Shanghai Fools

by Vann Chow

  "Yes, of course," Mr. Qi replied, against the backdrop of endless ocean and clear blue sky. He now invited me regularly to talk business on his yacht. Today, he had driven it pass the islands dotting the coastal line of Shanghai into the Yellow Sea. I took out my cellphone and took a picture of the view to send it to Marvey, so she knew I was not bluffing and I was really working with the boss.

  "Impressive, huh?"

  I nodded.

  "Why don't we put it on the Project Dragon One's agenda?"

  "This is a special branch of Dragon One. Let's say, I think the fewer people know about it, the better." Then he stood up and walked to the rails. "I want to sell this app, once it is finished, to other banks. Make it a white label product."

  "That's not the business model of the bank." I might not have been in this bank for a very long time, but it doesn't take a scientist to figure out what banks do. "We're not an app development company."

  "I got the same comment from the board. That's where they are wrong. How could we keep working in silos when the rest of the world is connected? I have pitched this idea to the board many times, and they repeatedly refused to move forward with time. To consider a bank to be just a bank that manages savings and checking accounts, and give out loans like it has always been doing since four hundred years ago is a completely outdated way of thinking."

  "We're developing financial technologies," I said. "Not a lot of banks are doing that."

  "Yes, but behind closed-doors. We innovate for ourselves, and what if our innovations could not live up to the customer's expectations and survive the market competitions? What would we do then? Instead of competing with players in the shrinking market, we should collaborate with them, and share the risks of these innovations together. Now that we have such a brilliant idea, we can be the first to approach the others and make them adopt the rules of our game, instead of giving them time to catch up with us?"

  "I think I understand what you mean."

  "So that's the answer to your question. This is one of the thousands of ideas we screened, and I found this one to be the most promising. It kills two birds with one stone."

  "I tend to disagree," I said. "The minimum investment in mutual funds is very high. Average consumers would likely not make big enough transactions to enroll themselves into our funds."

  "The workings of the app are just the details," he said. "Jong, what I have been trying to explain to you is this: we're not going to make any money with any of the apps we are developing in Bilious, including this one. We are just going to keep our customers from leaving us to another more agile, more convenient and more trustworthy online players, for the time being. We're only going to make money when we become a system developer, the rules-makers, the tool-provider. We are going to be the IBM of financial technology. What do you think?"

  I must admit Mr. Qi's idea made a lot of sense. "But you also said the board disagreed."

  "Well, it's easier to ask for forgiveness when you've made money than to ask for permission. My idea is that we just go for it."

  "Okayyy..." I said.

  "You're not convinced." Mr. Qi looked at me, a hint of suspicion showing in his eyes.

  "I am an employee of your bank," I replied. "I will do whatever you tell me to. I do not need any convincing or extra incentive to do my job."

  That put a big smile on my boss’s face. "So it's a 'yes' from you?"

  "I will do as you say to fulfill my capacity as an engineer for Bilious. Anything illegal, I am not interested in it."

  "Hell no! There's nothing illegal about it. You can trust me."

  "I will develop the app for you, in my regular working hours, on the company computers, with everything properly logged." I laid down the ground rules, "as an engineer, all I care about is the challenge. I am not interested in any company politics."

  "Fine. I'll take care of everything else, as long as you can develop the application," Mr. Qi said. "When can you get a rough pilot ready?"

  "Depends on whether I have access to the bank's account API or not."

  "I will write an email and get it granted in no time. And here, take this USB," Mr. Qi said. "It had all the instructions I drafted with the engineer who left. And the user instruction to the bank's API."

  I plugged it into my laptop. "The API looks easy enough to use," I murmured under my breath, formulating an attack plan.

  "If this works, how long will it take?" Mr. Qi asked me eagerly.

  "A day?" I replied, and then realized that I was no longer working alone. I needed to brief my team of junior engineers and sort out the development schedule. So I corrected myself, "give me a week for development. And a month for testing." Teamwork is not exactly the most efficient way to do things when it comes to innovation, I tell you.

  "Are you sure?" Mr. Qi said. "Is it not too soon?"

  "Yes, absolutely," I said. People often thought that software writing was very difficult. Some were, but not everything. For this job, since the back-end was ready, all I needed to do was to create and interface that would query and input data into it. Easy job.

  "Brilliant!" Mr. Qi. said. "You're the best! And trust me, I have met a lot of software engineers."

  That was a preposterous statement he just said there, but I guess people always resort to flattery when they want something done. Flattery had usually very little use on me, since I knew exactly where I stand in life: the bottom. "I doubt that I am the best, but I don't like to lie about development times." And I told Mr. Qi just that.

  "Right. Jong is our honest, model employee," he lauded. I wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.

  "I shall take my leave now, if you would excuse me." I packed up my laptop and stored the USB with all the information for this exciting project in my laptop bag.

  "Have fun. I'm looking forward to hearing from you," Mr. Qi waved me goodbye.

  Chapter 29

  Jenny had been calling me over and over again ever since our rendezvous, leaving endearing messages on my voice mail when I did not pick up.

  One day, she appeared at the reception of the bank when I was debugging ThriftyEP, the secret project that only Mr. Qi and I knew about. The secretary called me three times to pick up my visitor at the front but I ignored her. "I'm in the middle of something," I said to her on the phone.

  I really hated being interrupted when I was debugging, especially when I was working on ThriftyEP. There were so many things I had to keep track of. Having to memorize all the changes I made to the source codes and the responses I got every time in the tedious trial-and-error process was a huge mental exercise.

  "You have to come over!" Candice, the receptionist, said. "She's getting agitated."

  "Tell the visitor to wait," I said.

  After about half an hour, an angry Jenny stormed into my office to the prying eyes of my office mates, and started hurling words of distress at me.

  "Why haven't you returned any of my calls? Why are you avoiding me?" She said, screaming at me.

  I didn't look up from my computer. I was at the moment trying to hunt down a missing quotation mark. I had located the approximate area and was already on the fiftieth line. I was not about to stop now.

  That aggravated Jenny so much she swept my laptop off the desk. It slid across the glossy table and hit the wall.

  "My work!" I howled after the accelerating computer and watched it eventually hit the ground. Its battery case fell open. "I haven't saved yet!" I was bluffing. Of course I saved. Everything was automatically saved, but I just felt like scaring her a little bit. She was unfortunately not a bit apologetic.

  "You're only concerned about your work! It was like this two years ago, and it was like this as well now."

  "Why should I change?" I did not get the reason why Jenny came here just to compliment me on my excellent work ethics.

  She swallowed hard, walked over to me and caressed my face with her hand. Then she said, while looking me deep in the eyes, "Let's start over again. I'm still
in love with you. I didn't marry that bastard you saw the other day. He's just somebody I hired to seduce your wife, so the two of you will break up and we could get back together." When she finished, she wanted to kiss me on the lips. I took a step backward and she stumbled forward. I caught her in my arms.

  "You were the one who gave up on me two years ago. You said that you 'preferred to cry in a BMW anytime than laugh on the back of a bicycle.'" I bent over to pick up my poor laptop. It was company's property, but still. It had a touchscreen! Seeing a perfectly functional laptop get trashed made me so sad.

  "I was just complaining. Every woman does that sometimes. It doesn't mean I don't love you!" She was right about that one.

  "What about those other guys you were seeing?"

  "What other guys? They are just phone numbers on my contact list. I did go out on a few dates and I might have said some mean things to you back then. All these were just to motivate you. I thought you would ask me to come back to you after a while, but then your parents said you went to America with some rich woman. When you came back, you are married to someone else altogether. That's not how it should be!" She stamped on her feet.

  "Motivate me for what?!" I was hung up on what she said. I couldn't believe she managed to find merits in her betrayal.

  "To make more money, so you can provide me with a better life when I do marry you!" She justified it without batting an eye, showing the conviction women had when they believed that they were so right there was no room for error.

  "Why does it always have to be me who has to provide?!" I blared, my face reddened from anger. "You have two arms and two legs just like me! Why can't you contribute as well?" I finally said what I had in my mind for a long time. Just because she was a woman in China did not automatically mean she would get a free pass from being a useful member of the society. Even China itself is embracing feminism and equal gender rights as it takes big strides forward to become the world's economic powerhouse. "You know what, Paula is not nearly as pretty as you and not as educated as you are. I don't think she even knows the difference between Laozi and Sun Tzi, but at least she doesn't expect me to take the burden of providing for the family alone. She works hard for the family."

  "She's a whore!"

  "And you're a bitch."

  "Why do you yell at me for a whore?!" Jenny screamed in disbelief. In all the years we were together, I rarely contradicted her. I didn't think I have ever even raised my voice at her.

  "You're going to leave me for a whore?"

  I retracted my arm, which was until that moment still supporting her body weight, and let her fell forwards. "Stop calling my wife a whore!"

  "What's going on?" Candice had poked her head curiously into the room and asked. Behind her, a sea of curious onlookers was cheering us on.

  "Slap him! Slap him! Slap him!" They chanted, cheering the woman on, because, well, unfortunately, conventional wisdom dictated that woman was always right whenever a fight broke out between the opposite genders.

  "Why did you let her come in here without an appointment?" I yelled at Candice. "Please get her out of my sight immediately."

  Because I was the Chief Engineer of Project Dragon One, I had some authority around the office. This was the opportunity to use it now. It startled Jenny that Candice and a few people actually listened to me and came over to drag her out of my office.

  "I will not let this rest! You, fu xin han (ungrateful man)!" She was screaming and kicking as she was being extracted from the ground. "How could you treat me like this after I have suffered with you all these years, as the woman behind your back, supporting you, cheering you on, taking care of your parents for you! I've got absolutely nothing back. Not even good meals at the end of the days I spent with you."

  Candice and her helpers stopped to look at me, convinced that I was the asshole in here after hearing what she said.

  I sighed. Had she forgotten how much I loved her? That I actually proposed to her, with the biggest diamond anyone had ever seen in the world? Okay, it was in virtual reality settings, but it took me many nights to perfect it. If Cartier or Tiffany's ever asked the software company I used to work in to program something like that for them for marketing purposes, my company would charge them a hell lot of money for it. And Jenny got it all. Why did she think she got absolutely nothing from me? What about my love for her? I shook my head.

  "We already broke up two years ago," I said it loud enough so that everyone could hear me. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

  "I gave you the best years of my life! I'm now thirty-year-old! Who would want me now?! You owe me, you have to marry me!!" She screamed and resisted capture. Two security guards arrived at the threshold of my office.

  "Get her out of here!" I bellowed at them. They got to work immediately, this being probably the only real action they got all year working for a typically rather peaceful, corporate office.

  "You owe me! I will not let this rest, you fu xin han (ungrateful man)!" She called me that name again, the worst name a man could be crowned with. Whoever got crowned with such a name would have no luck in life from here on.

  "Nut job," I said under my breath as she was being carried away. The crowd thinned out slowly when they realized the show was over. There stood Marvey. She alone lingered in front of my door, waiting to say what was on her mind when everyone else was gone.

  "Don't lead her on if you don't like her," she hissed at me, her eyes seemed to spit fire.

  "I didn't..." I retorted, but she already walked away. "Hey! I haven't finished my sentence!"

  She raised her arm and gave me a middle finger.

  Chapter 30

  "How's ThriftyEP going?" Mr. Qi asked me as soon as I opened up my laptop at the office on his yacht. He spotted the dent on my laptop but chose to ignore it.

  "We're almost done with it," I explained. "There are still a few bugs but we're close. I'm also writing the documentations now."

  "Very good!" He said. "I have a meeting with a potential buyer tomorrow morning, would you be able to join me?"

  "Tomorrow?!"

  "It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just going to show them how it looks and what it could do."

  "Okay," I said. "I'll try to make it as clean as possible for you before tomorrow morning, but I can't be there. As I told you, it's up to you what you want to do with my work, I don't want to get involved."

  "Jong, don't be silly. When I heard that you need money for your wedding and didn't I look out for you? I could see that you have cashed it out, you know?"

  Oh, shit. The blackmailing started. I was too naive to believe that the check from Mr. Qi was just a personal gift.

  "I don't want to get in trouble...I need this job very much. If anyone else found out we were selling our software to another bank, I would surely be fired. "

  "That's nonsense!" Mr. Qi said. "I'm selling the software on behalf of the bank, with my capacity as the Head of Innovation. We're not doing this for our own gain. We're going to bring back concrete results with our new business plan to the board. They will thank us."

  I knew I wouldn't be able to argue with Mr. Qi, so I asked my last question. "What if they don't like it? Even when we make them money?"

  "I'll take all the blame for it. I mean, don't think of yourself as too important. My signature will be on all the documents anyway, not yours," he said, half chuckling at my undue concern. "Don't worry so much. You're always worrying!"

  The next day, Mr. Qi's Mercedes Benz stopped right in front of Paula's house and honked repeatedly. The driver wouldn't stop until I got in. I had no choice but to go along.

  "Don't worry," the driver said to me as I was sitting nervously at the back, my face in a tight knot. "Mr. Qi is a brilliant businessman. He will take care of you. You'll make lots of money together." And he gave me a smile in the rearview mirror.

  I wanted to explain that I wasn't interested in the 'lots of money' but I figured it was of no use to debate this with a man who was not the one
calling the shots.

  When I arrived on the yacht, I was led up the ladder to the deck by a man I had never seen before.

  "Good morning, Jong," Mr. Qi called out to me from his usual spot on the deck, enjoying a breakfast that looked exactly like the one Marsha cooked for me the other day. Opposite to him sat a man that must have been the potential buyer. He was a Caucasian man with thin dirty blonde hair in his forties. He was wearing a white suit with a pink shirt and light-blue tie. Behind him stood a dozen of men in light-blue suits and reflective biker's sunglasses. He too, was eating breakfast. I caught myself wondering which country and which bank did he represent. Judging from what he and his entourage were wearing, people probably did not have very good fashion sense where they came from.

  The man who led me up suddenly started to pad me down. "Hold out your arms and spread your legs!" He shouted at me authoritatively, as if I was a felony undergoing security checks right before I would go to jail. I looked at Mr. Qi for help, before the man could touch me, but he simply said, "Just do as he said."

  When the man finished padding me down and found nothing, he joined the ranks of the men in suits.

  "Come meet Mr. Seymour," Mr. Qi waved me over.

  I reached out my hand to Mr. Seymour. He wiped his ceremoniously with the white napkin on the table before squeezing my hand with an overly firm handshake. "So you're the engineer?" He asked.

  "Yes, he's the Chief Engineer. There's a team that works under him, of course. We have big projects at Bilious," Mr. Qi explained for me, so I could spend a few seconds to silently recover from the pain in my hand. "Why don't you go set up in the office and I will be right downstairs, with Mr. Seymour," he told me.

  I was about the head down, but then Mr. Seymour shouted at me. "Give me your cell phone."

  "I need it, for the demonstration," I complained. "There was a mobile app, on top of the web application that connects to the consumers' user accounts..."