquiring one'. (This, one assumes, is what's going on in another room of the Hyatt Regency's Club floor, supervised by Alec.) The top instruments have been gathered so that they can be played by Lu Siqing, who performed at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall the day after this interview took place. Lu, who was born in Qingdao in 1969, and educated at the Juilliard school in New York, usually plays a 1742 Guarneri del Gesu violin called the Wieniawski, which he has been loaned by The Stradivari Society since last year.