The Interior - Страница 29

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 naive 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 cafe. 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 amp; 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 office. 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."