Dreams of Joy: A Novel (40 page)

Our escape plan has evolved into something very simple, with just two components. First: travel permits. Z.G., having gone to the Chinese Export Commodities Fair in Canton at the beginning of November the last couple of years, has asked for and received permission to attend and bring with him Tao (a model artist) to give a joint painting demonstration—showing the old and new styles of art in China. Accompanying them will be a baby, her amah (my mother), and me (the wife of the model artist). Second: exit permits and passports. My mother and Dun will get married tomorrow, and then we’ll go to the police station and the Foreign Affairs Bureau to pick up passports for those of us who need them, travel permits to Canton for Dun and Ta-ming, and exit permits for my mother, Dun, Ta-ming, Samantha, and me to go to Hong Kong for a family reunification visit. (We’ve been going to interviews for six months now, pushing and begging everyone to get things done in time for our departure date. Tomorrow we have just one more set of appointments. If we don’t get our papers, then none of this will work.) Once we reach Canton, Z.G. will keep Tao occupied at the fair, allowing the rest of us to slip away and take the train to Hong Kong. Once there, we’ll go to May’s hotel.

It sounds simple, but many obstacles still need to be overcome. What if someone suspects something—at my mother’s work unit, at the Artists’ Association, in our house or Z.G.’s house. So, we must try to stay focused, not let fear overwhelm us, and keep moving forward.

As the others help Z.G. reel in his kites, I pick leaves from the poplars and gather some grass. They will be nice additions to tomorrow’s meals.

Joy

THE HEARTBEAT OF THE ARTIST

MONDAY MORNING, MY
mother’s wedding day. My mom and Dun help me prepare breakfast for the household. The boarders sit around the kitchen table, arguing and gossiping. My position in the house has changed since I first came to live here. Back then, the boarders were frightened by my presence. I didn’t have a residency permit, a work unit, or food coupons. I was half dead and brought with me two additional mouths to feed. I wasn’t shown sympathy or kindness, except by Cook, who clearly loves my mother and therefore loves her daughter and granddaughter. Fortunately, he was the only one who mattered, since he was in charge of the household and made all reports to the block committee, which then passed information on to the neighborhood committee, and on up the chain. Now he holds Samantha, giving her a bottle. Soon he’ll pass her to someone else at the table. She’ll have her first birthday in a couple of weeks, but she’s still frightfully small—a constant reminder that something isn’t right in the country.

The majority of city dwellers don’t fully understand what’s happening in the countryside. They’ve heard rumors, but they can’t reconcile them with being told crops grow to the sky on communes, hearing government officials report on the so-called years of bad weather that have destroyed fields of plenty, and what they see on the streets of Shanghai, where there’s no avoiding or covering up how people look as they wait in long lines to buy food with their coupons. They’re just moving past the first sign of starvation—losing weight—to the second stage—edema. They’ve begun to swell around their necks and in their faces. When people greet, they press thumbs into each other’s foreheads to see how deep the impression and how long it will last until the flesh resumes its normal shape. Everyone seems to walk in a listless haze. Still, no one complains, no one revolts. Only when people are truly hungry can you make them submit to you.

But the people in this house have seen starvation and its effects with their own eyes. Now they’re glad I’m here, because I understand what’s coming and I know how to survive. So does my mother. Her money and her special Overseas Chinese certificates have protected us, allowing us to buy provisions at exorbitant prices. In Shanghai, where the food is traditionally sweet, sugar is precious. Meat is hard to find and very expensive. My mom buys one quarter of a pork chop for fifty
yuan
or twenty-five dollars. Foodstuffs that once cost two or three
yuan
she now purchases at the equivalent of about thirty-five dollars. She procures wilted cabbages and other vegetables of inferior quality from farmers who’ve somehow skirted the checkpoints and sell their wares in dark alleys. She once paid a ridiculous price for a chicken, saying, “You need to be strong for our plan to work.” But none of this is enough to feed the ten people now living in the house.

I stand at the stove making “bitter cakes” from the grass I gathered at the Lunghua Pagoda yesterday. Later, when everyone goes to their jobs, I’ll soak the poplar leaves in water to get rid of their sour taste so I can make leaf pancakes tonight. I know how to make food out of almost nothing, and for this everyone not only tolerates but welcomes my presence.

“First, they tell us to kill sparrows, but now we have a campaign against bedbugs,” one of the dancing girls complains. “We don’t have bedbugs, so how are we going to prove we’re doing our part?”

“We’ll blame our lack of bedbugs on Old Big Brother,” the cobbler quips slyly. “We’ll say they took the bedbugs home with them.”

In July, Soviet experts pulled out of China, taking with them their machines, equipment, and technological expertise. Since then, the government has blamed Old Big Brother for everything.

“Yes, yes, yes! I’ve already heard that,” the widow chimes in. “We’ll say that’s why we don’t have bedbugs.”

“Now we have two enemies,” the cobbler continues, reaching out his arms so he can have a turn to hold the baby. “We must fight Soviet revisionism while continuing to fight American imperialism.”

Their logic makes no sense for many reasons, including that we’ve already been told the Soviets brought bedbugs with them and then left the pests to torture us, but then little makes sense anymore. The announcer on the radio tells us many things: that the USSR may join forces with the USA in the UN to further ostracize and diminish the PRC. (I was born in America and lived there for nineteen years. My family was victimized by red-scare tactics. I cannot imagine a single way that what we’re being told could ever come to pass.) In the meantime, other things are happening. Foreigners from countries other than the USSR have also been sent home. In fact, this is the smallest number of foreigners in China in centuries. All publications—except for two propaganda papers—have been barred from leaving the country. In other words, China has cut itself off from the rest of the world. What word escapes our borders, no one believes, as May pointed out in her letter. People
inside
China, including those right here at the breakfast table, try to look behind what we’re told to find the truth. Right now, the gossip turns to Mao Tse-tung, who recently relinquished his position as chairman of the People’s Republic of China to Liu Shao-ch’i.

“It’s said that Mao made his own self-criticism in front of a gathering of seven thousand Party officials,” one of the dancing girls whispers conspiratorially.

“Maybe he stepped aside to avoid blame for the Great Leap Forward,” the cobbler counters.

Samantha starts to fuss, and he hands her off to the widow. As the mother of two daughters, she knows exactly how to calm a baby, putting Samantha on her shoulder, swaying, and rhythmically patting her back. I set a platter of bitter cakes on the table, and the boarders quickly snap them up, all the while chattering.

“So what if Mao’s retired as head of state?” the widow asks. “He still maintains supreme command. Nothing has changed.”

“Except that we’re hungry.” This comes from Cook.

The boarders still don’t fully realize how lucky they are.

“Who could have guessed that rats would disappear from Shanghai?” The dancing girl leans forward, and everyone edges in to listen as she reveals in an awed tone, “People have eaten them!” Then she turns to the widow. “It’s my turn. Give me the baby.” She holds Samantha under her arms, so she can practice standing. Samantha’s still weak, but she’s surprisingly stubborn and persistent. Her little legs wobble, but she flaps her arms excitedly, a big smile on her face. The dancing girl steadies Samantha and then turns to me. “We’ll come with you to the Lunghua Pagoda to collect leaves the next time you go, if you’d like.”

“I’d like that very much.” (Except I’ll be gone.)

Dun and my mother duck out of the kitchen first, taking Ta-ming with them. The dancing girl hands me the baby. As the others file out, they chuck her chin or give her a delicate pinch. Everyone leaves their dishes for me to clean. I pour Cook another cup of tea.

“You should rest,” I tell him. “Little Miss doesn’t want you to be too tired for your duties later today.”

He nods, takes his cup, and shuffles toward the stairs. I hurry past him to the room I share with my mother. She stands before the mirror, staring at herself critically. She wears her work trousers and an ironed white blouse. Her hair has been brushed and tucked behind her ears.

“You look beautiful,” I say. “A perfect bride.”

“Little in my life is how I imagined it,” she says as she turns to me. These are not the words of regret that were always so much a part of my mother’s makeup. Although she’s longed for a big wedding with the dress and banquet—first for herself and then for me—she’s still not going to get it, yet she’s smiling and happy. Life is what it is, and she’s living it as a Dragon should—never accepting defeat.

As she puts on her paper collector’s jacket, I go to the window, open it, and bring in the box we’ve stored on the sill to keep the contents cool and safe. I sit on May’s bed and carefully lift the lid. Inside are a dozen eggs given to us by Z.G. Today my mother will go to her work unit and tell her supervisor that she wants to marry a professor. She will promise her supervisor a dozen fresh eggs if he will accompany her to the government office at one o’clock, where they’ll meet Dun, who’ll be coming from his morning classes. Her supervisor needs to approve the marriage: verify that she doesn’t suffer from disease, that she’s a helpful member of the proletariat, and that she and Dun are not blood relatives up to the third degree of relationship. The officer will have my mother and Dun sign some papers, and then they’ll be given a marriage certificate. My mother will hang on to the eggs, however, unless her supervisor also agrees to let her have the afternoon off for her honeymoon. We’re sure he’ll accept this bribe, since none of us have seen eggs in months and their protein is a good safeguard against the swelling disease.

I rotate the eggs so they’ll look perfect, replace the lid, and hand the box to my mother. I give her a kiss and a hug. “I wish I could be there with you.”

“I wish you could be too, but everything must appear as matter-of-fact as possible. I learned that from Auntie Hu,” she tells me.

Then she’s out the door with her dozen eggs.

Keeping to our usual schedule is important, so at nine I pack up the baby and Ta-ming and we take a bus to Z.G.’s, as we’ve done every day for the last two months. Tao is still living with Z.G. I wish more than anything that I didn’t have to see Tao, because I hate him and because nothing is more dangerous than an uneducated peasant—someone who can claim redness while painting black the people who helped him—but I have to see him to make our actions seem normal. “You just have to tolerate him awhile longer,” my mother often reminds me. I have, but it’s hard.

One of the servants lets me in, and I go straight upstairs to a bedroom Z.G. recently converted to a studio. Light streams through the window. Easels with canvases or watercolors in progress painted by Tao, Z.G., and me are propped around the room to take advantage of the natural light. Tao is here already. He’s still handsome, no doubt about that, but he doesn’t smile to show me his beautiful teeth or even turn to acknowledge my presence. He waits until I put Samantha in a baby tender—a wooden box that allows her to move around but not escape—and then he wanders over to pat his Ah Fu’s head.

Ta-ming goes to the window seat, where he can look out on the walk street below. The poor boy is not the same happy child I first met in Green Dragon. He doesn’t talk about his mother, the villa, being hungry, or that terrible time he spent in the dark by himself in the trunk of Z.G.’s car. He rarely smiles, but I guess that’s to be expected. Dun asked a friend of his, who teaches Western music at the university, to give the boy some simple violin lessons. He says the landowner’s violin is quite old and quite valuable. Now the things that make Ta-ming happy are his violin lessons and the time he gets to practice in our room at night. The rest of the time he’s quiet and pensive.

Z.G. enters the room. “Good morning,” he says. “Is everyone ready to paint?” He strides over to Tao, and they talk about what he’s working on. “I like the way the fields look so raw and cold …”

In many ways, our time together reminds me of when Tao and I had our private lessons with Z.G. in the villa, minus our crazy love, of course. Z.G. still treats Tao and me differently. He admires Tao’s work, praising him for the model artist he’s become. It’s a charade that helps to build my husband’s inflated opinion of himself. Z.G. teaches me the rub-and-paint technique he once used to paint the beautiful-girl posters of my mother and aunt—working carbon powder over an image and then applying watercolors to get the warmth and depth for cheeks, fabric, hair, furniture, and sky.

In my work, I’ve been trying to achieve what Z.G. told me when I first arrived on his doorstep is the true essence of Chinese artistic striving: depict the inner world of the mind and heart. I was physically saved by my mother and Z.G., but in my most hopeless moment I found my true voice, which saved my heart and soul. Art for art’s sake is not what motivates me. Certainly politics are not what motivate me anymore. Emotions are what motivate me. Of those emotions, the strongest is love—love for my two mothers, my two fathers, and my baby. During the days of my recovery, I began to
see
something. I remembered moments from my childhood: stringing peas with my grandmother, walking with my grandfather through China City, playing dress-up on movie sets with my aunt. And, of course, anything and everything my mother did with me: pinning me into a jumper she’d sewn, helping me spell the names of all the kids in my class on my Valentine’s Day cards, taking me to church, to the beach, to Chinese school, doing all those things that helped turn me into the person I am.

It’s the New Year’s poster—where beautiful girls once and still reside—that has become my art form and the way for me to realize my vision. The painting I’m working on shows my two mothers—the one who gave birth to me and the one who cared so much for me that she chased me all the way here. I’m between them—the link, the secret, the one who was loved. We’ve gathered together to stare at a baby girl, Samantha, who’s just learned to sit on her own. We’re three generations of women who’ve suffered and laughed, struggled and triumphed. My New Year’s poster is my heart’s thank-you for the gift of life. That I’ve painted it in the style perfected by Z.G. during the beautiful-girl days makes me happy. My two mothers have creamy complexions, tinted lips, eyebrows like willow leaves—all unmarred by time, worry, or Socialist Realism. They are as they are meant to be—forever beautiful.