The Interior by Lisa See

than the rest of us. But everyone looked at her and thought she was acting like a sister of the cave, like a prostitute.”
    “I see,” Hulan said, and she did see Siang’s jealousy very clearly.
    “Everyone felt sorry for Tsai Bing,” Siang continued. “He is a good man and a good peasant. He obeys family and public rules. The law says it’s too early for him to marry without parental permission and a special exemption permit. Maybe one day he will marry. When he does, he will go through the proper channels and not through the back door.”
    Hulan had heard enough. She slowly stood and asked, “Tsai Bing, you’re sure you didn’t see Miaoshan that last night or in the morning? Her mother thought she was with you.”
    Instead of answering with words, the boy reached out and took Siang’s hand. Hulan said good-bye and that she hoped they might meet again, but what she was thinking was that Tsai Bing, a sweet enough kid, was in over his head with Siang. If this obstinate woman had her way, he would become a husband sooner than later. When he did, he would quickly catch
qi guan yan
. The words meant “inflammation of the windpipe,” but the pronunciation was similar to the words for “wife’s tight control,” creating the meaning of a henpecked husband. But Hulan’s mind jumped beyond this superficial assessment. If she believed these two and they had been together on that last night, then where was Miaoshan? Perhaps, like Hulan today, she had gone to find her fiancé and overheard him and Siang in the cornfield. There were many women—and men, for that matter—who killed themselves over broken hearts.
    Hulan kept coming back to Tang Siang. She was obviously envious of Miaoshan. More than that, her comments had been unnecessarily cruel. They seemed less the observations of someone who was sure of her relationship with Tsai Bing than someone who was still trying to solidify her position or—if she was as clever as she thought herself—trying to distract Hulan from the truth, whatever that was. This, coupled with the blatant intimacy between Tsai Bing and Siang, caused Hulan to wonder: Could either Tang Siang or Tsai Bing have killed Miaoshan? Murders of passion were as old as the human heart.
             
    It was still early in the morning, but late by countryside standards when Hulan left the fields and stepped onto the road for Da Shui. Peasants who had gone to the village to sell their produce or to do business were already heading back to their farms, so that Hulan had to thread her way through the oncoming traffic of people, pushcarts, bicycle carts, and bicycles. At first she kept to the far side of the road, nervous of the cars, trucks, and buses that drove past, but soon she fell into the rhythm of the road—the even strides, the occasional greeting, the beeping of the vehicles, the smells of exhaust, sweat, earth, and the greens that grew upon it.
    An hour later, with the sun directly above her head, Hulan entered Da Shui. In many ways it still looked the same. The streets leading into the village were too narrow for cars to pass through. (She’d seen three cars parked on a vacant stretch of land just outside the village.) The unpainted gray-brick houses were small, mostly one or two rooms with a small courtyard holding a family pig. Tiled roofs inclined steeply. A few had upturned eaves, which showed their older age. In the center of the town was a square of sorts—a large, barren area of earth where a few chickens pecked. As in most of China, there was trash of every variety lying about—twisted pieces of iron, scraggly baskets, some old barrels.
    But to Hulan’s eyes Da Shui had changed dramatically. A few feet of cement sidewalk edged the north side of the square. Where once there had been one or two little shops with government-controlled prices, Hulan now saw store after store—all small establishments, all competing against each other to sell toiletries, rice, produce, crackers,