The Interior (Red Princess 2)

“Lunch. Dinner.” Peanut’s eyes scanned the room. “I can tell you not everyone is having lunch right now.”

“But where do they go?”

“Oh, the warehouse, the shipping area, the Administration Building, even here.” Seeing Hulan’s shocked look, Peanut laughed. “They aren’t doing it in here right now! That’s only at night after lights out and the men have supposedly gone home. Outside, you put a man and a woman together, how long does it take? Not so long and then the man goes to sleep. But”—Peanut’s eyes gleamed—“if you stay in the compound—if you’re in here perhaps—you do your thing and then you have all night to talk, because these floors are too hard for much sleeping. Believe me, I know!”

“Still, won’t you get caught?”

“Depends where you go,” Peanut said, “depends who with.”

“What if I wanted to leave the compound?” Hulan asked.

“Do you have a special man too?” Peanut wanted to know.

“Maybe,” Hulan said. “Maybe I just don’t believe you. What about the gate? What about the guard?”

“Oh, leaving is easy!” Peanut bragged. “We’re dismissed at seven and so are the men. You take off your smock, give it to a friend, join the men—walking in the middle of the group—and go right out through the gate. In the morning, you just reverse the process. And if you really want out, you can always pay the guard. He’s very greedy.”

Hulan remembered back to the first time she entered the compound and how the guard had paled when he’d seen her identification. He must have thought he was on his way to a labor camp.

“You’ve done this yourself?” Hulan asked. “Paid the guard?”

“Me? No. I’m here to make money, not spend it.” Peanut turned her attention back to Siang. “So, where did the manager want to meet you?”

Siang studied her empty bowl. “He said to come to his office. He said we would have dinner there and we could talk about my promotion.”

“Um.” Peanut nodded sagely. “He wants to talk.” Then she burst out in raucous laughter, stood, and called out across the room in a shrill voice, “Manager Red Face wants to talk!” The laughter that followed was accompanied by a few more comments on Aaron Rodgers’s prowess.

Feeling sorry for Siang, Hulan reached across the table and patted her hand. “You don’t have to do what he says.”

Siang looked up not in embarrassment but in defiance. “Why wouldn’t I go?”

“Isn’t it obvious that he does this with other girls?”

“So what?”

“So you could get hurt. You could get a disease. You could—”

“You only say those things because you’re old.” Siang filled the last word with as much contempt as she could marshal. As Hulan recoiled at the insult, Siang went on. “Don’t look so surprised. It’s true you look young, almost like one of us. But you are a friend of Ling Suchee. Tsai Bing’s mother says you are girlhood friends. Well, if you are friends for that many years, then you are as old as that old woman.”

Peanut consumed all this with considerable interest, and Hulan had no doubts that their conversation would be common knowledge by lights out tonight.

“And what about Tsai Bing?” Hulan asked.

“He’s the reason I’ll do it.” Siang pushed her tray away and stood. “We want to be together, but how can we without money?”

Hulan and Peanut watched Siang wend her way through the tables. “True-heart love, eh?” Peanut asked. Hulan nodded. “Parental objection too?” When Hulan nodded again, Peanut sighed at the hopelessness of it all.

During the long, hot afternoon, as Hulan continued to jab hair through tiny holes in the Sam dolls, Peanut peppered them both with questions: What villages were they from? How had they been hired? What were they saving money for? Fortunately, Hulan didn’t have to worry too much about her answers due to Siang’s repeated interruptions. Eventually Peanut directed her questions solely to Siang, who responded with an insolent brashness, as though she were taunting them with her family’s superiority.

“A hundred years ago my family was important in this area,” Siang said. “They were landowners, the worst of the worst, but even so, they didn’t have so much. They weren’t Mandarins or educated, but they’d been in this district for many centuries. They were slave owners. They bought girls to work in the house and eventually become the concubines of my great-great-uncles.”

All of these words were spoken with perfunctory contrition, for there was no masking Siang’s pride in her family’s past. Still, to be on the safe side, she covered her haughtiness by adding, “I had a great-uncle—a younger brother naturally—who joined the People’s Army. It’s a good thing too. Otherwise my entire family would have been killed during Liberation or during Land Reform.”

“What about the Cultural Revolution?” Peanut asked. “Your family must have paid then.”

“I wasn’t born yet, so I only know the stories,” Siang said. “In those days there was a big commune not far from here where thousands of youths from the city came to learn the ways of the people. Can you imagine?”

“In my home village,” Peanut said, “we also had a work camp for people from the black classes.”