Under an overcast sky the heat wave pressed on this mid-July Sunday, just as the
meteorologists had been predicting for the past week. Forewarning, however, often
paralyzed Bill. The more he learned about possible or remote disasters, the more
worried he became. The gloom and doom spread by the local stations since January
amid record rainfall depressed him for months. In the end, nothing bad had
happened to him, his family, or anyone he knew. All the worrying in hind sight
looked ridiculous, but he couldn't help it. Lugging a family-sized cooler fully
packed with fruits and water, Bill started for Fremont where he was spending the
past month sprucing up his old house for sale.
He bought the 1969 four-bedroom bank-owned dilapidated property in 2008 when the
economy took a nosedive amid the mortgage derivative crisis. The market was
still falling, but he couldn't wait to get out of the one-bedroom apartment in
north San Jose, which he shared with his wife and two-year-old boy. With a 15%
down payment, his monthly mortgage was two-thirds of his rent and six years
later, he paid it all off.
His ambition was to fix up the house. He painted the place inside-out, ripped
off dirty old carpets, and nailed down a layer of plywood, and on top of it, a
bamboo floor and with the help from Fausto, his Mexican neighbor, put in a new
kitchen, paved the backyard with red concrete blocks, and replaced all windows
with modern vinyl double-panes. A few years later, they remodeled the interior
and one bathroom.
Aspiring to be self-reliant, he purchased tools and tried to do many things. But
30-years of schooling and a career in tech did not a handyman make. He was
stingy and hasty on jobs big and small, e.g., flooring and painting, and the
results left much to be desired. He had never grown competent over the years and
each time had to envy the know-how and work quality of his skilled laborer
friend. 12 years passed and the family moved to the Peninsula. It was a new
three-story tower and no additional work was needed.
If it were not for his layoff in April and his nephew's moving out in June,
which led to his decision to sell the house, he probably would never have a
chance to further his education in homeownership.
Bill looked down at his bare veiny arms under the mid-morning sun. One decade of
physical discipline had chiseled the fat away and revealed a pair of sinewy
limbs. They reminded him of his grandpa and uncles, peasants in northern China,
and how as a boy he used to watch their muscular bodies at work, piling corn
stalks sky-high, pressing down the lever to pump underground water, shouldering
200-jin burlap soybean sacks, hand-cranking a tractor to life, or building a
wall brick by brick. They seemed never hurried and there was a rhythm to their
movements. It was as if they were expressing nature and harnessing an invisible
ingredient of life and it was beautiful to see.
With determination and harder work, Bill escaped menial jobs but at 50, he seemed
to arrive at the same place as his uncles did when they were much younger. Like
them, he seemed to have found his pace and would no longer hurry, which annoyed
a few important people, his last boss, e.g.
Sahana did not dispute his technical abilities but Bill must have felt like a
stone in her shoe. He was chronically late for, if not absent from, 10pm online
meetings with colleagues in Chennai. Since the company had gone Agile, a process
aiming at improving productivity and quality through rituals such as daily
standup meetings, these rendezvous had become more frequent. (Only that when
asked about collaboration across time-zones, the Agile instructor who taught
them simply said no.)
Bill was an odd ball to start with. He never shared his colleagues' passion or
even curiosity for cars, travel, restaurants, gadgets, etc. He skipped lunch and
rarely had meals courtesy of the company, ordered online and rushed in at noon
by young, pale, foreign, somber-looking servers in uniforms. While others acquired
height-adjustable desks, essential for health these days, he stacked four
cardboard boxes under his laptop when he wanted to stand. Driving a 14-year-old
beat-up Honda, he looked through the shiny Jaguars and Teslas in the parking lot
as if they were air. In his educated opinion, cars as well as humans should show
scars through life.
An able self-driven programmer, early on, Bill contributed the best code he had
ever written in his career. The memory subsystem he created replaced the
existing schemes, was instantly adopted by several teams, and had powered the
company's products for seven years without a single bug filed against it. As for
software bugs in other parts of the system, he did get to the root causes of
them, but before that, like the Roman Fabius, he preferred delaying and avoiding
over-communication and was rarely proactive in the directions Sahana wanted. In
meetings, he exuded an air of arrogant indifference that could be smelled across
oceans. His silence belied his cynicism what a meaningless game and waste of time
it was.
The truth, however, was that the company bought his time and he did not have the
right to decide how to spend it, not even in the best interest of the firm. On
office days (After the pandemic, three days of the week they come to the office),
he often worked from home in the morning and arrived at 1:30pm after his martial
art class.
When Sahana pointed out in a one-on-one that he had not sent weekly reports for
a month, he returned innocently: "If you wanted to see it so much, why didn't
you remind me the first week?" "I need to remind you? We'll have to agree to
disagree on that" was her icy incredulous reply.
And that led us to his worst sin, i.e., his obdurate refusal to bow to superiors.
Nobody told him that to his face, but he knew. At 50, Bill still believed the
story that all men are created equal, which was why he came to the Land of the
Free. Where he worked, however, acting out of that belief is dangerous as it was
easy for higher-ups to expect submission or even obeisance from subordinates,
especially when they all came from hierarchical Asian cultures. Migrating to a
Christian country in the age of globalization does not dispel the caste in their
collective mind.
In this sales-centric firm, most programmers come from India and East Asia and
typically English is their second language. In internecine disputes, vital in
assigning blames and doling out awards, engineering truth is the second important.
Often the one who can create a story with the right key words in smooth English
carries the day. One manager used to say "There are non-technical solutions to
a technical problem." Here, questions are often traps or instruments intended
to show dominance.
In the last couple of years, a weird thing happened as Bill started to slow
down. Facing a question, especially a pointed one, instead of getting back right
away, he would take a deep breath and calmly repeat it, as if to make sure he
heard it correctly, before proceeding to form an answer, deliberating on every key
word. It gave him time to think and sometimes he would add his own
interpretations. This practice disarmed and led to the analysis of the inquiry
itself. Often, flaws were revealed and the inquirer had to rephrase or supply
details to make the question stand. At the least, this gave Bill a sense that he
had some control and was not merely driven with his back against the wall. At
times, it even felt as if he were the one in charge and others were submitting
questions for him to review. He took them sincerely and helped searching for
answers. Even if he failed to find them, he could not personally lose because it
was a team-effort.
One thing he could not help was that his very presence can make some feel
inferior. Between 40 and 50, the once drooping obese Chinese tech slave filled
with a drunken desire for money and success had morphed. With discipline, he
traded in some extra forty-odd pounds of body weight for an athletic physique,
with some of the beauty that ancient Greeks and Romans attributed to their gods
and heroes. Someone observed that it is hard, if not impossible, to snub a
beautiful woman: she remains beautiful and the snub recoils. This seems to apply
equally to a man. His free air, proud chest, and swagger were hard to ignore and
they failed to endear him to cold, colorless, unhealthy men and women with no
other passions but a thirst for success. What an about-face: he was one of them
10 years ago.
The moment he realized that it was not about how well he would finish the task
in the Performance Improvement Plan, which he was placed under since Feb, Bill's
effort to save his job fizzled. After giving a recorded talk about one of the
software modules that he maintained, he was dismissed the next day over zoom for
unsatisfying performance. The terms were good: a standard severance and he could
apply for unemployment benefits as he was laid off and not fired. Unlike in the
past, however, he felt it was going to be a while before he would start working again.
