Oh yes, back then the reach of the Chinese government was short; and yet as I stepped off I was met with one of his minions. I was all alone, you must remember in a strange land full of very strange people. At first I was relieved. Oh you think you can imagine the relief, but you cannot. I had spent weeks sailing the ocean to get here, uncertain of anything. Tasked, on the death of everyone I held dear to overthrow the United States by myself! The country that was the breadbasket of the world! The country that was the arsenal of democracy!
And here was an act of mercy. Someone sent to greet me. A friend. But it was not to be friendly. He only told me that my own death was going to be the result if I did not have a plan in place and carry it out within the year; most of which was gone. Oh it was brutal, but more on that later.
In China, the power is in the forbidden city, but those in power ride on the backs of the most poor in the country who provide rice that it used as fuel for power by the rulers in China. So it was that I decided to see what was behind the power of the poor in this country who seemed to all drive huge cars. So it was that I found myself on a bus, air conditioned, which took me farther and farther from the docks to the area where the poorest of the poor lived.
I got off and walked around, still isolated, perhaps more so since every Chinaman I saw I knew to be potentially an assassin ready to end my life or a spy to make sure I was hard at work.
And what do you suppose I saw? Every yard was a car graveyard! There were not all shiny new cars, but broken down heaps! Why, these people were as poor as Chinamen, but even as I observed this I saw a large car drive up and park before one of these. A man stepped out with a six pack of beer which he promptly shared with those in the home. Oh how cool and sweet the cans looked to me. I eased closer, trying to blend in with the other refuse in the area and listened.
What I heard? These men were all friends from work which they did not stay at, but which they only worked sporadically. They worked in this factory and that factory doing the most menial of jobs, oiling equipment, working in assembly lines, those mind numbing businesses designed by this country in large part, which Ford turned into a science.
They enjoyed the work, although they complained of it. The one who did not work as much was the one who limped and could barely make the steps of the house, but still he worked. Still he enjoyed his job and the comradeship that came from it; refusing the least help from these people...who he knew. And after all, each of them bore the scars of their labor.
It made me lonely to listen to these men who shared this common bond of forced labor and I wondered if they would understand me perhaps if I came up to them.
This one tightened screws, this one cut the same metal day after day, this one oiled machines. But they all had these skills. And when the time came, they all went to the car graveyard and set to work, taking all the cars before them and using these cars for parts would make yet another car run a little longer. More than the parts, however, each used skills he had learned from work.
It all seemed so pitiful, and yet even as I watched, a gem of an idea began to form in my head.
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