The Tea Goes Cold
1
November came in, and the wind on the Fuchun River turned harder every day.
On the concrete road that runs from the shop to the plant gate, the puddles left from the night before had frozen into a thin brittle sheet, and when the heavy rubber tyres of a truck rolled over them they cracked into ice splinters. We had long since put on thick padded coats. The doors and windows of the big room were shut tight, but the damp cold coming up through the concrete still worked its way through the soles of our rubber shoes into the middle of our feet.
Saturday afternoon, as always, was the weekly review meeting for the joint venture.
The plant worked a six-day week, and the men who had run straight through all six days were packed along both sides of the long meeting table in the big room. Xu Junjie, Chen Huimin, Gao Xiaoqiong, Old Ye from the shop, and Chen Hongxun from import and export — all of them in dark old padded coats, sitting round the electric oil heater at the corner of the table, its sheet metal ticking as it heated. Every face carried the tiredness of days on end. Their breath gathered into a faint white mist under the fluorescent light.
At the far end of the table, facing the projection screen, the head seat stayed empty.
The tabletop there was clean. No teacup, no notebook.
That was Zhao Chenyang's seat. He was the only one in the whole plant. For the rest of us, the young ones grinding away at forms in the big room, Saturday had always been a regular working day. Come Saturday, nobody asked why Mr. Zhao had not come, and everybody had long since got used to that permanently empty head seat.
Zhao and Fang Jiangping had flown to South Africa together, so this week Xu Junjie chaired the meeting.
Behind his thick-framed glasses, Xu Junjie's eyes were red from lack of sleep. He cleared his big voice:
"Mr. Zhao and Mr. Fang are still in Cape Town. Today let us work through last week's mould milestones and materials first. Also, several letters came back from South Africa yesterday with some inspection photographs. Michael, put them up on the wall so everyone can have a look, and see just how advanced a South African yard is."
Chen Huimin worked the mouse and threw the large images from the digital camera onto the whitewashed wall one after another. Everyone had stretched their necks out, expecting to see how a big South African yard built a luxury catamaran.
But the photographs went by one after another, and they were all wide, general views. One was a large boat lying at the quay — the hull and nothing else. One was a forming shop shot from a second-floor walkway, empty and bare. One was a neatly stacked pile of timber in the fitting-out shop. And then a few blank white management boards. The lens was pulled wide. Not one mould parting line, not one joint where a keel or a stiffener met. Nothing of a vacuum-infusion line either. Whoever took them did not know what mattered; he photographed whatever he happened to see.
Xu Junjie pushed his thick frames up and put his face almost against the screen. He looked a long while, took the glasses off, breathed on them and wiped the lenses slowly on his sweater cuff, eyes narrowed to slits. "Those two leaders really got their money's worth," he said, his big voice held down in his throat. "Thirty-odd hours of travel, and it looks like they went to shoot a brochure for the South African parent. They picked their views generously. Just never thought to give us a close look at where the keel of a hull goes down."
The pack of engineers along the table could not hold it in. Two snorts leaked out of their throats, and then they bent their heads hurriedly and pretended to hunt for numbers in the notebooks in their hands. Old Ye's plastic mug wobbled; the corner of his mouth pulled up and he shook his head and shook it again.
Chen Huimin quickly hit Enter, and the screen switched to the written report Zhao Chenyang had sent Boss Xiong, titled Robinson Visit Log. The whole thing was a well-formed piece of foreign-company writing, fluent and long, not a single fault to be found between the lines. Not until item five, tucked between two paragraphs discussing timber cutting yields, did one line slide out quietly:
"Gary believes part of Gino's investment proposal is over-specified, or uses high-cost solutions. Try to avoid the sand-blasting guns; Gary believes the management level is not yet up to using sand-blasting guns."
Gary was the old foreign general manager of the South African parent plant.
Zhao Chenyang had not put one emotional word into the text. He simply used Gary's mouth to send that assessment, lightly, back to Fuyang.
Old Ye lifted the clear plastic mug from the table. The black tea swayed in the cup. He glanced at the projection on the wall, the corner of his mouth turned down, and he said nothing.
Outside, the cold wind hit the roller shutter with a dull clatter. The letter had gone out and lay quietly on the server, and nobody at the meeting mentioned the weight of that line.
2
Not many days after Zhao Chenyang came back from South Africa, Fuyang began to see scattered freezing rain.
He had changed into a long dark wool overcoat, and his footsteps came up the terrazzo steps of the main building without hurry.
After the rest of us moved into the big room beside the G-block shop, Zhao Chenyang stayed on in the large office on the third floor of the main building, the one by the window. Half of the third floor was Feiying's people, and the meeting room was at the end of the corridor. Dry, roomy terrazzo floors, a big desk by the window, looking down over the whole muddy, grey plant.
I went up to the third floor to check the list of substitute-material samples from the chemical plants in East China with him.
I pushed the door open. On the small round table lay his pen, and beside it a white porcelain thermos with steam coming off it. Zhao Chenyang was leaning back in his chair, his face a little dark, a grey-blue shadow of sleeplessness under his eyes, a few unshaved whiskers on his chin. I put the few pages of comparison sheets on the edge of the round table. He did not reach for them. His eyes rested on the black-on-white tables for half a second, then drew back.
"Larry." He said it once, his tone level, without a flicker. "These few days in Cape Town, the senior people in South Africa are very unhappy with our progress here."
He reached over and screwed the lid back onto the thermos. The room was quiet enough to hear the small friction at the rim of the cup. "Some things — you should not always push them along on Gino's line. He is a consultant. You are the company's buyer. You need to see the whole picture."
It was said mildly, with a trace of consideration in it even. But those two eyes came flat across the table, cold, pinned to my collar, held there a moment, then moved quite naturally to the window. The atmosphere forming in the big room, the habit of following the foreign technical line, had long been a splinter in his eye. Before this, Gino had muttered to me several times about setting up something here to run the purchasing on both sides, to cut every cost in China and South Africa onto one line — a so-called cost tsar.
Who would sit in that seat, who would get to say, was a line not to be crossed, there at that small round table on the third floor. "Understood, Mr. Zhao."
I gathered the papers back against my chest.
He said nothing more. He only picked up the pen from the table, took off the cap, and drew a line across the notebook.
I stepped out. The wooden door clicked shut.
There was not much in the corridor. The terrazzo floor held a cold gleam, and the Feiying rooms next door had closed up long ago. There
used to be the sound of foreigners walking about here. Now there was only one man turning pages behind that door.
3
The pressure in the big room sank a little at a time, without anyone noticing.
Etlon changed first.
The South African mould expert with the little braid at the back of his head, who followed Gino everywhere, used to run like a bearing that never wore out. But after three requests he had put in for a sample piece of non-slip decking were all stamped down, he collapsed entirely. He stopped carrying his notebook round after the shop men to log hours, and he stopped coming to our desks to sketch out his dream of a test room.
In his thick cotton coat, grey with dirt, he sat all day on the wooden chair in the corner of the big room. The fluorescent light was grey. His two long legs stuck out past the desk, his two big hands, hard with callus, lay flat on his knees, and he stared without moving at the white dust drifting in through the roller shutter.
His light-brown eyes had gone like dead water frozen at the river bank — clouded, numb.
He had read the climate here earlier than Gino had. In a place where you could not even get a non-slip panel decided, nobody was going to take him with them.
And Gino still had no idea.
He was stubborn. Even when the temperature in Fuyang dropped below zero, he wore only a knit cardigan under a thick jacket, and every morning he was standing in the G-block shop on time.
He knew nothing of what was folded into the papers that came back from South Africa, and less about what face Boss Xiong wore each day looking at the bills for the imported equipment.
One dusk after winter set in, the dark came early.
The shop was cold as an icehouse. The smell of styrene hung congealed in the cold air, stinging the nose and tightening the throat. The wooden plug of the thirty-seven-foot catamaran carried a cold dark-grey sheen of primer. The workers had all gone to the canteen, and only a few lonely mercury lamps were left on in the shop.
Gino, in thick woollen gloves, worked his way along the transverse stiffener on the side of the plug, feeling it a little at a time. Every couple of steps he stopped and tapped the board with a finger, listening to the hollow note it gave.
I stood beside him with the torch, lighting the way.
At a joint near the stern he stopped, pulled off one glove, and breathed out a thick white cloud.
"Larry, tell Zhao the damp course on the floor has to be started next week." He pointed at the concrete floor, frosted over. He rapped the board lightly with his knuckle and listened to the echo. "We will be in this building another twenty months at least. When the spring rains come next year, the damp coming up will lift the whole gelcoat. That money — not one cent of it can be saved."
When he said it, his eyes were full of the big boat due to launch the year after next.
He had the next twenty months of the schedule laid out clear, down to counting the temperature control for the plum rains in days. I moved the torch beam aside, and it fell on the deep black shadow at the bottom of the mould. My throat moved. I could not answer.
In this plant, born and grown here, nobody cared about the plum rains the year after next. What everyone was counting was tomorrow's bill. 4
It came down one morning, out of nowhere, with no warning at all. The plant was especially cold that day, and icicles as thick as a finger hung under the eaves.
The few of us in the big room had just settled in. Chen Huimin was breathing on his hands and rubbing them, Xu Junjie had taken off his thick glasses to wipe the mist off them. The oil heater in the room had not warmed up yet when the roller shutter was pushed open hard from outside and a burst of cutting cold came in.
Fang Jiangping came in in a thick padded coat, two sheets of paper pinched in his hand.
He did not go to his own desk. His steps stopped dead in the middle of the two rows of desks. His face was heavy, the flesh of his cheeks drawn tight, his eyes moving fast across the few faces in the room, as if holding something down.
"Everyone stop a moment." Fang Jiangping's voice came out dry.
The sound of keys and turning paper stopped at once. Only the faint movement of oil in the heater tubes was left.
"A formal notice from South Africa," Fang Jiangping glanced down at the paper in his hand, his voice pressed low. "Gino's consultancy term ends this month. It will not be renewed. He leaves the country this Friday and will take no further part in the project. All drawings and technical files in hand to be handed over today."
The sentence took less than half a minute.
When he finished, the room was dead quiet, quiet enough to hear a needle drop on the concrete.
The half-peeled boiled egg in Chen Huimin's hand stopped in mid-air, a piece of shell at his fingernail dropped into the tin bin with a clear ring; the glasses cloth in Xu Junjie's hand fell onto the desk, and he stared blankly past everything at Fang Jiangping, mouth slightly open, not closing for a long time.
That was not an ordinary resignation. That was a hammer falling out of the sky.
He was the master Boss Xiong had called for a thousand times over, brought in from America; he was the pillar holding up the joint venture. The week before he had been planning the process twenty months out; on the morning of this week he was pulled out by the roots, clean and quick.
A huge, cold panic crept quietly up everyone's spine.
They all knew in their hearts: if a man like Gino could be thrown away like a rag, what were the young people sitting in this room on a thousand-odd yuan a month? In this plant, who was irreplaceable? Who
could be sure he was not the next to go?
All day long, almost no human voice was heard in the big room. Old Ye came in from the shop with his hands behind his back and stood in the doorway a while. He looked at the empty passage, lifted the plastic mug and drank deep of the strong tea. He did not curse the way he usually did. He only shook his head, the corner of his mouth pulled into a cold, unreadable line, screwed the lid of the mug down a turn at a time, turned, and wandered back to his shop.
Nobody in the room said anything. The keyboards were tapped carefully, as if afraid of making a sound that should not be made. 5
The day Gino left, the sky over the plant was a sheet of lead grey, and a cold drizzle fell.
No farewell dinner, no gathering, and nobody went out to buy a bunch of flowers.
In the afternoon, the plant's black Buick pulled up in front of the main building, the exhaust puffing thick white into the wet cold. Gino came down from upstairs.
He had changed into thick woollen trousers and an old faded jacket, the thick dark-grey scarf round his neck. A flat old backpack hung off his shoulder, and he carried a laptop against his chest.
He looked much older and thinner than when he had come, but the cut face showed neither grief nor joy. His chin was slightly lifted, and the cold wind had blown his silver hair loose.
Out of the big room, only Xu Junjie and I and a few others walked out under black umbrellas to see him off.
In the big office by the window on the third floor, the curtains were drawn tight. Zhao Chenyang never came down. The whole main building was still, and only that shut window on the third floor looked down over everything on the concrete yard.
Fang Jiangping stood by the car door and waved at Gino. "Bye-bye." Gino stopped, looked at him without expression, and nodded. Then his eyes turned to Xu Junjie and me. Those dark blue eyes flickered in the freezing rain, carrying a lost, detached look of a tide already gone out.
He patted the backpack, his lips moved. "Take care, guys." Then he turned, bent, and got into the back of the Buick.
The door shut with a bang.
The window rose, and the black film cut off inside from outside at once. The driver pressed the accelerator; the wheels left two deep black tracks on the wet concrete, turned the corner, and drove straight out through the big iron gate of the plant.
A few seconds later the red tail lights were gone completely in the grey river wind and cold rain.
The man gone, the tea cold. Not even a spare sigh was left in the plant. Nobody even had time to look twice at the desk that had emptied. Fang Jiangping shook the water off his umbrella and had hardly got into the big room before his voice rose: "Old Chen, has the second container from South Africa reached port yet? Where exactly are the customs
papers stuck?"
Chen Hongxun, sitting by the door, lifted his head from a pile of customs documents, his face as grey as coarse paper. "The packing list South Africa sent is a complete tangle, the odd codes do not match, customs thinks the declaration does not add up and will not release it! I have run to customs three times today, my legs are about to drop off!" Chen Hongxun was the one who watched import and export customs work. Those stacks of outfitting-part codes, knocked out carelessly by South Africa, had become a bomb waiting to go off on the customs inspection table.
The master from America had gone. What was left to these young people was material codes by the thousand, delivery chasing without end, and a bottomless swamp behind that batch of containers at customs. Outside the window, the sander in the G-block shop let out a sudden shrill scream, and the motors began to roar again like something gone mad. Old Ye's rough Qiandao Lake voice went off in the corridor, the big shop door was slammed shut, and the sharp stink of styrene solvent, mixed with white dust, forced its way in through the gap again. The oil heater's sheet metal in the big room was scorching. The smell of rust dried in the throat.
I sat back at my desk, put out fingers stiff with cold, lifted the half-cup of water on the desk, long gone cold, and tipped it back.
The cold water went all the way down into my stomach, cold enough to tighten the whole body.
I set the cup down hard on the corner of the desk, opened the dense stack of substitute-material purchasing lists, picked up the ballpoint beside my
hand, and wrote, stroke by stroke, the name of the next supplier on the white paper.