The Interior

  “David, this could be dangerous,” she insisted. “I look at the Knight factory and think that they’re making money by putting people’s health and safety in jeopardy, but is it against the law? In China the answer is not really. I look at these papers and figure that Sun is connected somehow. Obviously the Knights wouldn’t be able to operate out here without his help. But what do these papers even mean? As I said, Sun is a powerful man. More than that, he’s popular, very, very popular. Even I,” she said, “have admired him.”

  “You don’t understand my concern,” David said with a rueful smile. “Governor Sun is my client. You trained as a lawyer, Hulan. You know what that means. The papers he sent me are now privileged information. Ethically I can’t turn them over to you or use them to damage him in any way, because he’s my client, as is the Tartan corporation.”

  “You’re a prosecutor,” Hulan said after a long pause.

  “I was a prosecutor. But even as a prosecutor I always respected the rights of the accused. Confidentiality is a cornerstone of our legal system.”

  “But you’re in China…”

  “I’m not saying that Governor Sun’s papers are anything like these, but if they were, would I be free to pursue him as though he was a criminal rather than a client?”

  “Article 3 of the Provisional Regulations Regarding Lawyers says that in carrying out their activities, lawyers ‘shall take facts as the basis and the law as the criterion,’” she recited. “This means that lawyers should never fail to distinguish between right and wrong. They should expose contradictory facts and clarify erroneous errors. A lawyer also has the right to refuse to represent a client if he feels that the defendant has failed to reveal the entire truth.”

  “What are you leaving out?”

  “As a lawyer operating in China, you must safeguard state sovereignty…”

  “No problem.”

  “And the state’s economic interests,” Hulan continued. “At the same time, the rights and interests of foreign businessmen must be protected.”

  “Just tell me, do I have to maintain confidentiality here or not?”

  “I’m afraid so. The code says that confidentiality of private matters must be maintained. It goes along with protecting state secrets.”

  “It seems to me there are a lot of contradictions in those rules.”

  “This is China.”

  “So what can and can I not do?”

  “I didn’t train in our system, and I’ve never practiced law here,” Hulan said. “I don’t know all of the subtleties or how to play them.”

  “You do have one thing in your favor,” Lo interrupted, although he didn’t fully understand David’s dilemma. “Lawyers have the right to make investigations and visits pertaining to the cases they’re handling.”

  “In that case,” David said, “I’d like to go back to the hotel.”

  A few minutes later, Suchee walked the trio to the car. With great solemnity she extended the papers to Hulan, who refused them. “Keep them here for now,” she said. “Your daughter knew how to keep them safe.” Then, “I promise you I’ll find out who killed her.”

  As soon as the car disappeared down the dirt road, Suchee turned toward the shed to restore to their hiding place the papers that might have cost her daughter’s life.

  13

  AN HOUR LATER, AFTER MAKING A PLAN FOR THE NEXT day, Investigator Lo dropped David and Hulan off at the entrance to the Shanxi Grand Hotel, then drove away to park the car. As they passed through the lobby on the way to the elevator, a woman’s voice called out, “David Stark!” He looked around and saw a woman he didn’t recognize approaching him. She was Chinese, but dressed unlike most women he’d seen here. She wore khaki trousers and a silk blouse. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and large gold earrings hung from her earlobes. She extended her hand. “Mr. Stark, I’m Pearl Jenner. Would you join me for a drink?”

  He knew he’d heard the name before but couldn’t place it. “I’m sorry,” he said. All he wanted to do was get to his room and look at Sun’s papers. “We’re just on our way up. It’s been a long day.”

  Pearl Jenner studied Hulan, then turned back to David. “I’ve come a long way,” she said. “This isn’t the easiest place to get to.”

  “Yes, well…”

  “I would think you’d want to talk to me. I’m from the Times. I’ve been covering the Tartan acquisition.”

  Now David realized who this woman was. She’d written the article he’d read on the day of Keith’s funeral, saying that the federal investigation into bribery allegations would now be dismissed because of his death. She had gotten her facts wrong and no doubt caused unnecessary pain for the Baxter family.

  “I’m not interested in giving an interview at this time,” he said, taking Hulan’s elbow and leading her away.

  “I know about Ling Miaoshan,” Pearl called out after them.

  David and Hulan stopped and turned around.

  A triumphant smile played around Pearl’s lips. “Why don’t you join me in the bar? There’s someone there I think you’ll want to meet.” She spun on her heel, utterly confident that David and his companion would follow.

  The bar was in the basement next to the gift shops. She sat down at a table where a young man nursed a half-empty bottle of orange soda. “I want you to meet Guy Lin. Guy, this is David Stark and…Miss Liu, isn’t it?” Hulan didn’t acknowledge her. Instead she shook the young man’s hand and sat down. Guy was young, twenty-two at most. His complexion was sallow and his eyes miserably sad. His shoulders sagged and his frayed cotton shirt hung loosely on his thin frame. To Hulan, he looked like an Overseas Chinese; to David, he looked like a mainlander. In a way they were both right.

  “Guy is from Taiyuan, but like you, Miss Liu, he was educated in America. In fact, he’s a graduate of your alma mater.”

  “You went to USC?” Hulan asked the boy. He nodded.

  David kept his eyes on Pearl, reflecting on the fact that she had not been introduced to Hulan and yet knew not only who she was but also where she’d gone to school.

  “Yes, he went to USC to study chemistry on a scholarship,” Pearl went on. “But things didn’t go according to plan. See, he gets there, takes a sociology class to fill an out-of-field science requirement, gets interested, and goes out to do a little community service for extra credit. Guess where he ends up? OSHA.”

  “I don’t see what any of this has to do with us,” David said.

  “Hear me out.” Pearl Jenner was attractive, but her smile was not in the least bit friendly. “First Guy volunteers in the office, assisting people with their claims, answering questions, filing papers. He begins to like it, and the folks there like him too. Pretty soon he’s forgotten all about chemistry. All he wants to do is go out and help his new friends in their work. He especially likes going into factories and helping people who’re being treated badly. Only one problem. He’s in America on a student visa. He gets pulled over for a speeding ticket. No big deal, right? Only his name gets run through the computer and by now he’s illegal. His friends at OSHA try to help him. They’re government people, but even they can’t do anything. Two weeks later he’s back in China.”

  “Ms. Jenner, it’s late. If you have something to tell me—”

  Pearl raised her voice and spoke right over David. “He’s seen the outside world. He’s seen the good part of the U.S., but he’s also seen the shit. You know what I mean? Put a greedy American and a hundred illegals together and you’ve got a nice sweatshop operation going. But he knows how it should be. So he’s back in China and he starts poking around. He hears about these American companies that have been opening in his home province. He gets hired by one, works a couple of days, and if he were a different kind of person he probably would have stayed there because the pay’s good, the dormitories are better than government-assigned housing, and the work’s not too hard. But he quits and tries another factory—Knight International. The problem here is he’s only a da
y worker in the warehouse, so he can’t see what the place is really like. Then one Saturday he gets an idea. On Saturdays at one the local men and women leave the compound together. He sidles up to the most beautiful girl he can find and strikes up a conversation.”

  David interrupted, “How long ago was this?”

  The young man looked up. “Three months,” he said. “But she”—he motioned to Pearl with his elbow—” is making it into something it wasn’t. I wanted to know about the factory, but when I first saw Miaoshan, all I wanted to know was her. On that day I walked her home. She didn’t want me to come inside, but she said she would meet me the next day.” He hesitated, then asked, “Did you know her?”

  When David shook his head, Guy said, “She was beautiful, but she had inside of her so much…” He struggled to find the word, then said, “She wanted to know all about America, and I told her. When she found out why I was at the factory, she said she’d help me. She was alive with ideas. She told me what it was like in there: the girls who were too young to work, the way the managers lied about the pay, the way people got injured and how often.”

  “Did she have proof?” David asked, thinking that if the factory employed child labor, Hulan surely would have told him.

  “She told me what she saw.”

  “But those could have been made-up stories,” David suggested. “Just how young are the women? Did she get ID’s from them? Was she able to introduce you to anyone who’d been hurt? Did she have medical records?”

  “Mr. Stark, hear him out,” Pearl said. “He’ll get to all that.” Then to Guy she said, “Tell him what you thought you’d do with the information you collected and why it was important.”

  Not knowing Hulan’s background, Guy explained that in America things were very different. If someone got hurt from a product, then the manufacturer could be sued. If a product was made in an unsafe manner, then the workers could sue. Most amazing, if the manufacturing process caused damage to the environment, then neighbors or the government could go after the company to clean it up and even make retribution to the people and the state.

  “When I left China, we didn’t have any recourse if we were burned or dismembered by products,” he continued. “But while I was away, a consumer-rights law went into effect. Now even state-owned enterprises can be sued! There have been about half a million individual suits each of the last three years. I am sure you have read of the different campaigns in regards to this movement.”

  Although Hulan always tried to avoid campaigns, she—like any other citizen of China—couldn’t avoid them, especially since the cornerstone of any campaign involved the press. So of course she’d seen articles like “Is a Chinese Life Worth Less Than a Foreign Life?” and “A Needle in My Father’s New Kidney!” In fact, the media was very much at the heart of the new consumer law. Since press reports could be introduced in court as evidence, smear campaigns went a long way in swaying judges. This resulted in costly counterattacks mounted in the media by the defendants. And while awards to plaintiffs weren’t as lucrative as in the States—the record still stood at about $30,000 U.S., given to the family of a woman who’d been asphyxiated by a faulty water heater—judges regularly granted monies to dubitable claimants based on a “fairness principle” that implied that the rich should help the poor.

  “But what does this have to do with Knight?” David asked. “They’ve never had a product-liability case.”

  “It’s not the products I care about,” Guy said. “It’s how they’re made. For me that includes not using child labor and providing a safe environment. Three years ago we didn’t have consumer rights or product liability, but we have them now. Why can’t we take the next step and push for workers’ rights?” Guy searched David’s face. “Every country, including yours, had to start somewhere. Miaoshan and I thought that somewhere could be Knight. But the women in the factory never helped us. They never said a word because they were afraid they would lose their jobs. Still, she kept asking.”

  “Even after the women wouldn’t respond?” Hulan asked.

  Guy nodded. Hulan put two fingers to her lips and tapped gently, deep in thought.

  “When the women wouldn’t help,” Guy continued, “I said, ‘Let’s forget it.’ But Miaoshan had another idea. There was a man in the factory, an American, who liked her. Sometimes during the week she would go and talk to him at night. She said he was worried about the factory. He thought it was unfair how the women were treated. He began to tell her things—money things—that went on inside. That’s when I knew we couldn’t do everything on our own. I have a friend who’s in business in Taiyuan. He has computers in his office, and he let me use one. I got on the Internet and looked for help.”

  “That’s how he found me,” Pearl interjected. “At the paper we get information out of China in the usual ways—press conferences and speeches by politicians. The things the government wants you to know are easy to find out. But what about something like Tiananmen? We had reporters in Beijing at the time, but we also relied heavily on the students who communicated with us through fax machines. The same goes for a lot of other stories. We hear about things, but it’s difficult to work officially, if you know what I mean. Nowadays, with the Internet, getting information is easier than it used to be. China blocks the Times’ website, but enterprising people like Guy are able to get around the firewalls.”

  “So for you it’s not personal,” Hulan said. “It’s professional.”

  “What isn’t?” Pearl asked. “There isn’t a business reporter in the States who hasn’t tried to get at a story like this, but it’s been completely closed to us by both the Chinese and the Americans.”

  “Why does it matter to you what happens in a factory in China?” Hulan asked.

  “Because it’s a human-rights issue and that’s a hot-button issue that sells.”

  Hulan said, “The people who work in the Knight factory aren’t prisoners…”

  “Human-rights violations come in many forms: political prisoners in solitary confinement, prison laborers, but I would also include what happens to the women and girls in factories like Knight.”

  “I agree it’s bad in there,” Hulan said, “but is it worse than working in the fields?”

  David hid his surprise. Hadn’t Hulan just gotten on his case for using this same argument? Was she using this as a tactic to provoke Pearl?

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Really?” Hulan retorted. “Do you have any idea what a factory like Knight has done for the surrounding area? I’m not defending the company. I’ve been inside, but I also see a new prosperity in the countryside that was unimaginable twenty years ago.”

  Pearl seemed ready for Hulan’s challenge. “You want the big picture? All right, here it is.” For the next few minutes Pearl talked about her and her colleagues’ efforts to cover American manufacturing practices in China and their deeper cultural and political implications. Manufacturers went overseas for cheap labor and great tax breaks, but they could also skirt around American laws by hiring children, by using chemicals that would never pass U.S. safety standards, by having working conditions that were dangerous, and by employing people for inhumane numbers of hours.

  “Occasionally some company or person gets targeted by a watchdog group,” Pearl said. “You’ve read about them. Some conglomerate hires a celebrity who endorses a line of children’s clothing that turns out to be manufactured using child labor. What do the celebrity and conglomerate do when the truth comes out? They plead ignorance.” Pearl sighed. “The truth is, they probably are ignorant, but that doesn’t make it right. Then you get reporters who want to go and see what it’s like in a factory like Knight, but we can’t get in. You have to wonder about that.”

  “But does anyone wonder about it?” Hulan asked.

  Pearl’s eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I lived in the States for a while. I never noticed anyone caring much about China one way or the other.”

 
Every once in a while Hulan said something that showed animosity toward the U.S. David knew she sometimes did it just to elicit a reaction. Other times he thought she was giving her real opinion. Right now, watching these two women—one Chinese, the other Chinese American—he wondered what exactly Hulan was doing.

  “That’s the beauty of the story,” Pearl exclaimed. “Most Americans never think at all about China, and to me that’s very strange, because China plays a part of our everyday lives.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hulan asked, agitated now.

  “China’s invisible,” Pearl responded, “producing invisible work and invisible products. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we go to sleep at night, we are coming in contact with China. Our alarm clocks, our T-shirts, our designer clothes. The tires on our cars. The electronics we use all day. Take any holiday—Easter, Halloween, Christmas—all the decorations are made in China. The toys our kids play with, even those that we consider to be the most ‘American’—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Sam & His Friends, and of course Barbie. Tens of millions of Barbies are made in China every year. Without naming names, I can say that there are some American factories in China that pay only about twenty-four dollars a month. That’s six dollars a month less than what the Chinese laborers working on the transcontinental railroad were paid in the last century.”

  “But these things aren’t unique to China,” Hulan said, again defending her home country.

  “You’re right. They also happen in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Haiti, but I’m Chinese American, and what happens here matters to me.”

  Seeing Hulan’s dubious look, Pearl said, “When Guy first contacted me, I didn’t know what to believe. Then he started e-mailing information about the factory’s conditions. They sounded really awful.” She turned to David. “Like lawyers, reporters also need proof. I tried to set up several appointments with Henry Knight, but he always canceled. Then, when I heard that Tartan was going to buy Knight, I tried Randall Craig, then Miles Stout. They were pleasant enough, but of course they told me nothing. About three months ago, I called Keith Baxter. He denied any wrongdoing by Knight or his client, Tartan. But I kept calling and giving him pieces of information that only someone on the inside, someone like Guy, could know. The more I pressed Keith with those tidbits, for lack of a better word, the more I could sense his softening. Did you know that Keith used to come out here a lot?”