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“I only knew his dreams,” she answered. “And even those were always…I knew he was unhappy. Remember back when Michael Ovitz left CAA and moved to Disney? He was arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood, but he still had to fetch Julia Roberts a glass of mineral water if she asked for it. Well, that’s how Miles felt. He made tons of money, but he had to be available whenever a client wanted him.”
David remembered what Doug had said about Miles. “Is it true that Tartan had offered him a job?”
“Yes, as general counsel. He would have been the client, don’t you see?”
There seemed nothing more to say, and they turned back toward the house. Mary Elizabeth reached out and put a trembling hand on his arm. “Did he…” She began in a quavering voice, but she couldn’t finish.
“No, he didn’t suffer. He didn’t even know what happened.”
In early September, Hulan was resting on a chaise longue in the central courtyard of her family compound when Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang paid her customary call. The old woman, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, hung onto David’s arm and wrinkled her face up at him in delight as he escorted her outside. She sat down opposite Hulan on a porcelain garden stool. As soon as David went inside to make tea, Madame Zhang said, “He is funny, that one. I see he is practicing his Mandarin, but aiya, to my ears it is frightful and hilarious at the same time.”
Hulan had been trying to teach David basic sentences: Welcome. How are you? Okay. How much? That’s too expensive. How is your son? Can you tell me…But he was as competent as a toddler in split pants. Lately she’d begun to think it would be better for him to forget the project entirely because his tones were abysmal, and, as Madame Zhang noted, they resulted in some amusing mistakes.
“What did he say today?”
“Qing wen…” Madame Zhang said, purposely missing the fourth tone of wen and replacing it with a third, thereby changing the meaning from “Please, may I ask” to “Please kiss.”
Hulan smiled as the Neighborhood Committee director cackled in pleasure.
“He could kiss me if he wants,” the old woman added. “He is not so ugly as I once thought.”
David returned with the tea, set it on the table, and retired to the other side of the courtyard, where Hulan’s mother, her nurse, and Vice Minister Zai sat under the twisting branches of the jujube. Jinli didn’t understand who David was, although she accepted his presence without question; nor did she understand that she would soon be a grandmother. But she seemed to find comfort in her childhood home and, while still not appreciating the raucous cymbals, gongs, and drums of the yang ge troupe, had grown more accustomed to the cacophonous morning ritual. David had found another way to deal with it. He’d joined the troupe.
“He is a foreigner,” Madame Zhang continued. “This we can never forget. But he isn’t so bad.” This compliment was of the highest order, and the old woman moved quickly to ward off any evil that might result by cautiously explaining herself. “He minds his own business. He knows enough to sweep the snow in front of his own doorstep and not bother about the frost on top of his neighbor’s roof. And yet he has shown high regard for our neighborhood and our neighbors. He is polite and respectful. And you should know”—she leaned forward and put a gnarled hand on Hulan’s knee—“the neighbors are appreciative of the way he cares for you.”
“I’m pleased that they’re happy,” Hulan said diplomatically.
A gauzy look came over Madame Zhang’s wrinkled face as she gazed over in David’s direction. Despite all of her attempts to remain critical, she was as smitten with David as if she were a schoolgirl.
“For so many years,” the Committee director continued dreamily, “the government has talked about what is good for the masses. But these days I wonder. What if individual happiness can serve the people more than anything else?”
“I would never argue with our government,” Hulan said.
The old woman frowned at her neighbor’s stupidity: always this girl was mindful, so careful of every word. Madame Zhang had come here not completely in her official position—although she never forgot her duty—but as an old woman who had seen her neighbor happy and at peace for the first time since she was a small child. This house deserved to have joy and tranquility again, and she would do what she could to make that happen. So, instead of debating with her obtuse neighbor, she went on as though Hulan had not spoken at all.
“In this spirit,” Madame Zhang said, “I’ve been thinking about a marriage certificate. Your David is a foreigner, yes, but I think I can make a recommendation that even the old-liners will accept.”
Did the Committee director expect Hulan to believe that these were her own original thoughts? It had probably been the old men from the compound across the lake who had sent her here today. But what use was there in pointing this out? Instead Hulan folded her hands over her swelling stomach and looked across the courtyard at David. He chanced to look up and cocked his head as if waiting for her to ask him a question. With their eyes locked, Hulan said softly, “We’ll see, auntie, we’ll see.”
Her duty done, the old woman paid her respects to Jinli and left. David came to sit at Hulan’s side and, as they had repeatedly over these last few weeks, went back over the events leading to the conflagration at Knight. His orderly mind had boiled everything down to greed. The old men in the Silk Thread Café had been greedy, getting their kickbacks from Doug via Amy Gao. Tang Dan and Miles Stout had clearly been motivated by greed. And it had all started because Henry Knight was greedy in his own way.
Unwilling to share his company with his less talented son, Henry had unwittingly set the whole catastrophe in motion. And as much as David liked the man, he couldn’t help but acknowledge that greed was what was keeping Henry going now. A makeshift assembly area—based on Doug’s plans—had been set up in the Knight warehouse, and even now women were working overtime to get boxes of Sam & His Friends in the stores by Christmas. With all the additional publicity, the supply really couldn’t meet the demand. More than that, the articles in the papers—and there’d been countless—had portrayed the Sam & His Friends technology as so revolutionary that it had caused…Well, the whole thing sounded positively Shakespearean.
In the meantime, Knight International’s stock had gone through the roof, and Henry had, to considerable acclaim, unveiled a plan to link executive pay to fair labor practices, especially regarding child labor, since, as he kept repeating, “We’re in the toy business. We create toys for children, not jobs!” Community groups, a reorganized board of directors, as well as a consortium of international watchdog organizations would carry out inspections. (This one action, if it was to be believed, wiped out half of Knight’s workforce. Peanut and so many others had been sent “home,” meaning that they’d simply moved on to other factories with less discriminating owners.) Henry’s actions were not as noble as it seemed at first glance. When he wasn’t giving interviews or testifying before Congress, he was talking to studios and conglomerates all over the world for what the international media was calling “the largest global out-licensing campaign of all time.” It seemed that Doug’s predictions had been frighteningly accurate.
Of course, all the attention had spurred the media to cover a different aspect of the story. Chinese woman migrant workers were changing the face of the countryside. Unlike their male counterparts, these women either sent their earnings home to their peasant families, increasing the household income by forty percent, or were saving their salaries so they might return to their villages to open little businesses. It was estimated that women who’d returned from foreign factories owned nearly half of all shops and cafés in rural villages. Suddenly Chinese peasant girls were seen by their families as leaders of social and economic chan
ge; as a result, in the last calendar year female infanticide had dropped for the first time in recorded history. As a Ford Foundation scholar noted, female migrant workers were the single most important element transforming Chinese society. “This is happening on a scope unprecedented worldwide, and it means radical, revolutionary changes for women.” If anything, these stories soothed the consciences of parents around the world who needed to have Sam and Cactus and Notorious and the rest of the Friends in time for the holidays. Or, as Amy Gao might have put it, if there was one thing Americans admired, trusted, and believed in more than democracy, it was capitalism.
Hulan had heard all this before and once again repeated her view. “This wasn’t caused by greed. It was love.”
When she’d first said this back in the hospital, David hadn’t believed her, for she was not a woman given over to mushy sentiments. But she had stuck to her theory now for weeks without much other explanation. In fact, since his return from Los Angeles, he’d noticed a certain bitterness in her thoughts, but perhaps after what she’d been through this was to be expected. That day in the factory she’d drawn on her last bit of strength to save not only David and Henry but all those other women. She’d been left so physically weak and emotionally frail that her usual defenses were in tatters.
“I’ve never experienced unconditional love like Suchee’s for Miaoshan or even Keith’s for Miaoshan,” she said, finally expanding on her idea. “She had a lot of faults, but she must have been a remarkable woman to elicit that kind of devotion.”
“Maybe they weren’t so blind,” David interrupted. “Yes, she was manipulative, but somewhere along the line she shifted. She had nothing personal to gain from trying to organize the women in the factory, and the way she divided up the materials tells me that she really wanted to make sure that information got out. She had energy, brains, and in other circumstances things might have turned out differently for her.” He paused, then asked, “What about Doug? You can’t believe he acted out of love.”
“Him most of all. Think of what he did to prove himself to his father. Then think of how on that last day, Henry was willing to take the blame for everything—the corruption, the murders—to protect his son. He begged us to bring him back to Beijing to face the consequences. And in our own ways we deceived ourselves and each other despite love, for love….” She closed her eyes. When she opened them, he saw nothing but sorrow. “I look back at my parents and the way I was brought up, and I wonder at all of it. I think of my work and how I see the very worst in people. But for me it’s easier than the alternative.”
