The Money Is Green (4 page)

Crystal pulled her hands back and set them on her lap. She stared down at the table. “I didn’t want you to watch me. You don’t belong here. You ruined my parents’ marriage and now you’re trying to ruin my relationship with my father. I’ll be counting the hours until you leave.” She picked up her books, placed them in her backpack, and left for her room.

Janine followed her and stopped at the entrance to her bedroom. Crystal sat at the edge of her bed, her head down, staring at the cover of her schoolbook.

“I don’t know what you’ve been told, Crystal, but here’s the truth: I met your dad for the first time long after your mother had moved to North Dakota. I had nothing to do with their break-up. I have no reason to lie to you, Crystal. I just hope you will be fair and give me a chance.”

Crystal looked up and nodded at the door. “I’ll give that some thought. If you don’t mind shutting the door behind you, I’ve got homework to do.”

Janine shook her head and closed the door. She walked back to the kitchen table and sat down in silence, tears welling up in her eyes. She placed her head in her hands and wept softly.

F
OUR

T
he older SUV bounced along the bumpy road leading to the outskirts of Shanghai. Dust from the vehicle left a large cloud behind them, rising up to join the already-dirty sky. On either side of the road, peasants carrying large bundles of wheat on their backs trudged methodically as they made their way to their given destinations. Once in a while one would look up blankly and watch as the vehicle passed them by. Every few miles Jason looked back to the skyline of the city, barely making it out due to the heavy concentration of smog. For the last two days his eyes itched and his throat felt scratchy, as if he had severe allergies. Unfortunately, he had found nothing in the drug store that could make them go away.

The driver of the SUV, a small Chinese man with two missing front teeth, pointed up ahead to two large smokestacks about five miles away spewing thick gray smoke into the atmosphere. “That’s the plant over there, the place on the right. We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

Jason squinted at the facility. “Really, fifteen minutes? It looks like it’s just up the road.”

The driver shook his head. “We have to weave our way through a residential section.”

As they got closer to the plant, the road grew crowded with more peasants walking in both directions, carrying various foodstuffs and live poultry to and from the city. Hundreds of bicycles clogged the road, making travel by car hazardous. Jason noticed the homes along the road were not much more than cardboard shacks with corrugated tin roofs. Young children stared at them with quizzical faces from the front doors of the shacks as they passed.

He’d never really thought about poverty in China before. It was his impression that China’s economy was expanding so fast that everyone was benefitting from it. He was obviously wrong.

They pulled up to a guard shack that protected the entry to the plant. A newer chain link fence with razor wire at the top surrounded it. A guard in a military uniform stepped out of a small shack and stopped them. He said a few words to the driver then quickly waved them through, and they drove down a long asphalt road to the front of the sprawling plant. From the street, the facility didn’t look that large, but once they pulled up to the front of it, Jason could see that it had to be at least three football fields long and half as wide. The walls were a concrete tilt-up construction at least fourteen feet high with a few small windows up by the top and all covered by a flat composition-tiled roof. There was a large parking area around the building, but Jason saw mostly company trucks and very few personal autos. The site was devoid of any landscaping and almost looked like it had been dropped on this deserted spot.

The driver, now tour guide, motioned for Jason to follow him. He walked quickly through a pair of glass doors into a very modern office complex. Secretaries, managers, and other office staff hustled back and forth between offices and the building behind them. The sounds of shouting and yelling reverberated around the office, which to Jason seemed like organized chaos.

After a few introductions, he was handed a yellow hardhat and they walked through the office to the production facility of the photovoltaic panels. A blast of hot, stuffy air hit Jason as he stepped inside the building. He stood in awe just outside the doorway as he observed the massiveness of the plant. Dozens of forklifts whipped around the concrete floor, lifting hundreds of finished solar panels stacked on wooden pallets and placing them in one corner of the building.

Workers moved around like ants, some toiling over huge vats of silicone to make the back of the panels and then another group using large wooden oars to stir pools of aluminum that ultimately turned sunlight into electricity. Jason had never seen anything like it. So many activities going on at once made it hard to fathom them all. There is nothing like this in the US, primarily because it would never be allowed. The working conditions in here were atrocious, and it had to be at least one hundred degrees, with very little ventilation and no air conditioning.

Particles of thick dust flew around the air from the saws cutting the silicone into four-foot by three-foot panels. As hard as it was to breathe in the area around the city, Jason felt it was almost worse here.

Jason followed as they walked down the assembly line, which was lit up like a football field by large fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. He tried to listen to the explanation of the guide, who was almost yelling over the sounds of the forklifts, saws, and other machinery. The plant seemed like a beehive of activity, where everything was in constant motion.

He motioned the guide over to ask him a question regarding the panels and, when he couldn’t hear the answer, motioned toward the office. The guide nodded his head and headed in that direction.

Soon they were standing behind a glass partition on the second floor above the offices. The sounds were still coming through the glass, but they were quieter now.

“Wow!”” Jason exclaimed as he watched the flurry of activity through the glass. “That’s an incredible operation.”

A manager with a microphone screamed something in Chinese at the workers in the factory, and they seemed to jump and move faster. Jason looked over at the man and asked the guide, “Who’s that and what’s he yelling?”

The guide leaned over and looked past Jason to see what he was referring to. “Oh, him. He’s the production manager. He has a certain quota of solar panels to put out per day. In order for him to meet the quota, he has to check every fifteen minutes to see where they are. If they’re falling behind, he implores workers to speed up production.”

“What if they don’t hit the daily quotas?” Jason asked. “They seem to be moving at full speed to me.”

“If the quotas are not hit, the manager will fire every lead person and move someone else up.” He pointed to a group of men in white coats walking up and down the plant. “Working here is an honor and it is a disgrace to be fired. There are thousands of people in Shanghai that are ready and willing to step in and get a job here.”

Jason watched the men in white coats shout at the other workers along the assembly line. Man, the only things missing are the cat-o-nine tails to whip those poor slobs into pushing harder. It’s almost hard to watch this. He turned to the guide. “Do you have any safety guidelines here? With all the equipment flying around and the men working as fast as they are, you’ve got to have accidents. How do you minimize that? Is there anyone here who’s in charge of watching out for the workers’ safety?”

The guide shrugged. “No, we have nothing in place for that, nor do we have anyone overseeing safety. This is not America. These workers are paid to put out a product in a specific timeframe and that is what they do. Sometimes accidents happen and we deal with them as they come. But the management does not spend a lot of time worrying about accidents.”

Jason’s eyes widened. “That would never fly in the US. This plant would be shut down in a minute with all the things that are going on.”

A toothy smile spread across the guide’s face. “That is true, and that is why we don’t build that many panels in the US. What is the name of that solar panel manufacturer in the US, the one that got the five-hundred-million-dollar loan from the government to make solar panels?”

“RayTech,” Jason answered.

“Ah yes, RayTech,” he said, grinning. “They have to follow all the work rules and pay the high wages, which we don’t. You can see there is no way they’re going to make their panels cheaper than we will. We’ll bury them.”

Jason surveyed the plant as he listened. We might be making them cheaper and we might bury them, he thought, but at what human cost? He turned to the guide. “How do our panels hold up as far as warranty?” he asked. “Are we as good as the US manufacturers?”

“Of course we’re as good. The good news is these panels don’t have any moving parts that can break down. They only degenerate over time and have a lifespan of twenty to twenty-five years. Our panels are as good as any on the market.”

The guide’s cellphone rang and he answered it, speaking in quick, short bursts and then hanging up. As he slipped his phone into his pocket, he took a deep breath. “That was Madam Chen. She wants me to bring you back to the hotel and go over what you’ve seen. She requests your presence at dinner at seven o’clock tonight. Do you have any questions before we leave here?”

Jason shook his head. “No, but if I think of any, we can discuss them on our way out of here.” He took another look around the facility and then followed the guide out the door and down the stairway back to their car. I’m glad I saw it with my own eyes since I wouldn’t have believed it otherwise, he thought.

As they got in the car and drove off back the way they’d come, he started doing some mental calculations in his head. Finally he
asked, “How many solar panels a day does that facility put out? I’m trying to do the math in my head and I can’t grasp it.”

“We do around thirty thousand panels a day out of there. One third of those go to Europe, primarily Spain and Germany, and the rest go to the United States.”

Jason sat back in his seat. Thirty thousand panels a day! That’s a huge amount of inventory they’re generating. I know we’re not selling anywhere near that number. What is Mei Chen not telling me?

♦

Jason sipped a glass of 2003 Silver Oak cabernet and waited for Mei to arrive. Waiters in dark slacks, white coats, and black bowties walked stiffly between tables at the Cherry Blossom restaurant, bringing crystal decanters of bottled water or refreshing drinks from the bar. The floor-to-ceiling windows gave an excellent view of the exotic gardens of the Shanghai Grand Terrace Hotel. Jason watched a flock of colorful peacocks strut along a walkway as brightly colored macaws and birds of paradise flitted from tree to tree. From the off-white-paneled walls and crown molding with the gold-gilded trim to the marble floors with individual Persian rugs under each rectangular table, it all smelled of money.

Without his asking, he was served a small dish of Black Sea sturgeon caviar with hard-boiled quail eggs and a cup of cream of mushroom soup with truffle oil. Out of curiosity, he tasted the caviar and found it rather good. The room was half-occupied with mostly Chinese men, a small number of Europeans and Americans amongst them, but even so, the noise coming from the staff and customers was quiet and muted except for an occasional clinking of glassware.

He heard a small commotion coming from his left and looked up to see Madam Chen striding purposefully through the restaurant. She wore a light blue business suit with a frilly white blouse and black pumps. The restaurant staff were frozen in place and every one of
them bowed as she walked by. Many of the diners looked up from their meals and whispered to each other.

Mei held out her hand to shake before sitting next to Jason. A waiter immediately appeared to open her white cloth napkin and place it over her lap while another one poured her a glass of champagne. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long,” she said, smiling. “I was meeting with David Wilson. He owns this hotel, along with two dozen others around China.” She leaned forward and whispered as though telling him a highly regarded secret. “He’s a very smart and very rich man. He might be useful to us someday.”

Jason nodded. “I’ve heard of him, but he’s a hotel developer. Why would he be useful to us?”

“Be patient, Jason. I’ll let you know what he can do in due time. So,” she set her glass down and picked up a menu, “you got to look at our solar panel production facility.” She studied his face for a second. “What did you think of it?”

“It’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a manufacturing facility so large. As much as is going on, I’m in awe of how many solar panels that place produces in a day.”

She smiled again and snapped her fingers without looking away from him. A waiter immediately appeared. “Let me order for us, Jason. I’ll give you a taste of Shanghai cuisine.” She spoke in rapid fire for thirty seconds as the waiter scribbled furiously on a small pad. When she stopped, he nodded, picked up their menus, and headed for the kitchen.

Seeing the worried look on Jason’s face, she leaned over and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, I only ordered two exotic dishes—some eel and frog legs in a white wine sauce. The rest is fairly traditional.” She leaned back in her chair. “You can see that, because of the size of the plant and the amount we produce, we need to sell a large amount of product in a short time. That’s why the Copper Mountain project is so vital to me. Right behind that project is the Antelope Valley project in the western Mojave Desert. That project
will be twice as large and will cost around one point three billion, of which eight hundred million will be used to buy solar panels.”

A mixed green salad was placed in front of him and Jason cautiously picked up a fork and tried it. This is a little on the tart side, he thought, but still pretty good.

“That’s a seaweed salad with sesame seeds,” Mei pointed out. “It’s very good for you.”