The Interior

The peasants knew of whom Woo was speaking but couldn't believe what they were hearing.

"There is only one person here who fits this description, and we all know who he is." Captain Woo stopped before Tang Dan. "The only remaining question your neighbors have is, why?"

Madame Tsai screamed in anguish and collapsed into her husband's arms.

Tang Dan stared proudly at the policeman. "Why!" Woo shouted.

Tang Dan blinked, then said, "I believe my minute is up, so it doesn't matter what I say." He held out his wrists to be handcuffed.

Woo glanced back at Hulan, unsure of what to do next. She nodded. He brought out his handcuffs, roughly clasped them on Tang Dan, then gave the murderer a shove toward the police car.

Suddenly Suchee rushed forward and slammed into Tang Dan's chest with both fists, sending him into the dirt. "Why? Why? Why?"

The other neighbors circled in closer, now gripping their hoes and other tools as weapons. Even those who were empty-handed crept closer, their bodies taut with anger and the desire for revenge. A boy, an only son, had been murdered by a man who had grown rich while they had remained poor.

"He comes from the landlord class," someone spat out. "You can't change a tiger's stripes," said another, quoting an almost universal epithet.

"Pig ass!".. * "Mother of a fart!"

Chinese villagers had five thousand years of precedence for dealing with such a crime. In the olden days a robber, kidnapper, or vandal was brought before the populace of a village and made to walk among them, where they might scream out his crimes and what they thought of him, where they might throw stones or beat the evildoer with sticks. The criminal might be made to wear a cangue, a huge wooden collar that made it nearly impossible to eat or even to shoo away flies. His wrists and ankles might be locked into a public stock so that everyone in the village might know that this was a bad person.

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 a

"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 ru

"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?"