The Interior by Lisa See Page B

financial profit, sex, revenge, politics, or religion? Or was this simply a suicide? She would have focused her attentions much more clearly on Miaoshan herself. As Hulan had said last night, to catch a murderer, an investigator needed to understand the victim.
    Hulan quietly dressed and went outside. Coming from Beijing, with its cars and trucks and millions of people, Hulan was accustomed to noise. Here there was noise of another sort. She heard birds enthralled in their morning song and the whirring of cicadas. Although it was Sunday, she heard the low reverberations from a piece of farm equipment somewhere in the distance. Beyond these sounds and hiding just below the surface quiet was the hum of the earth itself. As a girl she had thought of it as the roar of plants pushing up through the soil.
    She slowly walked to the shed where Miaoshan had been found. If she’d been here on the day of the discovery of Miaoshan’s body, Hulan would have kept everyone away from this area so that she could examine the fine dust that covered the hard-packed earth. But if there had been footprints, they were long gone now, so Hulan pushed opened the door and entered. Immediately her senses were assaulted with the sights and smells of long ago. In this small, enclosed, dark room, the aromas of burlap, dirt, insecticide, kerosene, and seed mingled into a muskiness at once intoxicating and repugnant, heady and earthy. She closed the door behind her. As she waited for her eyes to adjust, she forced herself to put away her girlhood memories and preconceptions.
    She tried to visualize Miaoshan hanging from the beam, the ladder below her. She called to her mind the suicides she’d seen before: the young mother in Beijing who’d killed herself by drinking carbolic acid; the old woman from Hulan’s own neighborhood who—for reasons that never became clear—had slipped some rocks into her pockets and walked into Shisha Lake; the man who’d taken his village’s savings, invested it in the stock market, lost it all, then had leaped from his hotel window rather than go home and face the people of his village. Then she remembered her own father, seeing him put the muzzle of a gun to his head and pull the trigger.
    Hulan let her body slip down into a sitting position with her back against the wall of the shed, and thought. Typically vanity—even at this most desperate moment—kept women from using guns to kill themselves. They preferred to take pills, swim out to sea, or even slit their wrists—options that would not alter the face and also allowed the possibility of a rescue. Death by hanging was also primarily a male act, involving as it did a certain level of mechanical expertise: securing a rope to a beam, tying a knot that would have the ability to slip, then hold, positioning an object on which to stand but could easily be knocked out of the way when the time came. Of course, a farm girl would have these abilities, but death by hanging did not result in a beautiful corpse. From everything Suchee had said about her daughter—that she was in the midst of transforming herself into a Western ideal of beauty—a broken neck, swollen tongue, and purple face didn’t fit the pattern for this particular victim.
    Something else bothered Hulan. While suicide stemmed from deep melancholy, very often victims used the act as a way of getting the last word, of inflicting permanent guilt on those left behind. As a result, suicides were often planned so that the people who discovered the body were the actual targets of the victim’s rage or despair. The young woman in Beijing, for example, had taken her baby to a neighbor’s house, come home, dressed in her wedding clothes, drunk the carbolic acid, and, despite her agonizing abdominal spasms, positioned herself so that her husband—who turned out to have had a series of affairs—would find her on their marriage bed.
    Out here on the farm only one person could find Miaoshan. But so far Suchee had