The Maya Pill
Page 7
I returned to my desk.
The inbox was full of messages that had arrived during my absence. The usual spam, notifications from the systems administrator, inquiries from branch offices, and a message from my favorite correspondent, the Chinese partner who supplied us with fish.
Their manager’s name was Ni Guan. Or “Eddie.” All Chinese businesspeople who work with foreign partners adopt nicknames. Li, Chan, Su, and Shin become Louis, Victor, Christina, and Tanya—whatever they can come up with. I think that they’re assigned those names back in school, in their foreign language classes.
My guess is that they adopt these names so that we won’t mangle their real ones and defile them with our poor pronunciation. They don’t want to waste time on the pointless and gratuitous labor of explaining their language’s phonetic system: “My name is Li Li. No, they’re different: Li is my first name, and Li is my family name. No, they’re completely different words. My first name Li is pronounced ‘Li.’ But my family name Li is a little longer and a half tone higher: ‘Li.’ A completely different meaning . . . Fine, okay, just call me Kolya. It’ll be easier for you.”
For the one-hundred-eighth time Eddie reminded me about our overdue payment of four hundred thousand dollars and encouraged us not to decrease our orders during the current quarter. He wrote calmly, without hysterics.
I was always struck by the paradoxical and transcendental attitude of Chinese employees toward their business dealings. The first time I came into contact with them was when I was working for a tobacco company. We were supplying unprocessed tobacco to Russian factories, which were failing gradually under the pressure of competition with transnational corporations. One of these semi-moribund factories was in Omsk. When the company entered into bankruptcy proceedings, I attended a meeting of creditors to represent the company and to try to salvage some portion of their delinquent account, which came to somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars.
Everyone assumed that the dominant voice at the meeting would be the representative of the Chinese National Tobacco Corporation, which had supplied over three million dollars’ worth of raw tobacco to Omsk.
But no one came from China. And they didn’t even submit any claims.
The Chinese had a philosophical attitude toward their client’s insolvency. So it didn’t work out, they thought; it happens sometimes. The world is not perfect. Or, on the contrary, the world is perfect, and the collapse of the Omsk tobacco business is also Tao, the path, part of the universal plan, one chord in the great musical harmony of the world. They wrote off their three million and just kept on doing business.
It’s possible that two or three of the company’s top managers—one for each unrecovered million—were dispatched by firing squad in a public square; that’s something we’ll never know. But they didn’t waste time milling about in the throng at the factory turnstile, didn’t interfere with the executors and court officials conducting the inventory of the factory’s property, and they refrained from hiring local Russian bandits and bureaucrats to solve the problem. Why bother? Too much trouble. It’s all Tao.
Cold Plus’s Chinese partners are also willing to spend years waiting patiently for their unpaid invoices, stoically enduring our never-ending attempts to obtain extra fees and discounts on any pretext, no matter how flimsy; occasionally they’ll even satisfy claims that are utterly without foundation. Just so they can continue supplying their products to Russia.
They have their own logic, their own way of understanding the concept of profit. We plan one or two years ahead, they mark time in centuries. Don’t bother paying now; go ahead, haggle for every kopeck, cheat us. But keep on buying our products, consume more and more of what we have to offer. You’re only cheating yourselves—and your offspring—enslaving yourselves to whatever we produce, destroying your own country’s economy, losing your own capacity to produce things of value. The day will come when we’ll take you with our bare hands . . .
I thought that it would be interesting to get inside the mind of a Chinese person, to learn what makes him tick. What goes on in the mind of this Eddie?
I typed out our standard formal response about how we “plan to execute payment this month”; and as for the volume of purchases, it was “currently under discussion in our commercial department”; then I slid the cursor over to “Send.” I hesitated for a moment, looking at the monitor, then briskly left-clicked . . .
What happened next, all of it, was very much like a hallucination, but to this day I’m convinced that what I experienced was real.
I looked into the monitor and my consciousness was sucked out of my skull, like a soft-boiled egg, out through my eyes. The egg metaphor comes to mind because my consciousness turned out to be yellow. A clotty, yellow-orange substance. I slipped through the monitor and down the cable to the processor, whirled along the circuit boards, and spiraled down into the telephone cable. Then I whizzed along the copper veins, leaping and bounding across transformers and switchboards until I burst out of a different monitor, flew upward, and squeezed with some effort into the pair of eyes opposite it.
And now I found myself looking at a screen again—but at my own message, this time, in the inbox.
Darkness and a short pause. Feel free to insert your commercial message here.
* That is: Tripping to China, or: A Trip Made of China.
THE TAO OF THE MID-LEVEL MANAGER
In a low-ceilinged room with a wall of windows facing the street, an old air-conditioner hummed quietly. The higher frequencies of the acoustic spectrum were taken up with the chirping of female interns chattering on the phone and with one another. Only the middle range was relatively quiet. Ni Guan usually tuned his brain to the middle range and basked in its emptiness. Ni Guan had mastered this technique years ago, akin to distinguishing between the high and low frequencies coming over a telephone line. Without it, the sensory overload would cause his head to explode.
Since Ni Guan had tuned out the higher acoustic range, he didn’t hear any ICQ beeps,* but the “new mail” icon flashed in the lower right corner of the screen and caught his eye. The message was from Cindy, Ni Guan’s young coworker and assistant, who dealt with contract issues involving the northern barbarians.
Cindy’s real name was Tsin Chi. She was twenty-two. She had a nice figure, was smart and fun to be with, and showered rather more attention and care on Ni Guan than was customary in interactions with a senior colleague.
Ni Guan opened the message and read:
I drive my chariot
Out the Upper Eastern gate.
To the north of the settlement
I see a multitude of graves.
Above them aspens
Rustle their leaves.
Pines and cypresses
Line the broad roadway.
Below the earth lie bodies
Of men who died in ages past,
They disappeared
Into the infinite night
And slumber there in the mist
Where yellow streams flow,
Where a thousand years pass,
Yet no one awakens.
Like a stream, a stream,
Eternally flowing, yin and yang,
The term allotted us
Is like the morning dew.
A man’s lifetime
Flashes by, a short visit:
Flesh in longevity
Is not like stone or metal.
Ten thousand years
Follow end to end.
No sage, nor holy man
Can exceed that term.
As for those who have “partaken,”
Striving to join the immortals,
To them before all others was delivered
The soporific of death.
Is it not, then, better for us
To savor the sweet wine,
and spare no silks
For our own raiment?
And under the “Thirteenth Ancient Verse” of the Shi Jing, a small postscript was
appended: “Ni, shall we go out for a drink after work?”
Ni Guan turned and looked over at Tsin. She was looking straight at him, smiling immodestly. Ni Guan smiled back and shook his head gently, then briskly tapped out another poem from Shi Jing, from memory. The poem, known as “The Cricket,” is from the “Odes of the Tang Kingdom” section:
The autumn cricket
Has settled in the hall.
It is clear, the year
Is coming to an end . . .
If today
we are not to make merry,
with the moons the days will pass,
never to return.
But let us not chase
After pleasure;
We must be ever mindful
Of what we owe,
And love merriment
Not to excess:
A man of worth
Must be cautious in his pleasures.
The autumn cricket
Has settled in the hall.
It is clear, the year
Will soon quit us . . .
If today
we are not to make merry,
With the moons the days will pass
In vain.
But let us not chase
After pleasure;
We must be ever mindful
Of what we have left undone,
And love merriment
Not to excess:
A man of worth
Must be zealous in his labors.
The autumn cricket
Has settled in the hall.
The time has come for the carts
To come from the field to their rest . . .
If today
We are not to make merry,
With the moons the days
Will pass, leaving no trace.
But let us not chase
After pleasure;
We must be ever mindful
Of many sorrows,
And love merriment
Not to excess:
A man of worth
Must be imperturbable.
Ni Guan added a note of his own: “Comrade Tsin, tonight I have to stay late at work. Comrade Luan assigned me to do a report on the contract with the northern barbarians. Speaking of which, send me the memorandum on the interruptions in the timeframes of deliveries to Russia.”
When she got his message, the girl tapped furiously on her keyboard, and within a couple of minutes the “new mail” icon again flashed on Ni Guan’s screen. Ni Guan opened the message and read:
Swift flies the “Morning Wind” falcon.
Thick grows the northern forest . . .
Long have I not seen my lord,
And my mournful heart
Is inconsolable.
What can I do?
What can I do?
He has forsaken me;
Will he ever think of me again?
On the mountaintop
The oak spreads its branches,
In the lowland, supple elms . . .
Long have I not seen
My lord,
And my mournful heart
Is inconsolable.
What can I do?
What can I do?
He has forsaken me;
Will he ever think of me again?
On the mountaintop
The plum branches spread wide,
In the lowland, wild pears . . .
Long have I not seen
My lord,
And my mournful heart
Is as though intoxicated.
What can I do?
What can I do?
He has forsaken me;
Will he ever think of me again?
No postscripts appeared after this poem from Odes of the Tang Kingdom. Ni Guan again looked over at Tsin. Comrade Tsin was concentrating on a pile of papers on her desk; her cheeks were slightly flushed, her lips protruding sulkily. Everything about her said “You are a heartless, dry old shell of a man, Comrade Ni!” Or, more precisely, “You are like a withered stalk of wild rice standing alone outside the farmhouse gate, his fruit untouched, when the time of harvest has already passed and his brothers’ white grains have been gathered into sturdy barns; he alone will be buried under cold snow, when the twilight of the year gives way to night and a heavy cloud covers the Mountain of Flowers, Huashan.”
Ni Guan heaved a sigh and resumed his work. From the purchasing manager of the Russian company Cold Plus, who went by the name of Maximus Semipyatnitsky (which was some abracadabra!), came one of his typically dull messages, utterly devoid of meaning. They always read as though they’d been written by some computer program. Blatantly false promises to settle their debt; nothing concrete in response to Ni Guan’s request to confirm the amount of product to be delivered according to their contract with the barbarians, which had given them a discount and advance credit.
Comrade Luan, the senior export manager, would be upset. But it had nothing to do with Ni Guan. Comrade Luan knew that it was the barbarians’ fault; it’s always like this with them. But the gurgling stream would flow down from the mountains, would crumble the rocky cliffs, would carve crevasses in the solid stone, and would make its way inexorably out onto the broad plain, where it would spread into a mighty river, bearing abundance to the lands under the vault of heaven.
So too Ni Guan, with every day he spent in the office, with every e-mail he sent, with every telephone call he made to the barbarian cities, with his patient persistence and imperturbability, would eventually bring prosperity to the Chinese people. Even now, thanks to the work of the Tsin-dao Seafood Export Co, Ltd., Ni Guan’s place of employment, and of thousands of other export companies, millions of Chinese peasants had jobs and could feed their families.
They cultivate everything that can be eaten. They even cultivate fish and seafood, like rice. Ni Guan had visited fish plantations and had seen how they worked. Fish hatchlings were kept in cages made of netting and submerged in flooded meadowlands. Standing waist-deep in the water, peasant workers scooped the fish out, sorted them by size, and moved them into larger cages. They sprinkled fish fodder into the water and cleaned out the cages. Then they harvested the fish, cleaned them, and chopped them up into edible portions.
Peasants working on the fish plantation earn twenty yuan a day! Not all that much, of course, compared to what people make in Europe, but people are no longer dying of starvation. And someday the Chinese peasant will earn more than a farmer in America. This will absolutely come to pass; all they have to do is persist in their patient labors, day in and day out.
Ni Guan recalled one of Mao’s sayings, dating from 1956: “Things develop ceaselessly. It is only forty-five years since the Revolution of 1911, but the face of China has completely changed. In another forty-five years, that is, in the year 2001, or the beginning of the twenty-first century, China will have undergone an even greater change. She will have become a powerful socialist industrial country.”
Who can now say that Mao’s prediction has not come to pass? China has entered the third millennium with unprecedented economic growth. True, some naysayers complain that China betrayed socialism in the process. But Ni Guan understood that permitting capitalist economic activity is merely the wisdom of the water, which always finds its path to the sea, even if the river does take an occasional loop and appears to be flowing in the opposite direction. As long as the Communist Party remains in power, the ideals of socialism will never be consigned to oblivion, and world imperialism is deluded if it wants to gloat that it has forced China off the Red Path.
But there was one other important thing besides the implementation of the Chinese Communist Party’s program, besides the great triumph of Chinese civilization: Ni’s own personal struggle. His own private, sacred duty, a secret that no one knew, not his bosses at the company, not even the Executive Committee of his apartment building, which knows everything about everyone.
Ni Guan was scrimping and saving, denying his own needs, putting money away for th
e sake of his younger brother, to clear a bright future for him.
Yes, Ni had a brother. That very fact was a crime.
A few years after Ni was born in the town of Suifenhe near the Russian border, China proclaimed the “One Family—One Child” policy. From that time on, any second child would be considered illegitimate. Only in rural villages were people permitted to have two children, and only if the first one was a girl. But the first child in the Guan family was a boy, Ni, and so they could not justify a second, even if they were to move out into the country.
When Ni’s mother became pregnant again, a dark shadow fell over the family. For breaking the law his parents could be punished and demoted at work, and his father could be kicked out of the Party. But his mother refused to have an abortion. She went away to stay with her relatives in a distant province for several months. Ni’s brother was born there and there he remained. They named him Kung, in honor of the great Kung-Fu Tzu.* His mother returned home alone, as though nothing had happened. The apartment building’s Executive Committee may have guessed the truth, but they didn’t know for sure, and so there were no consequences.
Little Kung grew up in the countryside without a birth certificate, leaving no paper trail, like three million other Chinese bastards. His mother and father, and Ni himself, were occasionally able to visit him secretly, taking money to their relatives so that they could feed and clothe the boy.
And now Kung was grown up. On his deathbed, Ni’s father entrusted Kung to his older brother’s care, and Ni Guan could never violate this sacred charge. And indeed, Ni was in his brother’s debt; it was because they had concealed Kung’s existence that his parents were able to retain their position in society and Ni was able to graduate from high school and get a higher education. Now Ni Guan’s salary in the export company was much higher than that of peasants and blue-collar workers. He had already managed to save thousands and thousands of yuan.