Dreams of Joy: A Novel (26 page)

Joy

BETWEEN THE YELLOW AND THE GREEN

“HOW MANY FLIES
did you kill today?” Brigade Leader Lai inquires as he walks between our two rooms as part of his newly instituted cleanliness inspection. Tao’s little brothers and sisters show him a cup where they’ve saved their dead flies. “That’s good,” he praises them, “but did you kill any rats or mice?” We haven’t, which is not good. “How about sparrows?” he asks.

“There aren’t many left,” Tao’s father answers.

“I hear this from others in the commune,” Brigade Leader Lai acknowledges. “But why do I still see them flying in the sky? You must try harder! Now, what has your family done to eradicate other insects?”

“It’s winter,” Tao’s father says. “Look.” He points to the paper we’ve pasted over the window openings with rice paste to keep out the cold. “We don’t get many insects now.”

“Take down the paper,” the brigade leader recommends. “Keep a lantern going on the table in the main room. In the morning, you’ll have many dead insects.”

I’d be more upset about this, except that rice paper isn’t exactly the same as a windproof glass windowpane.

“Shall we keep what we kill to show you?” Tao’s father asks.

“Absolutely. It won’t be an inspection if I don’t see what you catch.”

When Brigade Leader Lai leaves, the children roll out their sleeping mats on the floor. Tao’s mother and father go to the other room. They’re trying to make another baby. As Chairman Mao says and as my mother-in-law reminds me every day, “With every stomach comes another pair of hands.” As soon as my in-laws are done, Tao and I will take our turn.

Is marriage what I expected? Not at all. That first night? It wasn’t romantic, and Tao wasn’t very gentle either. I realize that who he is and how he acts are partially determined by being raised in this place, but also making out with him was very different from actually going all the way. But what bothers me isn’t limited to sex. I hadn’t entered Tao’s house until that day, so I hadn’t realized how dirt poor his family is. I didn’t have a marriage bed like I did in the villa. I didn’t have a suite of bedroom furniture brought to my home piled on the back of a bicycle like I’d seen traveling through the streets of Shanghai, Canton, and Peking. I had enjoyed roughing it in the villa, but here I didn’t have privacy to use the nightstool, not with twelve people living in two rooms. That night when I undressed, Tao told me to take off the pouch Aunt May gave me. He said I was safe and didn’t need it to protect me anymore. I obeyed because he was my husband. I told myself I didn’t require money, furniture, or a talisman to love and make love. Still, none of it was what I expected. It’s one thing to have a sort of camping adventure in a villa for a couple of weeks and quite another to realize that I’m going to have to live like this for the rest of my life.

Here’s what I’ve learned in three months of marriage: Even in the New Society, women must care for the husband, children, and older members of the family. They must look after the house, clean, make and wash clothes. All this they do and work outside too. Since the inauguration of the communes, a few adjustments have been made. Three rules now apply to working women: No women may labor in wet places during the visit from the little red sister. Expectant mothers will have light physical tasks. Mothers will toil near their homes. There are some unwritten rules too. At the end of the day, women should be ready to make another baby for the great socialist nation. In return, we are to be happy with a few words of praise or a pat on the arm. I grasp at these things and hold them to my heart as proof of Tao’s love and my worth.

The alternative isn’t so great. “Criticism and self-criticism should apply in marriage,” Tao tells me almost every day. “Unity is possible only when one side wages the essential and proper struggle against errors committed by the other.” Now that we’re married, I commit a lot of blunders in Tao’s eyes.

I was once enamored of Tao, but sex is a huge disappointment. Even if Tao touched me in the right places and wasn’t so rough and fast, how could I feel anything but nervous and uncomfortable with ten people in the other room? Sometimes I ask if we can go to the Charity Pavilion. I want to feel what I felt before we got married. I imagine all the things we could do there if we had that privacy. I’ve even whispered some of them to Tao. I can feel his response in my hand, but he says, “It’s not necessary to go there now. We’re married. You shouldn’t be so self-concerned.” In other words, I’m trying, but so what? He doesn’t care.

Sex is one thing, happiness is another. I hate this place, and I’m not even sure I
like
Tao now that I’ve gotten to know him.

Does this seem sudden? Not at all. I knew the morning after I married Tao and every morning since that this was a mistake, but in my own stubborn Tiger way I’ve accepted it as the punishment I believe I deserve. On the other hand, I constantly castigate myself for being so easily deceived and swayed. Yes, I’m still as mixed up as always.

I couldn’t talk about these things with my mother when she was here, because I didn’t want her to worry. I tried to act happy in front of her after that night we talked in the villa. I told her what I thought she wanted to hear. I needed her to
believe
I was happy so she could go back to Shanghai. But the truth is I’m heartbroken. I’ve ruined not just my life but hers as well. My actions have only made things worse, and I’m unable to change or fix them. And now that she’s gone, the dark feelings that have plagued me since my father’s death wrap their oily blackness around me.

ALL THROUGH NOVEMBER
, I stay peasant busy—mending clothes, making pickles, storing dried vegetables. Pigs are killed—which is disgusting to begin with—and then soaked in salt water for a couple of weeks, and finally covered with chilies to keep the flies away. Since we’re part of a commune now, the body parts are hung outside the leadership hall instead of individual houses as they once were. We keep eating as much as we want in the canteen, but when December arrives and the temperature drops below freezing—and those cornstalks added to the canteen walls are not much of a barrier against the weather—Brigade Leader Lai introduces rationing.

Tao tells me not to worry. “This always happens between the yellow and the green. The fields are bare of crops, the harvest begins to run out, and the planting that starts at Spring Festival hasn’t happened yet.”

“But I thought we had a bumper harvest,” I say. “How can the commune run out of food?”

“Don’t concern yourself with these matters,” my husband responds, trying to act like a grown-up, but I learn from others that the brigade leader pledged a huge amount of grain to be delivered to the government based on our bumper harvest. He made good on his promise by handing over the inflated amount, told us to eat as much as we liked, and now the granary in the leadership hall is dangerously low.

As the month progresses, it gets colder and damper. Tao’s family home faces north, so we don’t get much warmth from the winter sun. Frost whitens the ground. Standing water freezes overnight. Snow falls sometimes, but it melts quickly. Frigid air blows through cracks around the door and roof. And as far as I’m concerned, the window—we’ve reglued the rice paper over the opening—does absolutely nothing to keep cold air out or warm air in. I can see my breath inside the house all day. Tao’s family has had a long time to learn how to make do. They dress in layer upon layer of padded clothes. I do too, but I never get warm.

I write to my mother every Sunday, since it’s the one day I don’t have to work for the commune. I tell her about Yong, Kumei, and Ta-ming. I tell her about the weather. I tell her that I’m learning how to be a wife. Then, on Monday, I walk down to the pond and wait for the mailman, who visits the different villages that make up the commune on his bicycle. I give him my letter, which he’ll take to be sorted, read, and processed in the leadership hall. Today he hands me a letter, which I read to the entire family:

“Z.G. and I went to a tea party at Madame Sun Yat-sen’s home. She has a beautiful garden with thirty camphor trees. Did you know that she writes all her speeches in English? If you were here, I bet your father could get you a job helping her, since you went to college in America, just like she did. Anyway, representatives from Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, and India also came to the party. You should have seen the women in their saris. They were very elegant compared with the Russian women. Your father talked me into wearing a red silk
cheongsam
with yellow piping from the old days. Everyone said your father and I were the most handsome guests in attendance. I believe they were right, if I say so myself.”

A week later, she sends Christmas presents—a red scarf, a tin of cookies, and cloth purchased with her cotton coupons. I give the cookies to Tao’s brothers and sisters and the cotton to my mother-in-law so she can make clothes for the children. I keep the scarf for myself. I don’t explain Christmas to them.

Two weeks later, my mother writes with news we’ve also heard over the loudspeaker. Officials in Peking have announced the construction of ten projects in the capital to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China next year on October 1, 1959. “The greatest of these will be called the Great Hall of the People,” I read to Tao and the others. “It will be bigger and grander than anything China has built before, except perhaps the Great Wall. Most important, the Great Hall of the People is being built with volunteer labor. Your father promises to take me to the celebration. That will be something to see!” Here’s what I think she means by her false enthusiasm:
Volunteer labor? I’m happy I don’t live in Peking and won’t have to work on this or any of the other nine ostentatious shrines to Mao’s ego
. Censors can’t black out what isn’t written.

But to my husband and in-laws it all sounds glamorous, and the main room is filled with their excited exclamations. Madame Sun Yat-sen! The Great Hall of the People! They’ve been less impressed by May’s letters, because they don’t understand anything about television sets, cars, or movie stars. Still, they look at the photographs she sends and ask questions like “Why is she wearing that? Isn’t she cold with her naked shoulders?” Sometimes they look at the photos in which May wears makeup and teased hair, and they don’t say a word. They may never have seen a prostitute, but they know a broken-shoe when they see one.

My mother and aunt always ask me the same questions:
Are you happy? Are you painting?
I’m not happy, but I don’t want to tell them that. I’m not painting either, but Tao is. Knowing of Z.G.’s success with his New Year’s poster, Tao now wants to enter the national competition. “If I win, we could move to Shanghai or maybe even Peking,” he often says. He works at the table, bundled in padded clothes, with a quilt over his shoulders and another over his legs. He’s taken a traditional subject—door gods—and transformed them into two peasants bringing in an abundant harvest. He doesn’t use me as a subject or as inspiration as Z.G. did, which hurts my feelings something awful. Whenever I say anything about it, Tao says, “Quit complaining and do your own painting. No one’s stopping you.” That’s easy for him to say. I wish I could put brush to paper with as much confidence as my father and husband do. I have something in my mind—I know I do—but I haven’t yet been able to reach it and I have no one to encourage me.

At night, Tao and I lie on mats in the main room. The clothes we’ll wear tomorrow are under our mats, so they’ll be warm when we put them on in the morning. The older children curl around us. Tao nuzzles my neck. He puts a hand under my sleeping shirt. If we’re really quiet we can make the night pass in a way that will bring warmth of its own.

“Next time you write to your mother and father,” Tao says as his fingers slip into my wetness, “ask if they can get permits for us to visit them in Shanghai.”

BEGINNING IN FEBRUARY
, I wake up and go to bed hungry. I tell myself that I’m not as hungry as I think I am, that I have a bad Western attitude, and that what I’m seeing and sensing is not real. But some people say this is the worst between the yellow and the green ever. A few want to break up the commune, claiming they were better off when they were responsible for their own land, grain, and families. I keep my mouth shut, but I begin to think that the canteen is no longer there to encourage us to eat for free; it’s there to restrict what we’re given to eat.

All this leads to new inspections.

“Are you hiding grain?” Brigade Leader Lai demands, as Party Secretary Feng Jin and Sung-ling look through our cupboards.

Tao’s mother is small but tough. She looks him straight in the face. “Where could we hide anything?”

That momentarily stumps him.

“Have you turned in all your cooking utensils?” Sung-ling asks—woman to woman. “You shouldn’t have
any
cooking utensils. By now, they should have been either given to the canteen or melted in the blast furnace.”

“Are you asking if we’ve been cooking?” Fu-shee retorts sharply. “We couldn’t cook even if we wanted to. All we have left is our teapot.”