The Fissure
1
Chapter 8
1
Early October. The sun was still savage, and it had baked the hollow by the Fuchun River pale. The slips on my desk kept piling up. Red-and-blue carbon paper in triplicate, printed with requisition forms, material-issue forms, inter-plant transfer forms. The ink was coarse, the paper so thin it cracked. Press a ballpoint down a little hard and the first copy tore, while the third copy underneath stayed a blur. Five years at the Japanese company had made me used to a cold, precise Oracle system. Every screw, every panel, had an eight-digit material code sealed inside the system. The flow was a chain of meshed gears; press enter, and the slip moved on its own to Purchasing, to Quality, to Finance, and closed on the screen by half past four.
In Fuyang all of that had evaporated.
There was no ERP here, no system. Everything ran on shouting and on two legs, up and down terrazzo stairs and across concrete ground. Who was to sign, who could approve, which slip counted — all of it a muddle. Everyone was struggling in the mud, and no one could get a solid hold.
In the morning a man from the plug shop came and slapped my desk. In his fist was a paintbrush gone as hard as an iron bar. "Purchasing — is there thinner or isn't there? If that acetone doesn't come, the
2
gelcoat guns are blocked solid, the primer brushes are stone, and this afternoon you want us to pick it off with our fingers?"
Acetone was the everyday necessity of the composites shop. Resin and gelcoat stuck to hands and to moulds, warmed and set within minutes, and everything depended on acetone to soak them loose. But in 2008 acetone was a precursor chemical under strict police control. The new joint venture had not even had its online filing approved, and no chemical shop outside would dare sell it by the drum. I took the red-and-blue transfer slip I had just filled in, went down, crossed the yard in the sun, and walked to the old plant next door.
The old plant was Flying Eagle Boats, the ground John Xiong had built his fortune on. The materials warehouse stood behind several tall camphor trees. The building was old, high windows open on all four sides. It was dry inside, and smelled of resin and old timber.
Graeme Xu, the head of materials at Flying Eagle, was sitting behind an old wooden desk. He was in his mid-thirties, hair cut short and combed flat. A pale short-sleeved shirt, the tail tucked into his waistband, cuffs and collar clean. His face was burned dark by the sun. He was very still, lips pressed together, as if the words were all held in.
He did not talk much. The face stayed tight, and at a first meeting it could give a man the sense that he was not easy to approach. Sit down with him once and you learned that he simply did not talk. He was an old subordinate of John Xiong's, and a relative; he had been with the boss since the kayaks, and had taken the company to number one in the world. Over the years, east and west, north and south, he had built a composites channel that ran the whole country. On buying composites he was an expert who had earned it the hard way.
I pushed the slip gently across the desk. "Mr Xu. The plug shop here has just finished spraying the sanding primer, and our wash acetone is down to nothing. The JV still hasn't got its police filing. I'd like to borrow two drums from the old plant."
Graeme Xu raised his eyelids. His eyes went over my face once, then down to the hand-written carbon slip.
The room was quiet enough to hear the old ceiling fan grinding.
I had expected him to push the slip back with a cold face, the way the stories went, or to send me to Jiangping Fang, or to John Xiong for a special approval.
He simply picked up the red ballpoint on the desk, scrawled a signature on the transfer slip, tore off the bottom copy and handed it to me. His voice was not loud, the tail of it pressed flat: "Go round the back to the Class A store. Find Old Zhang, take two drums."
I blinked, and took the slip quickly. "Thank you, Mr Xu."
He had already looked down. Two seconds later he raised his eyes at me again. "Until that filing comes through, if you're short of anything, come and say so."
I said yes. He said no more, lifted the enamel mug, took a sip of strong tea, and went back to the stack of old delivery notes on his desk.
3
The Class A store put the two drums of acetone on the books and said the shop could send someone for them that afternoon. I went out of the Flying Eagle warehouse with the bottom copy in my fingers. I had just reached the concrete road in the middle of the plant when a furious hammering of a small engine broke out behind me.
A battered moped came past me along the edge of the road, trailing hot air.
Two men were on it. Riding was William, twenty-odd, the technical director sent over from the South African plant. Very fair, tall and straight, handsome the way the boys in the picture magazines were. Behind him sat Etlon, the mould expert, big and heavy, badly tangled blond-brown hair tied into a small tuft that stood up at the back of his head, his look loud and arrogant.
Both wore brand-new red full-face helmets. A couple of days earlier William and Etlon had quietly asked me to find them, and since we were going into town for supplies anyway, we had turned into a motorcycle parts shop on the way back and picked up two cheap ones.
William gunned it; Etlon, on the back, tipped his head back and laughed, both hands flailing in the air. They rode that second-hand wreck up the central concrete road of the plant, toward the gate. Inside the plant, slips written by hand and legs worn out; on the concrete, two South Africans flying. The two sounds knocked against each other, absurd as two plays that had nothing to do with one another.
Early the next morning, the small third-floor meeting room.
The blinds were down. A few blades of morning light cut across the long table.
Paul Zhao sat at the head. He wore a pale blue long-sleeved shirt pressed without a crease, a leather watch on his wrist, and between his long fingers he turned the black Montblanc slowly. Along the two sides sat J.J. Xu, Alex Cheung, Michael Chen and me. Etlon sat on the outside, long legs out in the aisle, a short-sleeved shirt on him with a little grey-white talc on it, flipping irritably through the drawings in his hand.
The meeting had been called by Paul Zhao. The subject was the deck mould for the thirty-seven-foot power catamaran, the L37PC.
Paul Zhao did not look toward the shop. He turned the laptop toward himself, bent over it, and typed item by item into the table:
"Forward hatch fairing, three days planned; scaffolding, shop to own; third sanding, foreign inspection … Etlon, we need to confirm the completion times for these fifteen nodes, so that we can report to the board in South Africa."
Paul Zhao's English was fluent, his tone even, his manner as composed as a man issuing orders from the boardroom of a multinational.
By the seventh item the meeting had already run two hours.
Etlon's brow had knotted into a hard lump. He had looked at his watch three times, his toe tapping fast on the terrazzo.
4
When Paul Zhao read the next line, Etlon laid the pen down on the table and stood up. "I have work in the shop. I am leaving."
He said it flatly, as though reporting something settled long ago.
The room went quiet for a moment. J.J. Xu pushed the heavy-rimmed glasses up his nose. Michael Chen looked up.
Etlon closed his own laptop, took it under his arm, pushed the wooden door open and went out. At the head of the table Paul Zhao's hand stopped on the keyboard. The composure drained out of his face for a beat.
"Etlon!"
Paul Zhao pushed his chair back hard, stood, and went out after him, to the terrazzo banister at the end of the corridor.
The stairwell carried the sound of Etlon going down, work boots knocking step by step on the terrazzo. Paul Zhao took hold of the iron railing at the stairs with both hands, leaned his body out over the empty, echoing well and shouted:
"Etlon, we need you!"
The footsteps paused half a second at the turn of the second floor. Then, from below, a very soft laugh. The steps went on down without hesitation, one floor after another.
Paul Zhao stood at the stairs a few seconds. Morning light came through the window onto him. He did not call a second time. He rolled his shirt cuffs up half a turn, turned, and walked back. His face showed nothing; his step was his usual step.
At the door of the small meeting room he paused and said into the room, "Let's stop there for today." J.J. Xu, Alex Cheung and Michael Chen got up one after another and went their ways.
After the meeting broke up I went back to my cubicle.
A few sheets of blank paper lay on the desk. There being no ERP, the rules had to be set down first: who raised a requisition, which level signed it, who approved a payment application. I was drawing boxes on the paper with a pen, sorting out the consumables purchasing flow as I went.
Halfway through, quick heavy footsteps came down the corridor.
No knock. Jiangping Fang stepped in.
He was the production vice-president; every schedule in the shop sat on his shoulders. His brow was knotted, a film of sweat on the tip of his nose, his Mandarin plain and his voice urgent and sharp: "Larry — the laminating side in the shop has run dry. Gloves, tape, rollers, all the small stuff, down to nothing. The men don't even have a decent pair of work gloves. The resin sticks to their hands. What is Purchasing doing? Get out to the market and buy it."
I put the pen down and pointed at the flow sheets spread on the desk.
5
"Mr Fang, I have one man. Buying consumables means a special run into Fuyang to the hardware market, today and tomorrow, and there simply aren't the hands. And I'm sorting out the purchasing and reimbursement flow right now. The old plant at Flying Eagle already has the hardware suppliers, the volume is large and the price is low, and Mr Xu over there knows me. These odds and ends of consumables, we can put them all through Flying Eagle to buy on our behalf. They deliver in one run, invoice us separately. It saves cost and it's more efficient."
Jiangping Fang glanced sideways at the flow charts on my desk, gave a sniff through his nose, and let a little contempt show on his face.
He did not answer me. He turned and went out, and pulled the door shut behind him.
A few minutes later I heard the putter of a moped in the yard below.
I went to the window at the end of the corridor and looked down.
Jiangping Fang stood on the open ground of the plant and waved down a worker who was heading out to the shop. He got onto the back of the battered moped himself, patted the worker on the shoulder, and the two of them, neither with a helmet, went out of the gate on a trail of black smoke, in a hurry for the hardware market in town.
Before long the moped came puttering back.
Jiangping Fang jumped off the back, two bales of coarse white work gloves in his arms; the worker carried several rolls of packing tape and a few packets of no-name plastic rollers. Jiangping Fang wiped the sweat off his face, strode toward the shop, and passing under the office building did not lift his head once toward the third floor.
I looked at the flow sketches on my desk and felt a heaviness in my chest.
At the Japanese company things moved forward in a line. Whatever material was short went into the plan ahead of time; when the day came, the goods arrived, the men were there, the work began. That system was not afraid of slow. It was afraid of numbers that could not be counted.
Here, people were pushed along by events. The hole opened first, and then someone leaped at it. Flow, signatures, rules — all of it gave way to a bale of gloves.
The vice-president got onto a worker's moped and went to the hardware market himself to carry back two bales of gloves. Not that he did not understand the rules. This plant simply turned by another method.
In the afternoon I took the draft on buying consumables through the old plant and went up to Paul Zhao's office.
The door was ajar. Paul Zhao sat back in the leather swivel chair, a cup of tea in his hand, his eyes on the small blackboard that stood on its easel.
On the board hung a Gantt chart printed out from Project, blocks of time in a dozen colours packed dense, running from design review and mould turning all the way to the launch of the first boat at the end of the year. Below the chart, in the blank space, he had written five characters in white chalk, upright and even: man, machine, material, method, environment.
6
I knew those five characters. On the morning-meeting boards at the Japanese company they were the same five, with a row of things behind them every day: shift rosters, check sheets, safety stock, work standards, a temperature-and-humidity meter.
On this blackboard there were only the five characters.
He turned the Montblanc in his fingers, easy and pleased with himself, as though admiring a drawing he had set out neatly. Seeing me come in, he lifted his eyes from the board, glanced at the paper in my hand, and pointed at the corner of his desk. "Leave it there. I'll look later."
I put the draft down and went out.
The corridor was quiet. Passing the small meeting room next door, the door was ajar and the room empty.
The afternoon sun came slanting through the blinds and fell across the big photograph on the wall directly ahead. It was the catamaran poster sent over from Cape Town. In the photograph the Atlantic was a deep blue, the spray white, a thirty-seven-foot catamaran going forward under sail, its white hull dazzling between the blue water and the blue sky, and on the deck a few foreigners in pale casual clothes, glasses in their hands.
I stood in the doorway a while.
There was still blue ink from the carbon paper on my fingers; the bottom copy of the transfer slip was in my pocket.
Looking at that Cape Town poster on the wall, and thinking of the English schedule on the blackboard upstairs, I felt a discomfort I could not put a name to.
The schedule upstairs was beautiful as a painting, while downstairs a few pairs of work gloves meant the vice-president jumping on a moped and riding into town. The South African walked out of the meeting room with his laptop under his arm, while Graeme Xu at the old plant kept the material coming on nothing but old experience. The drawing on the blackboard was one logic; the yard outside ran on another. They were in the same building and going in different directions, neither of them meaning to listen to the other.
Could we really build the beautiful thing in that photograph, out of this hand-to-mouth collection of methods?
The thought turned over once in my head, blurry, hard to hold, and lodged there like a grain of sand. The end-of-day bell went off over the plant.
Paul Zhao left at his usual hour, precisely. He packed his briefcase, changed into a jacket, and came down with an easy step. His company Buick Regal started in the yard, the lights came on, and it slid smoothly out of the gate and away up Highway 320 toward Hangzhou. He seldom worked late, and on weekends he went back to the city; the dust and the difficulty here he left behind in the Fuyang hollow when the hour struck.
The putter of the moped came again from below. William and Etlon, red helmets on, rode the second-hand bike out of the gate and away along the river embankment, throwing the noise off into the thickening dark. Down by Flying Eagle's materials building, Graeme Xu started his big car, the lamps striking the road, and drove slowly out of the gate as well.
7
The corridor darkened. A little cool of an autumn night came in through the crack of the window. I bent to the slips on the desk and gathered them into a stack. The boat had not even had a keel laid, but between the beautiful drawings and the real confusion, something had already, quietly, parted.