Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Michael had been in the meeting. He had made notes and barely said anything. One month later, he suggested China for the first time. He wanted to go to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to do some research to see if moving at least some of their manufacturing operations might make sense. At first, Richard Owen had thought his son was joking. They had just invested a hundred million dollars in a new plant, in the future of Aurora Metal. Why should they manufacture at the other end of the world? In a country ruled by Communists. The savings could not be so great that he would want to do business with them. He was a very conservative person, yes, old-fashioned and a relic, if his son wanted to look at it that way. The very idea of moving abroad just because they could shave a few cents off the price of manufacturing appalled him. They did not have to justify themselves to shareholders. Patriotism was more than a matter of lip service to him. He had bought American all his life. He would never have entertained the idea of driving a German or a Japanese car. When he had ordered his first motorboat, he had insisted on replacing the Yamaha engine with a Mercury. He only drank American wine and American beer.
But Michael would not leave him in peace. Every week, he came up with fresh figures and statistics, with examples from other industries, with comparable family-owned firms that had closed their factories in Indiana, Illinois, or the Carolinas and moved them to India or China. One day, Michael drove to a Walmart Supercenter with him and led him through the long rows of shelves. They started with the shoes. Michael picked out random pairs, turned them upside down, looked at the soles, and showed them to him, without saying anything. There were the words, Made in China. On every pair. And what about it, Richard Owen said. They’re shoes, just shoes. They went on to the pants and jackets, to the lights and garden furniture, to the tools, to the toys, and the digital cameras. They pulled televisions and DVD recorders out of the shelves. The same three words were everywhere: Made in China. Walmart, Walmart of all places, Richard Owen thought to himself. How long ago had it been since their stores had had giant billboards in front of them with the words Made in America? Since every customer had had a button proclaiming Buy American! pressed into his hand? Ten years ago? Definitely not. Five at most. Michael asked his father if he knew what percent of Walmart’s products came from China. Richard Owen got the feeling that he didn’t know anything anymore. He felt old, terribly old, and he wanted to go home. He shook his head and only vaguely registered the answer: almost 80 percent, his son told him with a triumphant tone in his voice.
Despite this, Richard Owen remained obstinate. What was Walmart to him, he said. Aurora Metal did not supply consumers who watched every cent, who only wanted to get things cheaper and cheaper. Its customers were General Motors and Ford, not for their budget models but their most expensive ones, which meant quality was even more important and quality had its price, as their managers knew; the people who bought a Cadillac or a Lincoln knew that too.
In the end it all happened very quickly. In the automobile industry, so it seemed to Richard Owen, the buyers had taken over power from the engineers in a short space of time. He found himself sitting across the table from young men who no longer enthused about the latest technical innovations or the R&D divisions, but cared only about the numbers. Suppliers meant nothing more to them than costs, which had to be reduced by every means possible. They demanded a “China price” from him, the amount for which they could supposedly get the parts manufactured in China. Aurora Metal could either comply or the business relationship between them would have to come to an end sooner or later, regrettable as it was. Richard Owen looked at his figures and felt that he was being made a fool of. He would have liked nothing more than to shove the young managers’ paperwork in their mouths. He could not have supplied the goods at these prices even twenty years ago. He thought about how his father or grandfather would have dealt with these fellows, how they would have chased them and their China prices off the premises. But he was no longer strong enough to defend himself.
Michael Owen flew to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, and when he returned after almost three weeks, he told his father that there was no country on earth that was more capitalist than China, that there was no need to worry about the Communists there, for they dreamed the American dream, and it was a ridiculous anachronism born of sentimentality or ignorance to produce even a screw or a button in America when you could manufacture it for ten, no, twenty times less at the other end of the world. Michael had already spoken to several possible Chinese joint venture partners. With the Owens’ experience and contacts, Aurora Metal was a sought-after partner; their only problem would be choosing who they should partner with. It was not a matter of moving parts of the production process there but the entire manufacturing operation. The plant in America had to be closed, the sooner the better, it didn’t matter how modern or efficient the machinery was. The hourly pay of their new workers in Guangdong would be twenty-five cents, thirty-five cents at most. There were no trade unions, no pension provisions, and only one week’s paid holiday, and anyone who did not do good work could be let go from one day to another. There were enough young men waiting at the factory gates who were ready to take on any kind of work. What was there left to discuss? Out of the nine hundred or so employees in America they would have to keep twenty at most in the office and in accounts.
When Richard Owen continued to hesitate to take this step, Michael threatened to go it alone. The next day, the first orders for the coming year were canceled. He knew that this was no cyclical downturn but a warning from General Motors’ Diet Coke men. He had waited too long. China was no longer an alternative. China was the only way out now.
Michael announced the closure of the Aurora Metal factory in Wisconsin at a workers’ meeting. He spoke calmly and matter-of-factly, like a teacher patiently explaining a math formula to his pupils. What surprised Richard Owen the most was that the workers’ reaction was just as measured. No furious protests raged through the halls; no cursing, no shouting was heard. It was as if it had always been clear to them that the gates here would one day be locked, to be opened again ten thousand miles away. The China price was a law of nature that only fools fought against.
Richard had stood next to his son fighting back his tears. He had not known how good Michael was at giving speeches. The resonant voice, the erect posture, the gaze directed straight over the heads of the workers at the silent machinery. The men had respected him, Richard. He had known many of them by name; they were the second, some even the third, generation of their families to work in this factory. He had not looked over their heads; he did not want to avoid their gazes but to look them in the eyes. He did not succeed. He had stared at the ceiling and the floor and his eyes had rested on the helmets, the blue overalls, and the fire extinguisher on the wall instead. The workers had expected a few words. He ought to have said something; he wanted to. But what? Michael had explained the China price to them. They had stood there silently, listened, and nodded. There had been nothing more to say. Richard had felt ashamed of his helplessness.
———
The noise of the train arriving back in Hong Kong drew him back from his memories. They walked out of the station onto the plaza, and he suddenly had the feeling that the ground beneath his feet was shaking. After identifying his son’s body what else could he expect. And then there was the heat and the humidity, which pressed down on him in the open air almost like a physical force. If only he had the feeling that he and Elizabeth were in this together, but she had been so distant. No matter what his wife thought, he did not love Michael any less than she did, even though he and his son had fought often and hard, especially in the last few weeks. What did that matter? He had explained the reasons to Elizabeth, but she did not listen; she did not want to know anything about the dangerous games her son was playing in China. He had tried many times, had pleaded with her to speak to Michael, perhaps he would listen to her rather than to his father, but she had only shaken her head. He
Richard Owen felt his eyes growing moist and he swallowed a few times. Might Elizabeth have been right? Had he done his son Michael an injustice with his skepticism? No tears now, he thought, he couldn’t let himself go, not in front of his wife and certainly not in public.
If only Tang were by his side now. Why had Elizabeth insisted that he not come? She liked him; she had always claimed to, anyway. Yet this morning, for the first time, she said that Tang made her uneasy, without saying why exactly. They had gotten into a fight about it, for if there was one thing—apart from the numbers, of course, which had showed the increased profits—that had persuaded Richard Owen that the decision to move production entirely to China had been the right one, it was the meeting with Victor Tang.
Their joint venture partner had impressed him greatly since their first meeting in the Regent Hotel in Hong Kong. Tang spoke perfect English, almost entirely without an accent. He had studied for a PhD at Harvard and had traveled a good deal through the States in that time. Over and over again, he impressed Richard Owen with his breadth of knowledge about American history. He was clearly fascinated by America, and knew more about its history than Richard Owen himself, and certainly far more than Michael did. The scheduled two-hour business lunch had turned into nearly a whole day, with a Chinese dinner followed by a visit to a karaoke bar, where they drank whiskey from Tennessee and sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” together. No one in Wisconsin would have believed it. A Chinese national who could rattle off whole paragraphs from the American Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart, who claimed that there was a spiritual connection between Deng Xiaoping and Ronald Reagan, and was even able to prove it with quotes. “Greed is good,” the American leader had said, while the Chinese one had declared that “to get rich is glorious.” Both of them, Tang said, meant the same thing. He constantly emphasized that China could learn a great deal from America, and that it was finally prepared to do so, which flattered the Owens. “The American dream, Mr. Owen, is very much alive. It is dreamed and lived by millions of Chinese people, and their numbers are growing every day, believe me.”
And Richard Owen did exactly that from that day onward. He believed Victor Tang. He had looked him in the eye and seen a strength of will and a steeliness that was familiar to him. He had eaten and drunk with him and known that he could do business with this man, that he could trust him.
He missed him today in that cold, dark cave where all eyes were on him, where a man in blood-spattered overalls lifted a dirty cloth, where his wife stood by the entrance and looked at him as though he were the murderer; he had felt as alone as he ever had in his life.
It was Michael. Of course it was Michael. He had guessed, no, known it the whole time. What was wrong with his head? Why was a piece missing? My God, Michael, what have they done to you? You were right, I should have listened to you, but why weren’t you satisfied with what we’d achieved? Why wasn’t it enough?
For a moment Richard Owen thought he would explode. He wanted to scream and flail around him; he wanted to press his son to him and take him away, carry him out of this miserable tomb. To touch him, at least, stroke him one more time. But he had resolved beforehand not to lose control. No tears. Not there. Not in front of those strangers.
The China price. The words shot into his mind. The China price.
XII
Victor Tang sat in the back of his Mercedes 500, which was so new that neither his driver nor Victor himself, of course, had had the time to familiarize himself with the functions and details of its many buttons, switches, and fittings. Tang heard his chauffeur swear after he had pressed yet another wrong button. With a few brusque words Tang instructed him to turn the music up and to restrain himself; Chinese curse words did not go well with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. “Louder, I said. And a little louder still.” The slow opening chords played from the four speakers crisply and clearly without the slightest jarring or distortion, and filled every last crevice of the vehicle. The engine could neither be heard nor felt; Tang felt as though he were sitting in a concert hall rather than a car. The interplay of the violin and the piano helped him to concentrate.
Richard Owen was worrying him. He had called him from his hotel in Hong Kong yesterday evening after identifying the body. His voice had grown shaky after a few sentences, and he had started crying, weeping bitterly. Tang’s careful attempts to comfort him had been in vain, and Richard had simply hung up after a while.
Tang had not reckoned with this reaction, not after the conversation that he had had with Owen Senior the previous week, not after all the fights between father and son that he had witnessed in the past three years, which had grown more serious and embittered in the past few weeks. He was unsure of how to judge Richard’s tears. He was either still suffering from the shock of the sight of his dead son or old wounds had been opened. The latter, Tang knew from personal experience, would be dangerous.
He looked at the clock. In about an hour the chief of police, the party secretary of the police headquarters, the leader of the homicide division, and a few trusted employees from the mayor’s office would be meeting him in his office. He wanted to emphasize to them once again that telling Elizabeth and Richard that the death was an accident was most definitely not an option. Elizabeth would insist on a postmortem in Hong Kong or America. It was murder and the case could not stay unsolved for long. Elizabeth would not let matters rest until the murderer was found and convicted. They needed a suspect with a plausible motive, and as quickly as possible. That shouldn’t actually be very difficult after everything that had happened at the factory in the previous weeks. The longer the investigation dragged on, the greater the danger that the media in Hong Kong reported on the case and thereby alerted the Chinese newspapers to it, or the American embassy in Beijing got involved. Diplomatic representatives, possibly including an FBI detective asking awkward questions, were the last thing they needed now. The murder had to be solved today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow at the latest. In Shenzhen and in his home province of Sichuan there were only too many envious people who were just waiting to pin something on him to sully his reputation, who wished for nothing more than for him to make a mistake so that they could pounce on him, tear his little empire apart, and divide it among themselves.
The Mercedes came to a standstill with a gentle jerk. They were stuck in an impossible traffic jam on the Shennan Road. Furious broken chords sounded from the loudspeakers in the car.
Tang looked at the city’s skyline, and got the impression, as he did every time whether he wanted to or not, that New York lay before him. Needless to say, he could not group these skyscrapers with those in Manhattan. Of course not. Shenzhen was not Shanghai or Hong Kong, but what they had created here from nothing in the past fifteen years, from a squalid and miserable fishing village, was more than astounding; it filled him with pride. No one could deny that this skyline had a certain beauty. Especially not at twilight, when the somewhat monotonous buildings disappeared and all that could be seen was the endless sea of light, reminding him of the American big cities that had fascinated him on his earlier travels, like every sighting of something new had.
New York City. Manhattan. Fifty-Third Street, corner of Lexington Avenue. There were two days in Tang’s life, which even today, decades later, were so present in his mind that he marveled at his memory over and over again, over its incredible capacity and precision. It made him a time traveler. Whenever he wanted, his memory took him back to that warm, cloudless day in the early summer of 1985, when he first set foot on American ground at the John F. Kennedy airport. He was there on a scholarship to Harvard, and had
Victor Tang saw himself standing in front of Terminal 1 of the airport once more. He was alone and feeling so unsure of himself that he had difficulty setting one foot in front of the other. This uncertainty was more than the brief disorientation of a stranger who first had to get used to a place. It went deeper than that; it filled him with shame and it wounded him. He was a grown man who, at thirty-three years of age, did not want to feel as helpless as a child. Mixed with this feeling of shame was an indistinct rage; he did not know where it came from or what it was directed against at first, but it was to accompany him like a shadow over the next few years.
The provincial government had given him a meager allowance. In his jacket pocket was an envelope with five twenty-dollar bills; they had also provided him with a dark-blue suit, but it did not fit him, unusually tall as he was for a Chinese man from Sichuan. The sleeves of the jacket did not even reach his wrists, and the trousers did not touch his ankles. They had not provided him with shoes in his size at all. His old footwear was so worn out that he would have preferred to go barefoot. He had barely noticed all this when departing from Beijing, but now he could not fail to see it. In these clothes he cut a ridiculous figure.