China Mountain Zhang (29 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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So at night I sit with flimsies in front of me, studying energy distribution and environmental monitoring. Normally because of air-flow, room size, room adjacency, exposure and window size, different rooms have different temperatures. The system for Wuxi Complex monitors temperature and humidity. But for an organic system, temperature is relative. My hands and feet are cooler than my head and chest. If I am sitting, I will find the room colder than if I am up and moving around. And different people respond to temperature in different ways, some are perpetually cold, some aren’t. We are sensitive to light as well; a well-lit place feels subjectively warmer than a dark place, and radiant heat from a window may heat one small area differently than another. Many buildings adjust room temperatures. The Wuxi Complex system also monitors the people jacked into it. People tell the system they are cold or warm and it adjusts. People, in fact, become nerve endings for the system. And the rooms are ingeniously structured so as to transfer heat from windows to darker areas, to increase the amount of outside light that comes in. It is part of the reason that the place is such a maze. Again and again I study a room and think, “Isn’t
that
clever.”
The number of ingenious little details in this Complex stagger the imagination. It is not only that the particular details are so good, but that they dovetail. The way a room is shaped to create heat transfer also allows for efficient use of space, creates offices that have some privacy without requiring that they be walled off, allows enough ambient noise for human comfort and privacy but
not so much that noise becomes an irritant. I request the system alter a detail, see what would happen if a window were put in somewhere else, only to find that the result, while bringing in more light, reduces the effectiveness of energy absorption, or affects ventilation. It’s as if this building were the result of biological evolution.
During the afternoon I draw paper houses. I sit, attuned, and imagine very simple buildings.
“Don’t plan the building, let the system do that,” Woo Eubong says. “You just let go, let your mind drift and do what it wants.”
At first I don’t even produce buildings, for two days I produce scribbles. Then one day I produce a very shaky-looking pyramid sort of thing. I believe it is an accident, but Woo nods. “A pyramid is a very efficient shape, using the minimum number of surfaces. The only thing with fewer sides is a circle.”
“Engineer Woo,” I say, “I can detail a building a hundred times better than this.”
“Certainly. But could you detail the Complex?”
“I’m not an architectural and engineering team,” I say.
“Wuxi Engineering Complex wasn’t detailed by a team, it was detailed by one woman, using, of course, feedback from the departments that would be using the building.”
I gape.
“Exactly,” she says, smiling. “A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected, but compromised and adjusted, ideas.”
“It can’t be done. It had to have taken years.”
“It did take over two years, but it can be done. I can’t do it, there aren’t many people who have the ability to do work on that grand a scale.”
“But all those little details,” I say.
She stops for a moment. As I said, she is a tall woman with a square face. She stands out among the company people, not for her height, but because she is different. Many of the engineers
have this air about them. They are more casual—today she is in black coveralls—and they tend to work different hours. Sometimes they come in late, sometimes do a lot of work at home. When I came I thought there were two classes; cadres and workers. But the cadres sometime refer to organic engineers as talent.
“An example,” she says. “Stand up.”
I stand up, a little nervous.
“Walk to Hai-hong’s desk.”
I walk over to Hai-hong’s desk, Hai-hong glances up at me expectantly, her look saying, “What do you need?”
“Woo Eubong is making an example,” I say.
Hai-hong nods and looks back down at her work. I walk back to Woo Eubong. “Yes?” I ask.
“When you passed your desk, you changed direction. How many degrees? How many steps did you take? How many meters to Hai-hong’s desk?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You didn’t calculate?” she asks. “You didn’t analyze the situation and determine the best possible method to get to Hai-hong’s desk?”
“No,” I say, smiling a little, “I just walked over.”
“But you had to figure the best way to walk. In fact, standing in front of me, your muscles are constantly adjusting to keep you upright, correct? Muscles in your legs and feet adjusting constantly to make sure you don’t balance too far one way or another?”
“Well, yes,” I say, “if you want to think of it that way.”
“But you don’t think to stand, or walk, or dance. Gymnasts don’t calculate trajectories.” She is smiling, too.
“I understand,” I say.
“Good, I want you to make buildings the same way that you walk to Hai-hong’s desk, thinking about the product, not the process.”
“You are going to try to make me a mental gymnast,” I say.
She shakes her head. “No, Li Jian-fen, who built this Complex, she was a gymnast. You, I am teaching to walk.”
 
 
I work using a tutorial. It’s a feedback system, when I start to think analytically the system cuts out. I sit down and try to imagine a space. I try to determine the qualities I want in the space. I try to imagine a sense of this space. I imagine white walls, realize that I have no idea of the roof and consciously start to sort through possible roofs to go with the concept I have—
System cuts out. Flimsie prints and I have a tangle of schematics. If I look I can sort of identify four walls. The timer indicates that I was in the correct mode for twenty-two seconds. About average.
Woo Eubong glances over my shoulder. “You are a stubborn man,” she says.
I shrug, not knowing what she refers to.
“You aren’t using the system, you’re staying in your own head. You have the manipulative skills but not the storage capacity.”
I still don’t know exactly what she’s talking about.
She sighs. “Words don’t really explain what you should be doing, you just have to do it, then you’ll know.
Dao kedao, feichang dao.
” The first line of the
Dao De Ching,
roughly translated, means that “The way that can be spoken is not the way.”
She doesn’t look like the kind of person who would spout Daoism, philosophy out of the
Dao De Ching.
She has a short ruff of hair and looks like an athlete. A swimmer maybe, long straight lines.
“Maybe I can’t learn to be an organic engineer,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, surprising me, I expected (hoped) that she would say, “No, no, no, you’ll learn, don’t worry.”
“Do you have a lot of failures?”
“I’ve only trained two others, one of them learned it, one didn’t.”
“Both of them were young?”
She nods. “And correspondingly more flexible than us elders. I really wonder if we shouldn’t teach this to ten year olds.” She smiles and I realize she is joking. “Truly, you cannot teach it to ten year olds, because in order to do it, you have to have experience with buildings, have to have buildings in your memory.”
“When you do this, aren’t you really an architect?”
“Yes,” she says.
“I imagine architects do not really care for the idea.”
She shakes her head. “No, there are also organic architects. They come at the problems from a different direction, but basically they do the same thing. But I tend to sacrifice aesthetics for engineering, architects tend to sacrifice engineering for aesthetics.”
“Can I see some of the work of architects?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. She looks into the middle distance, her eyes drifting left as people’s eyes tend to do when they are querying the system. “I had them print out in your apartment,” she says.
“So I don’t get any time off.”
“Ah,” she laughs, “you are clever.”
Clever in Mandarin means almost the same thing as sly. I grin and try to look wicked. Then I make more scribbles.
 
 
I do not confess to her how frustrating this whole process is. I am here by a fluke. The University charts our actual performance against our expected performance. Once I had a tutor, and that helped my grades. Then my tutor died and, oddly enough, that helped my grades. I worked very hard. Everything else seemed sour but in the second semester I had a systems course and found something fascinating. I learned to tie systems into all my other courses. My projects were systems related. And I was tapped for a co-op job at Wuxi Engineering Technologies, where
I would be working with systems, because Engineer Xi, who reviews applicants for co-op positions, read one of my projects.
It wasn’t until the list was posted and people started to congratulate me that I even understood I had been awarded something, that for maybe the first time in my life, I have been succeeding at something. And now, I am failing. And wasting an opportunity for someone who could have learned this.
It is worst at night, sitting in that beautiful apartment, making scribbles, going over flimsies. I get cold, although when I access the system it tells me that the temperature in my room is in fact higher than normal. I wear a ridiculous sweater, one with leather ties, from New York. All I want to do is sleep, but I go back over the Wuxi Complex. How did Li Jian-fen learn to do what she does? On my black desk sits a smooth stone carved into a walrus. It was a Christmas gift from Maggie Smallwood the year I spent on Baffin Island. I thought that what I learned in Baffin Island tempered me. Haitao thought we were damaged. I thought we were simply different. Maybe he was right. Then again maybe I am just too old.
I imagine a space, a clean clear white space like light through ice (clarity and sadness and the round-eyed faces of the seals in Lancaster Sound, but this is unfocused, as is the memory of Haitao’s white clothes neatly folded by the broken window). I try to hold that, but everything seems formless. All right, everything is formless, I let it drift, thinking, the building will form. A room unfolds, but it’s hard to hold it, hard to concentrate without concentrating. The system has the capacity to hold it for me, just as it holds a building I am studying, but usually I am conscious of the system when I work with it. I am not even aware I have reached into the system’s capacity, tapped the system’s space.
For an instant I have vertigo, and then a complete lack of perspective. A multiplicity of options, substances to use for walls, shapes in my mind flowing and shifting like ice. Everything becomes mutable, nothing stable, there are no boundaries. I did not know the perimeters of my own mind because I never had any
sense that there was any more than my mind but there is a sense of my thoughts fleeing out and out and expanding and I feel as if I am diffusing—
Forty-seven seconds. My heart is pounding. The scribble is complex, beautiful, abstract and inhuman. It has nothing to do with building, it has nothing to do with me. I am having a panic attack, my heart is racing, racing. I want to get up, get away, but I don’t want to go out. I get up, go into the bedroom, lean on the chairback and take deep breaths, hoping I will calm down.
Deep breath. Hold a second, let it out. Deep breath, hold a second, let it out. I want to talk to someone. I don’t want to be alone. My heart won’t slow down.
Anxiety attack. What do I know about an anxiety attack? That it is unfocused fear. I sure as hell don’t know what I’m afraid of, although I know what started this.
I call Peter, my hands are shaking as I make coffee and wait for the system to put me through. What time is it? The system tells me it is 22:41.
Peter is at work, it’s morning in New York. I can’t go home for another six months. I close my eyes and try a relaxation exercise (my thoughts skittering like dry leaves). First, visualize a calm quiet place. But the place I imagine is the nightlandscape of Borden Station. The long inhumanly white sweep to Lancaster Sound, a black line of open water, and then the deep sky paling slightly at the horizon.
Go to bed. I leave my cup of coffee and crawl into bed behind the white gauzy curtains. It is a bed big enough for two. I leave the lights on, instruct the system to turn them off when I go to sleep and turn them on again if I wake up. I lie there awhile, listening to my heart pound, which makes me nervous, which means that my heart rate doesn’t slow (charming little feedback loop) until finally I guess I wear myself out, and eventually the fear subsides. I close my eyes and painstakingly imagine Peter’s living room, his couch. I remember where everything is in relationship
to me sleeping on his couch. I am sleeping on his couch. I am thinking about Peter and Engineer Xi. It is morning, and time to put on my red and black and go to work.
I feel normal, a bit tired but in the morning the room is only wearing in its insistence that I am not back home. I take my latest scribble to Woo Eubong.

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