Lisa See - The Interior

According to Confucian tradition, punishment was meted out no less swiftly or brutally for domestic crimes. If a son hit his father, then the father had the right to kill his son. If a father hit his son, there was no punishment. If a landlord stole from the people or raped a daughter, then nothing could be done except to kowtow to that landlord and hope it didn't happen again. If a peasant dared to do anything against a landlord,

then punishment was brutal and final. For five thousand years retribution had been carried out thus; then the Communists had come into power. The forms of crime changed but the punishments very little. Now it was the government that acted swiftly. As the saying went-you sometimes had to kill a chicken to shock the monkeys. And yet the government understood that the masses still needed to have their moment of power, which was why the civil war and the Cultural Revolution had been so cruelly savage.

"Beast!"

"Murderer!"

"The devil rings his bell when he comes to get your life," someone else shouted. "Well, it's ringing now, Tang Dan!"

Hulan had seen crowds like this before, been a part of them. They demanded, insisted upon, blood for blood. Looking at Captain Woo and the other policemen from the local Public Security Bureau, she knew that they would do nothing to stop the crowd. It was so easy to look the other way. It made for less paperwork, and it satisfied the villagers. In fact, Woo and his comrades might even participate themselves. She was glad-if that was the word given the circumstances-that Siang was not here to witness this.

Hulan pushed through the crowd and stood between Tang Dan and Suchee.

"I have something to say," she announced. She searched for David, found his puzzled face in the crowd, and wished she could speak in English for his benefit. Then she saw Lo edge in next to David and begin to speak softly, explaining what was happening. Hulan looked around her, taking in the faces worn by hard work and hard times. These people had never been given a break. They had known only suffering. Always their joys had been simple-the birth of a child, a good harvest, a suspension of a political campaign. Now two of their neighbors had lost only children-those life-affirming gifts made all the more precious because of China 's daunting childbirth policies.

"You are right when you say that this man is from the landlord class," she said, "for his problems stem from old ways that we all have tried hard to forget. Some of you here are old enough to remember what the landlords were like. Insidious, cruel, ruthless, but most of all they were greedy. Tang Dan is a greedy man, and although I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I think if you look back you will remember that he has always been greedy."

Again Hulan sought David's face in the crowd. She saw Lo translating her words, while already a few people in the crowd murmured their agreement. She observed David's look of confusion as he realized that her words, instead of calming the heated tempers, were only inflaming them. Aware that his eyes were fixed on her, she turned away.

"I am only a visitor to this county," Hulan said. "I was here once many, many years ago and then again now. Since coming back I have seen the changes that have happened in Da Shui and all around the countryside. We can all agree that conditions are better. You have electricity, television, some of you even have refrigerators. All this"-her arm took in the expanse around them-"is better, and at first it made me blind, as it has made you blind, to the changes that are so basic to our Chinese life."

She paused, circling slowly, looking at the faces before her. "Fire, water, air, wood, earth-these are the five elements basic to Chinese life and beliefs. We see the sun and know there's fire. We stand on the earth, we breathe the air, we use wood in our homes, but what of water? Twenty-seven years ago when I first came to Taiyuan, the Fen River was a huge, roiling beast. Remember when the government built the bridge to unite the two banks no matter what the river's conditions? Could you have imagined back then that today the Fen would be but a stream? That the riverbed would now be a place to picnic and fly kites? Or that the Three Everlasting Springs so famous in this area would be but one spring in danger of everlasting no more? I saw that and I didn't think, because all of China, despite our yearly floods, is losing water. Our rivers, our lakes, our springs, our wells are all going dry."

She spun around to find Tang Dan, who'd raised himself to his knees. Red soil smudged his clothes. Dust had also settled on his face, mixing with his sweat and running in red rivulets down his face.

"Since land reform many of you have abandoned farming," she continued. "You have gone into brick making or worked at a local factory. I say this not as a reprimand. It is merely fact. And when you or your children or your neighbors have left your farms, you've subleased your land or even given it back to the government to redistribute. Much of that land has gone to Tang Dan, and who among us today can say that he has not done a good job with it?"

She gazed at the neighbors, but none could contradict her.

"When Ling Suchee's daughter died, she asked me to come here and find out what happened. I knew that to find the killer I would have to know the victim. I came to know Miaoshan. I came to understand her value to her murderer. She had access to the one thing he was missing."

"Water," the people answered as one. Their eyes had turned to Tang Dan again. Their hate was palpable.

"Water," Hulan echoed. "You live in Da Shui, Big Water, and yet you were blind to its growing scarcity. But this man wasn't, and he began to look for land that had access to water." Here Hulan lowered her voice. "You all know whose wells could be counted on."

For the first time Hulan looked for and found her friend. "Ling Suchee has such a well. She is a widow and could never work her land as well as a family with a wife, husband, and son, so her farm has never prospered. But under that soil lies something so valuable that Tang Dan was willing to lie and cheat and eventually kill for it."

Hulan expected to see her friend overcome by grief, but Suchee was a mother who still needed to protect her daughter. She stared hard at Hulan, pleading with her eyes. Hulan answered her friend with a barely discernible nod. The neighbors didn't need to know the squalid details that would make Suchee and her daughter look like fools for years to come.

"I will say only this," Hulan went on. "When Tang Dan knew he couldn't get the water from your neighbor Ling Suchee, he killed her daughter." She addressed Tang Dan directly. "You hoped that as an end-of-the-liner Suchee would give up her farm and move into the village. When this didn't work, you unleashed your next plan, for the Tsais' well was also bountiful."

Hulan bent her head, and her shoulders trembled. David took a step forward, but Lo held him back. "I blame myself for what happened next. I didn't see what was right before me." She hesitated, then said, "I have gotten to know Tang Dan's daughter. You all know her. You all know that she was in love with this dead boy, even though he had been betrothed to Miaoshan. Once she was dead, however, the path looked clear for Tsai

Bing and Tang Siang. They were young and Siang has what we could all agree is a strong personality, but I think they would have been happy together."

The villagers looked from Tang Dan to Tsai Bing's lifeless form to his pitiable parents. Yes, all this had been right before their eyes, and yet they hadn't really seen until now.

"What horrifies me as I stand here today," Hulan said regretfully, "is that Tang Dan could have gotten his water just by letting his daughter marry Tsai Bing. But here is where his past once again exposed its ugly face. Tang Dan couldn't and wouldn't allow his daughter to marry a peasant when he had come from the landlord class and had become a millionaire in his own right. He had other plans for Siang, and they didn't involve Tsai Bing."