Dreams of Joy (Shanghai Girls 2)

THE NEXT MORNING, Z.G. and I leave Green Dragon, walk to the drop-off point a couple of miles from here, and take the bus to Tun-hsi. From there, we go to Huangshan, where I’m inspired by the soaring peaks and the pines that jut from cliffs at improbable angles. I’m reminded—as so many artists have been before me—of man’s insignificance in the face of nature. We return to Hangchow and wander around West Lake as we did on our way to Green Dragon, only this time we stop to paint the Ten Views that Emperor K’ang-hsi enjoyed so long ago. Z.G. tells me Hangchow is China’s most romantic city, and I feel that. I long for Tao, and when I paint I feel his breath on my skin. But I also feel something opening in me … as an artist. I know I’m getting better every day.

At the beginning of November, we arrive in Canton for the Chinese Export Commodities Fair, which will last a week. The Artists’ Association wants Z.G. to represent the work that he so excels at: propaganda that sells China to Chinese and others who are sympathetic to the regime in the outside world. We walk the fair aisles and look at the merchandise: Chinese-made fabric, radios, thermoses, greeting cards, and rice steamers. I walk past 170 different types of tractors. People have literally come from all over the globe to buy steam shovels, auto parts, and fountain pens. Everything is for sale: hairnets, makeup, and mirrors. But isn’t it better to tie your hair in practical braids, let the sun rouge your cheeks, and see yourself in the reflection of a pond, stream, or water trough than buy all these things? Do you need plastic buttons or elastic when homemade frogs are so much more lovely and simple string works just as well as elastic to hold up your pants? And honestly, why do you need a tractor when you can work side by side with your comrades to do the same work by hand? I’m told over two thousand foreign businessmen and Overseas Chinese are attending the fair, and they’re buying stuff like mad. It’s the first time in two months that I see non-Chinese, and it shakes me.

I can’t wait to leave the fairgrounds, but I’ve been in the countryside so long that Canton surprises me with its bustle. Business enterprises—bookstores, barbershops, banks, photo studios, tailors, and department stores—vie for space. I see hospitals, clinics, bathhouses, and theaters. Music, announcements, and news blare from loudspeakers on what seems like every corner. The traffic is a bit like I remember from my brief visit to Shanghai: bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. Entire families—mother, father, and two or three children—balance on handlebars and fenders. Bicycles are also used for hauling gallon drums, boxes and crates, pigs in baskets, and great bales of hay that sometimes rise four feet above the cyclist’s head and can be as wide as ten feet in diameter, depending on the number of bamboo poles used for balance. The bicycles I like the most transport a bride’s dowry gifts—although in the New China I suppose it would be more accurate to call them wedding presents—down the street for all to admire. A bedroom suite with headboard, side tables, vanity, and dresser is very popular, and to see all that piled on a single bicycle is really something.

On our last night in Canton, Z.G. knocks on my hotel room door. (How strange it’s been these past few days to have running water, flush toilets, a bathtub, and even a television.) He enters, pulls the straight-backed chair away from the desk, and sits down.

“I’ve now been ordered to go to Peking,” he says. “I’m to submit my work to a national art competition.” He pauses. I can see he’s struggling to tell me something. Finally, he says, “We’re very close to Hong Kong. This is your chance, with so many other foreigners here, to leave. You could see if you could get an exit permit and then go to Hong Kong by ferry or train with one of the delegations. From there, you could fly home.”

It’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears.

“Don’t you want me?”

I asked him this when I first arrived at his house. I still don’t know the answer. He’s my blood father, but we haven’t talked about that. I don’t call him baba or Dad; except for the occasional words of praise for my drawings, he hasn’t had any endearments for me either. I’m not his little dumpling, as my father Sam sometimes called me, or even Pan-di—Hope-for-a-Brother—as my grandfather referred to me. But I’m still disappointed that Z.G. would want to send me away.

“It’s not a matter of wanting you,” he explains. “No one of any importance knows you’re here. If you go to Peking and people learn about you, you won’t be able to go home.”

I think of everything I’ve seen and experienced—singing in the fields with Kumei, kissing Tao in the Charity Pavilion, helping build the New Society—and then I weigh that against the secret my mother and Aunt May kept hidden from me, how they’ll want to fight over me, my uncle Vern languishing in the back bedroom forever an invalid in his body and mind, and my mother’s face when she looks at me and thinks about my father’s suicide.

“I don’t want to go back there,” I say. “My place is here.”

Z.G. tries hard to talk me out of it, but I refuse to listen. A Tiger can be stubborn, and I’ve made up my mind. Still, I realize how close I was to being sent away. I need to get to know Z.G. better, and he needs to learn to appreciate that he has a daughter.

The next day when we board the train to Peking, Z.G. sits across from me, his long legs crossed. He’s changed out of his country clothes and back into a Mao suit, so he looks quite elegant. I have my sketchbook on my lap and am drawing the fragments of life that flit past the window like picture postcards: a wheelbarrow propped against a wall, a kumquat tree in a pot, a little garden that comes right up to the track, people working in rice fields. I haven’t thought much about home since coming to China. In fact, I’ve worked very hard not to think about home. But as the train chugs through the countryside, I’m reminded of Chinatown and all the people who raised me.

I clear my throat, and Z.G. looks up.

“When I was a little girl,” I begin, my voicing quavering, “we lived in an apartment.” He remains silent, which I take as a sign to continue. “We didn’t have a garden and I didn’t play with other children. Once I started kindergarten, I began going to other girls’ houses. This was Chinatown, so the gardens were small, but they were filled with cymbidiums, bamboo, and maybe a bodhi tree here or there. They were also filled with all kinds of junk: used electrical conduit, dustpans made from old soy sauce cans, and greasy motors. I thought this was how everyone lived.”

I think—I hope—Z.G. understands why I’m telling him these things. I want to know you. I want you to know me.

“Then my mom started taking me to the United Methodist Church for Chinese-language classes,” I continue. His eyes widen. Yes, I suppose it’s hard for him to believe that Aunt May sent her child to a mission school, but I know just what to say. “My mother and aunt were educated at the Methodist mission in Shanghai, remember? That’s why she sent me. Anyway, in order for me to take Chinese classes, I also had to go to Sunday services and Sunday school. One thing led to another, and pretty soon the churchwomen were inviting me and other kids to their houses in Hancock Park, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills …” When he looks at me quizzically, I explain, “Those are good places to live.”

“But why did you go to the houses?” he asks.

“To sing at gatherings, to be given presents—as poor children—during the holidays, or to attend piano recitals.”

“Rich people.” He sniffs. “America.”

“I saw gardens with wide lawns and roses. I thought they were peculiar, but then you never can underestimate the strangeness of lo fan.”

“I remember them from their days in Shanghai,” he agrees somberly.

“When I turned fourteen,” I go on, “we moved into a house. It had a dried-out garden, but my mom spent a lot of time there, clearing away the grass and replacing it with the kinds of things our neighbors had: cymbidiums, bamboo, vegetables, and

a bunch of junk my parents and grandparents picked up by the side of the road.”

“When you’re poor, you never know when used electrical conduit or an old motor might come in handy,” Z.G. says.

I look at him in his dapper suit, his perfectly cleaned glasses, his neat manner. How would he know?

“By the time I went to the University of Chicago—”

“You went to university?” he asks. Pleasure, satisfaction, and maybe even pride fill his voice. How can it be that we’ve spent two months together and we still know so little about each other?

I nod. “By then I’d been to movie sets, all those houses for church excursions, and even a few homes of lo fan kids from high school whose parents were ‘progressive,’ meaning they didn’t mind having a Chinese girl in their living rooms. That’s when I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t those places with their manicured lawns that were strange; it was my family’s and our neighbors’ gardens that were strange.”

Z.G. looks out the train window to the little shacks that come right up to the train tracks. He points down at the tiny courtyards and gardens.