Liu Li sat down in the window seat, trying not to make too much noise. She secretly observed her new surroundings. The office was quite spacious, and the terrazzo floor was so polished it reflected your image, much more sophisticated than the cement floor of her factory's technical department.
At the next table sat a bespectacled man, who looked quite young. He was frowning at a thick foreign language book, tracing lines on it with his fingers, and muttering to himself. Diagonally opposite him was a woman with two long braids. In front of her was a huge blueprint, and she held a drawing pen in her hand. Her wrist was suspended in the air, and the lines she drew were fine and even, clearly showing that she had received formal training.
Not long after, Team Leader Chen came over with a stack of documents and placed them on her desk; the stack was surprisingly thick.
"Comrade Liu Li, please familiarize yourself with the situation first." Chen Siyuan's tone remained flat. "This is a catalog of relevant domestic and international technical documents that we have collected so far, as well as a summary of processing problems reported by various cooperating factories in the early stages. Please sort them out and classify and archive them according to type and urgency."
Liu Li stared blankly at the pile of documents that was almost half a foot high. This job... sounded like pure paperwork, and didn't seem to have much to do with the "technical problem-solving" she had imagined.
"Okay, Team Leader Chen." She didn't ask any more questions and nodded in agreement.
Chen Siyuan glanced at her, said nothing more, and turned back to his seat.
Liu Li opened the top document, which was filled with dense English and Russian text, interspersed with complex charts and graphs. She recognized some of the technical terms, but still struggled to read through the whole thing. She then opened another document, an internal report from a research institute, filled with terms like "stress distribution" and "modal analysis."
She understood a little. They were assessing her worth.
She calmed herself, picked up her pen and new notebook, and began to tidy up. When she encountered foreign language she didn't understand, she circled it; when she saw unfamiliar terms, she wrote them down in her notebook, planning to look them up in reference books or ask someone for help when she had the chance.
The office was quiet, with only the sounds of turning pages and writing. Occasionally, people would discuss issues, but it was always about unfamiliar terms like "Fourier transform" and "finite element method," topics that Liu Li couldn't easily join in on.
When it was lunchtime, everyone got up one after another. The man next to me who had been reading a foreign language book closed his book, rubbed his eyes, looked at Liu Li, and politely asked, "New comrade, shall we go to the cafeteria together?"
"Okay, sure." Liu Li quickly stood up.
On the way to the cafeteria, Liu Li learned that the man's name was Zhou Wei, a graduate of Tsinghua University; the woman who was very good at drawing was Sun Mei, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. There were several others, mostly graduates of prestigious universities, or transferred from various research institutes.
In the cafeteria, everyone naturally sat down at a table. The conversation quickly returned to the project, discussing something about "dynamic response," with rapid-fire delivery and a lot of technical terms.
Liu Li ate her meal in silence, listening to their conversation. She felt like a stranger who had wandered into someone else's living room, unable to join the conversation. She could sense that these people meant her no harm, but the invisible barrier created by their different educational backgrounds and work experiences was like an invisible glass wall, keeping her outside.
Seeing that she hadn't spoken, Zhou Wei probably wanted to give the newcomer some consideration, so he turned to her and asked, "Comrade Liu Li, what was your main area of work at your previous unit?"
"I... worked in the machining workshop, and later in the technical department, mainly solving some specific problems on the production site, and also made some small innovations," Liu Li said honestly.
“Oh, you have a lot of frontline experience, that’s good.” Zhou Wei nodded, his tone very polite, but Liu Li could tell that this “good” carried a hint that “your approach is a little different from ours.”
Sun Mei smiled but didn't say anything. However, the fleeting look in her eyes made Liu Li feel that her background as a "worker technician" seemed a bit...unrespectable here.
She ate her rice with her head down, feeling a little uneasy. At the Hongxing Factory, she had earned respect through her skills and problem-solving abilities. But here, it seemed that people valued academic qualifications, theoretical knowledge, and the ability to understand those convoluted foreign languages and formulas more.
This invisible barrier was thicker than she had imagined. It seemed that her previous experience in the factory wouldn't be enough to gain a foothold in this elite environment. She needed to find a way to break down this unseen wall.
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