Tina threw up her hands. Why so many pockets? Did she want her customers to lose things?
Jen remained firm. The design had four pockets; the bag must have four pockets.
Would she not prefer three pockets?
She would not.
Would she prefer three pen pockets and one large one? People had many pens!
No, even this generosity in regard to pens would not do.
Very well. If what Jen wanted was pockets, she would have pockets. Did this satisfy her?
If it matched the prototype, it did.
This round of negotiation finished, Tina sat back and surveyed her customers with evident pleasure.
It was clear they worked well together. Would they like to see another bag her factory could produce? It would go well with their other bags.
No, Jen explained, their line was already set. They had designers in the United States who created their bags. They needed only to have them manufactured exactly as designed.
Tina waved this away. They would like this bag. She was sure of it.
She called an assistant in, spoke briefly to him, and a moment later, a leather satchel was brought in and presented to Jen.
The first thing that Jen noticed was the Coach logo on it. No, she could not buy this bag. This was a Coach bag.
That was not a problem, Tina assured. The Courier logo could easily be substituted for the Coach one. Did she like the bag? It was a very popular bag. People would like it.
Jen turned on Eddy. Did this factory make pirated bags?
He shrugged.
Were Courier’s designs being shopped to other companies the way this Coach design was?
He told her this was impossible.
How was it impossible?
Eddy shrugged.
Returning the Coach bag to Tina, Jen suggested that it was time for them to go.
Did Jen want to have the bag herself? As a gift?
She did not. She wanted only to get out, though she hesitated to express the feeling so bluntly. Sue, she noticed, was casting longing glances at the rejected Coach bag. Jen considered briefly accepting it and giving it to her, but she was sure that any compromise on this point would result in problems later.
Hands were shaken all around, and Jen and her entourage gradually made their way out of the factory to the car.
This visit was followed by others, similar in outline but each excruciating in its own way. One factory had produced a bag that looked, to the naked eye, exactly like the prototype but had been reduced slightly in dimensions such that it no longer fit a fifteen-inch laptop. At another factory, the Courier design had been abandoned entirely and replaced by one that the factory already had patterns cut out for. (It was a very popular bag, the owner assured her. Jen remained unmoved.) In the most extreme case, not only did the design presented not match the prototype at all, but the factory they toured clearly did not manufacture bags at all. Under heavy questioning, it was eventually admitted that the bags were being provided by the factory owner’s cousin. “From where?” was a question that no one was willing to answer. Jen provided Sue with cash and sent her off to see if anyone could be convinced to venture an opinion. “I heard a rumor”, several were willing to suggest, when neither management nor Americans were in sight, that the bags were being produced in Vietnam. The outsourcers had outsourced in their turn. Despite Eddy’s objections, Jen insisted that this factory be wholly terminated and the business given to another.
The last two bags in the product line were manufactured at a factory so far from Guangzhou that it was necessary to make an overnight trip. The drive was long, the roads dusty. The factories themselves were primitive, but the results were, in fact, some of the most faithful to the original designs. After several hours of negotiation, the owner had committed to correcting what small issues remained.
With her two weeks of factory visits behind her, Jen felt a glow of accomplishment that was only slightly dampened as they pulled up in front of the hotel in which they would stay the night. It was not a gleaming tower on the model of the one in Guangzhou, but so long as it had a soft bed and a hot shower, Jen was willing to be forgiving. If it had a hotel bar, she was willing to be downright enthusiastic.
The bed, when she was shown to her room, was indeed soft. She turned on the water for a hot shower, undressed, and returned to the bathroom in a bathrobe, only to find that the water was no hotter than it had been before. She waited and checked again; the water was still cold.
Jen got dressed again and called the front desk. A woman who spoke surprisingly fluent English expressed her apologies and promised that the water problem would be rectified immediately. Some moments later, there was a knock at the door. Jen opened it to find the woman from the front desk, a young man in a porter’s uniform, and an elderly maid. Jen led them into the bathroom and showed them the problem. They contemplated the shower and discussed among themselves in quiet tones. They turned the water off and then on again, tried the sink, then tried the shower again. Time passed. At last they emerged from the bathroom. Jen was sitting on the bed, knees together, arms folded, feeling tired and miserable.
“You will have the hot water now,” the woman from the front desk advised. She began to leave the room, the porter and the maid following her.
Relief flooded Jen, but it was immediately followed by sickening doubt. She went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and felt the water. It was cold.
She called out for the delegation of hotel staff to stop.
The woman from the front desk folded her arms and regarded her with an exasperated expression.
“The water still isn’t hot,” Jen explained.
The woman from the front desk led the way into the bathroom. She turned off the shower faucet and turned on the hot water tap for the tub. Water came out. She pointed.
“Hot water,” she said.
Jen put her hand in the stream. “But it’s not hot.”
The woman put her hand in as well and considered.
“It takes time to get hot,” the woman advised. She turned on the sink’s hot-water tap and dipped a finger in it. “See. Hot water. There is hot water here. It takes time.”
Jen objected that she had given the water plenty of time and it had gotten no hotter.
The woman tested the water again with her hand. It was, she pointed out, not entirely cold. Indeed, it was a little bit warm. Could Jen be satisfied with this?
It occurred to Jen at this juncture, after the last two weeks of intensive negotiations with factories, that the Chinese solution at a time like this would be to secure some kind of compensation: money back, a discount, some sort of free room service. An accommodation was being offered. She did not, however, want accommodation. The only thing she wanted was a hot shower. She remained firm: while the shower might not be as cold as it could be, it was not hot.
Her interlocutor now fixed her with a suspicious glare. Why was it that only Jen’s room lacked hot water? No one else had complained. What had Jen been doing to it?
Jen was on the point of losing her calm completely at this accusation, but she saw the chance to make her own switch in tactics. Was this, she asked, not the largest and best hotel in the town?
The woman from the front desk drew herself up with pride. It certainly was.
Did she not then think, Jen asked, that the best hotel in the town ought to have hot water?
She felt almost cruel when she saw how the woman sagged under this attack. Yes. It should have hot water. She was sorry. She did not know why it did not have hot water. What could she do? The water was cold. She shook her head sadly and made her way toward the door. At the door, she stopped and turned back. The hotel did have an engineer. He was responsible for things like pipes. He was on his dinner break right now, but if Jen would like, she would send him up when he returned.
This renewed hope was unlooked for. Suddenly, the hotel seemed less dingy, the town less remote, the world better. Jen thanked her with real wa
rmth. Then she shut the door behind her erstwhile helpers.
She contemplated waiting till later for a shower, in hopes that the engineer would appear and work wonders with the water temperature, but she simply felt too grubby and tired after the long hours in the back seat and the tour through the hot, stuffy factory. She resolved to take the briefest possible shower now and then, if the engineer appeared and was successful, to luxuriate in hot water later.
Some minutes later, still shivery but feeling freshened by clean self and clean clothes, she ventured downstairs to investigate questions of food and drink.
Eddy and his assistant had gone off in search of a karaoke bar. Sue had expressed an intention to eat in her room and go to bed early. Jen had thus expected to eat alone—either truly so or alone in a crowd. The hotel restaurant had only a few customers in it when Jen entered, and she was surprised to see, sitting by herself, eating a bowl of noodles, a blonde woman about her own age who looked vaguely familiar.
Jen approached her. “Hi. My name’s Jen Nilsson. With Aspire Brands. Do you mind if I join you?”
The woman looked up and replied in a reassuringly American accent, “April Holland. No, go right ahead. It’s quiet here tonight. And it’s not every day I see someone from home.”
They discussed the menu and the town. Jen ordered. Discussion of home—which, for April, was Seattle—followed. Jen couldn’t shake the feeling that she looked familiar, but they could not definitively nail down any common acquaintance or milieu. Talk centered on home, and once dinner was done, Jen suggested drinks. She had been determined on at least a drink or two after her long day, and April was not opposed. Jen consulted the bar. It featured a few expensive brands but not a very wide selection. She ordered a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, and over it the two women became increasingly effusive. April was an “old China hand” and provided story after story of factories, hotels, and street vendors.
“How about you?” April asked. “Is this your first time in China?”
“No. But it’s the longest I’ve been here. I’d never been for more than a week before, and now it’s been almost five. And this is the first time I’ve been here for Aspire. You wouldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even started yet. I’d accepted their offer and I get an e-mail from Bryn: ‘Do you have a passport? I need you to go to China next week.’ Hoo!”
“Aspire Brands . . . Are you working on the Courier brand relaunch?”
“That’s me.”
“How’s it going for you?”
Jen rolled her eyes. “I’ve learned a lot. I can certainly claim that. I hadn’t realized how protected I’d been, working with huge electronics manufacturers. On this project, we’ve seen all kinds of things.”
“Getting your own share of China stories?”
Jen demonstrated that she was, indeed, becoming a “China hand” with her own trove of stories, concluding with the factory that had so very obviously not been designed for making bags at all, and the detective work that had revealed the Vietnam connection.
“It’s almost enough to make you wonder sometimes,” observed April. “Are we actually gaining anything by manufacturing here? By the time we deal with the cultural barriers, the intellectual-property issues, the quality fade . . . What do you think?”
Fortified with a second glass of Johnnie Walker and a sense of comradeship with her fellow businesswoman, Jen was prepared to consider herself an expert. “Look, there’s a huge amount of drive and entrepreneurial zeal here. It’s inspiring to see. But it’s true: by the time we deal with all the cultural barriers, the tendency to focus on the short term of getting orders rather than the long term of being known for quality, the double- and triple-checking . . . I don’t know if the savings we get by manufacturing here always make up for the unresponsiveness, the quality issues, and the lack of stake in the company. You have to ask yourself: Is following the dollars—not even the dollars, the cents—always the right thing to do?”
April raised a glass. “I’ll drink to that, sister.”
5
Jen dragged herself out of bed at five o’clock the next morning. She now had cause to regret both the late hours and the quantities of Johnnie Walker that had vanished during them. It was Thursday morning in China—Wednesday afternoon in California—and it was just over five weeks since Jen had gotten off the plane for what was to have been a one-week trip. She wanted to lose no time in alerting Bryn that she had now resolved all the factory issues.
“That’s a huge relief,” Bryn said. “The Macy’s and Saks account teams have been after me all week, wanting to know if we’d have the sourcing secure in time for their line reviews for next fall. The last thing we want with a newly relaunched brand like this is to have to dump the first year’s product line on the channel partners because we were too late for the big players.”
“So . . . where do we go from here?” Jen asked, deciding that the time had come for directness. “My understanding had not been that this was a China-based role. I’d like to be able to get home soon.”
“I know. I know. We all really appreciate your flexibility, Jen. We’ll get you back as soon as we can.”
“I hate to push, Bryn, but . . . when?”
“Well, we need to get Todd Williams out there from Procurement to sign papers with Trade Winds. You should be there for that exec meet and greet. This project has been your baby, and everyone recognizes you made it happen. I’ll call his admin and see if Todd can fly out Monday. That would put him in . . . what? Late Tuesday or early Wednesday. You can have the meet and greet on Wednesday and Thursday. Tie up any loose ends and be ready to fly home sometime the next week.”
“Seven weeks,” said Jen dully. Long-ingrained instinct told her this was the moment for some more optimistic statement about pride in getting things done, but with the full body ache and sour taste of too much alcohol and too little sleep, added to the prospect of at least another two weeks of what she was beginning to think of as “exile”, she could not muster up any business enthusiasm.
“Hey, hang in there.” Bryn offered a sympathetic smile. “I know this trip has been tough, but you’ve accomplished something not a lot of people could, and you’re recognized for it. Okay?”
Jen nodded.
The next week passed slowly. It was difficult to stay in the loop with work in the San Francisco office due to the time difference, and Trade Winds did not wish her to be overly involved in their work.
“This is your chance to be the tourist!” Katie told her, when Jen complained. “Go look at something. Go shopping. What do people do in China anyway?”
“Run factories and repress political dissidents.”
“Well, do some of that. Or visit the Great Wall. Is that near you?”
“It’s north of Beijing. About a thousand miles from here, I think.”
“That’s kind of far. How about the terra cotta warriors?”
“I think that’s pretty far away too. Look, Katie, I’ll find stuff to do. How are things at home?”
Katie looked down, then sideways, seemingly unwilling to meet Jen’s gaze even through the webcam. “Ummm. Things are fine. Just, you know, work and stuff.”
“Have there been any more issues with bills that weren’t on autopay?”
“No. No problems. Nothing to talk about. How’s work? How are the bags?”
Jen sighed. “I don’t want to talk about work. That’s why I called you.”
Though she had at first ignored it, Katie’s advice to be like a tourist and go shopping stuck in Jen’s mind. Given that she had originally expected only a short trip, she had brought only a limited selection of work clothes. The insufficiency of these clothes grew in her mind until, on Tuesday afternoon, with the office in California closed and Todd safely in the air en route, she resolved to blow off what little work remained and go shopping. Surely for the big closeout meeting she deserved a new outfit. She consulted the hotel desk, and they arranged for a car to drop her off at one of the city’s glit
tering downtown shopping malls. It proved a good thing that she had allowed all afternoon for the expedition. She did find several things that she was very pleased with—though she was surprised to discover that the elite shopping experience in China was not much less expensive than in California.
Next morning, she got up early, dressed in one of her new suits, put on new shoes, and dialed in to her daily conference call with Bryn in a significantly better frame of mind than usual. A call down to the desk revealed that Todd had arrived in the small hours of the morning. He was doubtless sleeping in late. That afternoon, they would have their first meeting with the Trade Winds executives, then go out for a tour of the nearest of the factories.
Looking at her image in the Skype window, it suddenly struck her how much her highlights had grown out since she had been in China. It was clear that she had dark brown roots, the highlights beginning nearly an inch out. If it was obvious in a fuzzy, two-inch video image, it certainly detracted from the polish of her in-person appearance. She went to the mirror and contemplated the situation, quickly confirming her conviction that it looked terrible.
She went down to the front desk. Were there any openings in the hotel salon this morning? The young man behind the desk briefly consulted a ledger of some sort, then shook his head sadly. There were no openings till the afternoon. She was about to turn away, resigned to looking like “warmed over businesswoman who has been in China too long”, when the man behind the desk called after her. The hotel salon did not have any openings, but he knew of a salon nearby, a very good salon that many Americans went to, that might have openings. Would she like him to direct her to it?
Jen hesitated a moment. Leaving the shelter of the hotel typically meant abandoning the precincts in which everyone could be relied on to speak English. But if the salon had many American customers . . . Why not? How hard could it be to explain that she needed her highlights touched up? She accepted the man’s offer with gratitude, and he drew a map for her on a piece of paper and wrote down the name. The name was in Chinese characters, but he assured her that the sign was big, and she was sure that she would be able to recognize it from his note. She set out.
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