The Odd Interviewer
1
It was the summer of 2002. China had just entered the WTO, the World Cup had just finished — the national team had made it for the first time and lost every match — and the flags were still up along the streets. The internet cafés were thick with smoke, and every monitor in them was a fat glass tube.
That summer I graduated from a university in Henan and came back to Hangzhou to look for a job. Job fairs were worst at the weekend: dozens of students to a booth, you handed over your résumé, and a man glanced at it and set it aside.
My first job did not last. An e-commerce company, building websites, selling Sina mail accounts. The pay was agreed at fifteen hundred a month; once you were through the door they told you it was seven hundred guaranteed and the rest depended on commission. The boss drew pies in the air all day. I lasted three months, took that pie apart carefully, and resigned.
I did not explain the resignation to my family. The money in my pocket began to be counted before it was spent, and I got nervous.
The day after I walked out, the phone rang.
"Am I speaking to Mr. Qi? We would like you to come in for an interview."
"What does your company do?"
"We are Toshiba. We make notebook computers."
Toshiba. Of course I had heard of the brand — a big Japanese name, on television every day. But the Toshiba in my head was the kind of shop you found in the computer market on Wensan Road: a few demo machines under the counter, people assembling their own PCs, pirated discs, vendors calling over each other. A computer company was a company that sold computers. Anyway, I had nothing else on, so I went to have a look.
The bus lurched for more than an hour out to Xiasha. I got off and looked around, and my heart dropped: construction sites and half-built workshops everywhere. On the phone they had told me to take a motorcycle taxi at the stop. The sun was vicious. The taxi puttered along with me on the back, and the whole way I was wondering: in a godforsaken place like this, what kind of computer-shop company could there be?
Then the plant appeared. A whole stretch of it, new and enormous, glaring white in the light. Sitting on the back of that motorcycle, I stared. What did a company that sold computers need a plant this size for?
Three people were sitting in the meeting room.
The one in the middle was not tall. I could not tell his age. There was something odd about his face that I could not place: the features had a touch of Europe in them, and yet the eyes and brows were not quite a foreigner's either. He did not look like any country in particular. On his left sat a man and a woman, the man around thirty, the woman past forty.
The odd face spoke first.
"Qi-san."
I stood there. Was he talking to me? Qi, and then something after it? What was a san?
He saw me freeze and did not explain. Slowly, he said it again. "Qi. San."
Then he switched to English.
English was where it fell apart. Ten years of English had all gone into exams. On paper I could race through a reading passage; face to face, I could not put one whole sentence together. He was patient. He handed me the words one at a time. Experience? My palms were wet. I forced out a few words. One... one month... no... student. He nodded, cheerful, and handed me the next one.
I understood three parts in ten, guessed three, and the remaining four were rescued by the man beside him, who dropped me a Chinese word under his breath so I could turn it back into English. When we were all stuck, the three of them simply hung in the air; the odd-faced section chief got impatient and let out a short word first. That confused me further. Only later did I learn it was Japanese.
Halting like that, the interview somehow came to an end. When I walked out my back was soaked — half sun, half nerves.
After the interview there was no word. One week, two weeks. The money in my pocket got thinner by the day. I assumed it had fallen through and went back to the recruitment pages of the newspaper. Just as I was about to forget the whole thing, the offer arrived: nineteen hundred a month. Later I learned why it had taken so long. They had in fact hired someone before me; he had joined ahead of me and been caught cheating on the entry medical, and was dismissed, and then it was my turn. That was something I only worked out much later. Would the nineteen hundred on paper turn out to be another set of terms once I was inside? I did not know. But there was not much money left in my pocket, and no room to be choosy. On the day of the first pay packet I looked at the pay slip for a long time. Base salary, allowances, overtime, each item clear; double rate for the weekend, triple for public holidays; after tax and social insurance and the housing fund, fifteen or sixteen hundred in hand. In those years plenty of factories were behind on wages. This company used a pay slip to tell you what the rules were.
Later I learned that the three people in that meeting room were a section chief, a team leader, and a clerk. And that the company I had taken for a computer shop was a Japanese giant's notebook factory in Hangzhou — a company that genuinely built computers. How big a name it was, I had no idea at the time. I worked it out, a little at a time, after I was inside.
2
On the first day I was issued work clothes: blue short sleeves and trousers, white antistatic shoes. I stood in front of the mirror and laughed at myself. Yesterday a drifter; today a productive force.
The plant had two floors. Downstairs was the assembly line, notebooks moving along a belt one after another. Upstairs, behind glass, was a bright clean room where a few large machines turned quietly with nobody in sight. Later I learned that was wave soldering and reflow soldering, for fixing components to circuit boards. At the time I knew nothing, and stood at the glass for a long while, thinking only that it was remarkable, a little like science fiction.
The office was one enormous open room, more than two hundred desks in a block, departments sitting mixed together: materials and procurement, information systems, production, quality, general affairs. At the very front sat Manager Ishikawa. Ishikawa had a round, laughing-Buddha face; he beamed at everyone, and his laugh arrived before he did.
At the front of our row, the materials and procurement row, sat Section Chief Murakami.
The odd face.
Murakami did not talk much, but he was genuinely kind, polite to everyone, his voice low. His English was in fact only so-so — a judgement I could not have made then, when merely opening my mouth was an effort and everyone's English sounded the same to me. In the plant they said Murakami was the easiest section chief to talk to.
The easiest section chief was put through a great deal by me. My reports were Chinese-English at the foundations, words jumping out one at a time, and when the words ran out I used my hands. He never hurried me. When he got impatient he let out a Japanese word himself, and when he saw me staring he picked up a pen and wrote it down.
More than half of Japanese is Chinese characters. I could read most of them; it was the compounds that defeated me. He wrote 納期 — I knew both characters, and together they meant nothing. Then he tapped his watch, then the wall calendar, and I worked out it was the delivery date. He wrote 検討, and I guessed my way through that one too: roughly, we will look into it.
By reading the characters and catching a few English words, that section chief and I somehow got things across to each other. For anything that really mattered, Team Leader Zhang Zheng translated. His Japanese had been soaked up among Japanese people; he was fast and steady.
Within a few days of joining I had a sense of the weight of the place. A Fortune 500 company. As for the notebook itself, the first one in the world had been made by this company. The old hands in the plant straightened their backs a little when they said so. A new employee had two things to show off. One: a notebook each, they would have given one to the cleaning lady. Two: the system was Oracle, a submarine cable ran from Xiasha straight to Tokyo, and a mail sent there arrived at once.
Lunch was in the big canteen. The first meal, I stared. The braised pork gleamed; a spoon went in and came out with something substantial. A dozen dishes, rice without limit. The first week I ate myself stupid every day.
A student just out of school, my résumé blank as paper, dropped into a plant like that, I found everything advanced and wanted to learn all of it. The notebook for each of us, the cable running to Tokyo, the Japanese engineers walking fast down the corridor with drawings in their arms, every one of them brisk and capable. Something I could not name pressed at my chest: to work for a company like this seemed to make me shine a little too. Looking back, that was worship, mixed with a pride I could not explain, as if being born into this plot of factory land made a person different.
The person who gave me my induction was Chen Dajie. She carried in three sheets of A3, spread them across most of the meeting table, and the three together made the company's whole purchasing process: who handled which step, who to find when it jammed, follow the line and you reach the end. She explained it in detail. I filled a whole notebook.
The notebook was full, and I was still uneasy. Every box and every line on that paper I could recognise, but joined together I had not walked a single step of it. Many of the people hired in the same batch were from famous universities. I was from an ordinary one, and I could not let anyone see how little I understood. For a while I worked up a stubbornness: if someone asked me one thing I wrote down three; after work I took the notebook out and went through it again.
That sheet held more than steps. It held how information moved. Orders came in by mail from Tokyo; MBK ran the material requirements on a rolling weekly basis; down in our purchasing section they became purchase orders, one click to send, and the supplier's inbox had them; goods came to the warehouse, the acceptance sheet was signed, the numbers went back into the system. Each link joined the next. If one link was half a day late, the next went hungry.
I looked along that line for a long while, and had one thought: this place is not the same thing as the pie the last boss drew in the air.
3
Systems like this could not be worked out by groping alone. My guide, sitting next to me, was Jocelyn.
She was Section Chief Murakami's assistant, administrative work: booking meeting rooms, office supplies, and the table when the section ate together. She was pretty, and she spoke in a soft, coaxing way; coaxing was in her nature. She never called Murakami section chief. It was always Murakami-san, the last syllable drawn out long. When she had nothing to do she would go over and put her arm around his neck and say a couple of things. Murakami sat there primly and let her; everyone around pretended not to see. It was nothing new. She was that kind of girl.
She sat next to me. Every stupid question I asked in my first week, she answered.
"What is MBK for?"
"Materials Booking," she said. "Material Booking — MBK. Planning. Sales says they want ten thousand units; MBK works out how many keyboards, how many screens, how many screws ten thousand units needs." She tapped her nail on my monitor. "But I'll say the ugly part first. Whether the number is any good depends on three things being clean: the inventory count, the BOM, and the master production schedule. If any one of them is rotten, the material requirement that comes out is rotten. The system won't wipe for you."
"And us?"
"Us?" She laughed out loud. "Our purchasing section, put plainly, chases parts. The system tells you to order today, you order today. It tells you to keep after someone, you keep after him."
Chasing parts. I turned those two words over twice in my head. Four years of university, and for this?
Whatever the system says is what it is? I did not believe it, and went to check in the warehouse once: one screen model came up in the system as one thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight pieces. I counted them carton by carton. Not one out. When I told her, she did not even lift her eyes. "Exactly. The numbers are clean. That is why people dare to live off them."
Lead time was also something she taught me. "Think of cooking a pot of soup," she said. "Dinner at six. The soup has to go on the stove at four. The rice is washed at five. The greens go in at five fifty. It is all counted backwards. If you only think about the soup at five fifty, you will be drinking hot water. The screen is the rice. The screws are the greens. The keyboard is the pot of soup that has to be on the stove twenty days early. The system has done the counting backwards for you. The day you order, you cannot be one day late."
One lunchtime, when the open room had thinned out, she leaned over to look at my screen, and while she looked her hand came in through the sleeve of my short-sleeved shirt and rested against my upper arm, stroking it lightly. I had been in the plant only a short while; half my arm went numb and I did not know where to put my eyes. She was not like that with everyone. In Japan, I suppose, that was how she got familiar with people. After a while she leaned in, grinning: "Ai yo, Qi-san, if I liked you, what would you do?"
I kept my face straight. "Then I would be in serious trouble."
She froze for half a second and then howled with laughter, and half the room turned around.
Those first months, in the middle of that noise, were how I soaked up lead time and that table which changed every week. Nobody told me at the time that all that laughing was a Japanese factory's welcome gift to a newcomer.
That autumn, the keyboard gave me my first lesson.
4
The keyboards for the notebooks were made at Logitech's Suzhou plant. One morning the people from MBK came to our desks with a report. On the keyboard line of the report, the date we wanted the goods and the date the other side had promised were a long way apart; days of stock on hand were down to three, and the new batch was stuck in their plant and not coming out. Three weeks later a large export order had to start kitting, and one missing material would put the whole line on the floor.
Manager Ishikawa heard the report in the corridor, stopped smiling, and said four words: it must be solved.
That day Section Chief Murakami named me. Qi-san, tomorrow you come to Suzhou with me.
The section was split fine; one person to a family of materials. LCD, CPU, keyboard, mine. The keyboard had gone wrong and I was named. It stood to reason. It stood to reason, and that night I still did not sleep well: a few months into the job, my first time standing in front of a section chief over something like this, and the reason was a material I owned.
The next morning a Buick minivan waited at the plant gate. A plant of four thousand-odd people, with buses for the shift and cars for trips. In the car I reported the situation to the section chief: on the phone the day before, their salesman had mentioned that an upstream material had run into trouble arriving, and exactly which process it was stuck at, he could not say.
The moment I said it I regretted it. I had just told the section chief that I knew nothing.
Murakami said mm, and closed his eyes to rest. We would ask when we got there. I understood him: what cannot be said clearly, someone on site will say clearly.
The highway ran more than three hours. Off the exit, both sides of the road turned into rows of brand-new plants, big and square, about as new as ours. People in the car said the Suzhou Industrial Park was the showcase of all those years of courting investment, mostly foreign: Japanese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, American, one after another — AU Optronics, Logitech, Yageo all inside it. The "factory of the world" the newspapers talked about every day came down to this on the ground: row after row of new plants.
We reached their plant close to noon. The one who received us was a Chinese salesman in glasses, very polite, one Japanese bento each: two lacquered tiers, the top one golden fried prawn and a few slices of sashimi, the bottom rice, rolled omelette, pickles, laid out like an ornament. My stomach was empty and my chopsticks had just started to move when Section Chief Murakami turned his body toward the salesman at the door, his face completely straight, his tone frightening:
"We are here to chase parts, not to eat."
My chopsticks stopped in the air. Since I joined the plant I had never heard Murakami speak like that. The man who was polite to everyone sounded like someone else.
The salesman's face went white. He bowed in a fluster and backed out of the room. Within five minutes he had brought their manager.
The manager came in with a man from planning, polite, pouring tea first and then pouring out grievances: the upstream shortage was real, capacity was fully committed — and with both hands he presented a production schedule, pointing from one end to the other, which meant: it is not that we will not help, we truly cannot, next week at the earliest. His words were not bold but the meaning was hard. It cannot be done, it cannot be done.
Murakami heard him out and did not argue a single word.
He turned his laptop around and set the screen facing the other manager, and called up the mails one by one: the date in such-and-such a month when the delivery time was confirmed, the date we sent the change reminder, the day their reply came. Then he pulled up the export order three weeks out: model, quantity, port of delivery, column by column.
His voice was not raised, and every word landed.
"The delivery date was confirmed by your plant. Please have your plant calculate the loss of one day's stoppage on that line. And please have your plant read the penalty clause in the contract. We came here today to hear the result."
Not one word of that was addressed to me. I did not get a word in from beginning to end, and my palms stayed wet. But my eyes could not rest either: how the delivery dates were dug out of the mails one after another, how the loss was counted out to them sentence by sentence — I saw all of it. The account was in the computer. The work had been done before we entered the meeting room.
The room was quiet enough to hear the air conditioning. The manager had sweat at his temples. He ordered the planning man out to make a call and paced back and forth himself. Murakami did not press. He sat still and tapped his fingers lightly on the tabletop. We waited a good ten minutes, like a whole afternoon. When the manager came back, his back was bent three parts more. The expedited plan was made on the spot: half would ship the day after tomorrow to save the emergency, the rest made up within three days, with the plant sending its own trucks.
They tried for one more favour — could half a batch meant for another customer wait. Murakami did not let one keystroke go. "I only want my number."
By the time every item was checked off it was past two in the afternoon. Murakami closed the laptop and sat a while longer with his face hard, then suddenly looked up, his brows and eyes curving:
"Qi-san. Eat. We can start eating now."
The bento had gone cold long before. But it was the first time in my life I properly ate Japanese food: sashimi dipped in wasabi, and the rolled omelette, eaten cold, was sweet. I put it away in three or four mouthfuls and wanted more. A bento like that, with a negotiation thrown in before you could start on it — good value.
5
Team Leader Zhang Zheng often took the few of us along. He was an old hand, good at Japanese, in the job since the plant was built. He was easy with everyone and very respectful to those above him; in decades he had not reddened his face at anybody.
I did not know then that Zhang Zheng, even-tempered as he was, would live to see the plant sold and sold again. At fifty, the new Taiwanese owners cleared out the old staff in every way they could think of. He was moved to a do-nothing post and never made it to retirement. That is all later.
On the way back the Buick was on the highway and the car stayed quiet for a long time. Close to Hangzhou, Murakami suddenly opened his eyes and asked me:
"Qi-san. Today, you saw?"
I thought he was going to lecture me on negotiation. He hunted a long time for the words, and handed them out one at a time. "Plan... the numbers, very clear. And... contract..." He got stuck and turned his head to Zhang Zheng.
Zhang Zheng finished it for him. The section chief meant that our planning was tight: the day we needed a part, how much we needed, the numbers were clear, and the other side could not fudge them. And the contract was hard, too: if the delivery was missed we could cancel the order, refuse payment, and claim for the line stoppage, in black and white. Anyone doing business carried a scale inside them.
Murakami heard it out, nodded, and closed his eyes again.
I said mm, and pretended I had understood all of it.
Two days later the first expedited keyboards came into the plant, were put away and booked into the system, and the stock that had run to the floor was relieved; the rest were made up within three days, and the export order started kitting without a problem. Nobody mentioned Suzhou again. Someone in the canteen did ask what wonders I had seen on the trip, and I said, a cold bento. The whole table laughed, Jocelyn loudest: "Qi-san has grown up. Even business trips come with Japanese food."
Only I knew that something was not the same. From then on, every number I saw in the system felt like it dragged an invisible line behind it, and at the far end of that line was a production line in Suzhou, a container at the dock. The number moved and the line went taut. The people in purchasing spend their days holding that line.
Later I saw many plants like ours: Japanese drawings and processes, Taiwanese buildings and orders, tens of thousands of young people just out of school, loading things into their heads one piece at a time in the open rooms. Some years on, those people scattered and carried it all into factory after factory of China's own. The floor of Chinese manufacturing was built up by hands like those.
I knew none of that at the time. I only felt there was something to look forward to, and set my mind wholly on how to go on in that plant: ten years, twenty years, all the way to retirement. In those years, who did not take a big foreign factory for an iron rice bowl?