03/16/97 8:43am From: GrandKnit China To: South Carolina
Dear Carl,
We didn’t buy the KOKETT, must be somebody else. We would of course buy from you if it were us. Don’t worry. You are always our best friend.
Best, Zhou.
* * *
Zhou’s loud voice on the phone made me look up from my reading.
“Old Song, this is Old Zhou!” He was almost shouting. “How are you, Old Song? You’ve gotten yourself some pretty whores lately?”
He chuckled lasciviously and then, raising his voice even louder, said, “Listen, I just got in some KS3, 1991, beautiful condition, 350,000 yuan each, very good price, but only for you. Interested? Yeah, yeah, I’ll be in the office this month. Fly over. But I have to warn you, you’d better hurry. I can’t hold them too long, even for you, my best customer.”
After hanging up the phone, he turned to his brother, who had been listening at the desk next to him. “I think for 350,000 each he would take them all. Let’s fleece this sucker again.” His brother, a bald man with a droopy, unhappy face and a pair of goldfish eyes, looked pleased to hear this news.
“What are KOKETT and KS3?” I whispered to Xiao Yi.
“Knitting machines made in East Germany.” She spoke briefly and coldly, eyes remaining on the notebook in front of her.
“I thought GrandKnit produced warp-knitted fabric. Do they actually buy and sell used knitting machines? Is it legal?”
“It makes more money. Who cares whether or not it’s legal?” she whispered. She pressed her index finger to her lips and gestured for me to stop talking, her thin eyebrows frowning.
Thus I started my second job in the South, as a translator for GrandKnit. It was a small company in Long Jiang a couple of miles away from LongJiang Enterprise’s headquarters. It consisted of a few factory buildings, a warehouse, and a small office building and was enclosed by a tall cement wall with a big iron gate in the front. It was essentially closed off from the outside. There were roughly twenty employees, most of whom were migrant workers who spent their entire days in the factories and then at night jammed into the four dorm rooms on the second floor of the office building. I didn’t understand how just one floor could accommodate all the workers until Xiao Yi took me inside. Each dorm room was as tiny as a chicken barn and had a very low ceiling, but they were further divided into six or even more sections with pieces of thin wood, and each section was only long enough for a single-size bed and wide enough for a person to turn around in.
My assigned sleeping spot was next to the window. Xiao Yi’s was on the other side of a board, next to the squat toilet with a faucet above it, the bathroom for the six girls in the room. It was summer, and the toilet was so stinky that Xiao Yi and I spent most of the days and nights in the air-conditioned office upstairs. One of us always had to be in the office anyway, because the fax machine spat out quotes and counteroffers at all times. These faxes, Zhou emphasized, required immediate attention. He demanded that we contact him right away with any valuable information, no matter where he was at the time—at the drinking table, in a karaoke club, or even sleeping in his apartment upstairs. So Xiao Yi and I took turns napping on the couch, and whoever was on duty watched the fax machine while the television constantly showed the exchange rates of different currencies.
Soon I understood why Xiao Yi was thin as a stick and pale as a ghost—this was a job that required at least sixteen hours’ work if you were the only one doing it. Work and sleep were really the only two activities in the place. You didn’t need to worry about passing the interrogation of the guards at the iron gate to get out of the compound, because you didn’t really have time to go out.
“I have always gotten sick frequently, even under normal conditions, but I have been sick every day since I came to this company. This work is just too exhausting. That’s why I asked Zhou to hire another translator,” Xiao Yi told me one day when we were sitting on the couch alone in the office. It had been two weeks since I had started work there, and Xiao Yi and I now chatted every once in a while. I looked at her sympathetically, understanding her pain at being far away from home and fighting for a life in the South.
Unlike Xiao Yi, I was happy with my job. Now I had enough food for every meal. The food in the company’s cafeteria was cooked in cauldrons, placed on big, filthy bamboo plates, and sold through dirty windows in the cement wall. Every day it was the same dish—pork with green peppers swimming in oil—but I was content. When I was a child, we had never had enough meat.
At first, I didn’t understand why the cook, a local man who threw spatulas and yelled at the outlanders who complained about the food, always smiled at me, refused my money, and even put extra food on my plate. So one day I asked Xiao Yi. She seemed to secretly know about everything at this company and was never reluctant to teach me.
“He’s currying favor with you. Don’t you know how important your position is in this company? Without you or me, the Zhous can’t do any business. They can’t even write their own names decently in Chinese, let alone read English letters,” Xiao Yi said scornfully.
She looked around the office, made sure that the door was shut, and then whispered, “Do you know how much money I have made for the Zhous these past two years? Millions and millions. When I first came here, GrandKnit was just one of the thousands of knitting companies in China competing for the domestic warp fabric market. Then one day I accidentally discovered that Chinese knitting companies were dying for used Western machines. These machines, they are trash in Europe and America, but they are gold in China. So I searched around for foreign dealers, and I found so many for the Zhous, and then we worked out all the other details such as shipping, customs, method of payment, et cetera. And since then, they have been rolling in dough.
“But these men are so cheap.” Her tone turned sour. “I do all the work for them—negotiation, shipment arrangement, order of bills, everything—but they pay me only eighteen hundred yuan a month, not a penny more. They don’t give me any days off during the year except Christmas time, when the foreigners are not working. I can’t stand the food in the cafeteria, but they don’t even allow an electric stove in my room, just to save that tiny bit of electricity. People here have secretly asked me so many times, why haven’t I betrayed these two blackhearted Zhous? If I did, their business would collapse.” Xiao Yi’s cheeks flushed with anger and resentment.
“Have you thought of leaving?” I asked her sympathetically, feeling that we were two people crossing a river in the same boat.
“I’m planning on it.”
“Have you found a new job?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, if you find a job, could you please let me know? Let’s stay in touch.” By then I considered Xiao Yi a close friend. We spent practically every waking moment with each other.
She hesitated a little and then said reluctantly, “Yeah, sure, I will let you know, but promise me you won’t tell anyone. I will only give two days’ notice before I leave, and I don’t want the Zhous ever to be able to find me for the rest of my life.”
“Xiao Yi, when did you come to the South?” I was curious about her. She appeared weak and frail but seemed to know how to take care of herself.
“About three years ago. I’ve lived in three different towns for jobs, but I can’t find a good one. There’s no stability in the South.” She sighed.
One month after I started the job, Xiao Yi gave the Zhous notice three days before her actual leaving date. After making sure she had taught me everything and given me all the data, the Zhous happily let her go. Xiao Yi told everyone that she was going back to her home town in Jiangxi Province for a break before searching for a new job, but I knew she wasn’t telling the truth.
“Good luck with your future. Call me. You know where I am,” I said during the final long talk we had in the office the night before she left. I grinned. “I’ll just be here, making fortunes for the Zhous.”
She made a small laugh. Then after a s
hort silence, she spoke. “You know, I’ve thought about importing machines myself before. It’s so tempting. This business can make you rich overnight.”
Her words caught my interest immediately, like a flame suddenly appearing in the dark and tearing apart the night before my eyes. To become rich. It was the universal dream of every outlander drifting through the South. If I became rich, I could give my parents lots of money so they would stop fighting, and I could finally have a happy family. I could buy a lot of cosmetics and clothes and become a city girl. More importantly, though, I could prove to everyone, my mother, my father, and all the villagers in the Shen Hamlet, that I could succeed, that I was different.
I held my breath and asked, “Do it yourself? How?”
“Well, I know all the suppliers’ information and the procedure. We’d only need someone to put up the money.”
“It’s not that easy, is it?”
“The most difficult part is getting the machines through customs. It’s very tough to import used machines into China, because the government protects domestic manufacturers, so there’s a quota on them every year. Do you ever wonder why the Zhous unload their machines at night? They’ve bribed somebody working at Customs and figured out a way to bring the machines into the country under the category of ‘parts’ instead of as whole machines.”
A strong desire to make money surged through me. If the Zhous could do it, why couldn’t I?
I grasped Xiao Yi’s arm. “Xiao Yi, let’s do it ourselves. We can make it work. You must have thought it through already.”
“We really need a millionaire. Every deal is at least half a million, and the turnover takes two months including the shipping, clearing, selling, et cetera.” Xiao Yi thought for a few seconds and then lowered her voice even more. “The best person would be Song, the Zhous’ biggest client.”
“You mean the fat guy who loves hookers and doesn’t close the bathroom door when he pees? The one Zhou’s wife calls a country bumpkin?”
“Yes, the guy with the huge stomach. But you would be wrong to think he’s just an illiterate peasant. He has a lot of money and buys at least half of the Zhous’ machines and then sells them himself. I think he would be thrilled to be able to bypass Zhou and import himself.”
“Why haven’t you talked to him, then?”
“Well, it’s not that easy.” She sighed. “What if Song can’t find a way through Customs? Would he really want to work with us? What if he tells the Zhous? They’d kill us. I’m not kidding. You and I are just two of the millions of migrant workers drifting here from Inner China, but the Zhous are powerful men in this town. Nobody would even know if we disappeared one day.”
She was right about everything. We could get in big trouble with the Zhous. But the idea that we could become rich teased me like the tip of a goose feather. I just couldn’t put it out of my mind. I knew it could be life-threatening to approach Song, but this was my chance, the opportunity I had longed for when I came to the South.
“Xiao Yi, Song should be in town soon again. Don’t leave yet. Stay somewhere in the town, and we can find an opportunity to approach him.”
She grinned. “No, Ah-Juan. Don’t get too excited. It’s just a beautiful dream. Who knows if it would ever work out? It’s too risky. I am leaving, no matter what. Life is too tiring. I just want a peaceful job in some small town where I can work normal hours and stay healthy.” She looked at me. “But why don’t you go and talk to Song? You seem to be good with men.”
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I summoned up my courage and said resolutely, “I’ll find a chance to go and talk to him, and I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Her eyes glinted. She didn’t believe I’d do it. I would prove to her that I was serious. I was young and impatient, and I had nothing to lose.
The next day, Xiao Yi left the company and I became the only translator. I worked day and night and gradually became familiar with the two major suppliers, Jacques in Paris and Carl in South Carolina. I kept getting good deals for the Zhous, and they seemed pleased with my performance.
Finally, the day I had been waiting for arrived. Song, the rich country bumpkin who always had stacks of cash in his pockets, flew in to buy the KS machines. Sitting at my desk, I heard Zhou telling his driver to pick up Song at Guangzhou Airport.
After the driver left, Zhou turned to me and ordered, “Ah-Juan, lock all the drawers and don’t let Song near the fax machine.”
Song’s oval stomach, wrapped up in a blue suit, was the first thing to appear at the door, and then came his flat, swarthy face with its two small eyes. After dropping his buttocks into a leather chair, he quickly surveyed the room. I smiled to him politely and then turned back to the faxes scattered on my desk. I could feel his eyes burning into my back.
“Old Zhou, I see you have a new translator. Damn, you change translators as often as you change hookers. That stick Xiao Yi is gone now, and you got yourself a round one. Good choice. I like meaty ones.” He winked to Zhou and laughed lasciviously, swiveling his chair with his bottom like a naughty child.
I kept my eyes focused on the paper and fingers grasping the ballpoint pen.
“Of course! Hookers—you need to change them often, just like machines. You need to change them often too.” Zhou cackled. “Old Song, I’ve told Ah-Juan that being a hooker is the best job for a girl, because not only do you make money, you also have fun. I told her that in my next life I want to be reincarnated as a hooker, and she scoffed. But don’t you agree?”
Both of them roared with laughter. God, how could such sleazebags get so rich? But then I thought of what Chairman Deng Xiaoping once said—white cat or black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat. Moral character was not worth a penny. I shouldn’t care how many hookers Song dealt with or how terribly he behaved, as long as he could help turn my destiny around. I had to like him, and I had to make him like me too. My chance came later that night when Zhou invited me to dinner with them.
I knew Song liked to drink and, like the LongJiang executives, would enjoy watching me drink. So at dinner I filled both our cups with the strongest rice wine the restaurant offered, proposed a toast, and then downed mine in one gulp. Sure enough, he became extremely interested in me and kept pestering me to have more.
“So, where are you staying tonight?” I asked as we clinked our glasses.
“The Golden Swan Hotel. It’s not far from here,” he answered quickly and then ordered me to finish my rice wine.
Soon his face turned red. He took off his blazer and loosened his belt. His belly was as big as an eight-months-pregnant woman’s. He definitely could not see his own toes. After five or six glasses, the rice wine was burning all my internal organs, and I could hardly focus on his face. I saw Zhou stand up and go to the bathroom. I shook the tipsy feeling out of my head and gathered up my remaining sense.
“So, what room are you staying in?” I asked. I tilted my head flirtatiously.
“Why? Are you going to visit me tonight?” He squinted and smiled cunningly. He was playing with a toothpick, sticking it in the gaps between his teeth.
“No, why would I visit you?” I said. Immediately, I realized my tone had been too harsh, and I said sweetly, “Oh, well, maybe, if I don’t have to work too late.”
“Two-oh-seven.” He winked. “I’ll be waiting.”
When Zhou returned to the table, I told him I had had too much to drink and needed to go back to the office building. Zhou instructed his driver to take me home. I said a quick good-bye to Song. I didn’t want to appear too friendly and arouse Zhou’s suspicions.
I stayed next to the fax machine that night as usual, waiting anxiously for Zhou’s return. At around eleven, I heard his Lexus pull up and park and then his footsteps going up the stairs to his bedroom. I waited another hour until I was certain he would be asleep, and then I locked the office door and tiptoed down to the iron gate.
“Miss Shen, going out so late?” the guard grunted.
“Yeah, a friend of mine is really sick, and I need to go and see her. I’m so sorry to wake you up,” I apologized. He picked up the big chain of keys from the table and walked toward the small gate next to the big iron gate. I followed him closely. As soon as he opened the small gate, I stepped into the darkness and ran to the road.
The one-mile distance between the factory and the hotel seemed to take forever to travel in the pitch-dark night. I jogged on the empty asphalt road, looking behind me repeatedly. After ten minutes, I arrived at the entrance of the Golden Swan Hotel, carrying a gust of dust with me.
The receptionist was sleeping behind her desk in the dark lobby. I hid in the space beneath the elegant wooden staircase, which was ornately carved with dragons and phoenixes. After double-checking that the receptionist was still asleep and no one was watching, I ran up the stairs as fast as I could. The rooms on the second floor were located along the four sides of a square whose open center overlooked the lobby. I walked around the square as discreetly as possible, glancing quickly at the golden plates on the doors of the rooms.
I found number 207 and halted. I clutched my jacket with both hands and paused for a moment, waiting for my heart to slow down. I was poised to knock, but my hand dropped to my side. Maybe the cost would be too high. I didn’t know if I was ready for this. But a voice inside of me thundered, Yes! Yes, you are. I knocked.
Song appeared, wearing an open robe, his eyes foggy from sleep. I said a soft hi to him and squeezed in. The funk of foot odor rose to my nose. He slipped back into the bed and leaned his back against the pillow, looking at me, a bit puzzled.
I sat down on the edge of the other bed in the room. He examined me from head to toe, and then I saw a sly smile emerging on his face. I started to get scared, and before he could develop wilder thoughts, I said, “Boss Song, don’t misunderstand. Sorry that I came to visit you so late, but I have a very important matter to discuss.”
“Oh, really?” he said skeptically. “What is it?”
Tiger's Heart Page 20
