#wenruo

[mitsundere]

xun yu this is a crime

[moraceaez]

roommates with roomba 

first day of work in 2017 tomorrow TT

[mitsundere]

supposed to be xun yu. he's so beautiful that i cant even draw him well lol

[moraceaez]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[moraceaez]

Fengxiao had been cycling through the TV channels for the past minute or so, and Wenruo was starting to get a headache from the disjointed nonsense blaring at him.

“Do settle on something now or just switch it off,” he said irately without looking up from his laptop, “it’s not like you’d be watching it.”

Fengxiao ignored him, one finger still mindlessly mashing the next button on the remote control. He had long ago declared that there was nothing but bullshit on the land channels, and their wide-screen TV was only good for his Playstation and as secondary display to watch Netflix streamed on his laptop.

“Studies show background noise is correlated with increased productivity,” he muttered, staring at the rapidly flickering TV as if hypnotised.

“Why don’t you listen to your usual screaming noises?” Wenruo had never understood–and would never understand–the appeal of heavy metal.

“I’m bored,” declared Fengxiao. He finally gave up on the TV and chucked the remote aside. Someone was singing and people were clapping. Wenruo wondered if people clap listening to Fengxiao’s kind of music. Fengxiao certainly is not the clapping kind; the only applause he had ever given was the slow, sardonic kind.

Fengxiao lied down the length of the sofa and brought a stapled bundle of paper over his face. He clicked his pen against his temple and made wild ticking movements down the page.

“What are you working on?”

“Cheng Yu’s bullshit peer review,” said Fengxiao. “You’re done with yours, right?”

“Yeah.” He did it on the day he received it; it was classified as an easy task on his to-do list, and so Productivity demanded that it be the first to be ticked off.

“Figures. Who did you do?”

“Yue Wenqian.” Hardworking, always taking the initiative to start a project, somewhat gruff to his colleagues, sometimes he worried if he took on too much on his plate at one go. He hoped he didn’t come across in trying too hard not to mention his disabilities. 

“Cool,” said Fengxiao. He sat up and started scribbling on the paper against the headrest of the sofa. “I’m doing you.”

Wenruo looked up from his screen. Fengxiao was rapidly filling up the second of the free response question: the constructive criticism section.What qualities can this colleague work on? 

“I don’t think you are supposed to tell me that,” said Wenruo. “And isn’t it an online survey?” In tandem with its new green image, Cao Wei group had discouraged printing in favour of digital documents. Every email signature in the company now implored recipients to not print any documents unnecessarily in order to save the world.

“Nothing beats good ol’ pen and paper,” said Fengxiao. He was still writing away as he spoke. “HR would be giving you a typed copy of this–presumably heavily edited, so it’d regrettably have less entertainment value. The anonymity would be pointless anyway, you’d be able to guess who wrote this from how shockingly well this person knows you.”

The show had broken into commercial. Visit Jiangsu province: Suzhou. The West Lake. The Suzhou gardens. The Grand Buddha. The channel repeated this ad three times in a row. And then it was repeated three more times within the space of the commercial break. Wenruo raised an eyebrow at Fengxiao.

“How well do you think you know me?”

Fengxiao raised an index finger at him, putting him on hold as he turned over the paper and scribbled on.

The show came back from the commercials and someone else started singing and the audience started tearing up and clapping. Fengxiao stood up and handed to him the paper.

“For your review, Xun lüshi, although I reserve the final discretion as to what I choose to submit to Cheng Yu. ” He rubbed his hands together and headed to the door. “I’m gonna pop over to the corner store and get some beer.”

Wenruo watched the door close behind Fengxiao before turning to the paper in his hand.

He had read many peer reviews in his professional career before. All of them were mind numbingly dull. No one had anything substantial to say about him. He was capable. Reliable. Professional. Trustworthy. Good head on good shoulders. Criticism: nil. Blank. N/A. Maybe too intimidating in that way perfect people make you push yourself beyond your own capabilities? (question mark always included).

He skipped the first section (“On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being poor and 5 being excellent, rate this colleague’s performance on the following”). He squinted at Fengxiao’s handwriting; black spindly things that make every character look like an arachnid species.

What are this colleague’s best strengths?

A row of words had been zealously crossed out. The surviving characters were squeezed underneath the massacre.

pretty useful for a lawyer

A particularly sustained high note had inspired a torrent of applause from the TV that drowned out Wenruo’s chuckle.

What qualities can this colleague work on to improve their performance at work?

Xun lüshi thinks bleaching his hair is the epitome of rebelling against his family. (But it was undeniably funny when those illustrious Xuns freaked the fuck out at the thought that their precious Wenruo is becoming a delinquent (or worse, a tasteless commoner mindlessly emulating ‘pop culture’) and flew him back to be subject to an intervention. How does this affect his work performance? It hints that under his calm demeanour and perfectionist zeal lies a loose cannon who thinks that dyeing his hair is a brilliant way to reassert his identity. He’s not as rational or logical as he seems. The danger is that there’s no way to tell when he would break down.

Wenruo ran a hand through his hair and rolled his eyes. Fengxiao only knew this because Gongda had broken down and told him about this one skeleton of the Xun family closet after several rounds of alcohol persuasion. He also recalled that Gongda had suggested that Wenruo was the reason he dyed his own hair once he reached Beijing. Fengxiao had triumphantly pronounced him a corrupting influence upon stumbling home that early morning (as well as grunting an unsolicited admission that the two Xuns, with their fairy tale pale skins, did make their light hairs look good).

(He’d like to think he had been a good uncle to Gongda. His only advise to Gongda had been the one he had told himself, which sounded much better on paper than voiced out loud: he should take full advantage of being away from the family to find himself. He didn’t tell Gongda his conclusion, that the colour of his hair aside, he was, truly and wholly, a Xun.)

Fengxiao’s scribbling continued. He was far from done.

It’s not as if he suffers from a lack of imagination. One of the few pleasures of life he allows himself to indulge in is fiction–he loves the Song of Ice and Fire books, but not the Game of Thrones TV series, he thinks it betrays important themes of the book for the sake of titillation. He had entertained the thought of writing previously. No time for that now, he would say in his sagely way. And then he would proceed to convince you how writing contracts and agreements was like writing a story, how it has to have a narrative structure, and a hero you root for. That is sad. That can’t be healthy.

Wenruo had lifted up his pen to scratch all over this paragraph. He could feel his set of Song of Ice and Fire books staring at him from its perch on the bookshelf. This Guo Fengxiao, he thought, who was he to make fun of contract drafting. A good contract has to be structurally sound and quietly persuasive, like a good story. Of course all these business types took it all for granted: they think yelling out their stance during a negotiation, and then punctuating it with a handshake, doth a contract make. They can’t even understand the strategic thinking behind insisting on a HK arbitration clause or an exclusive Chinese jurisdiction clause.

And reading ambitious novels and drafting complicated contracts are more than enough for him. He’s not a writer, and he never will be. That’s okay with him. (But that doesn’t mean it’s okay for Fengxiao to bring it up like that. He had offered that little bit of who he had given up in exchange for a little bit of who Fengxiao had given up.)

I used to think Xun lüshi was conservative. How else would you explain someone who still hasn’t moved out of a flat he shares with a pig of a roommate despite having the money for a place twice as big? I was wrong. He’s simply afraid of disappointment. Not as much of being let down by others as letting others down. He has set a high expectation of himself in other people–he knows others expect him to be perfect. When you’re perched in such a precarious position, of course you’d put a premium on stability. Don’t upset the balance, don’t upset anyone: he fashions himself as the counterweight to the forces in his life.

How is that not a desirable trait to bring to the workplace? It is, I know I can’t argue otherwise. But being a reliable, efficient pillar at work is not all Xun lüshi is. He is so much more than what he allows himself to be. His colleagues and this company deserves a fuller Xun Wenruo.

“You’re not submitting this,” said Wenruo once Fengxiao returned with empty hands. Fengxiao folded those empty hands against his chest.

“Cheng Yu wants an honest appraisal and constructive criticism of my colleague, and I’ve done just that here,” said Fengxiao. He kicked at the door so he could bolt it secure. “You don’t get any say in this.”

“This isn’t an appropriate review to send!” said Wenruo. He waved the offending paper in the air. “It’s inaccurate. It is a false statement of my character, for one, and if you hand it to HR, you’d have defamed me.”

The TV was still on. It was now showing the evening news: talking heads were discussing how good the economy was despite how bad it was supposed to be, how good their country was despite how bad it was supposed to be.

Background noise. It distracted Wenruo enough to let Fengxiao snatch the paper out of his hands. He should have used his height to his full advantage. He should have held it over his head (and then use his other hand to hold Fengxiao a safe arm’s length away to keep him from tickling or tackling him).

“Did you just try to threaten me, Xun lüshi?” Fengxiao smirked his slow wide smirk. He shoved the paper in his hands behind his back, and brought his face closer to Wenruo’s. There was no twangy saccharine smell of alcohol in his breath. “You should know better than to challenge me.”

“I do,” said Wenruo. “I know how to play your game, Guo buchang. I’m going to find who is the unfortunate soul to be reviewing you, and I’m going to use my authority in the company to dictate to then to write about how Guo buchang’s weakest area he should improve on is neither his crass attitude nor his misanthropic worldview, but rather, his overwhelming need to punish people who like him, as if he needs to ensure that no one likes him to prove a most ridiculous fact to the world. Buchang’s aloofness might win him deals on the business table, but it is detrimental to the morale of his colleagues and subordinates. I would suggest he work on liking himself just a little bit more, or at the very least, learn to accept that there are people who unfortunately have decided to care about him, regardless of his wishes, and stop making life difficult for them on that account.”

Fengxiao held his stare. The smirk twisted into something smaller, something more piercing and colder. Wenruo was very rarely the recipient of this chilling display of contempt. Just the sight of it almost made him recoil from the thought of challenging Fengxiao again.

“Nah,” drawled Fengxiao, “nah, not you.”

He knew people talk about them, about how they were polar opposites, black and white, yin and yang; he knew they wonder how they could stand each other, that old adage of opposites attracting each other long proven to only stand true for paramagnetic metals anyway. He was the one who would buy morning drinks for everyone; he was the one who would insist on paying for his own drink with the most number of coins an amount could be broken down into, harvested from the neat piles lining up one corner of his desk. He was the legalist who stood for order; he was the mathematician-turned-businessman who loved chaos theory so much he completed his thesis on it. How did they not end up killing each other?

(Isn’t it frustrating not to be able to read a person? said Gongda’s voice in his mind even though he couldn’t remember exactly who had asked him this.)

“Then maybe you don’t know me that well after all.”

(Not as much as pretending you can’t read a person who tries so hard to be inscrutable, said his own voice in his mind even though he had never, and would never, say this aloud.)

Fengxiao drew back. An eyebrow was raised still higher. The smirk returned. He went to his room without another word, leaving Wenruo alone with the babbling TV to stimulate his mind.

A few days later he received an email from HR. His anonymous peer review was attached, to be read on his screen instead of printed in order to save the world.

There was a solid column of ticks under '5’ in the first section that shot up the page as he scrolled past it.

What are this colleague’s best strengths?

writes good contracts

His finger was still flicking at his mouse scroll wheel when he realised he had already reached the bottom of the page.

What qualities can this colleague work on to improve their performance at work?

hair doesn’t befit his profession

The email also contained a link to an online survey that asked him, on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being least useful, and 5 being most useful, how he would rate this anonymous peer review exercise on his professional growth.

He ticked '5’ and clicked submit.

[moraceaez]

it’s been a month and a half since i posted this and the (chinese? global?) economy is still spiralling down the drain.

[moraceaez]

There’s no running away from trying to make sense of all the capitalist shenanigans happening in the story, so I’ll try to do just that under the cut. Please excuse any mistake or ignorance; I’m not a finance or business student, and everything here is the result of a common law company law education, one semester of Chinese Law, and a google crash course on portfolio management, M&A and takeovers. 

PS this took place years before the current Chinese stock exchange crisis. 

S-s-shhoow me the money!

On Dong Zhuo

Dong Zhuo was never a real gangster/mafia; he dabbled in societies a little when he was young, but he was too physically weak, and too smart to rise through the ranks and stay there. But he kept his contacts with the underworld. That was how he met Lü Bu, then a bored, incredibly violent young gangster who had a zeal for fame and fortune. 

Dong Zhuo’s main company is a holding (parent) company--I can’t think of a good name, so let’s pretend everyone refers to it as Dong Zhuo Holding (”DZH”) for now--that has its fingers in a lot of big (state owned) infrastructure companies. The biggest companies in China are still mostly state-owned or state-monitored, through state-owned companies controlling the shares and/or the director/supervisory boards (China has a peculiar system mashing together independent directors and a supervisory board, the two monitoring systems found in civil law corporate governance, although it seems none works effectively alone, and even less so together). After years of hustling/blackmailing/bribing hardwork, Dong Zhuo managed to cobble together an impressive portfolio in these companies; he was the largest non-state owner in a significant proportion of them. He also managed to get himself or his people on the boards of many of these companies and maintained a huge influence on others. He knew how to play the fear and greed game very well. 

DZH’s stocks are traded in the stock exchange, although Dong Zhuo and his people retained a lot of control in stock ownership and board constituency. He increasingly gave Lü Bu more and more power in DZH--he didn’t have family he could trust, and he kept dangling shares and positions in DZH as carrot and rewards to Lü Bu, who always completed his tasks spectacularly. He didn’t think of Lü Bu as a crude vulgar boy who even understood this sophisticated world until too late. 

An anomaly in DZH’s portfolio is a wholly-owned construction company he acquired unceremoniously ('robbing’ would be a good term for it) from a Liu clan. It’s not a public company, but when Dong Zhuo got on board it started doing very well due to a portfolio of big projects from state officials (cough) and intricate highly beneficial networks. When Dong Zhuo took over the company, he screwed over a lot of minor shareholders and investors, including Cao Cao, who was declared bankrupt and had taken loans from not very nice people in order to start up his business. If Chen Gong hadn’t helped him out, he might have ended up in several rivers several provinces away. 

Cao Cao got back on his feet with his family’s help (both Xiahou and Cao) as well as some other talented individuals he managed to win over. Xiahou Yuan, during his stint in the military, stumbled upon signs of a new mine in the west (he was a geology student; the degree that doesn’t seem useful until you stumble upon black gold or liquid gold while walking around). He worked together with some of the more established infrastructure and mining players such as Ma Teng (Yuan Shao was willing to share some contacts) to exploit the new mine. 

Cao Cao could now set his sight on Dong Zhuo. The Yuans were interested; everyone was. But even with their combined financial might, that didn’t mean they could take Dong Zhuo or DZH on; Dong Zhuo’s web of corrupt and/or terrorised officials and his underground connections proved to be as an effective deterrence as his iron-fist grip on DZH’s board and shareholders. 

The Yuans were willing to provide the project with some funds--it was a half-hearted gesture, something that was barely a ripple in the Yuans’ coffers, and it would be sourced from offshore shelf companies that would not be easily connected to the Yuans if anything went wrong. 

But Cao Cao managed just fine. Guo Jia came up with a plan to make DZH finance its own hostile takeover. They managed to pile ownership of cheap DZH stocks through various agents and companies using tactics that might not be as dirty as Dong Zhuo’s--but every corrupt official has their price. 

It was Xun Yu who came up with the idea to go to Lü Bu. 

Guo Jia had meticulously planned and timed each event of the climax of this story. The deluge of public exposure of Dong Zhuo’s evilness and corruption (many evidences of which were anonymously provided by Lü Bu) brought down the share prices; it took everyone by surprise (the surprise less being the scale of it and more that such a powerful and well-connected figure could be exposed like this), except for Cao Wei, who was already buying the shares as rapidly as they were being dumped. Cao Wei became the highest non-Dong-aligned owner within a few hours, with influence on a handful of other shareholders, enough to force a shareholder meeting. 

The police were forced to act on the scandal quickly and moved to arrest Dong Zhuo, only to find him dead in his luxurious condo--he had committed suicide from the sheer shock and fear of what was going to happen now that all the dominoes had fallen. No one contested the will, the will that named Lü Bu beneficiary of Dong Zhuo’s shares in DZH. Lü Bu became the most powerful member of the board by virtue of everyone else’s fear of him. He easily persuaded them to approve of the takeover. 

And just like that, in the space of one night, Cao Wei became the modern corporate David vs Goliath story. 

Housecleaning

Xun Yu was the one who warned Cao Cao and everyone else of the danger Lü Bu posed. Lü Bu had hardly popped his celebratory champagne open when he found that Cao Wei had started a derivative action suit suing him for breach of director duties. Even though the case went for settlement, it ended up with him declared bankrupt.  

The Yuans (represented by their army of companies) managed to get a bigger proportion of the war spoils (the damages from the settlement; Lü Bu’s and Dong Zhuo’s shares) than the proportion of their contribution towards the takeover. They quickly gained more control in the shareholders and in the board than Cao Wei had. Their greed were too obvious; they were especially lusting after DZH’s portfolio in the state-owned companies. 

Cao Cao was more modest in his goals; he only wanted the construction company Dong Zhuo had, the same one he was booted out of some years ago. He didn’t want to share this with the Yuans or other DZH stakeholders, but the construction company wholly owned by DZH, meaning any decision to the company was still made by the DZH board. The Cao Wei people also realised the urgency of getting the fuck away from the Yuans for now, especially when they were now a minority in DZH. 

The wolf 

Guo Jia had a plan. It hit a snag for a bit because of a seventeen year old kid who was too cool to play games like any other kid and instead got his kicks off the stock exchange. They thought his name was Sima Lang because he used his older brother’s credentials to sign up for an account. When Cao Cao asked Cao Pi about Sima Yi, he said he only knew him by name since they were in the same class; he was smart, but quiet in class. Cao Pi had never talked to him. 

The plan was something like this:

DZH shares had been steadily improving since hitting rock bottom when they got rid of Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu.

Since they already didn’t trust one another, Guo Jia wanted to exploit that mistrust and further rouse the Yuans’ (and those of other DZH shareholders) suspicions that Cao Wei was planning to takeover the Yuans’ ownership of DZH. He had a plan to crash the DZH stock prices to bring about that suspicion. Sima Yi foiled this when he posted online that this was Cao Wei’s bluff, and that people shouldn’t buy into it and dump their shares, and he argued very convincingly that DZH’s shares were instead very worthwhile now. The post went viral, the share price didn’t drop and instead increased in price. Sima Yi sold his DZH shares then for a quick fortune and was about to laugh on his way to the bank when a bunch of big men in black brought him to Cao Wei’s office at Soho Sanlitun. 

Guo Jia was annoyed that he had to come up with an alternative plan, but what had to be done had to be done, and it was easy to farm the culture of suspicion and mistrust already brewing in the DZH board. 

When DZH shares went down again (hmmmm...) Cao Wei suggested to the DZH board to sell the construction business since anyway DZH hadn’t been managing it well since Dong Zhuo’s downfall, and really it was more trouble than it was worth especially when compared to DZH’s other portfolios. Cao Wei put on the pressure and the board hurried agreed to sell it to this small company owned by some construction startup from the west.

After the sale, it was not a good idea to have this big influx of cash in DZH, and Cao Wei humbly suggested a buyback scheme... maybe theirs? They would even sell it for a discount, lower than the already low market price for DZH shares now. Cao Wei again put on the pressure, and the Yuans were already thinking that it was a good idea to also put some distance between themselves and Cao Cao. Even though some of Yuan Shao’s advisers advised against it, they agreed to buy Cao Wei out of DZH. 

The small company they sold the construction business to was owned by Zhang Xiu, who was primed for a merger with Cao Wei. After the merger, the new Cao Wei now owns the construction company.

As it stands now

Cao Wei as a parent holding company has several businesses, such as the mining company, and then now the construction company that is growing bigger by the day. The shares in Cao Wei construction is owned in a majority by Cao Wei, the employees (compulsory by law anyway), a bunch of of Cao/Xiahou family members, Zhang Xiu and his family etc. It has been open for a limited foreign investment for sometime now, and it is also now trading preference stocks without voting rights in public. 

The Yuans aren’t in the construction business (another reason why they didn’t worry too much about Cao Cao running away with the construction company); they’re an old family business dealing in property development and management. But Cao Wei is rapidly seeking to expand to that field (that’s why Guo Jia is obsessed with Tao Qian’s shophouse and the neighborhood it’s at), and the both of them would have to contest a rapidly developing and urbanising north/north-east China. For now, the property development part of Cao Wei is still a department under Cao Wei constructions (more specifically a bunch of folders on Guo Jia’s shelf). 

Lü Bu re-enters the picture here when he and Chen Gong approached Yuan Shu about crippling Cao Wei, Lü Bu desirous of getting back what he thought was stolen from him, with interest in vengeance increments. He will do whatever it takes, even if it means slipping back underground and giving up this humble hard life at the carwash even he was quietly enjoying. 

Cao Wei has some leverage over Lü Bu in that they could any time go to the justice system with some evidences of the terrible things he had done under Dong Zhuo’s orders, but their hands were tied since Lü Bu himself was smart enough to keep evidences--or get them from terrified officials he could easily scare--of Cao Wei’s underhand methods they resorted to when they were trying to take over DHZ from Dong Zhuo. Lü Bu knows he’s the underdog against Cao Wei and it suits him just fine; if Cao Cao could do it last time, there was no reason he couldn’t now. 

Somehow an old shophouse an unassuming former shoe salesman had been quietly fixing and running is the center of all this. Liu Bei didn’t ask to be suddenly thrown into the deep end of shit like this, but drowning is not an option; he will learn how to swim and make it to the other side.