Dreams of Joy (Shanghai Girls 2)

“Pearl—”

“You don’t have to apologize for anything.” I put a hand on his arm. “You’ll never know how much this”—I motion to our rumpled bed-clothes—“meant to me, but it can never happen again.”

I pull the sheet with me as I get out of bed. Z.G. tugs the quilt over himself, but I’m careful not to glance his way. I pick up my clothes off the floor, go in the bathroom, and get dressed. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. My cheeks are still flushed from the mao tai and the husband-wife thing, but to my eyes I look different. I’m finally over Z.G. and my fear of sex. Those two circles have closed. It’s unclear what this will mean for me—a widow—but I feel possibilities are now open to me that I haven’t had since I was a young woman.

I give Z.G. a rueful wave, check to see if the hall is deserted, and then sneak out of his room and make my way to my own. In the morning, we meet for breakfast, as though we’re good comrades, and then go to the fair. We will never speak of what happened again, but before we leave Canton I write a letter to May. I can’t erase what I did with Z.G., but I can soothe her mind. I’m so close to Hong Kong, I wish I could go there, fly home, and tell her myself. Instead, my letter will go to nearby Wah Hong, be put in a new envelope, and make the usual journey across the border and on to Los Angeles Chinatown.

There is something you should know. Z.G. is a Rabbit and you are a Sheep. Z.G. loves you and only you.

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 Leade

r 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: