The Interior

by Lisa See

  Before either woman could answer, the bus rounded the corner. It was neither a city nor a provincial bus, for it was far older than even those that usually plied country roads. The bus stopped and the door wheezed open. The three women picked up their parcels and climbed aboard. About a dozen women were already on the bus. Most of them had spread out their possessions so that no one would sit next to them. The driver ground the gears and began to pull away even before the three newcomers had found seats. Then someone at the back of the bus shouted, “Wait! Someone’s coming!” The driver stopped, threw open the door, and Tang Siang, her hair a windblown mess, hopped up the steps. “I don’t wait for people,” the driver said. “Next time I will keep driving.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Siang called out over her shoulder as she came down the aisle, trailing her belongings behind her. She plopped down in a seat across from Hulan. After she’d arranged her gear, she looked across the aisle at Hulan, trying to place her. “I know you.”

  “I am the friend of Ling Suchee.”

  “Yes, I remember now, but you look different.”

  Hulan ignored the remark, introduced her to Mayli and Jingren, then said, “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  Tang Siang ran her fingers through her hair. “It will surprise everyone, I think.”

  “Did you run away from home?” Mayli asked.

  “Something like that, yes.” Looking at the expectant faces, Siang said, “My father is a strong man. I can even say he is a wealthy man in our village, but he is old-fashioned. He thinks he can tell me what to do, but I don’t have to do it.”

  “What about Tsai Bing?” Hulan asked.

  When Siang didn’t answer, Mayli, her voice filled with girlish excitement, asked a series of questions. “Do you have a boyfriend? Are you betrothed? Is it for love or is it arranged?”

  Listening to the three young women, Hulan thought back to her own girlhood—first on the Red Soil Farm, then later as a foreign student at the boarding school in Connecticut. She remembered her own naïve dreams of how her life would be and realized that those dreams weren’t much different on either continent, nor had they been truly changed by time or culture.

  “I am not engaged,” Siang said. “Not yet anyway.”

  “Your father doesn’t approve,” Mayli said sympathetically.

  “Men want a lot of things,” Siang said, trying to sound worldly. “But that doesn’t mean I have to give it to them.”

  Hulan wondered if Siang was talking about her father or Tsai Bing.

  “So, did you run away?” Mayli repeated.

  Siang tossed her long black hair over her shoulder. “Last night I went to the café. I said I wanted a job. But those men are cowards. They said they couldn’t hire me. They said they would tell my father. You want to know what I said?”

  Mayli and Jingren nodded.

  “I said they would have far more trouble if they didn’t hire me. So they let me sign the paper. Then this morning when my father went out to walk his land, I packed my things and came running.”

  “Won’t your father come after you?” Mayli asked.

  “My father will not interfere with the foreigners’ business. That is one reason I know my plan will work.”

  Siang had left out some crucial details, but the two other girls didn’t seem to mind.

  Hulan, who’d listened quietly to their prattling, trying to parse truth from fiction, now went back to a conversation that had started on the dusty street outside the village. “Mayli, when the scouts said you could go to Guangdong or come here, did they say what the difference was in the kinds of work you’d be doing?”

  Mayli frowned. “Work is work. What does it matter?”

  The other girls agreed. “At least it isn’t the fields,” Jingren said. “I saw my mother and father die in those fields. Now I’m alone. Maybe now I can earn enough money to go back to my home village and start a business.”

  Mayli smiled. “My dream is to open a little shop, maybe for clothes.”

  “I was thinking maybe I’d open a place for hair cutting,” Jingren said. “What about you, Siang?”

  “My future is beautiful, that I can tell you.”

  The bus stopped at the big gates to the Knight compound. The driver handed down a clipboard, which the guard checked before stepping back into his kiosk. The gate lifted and the bus drove inside. Now everyone on the bus was silent as they took in the new sights. For Hulan, however, nothing seemed different from when she’d visited before.

  As soon as the bus stopped, everyone stood up and started to gather together their belongings until the driver called out, “Stay seated.” He left the bus, disappeared into a building marked PROCESSING, and came back five minutes later with a woman dressed in a powder blue gabardine suit, white blouse, nude knee-highs, and black pumps. Her hair was cut in a bob, making her look as familiar as an auntie.

  Taking a place at the front of the bus, she said, “Welcome to your new home. I am Party Secretary Leung. I am here to serve the needs of the workers. If you have problems, you come to me.” The party secretary motioned to the building to her right. “Your first stop today is the Processing Center. You may now stand and follow me. Talking is not necessary.”

  The women on the bus did as they were told. Once inside, other uniformed women guided the new arrivals into two lines. From here Hulan and her companions went through a dizzying round of paperwork. Then they were gathered into another large room and ordered to strip down to their underwear. A nurse did a cursory inspection of all the women, inquiring about rashes, checking eyes and throats, asking about infectious diseases. But all this was perfunctory. There were no reproductive questions, and Hulan didn’t volunteer any information about her pregnancy. Even naked she looked almost as thin as the others.

  Next they were herded into an auditorium of sorts—a great hangar of a building where the air temperature hovered at about forty degrees centigrade. There were enough benches to seat perhaps a thousand people, but today the handful of new arrivals dotted only the first couple of rows. As soon as the last woman had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and a video about the facility began to play. Narrated by Party Secretary Leung, the video tour was far more complete than what Sandy Newheart had shown Hulan on her previous visit. The dormitories looked clean if utilitarian. This was followed by quick shots of the clinic (with the voice-over explaining that the one-child policy was strictly enforced at this facility), the cafeteria (where smiling women lined up to receive trays of steaming food), the company store (where workers could buy snacks, feminine hygiene products, and Sam & His Friends dolls for friends and family at deep discounts), and the assembly room (which looked no different from what Hulan had seen on her tour).

  When the lights came back on, Madame Leung went to stand at a podium. Speaking rapidly, she described the routine—lights on at 6:00, breakfast at 6:30, at your station not one minute later than 7:00, fifteen-minute break at 10:00, a half-hour lunch at 1:00 P.M. At 7:00 the workers were dismissed from their stations. At 7:30 dinner was served. Lights-out occurred promptly at 10:00. “If all the workers meet their quotas,” she said, “you can expect to be rewarded with the occasional xiuxi.” Looking around her, Hulan saw the shock on the other women’s faces. Xiuxi, late-afternoon naptime, was considered customary throughout the country. “Yes, I know it sounds harsh,” Madame Leung acknowledged. “But this is an American company. These foreigners have different ideas about workdays and workers’ rights. They expect you to be on time. They do not want to see you eating, spitting, or sleeping at your workplace. Again, I must emphasize, no sleeping on the factory floor, on the cafeteria benches, or anywhere on the grounds outside.”

  Hulan had spent her teenage and young adult years in the United States, and when she returned to China as an adult she’d been amazed at her countrymen’s ability to sleep anywhere, at any time: at cosmetics counters in department stores, slumped on stools in the vegetable market, or even on the floor in the post offic
e. Workers—usually managers—who’d been assigned individual offices were often given a cot as a perk. Even at the MPS many of Hulan’s coworkers had cots in their offices.

  “Most important,” Madame Leung continued, “no men are allowed in the dormitory—ever. This means that all repairs and clean-up are done by us. The Party worked hard to achieve this so that the women who work here will be safe not only from the foreigners but from our own countrymen who would question our virtue.”

  Hulan felt the relief in the room. How many of these women had fled abusive fathers or unwanted marriages? And with the one-child policy, which had resulted in millions of abortions of female fetuses, women, for the first time in the history of the country, were a valued commodity. If what the party secretary said was true, then these women—some still teenagers—would no longer be at the mercy of bandits or other rogue groups who swept through remote villages kidnapping women to sell into marriages in distant provinces.

  “Punishment for infractions is automatic and severe,” Madame Leung went on. “For every missed minute of evening curfew, an extra hour of work will be added to your day. This means if you are not in your dormitory room precisely at ten, the next day you will work until eight. This means you will miss dinner.”

  Madame Leung held up a hand to silence the murmurs of dissatisfaction. “This is how things are done in America, so this is how things will be done at your new home,” she said sternly. Her hands clasped the podium as she waited for full silence. “Let me continue. If you miss one day of work, you will lose three yuan from your salary of two hundred yuan. If you miss three days of work in a row, you will be fired.”

  Again the women muttered among themselves. “I thought the salary was five hundred yuan a month,” a voice called out.

  Madame Leung’s disapproving eyes scanned the room. “Who asks this question?” When no one answered, she said, “One day, after you complete your full training, you will be promoted. Until then all of you will be paid two hundred yuan a month.” She surveyed the room, daring the women to complain. None did. “In a moment you will begin your education, but before you go I want to remind you that I am your government liaison. Please, if you have any problems, come to me. You will always find a receptive ear.”

  Twenty minutes later, Hulan found herself in yet another vast room, which had the capacity to seat a hundred or more at long tables. But since this was the middle of the week, the instructor explained, there would be only these few women for training. During the rest of the afternoon Hulan moved from one station to the next, getting timed on how quickly she could run fabric through a sewing machine, clip on button eyes, attach the extra gizmos to the cardboard packaging. She thought she was getting quite adept at installing the box that contained the software, until she saw that the others in her group were faster. She kept sneezing when filling the body with its polyester-fiber stuffing and saw the supervisor put a red mark next to her name for that activity. Her next chore was to punch hair into the heads of the dolls. This involved using a tool to run clumps of plastic hair through tiny pre-made holes, then tying off the strands along the interior of the skulls. At each stop the supervisor made a note of Hulan’s progress on her clipboard.

  Hulan then moved on to a stamping machine. Unused to working with her hands, she was slow at this job, which required quickly moving the doll’s plastic face into position so that special attaching holes could be punched through. Within a minute the cutters came down and slashed through the flesh between Hulan’s thumb and forefinger on her left hand. Madame Leung shut down the machine and hustled Hulan to the clinic. The nurse pulled out a needle and thread, then, without the aid of either anesthetic or disinfectant, stitched the wound closed. The nurse wrapped gauze around Hulan’s hand, tied two torn strips together, told her that the injury was neither significant nor permanent, then said, “You may go back to work.” Madame Leung nodded and escorted Hulan back to the training room. The bandage and the pain exacerbated Hulan’s clumsiness, but she found that although she was still not as swift as the others, she could still do the work. More red marks, however, were made next to her name.

  At 6:30 they were shown into the deserted cafeteria and given bowls of rice with stir-fried vegetables on top. At seven they heard a siren. Madame Leung reappeared, ushered them into an adjoining room, and told them they could rest for fifteen minutes. Just as Hulan heard the cafeteria filling with the regular workers, Madame Leung returned, opened a door to the outside, and led them through the late afternoon sunshine to the Assembly Building. Jimmy, the Australian, was not at his post in the lobby, so Madame Leung reached under the desk and pressed the button to release the lock on the door.

  On the other side was the small foyer that Hulan had passed through on her tour. Madame Leung opened one of the doors that led from it, and the women followed her down a hallway, turned right, left, right again, then two lefts. In each corridor they passed more closed doors. Hulan had no idea where she was in relation to the final assembly room she’d been in before, let alone the main courtyard from which she’d come. At last they stepped into a huge room that logic said must be on the other side of the wall from the final assembly area.

  The room was divided into two open areas. The first and largest held the cutting tables and sewing machines. The second area was dominated by gigantic machines, some of which measured eight feet high and twenty feet long. Madame Leung explained their various purposes: “molders” for making the plastic body parts, “flockers” to create the hair, and another machine with knife-like claws that grabbed compacted bricks of polyester fiber, drew it along a conveyor belt and shredded it into fluffy stuffing, which emerged out the other end of the machine to be packed loosely into burlap sacks. As she followed behind Madame Leung, Hulan could still feel waves of heat coming off the machines. The temperature, even this late in the day, was as hot as anything Hulan had ever felt. Fine beads of sweat broke out on Mayli’s forehead, and Siang whispered, “We are standing in an oven. In an hour we will be as cooked as a piece of pottery.”

  “This is where you will begin work tomorrow,” Madame Leung said. “You will be assigned a station and a guide. She will teach you how to work your machine. Once you have mastered the work in this room, you will be promoted to other jobs. Some of you might even make it into what the foreigners call the heart. This is a place with air conditioning. This is a special American invention that makes the air feel as cool as ice even in the hottest month. Many of you have come here with big dreams. I am here to tell you that they can come true. I can promise you this, because once I too was like you. I came from a village far away. I started in this room. I earned only two hundred yuan, but I kept working because I had my dreams.”

  Madame Leung paused, looked around at the newcomers, and smiled. Everyone in the room could see that the party secretary’s dreams had come true by her nice suit, her nice haircut, and her nice figure that was neither too thin nor too fat. “In a moment you will go to your dormitory. If you think you will be unhappy here, this is the time to say so. You have all signed a three-year contract. Tonight—and only tonight—we are willing to let you walk away from your obligation. Tomorrow you will be fully committed, and there will be no crying, no changing your mind, no saying this isn’t the way to your dreams.”

  For the second time that day Madame Leung inspected the group, looking for any signs of weakness. Again there were none.

  “Our countrymen know hard work,” Madame Leung said. “We are proud of what we can do. Through our American friends we can reap the rewards.” She straightened her shoulders, then said, “Good night. Sleep well, for tomorrow you start your new life.”

  The dormitory rooms were hot, stuffy, and humid. Three smells hung in the air—women, overflowing (or unflushed) toilets, and scented toiletries. The women who’d accompanied Hulan thus far now separated and went looking for beds. Each room had four bunks, each with three beds apiece. Underneath the bottom beds were stashed the belongings of all the women in t
he room. A single bare lightbulb hung from the center of the ceiling. Most of the rooms were fully occupied, and since the other women had set out before Hulan, the few bunks that were available were quickly taken. Hulan was about to enter one room when she saw Jingren coming out.

  “You don’t want to go in there,” Jingren said. “The only free bed belonged to a dead girl.”

  If the dead girl was who Hulan thought it was, then this was exactly where she wanted to be. She entered the room and asked which bed was open. One of the women pointed at a middle bunk. “But if you sleep there, a ghost spirit will visit you.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Hulan said.

  A couple of the women laughed. “You say that now,” a girl of about fourteen said. “Tomorrow morning you will move out like the other women who have tried to sleep here.” She feigned a frightened voice and twisted her face into a humorous crinkled mask. “She was sitting on my chest all night! She was howling! She was nibbling at my ears!” Her voice shifted again. “Sleep here if you want, but tomorrow you will be gone.”

  Hulan threw her satchel on the bed and slid into the space. She couldn’t fully extend her arm when lying down, and there certainly wasn’t room to sit up. Poorly written Chinese characters had been scribbled on the wall with pen and pencil: “Protect me,” “Home,” “Work is reward.” Had Miaoshan written these words and phrases, or were they the work of the women who had come before and after her death?