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IV.
Wednesday
has just turned into Thursday. Tracy, Su Ru, Jayce and I had dinner at a
Shanghainese restaurant with western Hard Rock Café-style decor. If you
remember, Su Ru is the Singaporean beauty queen who works with Zarah’s team. She
and I have become friends lately. There is much I still don’t know about her,
and her moments of unselfconsciousness.
After
dinner Su Ru and I stop by Jayce’s house. She is going to stay in Tianjin for a
long haul as well, and is looking for an apartment. So we take her on the
quickie tour of Crystal Palace (the apartment). She is also impressed by the
suite. We look overe Jayce’s photos of the past month or so, and relax for a
moment with a guitar.
Su Ru
asks us to play “Killing Me Softly”, but we don’t know the chords.
In his
pile of pictures Jayce has one which I secretly admire. It is a picture of a
middle aged pedestrian on the streets of Tianjin, caught unawares by the
camera. There is nothing truly remarkable about the picture itself except for
the look of infinite patience on his face, a sense of timelessness increased by
the lonely winters and the grey smog, the cold nights and the silence of a city
too large for its inhabitants. It looks like a face that hasn’t ventured out of
Tianjin in many long years, a settler too settled to ever really change.
V.
There
are sandstorms here in April, so Owen tells me. Wild winds scour the streets
and blow into people’s faces. It can blind you, choke you, leave you bent over
like an old man.
VI.
Every meeting
is the same. More or less the same; we go into the huddle room and match the
work processes to the global solution. I don’t even know what the fuck that
means anymore. We make mountains of meaning out of dry paper diagrams and
impute value to bullshit. We spin tales of risk assessment, migration efforts,
next steps out of the air like anti-storytellers. Tracy and I are weary of the
matching sessions, we are weary of the phone conferences and the endless
documentation and the meetings with key users who are equally weary of the
changes that happen every eighteen months to things that work perfectly fine.
Owen and
Betty are part of my technical team. In between matching sessions I teach them to
go into SAP and play with bits of data, configurations that determine the
difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of
orders. Real-life money, real life products are reduced to their most abstract
representations, numbers that build on numbers that run through code so obscure
that in understanding it, you lose touch with true understanding. SAP is a
deconstructionist’s dream; you get to realize that nothing, really, in your
company has any meaning whatsoever in the system.
And yet
- we continue, because someone pushed in a direction he wants to go, will
continue to go that way even after the wanting is over. There is inertia, there
is a whirpool of time that sucks two years of your life, ten, thirty, down the
drain as you stand in one place and endure the sandstorms that carve your face
into aged wood. Thirty years and someone captures you in a hidden camera and
preserves your expression long after you’ve forgotten what it looks like.
Going
home from the meetings, the air is so dark, so clogged with soot from the
factories and the residential coal heaters that you can’t see fifty feet in
front of you. Nearby buildings become ghosts in a cloud of grayness. The filth
is appalling, the darkness threatens to sprout eyes and chase you into your
winter dreams.
There is
a point to all of this, a message I need to bring.