The Day After Tomorrow
1
That film ticket stub I never showed to anyone.
It sat at the bottom of a drawer, under a stack of business cards. Printed on the stub were two characters, the title of the film: 后天 — the day after tomorrow. That year the film was playing everywhere, The Day After Tomorrow. And at the other end of the telephone line, in Taiwan, the stub had been passed around for a week.
The call was from Lai Xinru.
She was TET's interface with us. TET, Toshiba's company in Taiwan; part of our LCD screens came through it.
Xinru spoke softly and sweetly, unhurried, in a Taiwanese accent. On the phone she spoke Chinese; when the business was done she stayed on a while, about the weather, about films. Of all the overseas calls in the company, hers was the best voice to hear.
That day she came straight to it.
"Qi-san, let me ask you something. There's a film going around, The Day After Tomorrow — the American one, ice and snow, New York freezes over just like that. Has it opened over there?"
"It has. I haven't been yet, I was thinking this weekend. Why?"
"Ai yo, really? Your ticket stub has been passed all the way over here, with those two characters on it, and everyone laughed themselves sick. I didn't believe it. I called specially to ask you."
"What's so funny about a ticket stub."
"What do you mean, what's funny? We translate it as 明天过后 — after tomorrow. Much closer to the film. The sky falls in. And you call it 后天? What kind of title is that? A primary school kid translated it?"
I said all right, all right, the film is good though, isn't it?
She said it was. Then she laughed. And the laugh did not stop. One wave after another, until she could not breathe, and out of the middle of it came sorry, sorry, and then another wave. For a full minute the laughing at that end did not stop.
I held the receiver and did not dare move, and my face went hot in waves.
She was not a bad person. There was probably not even any malice in it. But I stood there holding the receiver and for a long while could not get a word out. The laugh was not aimed at me, and it still told me, plainly, what position I occupied in the eyes of the people at that end. Don't read too much into it, I told myself, she is only laughing at a translation. I understood the reasoning. The heat in my face took a long time to go down.
That weekend I went to see the film by myself. Coming out afterwards, I took the stub out of my pocket, turned it over twice, and put it back. It was a good film. But thinking of that laughter on the line, there was still something stuck in my throat that would not go down.
2
Before I had swallowed it, I made a fool of myself first.
LG's account manager was Park Hye-rim, Korean, in her thirties; the LCD business went through her. She did not know one Chinese character, and my English was a half-full bottle sloshing around. On the phone the two of us stumbled along like two people fording a river together, neither of us any steadier than the other.
Once she was coming to Hangzhou on business and I called to confirm the arrangements, and we got to the hotel. Hotel. A word that could not be simpler. And at that moment it could not be fished out of my head. I talked my way around the itinerary, and then at the end made myself charge at the word, and out came hospital.
"Hospital?" She went quiet for two seconds at that end, and asked, one word at a time, "I, go, hospital? Why?"
"No no," I said, sweating, and the more anxious I got the less I could find it, "you, sleep, there! Sleep, there!"
She was silent a good five seconds, and then burst out laughing. "Hotel? You mean hotel? My first time in China, and the first thing you ask me is whether I'm going into hospital?"
Foolish as it was, after I hung up that day I sat at my desk and thought: the LCD in my hands — on the other side stand LG, Samsung, TET, Intel, the big international firms. Every mail in English, every call in English, and when something goes wrong and responsibility has to be argued, in English again. There was no dodging it. Training courses cost thousands, my salary was nineteen hundred, that road was closed. At least the rented room had broadband, and the company's notebook could hold things. That left one road: the stupid kind of work.
First I practised on websites, following the recordings, listening to one passage a dozen times and repeating it again and again. Then somewhere I dug up Friends — ten seasons, more than two hundred and thirty episodes, twenty-odd minutes each, all of it set in a coffee shop and an apartment, the dialogue simple and the jokes thick, and I found I could actually sit through it. I copied it onto the notebook and watched it wherever I went; off work, with nothing to do, out it came, laughing and learning at the same time.
First pass, subtitles on, half guessing. Second pass, subtitles off, following most of it. Third pass I started reading along, saying the lines quietly after them. Fourth pass, Joey would set up a joke and I would laugh before he reached the punch line.
Two years, four passes. The young people hired in the same batch went out after work to sing and eat, and I went along, and shouted in the KTV until closing, and came back to the rented room and flopped on the bed and still watched two more episodes before sleeping. I ate and I sang like everyone else. It was only that when the others were asleep, my twenty-odd minutes were just beginning. The thing in my throat still had not gone down.
The change came quietly, on its own. One day I was on the phone with Hye-rim going through delivery dates and talked for five minutes straight, and after hanging up I realised: the whole call, I had not once drafted a sentence in my head first.
The real examiner was at the head office. On the Japanese side there was a woman who handled LCD, quick and fluent in English, and once she started she sounded like a typewriter. At the first conference call I caught half of it and guessed the other half, palms wet. Six months later I could follow it. After that, she said one line and I answered one line, reporting the numbers back faster than she had asked for them. That line was climbed one rung at a time.
3
In a notebook, the most expensive material is the CPU — one or two hundred dollars a piece, five or six hundred for the top ones. Second is the screen: a small sheet of glass, from a hundred and fifty dollars up, and the wide ones more. The screen is also the most delicate. Glass in layers, the four corners the most brittle; in the packaging each one gets its own slot, held off the base, sealed in a moisture-barrier bag, and it cannot be squeezed anywhere.
And the price was alive. LG sent a new price list every month: a page of models, a page of dollar unit prices. This month a hundred and fifty; compare again next month and the number has moved. A colleague who had handled panels before me said the market was like seafood — it depends on the season, on capacity, its face changes daily. So we never signed a fixed price with LG. One order, one negotiation; one month, one comparison.
Our plant sat inside an export-processing bonded zone, with a customs gate at the entrance. The zone was not big; walk round it in twenty minutes. But do not look down on that gate. Every cart of goods in or out has to be declared to customs and declared for inspection. Besides us there were several Japanese suppliers' plants next door. The big plant had put its supporting plants on its own doorstep, and what that saves is time.
Later I saw a set of figures in the customs annual report. This fenced piece of land, the first phase of it less than two square kilometres, had shipped in and out two billion two hundred million dollars in 2004 alone — fourth among the thirty-odd export-processing zones in the country. The checkpoint at the gate never rested: container trucks queued through it, several hundred a day. We, Panasonic, Yazaki, a few big names inside; several hundred more plants outside supplying us.
4
That autumn something happened that I still remember today.
In the afternoon the warehouse called and told me to come down. Usually when the phone rang I trotted down. That day the voice at the other end first dropped low and added: don't touch the goods, listen to me when you get here. The tone was wrong.
Downstairs I understood. In the middle of the warehouse that one pallet stood alone: the corner of the outer carton crushed inwards, a slanted crease across the stretch film. Not one box opened. The storekeeper stood beside it with his hands in his pockets. Crushed like that on the outside, and what is inside, nobody dares open it. Open it and nothing can be said clearly any more.
By the delivery note, this batch was more than five hundred screens. The crushed cartons were about one in ten.
Receiving at our plant did not end with unloading. Every batch into the zone went through the warehouse first: the stores counted the cartons against the delivery note, looked at the outside, and only once the receiving record was signed did the numbers go into the system and the account balance. That day it was this gate that stopped it. The storekeeper's pen hovered over the receiving sheet and would not come down. "There's a problem on the outside. I can't sign this. If I sign it, it's my responsibility."
I said nothing much in the warehouse. First I sealed the scene: the pallet as it stood, the film untouched, and photographs of everything — the whole pallet, the crushed corner, the crease, the shipping marks, the seals, one after another. I had the storekeeper keep the original pallet and all the packaging, not one piece moved.
A few days earlier I had chewed my way through the contract. We had signed DDU. Until the goods reached our gate, all risk in transit was the seller's. From the aircraft at Incheon in Korea to the customs gate here at Xiasha, every jolt and sway along the way was LG's business.
I reported it to the section. Murakami heard it out, did not ask much, and said one thing: "Report to me, every day."
Zhang Zheng took me aside and gave me the bottom of it. In a case like this, with the warehouse receiving record, the quality inspection record and the customs documents, the three anchors together, the other side can deny it all they like and it will not hold. The customs documents were with TLGH. TLGH, Toshiba's logistics company, handled all the import and export declarations in and out of the zone. He took me to borrow them, and taught me to check the numbers line by line: "Paper does not speak, but paper does not lie. You make the chain complete and the rest depends on whether the other side is reasonable."
He also pointed out the key thing. This was not the same as a defective incoming material. Dead pixels and bright lines are a quality matter, handled through supplier assessment. Chipped corners and crushing are a matter of the road, handled as a claim. Two roads, walked separately; mixed together, nothing is clear.
Sure enough, the next day the fight came.
"How, prove?" Hye-rim's voice on the line was faster than usual. "Maybe, your warehouse, broken?"
"What do you mean, my warehouse broke it?" I gripped the receiver. "Check the seals. Nobody, touch. The photographs are all with you."
"Carton seal, can open, then stick back."
So there it was. The word responsibility immediately put gunpowder in the air. We went back and forth several rounds, and I held to one thing: whether the packaging was touched, the seals and the wrap will speak; if you say our side opened it, produce the record of opening. There is none.
She gave half a step, then took an inch back. "Then, you, open carton, check it yourselves, OK?"
No. Something dropped in my chest: once this carton is opened, the ones who opened it are us, and what is there left to investigate? I pushed it back down the line. "No open. Third party, together, open. OK?"
She paused at that end for a few seconds. "...OK. Third party."
The transport insurance on this batch was taken out on LG's side. I reported it over, and they notified the insurer. A few days later the surveyor arrived.
The surveyor was in his forties, carrying a camera and a stack of forms, and got straight to work. The cartons were opened with all three parties present. Photographs of the whole pallet, of the crushed corner, of the fragments laid out piece by piece. Then out came a magnifying glass, and he went over the seals and the stretch film inch by inch, looking for any sign that the packaging had been opened a second time, and for whether the pressure marks matched the shaking of the journey. Tick by tick down the survey form, the pages rustling.
I stood at the side the whole time and did not dare breathe loudly. In that moment I properly understood: the surveyor has not come to help you, he has come to help the facts; and the facts can speak only because nobody has touched the scene.
The conclusion was four words: damaged in transit.
The survey report was made in two copies, one for us and one for LG. When I signed, my pen hesitated: since joining the plant I had signed attendance sheets and training forms, and this was the first time my own name went onto a formal commercial claim document.
The report reached LG and a few days later Hye-rim called. "Qi-san, we, accept." She paused, then added, "The replacements, we put first. The best batch, for you."
Accepting it is one thing. Getting the goods moving is another, and there was one more gate: that pallet of broken screens could not leave a single piece behind in the zone.
The land in a bonded zone is watched by customs. To ship the broken screens back to LG they had to go out through that gate in broad daylight; the replacement screens coming in had to be declared again. Both ends of that were TLGH's: the logistics company sat inside the zone, nominally a third party, in fact Toshiba's own operation.
The day we went to customs, Xiao Xie from TLGH came with a folder and worked the papers with me. Xiao Xie was the person I knew best in the zone — basketball first, then cigarettes; we fought for rebounds after work, and smoked strictly in the smoking room. But the moment he stepped inside the customs door he said less and walked faster. "The bill of lading governs the goods, the packing list governs quantity, the invoice governs price, the customs declaration governs the state's business." He laid the four sheets in a row on the table. "One that does not match and the goods do not leave this gate."
The customs officers opened the cartons and checked the goods. More than fifty broken screens, one by one: model, label, quantity, against the numbers on the return application, and one too many or one too few meant a written explanation. I stood there for a whole afternoon before I worked out who the gate was guarding against. Goods moving inside the zone are not import or export. But the moment they pass this gate, the state wants a look. What it guards against is someone declaring good goods as bad, and quietly leaving the duty that should be paid behind the gate.
And that was only customs. To leave the zone the commodity inspection gate is just as unavoidable: besides the customs declaration there is the inspection declaration, and the contract, the invoice, the packing list, the waybill, not one may be missing. The inspection and quarantine people check the goods against the certificate at the carton; when it matches they issue the certificate, and only then are the goods released. Xiao Xie squared the documents up and stamped them, and said something I remember to this day: "When the paper moves neatly, the goods move fast."
The money did not go through our account. A few days later Finance handed me a credit note: LG put the loss on this batch up front, we paid less on the purchase price, and the account balanced out.
Later Zhang Zheng told me: this fight went smoothly not because of luck. The documents complete, the process by the book, and no one who looked could find a fault; what that saves you is trouble.
5
The replacement screens came into the plant quickly — received, booked in, onto the line — and the export order started kitting without a problem. The morning it started, Murakami walked past behind my desk, paused his steps, and said one word: "Good."
After that fight, it was as if everything had changed, and as if nothing had.
Later, the supplier assessment record for that quarter came out. Quality scored every supplier, and on the LCD line, beside LG's name, was Grade D, and in the defects column: "Dot defect, Vertical line." Dead pixels, bright lines. I heard that when the feedback went over, LG's senior people flew in specially for a meeting. Hye-rim did not dodge it on the phone either. "We, improve. Next quarter, see."
By then I had properly understood one thing. Dignity is not argued back. However loud your voice, however fluent your translation, you cannot shout an apology out of anyone. It is by the clause, on the evidence, with the numbers, one fight at a time, winning what should be won. And when it is won, the person at the other end naturally speaks to you in a different tone of voice next time.
That ticket stub with 后天 printed on it stayed at the bottom of my drawer.
That film, they called it after tomorrow; we called it the day after tomorrow. Walking out of the cinema that evening, the night wind was cold and the street lamps stretched our shadows long.
Whether the sky falls is heaven's business. The show ends, you walk out of the cinema, and tomorrow the orders in your hand have to be chased just the same.