China Mountain Zhang

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “So we are well protected at Wuxi Engineering,” Engineer Xi deadpans and we all laugh.

  Inside everything is red and black. Black oriental rugs that look like silk with huge red medallions in the centers, red lacquer walls. The young man at reception is dressed in red and black, of course, but here the effect is even more conservative, as if the young man is actually a part of the decor.

  The wonders multiply, maddening and exhausting. Here no one jacks in, instead, Engineer Xi explains, the system will be attuned to me and I will be, in a sense, permanently jacked in. I can call on information anytime I want. Included, he says, is a syntax and vocabulary in Mandarin, should I ever need it. Although, he adds politely, I speak very well.

  I am shown my cubicle and desk, beautiful shining black lacquer with red lacquer fixtures. I am taken to the systems department where I am attuned to the system. All I do is jack in and a technician instructs the system to attune and it does. I jack out and query the time. 10:52. The information pops up. Always before I could only access information when I was jacked in, it gave me a sense that I knew what I thought and what the system told me, but now, how do I know what is system and what is Zhang?

  We eat in the cadres dining room. There is a cafeteria for workers, although I am assured that the food comes from the same kitchen. There are cold plates on our table which no one eats; sliced, spiced tofu, pickles, kimchee and peanuts. We are offered beer, I decline after Engineer Xi does. The chopsticks are cloisonne, the plates china. We have cloth napkins. Lunch is white fish cooked with ginger and scallions and tender vegetables.

  I have the feeling that they will discover who I am, that I’m just some huaqiao student masquerading in my suit. Everyone else has short hair. I promise myself that I will keep my ponytail.

  I’m jacked into the system. Is it monitoring me? Surely I’m not focusing, it can’t follow the random pattern of normal thought. A system would be overwhelmed trying to process unfocused thought, wouldn’t it?

  I don’t even know if it’s a stupid question. I am without perspective. I have always been told that we manipulate the system, but what’s to keep the system from manipulating us? Symbionts. Soon, perhaps it will be impossible to tell where human ends and machines begin.

  Engineer Xi has to work, so someone else shows me to my desk, introduces me to the Engineer with whom I will apprentice, a tall woman named Woo Eubong, a Korean. We are about the same age. “Good,” she says, “I’m tired of dealing with adolescents.”

  “You train them that young?” I ask.

  “Twenty-one. Not really adolescents, but not adults yet, either.”

  I don’t know how to take her, I suspect I will miss her humor, irony doesn’t translate. She’ll think I’m dreadfully serious. Maybe the system will flag irony for me?

  I live in an apartment so beautiful I am certain I will never live in anything like it again. It is three rooms with a tiny courtyard of raked stones and twisted rocks in back. The rooms are a little bigger than the front room of my apartment in Brooklyn, but what is so amazing is the finish. The bed is an alcove hung with white gauze curtains, the alcove and one wall (hiding a closet) is completely faced in wood with lacework carving at the corners. The black and red carpets are in every room except the kitchen, which is red and white tile. The couch has two little footstools of wood, purely decorative. The walls are hung with calligraphy. Over a black lacquer desk (very like the one at work) hangs a scroll with the characters spelling out “Inaction” followed by a verse from the Dao De Ching.

  “I’m sorry it’s so corporate,” Woo Eubong said before leaving the night before. “it’s a bit impersonal, but you’re only here for fifteen weeks. And it’s better than the guesthouse.”

  I’m not sure I ever want to leave.

  I go to work in the morning through the clean, twisting maze of the Wuxi complex, walking through passages with carved wooden handrails and climbing immaculate stone steps. People sympathize with me for having to spend so much time here. Woo Eubong tells me I have to come to her place for dinner some Saturday, just to get away from work. Hard to explain that I like it here just fine.

  In the morning, from eight to noon, I do donkey work. I check figures, run things through the system, review jobs. Engineers hate that sort of paperwork. Mostly it’s routine, although once in awhile there’s something unusual, a novel solution to a problem. It’s a good way to learn a lot about engineering. Building plans in front of me on flimsies, the system presents the entire building to me, supplements my own capacity and allows me to hold the entire building in my head and go over it. Although the work is routine, it takes me a morning to do five jobs, I have to call on the system to explain techniques to me. Woo Eubong tells me not to worry, in twelve weeks I’ll find myself reviewing thirty or forty jobs in a morning, finish two or three complete buildings a day.

  “It’s the only way to really learn,” she says. “You just have to get the experience of knowing so many jobs. Now you can run through the construction jobs as fast as anyone, it’s the systems, the electrical, the utilities, the aesthetics that slow you down.”

  Particularly the systems and the aesthetics.

  In the afternoon, I am Woo’s student.

  Woo is an organic engineer. That doesn’t mean she works with growing things, it means that she plans work so that it makes organic sense. It seems to me that she doesn’t plan at all. Daoist engineering. I refer to it that way once, and she says, “Right,” without blinking. Irony doesn’t translate.

  Each daoist engineer learns from working one on one with a teacher, as I will learn from Woo Eubong. There are only a handful of daoist engineers in North America. It’s not a specialty that is in much demand at home, mostly because we do not make the kinds of buildings that call for the subtlety of daoist engineering. They are very subtle buildings. Complex as bodies, with systems for nervous systems, and circulation and musculature. For homework she gives me the task of studying the Wuxi Engineering Technologies complex.

  So at night I sit with flimsies in front of me, studying energy distribution and environmental monitoring. Normally because of airflow, room size, room adjacency, exposure and window size, different rooms have different temperatures. The system for Wuxi complex monitors temperature and humidity. But for an organic system, temperature is relative. My hands and feet are cooler than my head and chest. If I am sitting, I will find the room colder than if I am up and moving around. And different people respond to temperature in different ways, some are perpetually cold, some people aren’t. We are sensitive to light, as well; a well lit place feels subjectively warmer than a dark place, and radiant heat from a window may heat one small area differently than another. Many buildings adjust room temperatures. The Wuxi Complex system also monitors the people jacked into it. People tell the system they are cold or warm and it adjusts. People, in fact, become nerve endings for the system. And the rooms are ingeniously structured so as to transfer heat from windows to darker areas, to increase the amount of outside light that comes in. It is part of the reason that the place is such a maze. Again and again I study a room and think, ‘isn’t that clever.’

  The number of ingenious little details in this complex stagger the imagination. It is not only that the particular details are so good, but that they dovetail. The way a room is shaped to create heat transfer also allows for efficient use of space, creates offices that have some privacy without requiring that they be walled off, allows enough ambient noise for human comfort and privacy but not so much that noise becomes an irritant. I request the system alter a detail, see what would happen if a window were put in somewhere else, only to find that the result, while bringing in more light, reduces the effectiveness of energy absorption, or affects ventilation. It’s as if this building were the result of biological evolution.

  During the afternoon I draw paper houses. I sit, attuned, and imagine very simple buildings.

  “Don’t plan the building, let the system do that,” Woo Eubong says.
“You just let go, let your mind drift and do what it wants.”

  At first I don’t even produce buildings, for two days I produce scribbles. Then one day I produce a very shaky looking pyramid sort of thing. I believe it is an accident, but Woo nods. “A pyramid is a very efficient shape, using the minimum number of surfaces. The only thing with fewer sides is a circle.”

  “Engineer Woo,” I say, “I can detail a building a hundred times better than this.”

  “Certainly. But could you detail the complex?”

  “I’m not an architectural and engineering team,” I say.

  “Wuxi Engineering Complex wasn’t detailed by a team, it was detailed by one woman, using, of course, feedback from the departments that would be using the building.”

  I gape.

  “Exactly,” she says, smiling. “A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected-but compromised and adjusted ideas.”

  “It can’t be done. It had to have taken years.”

  “It did take over two years, but it can be done. I can’t do it, there aren’t many people who have the ability to do work on that grand a scale.”

  “But all those little details,” I say.

  She stops for a moment. As I said, she is a tall woman with a square face. She stands out among the company people, not for her height, but because she is different. Many of the engineers have this air about them. They are more casual-today she is in black coveralls-and they tend to work different hours. Sometimes they come in late, sometimes do a lot of work at home. When I came I thought there were two classes; cadres and workers. But the cadres sometime refer to organic engineers as talent.

  “An example,” she says. “Stand up.”

  I stand up, a little nervous.

  “Walk to Hai-hong’s desk.”

  I walk over to Hai-hong’s desk, Hai-hong glances up at me expectantly, her look saying, ‘what do you need?’

  “Woo Eubong is making an example,” I say.

  Hai-hong nods and looks back down at her work. I walk back to Woo Eubong. “Yes?” I ask.

  “When you passed your desk, you changed direction. How many degrees? How many steps did you take? How many meters to Hai-hong’s desk?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t calculate?” she asks. “You didn’t analyze the situation and determine the best possible method to get to Hai-hong’s desk?”

  “No,” I say, smiling a little, “I just walked over.”

  “But you had to figure the best way to walk. In fact, standing in front of me, your muscles are constantly adjusting to keep you upright, correct? Muscles in your legs and feet adjusting constantly to make sure you don’t balance too far one way or another?”

  “Well, yes,” I say, “if you want to think of it that way.”

  “But you don’t think to stand, or walk, or dance. Gymnasts don’t calculate trajectories.” She is smiling, too.

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Good, I want you to make buildings the same way that you walk to Hai-hong’s desk, thinking about the product, not the process.”

  “You are going to try to make me a mental gymnast,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “No, Li Jian-fen, who built this complex, she was a gymnast. You, I am teaching to walk.”

  I work using a tutorial. It’s a feedback system, when I start to think analytically the system cuts out. I sit down and try to imagine a space. I try to determine the qualities I want in the space. I try to imagine a sense of this space. I imagine white walls, realize that I have no idea of the roof and consciously start to sort through possible roofs to go with the concept I have-

  System cuts out. Flimsie prints and I have a tangle of schematics. If I look I can sort of identify four walls. The timer indicates that I was in the correct mode for 22 seconds. About average.

  Woo Eubong glances over my shoulder. “You are a stubborn man,” she says.

  I shrug, not knowing what she refers to.

  “You aren’t using the system, you’re staying in your own head. You have the manipulative skills but not the storage capacity.”

  I still don’t know exactly what she’s talking about.

  She sighs, “Words don’t really explain what you should be doing, you just have to do it, then you’ll know. Dao kedao, feichang dao.” The first line of the Dao De Ching, roughly translated means that ‘The way that can be spoken is not the way.’

  She doesn’t look like the kind of person who would spout philosophical Daoism. She has a short ruff of hair and looks like an athlete. A swimmer maybe, long straight lines.

  “Maybe I can’t learn to be an organic engineer,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says, surprising me, I expected (hoped) that she would say, ‘no, no, no, you’ll learn, don’t worry.’

  “Do you have a lot of failures?”

  “I’ve only trained two others, one of them learned it, one didn’t.”

  “Both of them were young?”

  She nods, “And correspondingly more flexible than us elders. I really wonder if we shouldn’t teach this to ten year olds.” She smiles and I realize she is joking. “Truly, you cannot teach it to ten year olds, because in order to do it, you have to have experience with buildings, have to have buildings in your memory.”

  “When you do this, aren’t you really an architect?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I imagine architects do not really care for the idea.”

  She shakes her head. “No, there are also organic architects. They come at the problems from a different direction, but basically they do the same thing. But I tend to sacrifice aesthetics for engineering, architects tend to sacrifice engineering for aesthetics.”

  “Can I see some of the work of architects?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says. She looks into the middle distance, her eyes drifting left as people’s eyes tend to do when they are querying the system. “I had them print-out in your apartment,” she says.

  “So I don’t get any time off.”

  “Ah,” she laughs, “you are clever.”

  Clever in Mandarin means almost the same thing as sly. I grin and try to look wicked. Then I make more scribbles.

  I do not confess to her how frustrating this whole process is. I am here by a fluke. The University charts our actual performance against our expected performance. Once I had a tutor, and that helped my grades. Then my tutor died and oddly enough, that helped my grades. I worked very hard. Everything else seemed sour but in the second semester I had a systems course and found something fascinating. I learned to tie systems into all my other courses. My projects were systems related. And I was tapped for a co-op job at Wuxi Engineering Technologies, where I would be working with systems, because Engineer Xi, who reviews applicants for co-op positions, read one of my projects.

  It wasn’t until the list was posted and people started to congratulate me that I even understood I had been awarded something, but for maybe the first time in my life, I have been succeeded at something. And now, I am failing. And wasting an opportunity for someone who could have learned this.

  It is worst at night, sitting in that beautiful apartment, making scribbles, going over flimsies. I get cold, although when I access the system it tells me that the temperature in my room is in fact higher than normal. I wear a ridiculous sweater, one with leather ties, from New York. All I want to do is sleep, but I go back over the Wuxi Complex. How did Li Jian-fen learn to do what she does? On my black desk sits a smooth stone carved into a walrus. It was a Christmas gift from Maggie Smallwood the year I spent on Baffin Island. I thought that what I learned in Baffin Island tempered me. Haibao thought we were damaged. I thought we were simply different. Maybe he was right. Then again maybe I am just too old.

  I imagine a space, a clean clear white space like light through ice (clarity and sadness and the round-eyed faces of the seals in Lancaster sound, but this is unfocused, as is the memory of Haibao’s
white clothes neatly folded by the broken window.) I try to hold that, but everything seems formless. All right, everything is formless, I let it drift, thinking, the building will form. A room unfolds, but it’s hard to hold it, hard to concentrate without concentrating. The system has the capacity to hold it for me, just as it holds a building I am studying, but usually I am conscious of the system when I work with it. I am not even aware I have reached into the system’s capacity, tapped the system’s space.

  For an instant I have vertigo, and then a complete lack of perspective. A multiplicity of options, substances to use for walls, shapes in my mind flowing and shifting like ice. Everything becomes mutable, nothing stable, there are no boundaries. I did not know the perimeters of my own mind because I never had any sense that there was any more than my mind but there is a sense of my thoughts fleeing out and out and expanding and I feel as if I am diffusing-

  47 seconds. My heart is pounding. The scribble is complex, beautiful, abstract and inhuman. It has nothing to do with building, it has nothing to do with me. I am having a panic attack, my heart is racing, racing. I want to get up, get away, but I don’t want to go out. I get up, go into the bedroom, lean on the chairback and take deep breaths, hoping I will calm down.

  Deep breath. Hold a second, let it out. Deep breath, hold a second, let it out. I want to talk to someone. I don’t want to be alone. My heart won’t slow down.

  Anxiety attack. What do I know about an anxiety attack? That it is unfocused fear. I sure as hell don’t know what I’m afraid of, although I know what started this.

  I call Peter, my hands are shaking as I make coffee and wait for the system to put me through. What time is it? The system tells me it is 22:41.