Ander spent the next few days on the sofa. He was too afraid to go outside for fear of drifting further over budget than he already was, and had convinced himself that watching many consecutive hours of game-shows on TV improved his language and comprehension skills. More likely, they were inducing in him a mild form of lunacy. Contestants introduced themselves, engaged in low quality banter with the host, and were then humiliated fighting one another for appliances and archetypally exotic vacations â all in essence intermediate level understanding.
Meanwhile, Lady Zhao had returned to her weekday life in an office in Xintiandi. She worked for a large chemicals multinational, an icon of French industrial might run out of Toulouse called Enterprise Chimique Nationale, or ECN, a somewhat misleading name since it was not State owned or managed. Moreover, it was headquartered in Luxembourg, listed in London, and present across four of the planet's continents, with Europe being only its third largest source of income.
As an ambassador-without-portfolio, when not shackled to her desk doing stakeholder analyses (her most hated duty), it was Lady Zhao's role to go on good-will missions to landlocked Chinese provinces where she would parrot the company's philosophy of "safety first, products second." Sometimes, she spoke to school-age kids or students of process-engineering with the mission of convincing them that working for the nebulous entity that was ECN was aspirational in itself; sometimes she found herself in out-of-the-way villages where the residents were disgruntled, and her responsibility was to convince them that, considering hypothetical reputational costs and marginal capacities, it simply didn't make commercial sense for ECN to poison their water supply. If she was part of a team sent to liaise with yet another level of regulators, in addition to making up the numbers (show of force was a strategy of ECN's), she had to be able to speak about the figures and measurements confidently enough to convince the other side the company knew what it was doing better than they did, and that ECN was operating beyond best practice.
The added value she brought as a junior ambassador of flexible utility, Lady Zhao had once had to articulate during a round of staff reductions (the company was profitable, but it always seemed to upper management that it could be more profitable), was her fluency using difficult business and technical concepts in Chinese, French and English â not a common skill set, she emphasized.