Young Hero Yang
1
When I joined the purchasing section, I took over from someone who was leaving.
Chen Minxia was a few years older than me, and she spoke slowly. Her resignation had already been approved; she had one month of handover left. I was there to take her place, and the work came across to me one piece at a time. For the first week she would not let me touch anything. I sat beside her and watched, and when I got hungry she took me to the canteen.
"Don't be nervous," she said. "The work isn't hard. It's the people."
The first thing in the handover was teaching me Oracle. By then we were paperless: documents did not land on paper, they ran through the system — purchase orders, stock figures, receiving status — one window after another, the fields in Japanese, the buttons in English. Chen Minxia moved the mouse fast and talked as she moved. Factories out in the rest of the country, she said, were still checking orders by fax in those years. At the time it sounded like small talk.
I got to know a batch of people quickly enough. Our department had the purchasing section on one side and MBK on the other, under the same manager, in the next bay, two rows of desks apart. MBK did planning. Every purchase order we issued came off their tables at the source, and I ran over there eight times a day.
Jocelyn, who sat beside me, was Section Chief Murakami's assistant — soft and pretty, swinging her arms about all day, either coaxing snacks out of the Japanese or leaning back in her chair to tease us newcomers. When there was a system operation I did not know, I mostly asked Huang Minjun, the most senior in the section: good English, the best in the office at Oracle, and he never once minded a question I would have blushed to ask out loud. Huang Minjun later jumped to Electrolux and rose very high; some people called it the brain drain from a Japanese training school, but the same things were taught to a whole room of people, and what you could finally carry away came down to your own small share of understanding.
A few days after I sat down, I heard a woman's voice from the bay next door, high and sharp, cutting through, chasing the delivery date on a part number. It was not angry, only loud, loud enough that the whole floor moved to its rhythm.
"That's Yang Jingxia," Chen Minxia said without lifting her head. "Team leader in MBK. You'll be dealing with her for a long time."
"Is she bad-tempered?"
"She's fine." Chen Minxia smiled. "Don't let the noise over there fool you. She's genuinely warm. Anything you can't get sorted, go and ask her — she will lay it out for you clearly, more carefully than your own teacher."
Yang Jingxia's Japanese was indecently good, too. I could not manage a word of Japanese. After a year or two, when I was a familiar face, anything I could not get across to the Japanese I would take to her to make a call for me, and when the call would not do it she simply wrote the mail for me. I felt a little awkward about it and mentioned it once to Zhang Zheng. Zhang Zheng was the team leader who had me, an easy-going man; he waved it off, no problem, no problem, just right that Yang-san teaches you. He really did not care. A more calculating boss would have had a face on long ago, with his people running next door over everything.
"Two team leaders, two kinds of people." Chen Minxia said this while clearing her drawer — she was leaving soon and had a cardboard box filling up. "You'll work it out."
Having run into this often enough, I began to taste something in it. Then one time she properly won me over. There was a connector that had run short and the line was waiting on it, and the supplier insisted the shipping schedule could not be met. Zhang Zheng was not in, and I was running in circles. On the off chance I went next door to Yang Jingxia. She heard it out, her eyes lit, and she rolled up her sleeve. "Give me the contact at that company!" She grabbed the phone and called straight through to the other side's sales, one soft word and one hard word, and inside half an hour they had given ground and agreed to fly it in as an emergency. She put the phone down and waved at me. "Go back and keep the amendment record. Next time they argue, that is the evidence!"
2
Yang Jingxia on the telephone: the voice high, the pace fast, words coming out in strings. She talked to her own people the same way, volume steady, pressing one word down at a time: "This version of the numbers doesn't match. Three minutes. In three minutes, come over yourself and admit it. After three minutes I check the record, and it's a different matter." Every time, somebody really did stand up red-faced; and every time she let it go, waved a hand, sat down, and got on with the work.
The person who went head to head with her loudest was Zhou from production, not yet forty, a Hangzhou local, in charge of production scheduling. When he ran short of material he came charging into MBK for goods and went at Yang Jingxia across the desks. The beautiful part was that they were both Hangzhou people, and when they got worked up they switched to Hangzhou dialect at machine-gun speed. I am from Fuyang; I could follow the general sense of Hangzhou dialect, and I did not miss a line of their act. Many of our colleagues were locals, and understood every word. When the two of them let loose, half the open room stopped work to watch, better than anything else on offer.
The amusing thing was that less than two hours after a fight you would find the two of them at one table in the canteen. Zhou saved her a seat; she set down her tray, took two mouthfuls, and started going through the numbers again. Neither held a grudge. In Chen Minxia's words, an argument in the plant is business, like the weather: it rains and it rains, and when it is over it clears.
Watching the show that often, I got to know MBK's people too. Zhang Guolin was one of them: an old hand who could feel his way around the system's twists and turns with his eyes shut, which table came out on which date, which field was maintained by whom — ask him and you were never wrong. What struck me most about him was how flat he was. Overtime: flat. A raise: flat. Talking to him was like talking to a man who had seen through all of it. He smoked, so did I, and we often met in the smoking room and talked about everything under the sun.
Once in the smoking room he brought up Yang Jingxia. "That one, her warmth is genuine. Ask her for something and she takes it more seriously than you do." He flicked his ash. "But I'll tell you something from the heart. Her sense of where the line is, it's a bit blurred. She crosses it when she works. A small step today, a bigger step tomorrow, and before long she treats someone else's yard as her own."
I did not understand it at the time. I thought he was being harsh. Warmth and crossing lines — how were those the same thing?
3
I had been in the job less than a month when I ran into my first end-of-month fight.
That day Chen Minxia called me over to her screen and brought up a screen in Oracle, with a column of Japanese fields at the top: 強制払い出す. Compulsory issue.
"You need to know how to read this," she said. "I'm leaving anyway, so let me tell you about it."
"Here's the game," she said, and went slowly. What we signed with suppliers was VMI — Vendor Managed Inventory. The stocking was pushed onto the supplier: we gave only a rolling forecast and they stocked against it. The goods did not come into our plant. They sat in a separate third-party warehouse inside the park, not far from us, a bit over a kilometre by road. The warehouse itself was run by TLGH, the logistics company under Toshiba's name. TLGH had four sections under it: business administration, import and export, warehouse management, and one more, the VMI section. But the goods piled inside were still the supplier's property; until they were used, not one piece of it was ours. The storage fee, the handling fee, the people working in that warehouse — all of it paid by the supplier. We drew what we used, and only what was used was settled. How much sat in that warehouse was nothing to do with us.
"Sounds like we take all the advantage, doesn't it." She glanced at me. "They're not stupid. The orders are in our hands. If they want to do business with us, they accept the way it's played. Besides," she brought up the supplier rating table in the system and pointed, "this column — whether a third-party warehouse is used — zero to four points. Going VMI adds rating. The sweetener is sitting right there. Who wouldn't come."
The goods were drawn in by the sweetener. But over a month, our purchase orders always had a quantity that had not been drawn. "By the contract," she turned to the next screen, "if we actually draw less than planned, they have the right to sell us the difference. Before the end of the month the goods have to be pulled from the third-party warehouse into our own, and once the system confirms it, title passes. That is the compulsory issue."
I asked her, so pull them then. Whose warehouse they sit in, what difference does it make.
"You don't understand anything." She blinked at that, and then laughed. "Once it's in our warehouse, it's our stock on the books. MBK's stock level is what Finance assesses them on. On the monthly report that goes to the head office, that column carries Yang Jingxia's name. Over the level, she is the first one called in; the whole section's assessment rides on that number. You tell me whether she'll allow it."
She picked up a pen and drew a line on a sticky note, a dot at each end.
"Finance takes two numbers for average inventory — one at the start of the month, one at the end, add them and divide by two. That formula has been cutting corners for a dozen years and nobody has ever changed it. If goods enter the plant on the thirty-first, the end-of-month point shoots up and her figure is ugly at once. If the goods are held until the small hours of the first, then the month's account was sealed at the last second of the month, and this batch is booked to the next month — nothing whatever to do with this month's report." She put the pen down. "So however nice she is the rest of the time, on this date she will not give an inch."
I half understood. Chen Minxia patted my shoulder. "You'll see for yourself when the time comes."
Those days the suppliers' salespeople called our section every other day, very polite, and every word was about dates. Chen Minxia never took the bait; she only said she had noted it, she would ask. After hanging up she told me: you cannot close on it, once you close on it, it is a promise.
The fight started around that Thursday. And there were no outsiders in it.
The suppliers we dealt with — Intel, Samsung, LG, that order of company — would not fly over specially for one compulsory-issue order. The pressure came down layer by layer: the supplier sent the order to the Japanese head office; procurement at the head office; the head office passed it down to our plant, mail first, phone after. By the time it reached our level it was endless tug-of-war. Our section called MBK and was batted back in one line. On the supplier side, one call over to smooth things, and they were very polite, and said it was not theirs to decide either, they would have to ask the head office. The next day the mail from head office procurement was in our plant, with a long cc list, section chief and manager both on it. And this time the date was pinned down hard: the whole transfer to be completed before the thirty-first. Below that, another line: any storage charges arising beyond that date to be borne by the buyer. Every extra day the goods lay in the third-party warehouse was real money.
The loudest argument was at team-leader level. Yang Jingxia and Zhang Zheng went at each other across two rows of desks. Her eyes wide, she said the receiving schedule was set in stone long ago, the contract said "has the right to require", it did not say "must be on the day", and if it really had to be on the day, Finance could start by changing the average-inventory formula. Zhang Zheng waved a hand: the contract came first, this time the head office had pinned the date, the manager was copied on it, and every day the goods lay in their warehouse was their money. One holding to the assessment, one holding to the contract, each line harder than the last, neither able to press the other down.
On the third afternoon I saw her come through our row, sleeves rolled, and go straight up to the very front of the open room. The manager did not have an office of his own; he sat up there at a desk facing the whole room, where everyone could see him. A team leader going over the section chief's head straight to the manager — she was the only one I ever saw do it. The rest of us did not dare lift our heads and typed very fast.
That afternoon the open room was unnaturally quiet. I got the outcome later from Chen Minxia. Section Chief Murakami took Section Chief Qingtian aside to talk, and the manager finally made the call: hold the goods until the small hours of the first, then bring them in, the receiving bay open as usual; Murakami would answer the supplier side and block the head office mail as well, and the words storage charges were never mentioned again. The accounts Yang Jingxia had argued were not argued for nothing, but I understood that what really turned it around was the one trip she made to the very top. A team leader going past the section chief to the manager was against the rules. She did not care, and she did it in front of the whole room.
When I had heard it all out I asked Chen Minxia, dragging it out this way, doesn't that leave us in the wrong?
"So we're in the wrong." She went on packing her box without looking up. "Are they going to fire anyone for it?"
4
Two days before Chen Minxia left happened to be the first of the month.
At eight in the morning she took me to the receiving bay to watch. The truck came in, the tarpaulin was thrown back, and the whole pallet of keyboards was stacked neat as anything; the storekeeper counted it pallet by pallet, then tapped the confirmation on the screen, and the status of that transaction in the system flipped to 実施した. The whole thing was quiet. Nobody even sounded the horn.
Keyboards alone came to more than a hundred thousand dollars that month. Add the CPU, the LCD screens, the other big items, and one month-end's worth of goods pressed in was far more than that.
I stood at the side, finished counting, and suddenly remembered the two dots she had drawn on the sticky note. I turned and ran back to the office and pulled up the inventory report. On the thirtieth of September, that batch appeared nowhere. On the first, all of it was there.
5
After Chen Minxia left, that end-of-month telephone was entirely mine.
After a few years in it I had slowly become an old hand myself. Every time a supplier was jumping up and down on the phone at the end of the month, I had learned to do what Chen Minxia did back then: hold the receiver, smile my way through it, smooth it over, promise that next month the order would certainly be released. Then hang up and, without a flicker, push the issue date in the system to the small hours of the first of the following month.
In the bonded warehouse outside the plant the goods sat on their pallets, not one carton moved, dust settling quietly.
But move the pointer past that last second of the month and the thirtieth's report was all green across the plant: Yang Jingxia's assessment looked beautiful, the manager's monthly summary looked dignified, and the head office's assessment could not find one fault.
Nobody was a bad person, and nobody felt they were falsifying anything.
In my first month I had asked Chen Minxia in the canteen, full of indignation, whether a few hours later made it any less of a stock. When I asked that question I was young and full of a sense of injustice at that kind of head-in-the-sand.
It was only after years of knocking around in this trade that I finally understood:
In an enormous multinational system, the goods are for the shop floor and the numbers are for the people above. Not one carton left the warehouse, and as long as the dates were picked precisely, the ones looking were satisfied and the ones using had got used to it. This world has never cared about the truth of anything. What everyone cares about is that at the moment the report goes up, all is quiet under heaven.
In my first month I stood outside that door, furious, asking why.
Later, I became the person who kept the door for it.