The Interior Read online

  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 café 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.

  I am continually inspired by those writers who’ve written memoirs or chronicled China’s turmoil of the last century. For readers who’d like to pursue the subject, I highly recommend He Liyi’s Mr. China’s Son, Peter J. Seybolt’s Throwing the Emperor from the Horse: Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923-1995, Huang Shu-min’s The Spiral Road, and Chihua Wen’s The Red Mirror: Children of China’s Cultural Revolution. An afternoon spent in a Hong Kong bookstore uncovered Ungrounded Empires, which featured an eye-opening essay by Ching Kawn Lee, a sociologist who, I believe, is one of the few outsiders to work in and report on factories in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Jim Mann’s Beijing Jeep, G. Wayne Miller’s Toy Wars, and Du Xichuan and Zhang Lingyuan’s China’s Legal System also informed my work.

  The nasty Pearl Jenner aside, Chinese culture, U.S.-Sino relations, and the sometimes arcane world of toy manufacturing and marketing would remain mostly inaccessible and incomprehensible if not for the professionalism of many honest, forthright, and dedicated journalists. These include: Rone Tempest, Maggie Farley, Seth Faison, William Holstein, George White, Stephen Gregory, Sara Fritz, Henry Chu, Jonathan Peterson, Scott Craven, Ian Buruma, Fareed Zakaria, Craig Smith, James Flanigan, George Wehrfritz, and the aforementioned Kathy Chen.

  A book like this can’t be written without help and guidance. My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and her wonderful staff have given me encouragement, astute criticism, and, most important, great peace of mind. I’m thankful as well to the wonderful work of Carolyn Marino, my American editor at HarperCollins, and Kate Parkin, my English editor at Century. Although Eamon Dolan has moved to another house, I continue to be grateful for his imprint on this story. I have been fortunate to receive further assistance from Arlene Gharabeigie, Alicia Diaz, Jessica Saltsman, and Sasha Stone, all of whom have been unstinting with their energy, hard work, and good humor.

  Last but not least, I want to thank my family: Ariana, Baby Dash, John, Leslee, Anne, and my parents, Richard and Carolyn See. During the writing of the proposal my sister, Clara Sturak, helped me focus on the real purpose of The Interior; my brother-in-law, Chris Chandler, rescued me more times than I’d like to admit from computer hell. My husband, Richard Kendall, has shared in every aspect of this endeavor, while my children, Alexander and Christopher, are my bright lights. None of this would be fun or would matter without them.

  LISA SEE is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, as well as Peony in Love, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), Dragon Bones, and the widely acclaimed memoir, On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.

  ALSO BY LISA SEE

  Peony in Love

  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

  Dragon Bones

  Flower Net

  On Gold Mountain

  Praise for

  The Interior

  “See’s China is as vivid as Upton Sinclair’s Chicago…. Hulan remains an intriguing heroine with a complex inner life that distills the contradictions of modern China…. One of the classier practitioners of the international thriller…See does more than strew mayhem—she draws her characters with convincing psychological depth, and she offers up documentary social detail that reeks of freshly made muck.”

  —The New York Times

  “Sophisticated…See’s writing is…graceful and she still has China passionately observed.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Lisa See [does] for Beijing what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did for turn-of-the-century London or Dashiell Hammett did for 1920s San Francisco: She discerns the hidden city lurking beneath the public façade.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Original and fresh, an absorbing look at an unfamiliar world.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Immediate, haunting and exquisitely rendered, a fine line drawing of the sights and smells of the road overseas.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A unique read…a thriller with a heart.”

  —The Guardian

  “The Interior is packed with well-researched and nuanced reporting on today’s China…. Hulan is an insightful guide to both Chinese corruption and those who resist it.”

  —The Washington Post

  The Interior is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1999 by Lisa See

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon a
re trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 1999.

  “Yesterday Once More” by John Bettis and Richard Carpenter © 1973 Almo Music Corp. and Hammer & Nails Music (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  See, Lisa.

  The interior: a novel/Lisa See.—Random House trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Women detectives—China—Beijing—Fiction. 2. Government attorneys—United States—Fiction. 3. Americans—China—Beijing—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. China—Relations—United States—Fiction. 6. United States—Relations—China—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3569.E3334I58 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2007014491

  www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-668-9

  v3.0