Dreams of Joy (Shanghai Girls 2)

“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.”

I thought my mother and aunt were good liars, but my mother-in-law may be the best, and she knows how to take care of her family. She’s been going out to the fields with the younger children and scavenging rice, turnips, and peanuts that were ignored during the hurried harvest. She also saved enough utensils—all hidden in a hole in the floor—to make corn-flour buns, which we eat with pieces of dried peppers.

“I smelled food when I came in,” Sung-ling continues accusingly. “You must be smelling the hot water we make to drink, since we no longer have leaves to make tea.”

That night I write to my mother:

They say mothers-in-law are awful creatures put on earth to torture their daughters-in-law, but Fu-shee isn’t so bad. She’s pregnant again. I’m not. I’d like to have a baby. A son, of course. It would make Tao happy. It would please my in-laws. I hope it would make you happy too.

In Chinese, the word womb is made up of characters for palace and children. At night, lying next to Tao, I send propitious wishes to my womb. If marriage doesn’t cure my sadness, maybe a baby will.

AT CHINESE NEW YEAR, food is found in a neighbor’s house during an inspection. The house is torn down. The family has nowhere to go, so they sleep in the ancestral hall. Also, as a result of our neighbors’ sloppiness, all the locks in the commune are taken away.

“If you don’t give up your locks,” Brigade Leader Lai tells us, “we’ll take away your doors.”

He doesn’t stop there. In a flurry of activity, gates and courtyards that separate property are taken down to prevent the hiding or hoarding of food—and to keep everyone and everything visible. If clear lines of sight still aren’t available, then the entire house is destroyed. “Our new policy benefits the motherland,” Brigade Leader Lai remarks, “since the last remaining metal from hinges and locks can now be smelted and we can use the wood from houses and furniture to stoke the fires in the furnaces.” The villa, where he lives, remains untouched.

Three days later, we come home from the fields and find Fu-shee squatting in the corner, a bucket filled with blood and little bits of tissue under her. I’m told to clean the bucket, which is sickening and revolting. I try to be helpful in other ways too, but whatever gains I’ve made with my mother-in-law disappear. Now she looks at me reproachfully. Soon other pregnant women in the commune walk the other way if they see me or turn their backs on me. Women who haven’t given birth are believed to bring bad luck to unborn and newborn babies.

My only friends are Yong and Kumei, who repeatedly tell me not to be concerned. “We’re between the yellow and the green,” they say, as though that will make me less hungry, pregnant women less likely to ignore me, or my mother-in-law less upset with me. “It’s worse than usual, but it happens every year.”

I have an American perspective: Should we accept something just because it’s always happened that way? I come up with ideas to help ourselves.

“Let’s buy a few chicks to raise, so we’ll have chickens to lay eggs,” I suggest to my husband’s family.

“Where would we hide them?” my father-in-law asks. “What would happen when the brigade leader comes for his inspection?”

“We could make tofu,” I say. “When I was a little girl, my grandfather made tofu in our bathtub.”

“Where will we get soy milk?” my husband asks.