The Interior (Red Princess 2)

Most of the women had already crossed the compound’s yard and had disappeared into the cafeteria building. “Well, if I’m going to leave, I’d better do it now,” Hulan said. She quickly took off her pink smock and handed it to Peanut. “See you tomorrow,” she said, then walked down the steps and casually drifted into the cluster of a hundred or so men. A few of them looked at her curiously, but none said a word.

Hulan’s breathing became shallow and her heart began to pound as she waited for the gate to open. She told herself that it didn’t matter if she was caught, that she had nothing to lose. Still, the fear she felt made her realize why the women here rarely did this; the danger of losing their jobs, of being stranded miles from home, was too big a risk to take. When the gate drew up, Hulan kept to the thickest part of the crowd. With dozens of male bodies shielding her, she strolled as nonchalantly as possible out of the compound.

When she reached the hotel, she walked around to the back, slipped in through the employee entrance, rode up the freight elevator to the eleventh floor, and knocked on David’s door. David drew her in and hugged her, but not before she glimpsed the momentary lack of recognition that flickered across his face. Hulan retired to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, she saw that her newly cropped hair had come loose from its pins, and her face was streaked with dirt. She stepped into the shower, enjoying washing the grime of the factory from her skin and feeling the warmth of the water on her aching muscles. When Hulan reemerged, her hair was pulled back, she wore a sleeveless ecru dress of raw silk, and she’d applied a fresh bandage to her wound.

“Do you want dinner in the room?” David asked, admiring her transformation.

Hulan shook her head. “I’d like to go out, especially if we can walk somewhere.”

They went back downstairs. Hulan checked with the concierge for a restaurant recommendation, but he insisted tha

t all the restaurants in Taiyuan were for the masses. “You are only two people and he is a foreigner,” the concierge said in Mandarin. “You will be an inconvenience to the other patrons. It is better that you stay here. If you really must go someplace else and you want authentic food, I can recommend the restaurant in the Hubin Hotel, which caters to our overseas compatriots.”

When the concierge wouldn’t budge on his suggestions—he probably received kickbacks from the two hotels’ chefs—David and Hulan pushed through the revolving doors and into the sultry night air, crossed the street, and decided to take a chance on a small restaurant decorated with Christmas lights. Hulan conversed with the waiter about specialties and ingredients, then ordered. David asked for a Tsingtao beer, while Hulan accepted some chrysanthemum tea. A few minutes later, the waiter returned with fresh corn soup.

David and Hulan had both experienced a lot since the previous morning, but at first they shared only trivialities. David said he’d looked for her at lunch but hadn’t seen her; she said she’d seen him. He said he was impressed by how cheerful the women seemed as they walked to the cafeteria. “They waved and called out to us,” he said. Hulan smiled but didn’t tell him what the women were really saying about Aaron Rodgers.

The waiter arrived and with a flurry set down three dishes: diced chicken sautéed with hot peppers, baby bok choy warmed with giant mushrooms, and prawns that had first been stir-fried with ginger, garlic, onions, and black beans, then dipped in molten lard to create morsels that were flavorful on the inside and crispy on the outside. It all tasted wonderful, especially to Hulan, who hadn’t had a decent meal in twenty-four hours.

At last David asked, “So tell me about the factory.”

“Last night when I called you, I’d only seen those places that were nice enough to keep me from walking out on the contract,” she said, putting down her chopsticks. “But here’s what it’s actually like: There’s running water only for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. To flush the toilets, you scoop water out of a barrel and dump it in the tank. There’s no hot water at all. The shower stalls—if you can call them that—probably haven’t been cleaned since the factory opened two years ago. The food in the cafeteria has hair on it. From what animal, I don’t know. And then there’s the factory floor itself—”

But before she could go on, David interrupted. “You’re a Beijinger who’s happened to have gone to a Connecticut boarding school. You’re always telling me about dirty or backward conditions like on your train trip or in that hotel in Datong. Didn’t that place only have hot water two hours a day?”

“There’s a big difference between no running water and rationed hot water.”

“To a peasant? The women I saw today looked perfectly content. It has to be better working in the factory, no matter how primitive, than being out on a farm.”

His ignorance surprised her. “Is it that you don’t believe me when I tell you that we’re tricked into signing contracts that promise one thing but deliver another, or is it that you think that just because the women are peasants they should be grateful for what they get?”

“I’m saying neither of those things, Hulan,” he replied patiently. “I’m saying they were singing. They seemed happy to me.”

“I’m sure that’s what your slave owners used to say,” she bristled.

“Hulan…”

“I just spent a day working shoulder to shoulder with two women. Siang and Peanut may not have been educated in the way that you or I have been, but they have a deeper understanding of how things work than either of us.”

“Aren’t you romanticizing them?”

Hulan thought back. “No,” she said, “just the opposite. They’ve lived at the whim of so many things. They are truly close to the soil. You know what that means to me? A kind of earthiness.”

“In my meeting Sandy said something like that as well. He was referring to crudeness, I think.”

“Perhaps it’s crude to live from hand to mouth, but it makes things very clear. The women I worked with today understand that they’re being taken advantage of. The hours are long. The living facilities are substandard. The noise level on the factory floor has to be bad for our ears. A lot of what we’re doing is dangerous. Look at my hands, David.”

Of course, he’d already seen the gauze wrapped around her left hand and that wound remained covered. But the exposed flesh on both of her hands was scratched and scabbed, while her fingernails were broken and jagged.

“But this is nothing,” she continued. “A woman was badly injured in the factory today. Her whole arm was torn up.”

David waited for Hulan to tell him about the death. When she didn’t, he said, incredulous, “Their security man was right. He cleaned it up and no one even knew what happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The woman who was hurt jumped off the roof of the building. She’s dead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she asked.