Half a Map
1
That PSI summary the head office sent over from Japan — I never properly understood it.
The sheet was enormous, seven thousand-odd rows and more than a hundred columns. A notebook screen is narrow to begin with; you scrolled and scrolled and never reached the bottom. Formulas were nested inside cells layer upon layer, cross-referenced between sheets, and if you clicked one by accident the pointer turned into an hourglass and hung there spinning for several seconds.
Which part number hung under which machine, which cell held a real requirement and which was only a rolling forecast feinting in the air — I could not see into the workings of any of it. After four or five years in a big Japanese plant I was still hazy about those dense stacked formulas.
What we in purchasing guarded every day was not, in fact, that great sheet.
The young women next door in MBK — Material Booking — were the ones who served it. Every month they turned several tens of thousands of data points over and tipped them into Oracle with a button. We in the purchasing section came in each morning and opened that blue-grey interface, the screen blinked, and out came row after row: material requirement arrival plan. Which day several thousand screens were due, which day how many keyboards — instructions the system had worked out from the production schedule.
When the instruction appeared I released it to the supplier, chased the goods, checked the delivery date. As for how that figure had been calculated step by step from the head office two thousand kilometres away down to Xiasha in Hangzhou, I did not know, and at the time did not feel any need to.
As long as nothing in Oracle flashed a warning, the days in the Xiasha open room went by comfortably.
The summer of 2006 was especially hot. On the big roads of the Xiasha development zone the asphalt softened under the sun, and a smell of heated tar hung in the air. But inside the open office in the plant the air conditioning was strong. More than two hundred desks in one long block, fluorescent tubes lined up all the way to the end, and nothing but the sound of keys.
When I was tired of the work, or when the arrival plan in the system jumped a little oddly, I would stand up and drift over, hands in my pockets, past two rows of desks, into MBK next door.
Two young women sat side by side there. Two identical large plastic cups stood on the desk, with handles, the plastic gone a little white, steeping lemon slices or barley tea.
The one nearer the aisle was Zhong Ying. Fine-featured, tall and thin in build, long hair, a pointed chin, big bright eyes that seemed to hold water when she looked at you. Her cheekbones were a touch high, but when she smiled the whole face softened.
The one sitting further in was Wang Haihong, a little shorter, round-faced, long hair pinned up behind, a voice louder and crisper than Zhong Ying's, with a laugh that carried.
I walked over, leaned both hands on the partition of Zhong Ying's desk, and looked over at her screen.
"Yingying," I said, keeping my voice down, "the wide-screen arrivals for next month in the system — why does that look a bit floaty?"
Zhong Ying was scrolling a huge table with the mouse and did not even lift her head. Her voice was very soft, sticky and sweet, as if she would not spend any effort on it, breathing it out between her lips: "Qi-san, you're over here drifting again... don't block my view, all right."
"If I don't drift over, and next week the supplier cuts us off, what will you give the shop floor?" I fished a preserved plum out of the small plastic bag on her desk, tore it open and put it in my mouth. "Good sister, give me a straight answer — did the head office move that version of the numbers again last night?"
Wang Haihong turned round from further in and burst out laughing, bright and crisp. "Qi-san, stop scaring our Yingying with shortages. Who is it that chases hardest every time, and in the end the accounts never balance?"
"My accounts don't balance because you people keep changing the sheet." I bit down on the plum stone and raised an eyebrow at Wang Haihong. "Haihong, last night at the KTV with the Shanghai supplier — that Stefanie Sun number of yours was savage. The whole room only heard you."
Wang Haihong went red, grabbed the sticky-note pad off the desk and pretended to throw it at me. "And your ears are too sharp! That is called singing well. The supplier people clapped!"
Zhong Ying sat to one side with her lips pressed together, pleased, her big eyes curved into crescents, her thin shoulders shaking gently. Her slender fingers tapped a few times at the keyboard, then she tilted the notebook screen half an inch toward me and dropped her voice very low. "This line... the head office changed it just before they left yesterday. It hasn't been formally imported into the system yet. Keep it in your head, and don't say a word about it, all right?"
She was close, and there was a faint smell of shampoo on her that settled a person in that close summer heat.
At the time I thought that was what life in a foreign factory was. In your twenties, on nineteen hundred a month, living in a rented room in Xiasha, fooling about in the open room, occasionally leaning close to a pretty girl and trading a few idle words, and the days could drift on comfortably like that.
2
I am the kind of person who learns things out of sheer grinding curiosity.
Complicated, fancy theories I cannot hold in my head — like that seven-thousand-row sheet, one formula inside another, and two looks are enough to give me a headache. But give me the skeleton underneath, and I pick it up faster than anyone.
I was the one who taught Wang Haihong to swim.
That summer was monstrously hot, everyone had nothing to do at the weekend, and we went to the pool nearby. Wang Haihong was a stone. Once in the water she flailed with both hands, feet jammed hard against the bottom, and after two mouthfuls of water she yelled in fright and clung to the ladder rails.
Anyone else would have talked a great deal about body position, the angle of the pull, the frequency of the kick. I did not bother with any of that.
I learned to swim late myself, in my mid-twenties. Before that I did the dog paddle; then I found teaching videos online and went over the slow-motion shots again and again. What I worked out was this: swimming is not really about how hard the arms work, it is about the rhythm of breathing and kicking. Get your head down and breathe out steadily, come up and breathe in calmly, and on the kick squeeze the water behind you, and the body will glide forward on the momentum. With the foundation solid, everything else follows. Once I had that clear, I practised twice and could swim a thousand metres, two thousand, without stopping.
I pulled Wang Haihong away from the rails and taught her two things only. First, no arms: hold the float with both hands, put your head under and blow bubbles, come up and breathe in. Once the breathing was smooth, practise the kick: tuck, turn, push, squeeze.
"Don't rush the arms," I said, hand on her waist. "After the kick, let the body float. With the basics right, the water will hold you up by itself."
She was not bold, in truth. Her round face was all water, eyes wide, lips pressed tight. But she was stubborn, and she practised the rhythm I gave her, step by step.
Three visits to the pool in total. The third time she surfaced she could already swim from one end of the deep section to the other; two hundred metres, five hundred, and in the end a full thousand without stopping.
She hung on the edge of the pool, took off her goggles, wiped her face, and gulped air, her eyes bright as stars, and grinned at me. "Qi-san! Look! I can really swim!"
The summer steam glowed white under the fluorescent light, the smell of chlorine in my nose. In that moment I thought everything in the world ran on the same principle: see the skeleton clearly, grip the thing underneath, and what looks impossible can be walked through in two or three steps.
What I did not know then was that in this factory there were things whose skeleton had never once been laid out on the table for me to see.
3
Besides going over the numbers with Zhong Ying and the others, the worst headache in purchasing was the month-end reconciliation.
Especially anything involving the suppliers' consignment stock and returns. We were making notebooks. The screens were the most delicate, the unit price high, and the price moved once a month. At month end Finance pressed to close the books and the suppliers pressed to draw stock and be paid.
Sometimes a supplier's salesman, over from Shanghai or Suzhou, went through the drawn amount with me on the phone.
"Qi-san, this month's 14.1-inch screens, the number your system is showing is wrong. That return on the seventeenth of last month, and the price adjustment — you have shorted us fifty-three thousand dollars."
At my desk I opened Oracle, jumped between windows, checked receiving status, checked credit notes, until my eyes swam. The document numbers were a tangle and the dates spanned two months; I went over it and over it and could not work the return out, my head a mess.
The man on the phone spoke with mouth and eyes, this day this consignment, this delivery note number, how the price difference was deducted, reporting it line by line more cleanly than the system.
I was pressed from both sides and sick of it, and on top of that we were all familiar by then, we had drunk green tea together at the KTV and heard Wang Haihong yell out Stefanie Sun, and whatever defence I had in me had long since gone slack.
"All right, all right." I sighed into the receiver. "I've noted the document numbers you gave. Go with your figure for now, as long as the drawn stock balances this period and it doesn't hold up next month's release."
The supplier thanked me profusely at the other end. I closed the window and reported the numbers up, and felt hollow inside: how that account had actually been squared, I had only the vaguest idea; whatever they said, I accepted.
It seemed the days could be fudged along like that, half blind and half knowing. Until April of that year.
4
On that April morning I saw from Oracle that something was wrong.
I sat down at my desk as usual and opened the system to look at material requirements. The moment the screen came up, I froze.
The Dubai model was the largest line our plant ran in those two years, half of the plant's four thousand-odd people turning round it. By the forecast the head office had sent last month, we were to schedule ninety-eight thousand units for April; the 14.1-inch LCD in my hands alone was several million dollars' worth of goods.
And that morning, in the material requirement column in Oracle, a great stretch was empty.
I dragged the scroll bar down, then up. There was no ninety-eight thousand.
The April requirement sat alone in its cell, a glaring stub: 7,899.
From ninety-eight thousand down to seven thousand nine hundred. Of every hundred units, ninety-two were gone.
I thought the system had a bug. I refreshed three times and the number did not move.
At half past nine the phone went off. It was Park Hye-rim at LG.
Her English, thick with Korean, went up three tones, and she was stamping her feet. "Larry! New forecast, I see! April, seven thousand nine! March was ninety-eight thousand! Why? Why changed? Our production line is running! I cannot stop!"
The line was already running. The glass substrates had already been cut. She could not stop.
"Wait for me," I said, sweat all over my forehead. "Let me check. I'll come back to you."
When I hung up, Zhang Zheng drifted over from the far end of the aisle. He was the team leader, my direct boss, easy with everyone, and in decades he had never reddened his face at anybody. He stood at my desk with his vacuum flask in his hand, his face unreadable.
"This cut is brutal." His voice was very low. "Don't rush anything to the Koreans, and don't promise anything. Wait until the section has settled what we say."
"Boss, has the system imported the wrong numbers?" I asked.
Zhang Zheng shook his head, said not one more word, and walked off.
I could not sit still. I got up and went straight next door to MBK.
The open room was nothing like usual. The young women who spoke softly every day were all looking down, dead quiet.
Zhong Ying sat there with both hands resting on the keyboard, her eyes red; she had obviously been crying. Wang Haihong sat further in, her lips bitten white, pressing the backspace key hard, deleting row after row of the production plan she had just built.
The big plastic cup on Zhong Ying's desk had its lid on. The water inside had not been touched.
I went over, propped my hand on the partition, and asked quietly. "Yingying, what's going on? Why has everything in Oracle collapsed?"
Zhong Ying looked up at me. Those eyes that usually shone were filmed with water, the tip of her nose slightly red. She looked at me and her voice was even softer and fainter than usual, barely a trembling breath.
"Qi-san... the mail from the head office last night. The section chief tore into us first thing..."
"What exactly did the head office say?"
"It's not an import error." Wang Haihong cut in from further in, her voice full of grievance she could not keep down. "The head office has re-split the whole year! The Dubai model — the volume behind it is not being made in Hangzhou at all!"
Zhong Ying lowered her head, her long hair sliding down and covering half her face. The hand on the mouse was trembling slightly, and it pointed at the enormous PSI sheet, recalculated. "What we worked out before, what we scheduled... it doesn't count any more. The head office says move it, and it moves, one sentence, and the sheet the few of us sat up all night making is waste paper..."
I stood beside the two of them looking at the great blanked-out cells on the screen, and a bitter taste came up in my mouth.
I had always prided myself on being clever, learning to swim in three visits, grasping the essence faster than anyone. I had fooled about in the open room thinking that by getting close to the girls and joking with suppliers I could play the complex supply chain the way it was meant to be played.
And only at that moment, looking at Zhong Ying's reddened eyes, did I suddenly see that I understood nothing at all.
5
That afternoon I took Zhang Guolin to the smoking room.
The Japanese plant was strict; this small room was the only place in the whole compound where you could smoke. The extractor fan whirred, the smoke dispersed slowly and caught in the throat. Zhang Guolin and I leaned against the white tiled wall, one cigarette each.
Zhang Guolin was an old hand in MBK, and usually wore that flat look of a man who would not mind if the sky fell in. He blew out a thin stream of smoke, looked at my lost face, and said quietly, "Stop staring into space. Go back to the desk. I'll show you something."
We stubbed out the cigarettes, washed our hands, and went to his desk.
Zhang Guolin closed the in-house Hangzhou table he normally showed us, clicked a few times in a shared directory deep in the computer, and brought up a file that was all in Japanese.
"What you look at normally is the In-House sheet. You can only see Hangzhou's own patch of ground." He took the mouse and opened a few of the sheets inside. "These few are the big board."
I leaned in. Across the screen, three names of contract manufacturers stood side by side: Compal, Inventec, Quanta.
The tables were neat, and the model codes were all another set of English I did not know: Boston, Dallas, Denver, Aichi.
"Toshiba's notebooks moved the bulk of it onto these Taiwanese contract lines long ago." He slid the mouse to the Quanta page and pointed at a column of numbers climbing without pause. "They hand over the whole machine — design, purchasing, tooling, scheduling. Quanta buys materials for millions of units at a time, and squeezes the cost far below ours. We spend years getting a model right, and the head office turns round and packs it off to the contract manufacturer."
Then he dragged the sheet to the column at the far right. The column was headed Supply.
Underneath, the names stood out: LG, Samsung, Sharp, AU Optronics.
"See it?" Zhang Guolin pointed at those familiar suppliers. "The screens are the same screens. The goods are the same goods. The people making the screens have not changed. But the delivery address changed from Xiasha, Hangzhou, to Taiwan, a long time ago."
I looked at that sheet and my head rang.
"Then... the arithmetic we do on the sheet, the numbers Zhong Ying and the others sit up all night checking — what are those?" I asked.
Zhang Guolin laughed, and the laugh was utterly cold and utterly clear. "What are they? They are the tool for doing the work. The head office holds the pen, and it hands the work to whoever it likes. Give it to you today and your side is busy. Tomorrow the contract manufacturer works out cheaper, and one stroke of the pen and the Hangzhou cell is empty."
He closed the notebook and clapped me on the shoulder. "Kid, you think that because you know Oracle and you've got the suppliers handled, you understand the supply chain? What you have seen is the half of the map that they have deigned to give Hangzhou. The other half, the half that decides life and death, is two thousand kilometres away, and it has never once been shown to us."
I stood at the side of Zhang Guolin's desk and for a long time could not speak.
When I walked out of the office it was already dusk.
The Xiasha sunset stained one edge of the sky a brutal blood red. On the open ground at the plant gate a few of the yellow staff buses stood by the roadside, exhaust smoking. The leaves along the road rattled in the dry midsummer wind.
I thought of the KTV two nights earlier, Wang Haihong with the microphone, belting out Stefanie Sun, the coloured neon sweeping round and lighting up the snacks and the big water cups on the table.
I thought of Wang Haihong in the pool, breathing out for the first time, wiping the water off her face, eyes curved, grinning at me.
I thought of myself drifting through the open room with a cup in my hand, thinking myself clever for having found the shortcut to life, thinking that with an iron rice bowl at a big foreign plant the days could go on being that comfortable.
The wind was on my skin. The wind that had been close and hot a moment before went across my back and raised a layer of chill.
That night I went back to the rented room and, for the first time, did not open Friends.
I lay on the narrow single bed looking at the shadow the fan cut across the ceiling. In my twenties I had finally understood one thing:
In that vast, precise, seemingly unassailable foreign factory, all our laughter, all our young stirrings, all our self-satisfied competence and cleverness were, on that cold and enormous compass of capital an ocean away, no more than a line of pencil that could be rubbed out at any time.
That night there was no rain in Xiasha. Two hundred-odd computers were shut down quietly in the dark, and nobody's tomorrow was written on them.