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.”
“Right next to the building?” she inquired. “On the steps? Up against the wall?”
“No, she was on the dirt. I’d say seven to ten feet from the building.”
“And how did she look?”
“How do you think?” he asked impatiently. “Her head was flat. There was lots of blood.”
Hulan closed her eyes and slouched back in the chair. “On her side? Face up?”
“Face up.”
Her eyes still closed, Hulan nodded grimly as if she’d seen the body herself. “Do you know what Peanut said?” she asked. “She said that Xiao Yang—Little Yang, that’s the dead woman—wouldn’t be coming back. I thought she was joking. At the time I thought she meant that Xiao Yang’s injuries were so bad she’d have to go home. But now I see Peanut meant something quite different.”
“Don’t read anything into this, Hulan.”
Hulan slowly opened her eyes and stared at David. “I’m only responding to what you saw.”
“I saw a woman who jumped from a building and died.”
“Look at it with me: A woman gets her arm half torn off. She loses a lot of blood. She’s probably in shock. She can’t walk off the factory floor—”
“Aaron Rodgers said he carried her to his office, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t walk.”
“I’m telling you she couldn’t walk.” Hulan waited for David to challenge her again. When he didn’t, she continued, “He takes her somewhere—”
“His office…”
“And goes for help.” David nodded, and Hulan went on. “Now, you’re suggesting that Xiao Yang gets up, climbs a set of stairs, somehow finds her way onto the roof, goes to the edge of the building, and jumps?”
“That’s what happened.”
“David, think about that building. If you were on the second-floor roof and you jumped, do you think you would die?”
“Probably not, might break an ankle, though.” He smiled, but Hulan would have none of it.
“So you’d go feet first?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Then how do you explain the fact that Xiao Yang landed ten feet from the building, with her head crushed?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Someone threw her off the building,” Hulan said gravely.
David disagreed. “If you jump, your body’s going to have a forward trajectory. Even if she landed on her feet, she’d have to fall forward or backward. If the circumstances are right, the momentum could be enough to cause that damage.”
“Three weeks ago Miaoshan supposedly kills herself. Today Xiao Yang also kills herself. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“Look, it’s terrible what happened to Miaoshan, and it’s sad what happened to that poor woman today, but you’re seeing murder where there’s only suicide. These things are tragic, but that’s all they are.”
On another day, maybe in other circumstances, Hulan might have heard these words differently. Instead she filtered out everything except for what she took to be his condescension.
She stood and put her purse on her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“You’re not going back to the factory.”
Hulan’s eyes flashed. “Are you telling me what I can and cannot do?”
“You said a day, Hulan. You were in there two days.”
She looked at him in anger and disappointment. “You’re a lawyer. You’re supposed to look at things logically. Where is your brain, David?”
“You say that just because my interpretation deviates from yours?”
Hulan shrugged indifferently.
David didn’t know where his next words came from and regretted them the moment they left his lips, but he said, “I forbid you to go.”
Her eyes were cold as she said, “You’re not my father.” Then she left the restaurant.
12
WITHOUT THINKING, HULAN GRABBED A TAXI AND ASKED to be dropped at the bus stop for Da Shui Village. When the driver said that the last bus had already left for the day, she asked if he’d take her. Speaking into the rearview mirror, the driver said, “You’re a Beijinger. Why do you want to go there?”
“You look at me and see only my face and my clothes,” Hulan said. “Since that is the case, you know I also have money.”
That seemed a good enough answer for the driver. He made a U
-turn, stepped on the gas, and headed out of town. Soon the city lights were left behind them, and only the taxi’s headlights illuminated the deserted road. Hulan stared out into the darkness. Again and again she went over the words of her argument with David. How could he tell her what to do? How could he see Siang and Peanut and Mayli and Jingren all as faceless, uneducated peasants? How could she be with someone like him? She felt as trapped as she had the day David and Zai had discussed her activities as though she weren’t at the table with them.
At the crossroads, Hulan pointed left. Soon after, she asked the driver to stop. She got out of the car and paid her fare, supplementing it with a tip. But he waved away the extra money. “I have seen this on American television shows,” he said. “And they say tips are now given in Beijing, but I cannot accept.”
“Please take it,” she said. “I was rude before, and tired. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Ha!” he said. “I thought you were just showing your city ways. So we are both mistaken.” He looked out into the black fields. “You’re sure this is where you want to be?” When Hulan nodded, he said good night, then sped away. In the far distance she could see the glow of Taiyuan’s lights. In another direction Da Shui’s electricity provided another smaller proof of civilization. But other than these two gentle luminescences, the night seemed an opaque blanket. Hulan walked along the road for a short way, then dipped down onto a raised pathway. Eventually she came to Ling Suchee’s small compound.
She entered the tiny courtyard and was surprised to see Suchee sitting on a low-slung bamboo chair talking to a man. He looked very much at home as he sat on the metal cover of Suchee’s well. Suchee introduced him as her neighbor, Tang Dan, and Hulan as an old friend.
“I’ve met your daughter,” Hulan said, trying to camouflage her distress with the usual pleasantries.
Tang Dan gave a customary response. “She is disobedient and ugly.” He regarded Hulan frankly, and she returned his stare. His eyebrows were bushy over dark eyes. A few white whiskers jutted from his chin. His stomach pressed against his shirt. His sandaled feet were callused and rough. The only family resemblance between Tang Dan and his daughter was in the strength of their jaws.
“She’s at the Knight factory,” Hulan said. “Siang is safe.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Tang Dan replied. “When she comes home this weekend, I will make her see sense. By Monday morning all obstacles will be removed and she will once again obey.”
The words “When a daughter, obey your father” ran through Hulan’s mind. Then she thought of Siang’s headstrong ways, her stubbornness, her sense of entitlement, and wondered which of the two—father or daughter—would win in this contest of wills.
With a grunt Tang Dan heaved himself to his feet. His legs bowed out under him. “Good night, Ling Suchee, Liu Hulan.”
“See you tomorrow,” Suchee responded.
As soon as Tang Dan left the courtyard, Suchee beckoned Hulan inside.
A few minutes later, Hulan sat at the small table in Suchee’s single room, sipping tea. Etiquette prevented Suchee from asking her guest what she was doing here this late at night, so she went back to an earlier chore of making shoes. Silently she took some paste made from flour and water and applied it to sheaf after sheaf of cut newspaper, taking pains to press the sheets together so that there were no bubbles or uneven areas. Wordlessly Hulan watched her friend, remembering back to the days of the Red Soil Farm and how she herself had spent long evenings making the papier mâché soles, then dying them red in a vat tinted with soil, and sewing on scraps of cloth to create the tops.
“I’ve told you about David,” Hulan said. Suchee nodded and continued her work. “Many years ago in America I left him with no explanation. It was cruel and unforgivable. All those years since that time I’ve been lonely. Of course, there were other men, but they meant nothing. Then, when David came back into my life, I wanted nothing more than for us to be together again. I thought we could be happy together, but I don’t think we can.”
“Because…”
“Because since he’s come here, I don’t know who I am,” she said. “I act one way, he acts another. He’s said terrible things.”
“What terrible things were those?”
“That the women in the factory are uneducated, that our country is corrupt, that the people who run the factory are honest…”
“Ah, so it is a political disagreement.”
“That, and he thinks he can treat me like a woman, like a taitai.”
“Don’t you want to be his wife?”
“It is a word that, like so many in our language, is a prison to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mama, baba. Separate words for older brother and younger brother—gege and didi. Separate words for older sister and younger sister—jiejie and meimei. Yeye, nainai, bofu, shushu,” she rattled off the words for paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, oldest paternal uncle and younger paternal uncle. “All these are different than the words for their maternal counterparts, and those words connote a lesser meaning because the female side is seen as unimportant.”
Suchee picked up another piece of newsprint, coated it with the paste, and pressed it to the growing sole. “You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know.”
“My whole life I’ve known exactly where I fit in the family tree. Even when I lived in America, I felt the pressure of that. No, not pressure, the weight, the sense that I could never truly be myself.”
“But our words are a comfort,” Suchee said, glancing up from her work. “They tell us who we are. They are what make us Chinese.”
“No, they are what keep us locked to the past,” Hulan countered. “When a daughter, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son,” she said, completing the proverb she had thought of when talking to Tang Dan.
At this Suchee put down her work. Once again Hulan was struck by how much her friend had aged in this harsh environment. But Hulan was doing just what she had accused David and the taxi driver of doing, judging Suchee by her face. Behind the rough skin and tragic eyes, Suchee was as she’d always been—gentle, kind, and astute.
“It is sad, Hulan. You have not changed since you were a girl. You were always running away, even when you first came running to the countryside all those years ago.”
Hulan disagreed. “I was sent to the Red Soil Farm.”
“Yes, but even then you ran away from the truth of you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Suchee’s eyes narrowed as she appraised her girlhood friend; then she asked, “Do you want me to say this?”
Suddenly Hulan wasn’t sure, but Suchee went on. “Here is what I remember about you: Unlike most of the girls sent here, you were happy to be away from your family. Oh, you said you were lonely, but no one ever saw you cry, no one ever saw you write a letter. When they had struggle meetings, you spoke out the loudest and said the worst words. No one wanted you on their team, because at any time you could turn against an individual person or the entire group.”
“I know all this,” Hulan said. “I’m sorry for the things I did.”
“Are you sure? Because what I remember is that your words kept you safely alone.”
“You think I spouted those slogans and reported on people’s infractions because I didn’t want friends? You’re absolutely wrong.”
“Am I?” When Hulan didn’t answer, Suchee said, “If you couldn’t run away from people physically, then you could distance yourself by being politically superior.”
“I never treated you that way.”
Suchee raised her eyebrows. A dark silence settled on them.
Finally Hulan said, “It was against the rules to have sex. That was the worst infraction.”
“I was your friend,” Suchee said. “You didn’t have to report us.”
“But everything worked out. Ling Shaoyi was able to stay here with you. The two of you had a life together.?
??
Suchee shook her head. “Do you think a day goes by when I don’t wish that you had never seen us on that day, that I had never married, that I had never given birth to a daughter? Shaoyi was sixteen and I was twelve when your train arrived. You remember how I loved him from afar? That was the love of a farm girl for a city boy. Two years later, he finally saw me, but we were not looking to spend our lives together. We both understood our differences. Like you, he was from a good family. They had always planned for him to go to university and become an engineer. But you said your words and then you ran away.”
“I didn’t run away. A family friend came to get me. Do you think I was happy about what happened next? I was made to say more terrible words and then was sent into exile in America—”
“Even after you left, Shaoyi was punished,” Suchee pressed on. “There were more struggle meetings. He was called a counterrevolutionary, a revisionist, a cow demon. They made him write self-criticisms. The brigade leaders instructed us to get married. But what kind of a ceremony was it? We both wore dunce caps. We were paraded through the compound. We didn’t have a wedding banquet, but people did throw rotten fruit at us. We didn’t enjoy a wedding night. Instead I was sent back to my family and Shaoyi was put in the cow shed. I heard later that they kept him there for three months and only brought him out after he contracted pneumonia. I thought I would never see him again, but I was wrong. When the others went home, Shaoyi had to stay behind. When he came to my parents’ house, I didn’t recognize him. He had lost much weight and his color was that of a dead man. He looked sixty, not twenty.”
“Everyone suffered in those days,” Hulan said, echoing the words that Peanut had said earlier today. “Is there anyone in our country who wasn’t affected by the Chaos?”