Blind Box
1
The two hulls of the thirty-seven-foot catamaran came out of the moulds and were joined in mid-December.
The two glass-fibre shells, more than ten metres each, sat on steel cradles with the wide bridge deck between them, making one complete catamaran form. It had been sprayed all over in white gelcoat and it threw back a hard light in the cold daylight of the workshop.
People came down from the main building to look. Xiong Zhangyou, in a black jacket, hands behind his back, walked a circle round the cradle, let his eyes rest a moment on the join, and barely stopped.
The old man was a little unsettled.
He had just got rid of Gino a fortnight earlier, and the company was talking about it inside and out. It made him nervous, and he had no bottom to stand on. But the hardest part — turning the composite moulds and forming the hulls — had been chewed through. The rest was laying up and joining, by the book. If the hulls could be built, there was no need to keep the man.
Only, with the shell standing up, everything behind it lay exposed.
The workshop wanted material every day, and the schedule was being cut almost to the hour. Zhou Linchu, who ran mechanical assembly, stood in the gap between the two hulls looking up at the engine-bed foundation, the general assembly drawing rolled in his hand, his brows locked. Chen Liansong, on the electrical wiring, crouched at the edge of the deck with a multimeter and two coils of thin cable at his feet, and did not move for a long time.
Manager Ye came over, walking slowly, stopped beside Zhou Linchu and rapped the white shell twice with his hand.
Tonk. Tonk.
The sound was hollow, and it rolled away under the steel beams.
"Are the beds levelled?" Manager Ye asked.
"Levelled enough." Zhou Linchu tucked the drawing under his arm and pressed his voice low. "But where is the steering gear? Have the seacocks and the exhaust connections come from South Africa or not? The specs on the drawing — you can't find them anywhere on the domestic market. No Yanmar engine at all, no generator, no switchboard, no bronze ball valves, not a box of any of it in the stores. Two empty shells sitting here. What are we supposed to fit into them?"
Manager Ye did not answer. His eyes went along the empty inner walls of the hulls, and he turned and walked toward the big open room on the ground floor.
The open room was beside the workshop, past a row of tall spare-parts stores. The long tables were covered with material lists, all of them open.
Over this boat's outfit, that room and Cape Town had been arguing for four whole months. A hundred-odd mails went over, and the lists that came back from the South African plant were always incomplete. The item names on the invoices, the codes in the BOM and the labels on the goods called themselves three different things.
The workshop chased every day, and the schedule pressed down from above. With the data incomplete, Old Chen had ground his teeth last month, reported to Zhao Chenyang, and decided to declare to Fuyang Customs anyway.
That was a gamble. Declaring with incomplete documents, if the inspection did not match, meant at best the whole container seized and shipped back, at worst the company put on the customs watch list.
Fang Jiangping was in and out all day, his voice pitched high, chasing the question of when the second container would dock. Everyone knew that the life of the whole production line now hung on those boxes drifting at sea.
And it was at this moment that Zhao Chenyang's way of looking at me changed.
He had not long come back from his inspection tour of South Africa. The foreign senior management on the far side of the ocean had not bought him at all; he had come away from Cape Town with a bloody nose and landed home defeated. And yet, back at the plant, the mails from the South African plant on technical and material matters came to be copied to me directly more often, and the foreign technicians, even William, were more willing to check details with me. Zhao Chenyang's dignity had been bruised. The gentle, cultivated manner from the small round table at the interview was gone, and in its place was a layer of guardedness. Passing me in a corridor or in the open room, his eyes would rest on my face for several seconds, appraising, with something in them I could not name that was close to resentment.
2
In the days when the hulls were being joined, my body gave out first.
After several nights in a row comparing material documents, the upper right of my abdomen went into violent spasm four or five times. It was a pain like someone twisting a blunt knife under the ribs; cold sweat soaked through my sweater. At night I could not breathe evenly for the pain, and when I really could not hold out I gritted my teeth and took a taxi straight to the emergency room at Fuyang People's Hospital for a drip.
The doctor glanced at the ultrasound and spoke flatly: gallstones with acute cholecystitis, the gallbladder packed with sludge, its function long gone, laparoscopic removal required.
I took leave from the plant and had the operation at the county hospital.
Three small holes in the belly, and the gallbladder out. The operation was minor, but the flesh around the wounds went stiff, and any movement pulled faintly at the abdominal wall.
I am Fuyang born and bred, and I grew up with my parents. A separate five-storey building in the compound; ours was the fourth floor. After discharge I went home with a dressing taped to my abdomen, the doctor's instructions being rest, slow steps, no lifting.
I lay in the room on the fourth floor until the fifth morning.
Outside, sleet fell from a leaden sky. I had just drunk half a bowl of plain rice porridge when the phone by the pillow rang.
It was Xiong Zhangyou.
I had only just pressed answer when the boss's short voice came down the line. "Little Qi. Get dressed and come down. The driver and I are below your building. The car is waiting. We're going to get your passport done."
"Chairman Xiong, I had laparoscopic surgery a few days ago..."
"South Africa can't wait. We need the visa at once. The car is downstairs. Hurry."
He hung up.
I sat on the edge of the bed and caught my breath. Under the pyjamas the wound drew slightly tight. I propped both hands on the mattress, straightened slowly, and put on a thick padded coat.
Going down from the fourth floor, the staircase had the old wooden banister rail, the wood worn to a dull shine. I gripped the rail hard with one hand and took very small steps, one tread at a time.
The black Buick was standing at the door of the stairwell with white steam at the exhaust. Xiong Zhangyou sat in the passenger seat, both hands in his jacket pockets, leaning back, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, not turning round.
I reached out, pulled the door open, and lowered myself sideways into the back. The car started with a jolt, the dressing drew tight, and I sucked in a breath.
3
The car pulled up at the Fuyang Public Security Bureau's exit-entry hall.
Long fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling and lit the floor dead white; the air smelled coldly of umbrellas and old paper. Xiong Zhangyou, hands in his jacket pockets, shoes clicking, led me straight to a counter at the back.
His daughter-in-law worked behind that counter.
"Xiao Min." Xiong Zhangyou tapped the marble top. "Do a passport for little Qi. He's going out to South Africa for the plant. It needs to be urgent."
The young woman behind the glass looked up, hair pinned up, brisk and capable. She glanced at her father-in-law first, then her eyes came to rest on me.
I was shuffling slowly up to the counter, both hands on the top, my upper body held very straight, not daring to bend.
"Why are you walking like that?" she asked, looking at me.
I pushed my identity card and residence booklet across, my voice low. "I had laparoscopic surgery a few days ago. The gallbladder. I have to move slowly."
The hands on the keyboard stopped.
She slid a glance sideways at Xiong Zhangyou, who stood with his hands behind his back studying the ceiling, and the corner of her mouth turned in a thin, cold smile.
She opened the papers and, as if talking to herself, her voice coming clearly through the speaking grille onto the marble:
"That is just what this person is like."
Xiong Zhangyou acted as if he had not heard, turned, and walked out toward the smoking area.
When the paperwork was done the car took me back to my building. I gripped the old wooden rail and shuffled up to the fourth floor, one tread at a time, and lay back down.
4
On the seventh day after surgery I went back to work.
The scar tissue at the laparoscopic punctures was still hard; I walked slowly, and to get up or sit down I had to prop a palm on the corner of the desk.
In the open room Huang Yuan was at his computer, checking material tables. A round face, the very picture of a fresh graduate, no glasses, methodical, strong on Excel functions. He usually spoke softly and slowly. Seeing me come in he looked up and said quietly, "Engineer Qi, can you manage?"
"Walking slowly is fine."
I had barely sat down when a heavy braking thud came from the open ground outside.
A semi-trailer backed into the concrete apron and the green forty-foot container came down on the ground and shook up a layer of dust.
Container No. 1 had arrived.
"The container's here! The goods are here!"
Someone in the open room shouted at the top of their voice, and the whole corridor of the main building boiled over. People who had been tormented for months by stoppages and missing material all ran out onto the apron, faces unable to hold the excitement down. Everyone was sure that this container, wrestled out by Old Chen at that risk, was the water that would save them.
Xu Junjie walked in front with the engine-room general drawing rolled in his hand; Zhong Miaohong, the warehouse supervisor, had a stack of in-and-out slips in his fist and moved as if on wind.
The fitters came up with crowbars and tin snips, snipped the lead seal with a snap, and pulled the two heavy doors outward.
The noise cut off in an instant.
The people who had been pressing forward full of hope froze in a single moment.
The container was stuffed to the doors and in total disorder. No pallets, no racks; cartons of parts piled and crushed against each other. Many of the cartons had gone soft with sea damp and split at the edges, white foam beads scattered everywhere. Most bore nothing but letters scrawled in thick marker; the labels were scribbled and worn.
Zhong Miaohong stood in the doorway turning over the thin handover slip, his brows knotted. "How can it be piled like this? Where is the packing list?"
Huang Yuan stood to one side with a clipboard, his voice still slow. "Don't be in a hurry. Get the forklift and the trolleys. Let's unload everything into the warehouse first."
At that moment all Huang Yuan wanted was to get the things properly into the warehouse. He did not yet know how hard the counting afterwards would be.
5
The workers ran the hydraulic trucks and it took them half a day to shift the jumbled boxes into the big parts warehouse on the ground floor.
The warehouse was one long bay partitioned out of a standard factory shed, tall windows on four sides, daylight falling in, open and bright. Up on the concrete those cartons made several small hills.
The moment the goods landed, the counting blew up.
Zhong Miaohong took two storekeepers and opened a few of the big cartons, working against the delivery note that came with the container, and the further they got the more lost they were. The obscure codes put on things in South Africa had nothing to do with the drawings; the goods had no documents, the documents had no goods. Of two hundred and seventy-five items, most had specifications that did not match, contents mixed between cartons, quantities wrong, and the discrepancy table grew longer and longer.
Zhong Miaohong stamped his foot in the warehouse and shouted. "How am I supposed to check this off?! The codes are all over the place, the specs don't match, how am I supposed to book it in?!"
Xu Junjie pulled open a few crates and checked the drawings against them, and his face went the colour of iron. He shoved his thick, wide-framed glasses up his nose and his big voice came out with a bite he could not keep down.
"This is nonsense! This is sheer nonsense! Where is the embedded plate for the steering gear bed? Where are the seacock connections? No Yanmar engine anywhere, and we dig out two sets of electronic control panels! And this generator — the nameplate says a hundred and ten volts. Our first boat is on domestic voltage. Are we towing it back to be an ornament?!"
The warehouse was chaos. A few of the foreign engineers shook their heads and walked off.
I propped myself on a steel rack and went over slowly, the dressing drawing tight. By the warehouse door stood a solid wooden crate with a flat top. I dragged it out onto the open floor, both hands on my knees, and lowered myself onto it.
Sitting on the crate, leaning slightly forward, with the belly relaxed, the dragging in the flesh eased a great deal.
I took pen and notebook out of my pocket and spread the original South African BOM on my knees.
"Master Zhong, stop shouting," I said, raising a hand toward Zhong Miaohong, who was stamping about in front of the pile. "Get a couple of the lads to carry things out. We check it as it comes out, one piece at a time."
Zhong Miaohong was taken aback for a moment, saw me already seated on the crate with the pen in my hand, saw Huang Yuan come over with a tape measure, and in the end called people over to start sorting.
One piece. Two pieces.
The big warehouse had plenty of light. For the odd-shaped items with no code, Huang Yuan ran the tape over the opening and I checked it against the drawing, line by line; where it did not match, we photographed the item and noted the photograph number on the paper.
That was the foundation of the later 275-item material table: column J with the hyperlinked photographs, the new Chinese codes; column L, the South African codes; column M, the handbook code Old Chen had declared under.
Halfway through the count, Zhao Chenyang came over from the main building. He wore a woollen overcoat with both hands in his pockets and stood a few paces off, watching.
Zhong Miaohong, shifting boxes, was loudly complaining about the state of the documents, his voice sharp and loud. I sat on the crate without a sound, head down, checking specifications.
Zhao Chenyang looked at the crate and stood there a while.
Then suddenly he took a few quick steps forward, pointed at Zhong Miaohong and said, coldly:
"What are you shouting for! Is shouting all you can do?!"
He seldom darkened his face in public. Zhong Miaohong jumped, the slips nearly went out of his hand, and he ducked his head and said nothing more.
Zhao Chenyang turned and looked at me. His eyes rested a second on the crate and the drawing, cold and complicated, and without a word he turned and went back to the building.
By nightfall the material had come roughly into shape.
Huang Yuan came to my desk with the summary and said quietly, "Old Chen has just come from Customs. Fuyang Customs has exactly one person who handles classification. He's on leave until the tenth of the first lunar month. One man on holiday and the whole plant's handbook applications stop."
He tapped the bottom of the table with the pen. "And one more thing. When Container No. 1 was counted, besides the widespread mismatches, seven critical items were not packed at all. Bronze ball valves, navigation light bases, radios... the South African shipping list has them ticked. There's not a trace of them in the box. Those seven are already locked into the handbook declaration and can't be mixed into another batch. South Africa will have to send them express at their own expense."
The screen blinked. A short reply came from Flip, the logistics manager in South Africa. Huang Yuan looked at it and gave a bitter smile. "I asked him for the original shipping documents. His answer: I unfortunately do not have access to a scanner..."
The open room went dead quiet.
6
Three days later the door of the small meeting room on the third floor of the five-storey main building was locked from inside.
The meeting was heavy, and the room was thick with cigarette smoke.
Every day the hulls stood idle was a day's cost, and South African logistics had broken down completely. The South African general manager, Gary, was adamant: SinoEagleLeopard had to send professionals to Cape Town to straighten out purchasing and packing on the spot.
Along both sides of the long table, the abacuses clicked.
Xiong Zhangyou sat at the head with a black face, his short thick fingers tapping the edge of the table. The old man was impatient; what he was counting was the thousands upon thousands of yuan of labour depreciation thrown away every day, and he kept pressing for a decision on who would go and when. Beside him Xiong Ying was steady, the opposite of his father, not one to lose his temper; he sat listening to each report, occasionally turning a page of the contract.
Zhao Chenyang sat opposite.
His inspection tour had not established his authority, and now the material had become a tangle. He was anxious to cut the knot, and he was also anxious to hold on to his voice at management level.
When the smoke cleared, the four-man overseas list was settled: Zhou Linchu for mechanical assembly, Chen Liansong for electrical installation, Qian Tao for production interpretation, and for purchasing and logistics, Qi Dongsheng.
After the meeting, a mail drafted by Zhao Chenyang himself arrived in my inbox.
"Your work in South Africa will be very challenging. The work you are responsible for will absolutely not be limited to your own jobs. You will need to represent SinoEagleLeopard fully in coordinating and resolving all related problems.
Never say this sentence to the foreign side: this is not my responsibility. Anything that is the joint venture's business is your business."
The words were stiff, and they pressed the responsibility down hard.
7
Two days before departure Zhao Chenyang called a pre-departure meeting in the third-floor meeting room of the main building.
All four of us going to South Africa were there: Zhou Linchu, Chen Liansong, Qian Tao and me. Huang Yuan sat along one side of the long table with a notebook.
Days of material stoppage and pressure from above had left Zhao Chenyang with a suspicion and irritation he could not dissolve. He went through the points of contact in Cape Town one by one, his tone tight. When the handover points were all covered, the room fell quiet.
Zhao Chenyang closed the report in his hand on the table, leaned slightly forward, and his gaze crossed the long table and came to rest on me.
The corner of his mouth moved, and there was no mistaking the sarcasm in his voice.
"Larry, you look as if you are afraid. What are you afraid of?"
Dead silence.
Zhou Linchu and Chen Liansong froze. Huang Yuan's pen stopped in the air.
Under the work shirt the laparoscopic wounds drew slightly tight. I sat very straight, my back upright, both hands flat on the edge of the table.
I picked up the water cup on the table, drank a mouthful of warm water slowly, and set the cup back down gently; the base made a light, clear sound on the table.
Then I raised my eyes and met the gaze at the far end of the table, my voice flat as a worn slab of stone.
"I am not afraid. This is all work, and I will do it well."
There was not a single superfluous sound in the room.
I looked at him, quietly, like that.
Zhao Chenyang's eyelid twitched. The sarcasm at the corner of his mouth slowly stiffened, and in those several seconds of eye contact the appraisal in his eyes dispersed, little by little. He looked away and smoothed his cuff. "Good. When you get to South Africa, hold the thing down."
The meeting broke up quickly.
I had just come out of the main gate when William hurried over from the workshop. He had heard about South Africa somewhere, and he stopped me squarely, his brows bunched. "Larry, the meal allowance Mr. Xiong set for you — eighty yuan a day?"
I nodded.
William's eyes went wide and he shook his head like a rattle-drum, his tone full of incomprehension and stubborn insistence. "Eighty yuan is not enough at all. In Cape Town you cannot eat a plain meal for that. You are going to solve a big problem for the company. How can they have you paying out of your own pocket to live? No. I am going to find Xiong Zhangyou about this."
In a plant where everyone was calculating and passing the buck, the directness and warmth of this young foreigner made something warm up in my chest. Later I heard that William really did go up to the third floor and find Xiong Zhangyou, arguing the real prices in Cape Town. Xiong Zhangyou gave way and raised the daily allowance by fifty, to a hundred and thirty.
In the evening, with the paperwork handed over, Zhou Linchu and Chen Liansong came over from the workshop, and Qian Tao brought his interpretation notebook.
The four of us stood on the concrete apron outside the open room. It was fully dark. The workshop door stood half open, and inside it the newly joined thirty-seven-foot hull sat quietly on its steel beams, one great white mass, throwing two long dark shadows under the dim yellow bulb.
Zhou Linchu touched the new passport in his inside pocket and let out a breath of white vapour. "Engineer Qi, how far away is Cape Town exactly?"
Qian Tao looked at the printed itinerary in his hand. "Shanghai to Dubai, ten hours. Change at Dubai, nine hours more to Cape Town. Most of the way round the world."
Not one of us had ever been abroad, and none of us knew what situation was waiting at that old plant in Cape Town, behind that mess of scattered part codes.
Under the padded coat my surgical wounds drew faintly, with a hard, pulling feeling.
The workshop roller shutter came down with a clatter and the lock clicked shut. Out beyond Golf Road, on the river embankment, the heavy trucks' engines ground through the night, headlights cutting the darkness one after another and throwing light out over the black water.