The Interior (20 page)

“Is he a millionaire?” Peanut inquired.

“My father? No! He’s a peasant like everyone else in our county. That’s why his family attitudes are so backward.”

The three of them kept working, their shoulders almost touching. Once Peanut leaned over and rewrapped Hulan’s fingers around her tool. “Don’t forget to do it this way,” she said. “The work will go faster.” Then again they drifted back into silence while all around them the machines roared and the other women chattered.

“After everything that happened to my family, what could my father do but obey every new law our country put forth?” Siang said at last. “The government said one child and that’s what my parents had, but my father has never forgiven me for being a girl.”

“Look around,” Peanut said. “Do you think anyone in this building has been forgiven for being a girl? Sometimes I think that’s why we’re all here.”

“I came here to break away from my father,” Siang confessed.

Peanut raised an eyebrow. “Like a lot of us.”

“But this is different,” Siang insisted. “My father has plans for me. He has a boy picked out for me to marry. He’s from Taiyuan City, not from the village.”

“But you love someone else,” Peanut said.

“My father says Tsai Bing is not good enough. He says Tsai Bing will never be more than a peasant. But more than anything he says I should be no man’s second choice. You see, Tsai Bing was engaged before. His fiancée used to work here, but she died. Ling Miaoshan was her name. Did you know her?”

“She shared our room,” Peanut said without much enthusiasm. “She was a troublemaker.”

Hulan would have loved to have questioned Peanut about this, but Siang continued. “Her death made us free to be together. If I work here and earn enough money, then Tsai Bing and I can go away. Have you ever been to Beijing, Peanut? I’ve gone there with my father several times. You can’t imagine what it’s like. So much opportunity…”

Despite her companions’ incessant gossiping and all of the information she learned about Siang’s character, Hulan could no longer ignore her physical discomfort. By three her hands ached. By four her arms felt as heavy as they had the first time she’d worked a full day shoveling manure back when she was twelve. By five her legs and feet throbbed from standing in one position for so many hours. By six her neck burned from constantly staring down. By seven, when the bell finally signaled the end of the workday, she was sore, tired, famished, and ready to be as far away from this place as possible.

Siang, who’d scrupulously ignored Hulan all afternoon, whispered a few words to Peanut, shot a last impertinent look in Hulan’s direction, and quickly headed for the exit. Peanut stretched her fingers out and closed them again.

“I like her,” Peanut said, nodding toward Siang’s retreating back. “But you see the landowner class all over her.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s that,” Hulan said. “She’s just young.”

“She’s older than me,” Peanut corrected.

“In years, yes,” Hulan said. “But unlike you, she’s insecure. We should try to make allowances for that. She’ll grow up in time.”

“You say that after the way she treated you today?” Peanut asked as they walked toward the exit. “You’re a good person.”

“Not so good,” Hulan responded, “just old like Tang Siang said earlier today.”

Peanut giggled, then turned serious. “What I told you before about sneaking out of here…”

“Yes?”

“It’s not as easy as I said.”

“I didn’t think it could be.”

“Actually, I’ve never done any of those things that I said before,” Peanut admitted.

“I won’t tell.”

“And only a handful of women have ever left the compound,” Peanut said.

“Maybe some have kept it a secret.”

“You think anyone could keep a secret around here?” Peanut quipped. “I’ll tell you this: All of us have plotted ways to leave, but only a few have had the courage. They’re so strict here. You would lose your job for sure if they caught you. That’s why it’s safer to be in the compound. It’s easy to hide in here. Even if they spot you during lights out, you’re only docked pay. On the other hand, if someone sees Tang Siang with the manager, no one will report them.”

They stepped outside. The sun hung low in the sky, but the heat had not begun to abate.

“Funny, though,” Peanut mused. “She’s in love with the same village boy that Ling Miaoshan was supposed to marry. Now she’s going off to do the house thing with Manager Red Face.”

“When you’re held under water, you only think of air,” Hulan recited. “She thinks she’s trapped, and like the lowest rat she’ll do anything to get free.”

“It’s not for me.”

“Or me either,” Hulan agreed.

“Yet you’re going to try and leave the compound tonight.” With Peanut’s eyes boring into her, Hulan couldn’t lie. Peanut accepted the news with an abrupt nod of her head, then added, “I’m the designated room watcher. It’s my responsibility to report you.”

“But you won’t.”

“I never reported Miaoshan, because she always said she would report me as retribution even though I’d done nothing.”

“I’d never report you even if I caught you.”

“Be careful,” Peanut warned. “You’ve already been given one chance. It’s just like what happens if you’re injured. You hurt your hand but not badly, so you can stay—for now. If you have a more severe injury or if you get hurt more than once, you disappear. The same goes for sneaking around. If they find out, maybe they’ll give you another chance; maybe you’ll disappear like the others.

“I’d just go home to my family.”

“Maybe.”

Hulan frowned, then asked, “The other women
do
go home to their families, don’t they?”

“Sure. I’ve seen people go back to the villages around here, but how do I know what happens to the girls from far away? The factory hired them from a distant place and paid their way here, but how do I know what happens if they want to go home? For all I know, those girls go on to Beijing or south to Guangzhou or out in the fields here and die. I’m not there. I don’t see it. All I’m saying is that if you get in trouble, you’re gone. If you get hurt like Xiao Yang today, you’re gone forever.”

“If what you say is true, maybe you should report this to the Public Security Bureau,” Hulan suggested in a mock serious tone, believing Peanut’s words to be as much of an exaggeration as her various sexual escapades.

“Me? Never!” Peanut laughed. “Don’t take everything so seriously.”

Most of the women had already crossed the compound’s yard and had disappeared into the cafeteria building. “Well, if I’m going to leave, I’d better do it now,” Hulan said. She quickly took off her pink smock and handed it to Peanut. “See you tomorrow,” she said, then walked down the steps and casually drifted into the cluster of a hundred or so men. A few of them looked at her curiously, but none said a word.

Hulan’s breathing became shallow and her heart began to pound as she waited for the gate to open. She told herself that it didn’t matter if she was caught, that she had nothing to lose. Still, the fear she felt made her realize why the women here rarely did this; the danger of losing their jobs, of being stranded miles from home, was too big a risk to take. When the gate drew up, Hulan kept to the thickest part of the crowd. With dozens of male bodies shielding her, she strolled as nonchalantly as possible out of the compound.

When she reached the hotel, she walked around to the back, slipped in through the employee entrance, rode up the freight elevator to the eleventh floor, and knocked on David’s door. David drew her in and hugged her, but not before she glimpsed the momentary lack of recognition that flickered across his face. Hulan retired to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, she saw that her newly cropped hair had come loose from its pins, and her face was streaked with dirt. She stepped into the shower, enjoying washing the grime of the factory from her skin and feeling the warmth of the water on her aching muscles. When Hulan reemerged, her hair was pulled back, she wore a sleeveless ecru dress of raw silk, and she’d applied a fresh bandage to her wound.

“Do you want dinner in the room?” David asked, admiring her transformation.

Hulan shook her head. “I’d like to go out, especially if we can walk somewhere.”

They went back downstairs. Hulan checked with the concierge for a restaurant recommendation, but he insisted that all the restaurants in Taiyuan were for the masses. “You are only two people and he is a foreigner,” the concierge said in Mandarin. “You will be an inconvenience to the other patrons. It is better that you stay here. If you really must go someplace else and you want authentic food, I can recommend the restaurant in the Hubin Hotel, which caters to our overseas compatriots.”

When the concierge wouldn’t budge on his suggestions—he probably received kickbacks from the two hotels’ chefs—David and Hulan pushed through the revolving doors and into the sultry night air, crossed the street, and decided to take a chance on a small restaurant decorated with Christmas lights. Hulan conversed with the waiter about specialties and ingredients, then ordered. David asked for a Tsingtao beer, while Hulan accepted some chrysanthemum tea. A few minutes later, the waiter returned with fresh corn soup.

David and Hulan had both experienced a lot since the previous morning, but at first they shared only trivialities. David said he’d looked for her at lunch but hadn’t seen her; she said she’d seen him. He said he was impressed by how cheerful the women seemed as they walked to the cafeteria. “They waved and called out to us,” he said. Hulan smiled but didn’t tell him what the women were really saying about Aaron Rodgers.

The waiter arrived and with a flurry set down three dishes: diced chicken sautéed with hot peppers, baby bok choy warmed with giant mushrooms, and prawns that had first been stir-fried with ginger, garlic, onions, and black beans, then dipped in molten lard to create morsels that were flavorful on the inside and crispy on the outside. It all tasted wonderful, especially to Hulan, who hadn’t had a decent meal in twenty-four hours.

At last David asked, “So tell me about the factory.”

“Last night when I called you, I’d only seen those places that were nice enough to keep me from walking out on the contract,” she said, putting down her chopsticks. “But here’s what it’s actually like: There’s running water only for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. To flush the toilets, you scoop water out of a barrel and dump it in the tank. There’s no hot water at all. The shower stalls—if you can call them that—probably haven’t been cleaned since the factory opened two years ago. The food in the cafeteria has hair on it. From what animal, I don’t know. And then there’s the factory floor itself—”

But before she could go on, David interrupted. “You’re a Beijinger who’s happened to have gone to a Connecticut boarding school. You’re always telling me about dirty or backward conditions like on your train trip or in that hotel in Datong. Didn’t that place only have hot water two hours a day?”

“There’s a big difference between no running water and rationed hot water.”

“To a peasant? The women I saw today looked perfectly content. It has to be better working in the factory, no matter how primitive, than being out on a farm.”

His ignorance surprised her. “Is it that you don’t believe me when I tell you that we’re tricked into signing contracts that promise one thing but deliver another, or is it that you think that just because the women are peasants they should be grateful for what they get?”

“I’m saying neither of those things, Hulan,” he replied patiently. “I’m saying they were singing. They seemed happy to me.”

“I’m sure that’s what your slave owners used to say,” she bristled.

“Hulan…”

“I just spent a day working shoulder to shoulder with two women. Siang and Peanut may not have been educated in the way that you or I have been, but they have a deeper understanding of how things work than either of us.”

“Aren’t you romanticizing them?”

Hulan thought back. “No,” she said, “just the opposite. They’ve lived at the whim of so many things. They are truly close to the soil. You know what that means to me? A kind of earthiness.”

“In my meeting Sandy said something like that as well. He was referring to crudeness, I think.”

“Perhaps it’s crude to live from hand to mouth, but it makes things very clear. The women I worked with today understand that they’re being taken advantage of. The hours are long. The living facilities are substandard. The noise level on the factory floor has to be bad for our ears. A lot of what we’re doing is dangerous. Look at my hands, David.”

Of course, he’d already seen the gauze wrapped around her left hand and that wound remained covered. But the exposed flesh on both of her hands was scratched and scabbed, while her fingernails were broken and jagged.

“But this is nothing,” she continued. “A woman was badly injured in the factory today. Her whole arm was torn up.”

David waited for Hulan to tell him about the death. When she didn’t, he said, incredulous, “Their security man was right. He cleaned it up and no one even knew what happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The woman who was hurt jumped off the roof of the building. She’s dead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.

“I assumed you knew. I figured that’s why you were so upset.”

Hulan ignored his last comment and said, “Tell me everything.”

“We were in a meeting. Sandy Newheart got a call. He said we should break for coffee. He and the Knights left. When they didn’t come back, I went outside and found them with the body.”

“And?”

“And nothing. A security guard wrapped her up and took her away. We went back to the conference room. The old man was pretty shaken up, but he’s tough, focused. We continued our meeting.”

“David,” Hulan said, leaning forward intently, “tell me about the body. Where was it in relation to the building? How did it look exactly?”

“Oh, Hulan—”

“David, please.”

“Okay.” He sighed, then began to conjure up the picture in his mind. “She was on the ground, obviously.”