Mandarine

By Dominic Billings

Yoland Fuchs believes in America. America made her fortune. America made her rice pudding empire.

Yoland seeks to expand Pud, her Pittsburgh-based rice pudding corporation, to China.

Yoland's intrigues aim to use her political machine, United States of Alleghenia, to harness the production of rice and high-fructose corn syrup.

Mandarine is a dark-humoured political novel, exploring American exceptionalism through the prism of pudding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Dec 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649694850

Book preview

Prologue: Gidelia

Gidelia‘s migration from Venezuela to the United States hadn’t been tortuous. Not like many attempting the mercilessly fraught journey from their neglected point of origin. To a more hopeful life of underclass, perilous employment. Performing menial, unwanted tasks, in the land of the big, northern neighbour. 

In Venezuela, Gidelia’s family was modestly wealthy, yet in the context of the Venezuelan societal stratification, the average plebeian would’ve considered her family upper class, whatever Gidelia’s protestations to undermine where she occupied in the country’s pecking order with misguided claims to modesty. 

She’d arrived eagerly first in New York City, residing in youth-filled dormitories she eventually found too crowded. She eventually resigned to the realisation, despite the exhilaration of the Big Apple, the way of life, trying to make do sustainably as an NYC resident was gruelling, even subsided by occasional payments from her father in Caracas. 

She missed her family with deep pangs of soreness. An effervescent occasion was any Skype call in rapid-fire, piercingly  excitable Spanish to her parents and siblings. 

Opportunities had arisen to make a life within the US, which both her parents encouraged, due to the devolving situation in Venezuela. Even her parents were considering a secure means to flee, whether the unanticipated shame of seeking refugee status in neighbouring Colombia, or some other more lateral-minded avenue. 

A close girlfriend from South Dakota that Gidelia had  befriended from her New York hostelling experience shared a job opportunity within a meat processing plant. The plant was one of the the largest in the country, with the capacity to process and pack over a million head of livestock for retail consumption.  

Gidelia’s resounding first reaction was a declarative negative, almost spiteful toward her friend for suggesting labour clearly beneath her. 

Beside her own pride wounded by the implication of, to her mind, ‘demeaning work’, Gidelia’s resentment also grew out of an implicit sense her Dakotan friend ought know her well enough. Gidelia's social standing and qualifications placed her well above production line handling of freshly-slaughtered, bovine and porcine flesh.  

Gidelia’s friend, Joanne was a native of the the prairies. Not un-pretty, a mildly lazy eye lending a bright-eyed, quiet, judgmental disposition, betraying her staunchly-conservative, Christian raising. Joanne had yet to lose her virginity, but had engaged in anal sex as a presumably permissible proxy, turning a blind eye to the etymology of the Scripture passage of the Lord’s smiting of the settlement of Sodom.  

Gidelia’s family was ideologically opposed to Venezuela's Bolivarian government, the most socialist leaning in the Western Hemisphere following Cuba. 

Her family was pro-business, considering the regime of Chávez and Maduro beyond corrupt, an unforgivable embarrassment to their nominal claims to support social programs for the poor. 

The Bolivarian regime claimed antecedents to the liberator and father of independence for several South American states Simón Bolivar. 

Gidelia’s family considered the Chávez-Maduro regime to be more akin to a kleptocracy. Likely profiteering from narcotics trafficking, additional to siphoning funds from the state-owned oil giant, PDVSA. Venezuela sat atop the largest oil field on the planet, albeit with properties of viscosity and other characteristics precluding cheap production and refining.  

Gidelia’s father had been an indispensable engineer within PDVSA, but had become increasingly marginalised early in the Chávez presidency to an untenable point. This precipitated a nervous breakdown, bed-ridden for a year and a half. The family, in this time, had relied upon her mother’s wage as a receptionist for a consulting firm. 

Her father eventually consolidated the wherewithal to resume a career as an energy market analyst, able to draw on leaks of information from PDVSA, and bureaucrats within relevant ministries. 

His seething resentment toward the regime had never abated. His precarious nervous state had never brought him close to the brink of outward support for opposition political figures. He welcomed US overtures to topple the regime, though was mixed on the efficacy of the impact of sanctions upon the people. 

A supporter of the US Republican Party from afar, Gidelia’s father had sent her on her way with a copy of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, by the US diplomatic doyen, espousing his realpolitik worldview. 

In any challenges from those who questioned how she could sympathise with sentiments toward an outlook which meddled in the sovereign affairs of her native continent in the past half-century - including Kissinger’s tenure of officialdom - her smug retort was to look at the state of her native Venezuela.

Teetering on the brink of a failed state, wracked by acute shortages of food and vital medical imports. Chronic rolling electricity shortages and suffocating debt, compounded by crushing US sanctions, hindering the importation of equipment parts to ameliorate the parlous state of the oil and electricity infrastructure. 

Also hindered, was access to the international financial systems, precluding the inability to meaningfully raise new bonds. 

Amid a master’s degree of international relations when she had arrived in New York to complete an exchange semester abroad, the decision not to return to her ailing homeland had been excruciating, not least because it implied a suspension of her studies. 

Therefore, the indignity her friend had bestowed upon her, to imagine, amid a master’s degree, performing the work a robot would soon be able to accomplish, could be worthy of consideration as a means to make ends meet in the US, was an indefensible insult. 

For Gidelia, to be among the working class, was an active choice to shun the capital class, to not be open to the spoils of enterprise.  

She could readily admit, she could at the best of times be a princess, petulantly claiming the centre-of-attention and moral high ground. She believed herself to be very beautiful, a vestige of praise showered upon her from her father as a child; now compounded by her boyfriend stranded in Caracas, in spite of been a little plump, her assured arrogance on the topic belying an easy beauty. 

Removed from her family and boyfriend, but for a video call, the realisation of returning home to a country cratering, becoming increasingly unsafe, had been the hardest to accept in her 25 years of life. 

Her heated protestations were retarded by her father, depriving her of agency in her decision-making, declaring she must stay in America. 

His remittances to her remained tenable. But over one call, he collapsed in tears. Removing himself from the call, Gidelia’s mother conceded the hard truth, even her father’s income may soon shrink measurably to even cover their own subsistence. 

A crisis point they almost never could’ve foreseen, such were the precipitous declines in wealth in the country, due to the phenomenal rates of inflation, reaching four digits, eviscerating savings.  

The implication was clear: Gidelia was well-advised to seek employment in America. 

Now, Gidelia’s father appeared to be backsliding into a state of breakdown. His precarious state left his immune system susceptible, and he soon fell prey to pathogens undiagnosed, due to testing capacity shortages. A victim of food and water systems no longer able to cling on to basic services, such as sufficient sanitation or electrical blackouts, hindering consistent refrigeration. 

At this juncture, Gidelia's father ill, unwilling to face his daughter via video chat under a pall of self-shame, her mother’s wages insufficient to remit abroad to her daughter, a panicked Gidelia contacted Joanne.

Gidelia apologised for her prior eruptions toward an offer of help, querying if the opportunity at the meat processing plant still stood. 

Joanne, an administrative officer at the plant, had secured her own job through her uncle, the head foreman, who was preferably looking for foreign labour to supplement his labour pool of a United Nations of workers on temporary visas. Such workers willingly accepted a minimum wage and negligible entitlements, too grateful or scared to demand more investments in occupational safety measures. 

In the emotionally gaping chasm between Gidelia's spiralling recognition that her lifeline to support from home was no longer tenable, and accepting Joanne's job offer, Gidelia had resolved her next step was temporary. 

She was educated to an elevated level, though unsure what traction Venezuelan degrees held Stateside. The idea of her education to this point being worthless in a country like America was inexplicable however.

---

Home for Gidelia became the southeast corner of South Dakota, bordering Iowa and Nebraska. 

Sedate, albeit with little sense of community beyond the activity in the car lot in front of the Walmart and other big box stores, she roomed again, like in NYC, with her pal Joanne, whom she grew to fully appreciate for having looked out for her with this job. 

Moving to South Dakota and developing a sense of where Joanne had grown up, allowed Gidelia to understand better how it was Joanne could’ve believed hard, but honest, work was not beneath her friend Gidelia. 

To Joanne, it was rather a hallmark of working life in her region of the country. It attracted a sense of pride and honourability, held in esteem by the average Dakotan. More so than perhaps a senior manager, as it meant to be among the people. 

In Venezuela, to be among the people, in such wretched manual work, was to be of a lower caste. Held in low regard, even to the self-worth among such labourers, always conscious of their lack of education, whatever work ethic they were able to muster. 

Gidelia’s world became cuts of livestock loin and eye fillets. Her ancestors several generations before had been ranchers on a handsome plot tending beef, sowing a sense of tangibility with her lineage, albeit through a lens detached from landowning fertile pasture, in lieu of industrialised efficiency, under neon lighting, within a factory operating 24 hours a day.  

Gidelia cried herself to sleep every morning after a shift for the first four days, mercifully after Joanne had left for work around 8.30am. 

Thereafter though, Gidelia accepted her lot, a vestigial grudgingness counterweighting her still clear resolve to improve her lot.  

She was too educated to be hoodwinked into the American dream, but willed herself up the ladder of prosperity in her newly adopted home for now. 

How she could reunite with her family and boyfriend was still too painful to pragmatically consider. Correspondence with her boyfriend had ground to a halt, as she felt paralysed to maintain the connection which she felt presently helpless to remedy. 

The brevity of the window to growing accustomed to the visceral aspect of the job was considerably shorter than she ever could’ve imagined. She took almost glee in what this may have suggested about her. Among her colleagues, also, their appeared zero compunction at all about the task at hand, never acknowledged at all, so far as Gidelia could tell. 

Each worker’s mother tongue seemed unique to each individual. Conversational English was in relative fluency to all, though an embarrassment of modesty kept chat on the floor and tearooms to a minimum. Much to the chagrin of management, which would’ve sooner subjected a dissident staff member, clamouring for unionisation, to the mechanical cleavers of the production line, than consider concessions on conditions. 

For the first time since leaving Venezuela, now indisputably of the working class, in a country less affluent than her own, she was able to, at a minimum, put herself in the shoes of the working Venezuelans who were sentimental toward the leftist rhetoric of the current regime.

The regime railed against exploitation and worker rights, however much she believed such rhetoric was lip service. She believed the regime appropriated Marx. To Gidelia, the practice, in reality, of socialist governments, however well-intentioned to begin with, invariably became stuck in a quicksand of the ‘dictatorship’ aspect of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. No modern, historical examples attested that Marxian experiments heretofore had been little more than opiates of the masses. 

Gidelia wasn’t blind to the harms of capitalism. Particularly, her heart swelled for the ecological effects of oil spills. She was a staunch advocate of the belief in human-caused climate change, an almost violent cleavage between her father and her. 

As vehemently as she on the topic, he was unable to consider it needn’t be a zero sum game between economy and the environment. Both could be taken care of in tandem, as Gidelia held. She determined she must accept he may not shift, even if she held her devotion for him as leveraged ransom on the topic. 

It was only upon her realising, were the tables turned, and he behaved similarly toward her, despite his seniority and bringing her in to the world, she would wholly resent the pushy imposition.

---

Gidelia’s much hoped for break into the ranks of the white collar from blue served an overwhelming, welcome reprieve. 

The benefactor took the form of Pud Inc., a rice pudding manufacturer site across the state line, in Iowa. 

Again, the entry point had been Joanne, who’d recognised a better health care plan was available at Pud albeit without the trapeze net of nepotism via her uncle. 

None of the American-born staff held much pride toward working for the meatpacking company. Not because it was gruesome, bloody work. Rather because, when they contrasted themselves with the overwhelmingly ethnically diverse staff on the factory floor, most of whom arrived on American soil via refugee programs, the stark reality was recognised of their own languishing among the lower classes of American life, without the excuse of fleeing war and persecution from a third-world country. 

Though Joanne seldom set foot on the factory floor, or could recognise one of the staff if she crossed paths in a supermarket in town, she felt a faint, vestigial sense of this same sentiment. 

From Joanne's internship in the Big Apple, where she’d met Gidelia, she’d gleaned unequivocally she was a Dakotan, not well suited to the cosmopolitan contrast to the prairie state way of life. 

Joanne was simpler, could recognise of herself narrower of thought, though she preferred to see it through a lens of New Yorkers, and those attracted to it, were by contrast too open-minded. 

She could sense within herself a faint nativism when considering the meatpacking factory floor staff. Though this may have arisen more for what her association with them said about her more than they. 

Joanne kept her home in South Dakota, as the commute wasn’t at all burdensome, with no impeding traffic. 

Within days, a certain dysfunction seemed to steep Joanne's new office. Her sense was several staff appeared to be on the verge of resigning, due to office politics she wasn’t yet able to put her finger on. 

After some gentle enquiry why some staff appeared harried, Joanne’s supervisor acknowledged they were chronically understaffed, a swath of long-serving staff having recently resigned in waves. 

Many staff were juggling what had previously been the tasks of multiple roles. Joanne asked if they needed more staff, even on a temporary basis, and her supervisor positively invited her to suggest anyone she may know. 

The office had seemingly seen a raft of temporary staff come and go, knowing better to weather the dysfunction. But to Joanne’s mind, fully cognisant of Gidelia’s attitudes toward the meatpacking role, expressing only the night prior her envy toward Joanne’s new, generous healthcare insurance, a clear opportunity presented itself. 

Joanne was a little startled at her supervisor’s willingness to take on a new staff member, sight unseen, outside a vetting protocol, like so many others who’d come and since gone. Joanne certainly wasn’t going to protest such cavalier recruiting practices.

The following day, Gidelia accompanied Joanne on her morning commute, cathartically in business attire.

Gidelia called the meatpacking factory foreman the evening before, advising today had been be her last day, a virtue of her casual employment status. 

On the drive with Joanne that first day, Gidelia felt a deep hopefulness. Not yet celebration, as the day ahead could hold anything, she could readily acknowledge. 

Gidelia wasn’t immune to what pitfalls those before her had faced in this workplace, a factor she’d weighed considerably, but swiftly, in making the decision to part with her meatpacking employer, in the hope of greener, yet more uncertain, pastures. 

There was a glimmer, however, this new path, of which she was taking that morning with Joanne at the wheel, could be the next step she took to meaningfully making it in America. 

Gidelia was practical enough in her muted excitement to not jump ahead too far, indulging fanciful dreams of bringing her family to live with her, enjoying a prosperous life, which no longer seemed within remote grasp back home. 

She trusted, without having set foot in this office, whatever travails may be infusing the day-to-day operations, she could go head-to-head with whatever headwinds would otherwise keep her from her dreams of prosperity. 

She could impose herself on the situation. Her headstrong, resolute determinedness prevailing to manifest her will. 

She knew she was feisty, a fighter, and could will her desired outcome in this instance into reality. At stake, after all, was the future health and well-being of her and her family, so uncertain for so long. 

From the outset, she was thrust into the cauldron of hectic phone calls, getting used to software she was gaslit into conviction she was familiar with, in lieu of actual training. 

The saving grace was her friendship - Joanne a glorious valve of silliness to debrief with after a day’s work bordering on ridicule. 

Among the hectic chaos, Gidelia had a clear-sightedness. 

It was possible, as gruelling and under-supported as she’d been on this first day, that if this were the worst of it, she could adapt. 

It might take a week of high stress, offset by splitting a bottle of wine with Joanne to decompress at night before plunging in again. 

For now she was unmoored, from any sense of context for how to handle calls until she’d had the chance to put the caller on hold and find someone free to guide her  

The stress was initially high, but as the days strung together, and she became more familiar to the processes and personalities, she relaxed into a routine she found not unpleasant. 

The timbre of an incoming call instilled dread, just for her inability to effectively field a knowledgeable answer for the myriad queries. 

After several months, and many seasoned staff having left, seemingly fed-up with the chaos, Gidelia recognised she was actually beginning to become one of the more senior staff. New recruits came - and just as often went - finding herself in the role of training them. 

The mania was ever present, and she largely managed to ride above it. She recognised errors were causing them to double and triple handle tasks previously completed because of errors, growing more outwardly impatient. 

She expressed to those far longer serving then her that the processes in place weren’t effectively working - they seemed to be going around in circles. This culminated in a meeting with senior management, Gidelia, Joanne and some other colleagues, to express their thoughts as to how best improve processes effectively and efficiently. 

Gidelia lost her temper at the meeting. Not toward anyone in particular, just the inanity of the existing status quo. The senior manager interpreted this as a passion to improve processes, a voice speaking up to try and mitigate problems before they occurred. Gidelia was animated and heated, proving herself a problem-solver. 

---

Gidelia's standing only advanced with the Pud Inc. offices. She'd been promoted within a span of months to oversee the operations for the manufacturing inputs to later be distributed to the 260 Puderia rice pudding parlour franchises across the Midwest and Appalachian states. 

The new role largely called for coordinating personnel, of which the churn in staff turnover was laying bare fundamental deficiencies which management were wilfully ignoring.

Management seemed focused on prying open opportunities to appeal to and accommodate new franchisees, keeping budgeted costs static. Simply, more money needed to be spent to recruit more hands on deck on a permanent basis, retaining the knowledge base, rather than it accreting, then evaporating, as staff came on a temporary contract, then