The Interior (Red Princess 2)

“The alternative?”

“To give myself over fully to love,” she said, at last admitting her deepest fear. She looked away again and stared over at Zai, her mother, and her nurse. “Suchee says I’ve run away my entire life. Maybe I have, because staying opens up the possibility of losing love and being hurt.” When she turned back to him, her eyes glittered with tears. “I don’t think I could stand losing you or the baby.”

“You’re not going to lose us,” he said. “I’m here and the baby’s coming.” He tried to be light. “You’re always so good with your proverbs. Well, I have a few of my own. You can run, but you can’t hide. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. You don’t know if you don’t like spinach unless you’ve tried it.”

“Those aren’t proverbs! They’re clichés.”

“Well, hear this, then.” He took her hand and kissed it. “I’ll never leave you, Hulan. That’s just the way it is.”

Epilogue

THE DEAD HEAT OF SUMMER FINALLY PASSED, AND A KIND of languid somnambulance fell over the countryside as the crops ripened and the people readied for harvest. The heads of the sunflowers, drooping from the weight of their seeds, could no longer look up to the sun. The fields of millet and sorghum had already been harvested, the land cleared, and some farmers had begun preparations for their winter crops, for every day the sun rose less high in the sky and daylight waned minute by minute. The cicadas had grown quieter in recent days as the humidity, stickiness, and thick air disappeared as it always did at this time of year. Ling Suchee imagined—for by any measure temperatures were still warm, hot even—a coolness drifting on the air.

Suchee tore an ear of corn from the stalk, peeled back the outer leaves, and examined the kernels. They were plump and a pleasing shade of yellow. There were no bugs and no diseases. She took a bite and the raw corn felt fresh and sun-warm in her mouth. Yes, in another day or two this field would be ready for harvest and she would hire a couple of boys to help her. She walked on, passing through the rows, feeling the rustle of the stalks against her arms and the warmth of the soil beneath her bare feet.

But inside, where her heart kept its steady, relentless beating, she ached. Not a day, not a minute went by that she didn’t wish for a hardness to form over that delicate but persistent organ. She knew, of course, that the physical heart—the chambers and valves and aortas that she’d seen in a book—did not really suffer from loss, but then how else could you explain the pain, the sickness that lay heavy in her chest every morning when she woke up and that she carried with her as she went about her chores?

The barefoot doctor had recommended that she leave this place and move into the village. Instead she’d come away with a packet of herbs and instructions to boil them, strain them, boil them again, then drink one cup three times a day for ten days. She’d done as the doctor ordered, but that bitter liquid could not cure her.

Nor would her neighbors’ suggestion to join them in the village. Tang Dan had been right in his assessment of the Tsais. Everywhere they looked they saw reminders of their son—the kang where he’d slept, the well where his body had been found, the land where he’d been with them literally every day since his birth. So within days of Tsai Bing’s death, his parents, without completing the harvest, had handed their land back to the government and had moved to the village house for end-of-the-liners.

“It is not so bad,” Madame Tsai said. “We have our own room. They tell us it is dry in winter and that the local government will provide all the coal we need to keep our old bones warm when it gets cold. We get rice three times a day. Every day is a banquet. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—always we are with other people. There is a communal television set. At night we have more companionship than we ever had on our land.” Suchee understood what her friend was saying. That television, the yakking of the other end-of-the-liners, could not actually fill the void, but they did make a noisy cover for it.

But how could Suchee leave this land? As she looked at the uncompromising red earth all around her, she thought of the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter that gave the land its fertility. She thought of the lies and deceptions that insinuated themselves into the soil as surely as water and sunlight. She thought of how so many of those lies and deceptions had come through her, had radiated right through her from the sky, into the human and down through the soles of her feet into the earth.

Suchee had always believed in her government’s policies. Her life, like so many in the countryside, had improved from the days when her parents and grandparents had worked the fields in this region for landlords who’d sucked the very life out of them. Now she looked around her and saw that whatever advances had been made were eroding as easily and ruthlessly as the way a dust storm swept away the earth. They said she now could have electricity and television, but they only gave her a window into the outer world where she could see exactly what she didn’t have and would never, ever have.

They say there are nine hundred million peasants working the land in China, one-sixth of the world’s population, Suchee thought, and somehow—amazingly, ridiculously—her government believed she should accept her lot as her ancestors had accepted it before her. Miaoshan had seen this. She understood it in a way that only the young can. She understood what the leaders of China didn’t when they said to the country’s peasants, “You are the life blood of China. Don’t come to the ci

ties. Stay where you are.” She understood that the foreign outsiders were engaged in their own lies and deceptions. It was too late for Suchee, but there were hundreds of millions of others like Miaoshan who would not sit back any longer and let the world do to them. They would eventually rise up, as Chinese peasants had in the past, and make the world come to them by giving their blood, by sacrificing their respect for the past, by looking out to the horizon, by demanding what was theirs by human and political right.

But all that was almost too large for Suchee to contemplate, because her world had always been and always would be confined to what she knew was a very small and insignificant life. And in that life she had told herself numerous lies.

She had believed in the ideals of friendship, but Liu Hulan and Tang Dan had not been true friends. Yes, they were in the same place in her damaged heart, for they had both acted coldly with no respect for the consequences. Tang Dan’s deceit had stemmed from avarice, and the consequences had been tangibly recognizable and condemned by the larger society. But Hulan’s crimes had been done without thought to the consequences and would never be punished. If Hulan had never come to the Red Soil Farm, had never turned in Suchee and Shaoyi, had never introduced Suchee to the larger-world concepts of privilege and deprivation, Suchee’s life would have been very different.

Suchee had believed in love, but her love for Ling Shaoyi had only been a matter of bad circumstance. The lies Suchee had told herself about Miaoshan were the most cruel and devastating of all. Her daughter, for all of her supposed idealism, was a liar, a cheat, a loose woman of no morals, and greedy almost beyond words. Suchee had deliberately chosen not to see it, and that had caused more bloodshed and more suffering than she ever could have imagined.

All this torture and the resulting suffering were in the air and soil around her. This place would be a daily reminder of that.

Suchee walked to a little clearing where she had left a thermos of tea, a bun for lunch, and a few tools. She picked up her hoe, waded back into the field, drove the blade hard into the red earth, then with a swift, strong movement lifted the aromatic soil to let the air down into it.