The Interior

by Lisa See

  “There are many laws in China. That doesn’t mean we follow all of them.”

  “True.” Suchee allowed herself a small smile. “It is also true that in the countryside many people still prefer arranged marriages. This way we are able to consolidate our land or resolve disputes. These days we have even more concerns. The one-child policy—”

  “I know,” Hulan interrupted. “Too many abortions or girl babies given up for adoption. Now not enough girls to go around. Of course families want to make sure their sons will have wives.”

  Suchee nodded. In the golden light of the lantern, Hulan saw Suchee’s eyes mist up again. “As a neighbor, Tsai Bing was always a good match for my daughter, but you know me, Hulan. I myself married for love.”

  “Ling Shaoyi.” As Hulan spoke Suchee’s husband’s name, she was cast back again over the years. Hulan had met Shaoyi on the train from Beijing. He was older, perhaps sixteen, and not so afraid to be leaving home. He was a city boy clean through. Like all of them who’d come from Beijing, he knew nothing about farm life. Suchee had been the peasant placed on their team to teach them. At that time Western ideas like “love at first sight” were considered bourgeois at best and capitalist roader at worst. For a long while the kids in the brigade decided to look the other way when they saw Shaoyi’s blushing face each time he spoke with Suchee, or when they observed her bringing him home-cooked treats while the rest of them were subsisting on bowls of millet porridge. After those years of turmoil were over, Shaoyi could have gone home to Beijing. He could have resumed his studies, maybe even become a party official. Everyone was surprised when he married Suchee, stayed in Da Shui, and became a peasant.

  Suchee’s voice cut into Hulan’s thoughts. “Do you think I could let my daughter marry for anything less than true love?”

  “No, not you,” Hulan answered, knowing that this still might not be the full truth. The aphorism “Only speak thirty percent of the truth” was valid even in the countryside, even between old friends.

  “Is there anything else I should know about Miaoshan?” Hulan asked. “Did she keep any papers here? A diary perhaps or letters?”

  Suchee stood and went to one of the beds. From underneath she pulled out an oversize manila envelope, then laid it on the table.

  “Miaoshan had a special place where she kept her private things,” Suchee explained, “but I am a mother and this is a small farm. I knew that she hid her treasures in the shed behind the grain bin. After she died, I went there to look for objects to put on the altar.” She took a deep breath, then continued, “I know some ABC letters and words that I learned in the Peasant Woman’s School, but I can’t understand these papers. And there are drawings…”

  Hulan opened the clasp and pulled out three sets of papers. One set was folded into quarters, which Hulan opened and smoothed out on the table. Quickly Hulan leafed through them, while Suchee held up the lantern so they might see better.

  “It says Knight International,” Suchee said, “but what are they?”

  “They look like specifications for an assembly line, and these look like they could be the floor plan for the factory itself. Have you been there? Can you tell?”

  “I have seen the outside, but I’ve never gone inside. Even so, I don’t understand the pictures.”

  Hulan drew with her finger along the lines. “This must be the exterior wall. And see, this says workroom, bathroom, office…. Let’s see what else you have.” She refolded the plans and picked up a stack of papers held together by a paper clip. It was a list of some sort with several columns. On the left were names—Sam, Uta, Nick, and the like. In the adjacent columns were account numbers and what looked like deposit amounts.

  Silently Hulan put the papers back in the envelope, then took her friend’s hand. “I’ll tell you the truth. When I came here, it was because you were my friend and I thought I could offer help in your time of mourning, but now I don’t know. So many things you’ve told me don’t make sense. What you said about the men in the town and the fact that Miaoshan was pregnant, well, these are common occurrences in our country. But these papers make me look at things differently. What are they? Why did Miaoshan have them? Even more important, why did she hide them?”

  “Are these ABC papers why she was killed?”

  “I don’t know, but I want you to put them back in Miaoshan’s hiding place. Don’t mention them to anyone. Can you promise me that?”

  Suchee nodded, then asked, “What will you do now?”

  “If Miaoshan was murdered, then the best way for me to find her killer is to understand who Miaoshan was. As I begin to know her, I will begin to know her killer. Once I know her, I will know her killer.” Hulan paused, then added, “But, Suchee, remember this. There may not even be a murderer. Your daughter may have simply killed herself. Either way, are you prepared for whatever I find?”

  “I have lost my only child,” Suchee answered. “I’m an end-of-the-liner now. With no family to take care of me, I will end up in the government old people’s courtyard in the village. So am I prepared? No. Ready? No. But if I’m going to spend the rest of my life alone, then I need to know.”

  4

  HULAN WOKE BEFORE DAWN THINKING ABOUT MIAOSHAN. Last night she’d been distracted by her friendship with Suchee and hadn’t used the investigative tools she usually employed when conducting an inquiry into a crime or interviewing a witness. Ordinarily she would have thought about motive. She would have tried to categorize the murder. Was it a contract killing? Was it murder motivated by an argument, personal or financial profit, sex, revenge, politics, or religion? Or was this simply a suicide? She would have focused her attentions much more clearly on Miaoshan herself. As Hulan had said last night, to catch a murderer, an investigator needed to understand the victim.

  Hulan quietly dressed and went outside. Coming from Beijing, with its cars and trucks and millions of people, Hulan was accustomed to noise. Here there was noise of another sort. She heard birds enthralled in their morning song and the whirring of cicadas. Although it was Sunday, she heard the low reverberations from a piece of farm equipment somewhere in the distance. Beyond these sounds and hiding just below the surface quiet was the hum of the earth itself. As a girl she had thought of it as the roar of plants pushing up through the soil.

  She slowly walked to the shed where Miaoshan had been found. If she’d been here on the day of the discovery of Miaoshan’s body, Hulan would have kept everyone away from this area so that she could examine the fine dust that covered the hard-packed earth. But if there had been footprints, they were long gone now, so Hulan pushed opened the door and entered. Immediately her senses were assaulted with the sights and smells of long ago. In this small, enclosed, dark room, the aromas of burlap, dirt, insecticide, kerosene, and seed mingled into a muskiness at once intoxicating and repugnant, heady and earthy. She closed the door behind her. As she waited for her eyes to adjust, she forced herself to put away her girlhood memories and preconceptions.

  She tried to visualize Miaoshan hanging from the beam, the ladder below her. She called to her mind the suicides she’d seen before: the young mother in Beijing who’d killed herself by drinking carbolic acid; the old woman from Hulan’s own neighborhood who—for reasons that never became clear—had slipped some rocks into her pockets and walked into Shisha Lake; the man who’d taken his village’s savings, invested it in the stock market, lost it all, then had leaped from his hotel window rather than go home and face the people of his village. Then she remembered her own father, seeing him put the muzzle of a gun to his head and pull the trigger.

  Hulan let her body slip down into a sitting position with her back against the wall of the shed, and thought. Typically vanity—even at this most desperate moment—kept women from using guns to kill themselves. They preferred to take pills, swim out to sea, or even slit their wrists—options that would not alter the face and also allowed the possibility of a rescue. Death by hanging was also primarily a male act, involving as it did
a certain level of mechanical expertise: securing a rope to a beam, tying a knot that would have the ability to slip, then hold, positioning an object on which to stand but could easily be knocked out of the way when the time came. Of course, a farm girl would have these abilities, but death by hanging did not result in a beautiful corpse. From everything Suchee had said about her daughter—that she was in the midst of transforming herself into a Western ideal of beauty—a broken neck, swollen tongue, and purple face didn’t fit the pattern for this particular victim.

  Something else bothered Hulan. While suicide stemmed from deep melancholy, very often victims used the act as a way of getting the last word, of inflicting permanent guilt on those left behind. As a result, suicides were often planned so that the people who discovered the body were the actual targets of the victim’s rage or despair. The young woman in Beijing, for example, had taken her baby to a neighbor’s house, come home, dressed in her wedding clothes, drunk the carbolic acid, and, despite her agonizing abdominal spasms, positioned herself so that her husband—who turned out to have had a series of affairs—would find her on their marriage bed.

  Out here on the farm only one person could find Miaoshan. But so far Suchee had said nothing that would indicate that there had been any hard feelings between herself and Miaoshan. Twenty-five years was a long time, but could Suchee have changed so much that she could hide her emotions and motives so cleverly that Hulan wouldn’t be able to see through them? If Suchee had felt guilt or remorse, would she have asked Hulan to come out here at all? No, Hulan decided, the mother was convinced that something had happened to her daughter, and the longer Hulan spent out here in this shed, the more convinced she became as well.

  Without obvious physical evidence Hulan knew that the only way to understand what had happened was to take steps back from the scene of the crime. With each step a clearer picture would emerge. Her first step would be to interview Tsai Bing, since so often murders were committed by husbands or boyfriends. Nothing in what Suchee had said about Tsai Bing suggested any animosity between him and his fiancée, but mothers could be blind when it came to such personal matters.

  Hulan stood, pushed open the door, and went back outside. She scanned the fields and spotted Suchee. Hulan walked along a raised berm running between a field of corn and a field of budding sunflowers until she reached her friend, who was working the soil with a hoe.

  “I’ve been thinking, Suchee,” Hulan said. “It would be a mistake for me to talk to people as an investigator for the Ministry of Public Security. They would be too scared.”

  Suchee frowned. “My daughter’s murderer deserves to be scared.”

  “Yes, of course, but if you want him caught, then we can’t frighten him into hiding. Let him think he’s gotten away with it. Let him think I’m merely a relative or friend who’s come to visit. He’ll let down his defenses. When he does, I’ll be there.”

  “But who?”

  “I don’t know yet, but for me to flush him out, I must understand him. To understand him, I must understand Miaoshan. To understand her, I believe I must blend in.”

  “Not like that,” Suchee said, nodding at Hulan’s clothes. “You can wear Miaoshan’s things, at least until that baby you’re carrying gets bigger.”

  Back in the house, Suchee opened a low cabinet. On two shelves were neatly folded cotton clothes. “These were Miaoshan’s. She was thin like you.”

  Many times in Hulan’s life she’d been required to change personas. On some occasions these had been at the whim of politics, as when she’d been thrust out of her routine as a model child of privilege and sent to the countryside. Other times had been the result of geographical circumstance—from Chinese countryside girl to Connecticut boarding school student. Jobs and money had also affected her attire—as a law student, then as an associate at Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout. In recent years she’d changed her dress to meet the needs of a particular case. Hulan thought of this less as working undercover than simply blending into a landscape so she could hear people’s real voices.

  Hulan stripped off her dress, then pulled on a simple short-sleeve white blouse worn soft by years of wear and washings, and pants that came to just above her ankles. Suchee then handed her a pair of homemade shoes. Slipping these on, Hulan thought about the kind of life that a person wearing them would have out here in the countryside. She felt her body losing its attitude of self-possession and assuredness, to be replaced by a woman who had survived only at the caprice of nature. Within minutes, and aided by these few garments and a change in demeanor, Liu Hulan devolved from Red Princess to peasant.

  “Can you tell me the way to the Bing farm?”

  “They won’t know anything,” Suchee said.

  “I’m going to see Tsai Bing,” Hulan clarified, then added, “but if you want me to do this, then you’ll have to let me do it my way. Please don’t question me.”

  After a brief discussion, Suchee reluctantly agreed.

  “One more thing,” Hulan said as they left the house and headed out across the fields. “Please don’t tell anyone who I am.”

  “What if someone remembers you?”

  Hulan shook her head. “I was here long ago. You were one of the few local people who came to the Red Soil Farm to teach us. The others who were older are probably dead.”

  Suchee acknowledged that this was so.

  “And the people who were our age, well, most of them went back to the city. Am I right? Besides, twenty-five years is a long time. Few of us look as we once did.”

  “Yes, but there may be people who will remember you for your name—Liu Hulan, martyr for the Revolution.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It was a popular name once, so I am only one of many my age. What’s important is that even if people do recognize my face for some reason…” She thought about the photographs from the newspapers, then strengthened herself and her voice. “No one can know I work for the ministry. No one. Do you understand?”

  The two women stopped walking. Suchee contemplated Hulan. Would she have thought to write Hulan if she hadn’t seen that photograph of her dancing in that tight dress in the nightclub pasted to the news wall in the village? At that time Suchee had heard no gossip and didn’t mention that the decadent woman in the picture had once lived in the area. As Hulan said, that was a long time ago, and she had been only one soft city face among thousands of other soft city faces. Today, if someone saw Hulan in Miaoshan’s clothes they would not think Beijing woman, let alone Ministry of Public Security inspector. She would be just another peasant. To Hulan’s question, Suchee nodded solemnly. Hulan put a hand on her friend’s arm. “And you’re sure this is what you want? Because if you have any doubts, now is the time to stop me.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay, then, how much farther is it?”

  Suchee raised an arm and pointed out across a bean field. “Go one more li. You will see the house.”

  Hulan took a couple of steps, then looked back at her friend. “I may be gone for some time. Go back to work and don’t worry about me.” Then she turned and walked along the pathway.

  It was still early, maybe only eight, but the sun beat down unrelieved by any breeze. Hot air undulated up off the earth, heavy with humidity. Soon enough Hulan’s body would become acclimated, but for now she endured the heat as best she could. She felt sweat running down the backs of her legs, but she kept her pace steady. To go more slowly would prolong her time under the direct sun; to hurry would only hasten dehydration.

  Eventually the rows of beans changed back again into corn. The air was moderately cooler here with banks of corn coming up above Hulan’s head on both sides of her, but in many ways she would have preferred the low-lying bean fields to the slashing leaves of the corn stalks that sometimes breached their orderly rows. Suddenly Hulan heard voices. She held still for a moment and decided that they were ahead of her. It was late enough now that the Tsais would already be out in the fields, but these were not the sounds of mother
, father, and son working side by side. These were low murmurs punctuated by a young woman’s giggle. With her homemade shoes, Hulan’s footsteps were virtually silent as she passed along the earth, so she brushed her hands against the corn, causing the leaves to rustle so that whoever was out here would hear her approach. Abruptly the corn opened up to reveal a small area of about six by six feet where the corners of four different plots met. Where the pathways created a cross sat a young couple, face to face, with their legs draped over each side of the berm.

  “Ni hao.” The young man’s greeting came out more as a question: Who are you and what are you doing here?

  “Zenmeyyang,” Hulan replied. This translated to something casual along the lines of “What’s happening?” Without waiting for a response, she continued, “I am looking for the farm of the Tsai family. Am I close?”

  The girl giggled. The boy said, “I am Tsai Bing. This is our family’s land. Can I help you? Are you looking for my parents? They are in the field on the other side of the house.”

  Instead of answering his questions, Hulan asked, “May I sit down?”

  The two young people looked at each other, then back at Hulan. Finally the boy motioned for her to sit.

  “I am Liu Hulan, a friend of Ling Suchee.”

  “This is Tang Siang,” the boy said, motioning to the young woman seated across from him. “She is the one-child daughter of our neighbor. The Tang lands are over there.” He raised a dirty finger and pointed to his left. “They go for many li. For so many li that Tang Dan and his daughter are able to live in Da Shui Village.”

  In another culture Hulan might have taken this thorough introduction for nervous jabbering, but here in China it was not only common but expected that an introduction would include identification of place, status, and, most important, family position.

  Hulan did not respond with similar information on herself. Instead she said, “I have come to visit Suchee. She is sad to lose her daughter.” As she spoke, Hulan observed Tsai Bing. The boy’s face had not yet developed into manhood, and he had an open look to his features. His eyes were bright. His smile was friendly. He was countryside thin, meaning that he was just bones and skin. His shorts—several sizes too large for him—were held up by a tightly cinched belt. His black hair was long and stuck out in unruly chunks. Whether this was from home cutting or from his time alone with the girl at his side Hulan couldn’t say. “It must be hard for you too.”