Burnout Is What You Call It
24. HCMC - 2014
The fair was in District 7, in a convention centre built to accommodate the particular chaos of several thousand people looking for things to buy and sell at scale.
He’d come for three suppliers. Two sourcing contacts from a connection in Jakarta, one follow-up from a Singapore manufacturer who’d moved production here for the labour cost. He was setting up a new line. Cables had been the start — portable, easy to ship. Then power banks. Now this: t-shirts. A label called Bare. Classic cuts, fabric that hangs rather than clings. He’d stock it with brick and mortar shops first, then online. Rena wanted a run for her yoga members; he’d build that in on the side. His people in Manila handled the back-end. He came to fairs to find the things they couldn’t find remotely.
The hall was large and loud and smelled of carpet and printed materials and the particular ambition of a hundred booths all trying to be the one a buyer remembered.
He’d been doing this long enough to move through it without being caught in the pull of it.
He found the first two contacts quickly. Reasonable conversations. Pricing that made sense. He walked the third booth with less certainty — the manufacturer had moved three times in four years, each time slightly further from what had originally worked. He spent forty minutes there, noted what had changed, decided to give it one more quarter before recommending a switch.
By noon he’d done what he came to do.
He went to find food.
The lunch area was where the fair became honest.
Away from the booths and the practiced handshakes, people ate like they were tired. Which they were. The tables were full — a particular democracy of strangers who all needed the same thing at the same time and would not have chosen to share it under other circumstances.
He found a seat at the end of a table already occupied by three people in conversation and set his tray down.
The woman across from him was speaking to someone beside her — a few words in Cantonese, brief, the other woman Vietnamese Chinese from the softness under her consonants. The exchange ended. She looked down at the samples spread beside her plate, touching them without looking, the drape of one against the tray.
Malaysian, he thought.
She wasn’t looking at him.
He ate.
Twenty minutes later she said, without preamble: “You’re not buying fabric.”
He looked at her.
“The way you looked at my samples,” she said. “Not like someone who needs this. Like someone trying to work out who does.”
“Tshirts,” he said. “Classic cut. Looking for something that hangs properly.”
She picked up one of the samples. Held it out.
He took it. Felt the weight — lighter than what he’d been using, a softness that came from the finish rather than the weave.
“Too processed,” he said. “Loses the drape after a few washes.”
She nodded once. “Wrong direction.” She took it back. “Hall C. Taiwanese manufacturer, mid-weight cotton, natural finish. Good weight. Doesn’t pill.”
He noted this.
“Thank you.”
She looked at him briefly. Then she went back to her food.
He found the booth in Hall C.
She was right.
He saw her again at the end of the afternoon, at the edge of the hall in the particular quality of lateness that trade fairs took on when the serious buying was done and what remained was either persistence or winding down. She was standing alone with the slightly distant expression of someone calculating privately.
He stopped.
“The grip treatment worked.”
She turned. He caught a wry smile. He noticed she was pretty.
“Good.”
He said: “Do you want a drink.”
She looked up at him for a moment.
“One,” she said. “I have a dinner.”
They found a bar on the ground floor of a building that had been French once and Vietnamese for much longer. The ceiling fans moved the heat rather than removing it. The beer arrived cold.
She was based between HCMC and KL. Textiles — sourcing for three Malaysian brands and one she was building herself, slowly, without urgency.
“The slow version is better,” she said. “I tried the fast one.”
He asked what happened.
“It worked,” she said. “That was the problem.”
She asked what he did. He told her — the lean version, stripped of the history. T-shirts. A label called Bare — new, still finding its stockists. Cables, power banks before that. People in Manila, handling customer service. Jakarta, handling fulfilment.
“You rebuilt it smaller,” she said.
“Differently.”
She turned her glass slightly on the table.
“What made you stop,” she said. “The first version.”
He thought about this. Then thought about why he was deciding whether to answer it, which was a different question.
“My body stopped first,” he said. “I caught up later.”
She considered this.
“Most people say burnout.”
“Burnout is what you call it when you don’t want to look at what the body was actually saying.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Yes,” she said.
Outside the street continued its HCMC evening — the density of motorbikes and movement and something frying at the cart on the corner.
He didn’t reach for his phone.
She finished her beer.
“I have to go,” she said.
She stood. Gathered the samples from the chair beside her.
“I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said. “If the Taiwanese mill doesn’t work out, there’s a Vietnamese one in Hall A, similar weight.”
“Thank you.”
She looked at him once — with the same quality of presence.
Then she left.
He sat for a while after she’d gone.
The ceiling fan turned.
The beer was finished.
He walked back to the hotel through the evening heat, unhurried.