2012 — Guangzhou
7. Where the squeezing stopped
The client had needed someone to go.
David had said yes before the sentence finished.
He told himself it was the account. That he needed it. That the margins on this one would carry two salaries through the quarter and that was reason enough to get on a plane on four days’ notice and spend three days in factories he’d never been to checking specifications he could have verified by email.
He told himself this on the taxi to Changi. He told himself this at the gate. He was still telling himself this somewhere over the South China Sea when the drink cart came and he ordered water and swallowed two capsules with it and looked out the window at nothing.
The air at Baiyun was the first thing.
Not bad exactly. Just present in a way Singapore air wasn’t. Thicker. Something industrial underneath the humidity, something that had been burned or processed nearby and hadn’t fully dispersed. The sky a particular shade of white that wasn’t cloud and wasn’t sun. The Pearl River Delta in March, the smog sitting over everything like weather that had forgotten how to move.
He stood outside the terminal and felt it on his face.
The taxi driver didn’t speak English. David had a printout with the factory address in Chinese characters, supplied by the client, and he held it up and the driver nodded and they moved into traffic that had its own logic, its own negotiated rhythms, nothing like the compliance of Singapore roads.
He watched the city through the window.
Wide roads. Construction everywhere, the permanent scaffolding of a place that hadn’t decided yet what it was becoming. Billboards in characters he couldn’t read. Trucks carrying things he couldn’t identify. The occasional flash of something green between the concrete — a tree, a strip of scrub — gone before he could hold it.
His mind ran the numbers.
Battery specifications. Discharge rates. Cycle life. The client’s brief open on his laptop, the tolerances highlighted in yellow, the questions he needed answered before he could sign off. He went through them in order. Systematic. The way he always worked — structure first, then fill it. He had done this ten thousand times. His mind was good at it. His mind would keep being good at it regardless of what his chest was doing.
The squeezing arrived somewhere on the expressway.
Not bad. Just present. A reminder.
He put his hand flat against his sternum for a moment, feeling for something he couldn’t name, then took it away.
The factory was forty minutes outside the city centre. The taxi turned off the expressway onto a road that got narrower and then narrower again, past low buildings with roller doors open, past a canteen with plastic chairs outside, past a row of motorcycles parked with the particular density of vehicles that live somewhere rather than visit.
The building itself was three storeys. Concrete. The kind of grey that had once been a colour and given up. A sign above the entrance in red characters with a small English line underneath: Precision Electronic Components. Est. 1998.
A man was waiting outside. Mid-forties, round face, a polo shirt with the company logo, holding a paper cup of tea that had gone cold. He smiled when the taxi stopped. Not a performing smile. Just — acknowledgment. You’re here. Good.
His name was Mr Chen. His English was functional and direct. He shook David’s hand once and led him inside.
The fluorescent lights were the first thing David noticed.
Not the good kind. The kind that had been running for years, flickering at a frequency just below conscious perception, making everything look slightly more real than comfortable. The concrete floor was clean but marked — the permanent staining of industry, oil and compound and time worked into the surface until it was part of the material. The air smelled of solder and something plastic being heated and underneath both of those something he couldn’t identify, something mineral and faint.
The machines ran.
Not loudly. Just continuously. The sound of things doing one thing repeatedly, with the patience of things that don’t have a choice about whether to be patient.
Workers in grey uniforms moved between stations. Heads down mostly. Hands doing what hands here knew how to do. Nobody looked up when David and Mr Chen walked through. Not indifference. Just — focus. The work was the thing. He was not the thing.
David felt something in his shoulders release slightly.
He hadn’t known they were held.
Mr Chen walked him through the line. Explained the process in short accurate sentences. Pointed at things. David looked at them. Asked questions from his list. Mr Chen answered them without elaboration, without selling, without the particular performance of a supplier who needs the account. Just: this is the discharge rate. This is the cycle life. This is what happens at temperature extremes. Here are the test results. You can take them.
He handed David a folder.
David took it.
They walked to the next station.
At some point David stopped ticking boxes on his mental list and just — watched. The woman at the third station, her hands moving through a motion she had performed so many times it had stopped being movement and become something else, something closer to breathing. The man checking tolerances with a gauge, the small adjustment he made without looking, the way his body knew the correct pressure without having to calculate it.
Nobody here was performing competence.
They just had it.
Mr Chen led him upstairs to an office with a glass wall overlooking the floor. Tea arrived. Not from a machine. From a thermos that someone had filled recently, the steam still coming off it. They sat and went through the folder together and David asked the remaining questions and Mr Chen answered them and the numbers were good and the timeline was achievable and there was nothing preventing him from telling the client yes.
He should have felt relief.
He felt something else.
Below them through the glass wall the floor continued. The machines continued. The grey uniforms moved through their stations. The fluorescent lights made everything look exactly like what it was.
He watched a man eat lunch at his workstation. A plastic container, a pair of chopsticks, rice and something dark. He ate without looking at his phone. Without looking at anything in particular. Just eating, between one task and the next, his body doing what it needed and then returning.
David’s chest did not squeeze.
He noticed this.
He sat with his tea and his folder of specifications and noticed that for the past — he checked his watch — two hours, his chest had not squeezed once. His shoulders were somewhere lower than usual. The calculation that ran constantly in the background of his mind, the one that tallied responsibilities and projected risks and modeled scenarios, had gone quieter than it had been in months.
Not silent. Just quieter.
Mr Chen was saying something about lead times.
David turned back to him. Nodded. Made a note.
Outside the glass wall, the floor ran on. Honest and unglamorous and completely indifferent to how it looked. Getting on with the thing. The work and the body and the light and nothing extra.
He thought about his studio.
The light on the long table. The mockups. The calibrated smiles. The borrowed urgency that everyone brought in each morning and left with each evening and no one had chosen and no one could put down.
His chest did something then. Not the squeezing.
Something quieter. Something that felt, if he sat with it long enough to find the word, like recognition.
Mr Chen was waiting.
David looked at him. Smiled. The kind that didn’t require anything.
“The numbers work,” he said. “I’ll confirm with my client tonight.”
Mr Chen nodded. Refilled his tea without asking.
Below them, the floor continued.