The Interior (Red Princess 2)

“That’s right,” Tsai Bing chimed in.

Tsai Bing and Siang had to be lovers. How else to explain Tsai Bing’s odd indifference to losing his fiancée or Siang’s callous remarks? But the young woman with the pretty face wasn’t finished.

“Miaoshan was always showing off. With her new clothes and her painted face, she thought she was telling the whole village she was better than the rest of us. But everyone looked at her and thought she was acting like a sister of the cave, like a prostitute.”

“I see,” Hulan said, and she did see Siang’s jealousy very clearly.

“Everyone felt sorry for Tsai Bing,” Siang continued. “He is a good man and a good peasant. He obeys family and public rules. The law says it’s too early for him to marry without parental permission and a special exemption permit. Maybe one day he will marry. When he does, he will go through the proper channels and not through the back door.”

Hulan had heard enough. She slowly stood and asked, “Tsai Bing, you’re sure you didn’t see Miaoshan that last night or in the morning? Her mother thought she was with you.”

Instead of answering with words, the boy reached out and took Siang’s hand. Hulan said good-bye and that she hoped they might meet again, but what she was thinking was that Tsai Bing, a sweet enough kid, was in over his head with Siang. If this obstinate woman had her way, he would become a husband sooner than later. When he did, he would quickly catch qi guan yan. The words meant “inflammation of the windpipe,” but the pronunciation was similar to the words for “wife’s tight control,” creating the meaning of a henpecked husband. But Hulan’s mind jumped beyond this superficial assessment. If she believed these two and they had been together on that last night, then where was Miaoshan? Perhaps, like Hulan today, she had gone to find her fiancé and overheard him and Siang in the cornfield. There were many women—and men, for that matter—who killed themselves over broken hearts.

Hulan kept coming back to Tang Siang. She was obviously envious of Miaoshan. More than that, her comments had been unnecessarily cruel. They seemed less the observations of someone who was sure of her relationship with Tsai Bing than someone who was still trying to solidify her position or—if she was as clever as she thought herself—trying to distract Hulan from the truth, whatever that was. This, coupled with the blatant intimacy between Tsai Bing and Siang, caused Hulan to wonder: Could either Tang Siang or Tsai Bing have killed Miaoshan? Murders of passion were as old as the human heart.

It was still early in the morning, but late by countryside standards when Hulan left the fields and stepped onto the road for Da Shui. Peasants who had gone to the village to sell their produce or to do business were already heading back to their farms, so that Hulan had to thread her way through the oncoming traffic of people, pushcarts, bicycle carts, and bicycles. At first she kept to the far side of the road, nervous of the cars, trucks, and buses that drove past, but soon she fell into the rhythm of the road—the even strides, the occasional greeting, the beeping of the vehicles, the smells of exhaust, sweat, earth, and the greens that grew upon it.

An hour later, with the sun directly above her head, Hulan entered Da Shui. In many ways it still looked the same. The streets leading into the village were too narrow for cars to pass through. (She’d seen three cars parked on a vacant stretch of land just outside the village.) The unpainted gray-brick houses were small, mostly one or two rooms with a small courtyard holding a family pig. Tiled roofs inclined steeply. A few had upturned eaves, which showed their older age. In the center of the town was a square of sorts—a large, barren area of earth where a few chickens pecked. As in most of China, there was trash of every variety lying about—twisted pieces of iron, scraggly baskets, some old barrels.

But to Hulan’s eyes Da Shui had changed dramatically. A few feet of cement sidewalk edged the north side of the square. Where once there had been one or two little shops with government-controlled prices, Hulan now saw store after store—all small establishments, all competing against each other to sell toiletries, rice, produce, crackers, and other dry goods. Painted on empty walls were advertisements for chewing gum, appliances, and face cream. She even saw a couple of billboards.

Twenty-five years ago the only decoration in the village had been larger-than-life posters and paintings of the Great Helmsman. Of course, there had been other embellishments in the form of revolutionary slogans promoting Mao’s Cultural Revolution (“Universal Redness With No Exceptions” or “Fight With Words, Not With Weapons”) and in dazibao, the big character posters that proclaimed the real and imagined crimes of this or that villager. In those days loudspeakers had blared Chairman Mao’s quotations all day and long into the night.

Even today cone-shaped speakers wired to the eaves of buildings played a set routine of programs, beginning at six in the morning with news and commentary. At noon, those fortunate enough to have fields near the village would have lunch accompanied by news and maybe a little music. At dusk, when peasants from the surrounding area converged on the town for a cup of tea, a little conversation, and a game of cards, the programming would start up again with what had traditionally been political indoctrination. Right now an old-fashioned military march accompanied Hulan as she walked down the dusty street.

She went straight to the local Public Security Bureau. The linoleum floor was worn and dirty. An electric fan hung from the ceiling, flanked by two sets of fluorescent lights, but none of them was turned on. Hulan went to the counter. Two women sat at desks against the wall. One was eating from a bowl of food she’d brought from home; the other was doing nothing as far as Hulan could tell. Neither woman looked up. The police bureau was not part of what might be considered the service industry. Manners had no place here. There were no forbidden phrases or outlawed attitudes. To the contrary, people in law enforcement—even if they were simply office staff—were allowed to be rude. Hulan understood the routine, but that didn’t make her like it any more.

Finally Hulan cleared her throat.

“What do you want?” the woman eating noodles asked.

“I was hoping to see whoever is in charge.”

&n

bsp; “Captain Woo is busy. He can’t see you now.”

“I can wait.”

The two women exchanged glances. The woman eating noodles smirked as she said, “You can sit or you can go, we don’t care.”

What came to Hulan’s mind as she stood there in the hot room was a centuries-old saying: To be an official for one lifetime means seven rebirths as a beggar. Wisely, she didn’t say this and sat down instead. She picked up a newspaper, but there was little news in the province this week. A while later, she got up and walked to the bulletin board. Here were the usual posters promoting the one-child policy, a flyer for employment at the Knight factory, a chart showing farming quotas, and a government-sponsored list of slogans encouraging better work habits, personal hygiene, and good attitudes such as “Time Is Money, Efficiency Is Life” and “Persist in Reform and Open Policy.”

At last a door behind the counter opened and a man came out. Seeing Hulan, he leaned down and spoke quietly to one of the secretaries, then straightened and addressed Hulan directly. “You may come in, but only for five minutes.”

The sign on the door said Captain Woo. He motioned for Hulan to sit and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Liu Hulan.”

“An old-fashioned name. People don’t use that name much anymore.”

“This is so.”

Captain Woo poured himself a cup of tea from a thermos but didn’t offer any to the woman who sat before him. “You are not from Da Shui.”

“I have come to visit a friend.”

“And you find that you argue, that things aren’t as they were? This happens sometimes. Friends grow apart.”