09.23.2002
I had no idea what I was doing. This was not something entirely new or out of the ordinary, but it was the first time other people found themselves actually depending on me for something I was completely ill fitted to accomplish. It was, at least I'm pretty sure of it, the first time I'd ever been surrounded by a group of screaming Chinese in olive uniforms with large and menacing guns.
It was a first for all of us, for that matter, which is why I probably ended up with the job of trying to calm down our panic stricken interrogators. It is probably a safe bet that they had not been expecting to receive a cargo container of office furniture and three American stowaways. It was okay. We could understand. The last thing we would have figured on was ending up in China. It was undoubtedly a new experience to everyone involved.
"It's okay," I said in English with my hands in the air. "It's okay."
"It's not working Roland," Jennifer hissed.
There was a girl in every office that got special treatment because the men had all silently agreed that she was somehow better looking than the rest and it would be a real shame to lose her. Jennifer was that girl but two weeks in an industrial shipping container with anyone would shorten tempers. Besides, as it was quickly discovered, her good looks turned out to have more to do with the cosmetics counter on 5th Avenue than good genetics. None of the four guys who traveled with her were overly disappointed though as we all looked like the warmed over redivivus dead.
"Well I don't speak fucking Chinese," I snapped in reply.
The lead soldier, the one I assumed to be in charge by the number of buttons, stripes and decorations on his uniform, screamed something at me as he cocked his pistol. I re-raised my hands and nodded okay, though he might have been asking if I was a spy in which case I would have been saying yes.
"What's he saying," Taylor asked.
"I have no idea," I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth.
"Then why are you nodding at him!"
"If you want to be in charge," I tried to say as forcefully as possible without turning my back to the soldiers. "You can take over anytime. Until then, shut the fuck up."
Another soldier suddenly appeared, making the total people with guns around us ten. He was pushing a young man dressed like the other dockworkers we'd seen scurry away when the container was opened and revealed to be holding us. The Chinese Army Regular shoved the man into the semi-circle of guns and screamed something quickly that could have been that month's Maxim girl's hobby. Though I'll never know for sure, I'd bet it wasn't. I glanced at Taylor who frowned in return.
"The, uh, Major want to know what you do here," the young man mumbled as he clutched his work hat and wrung it nervously in his hands.
"He speaks English," Taylor and Jennifer said at once, relieved.
I waved my hand to quiet them and as I did so the shy dockworker asked his question again.
"Tell the Major we'd like to see our representative at the American Embassy," I said as politely as possible. When the translation had been completed, the Major grimaced and fired three shots from his gun at our feet. I'd seen various makes and models of weapons in the movies but I was nowhere near a gun expert. All I knew about the gun the Major held was that it was big, loud, and could kill us if pointed in the right direction. The antiperspirant under my arms had long since ceased to be effective and I felt a steady stream of sweat dribble down my flank. We were computer engineers. We were a delicate people. If the coffee machine wasn't producing coffee, we complained about the sweatshop like practices of our employer. I drove a Honda. Guns and angry Chinese were something I watched on network news.
We were not the only one's put off by the Major's trigger-happy fingers. Our translator was forming large brown circles of sweat under each of his arms and seemed to be as gun shy as we were. The Major screamed a fresh barrage of instructions to him and he seemed to flinch from the beating each word inflicted on him.
"The Major suggest you answer his question," the translator begged.
"Yeah Roland," Jennifer said. "Answer his question."
I thought about it for a minute as I planned out what I was going to say and silently prayed that our translator understood better English than he spoke. Then I began to tell him.
A middle manager somewhere had decided that technology work could be just as well done by monkeys as well as by highly paid engineers like Taylor and me. "It's like Shakespeare," my boss explained. "Monkeys can do it, Shakespeare just did it first."
It didn't make us feel any better, even with the allusion. Our jobs were going to be eliminated in favor of outsourced labor in the newly open and hungry China and we were going to be poor from falling economy in the home of democracy and capitalism. The worst of it was that we were going to help them do it too.
Jennifer, as the project manager for another team also on the chopping block, found out that the company was going to offer two weeks of extra pay and another week of severance to those who stuck around to help pack the office and load it into the giant cargo container recently docked in the employee parking lot outside.
The three of us were incensed. Not only were we going to be fired but we were giving our desks to the people taking our jobs? It didn't seem fair somehow. We needed the money, so we did it, but it didn't seem fair. We protested in the only way we knew how: we came into work late, left early, and enjoyed many smoke breaks in between. We were American workers after all and as such were too lazy to actually do any kind of effective resistance.
It was on our final day, the large rectangular container filled with our cheap furniture – which was, ironically enough, made in China – and our filing cabinets that we surveyed our empty office and deemed it too passive to merely say our goodbyes and leave. Taylor made a run to a local bottle shop and, when he returned, the three of us headed into the container where we would say a toast and wish it farewell as we liquored ourselves past any reasonable point. The one thing we hadn't counted upon, of course, was falling asleep. Jennifer in a righted office chair, Taylor and me on different desks.
There is no way of saying for certain what time they came to take us away as we had shut the door to prevent the cold night air from ruining our little shin-dig. Looking back on it, maybe it wasn't such a swell idea but whoever thinks about that at the time.
"And you spent three weeks inside it," the American Consul asked me, feeding me cigarettes which I happily chain-smoked.
"Yeah, though it felt longer," I said. I was freshly shaven and showered and much more willing to be questioned. I welcomed it in fact. Not only were the American's not pointing guns at me while I answered it, they actually seemed to be a little sympathetic.
"What the hell did you eat the whole time," he asked, scratching his beard.
"We had the chips and salsa we bought. After we ran out of them, we rifled through the desks and found various things," I said, proud of our resourcefulness. We were no longer white collard losers. We were survivors.
"If I may make a suggestion," the employee from the State Department offered.
"Certainly," I said with a smile.
"I wouldn't tell anyone that story you just told me."
"Why not," I asked. It wasn't an unreasonable request, I figured. It probably had something to do with national security.
"Because that's the stupidest story I've ever heard."