"Engineer Zhang," Engineer Xi says, "this is Driver Shi."
Driver Shi nods at me and smiles. The car is a Renminde-Hou, a 'People's Tiger'. I've heard of Renmin cars. Engineer Xi opens the back door and I get in. The door closes and my ears feel the way they did on the flight over here, as if we have been completely isolated. It smells different than I expected, faintly sweet, lemony. The interior is uniform-gray. I've been in a car before, three times, in fact. My mother hired a car to take me to the hospital when I broke my arm; my father hired a car to take us from the port to his father's place in California (that car was red and had a slogan across the front panel where the instruments are. My father told me what it said, "Revolution is not a dinner party.") I in a car when Janvier got married just out of middle school, I was a member of the wedding. That car was also red. The cab that took us to the hospital was yellow, of course.
The feeling of movement in a car is stronger than it is on a train, acceleration pushes me firmly back in my seat, and when the car goes around corners the pull right or left is very sharp. The first time we turn I grab the door, and am embarrassed that Engineer Xi doesn't, but he pretends not to notice.
The next surprise is the office complex of Wuxi Engineering Technologies. Red lacquer roof tiles swoop in graceful waves down the hill. The buildings themselves are black matte. Engineer Xi describes how the building fuses traditional Chinese architectural details-the many connected buildings and the roofs with the upturned eaves-with more modern architectural technology. The black matte walls actually absorb enough light and sound radiation to provide the energy needed to run the complex. Driver Shi glances back, "Do you know why the eaves go up?" he asks. "Demon slides. Demons can only travel in straight lines, so when a demon came down from the sky it would hit the roof and be shunted along to the eave and whip off the end back into the sky."
"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.