My comprehension improved when the information moved away from business or technical terms. I gathered that, to motivate employees to arrive at work early, breakfast was free in the cafeteria before seven-thirty a.m., that there were hot water limits in the dormitories housing the MAs, and that the company’s management style was decidedly punitive. During a session explaining clean rooms, where blank silicon wafers were etched into chips, cut, and packaged, and which had air filters extracting everything larger than five microns (the size of a human red blood cell) because even the tiniest particle could interfere with or damage the equipment or wafers, we learned that employees could be fined for using their storage cabinets for anything other than their full-body clean suits or shoes. Or for stepping on the wardrobe clapboard when changing out of the clean suit. Or for “doodling on clean suit or shoes” (a 700 RMB fine, which was a month’s salary for an MA). Or for failing to hang the suit on the right rack (100 RMB; employees were fired after the third offense). Or for failing to escort a visitor (200 RMB). Inside the fabs there was to be no food, drink, or communication or recording devices, no games, no running, and no more than two people chatting at one time. “Violators ticketed and told on,” the signs warned. There were also fines for spitting in sinks, running in the hallways, and not wearing clean socks.
The importance of clean socks came up often during orientation, one instructor after another exhorting us to mind our pedal hygiene. In an effort to reduce the dirt and dust that might ruin wafers, the mass of employees who surged through the turnstiles every morning first went into a locker area, where they changed into a pair of indoor shoes, a familiar habit for Chinese. The company provided white canvas slippers for this purpose, an affront to even my rudimentary sense of fashion, and everyone got a pair the first day except for me, because they didn’t have any big enough for my feet.
We were reminded to smile for the photograph that would appear on our identification badge and to wear it around our necks at all times. To flush the toilets after using the bathroom, to be polite and mannered when getting on and off the elevator, to show up for work on time and every day, to have a good attitude (“Your boss isn’t looking for who’s smart but who’s helpful”), and once again to wear clean socks. “Buy enough and wash them so that you can wear new ones every day,” another instructor, Christa, said. “We can look up your locker number and find out who has stinky socks and tell their boss.”
I looked around to see if anyone else was amused at this paternalism, but most of the other new recruits seemed engaged and interested. Some of them took notes. After Christa exited, Grace asked if there were any questions.
One man raised his hand. “Yes,” he said, “when’s the test?”
I chuckled at his joke.
“Right after class,” Grace answered.
There was even a session devoted to graft, during which we were told that it wasn’t okay to accept kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to offer kickbacks, it wasn’t okay to suggest giving or receiving a kickback, and so on. When I asked Andrew later for the reason behind all the lecturing, most of which seemed common sense to me, he said, “Because they’d all take kickbacks if they could.”
There is a term that describes the way interpersonal relationships work in China: guanxi. Basically, guanxi is a person’s connections, the social network in which members look out for one another—similar to the way family members can count on one another for a favor. Originally a value-neutral idea rooted in Confucian values, guanxi was critical to doing business in China and had lately become conflated with nepotism, cronyism, and other corruption.
“You mean that’s not understood as unethical?” I asked.
“Listen,” Andrew said. “I went to a Chinese university for my MBA. Plagiarism isn’t seen as such here. They copy everything. It’s all about the grades. It’s probably because of the entrance exam system. They compete for spots, and once they’re in, they’re not well served. It’s not like America, where there’s always the guy who buys the beer and pizza, provides the apartment, and sort of skates by. Here they’re cribbing on exams, and everyone’s doing it.”
In a twist to Deng Xiaoping’s famous pronouncement that it didn’t matter if the cat was black or white as long as it caught the mouse, the Chinese valued results, not processes. And now, in a race to catch up with the West, it didn’t matter how the cat caught the mouse. This created an environment where, as one popular saying went, China’s hardware (technology, machinery, materials) far exceeded its software (knowhow, critical thinking, moral reasoning, the entire education system). That’s why motion sensors in public bathrooms were installed upside down. And road and building construction flouted safety codes, established practices, and even basic physics in contractors’ haste to present a “finished” project that could pass eye tests. Across the street from the company, next to a landscaped park with winding stone pathways and groves of bamboo along a canal that would have offered the neighborhood a rare green space if the iron gates hadn’t been locked at all times, the local government erected and tore down a new administration building three times before the last try was deemed satisfactory (or the building and demolition contractors had enriched themselves enough).
WITH MY ORIENTATION completed, I was assigned to the business development department and given a desk in the reception area of a suite on the fifth and top floor, near the executive offices. From the windows, I had a view of the neighboring farmland on which had encroached luxury home communities, wanton monstrosities assembled from every convention of European architecture, adorned with swimming pools and tennis courts, and as far as I could tell, completely unoccupied. The multimillion-dollar properties had all been purchased solely as investment properties. At night the communities were completely dark.
My colleagues, all of whom had English names, consisted of a fellow American-born Chinese (or ABC), two local Chinese, and another born and raised on the mainland, educated in the United States, and returned to China in midcareer. Those were affectionately termed haigui, or sea turtles, and the company’s management was full of them. The head of the department, a genial Taiwanese man who received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell and a doctorate from Columbia, was known as one of the best, most Westernized managers in the company. He had struck me as efficient but not overly friendly during my phone interview, perhaps due to his compromised position. “You’re the CEO’s nephew,” he explained to me one day after work. “We had to hire you.”
My first duty was to read a semiconductors for dummies book. My second was to review about four hundred pages of electronic presentations about the company and its processes and products, full of acronyms and unfamiliar terms. When I asked where I could find the answers to my questions, I was told to check the Internet. But Internet access was so tightly controlled that the entire company had a fixed number of “permissions,” irrespective of employee numbers or needs, of which my department of six people had only two. Even though the company had grown exponentially since those permissions were first doled out, the quota had not increased. I couldn’t have imagined that an international high-tech company like my uncle’s could be so draconian, but Andrew assured me the Internet arrangement wasn’t the norm in China. It was a productivity measure concocted by the chief technology officer and head of the IT department, a buddy of Richard’s from Dallas known as “NYC,” whose seemingly innocuous initials were uttered with the same dread as “KGB,” and even Richard somehow didn’t have much veto power when it came to this. The Internet permissions were so coveted that anytime someone with Web access left the company, a frenzy ensued as other employees, and sometimes even entire departments, scrambled to get that person’s access transferred to them.
The idiosyncrasies extended to the phones, which didn’t allow callers to leave messages—China had leapfrogged voicemail as it tried to catch up with the world’s