Ambition on the Fuchun River
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Chapter 7
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The interview was in early August.
The sun was brutal that day. The factory gate stood wide open, not so much a gate as a stretch of wall left out between two pillars. An opening that wide was for the big trucks.
Facing the gate was a five-storey office building, terrazzo floors, no lift. A carport stood on each side, with more than twenty cars under it. Mercedes, Hondas, a Cadillac. Later I learned that most of them belonged to the boss and the boss's relatives.
I took the stairs to the third floor. Paul Zhao's office was large and bright. On the desk by the window stood an enormous flat-panel monitor with a laptop propped beside it. In Fuyang in 2008, that was a rare arrangement for a senior manager.
But Paul Zhao did not sit behind that desk looking down at people. By the door there was a small blackboard, and next to the blackboard a small round table. He was in a pale shirt pressed flat, sitting at the round table in his shirt sleeves, and when I came in he motioned me to the chair across from him, a mild smile on his face.
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He asked about purchasing. How we handled bonded-zone imports and exports. How purchase orders and goods receipts mapped to each other in Oracle. How international trade terms were set, how we pinned down delivery dates from subcontractors. All of it was routine to me from the Japanese company. I answered one question at a time; he nodded one time at a time.
It wasn't strange that everything matched. He was asking about process. At the Japanese company I had spent five years and more inside a mechanism that meshed like a fine watch. Swipe in every morning, change into anti-static shoes, sit down in a bright long room, and the day ran on Oracle. How many shipments in transit, how many parts short, click through the screens, fill in the exception report, hand it over by four thirty. The part numbers were eight digits, sealed by Tokyo head office. Suppliers were already qualified. Specifications were checked by the section manager. Quality was signed off by QA. At the Japanese company I had handled paper, never material. Once the crate was sealed, it had nothing to do with me. I was, in essence, an expediter.
Halfway through, Paul Zhao picked up his cup and took a sip, and changed his tone. "Composites. Do you know anything about them?"
My heart skipped. My palms went damp. "No. Never worked with them."
For five years I had dealt with nothing but notebook computer components. Of chemicals and fibreglass I knew nothing. I had expected him to frown, and I was ready for a polite good-bye. Instead he only smiled slightly, and there was something very forgiving in his eyes. "In this line, a purchasing man who really understands composites is hard to find."
The words were light. But the more ordinary he made it sound, the emptier I felt inside. At the Japanese company the material had never been mine to recognise. Here nothing existed yet, and the person he was looking for was the one who would recognise it.
Those few words saw straight through five years of me.
The second half of the interview was in English.
He started, and I followed. Back and forth, and I never stumbled.
He leaned back in his chair, took a sip of water, and glanced at my resume again. "Where are you from?"
"Fuyang. Born here."
His eyes lit up. He leaned forward a little. "Fuyang is good. The men on the line and the old hands from the old factory all speak Fuyang dialect. A purchasing man who knows foreign-company practice and can talk the local language - that is rare."
Then he stood and pointed out the window, to a particularly tall steel-framed workshop deeper in the plant. Its doors were shut. He said that one had been emptied out specially for the yacht work. The catamaran drawings had already arrived from Cape Town, and from nothing here we would build a supply chain for a line of luxury catamarans.
Before I left, Paul Zhao walked me to his office door, and at the end of the corridor he waved me off, very gently. He said this still had to be settled with the chairman, and told me to go home and wait for word.
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The morning I reported for work, I went looking for the washroom and walked down the third-floor corridor.
Passing the project department, the door flew outward and a man came charging out, nearly colliding with me.
He was in his forties, with heavy, thick-rimmed glasses on his nose. Behind the lenses his eyes went wide. The door frame hummed from the force of it, and his voice carried the whole length of the corridor:
"Hey - what are you doing here?!"
I froze too, and it came out of me: "J.J.?"
It was J.J. Xu. Fuyang born and raised, studied ship design at university in Dalian. He and my parents had worked at the same company once. One summer holiday I had gone to their plant and run into him. J.J. Xu wiped the sweat off his face, his voice not dropping a decibel, with the particular combative edge of a technical man. "What are you doing here? Weren't you doing fine at that Japanese company down in Xiasha?"
"Switched over. Purchasing."
"Purchasing?" He snorted, pushed the heavy glasses up his nose. "Then you're in for it. Right now there isn't even a decent set of drawings sorted out, and the South African foreigners are chattering away in the workshop all day. The foreigners are used to buying in South Africa. Half of what you'll need to buy, nobody in China has even heard of."
He snapped at me like he was picking a fight, but that thick Fuyang accent of his cleared the cold air out of the corridor in one stroke. Running into an old acquaintance in this strange plant, I did feel steadier on my feet.
After the paperwork, Paul Zhao took me up to the third floor and showed me to an office. The offices in that building were separate rooms, not an open floor. He pushed one door open and said this one was mine.
The room was small: a desk, a chair, a steel filing cabinet. The chair was new, and it still smelled faintly of the plastic wrap.
Paul Zhao stood in the doorway. "Sit here for now. I'll take you round to meet people in a day or two." He left. I put my bag down. The desk surface was newly re-covered, and in the bottom right corner a small patch had not stuck; press it with a fingernail and it lifted. I pressed it flat three times. There wasn't much in the drawer - a stack of blank forms, a pen, and not even one decent material code book. That afternoon Paul Zhao walked me to the other end of the corridor to meet people.
Michael Chen, production scheduling, had his office there. When I went in he was hunched over his screen, both hands on the keyboard.
"This is Michael, Michael Chen, production scheduling. He sends out the material status every day," Paul Zhao said.
Michael Chen looked up. A thin-framed pair of glasses, a stocky build, and when he opened his mouth it was a thick Hubei accent, hard and blunt:
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"Mr. Zhao, I'm still checking that South African material list."
Then he turned his face to me and tugged one corner of his mouth sideways. "New purchasing man?" "Qi Dongsheng. Just call me Larry."
He reached out and touched my hand, quick, pushed his glasses up, and turned back to his screen. On his desk lay a two-column material plan, Chinese on one side and English on the other. The English in those cells was squeezed out like toothpaste from a hard tube, grammar leaking everywhere: "Please confirm container from South Afria", "do dot infusion when have dust".
Those first days there wasn't much else to do. In the mornings I sat in my office going through files. At noon I followed Paul Zhao to the canteen and put a few names to a few faces.
The meeting was on my third afternoon.
Two o'clock, the third-floor meeting room.
I had barely sat down at the long table when the door opened and a very tall white man walked in. He was around sixty, silver hair combed neatly into a three-seven part. He wore a loose, big-print Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt, shorts, and open-toed sandals.
J.J. Xu leaned over and told me in a low voice: the old man was Gino Morrelli, one of the top catamaran designers in the world, just back from a family wedding in the United States, straight off the plane into the hills of Fuyang.
Gino came in without greeting anyone, slapped a manila folder down on the table, and dropped into a chair with the total relaxation of a man who knew exactly how good he was.
The meeting had barely begun when Jiangping Fang started scratching his head, face pinched. He was the production vice-president; everything in the workshop ran through him. He did not speak a word of English, and the foreigners' process only reached him second-hand, through whoever was translating. The thing on fire was this: the whole plant had to produce the full-size hull plug for the catamaran by September. A yacht is a huge object; without a mould, you cannot build a hull at all. Building the plug was a hard fight. First a 1:1 hull skeleton out of timber. Then the surface sprayed with a sanding primer and sanded by hand until it shone. Then black high-gloss gelcoat. Then resin and chopped glass fibre shot on with a chopper gun to build up the laminate. Only then could it be pulled, and a real fibreglass production mould taken off it.
Jiangping Fang, in his thick, awkward Mandarin, slapped his thigh in frustration. "The carpenters are still putting the frame together, and there isn't a single man in the workshop who can run a chopper gun. We can't hire anyone who knows how. If the primer and the gelcoat run out next week, the whole plant stops."
Gino shrugged, opened the composite material list that had come from South Africa, and put it up on the wall.
The moment the table lit up on the white wall, the room went silent.
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J.J. Xu craned his neck, pushing the thick glasses up his nose again and again, and finally his big voice broke out: "What the hell kind of BOM is this?!"
I froze too, and felt a cold line run up my spine.
At the Japanese company a BOM was a clean multi-level tree. Structural parts, electrical components, fasteners, each in its own category, with material, specification and drawing number neat in every column. What was on the wall was a flat spill of gravel.
No hierarchy at all. Just rows of flat uppercase abbreviations and short descriptions: LA SRC BNG001, BLSA 19, CRMT 2, FM H80...
Alex Cheung, at the laptop, was flipping through it and stumbling. J.J. Xu banged the table. "What are these abbreviations?! What factory in China recognises these letters?!"
Michael Chen sat at the side, fingers hovering over the keyboard, pushing his glasses up, wanting to type and not knowing which column anything belonged in.
Paul Zhao, in the chair at the head, kept his mild, composed posture, turning a Montblanc pen in his hand. He did not lose his temper. He simply moved his eyes off the projection, across the long table, and rested them on my face.
"Larry," he said, gently, as if asking me to do some small and ordinary thing, "the plug materials have to be settled in September. Work through it with Gino."
In that instant my palms were running with cold sweat.
In five years at the Japanese company I had never touched a single chemical material. High-gloss gelcoat, sanding primer, zero-shrink resin - every one of them was gibberish in the blank region of my knowledge. In Xiasha the part numbers were sealed by Tokyo, specifications were watched by the section manager, and all I had to do was figure delivery dates and chase invoices. Here there was nobody behind me, and a dozen pairs of eyes were fixed on me.
I swallowed hard. All the stubborn practice I had built up at the Japanese company, grinding through English technical manuals, I gripped hard in both hands. I forced my shaking voice flat, pulled the sheet in front of me, put a finger on the first line, and looked up across at Gino.
"Gino, for the plug surface, are we using Mould Sanding 5256 as soft primer?"
Gino, who had been leaning back, raised an eyebrow. Those deep-set eyes came to rest on my face. He leaned forward, fired off a string of technical terms at speed, his hands moving in the air to show the thickness of the sanding and the spraying.
I held the pen, my wrist tight, and chased the core words out of his speech onto the paper: Plug HG 5000, black high-gloss gelcoat, the very high-gloss surface coat for the plug; Mould Sanding 5256, grey sanding primer, for filling and fairing the plug;
Neomould 1982, zero-shrink mould resin, so the mould comes off exactly to size...
"Sanding primer 5256. Sand it flat, then a coat of black Plug HG 5000 high-gloss gelcoat on top." I turned it into Chinese for J.J. Xu. My lips were tight, but the pen never stopped. My mind was racing. I remembered the foreign chemical companies with offices in China that I had once looked up in a
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Hangzhou industry directory, and I looked up into Paul Zhao's and Gino's faces.
"DSM has a composites plant in Nanjing - Neomould mould resin can be sourced domestically. Composites One has a stock warehouse in Shanghai; they are the national distributor for the sanding primer and the black high-gloss gelcoat. First thing tomorrow I'll call Shanghai and Nanjing, and get samples and test reports into the plant within three days."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Gino looked at the grades I had written down at speed, leaned back in his chair, nodded, and said, short: "Good. Make it fast."
A satisfied smile hovered at the corner of Paul Zhao's mouth. He nodded, lightly.
I eased my back against the chair. My palms were soaked, and the back of my shirt was wet through. At the edge of a cliff, in that panic, I had forced open the first crack for myself.
Once the plug meeting was over, nothing settled down again. Samples came into the workshop from Shanghai and Nanjing, one after another. By day I checked delivery notes; at night I sat in my office copying those grade numbers into a table, one at a time.
The all-hands meeting was called one evening.
That day the overtime ran late, and by the time we finished it was dark. Everyone was packing up to go to the canteen when the admin people swung the door of the big ground-floor meeting room shut. The workshop superintendent came running up the stairs, knocking on doors, his voice loud: "Everybody to the ground-floor meeting room! The chairman's here. All-hands meeting!"
A low groan of complaint went down the corridor. A few of the old hands who had come over from the kayak side sat at the back, heads down, and snorted through their noses:
"Here we go again. The old story. My ears have calluses."
"No overtime. Nobody even mentions it. Pure punishment."
The old hands dragged themselves downstairs, mouths twisted. Michael Chen walked beside me, head down, pushing his glasses up, saying nothing, his steps very heavy.
The ground-floor meeting room was packed. The strip lights overhead hummed, and the concrete floor was lit a stark white.
A little after seven, the door at the front of the room was pushed open and a short, powerfully built man walked in.
He was around sixty. Heavy, fleshy cheeks, red weals at the corners of his eyes from years of sun. A rumpled jacket. He walked like weather coming. He had no notes and had not even brought a teacup. He put both rough hands on the edge of the lectern and leaned forward, like a black boulder lying across a mountain path.
It was the first time I had seen John Xiong.
Paul Zhao sat in the front row, back straight, deferential, and led the applause.
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When John Xiong opened his mouth, it was heavy, muddy Fuyang dialect mixed with stiff Mandarin, his voice as coarse as thunder:
"What's with the long faces?! Think you're tired from the overtime?!"
The room went dead silent. The old hands who had been complaining all dropped their heads. Michael Chen sat beside me, staring rigidly at the teacup on the table.
John Xiong gave a cold laugh, rapped three times hard on the table with thick short fingers, and the sound came back dull. "In Fuyang, I was not the first to make kayaks! I saw a friend of mine here in Fuyang make a fortune in composites, and I was jealous! I admit it, I was jealous! If you're in business and you're not jealous, what business are you in?!"
His speech was very fast, his feeling like a mountain flood let go, the heavy flesh of his cheeks shaking with every phrase:
"I don't understand the technology, so I went and pulled strings. Begged and pleaded, and got that German master, Klaus Filter, to come to Fuyang! Klaus sets the world standard. He taught us with his own hands! The day before the plant started, I went to that friend's shop, stood up straight and slapped the table: brother, I'm starting on kayaks, and from now on I'm in it with you, blade against blade!" The room was utterly still. Not even a cough.
"And how did it turn out?!" John Xiong's voice jumped, ringing in the hall until it hurt the ears. "Those old European and American racing-boat names, every one of them centuries old. In the end we flattened them all! The foreign racing associations all buy my boats! Why? Because our value for money is the highest. We squeezed the cost below what they can build at. They sell one for ten thousand; I'll take eight thousand and still make a profit. Tens of thousands of boats a year. You do the arithmetic!" He straightened suddenly, his big hand slashing down hard through the air, and pointed abruptly out of the window, at the vast dark Fuchun River, and at the tall steel-framed workshop deeper in the plant: "What is being number one in kayaks worth?! Yachts are the real business! One catamaran, a few tens of feet long, sells abroad for over three hundred thousand US dollars! The drawings come from South Africa, the factory is ours here in Fuyang! The boat gets built, and we sell it! On the banks of the Fuchun, we will not only build kayaks. We will build the finest luxury yachts in the world!" Paul Zhao stood up first, both hands raised at chest height, applauding with great politeness and great poise. Then scattered applause went up across the hall.
I sat in the shadow below the stage, rigid in a wooden chair, dazed. Outside, the Fuchun was black, the water inaudible, and only the wind knocked against the glass, gust after gust.
The scattered applause stopped, and the room emptied fast. Not one of the old hands was talking about yachts. They all picked up their bags, heads down, shoving to get out, muttering about catching the bus or getting home to reheat dinner.
Paul Zhao walked ahead, unhurried. Passing me, he patted my shoulder and left me, mildly, with: "Larry, first thing tomorrow, chase the primer samples in. Gino is pushing."
Michael Chen, beside me, was packing up his laptop with a blank look. Just before he closed it, he threw a hard line at me in that Hubei accent: "Still have the customs declarations to check tomorrow. The boss talks about all this... it doesn't put food on the table." Then he went downstairs.
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The corridor emptied quickly.
I went back to my own desk, the one that had just been re-covered, that corner at the bottom right still lifting. The strip light flickered again, softly, buzzing.
On the desk lay the flat, uncategorised South African composite BOM, all those rows of abbreviations, with the chemical names I had copied down in ballpoint across the top: Mould Sanding 5256, Plug HG 5000, Neomould 1982.
The cold sweat in my palms had dried. Five years of steadiness at the Japanese company, and the greenhouse, were gone for good. This great spread on the banks of the Fuchun, this ambition to be first in the world - it was now nothing but those few strange codes on the desk, pressing down on my shoulders alone.
I picked up my teacup and walked to the window at the end of the corridor.
The night was thick. Early-autumn river wind, damp. The tall workshop next door had its big doors shut; under the dim yellow bulb at the entrance, two night-shift workers were squatting on the stone steps smoking, the cigarette ends going bright and dark in the black.
Out on the Fuchun the water could not be heard. That wild, feverish ambition, with the night wind, had quietly pressed itself against the window frame.
I drank a mouthful of cold tea and turned off the light.