The BlackBerry
1
After the weather turned, we moved out of the main building into the big open room beside the G-block shop.
It was a single-storey shed, a wide roller shutter for a door, and two rows of yellow wood-grain desks pushed together. Xu Junjie, Chen Huimin, Xiao He and I sat in it, and William too. Any of us could look up and see what the others were doing.
Ye Youxiang was in the same room. His desk sat beside Xiao He's. He was the production manager, and one of Boss Xiong's old men, brought out of Qiandao Lake. He had come up with the boss, building kayaks in Fuyang, from one small hull to the biggest in the world. Little schooling, no computer, no typing. When the foreigners wanted the shop told anything, all of it went through Xiao He. A clear plastic mug stood on his desk, the tea stewed black, and his Qiandao Lake accent was heavy and blunt. Sitting behind him, we heard everything.
Back then I was in the shop every day. The composites had to be localized, resin and gelcoat and glass cloth all sourced at home, and whether a substitute would work, whether the mould would distort once we used it, all of it had to be tested first. My part was to find the material, chase it in, and line the delivery notes up against the quotations. The formulation and the curing tests belonged to Gao Xiaoqiong, in the technical department.
Fuyang cooled fast in late autumn. That DSM batch, Neomould 1982, the zero-shrink resin, gelled very slowly at low temperature, and if the catalyst ratio drifted even slightly the whole mould face would orange-peel. Gao Xiaoqiong had run three days straight in the little lab, carrying sample plates back and forth, and there was always a film of white dust along his trouser legs.
The big room was close to the shop, only an open passage between. Sitting there you could hear the dull turn of the sanders. But the moment you stepped through the G-block gate the smell hit you full in the face. Styrene, out of the polyester resin. Sharp, faintly sweet. In the shop they were fairing the plug of a thirty-seven-foot catamaran. The men wore 3M dust masks and worked sanding blocks wrapped in fine paper back and forth along the long edge of the plug. The dust hung in the fluorescent light, fine as flour, and settled on dark work clothes. The masks did not stop it; by the end of a day there was a grey ring around the nostrils.
Gino stood on a patch of clear floor by the gate.
He had an old works jacket over a short-sleeve shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm. His silver hair was brushed neat and his face showed nothing. The dust drifted around him. He wore no mask, and stood watching the men run their sanders along the plug.
That morning Gao Xiaoqiong had brought a set of test plates in. When I walked over, Gino waved us both closer, took the plate from him, and pressed a small Barcol hardness tester into the middle of it. The needle jumped twice and stopped at thirty-eight.
"The gel time is still too long." Gino pinched the edge of the resin with a fingernail; the layer was still slightly soft. His voice was short, a verdict.
He was looking at Gao Xiaoqiong. "The shop is under fifteen degrees. The MEKP ratio has to come up to one point eight. Mix two more sets, and test the cure shrinkage in two hours."
Gao Xiaoqiong wrote it down fast. He was the only one in the technical department who could talk to Gino in parameters. Whatever Gino said, he recorded, and he rarely asked anything back.
That done, Gino took a black phone out of his jacket pocket and beckoned me over.
"Larry, look at this."
It was a BlackBerry. Full keyboard, a small black roller set into the side. He rolled it twice and a crosshair came up on the screen, a small point of light blinking steady in the middle.
"GPS, real-time."
"Satellites twenty thousand kilometres up, holding the signal." He clicked the roller and switched back to the mail screen. "Anywhere on earth, as long as it's on, it knows where you are."
Against the dust and the grey concrete of that old shop, the small blue-grey screen was very bright.
He typed fast with his thumbs, answered a message, and slid the phone back into his pocket.
2
Footsteps came fast down the passage.
Etlon ran up.
His jacket front and cuffs were white with dust, his goggles pushed up on his forehead, and he carried a thick notebook with a curled edge. He stopped short in front of Gino.
"Gino, the primer sanding..." Etlon spoke fast in his South African English, holding the notebook out with both hands, tense around the eyes. "Old Ye's people want to stop now. I checked the thickness. There is zero point three of a millimetre uneven. The hours are all recorded here. Do we keep sanding, or do we follow the shop?"
Gino glanced at the pencil marks and did not take the book. "Not flat enough." He spoke fast, the words short as a verdict. "Tell them two more coats, wet-sanded with four-hundred grit. Do not touch the edges."
"Yes. Two more coats." Etlon nodded and nodded, let out a breath as though he had been handed something certain, ticked the page, and ran back into the dust.
I had looked through that notebook once. Page after page, every line dense, and only one source, all of it Gino. He copied each English sentence of Gino's exactly, down to the interjections, and marked in red beside it what he himself had to do. I asked him why he kept it so fine. He blinked, and said: Gino understands boats.
But what he actually wanted was more than keeping a notebook. Once he pulled me into a corner of the shop and talked for half an hour. He wanted to build a research and test room here. Not a big one, just a room with temperature and humidity control and a few test machines, and then resin, gelcoat and glass cloth worked through sample by sample, side by side. Whose material was good, whose was poor, settled by numbers and not by feel. He also wanted to make a pair of rudder
mock-ups and cut them open down the middle, to see whether the epoxy foam had gone in evenly.
He talked fast, English mixed with drawing terms, drawing in the air with a finger. He said he was in the plant almost twenty-four hours a day; he had time.
A few days later he really did put in an application.
He came back with the notebook under his arm and no life in him. The answer had come back: any purchase, change or addition had to be approved by the board.
He stood at the shop door for a moment, and then went over to the main building after all, to Gino, to ask Gino to write a letter for him. In Ye Youxiang's shop, changing a process took one sentence from him. Etlon, to add a test room to the shop he worked in, first had to apply to the board in South Africa.
Around that time he was angry about something else. The shop's abrasive paper had changed supplier, and he rubbed a sheet between his fingers and said, in front of us, that it was hopelessly inferior. He went and asked Mirka for a price, twelve thousand sheets of every grit, a full year's use. At the end of the message he added it himself: "There is still a long way to go before this is approved."
He was waiting, all that time, for one chance: for the day Gino went back to America and could carry him along. He never said it to anyone, but it was all over the way he ran after Gino.
Gino did not stay long in the shop. He turned and walked out, his face showing nothing, not looking at anything around him, and went back to the main building.
3
A few days later a mail from Gino came up in everyone's Outlook, in English.
It went to Fang Jiangping directly, copied to Zhao Chenyang, to me, and to South Africa. The subject line was Action Items "G" Building, a list of fixes for the G-block shop.
Five items: Ventilation insufficient; the sanding area needs high-capacity extraction; The simple chain hoist on the shop beam has no safe-load certification; a qualified third party must issue a test report, and the safety factor must reach four; Wiring in disarray, flammable resin stored beside the distribution box, two small fires already; Lighting at the sanding and lay-up stations insufficient, with one line added: "Why are the lights off? To save power?"; Process flow on the shop floor is not to be changed by unauthorized personnel.
The moment the mail opened in the big room, He Wenqin, Xiao He, understood it.
Xiao He was the girl who had been assigned as translator, and her desk was next to Ye Youxiang's. She pulled the key lines out of the English, turned to him, and read them quietly.
When she reached the second item she stopped.
That sentence was long in the original. She read it slowly, one word at a time.
"...Second item. The simple chain hoist on the shop beam has no safe-load certification. In Cape Town, a forty-six-foot catamaran was being lowered with exactly this kind of rig. Half a metre off the ground, one end slipped. The hull came over on its side and hit the concrete, split
open on the spot, the bilges written off. A worker was caught under the hull. When they got him out he was critically injured."
I looked up without meaning to.
On the I-beam over the shop hung a chain hoist exactly like it. The big room went quiet. The typing stopped. People at the back looked up.
Ye Youxiang's hand stopped in the air with the plastic mug in it. The black tea at the bottom turned slowly. He said nothing, and stared at his desk for several seconds.
Xiao He did not dare go on.
Then Ye Youxiang knocked the mug down hard on the desk. The plastic base hit the wood-grain laminate with a dull thud.
"Testing?" His voice was not loud, flat and hard. "Foreigners know a lot. People who fly around up in the sky, what do they know about how work gets done on the ground?"
Xiao He held the notebook and did not answer.
Ye Youxiang leaned back and laughed, cold. "He thinks the wiring is dangerous, the hoist no good. All right. Tomorrow let's pull the main switch, everybody stops, everybody goes home and sleeps. We wait till the foreigners' certificate comes through, and then we start building boats again, and we'll see whether the boss can still pay wages." It was said quietly, but the whole room heard it.
He drank deep from the mug, opened the schedule book at his elbow, and paid Xiao He no more attention.
The letter simply sat in that room. Nobody could pick it up.
But for those few days, the shop talked about the sling among themselves. The foremen said out loud that the foreigners were trying to scare them, and then, after hours, quietly took a few old slings down and put new ones up.
Ye Youxiang said nothing at all. He did not tell them to change them, and he did not tell them not to.
4
What really put urgency into the air was a hard task handed down from South Africa.
The date of Robertson & Caine's annual budget review was fixed. Zhao Chenyang and Fang Jiangping were to fly to Cape Town. But before they left, South Africa required the joint venture to produce a complete 2009 capital expenditure and equipment budget.
That paper had originally been pressed on them by Boss Xiong, and Zhao Chenyang was being chased to the point of fire. He did not know the shipbuilding equipment, the mould ratios or the shop tooling well enough to draw up a list himself. For two days he paced the building, frantic.
With nowhere else to turn, Zhao Chenyang called Gino into the small meeting room in the main building.
The fluorescent light was on. Zhao Chenyang pushed a blank Excel capital-expenditure sheet across to Gino and told him to get next year's equipment needs down, quickly, all of them.
Gino sat across the table.
He was pure technical stock. On drawings he gave nothing away; off drawings he gave them none.
He did not argue either. He did not look at the investment payback column or the depreciation column at all. He put the ballpoint on the equipment column and worked down the coating sequence of the thirty-seven-foot catamaran, line by line.
The thirty-seven-foot catamaran had five colour zones. As he saw it, if one gun was shared, every colour change meant flushing the lines with a great deal of solvent: waste, and easy to contaminate. One machine to a colour was simplest.
He asked nobody. He worked down the coating sequence, listed the machines one by one, and wrote "5" in the quantity column. MVP Gelcoat Spray Machines x 5.
Five MVP gelcoat spray machines.
He handed the draft over. Zhao Chenyang took it and, without asking a single question about what the five machines would each do, entered it into the 2009 budget table in a hurry.
One machine was close to a hundred thousand. Five made half a million. Gino finished the errand and went back to the shop.
5
Not many days later, a storm broke on the third floor of the main building with no warning at all.
I had three vendor quotations I had just checked, and I went up to the third floor to get Fang's signature. At the turn of the corridor, Zhao Chenyang's office door stood ajar, a hand's width of gap.
Inside, something hit a desk, very hard.
The thud was heavy, as if a whole palm had been brought down on thick wood. For an instant every small sound in that corridor, the footsteps, the printer in the next room, seemed to be cut off.
Then a voice, not loud, almost slow, as though confirming something: "Five?"
A short dead silence. Then paper turning, fast, a little untidy. "This table. Who made it?"
Zhao Chenyang's voice came out of the room, half a tone higher than usual and half a beat quicker. He was usually unhurried; this came as though squeezed out of his throat.
"Boss Xiong, this is... this is the plan Gino reported. I only got the table a little while ago, I hadn't been through it in detail..." "Five."
The voice repeated it, still not loud.
"A hundred thousand each. Five hundred thousand. You put the table in."
I stood in the shadow of the wall by the door, holding my breath. I could not see his face; I only heard him get up, the chair legs scraping hard on the concrete.
The next few sentences Zhao Chenyang got out fast and steady, almost in one breath:
"Boss Xiong, calm down first. This equipment list is the plan Gino reported. I only consolidated it. Foreigners in Europe and America are
used to fitting out everything with the best; they would rather over-report than leave anything out. The young people below us lack experience, they didn't police it at the front end..."
The room was quiet for a full two seconds.
Then Xiong Zhangyou's voice, Qiandao Lake dialect, one sentence at a time, very cold:
"Send the table back. Report it again."
"We're not buying. Not one of them."
"Half a million can feed how many people. Did he even work that out." Nothing else was said.
Heavy leather on concrete, suddenly. I stepped back twice and pressed myself against the pier at the turn of the stairs.
The office door was thrown open.
Xiong Zhangyou came out black-faced in long strides, nothing in his hands, staring straight ahead, not even glancing down the corridor, and went fast down the steps.
The corridor went quiet again, dead quiet.
6
When the end-of-day bell rang the plant emptied quickly.
The light on the third floor went out early too. Zhao Chenyang and Fang Jiangping had gone to Pudong overnight, to fly to Cape Town. In the big room only my own fluorescent tube was still on. On the screen, Gino's Action Items was still open. Five items, not one of them landed. Outside the window there was no sound of extraction
going in, no test report, and the wiring hung in the beams exactly as before.
I shut the computer down and walked out.
The G-block gate was still open half a leaf. Gino had not gone. He was crouched at the stern of the plug with the BlackBerry in his hand, thumb moving slowly on the roller. The blue-grey screen was lit in his palm, the crosshair still blinking in the middle.
He did not look up.
I pulled the roller shutter down. The steel hit the concrete, very loud.