Chapter 23: The First Video Failed
985 Words
The first video was terrible.
Not small-terrible.
Not almost-there terrible.
Terrible in the way that made all of us go silent after watching it.
Leo's cousin, Kenny, had a camera, yes.
What Nora forgot to mention was that Kenny mostly filmed motorcycle meetups and birthday parties where people shouted at the lens.
Our first version of the tea set video looked like a hostage statement with porcelain.
Liang stood behind a table, stiff as a criminal suspect, holding a teapot.
"This tea set is high quality," he said.
His eyes kept drifting off camera.
"Good for gifts. Good packaging. Good price."
Then he smiled.
It was a painful smile.
Like a man being forced to pay tax.
The video ended with Kenny zooming too close to the teapot until the image blurred.
Nora closed the laptop.
Nobody spoke.
Liang lit a cigarette.
May smacked it out of his hand.
"Not in the warehouse."
He did not even argue.
That was how bad the video was.
Kenny scratched his head.
"We can add music."
Nora looked at him.
"Music cannot save kidnapping."
Leo, who had come to help carry boxes, laughed so hard he had to sit down.
I rubbed my face.
"Okay. We start again."
Liang looked at me.
"Start again costs time."
"Yes."
"Time costs money."
"Yes."
"My money."
"Also yes."
He stared at me.
I did not look away.
After a long moment, he sighed.
"Fine. But no more making me talk like dead fish."
"Agreed."
We spent the rest of the afternoon testing different ideas.
A young man visiting his girlfriend's parents.
A daughter choosing a gift for her father's retirement.
A business owner preparing a return gift after receiving help.
The ideas looked good on paper.
In reality, they fell apart in new ways.
The young man actor was Leo. He could not stop grinning.
"I look like a criminal son-in-law," Nora said after watching playback.
"I am charming," Leo protested.
"You look like you are about to borrow money from her parents."
May volunteered to play the mother.
She acted too well.
Leo became genuinely afraid.
Kenny forgot to press record during the best take.
Liang cursed.
May cursed louder.
By evening, we had three hours of footage and nothing usable.
My head pounded.
Liang's patience thinned.
"Ethan," he said, pulling me aside, "I like your plan. But likes do not sell stock."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The question was fair.
That made it worse.
I looked at the warehouse shelves.
Boxes upon boxes.
Each one money trapped in cardboard.
"Give me two more days."
He frowned.
"Two."
"Two."
He pointed at me.
"If still no result, we stop. I cannot play film crew every day."
"Understood."
That night, after shift, Nora and I sat in the factory cafeteria with my laptop between us. The footage played without sound.
Everyone looked awkward.
The products looked dead.
The story looked fake.
Nora paused on a frame where May was scolding Leo with terrifying realism.
"This is the best part."
"Because it is real."
"Exactly."
I leaned back.
"The scripted parts are killing it."
"Yes."
"So we stop scripting?"
"No. We hide the script better."
I looked at her.
She tapped the screen.
"Liang is bad at selling to camera. May is good when she is annoyed. Leo is useless unless fear is needed. The product looks better in someone's hands than on a table."
"So?"
"So tell a real moment."
I thought of the retirement gift idea.
A daughter buying a tea set for her father.
But we did not have a daughter.
We had May.
We had Liang.
We had years of a shop owner who knew gifts were about care, but could not say it without sounding like an advertisement.
"What if Liang is not the seller?" I said slowly.
Nora waited.
"What if he is the father?"
Her eyes sharpened.
We rebuilt the video at one in the morning on a cafeteria table sticky with spilled soy milk.
No hard sell.
No product introduction.
A daughter comes home after work. Her father pretends not to care about his retirement. She gives him a tea set. He says she wasted money. Then he uses it that night when old friends visit.
End with the gift box.
Headline: Some fathers do not say they are happy. They make tea.
Nora read the line twice.
"Good."
"Rare good?"
"Very rare good."
That was almost a standing ovation from her.
The next morning, we shot the video.
May played the daughter because she refused to let anyone else "ruin the feeling." Liang played the father after complaining for twenty minutes that he was too young to retire.
He was not too young.
May told him so.
The argument before filming was better than the script.
Kenny filmed quietly this time.
No zooming crimes.
No birthday party angles.
At noon, Nora edited a rough cut.
We posted it that evening.
Then we waited.
One hour.
Eighty views.
Three hours.
Two hundred views.
By midnight, three hundred and seventeen.
Liang sent one message.
Is this normal?
I stared at the number.
My stomach sank.
Nora sat beside me in the factory cafeteria.
"It is the first one," she said.
"It is the third first one."
"Then it is still early."
I wanted to believe her.
But at two in the morning, the video had four hundred views and no orders.
Liang did not message again.
That silence felt worse than anger.
At dawn, I walked home under a gray sky and wondered if I had convinced everyone to believe in a plan that only sounded good in my head.
When I opened my phone again, the view count had reached five hundred and twelve.
Still nothing.
For the first time since arriving in Southport, I felt the old fear return.
Maybe I was not rebuilding.
Maybe I was just failing in a new city.
- Writer
