The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  My comprehension improved when the information moved away from business or technical terms. I gathered that, to motivate employees to arrive at work early, breakfast was free in the cafeteria before seven-thirty a.m., that there were hot water limits in the dormitories housing the MAs, and that the company’s management style was decidedly punitive. During a session explaining clean rooms, where blank silicon wafers were etched into chips, cut, and packaged, and which had air filters extracting everything larger than five microns (the size of a human red blood cell) because even the tiniest particle could interfere with or damage the equipment or wafers, we learned that employees could be fined for using their storage cabinets for anything other than their full-body clean suits or shoes. Or for stepping on the wardrobe clapboard when changing out of the clean suit. Or for “doodling on clean suit or shoes” (a 700 RMB fine, which was a month’s salary for an MA). Or for failing to hang the suit on the right rack (100 RMB; employees were fired after the third offense). Or for failing to escort a visitor (200 RMB). Inside the fabs there was to be no food, drink, or communication or recording devices, no games, no running, and no more than two people chatting at one time. “Violators ticketed and told on,” the signs warned. There were also fines for spitting in sinks, running in the hallways, and not wearing clean socks.

  The importance of clean socks came up often during orientation, one instructor after another exhorting us to mind our pedal hygiene. In an effort to reduce the dirt and dust that might ruin wafers, the mass of employees who surged through the turnstiles every morning first went into a locker area, where they changed into a pair of indoor shoes, a familiar habit for Chinese. The company provided white canvas slippers for this purpose, an affront to even my rudimentary sense of fashion, and everyone got a pair the first day except for me, because they didn’t have any big enough for my feet.

  We were reminded to smile for the photograph that would appear on our identification badge and to wear it around our necks at all times. To flush the toilets after using the bathroom, to be polite and mannered when getting on and off the elevator, to show up for work on time and every day, to have a good attitude (“Your boss isn’t looking for who’s smart but who’s helpful”), and once again to wear clean socks. “Buy enough and wash them so that you can wear new ones every day,” another instructor, Christa, said. “We can look up your locker number and find out who has stinky socks and tell their boss.”

  I looked around to see if anyone else was amused at this paternalism, but most of the other new recruits seemed engaged and interested. Some of them took notes. After Christa exited, Grace asked if there were any questions.

  One man raised his hand. “Yes,” he said, “when’s the test?”

  I chuckled at his joke.

  “Right after class,” Grace answered.

  There was even a session devoted to graft, during which we were told that it wasn’t okay to accept kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to offer kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to suggest giving or receiving a kickback, and so on. When I asked Andrew later for the reason behind all the lecturing, most of which seemed common sense to me, he said, “Because they’d all take kickbacks if they could.”

  There is a term that describes the way interpersonal relationships work in China: guanxi. Basically, guanxi is a person’s connections, the social network in which members look out for one another—similar to the way family members can count on one another for a favor. Originally a value-neutral idea rooted in Confucian values, guanxi was critical to doing business in China and had lately become conflated with nepotism, cronyism, and other corruption.

  “You mean that’s not understood as unethical?” I asked.

  “Listen,” Andrew said. “I went to a Chinese university for my MBA. Plagiarism isn’t seen as such here. They copy everything. It’s all about the grades. It’s probably because of the entrance exam system. They compete for spots, and once they’re in, they’re not well served. It’s not like America, where there’s always the guy who buys the beer and pizza, provides the apartment, and sort of skates by. Here they’re cribbing on exams, and everyone’s doing it.”

  In a twist to Deng Xiaoping’s famous pronouncement that it didn’t matter if the cat was black or white as long as it caught the mouse, the Chinese valued results, not processes. And now, in a race to catch up with the West, it didn’t matter how the cat caught the mouse. This created an environment where, as one popular saying went, China’s hardware (technology, machinery, materials) far exceeded its software (knowhow, critical thinking, moral reasoning, the entire education system). That’s why motion sensors in public bathrooms were installed upside down. And road and building construction flouted safety codes, established practices, and even basic physics in contractors’ haste to present a “finished” project that could pass eye tests. Across the street from the company, next to a landscaped park with winding stone pathways and groves of bamboo along a canal that would have offered the neighborhood a rare green space if the iron gates hadn’t been locked at all times, the local government erected and tore down a new administration building three times before the last try was deemed satisfactory (or the building and demolition contractors had enriched themselves enough).

  WITH MY ORIENTATION completed, I was assigned to the business development department and given a desk in the reception area of a suite on the fifth and top floor, near the executive offices. From the windows, I had a view of the neighboring farmland on which had encroached luxury home communities, wanton monstrosities assembled from every convention of European architecture, adorned with swimming pools and tennis courts, and as far as I could tell, completely unoccupied. The multimillion-dollar properties had all been purchased solely as investment properties. At night the communities were completely dark.

  My colleagues, all of whom had English names, consisted of a fellow American-born Chinese (or ABC), two local Chinese, and another born and raised on the mainland, educated in the United States, and returned to China in midcareer. Those were affectionately termed haigui, or sea turtles, and the company’s management was full of them. The head of the department, a genial Taiwanese man who received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell and a doctorate from Columbia, was known as one of the best, most Westernized managers in the company. He had struck me as efficient but not overly friendly during my phone interview, perhaps due to his compromised position. “You’re the CEO’s nephew,” he explained to me one day after work. “We had to hire you.”

  My first duty was to read a semiconductors for dummies book. My second was to review about four hundred pages of electronic presentations about the company and its processes and products, full of acronyms and unfamiliar terms. When I asked where I could find the answers to my questions, I was told to check the Internet. But Internet access was so tightly controlled that the entire company had a fixed number of “permissions,” irrespective of employee numbers or needs, of which my department of six people had only two. Even though the company had grown exponentially since those permissions were first doled out, the quota had not increased. I couldn’t have imagined that an international high-tech company like my uncle’s could be so draconian, but Andrew assured me the Internet arrangement wasn’t the norm in China. It was a productivity measure concocted by the chief technology officer and head of the IT department, a buddy of Richard’s from Dallas known as “NYC,” whose seemingly innocuous initials were uttered with the same dread as “KGB,” and even Richard somehow didn’t have much veto power when it came to this. The Internet permissions were so coveted that anytime someone with Web access left the company, a frenzy ensued as other employees, and sometimes even entire departments, scrambled to get that person’s access transferred to them.

  The idiosyncrasies extended to the phones, which didn’t allow callers to leave messages—China had leapfrogged voicemail as it tried to catch up with the world’s technology. Instead, employees carried long-range cordless phones with them whenever they left their desks, and they were expected t
o answer without delay whether they were midbite at lunch, midsentence in a meeting, or midgrunt in a bathroom stall, which were marked “Western” and “Eastern” for having regular toilets and porcelain-lined pits in the floor, respectively.

  Speaking Chinese at a preverbal level had its benefits. Nobody expected me to say anything in meetings, which were conducted almost exclusively in Chinese, with a few technical or business English terms that tempted me into believing I understood what was being discussed. And it forced executives into their nonnative languages, relinquishing their positions of power, though not everyone played along. Chen Laoshi (laoshi means “teacher” and is used as a respectful way to address elders), the Communist Party cadre and vice-president who oversaw my department, spoke Chinese with complete indifference to the person in front of her. An otherwise pleasant, fashionable older woman who liked to experiment with hairstyles, she nonetheless terrified me, owing to her status as a party member old enough to have participated in the Cultural Revolution. I had read of the heinous crimes committed during that period, including students who killed and ate their teachers to demonstrate their ideological bona fides. Another cadre in the company, Zhang Laoshi, spoke only in the inflected rhetorical style of revolutionaries and said that when she passed away, she would see Lenin and Engels in heaven.

  With little work to do and no Internet, I spent most of my early days at the company browsing the employee directory. Ivy’s bewilderment at my not having an English name proved to be no isolated event. My Chinese colleagues, with names like Caroline, Catherine, and Lanna, had done double takes when I introduced myself and asked me to spell out my name in both English and Chinese. Though the company was 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or received in school, and commonly used it when addressing one another, even when the rest of the conversation was in Chinese. Unable to recall my name, one Shanghai-born vice-president called me “Steve” for almost three months.

  Even the characters of my Chinese name confused my colleagues. For as long as I could remember, I had been asked what my name “meant”—some people assumed that it must be Chinese for “John,” which it was not. My answer was always more complicated than people wanted—Chinese just didn’t translate one-to-one into English, something I would come to understand better when I started taking language lessons—and drawn from a childhood conversation that I remembered having with my parents, probably after the first time someone asked me about my name. The character for Huan is an obscure, seldom-used one that appears almost exclusively in personal names and has to do with the main wooden beam of a traditional Chinese house. The radical, , or mu, means “wood,” and the second part, , or gen, consists of the character for “sun” between two columns. So my name means something like “pillar” and connotes things like strength, steadfastness, and permanence. But modern Chinese often aren’t familiar with the ancient character , which differs from the more common heng, , by a single stroke. I fielded a lot of phone calls from people asking for Hsu Heng and found myself correcting my name’s pronunciation just as often as I had back home.

  I also learned that in China my mother’s be-thankful-it’s-not-spelled-with-an-X words of comfort didn’t hold up, because it was spelled with an X. My family spells our surname “Hsu” because Taiwan and other diaspora regions anglicize according to the Wade-Giles rules. But in the People’s Republic, which uses the pinyin system developed during Mao’s rule, my surname appears as “Xu,” one of the few spellings that make it even more difficult for non-Chinese to pronounce.

  As most of the English names in the company directory were chosen, not bestowed, I concluded that the “regular” Western names had been selected for their ease of pronunciation—there were almost two hundred employees named Jacky. Meanwhile, the more unusual names appeared to reveal hobbies, aspirations, and values. There was a man in the legal department named Superiority. There was a Holy, a Hebrew, and a Leafy. There was a Shopping, a Running, and a Cooking. A Snow and a Vanilla. A Mars, a Soda, a Silk, and a Coma. There was a Quake, whom I later met; he’d chosen the name because he liked the computer game. There was a Snoopy, a Fantasy, a Leeway, and a couple of Creams. There was a Fire and an Ice, a Fish, Lion, Bison, Fox, Gazelle, and Ducky. There was a Water, Fjord, and Mountain; a Spring, Summer, Winter, and Season. There was an Ares, Apollo, Zeus, and Socrates. There were Zhongs named Stuck and Feeling. There were Wangs named Double, Soda, Viking, Power, Burden, Sprite, Wonder, and the unfortunately chosen Blown. There were Lions (one), Tigers (eight), and Bears (three). There was a Sky, Rainbows (two), a Sleet, a Rain, a Cloud, five Dragons, a Condor, and an Icecrane. There were many Ivys but only one Yale. A man named Penguin really did resemble a penguin. There were soccer fans: Baggio, Lampard, Bolton, and Arsenal. And basketball fans: two Magics (plus one Earvin), three Birds, three Jordans, two Kobes, an Iverson, and even a Shaquille. Oddly, there wasn’t a single Yao Ming. There was a Chocolate and a Greentea. A Charming, Hansome (without the d), Bright, and Hyper. There was a Demon, the second to come along at the company, and a couple of Lucifers. A married couple at the company was named Alpha and Beta (Alpha was the male), who subsequently named their son Gamma. There was a Cheney but no Bushes. No Obamas appeared after the 2008 presidential election, but there was a Change. And who said there was no freedom in China? Freedom Huang worked in the IT department.

  I wasn’t the only one wasting time. The news back home tended to be a chorus of lamentations over America losing ground to Asian students, who were scoring better on science and math tests. But from my perch, and considering the rampant cheating, apathy, ineffectiveness, and outright incompetence and laziness of some local employees, many of whom were graduates of China’s top universities, the world could rest easy. Despite the ABCs’ grumblings over the company’s many regulations, such as wage garnishment for any employees who failed to clock in by eight-thirty a.m. or who clocked out before five-thirty p.m., even if it was only by a minute, most also had to concede that they were necessitated by a workforce that didn’t exactly disprove the notion that if they weren’t carefully watched and supervised every second of the day, they wouldn’t get anything done.

  If they exhausted all other forms of time wasting, there was always napping. Employees dozed in the darkened cafeteria between meals, or at their desks. Andrew discovered cardboard pallets in a corner of the solar cell fab where his subordinates literally slept on the job. An engineer on the floor below me even tucked a chaise longue, pillow, blanket, and eyeshade under his desk. The Westerners who liked to characterize China as a sleeping dragon were focused on the wrong word. I began to suspect that the groundswell of Christianity at the company had something to do with the permission it gave people to shut their eyes at their desk. Anyone with their arms folded, eyes closed, and head bowed before an open Bible on their desk was typically beyond reproach.

  Eventually I gave up my search for an English name, but I did acquire one of sorts, as I became known around the company as Li Xiao Long, or Bruce Lee. I learned of this from another ABC at the company, who told me that the entire human resources department referred to me as the kung fu movie star, owing, I supposed, to my shaggy hair. In fact, he said, my given name usually elicited blank or confused stares. But when he said, “You know, that ABC guy with the long hair,” everybody smacked themselves on the forehead and said, “Oh, you mean Bruce Lee! Why didn’t you just say so?”

  EXCEPT FOR THE final afternoon of my orientation, when Richard had given a short presentation to the new employees on the differences between a mercenary and a missionary (“I hope everyone here will be a missionary, not a mercenary,” he said), I didn’t see my uncle much. I sometimes encountered him in the hallways, dressed in his usual work outfit: loose-fitting black pants; a light-colored shortsleeved dress shirt with his identification badge clipped to his collar; a chunky multifunction metal wristwatch one or two links too large, requiring him to constantly shake it back up his right ar
m; and black leather shoes with round toes and rubber soles. His only sartorial concession was his hair, which he dyed black, a popular practice among aging Chinese executives and party officials. A retinue of important-looking people dangled around him like eager accessories. If he noticed me, he’d wave and remind me to “be a good boy.”

  Despite having told Richard from the beginning that I was coming to China to look for the family’s porcelain, he seemed to consider it a waste of time, aside from the filial component of talking to my grandmother, disbelieving that I could possibly be more interested in that than in all the opportunities his company afforded. Whenever I brought up the subject of the porcelain, he got so annoyed that I stopped talking to him about it. Still, I understood and respected his sensitivity to any appearance of nepotism and was happy to be just another employee, especially when I saw the way some people would react—sensing an opportunity, shying away, or projecting their animus toward him onto me—when they found out I was Richard’s nephew.

  For all the money behind Richard’s company, it was hamstrung from the start. Because he had hired many employees from the major competitor, TSMC, which had acquired his first company, TSMC sued him almost immediately, claiming that he stole intellectual property via its former employees. It didn’t help that the name SMIC—which Richard insisted be pronounced as an acronym and not as a word—had a certain Even Better Than Movie World ring to it. In 2003 SMIC paid a $175 million settlement. But a year later TSMC sued again, claiming SMIC had broken the terms of the settlement and alleging more intellectual property theft; that suit remained unresolved when I arrived. The party line at the company was that the lawsuits were frivolous and the cost of doing business; being targeted by the top dog was a kind of honor and Richard was noble for settling in the first place to avoid a protracted battle. Some Christians at the company even cast the lawsuit in terms of spiritual warfare, a tribulation that would eventually be triumphed over by faith and good works.