Get a Job, Raining! Faulty Memory China, Part Three
In which our narrator finally goes to work.
It’s the tenth day of incessant rain and I’m starting to lose my mind.
My temporary apartment is on the 20th floor, facing Hangzhou’s grim river. The floor-to-ceiling windows are covered in a yellow slime that’s sometimes being pelted with fat, gross raindrops. At other times, it’s as though waves are crashing against the dirty glass, rhythmic and constant and maddening waves. The yellow dust stuck to the outside of the windows doesn’t get washed off, but instead it forms new disgusting patterns—Rorschach splatters that all look like bad decisions.
This is the time of the quaintly named “plum rains” that fall in the early summer all across Southern China. During this time, Hangzhou is constantly soaked. The plum rains manifest sometimes as cruel horizontal sheets, a kind of wet and inescapable constant wind that mocks umbrellas. When that wind lets up, the world is a permanent drizzle. Sometimes, in between, it simply straight-up pours. It’s also 30 degrees outside before the humidity, which is always 100% due to the air being comprised entirely of water.
I was finding it impossible to go outside. Toby, of Mediterranean stock, refuses to get wet. He’s offended by it. It is an affront to his genetics. When we step into the rain, he freezes, then turns and looks at me with an expression suggesting I should have known better. This, I think, is punitive behaviour and a life-long campaign of revenge for me having subjected him to a bath the first day that he wormed his way into my life, when I picked him up filthy and tick-invested off a pedestrian street in Istanbul. That day, he had patches of fur missing and splotches of green paint mixed in with the dirt, and the kindest thing I could think to do was take him to a vet and have him cleaned up. He whimpered and cried so loudly in the bath that I could hear him from down the street, where I was trying to have a coffee and ignore the whimpering and crying. From that day on, he despised water, especially that which he couldn’t see coming.
As a solution to this new damp life we shared, I ordered him one of those silly dog raincoats online. He would wear it proudly and comfortably indoors, but the second we were outside and the raincoat was necessary, he’d shake it free. This happened for a few miserable days in a row, and we limited our walks to the places of the apartment compound that had the slightest bit of tree cover. Before long, I did what anyone would do in a new country, wet and annoyed and alone with a wet and annoyed dog: I started walking him underground.
Beyond City’s five huge towers are connected by a vast, mostly unlit parking garage. In the mornings and evenings, we’d do long laps of the place, the water running down the ramps as churning grey rivers, pouring down the stars in thick brown waterfalls. We’d jump over puddles. I’d take a tennis ball and throw it for Toby in a disused corner. We’d steer clear of the rat-infested garbage pile that took up 1/5 of the parking garage, an informal recycling center that functioned on the principle that residents of Beyond City would throw their bagged garbage down one specific parking ramp, and someone would come along and open the bags to find anything that can be turned in for money, then leave the rest to rot and stink.
I only left the apartment and Toby to get food or to look at the dozens of other apartments I mentioned in the last post before settling on one across the courtyard in Building Number Three. It also had a view of the river, which you can almost making out during the constant drizzle, but can’t see at all during the other two variations of rain.
One of these days sitting around inside, I received an email from Alibaba telling me to accept my contract and to choose what is called a “flower name” in English. Having not started work yet, I had no concept of what this meant or how important it would prove to be; I simply knew that I have to enter some Chinese characters into a form to be able to read and digitally confirm my work agreement. The HR website gave scant clues (“pick a unique name of significance; must be in Chinese”) and so I typed random words that I liked into Google Translate and then pasted the Mandarin into the form. Time after time, they were taken, and I couldn’t move to the next screen. I tried a few dozen before I began to get frustrated and saucy and typed the names of things I saw lying around the apartment. “Window.” Taken. “Ruler. Used already. “Stapler.” Nope. I stared at the filthy glass, the driving rain. I hated it all so much.
I tried “Raining.” 下雨 (xià yǔ). It worked. At this point, I realized that there is no back button. Instead, I’m taken to a screen to view my contract and I click “Accept” (there is no “Decline” button). It’s done. I am Xiayu.
A few days later, in an effort to find a bit of grounding, Xiayu went to work.
Work would have structure and rules, I reasoned. Work would have people who spoke English. Work would have people! I missed people. Work might even have food I could eat that wasn’t the same rice noodle beef soup that I’d been eating for every meal because the waiter spoke a teensy amount of English and wasn’t scared of the dog. Those first few days in Hangzhou were many things, but above all they were lonely. I was looking forward to work. Work might feel normal!
These were the first of many assumptions about Alibaba that would quickly be proven incorrect. Others included:
Because they hired me and relocated me as a “foreign expert”—my work permit even said so!—and because it took nearly nine months for me to arrive for my first day of work, the company would be ready for me.
Because Alibaba was in the thralls of a huge internationalizing push, at least according to everyone I spoke to during the hiring process—they would have some support for new overseas employees.
Because it was a company with tens of thousands of employees in Hangzhou and more still around the world, the company would know how to integrate new employees, foreign or otherwise.
Because it is such a huge company, there must be a lot of very clever people who are doing very interesting things.
Because it’s such a rich company—Jack Ma claimed once that Alibaba was the world’s 21st-biggest economy—it must ooze dough, like Google or Amazon.
At the very least, there would be a computer and desk ready for me.
When I arrived at the gate of Alibaba’s Hangzhou campus on June 15, 2017, these bubbles began bursting rapidly.
The Alibaba campus is a very good imitation of a Silicon Valley tech hub, all cool honeycomb architecture and reflective surfaces and interesting shadows and bizarre installation art. From the main gate, where my taxi dropped me on the first day, it was undeniably impressive. It suddenly felt like I had ended up where the world happened, this swampy corner of this grim Chinese city. For the first time, and for a fleeting moment, I got it. I was happyish to be here.
The campus where I worked at isn’t even Alibaba’s main campus. The Xixi Wetlands campus is the true show-stopper, an imitation Google headquarters with eight enormous buildings encircling a reed pond crisscrossed by bridges upon which to contemplate bad career choices. At Xixi campus, free bicycles—including whimsical tandem bikes—are placed outside each building, encouraging employees to cycle between the far-flung office spaces, though Hangzhou’s monsoon climate prohibits this about 50% of the time. Xixi is where foreign dignitaries go, where deals are struck for trade agreements between sovereign nations and a private company, where Justin Trudeau’s bilingual messages to young women entrepreneurs are displayed on the jumbo screens. It’s where Alibaba truly hums. And it’s a dastardly, confusing place, laid out to deliberately confound and encourage chance meetings—mostly of people saying “excuse me but where is meeting room 6-5-1?!” (It’s the first meeting room on the 6th floor of Building Five, obviously. Or the fifth on the sixth floor of Building One.) Xixi Campus also has conceptual installation art strewn about, sometimes tasteful and sometimes bizarre, but is perhaps most famous for Jack Ma’s private Tai Chi gardens. It is an appropriate headquarters for a company with the ambitions and reach of Alibaba.
My office wasn’t quite as flashy nor quite as new, but it wasn’t some dusty, drab thing. Even here, there was an evident shine to Alibaba. It was an imposing—but playful—place. It assuaged my fears about whether or not this was a real company, let alone a serious international player in technology and finance. The red flags from the long process of getting to China, of “negotiating” with HR, were briefly pushed to the back of my mind. Instead, I felt excited to get started.
I fumbled with the VPN on my phone so I could access Gmail, and proudly loaded an email from my manager explaining how to get into the compound on that first day. I showed it the security guards outside of the gate, who promptly blinked and offered no response. “It’s my first day,” I beamed, and tapped the screen. They panicked in a way I thought was unique to China: not sure of how to help, they avoided eye contact and try to stoically ignore me. But my optimism was at an all-time high, and I smiled and tapped the name of my manager. Nothing. The security guard finally and uncomfortably explained something in Chinese and gestured to the side, the universal sign for “you’re in the way.”
Not to be deterred, I messaged my manager to tell her I had arrived at the agreed time of 9:30. It was a Thursday morning—Alibaba only allowed employees to start on Mondays or Thursdays—and was wet and hot, so I understood that my boss might be running late. It had taken me ages to find a taxi to get to the office. I waited. No response. Around 10 o’clock she came scurrying out to the gate.
“Drung?” she asked. This might have been spelled Jleung. “Are you Jleung?”
I was the only one there, but still looked around. The uniformed security guard showed the same blank expression, so it seemed that she was talking to me.
“Um, hi. Yes, hi,” I responded, maybe just hiding the confusion on my face. “I’m Drew.”
“Dreeeeeeung!” she explained. “So nice to meet you. We are excited to have you here, Jleung.”
This was Celina, a mousy Shanghainese woman who led the content team for Alibaba.com. I assumed, then and many times in the future, that I had simply caught her on an off day. She wore her hair in a tight, wet-looking perm, her thick glasses were always sliding off and she was fiddling and adjusting them constantly. She looked to have dressed for a different, far-more-joyful climate: a heavy red skirt falling just below her knees, thick white stockings, and a fuzzy festive sweater.
But no, this was her. She had previously worked in Shanghai for Hewlett-Packard, a fact she reminded her team of daily. (“Well this would never happen at HP, Deroong.”) She was usually on edge or distracted, always with her face close to her computer screen or her phone, always on the way to a meeting or taking a call and laughing shrilly and flirtatiously any time a man asked her a question—“Oh Jellllllllung! Of course there’s nowhere nearby to print in colour!”—and always, infinitely, dressed for the office Christmas party in 1985.
Only after working with her for a few months did I come to understand the deep well of her nervousness. Like many people who worked for Alibaba, Celina had left a comfortable, though complex and ambitious, life on pause elsewhere. Her husband and daughter lived in Shanghai, sharing a house with her parents. On Monday mornings, she would board the company shuttle bus in Shanghai at 6 a.m. and head directly to the office, nearly four hours away. She had an apartment in Hangzhou, but she hated it. It was a bed and refrigerator, and probably only the bed was used. She was at the office from 10 a.m. until well past dinner each day, except on Fridays when she would race to the bus at 6 p.m. sharp to return to Shanghai. She struggled with a workload that none of the rest of us on her team understood, for it never filtered through to us. She would video call her daughter every night to try parenting from afar. She worried constantly about money, as she owned half a dozen apartments in Shanghai and around Zhejiang province that she kept as investments or rented out to foreigners. Her husband didn’t seem to be involved in raising their daughter, focussing instead on his own career. He showed her no attention, but she lived in constant fear of disappointing him. She refused to allow herself to drink in the company of other men, even at group work dinners, actively hinting at some past indiscretion that she was forever paying for. She was a person who perpetually walked on eggshells, trepidation in human form.
She offered no explanation for showing up 30 minutes late. Instead, she asked how I was liking Hangzhou. “Oh Droong, Shanghai is much better. You must come to Shanghai.” I told her I’d been to Shanghai twice before moving to China, and liked it a lot. “That’s right, Gwereng. That’s right. It’s perfect there.”
Celina led me across the wet stones beneath the suspended honeycomb ceiling of the campus to the buildings, while I wondered why she was having such trouble with my name. She spoke strong English otherwise, after all. We passed the Starbucks, where one of my new teammates was waiting in the long queue. Celina poked him on the shoulder, and he slid off his huge headphones. “This is your new teammate,” she told him. He smiled broadly, and shook my hand. “You must be Javier!”
“Drew,” I said. I made sure to articulate. “Drew. Nice to meet you.” He laughed and apologized, asked if I wanted a coffee, flashed a maniacal grim, and said quietly: “Welcome to hell.”
We were off to a flying start. Celina led me up to the third floor, where the User Experience Design (UED) team sat. At 10 a.m. on a weekday, it was empty. By-and-large, the 50 or so members of the team showed up around 10:30. The only other person there was a handsome young British guy in jogging pants and a sweaty t-shirt, his face red and his brow sweaty, who Celina introduced as “Garisss.”
“Gareth,” he corrected. “Nice to meet you.”
After a few minutes of simple pleasantries, Celina took me to a small meeting room where I’d officially start my onboarding with Alibaba. There, I was joined by Nelly, from HR, and Javier, another new hire who was originally from Spain. This solved one of the day’s mysteries. Javier was joining AliExpress, Alibaba’s attempt to mimic Amazon as a consumer goods ecommerce platform. He wore the same expression that I assumed was on my face: bewilderment, amusement, confusion. There was comfort in that. It was short-lived.
Nelly, grappling with English and boredom, asked us to huddle around her computer to show us a company values video—a three-minute advertisement for working for Alibaba—while she fiddled with her phone. She explained with imprecision where certain vital areas of the campus were and told us we’d have a tour later. All the while, in the large meeting room next door, the 60 or so local staff who were joining and had the Chinese-language version of the same onboarding were shouting slogans and singing and dancing. “It’s a little different for Chinese,” Nelly offered by way of explanation, frowning a little at her bad luck for being stuck with us.
She proceeded to run through some basic rules of the company, none of which had been shared before and all of which were terrifying. At Alibaba, the human resources department seems to exist to fire people for violating these basic rules, and Nelly’s role in that process seemed to be to explain the rules and then quickly see if we would violate them so she could fire us. There are many ways to be fired from Alibaba, but three stood out: “data security” (removing any company files or leaking any of its data); “unethical behaviour” (preferential treatment of a particular vendor, giving or receiving gifts from clients, random things to be determined); and “discussing money” (including sharing with anyone else your “P” level, your salary, or any of the details of your contract). The negotiations suddenly made sense. Fountain could tell me whatever she wanted about my offer—“Everyone gets this!”—because I would be fired if I tried to verify that information. Once again: well played, Fountain.
Upon delivering these strict rules, Nelly proceeded to hand us our contracts. Side-by-side in a small meeting room. Clearly visible to one another. And then she just say back in her chair and stared at us. Javier and I turned slightly away from one another to read. Nelly nodded, then stood up and left the room.
“So, what level are you?” asked Javier.
“P7—you?”
“Nice. I’m P6.
“Cool.”
I read through the contract that I was seeing for the first time. The offer I had received before flying to China had only included the salary I hadn’t been able to negotiate and a few other other financial terms, but was very light on the full employment details, including working hours, non-compete clauses, and non-disclosure stipulations.
These last two were concerning. The NDA less so, as who would I disclose anything of these specifics to? It’s not like I’d be writing about it or anything. But the non-compete seemed ludicrous at the time: employees who quit or were fired were prohibited from working for any of Alibaba’s competitors for one year after leaving the company. Alibaba considered its competitors to be any company working in any field in which Alibaba has interests, which is every field. Basically, if you leave, you can’t work for anyone else for a year, but Alibaba offers no gardening leave or compensation for this, just threat of legal action.
“Have you seen any of this before, Javier?” I asked.
“Nope. Nothing.”
“What do you think about it?”
He paused, but I think just to appear to be thinking about it.
“Looks like a Chinese contract, all right,” he said.
Javier had lived in China for many years, worked a few different jobs. He knew the game.
“Looks illegal to me,” I said.
“In which country?” he laughed. That same old immigrant cynicism. I hope it wasn’t contagious.
I had no real answer to his question. For a brief moment, I considered not signing the contract and just walking away. The whole process of getting here had left a funny taste in my mouth, but this was the dodgiest behaviour so far. This was entrapment, probably. But I had already signed a lease and paid four month’s rent up front (40,000 RMB), my furniture was already somewhere in the Indian Ocean on a container ship (another 40,000 RMB I hadn’t yet been reimbursed), and my dog was already quivering in an AirBNB to the thunderstorm raging overhead. Of course, I was welcome to walk away. Everyone is. Yet who does? The stakes were too high now. I signed. I tried to console myself as before: it’s an adventure! But it wasn’t feeling less and less like an adventure and more and more like a mistake.
Still, onward and upward to greater things, I reasoned. It couldn’t get much lower. And I had other mysteries to solve, like “Did I have a computer?” and “If so, where was it?”
The answers were “yes” and “inside of a vending machine, obviously.”
When she returned, Nelly led us to what looked like an overgrown filing cabinet. It had rows and rows of orange drawers and was about 5 meters long, with a giant touch screen panel in the middle and a scanner for our employee badges. By tapping my badge on the scanner, I woke the vending machine from its slumber. My employee number and name flashed on the screen briefly, then one of the drawers suddenly popped open. Inside was a box with a laptop and other bits and bobs needed to be a modern corporate stooge.
This was cool. This was the future, I decided, and for a brief moment I forgot about the high-pressure contract signing session I’d just endured. Such was life here in China: prolonged periods of stress and exhaustion punctuated by moments of serenity and curiosity that obliterated the stress and exhaustion. The day-to-day could be grim and depressing, but every so often this would feel like adventure, that drug to which I had long since been addicted. I was once again on top of the world, and was able to ignore the contract misstep, the rain, everything.
Besides, it was nearly 1 o’clock, and I was hungry. My hiring manager, Kyle, had offered to take me for lunch in the company’s two-storey canteen, so I messaged him that I was free and he seemed surprised that I hadn’t already eaten. “Let’s hope there’s some food left,” he messaged back.
Over a bowl of sad rice with a side dish of limp bean sprouts in greyish water, Kyle and I discussed our dogs, live in Hangzhou, and China in general. He was quick to point out how I was dressed too seriously for the company. It was my first day of work, so I’d put on a shirt and jacket, no tie, with slacks and a pair of brogues. I was, he correctly pointed out in his T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops, seriously overdoing it. The canteen was mostly empty, but those who flitted about looked fresh from bed, dressed in flannel pyjamas or oversized T-shirts, wiping sleep from their eyes and desperately seeking the last of those grey bean sprouts.
This conversation with Kyle was low-key devastating. Throughout the hiring process, he had been an enthusiastic beacon of hope, a champion for a professional life in China. Now that I was here, he was glib and cynical like everyone else, teasing me for things I didn’t know anything about and exuding a kind of competitiveness that would define most of my male friendships in China. This was just the latest bait-and-switch in a weeks-long campaign of baits and switches, and I was already exhausted.
Meanwhile, around us, the staff of the cafeteria were starting to realize that no one else was coming to eat, and were taking their own lunch break. They sat at one long table, not speaking, all in their sweat stained uniforms and looking like the survivors of a particularly harrowing war. Kyle droned on about his time living on a construction site in Shanghai as a way to learn Mandarin and I watched the restaurant staff find benches to fall asleep on. There were no other diners, just me and this bragging American in his flipflops. Eventually I went back to my desk to find the rest of the team missing, and I turned on my computer to find out that my login credentials had already expired.
And so that first day passed, calamitously, slapdash, disorganized, and wild. The bold façade of the company from the main gate seemed now like a mirage—the glitz and glam of this shining edifice of technology and commerce being routinely tarnished by an engineer walking by in a black T-shirt emblazoned with eight-inch-high letters saying “FUCKBOY” or a tiny woman in a pink tutu walking slowly, eyes glued to her phone, into a plate-glass window. I spent the rest of the afternoon googling flights home and left at 4 o’clock, not sure if I’d be coming back.
***
Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):