"It is not so bad," Madame Tsai said. "We have our own room. They tell us it is dry in winter and that the local government will provide all the coal we need to keep our old bones warm when it gets cold. We get rice three times a day. Every day is a banquet. Breakfast, lunch, dinner- always we are with other people. There is a communal television set. At night we have more companionship than we ever had on our land." Suchee understood what her friend was saying. That television, the yakking of the other end-of-the-liners, could not actually fill the void, but they did make a noisy cover for it.
But how could Suchee leave this land? As she looked at the uncompromising red earth all around her, she thought of the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter that gave the land its fertility. She thought of the lies and deceptions that insinuated themselves into the soil as surely as water and sunlight. She thought of how so many of those lies and deceptions had come through her, had radiated right through her from the sky, into the human and down through the soles of her feet into the earth.
Suchee had always believed in her government's policies. Her life, like so many in the countryside, had improved from the days when her parents and grandparents had worked the fields in this region for landlords who'd sucked the very life out of them. Now she looked around her and saw that whatever advances had been made were eroding as easily and ruthlessly as the way a dust storm swept away the earth. They said she now could have electricity and television, but they only gave her a window into the outer world where she could see exactly what she didn't have and would never, ever have.
They say there are nine hundred million peasants working the land in China, one-sixth of the world's population, Suchee thought, and somehow-amazingly, ridiculously-her government believed she should accept her lot as her ancestors had accepted it before her. Miaoshan had seen this. She understood it in a way that only the young can. She understood what the leaders of China didn't when they said to the country's peasants, "You are the life blood of China. Don't come to the cities. Stay where you are." She understood that the foreign outsiders were engaged in their own lies and deceptions. It was too late for Suchee, but there were hundreds of millions of others like Miaoshan who would not sit back any longer and let the world do to them. They would eventually rise up, as Chinese peasants had in the past, and make the world come to them by giving their blood, by sacrificing their respect for the past, by looking out to the horizon, by demanding what was theirs by human and political right.
But all that was almost too large for Suchee to contemplate, because her world had always been and always would be confined to what she knew was a very small and insignificant life. And in that life she had told herself numerous lies.
She had believed in the ideals of friendship, but Liu Hulan and Tang Dan had not been true friends. Yes, they were in the same place in her damaged heart, for they had both acted coldly with no respect for the consequences. Tang Dan's deceit had stemmed from avarice, and the consequences had been tangibly recognizable and condemned by the larger society. But Hulan's crimes had been done without thought to the consequences and would never be punished. If Hulan had never come to the Red Soil Farm, had never turned in Suchee and Shaoyi, had never introduced Suchee to the larger-world concepts of privilege and deprivation, Suchee's life would have been very different.
Suchee had believed in love, but her love for Ling Shaoyi had only been a matter of bad circumstance. The lies Suchee had told herself about Miaoshan were the most cruel and devastating of all. Her daughter, for all of her supposed idealism, was a liar, a cheat, a loose woman of no morals, and greedy almost beyond words. Suchee had deliberately chosen not to see it, and that had caused more bloodshed and more suffering than she ever could have imagined.
All this torture and the resulting suffering were in the air and soil around her. This place would be a daily reminder of that.
Suchee walked to a little clearing where she had left a thermos of tea, a bun for lunch, and a few tools. She picked up her hoe, waded back into the field, drove the blade hard into the red earth, then with a swift, strong movement lifted the aromatic soil to let the air down into it.
Acknowledgments
In 1996, while in search of bear farms for Flower Net, I found myself in a small and extremely remote village in Sichuan Province. The village had no telephone service and had running water for only two hours a day, but in the cafe where I took my meals was a television tuned to CNN. That slice of Chinese life-so far removed not only from what most people think of as contemporary China, but also from what most tourists visiting the Forbidden City or the terra-cotta warriors ever see-has stayed with me. So too did a 1996 article written by Kathy Chen in the Wall Street Journal about the misadventures of a young Chinese migrant worker laboring in a factory in Shenzhen. Sometime in that same year we had a barbecue at our house for Pamela Rymer (a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals), Brad Brian (a former assistant U.S. attorney), and Claire Spiegel (a writer with the Los Angeles Times). As a writer, you will get no better advice than from people who defend, prosecute, adjudicate, or report on criminals. Our charming dinner quartet certainly set my mind to racing with the ways in which Americans could commit crimes abroad and how they might get away with them. With my imagination captivated, my own adventures began.
I was blessed with innumerable kindnesses from relative strangers, as well as by the generous acts of friends. In China, my guides, translators, and drivers were indefatigable and amazingly open. On this side of the Pacific, Paul Moore of Crown Travel got me to ever more isolated villages, David Li contributed to my aphorism collection, and Xuesheng Li patiently drilled me in Mandarin and assisted with other matters of translation, as did Sophia Lo and Suellen Cheng (and her siblings in Taiwan). William Krisel shared some extraordinary tales about China during the war, imparted some great recommendations and warnings about places to see, and lent me his complete collection of the Ex-CBI Round-up. Rick Drooyan, former chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office, offered his insights on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other matters. Dede Lebovits, a wonderful friend who knows the world about private jets, managed to get me on a short hop and answered questions about fuel, runways, landing rights, and the like that ultimately did not end up in these pages. I also interviewed several people who do business or manufacture in China. For obvious reasons, they prefer to remain nameless. However, I must single out Poppy-a childhood nickname-for his great details, particularly in regards to the fiber-shredding machine.
I hate to see death or illness either romanticized or glorified. To keep that from happening in my own work, I have relied on expert advice from Dr. Xiuling Ma, Dr. Pamela Malony, and Dr. Toni Long. I am beholden as well to the librarians at the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA for their assistance.