Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

All the unease and crassness made me appreciate the occasional moments of kindness and civility. There was the man who answered when I called the service number listed on a subway drink machine that had eaten my money. He apologized and promised to send my refund—two RMB, or about thirty cents—to my address within a week. I could have hugged the Chinese woman who, before exiting the subway train, told her son, “ Xian xia, zai shang, ” or “First off, then on.” There was the woman I called at the bank who spoke good English and found me the address and hours for two nearby branches. Fearing that the branch employees might not understand me, she even gave me her personal cell phone number in case I ran into trouble. I thanked her profusely, to which she replied, “No problem. Welcome to China.” These encounters reminded me that China renews itself every day, and every day needs its own welcome.

THOUGH I TRIED to avoid eating raw vegetables at restaurants, drank only bottled water, and used gallons of antibacterial hand gel, I still fell victim to a virulent stomach bug that left me with a high fever and diarrhea, or la duzhi . A variant of la shi, or “pull shit,” which describes a regular bowel movement, la duzhi means “pull stomach,” which described my condition and, no less accurately, the sensation of having my stomach pulled out of me every time I went to the bathroom. Once the fever subsided, the stomach cramps continued, feeling as if my intestines were being wrung out like a towel. Andrew didn’t believe me. “You’re weak,” he declared. “I think you like this.”

I recovered in time to start work. My uncle’s company was one of the Zhangjiang technology park’s anchor tenants, a dozen glass and poured concrete boxes the size of airplane hangars occupying a hundred-acre parcel about a mile from the living quarters at the intersection of two major roadways. Emblazoned at the top of the main building was the company’s name, SMIC, superimposed over a silicon wafer, which lit up at night like a beacon. I took a taxi to the company’s front gate, signed in at the guard booth, and walked through neatly trimmed hedges to the main building, its curvilinear blue glass facade the only exception to the Mondrian architecture of the campus. Though it was just eight in the morning, the short walk through the heat and humidity soaked my clothes with perspiration. At the building entrance, a circular drive ringed a dry water fountain that was switched on when important customers or government officials visited. Inside, a security guard ordered me over to a bin of blue shoe covers and made me put on a pair.

A few minutes later a Malaysian Chinese woman from human resources named Ivy escorted me to the auditorium for the new employee orientation, where I was the only American. A screen above the stage bore a projection reading “Welcome to SMIC Big Family Orientation Meeting.” Another Chinese woman from human resources introduced herself as Grace, who would be supervising us over the next three full days. She clicked a button on the laptop on the podium, and the next slide appeared: “Training Purposes.” I realized then that I had been misled in terms of how much the company relied on English as its lingua franca. Though all the orientation instructors, called “owners” in the company’s business-speak, introduced themselves by their English names, that was often the only English I heard during their sessions. Their Mandarin sounded familiar, and their speech didn’t seem fast to me, and sometimes I could even understand a good number of the words. But I couldn’t comprehend a thing because I was missing all the important ones, so I would hear something like, “Okay, and now we’re going to talk about [blank] and why you [blank] and [blank] because [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] [blank] otherwise [blank] [blank] [blank]. Any questions?”

We filled out stacks of paperwork, some of which I had already completed before I was hired. I said as much to Ivy, who had stuck around to translate for me when I revealed that I was all but illiterate in Chinese. Ivy gave me a look as if to say that I’d better get used to this kind of thing and told me to just do it again.

Almost all of the company’s paperwork was in Chinese.

“What’s this?” I would ask.

“It’s the SMIC corporate culture,” Ivy would say.

“I mean, what does it say?”

Ivy would read the Chinese. I would try to conceal that I had no clue what she was saying. Then I’d sign the form.

Despite having already been hired, I had to fill out a job application for the company records, which asked for my Chinese name. I scratched out mangled versions of the two characters, which Ivy recognized and rewrote properly. The next line on the form, Ivy said, was “where you put your English name.”

While all the other Chinese parents in America appeared to have given their children “American” names, my parents—born in China, raised in Taiwan, and educated in the United States—neglected to do so for me and my brother, for reasons that they never fully explained. All my parents’ siblings in America had English names, and so did all my cousins, but not me, and when I was young I hated it for the inevitable mispronunciations during classroom roll calls, the misguided compliments on my English when I introduced myself, and the constant questions about where I was from— No, I mean, where are you FROM? I lost count of how many times I parsed the answer to that question in a manner that was probably familiar to other hyphenated Americans: I was born in California, and my parents grew up in Taiwan (which people often confused with Thailand).

Whenever I complained to my parents, they told me I was free to change my name to anything I liked when I turned eighteen. That felt light-years away in my mind, and my parents always said it in a tone that suggested such an unfilial act might cause them to die of disappointment. My father liked to point out that common Chinese surnames are about as plentiful as common English given names, so did I really want to be another one of the thousands of Michael or Steven Hsus in the world? (I did.) My mother, who never passed up an opportunity to trot out her well-worn, Christian-inspired “think of the less fortunate” palliative, would remind me that it could have been worse. “Your name could start with an X or something,” she would say.

Now, given the opportunity to adopt the English name I had always wanted, I froze. The forty or so other employees, all Chinese, and all presumably with English names, began passing their completed forms up to the front for collection. Ivy, who already seemed panicked at how little Chinese I could read or speak, made impatient noises.

“Sorry,” I said finally. “But I don’t have one.”

“You don’t have an English name?” Ivy gasped. “You should really pick one.” She folded her arms and waited for me to do just that, as if I could make such an existential decision on the spot.

“Can I just leave it blank?” I said.

I could not, she said. This was the name that was going to be printed on my identification badge and all my company records, including my work visa, and leaving it blank would delay all the processing. We were holding up orientation. I was already a curiosity for being the only newcomer with a personal assistant, and I could feel the other employees watching me.

“What do your friends call you?” Ivy asked.

“Uh, Huan?”

“Well, that’s fine,” she said. “Just put that down for now. You can always change it later.”

After that she had to get back to work. “Just do your best,” she said as she left.

I spent the next three days of orientation sitting through a blizzard of Chinese characters punctuated with the occasional English word. Much of the English was also incomprehensible, as the company seemed to employ acronyms at every opportunity, a penchant that I chalked up to the representational nature of its mother tongue, so I remained mystified through sessions such “Q&R Intro,” “IP Intro,” “KMS & DMS Intro,” and “Quality System Intro & ISO/TS 16949/TL900.”