“Honey, your dad’s suicide wasn’t your fault. Don’t ever think that. Yes, maybe the FBI used you as a pawn, but they were always going to win the game.”
“Nothing you can say or do will change what happened, what I did, or where I’ve ended up. You can never punish me as much as I’ll punish myself.”
“Is that why you came here?” I ask. “To punish yourself? But this is too much punishment for anyone.”
“Mom, you don’t understand a single thing. I want to be part of creating something bigger than my own problems. I want to make up for all I destroyed—Dad’s life, our family. It’s my way of atoning.”
“The best thing you can do is come home. Uncle Vern misses you. And”—this is hard for me to say—“don’t you want to get to know May in a new way? And even if you are right—which you aren’t—Red China is not the place to atone.”
“Pearl is correct,” Z.G. says. “You should go home, because you don’t understand what you’re seeing and experiencing. Lu Shun wrote, ‘The first person who tasted a crab must have also tried a spider, but realized it was not as good to eat.’ You’ve only tasted the crab.” He glances at me and then back at Joy. “The last time I saw your mother was twenty years ago. I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know what happened to your mother and aunt. Why? Because I went to join Mao. I fought in battles. I killed men.”
He begins chronicling his hardships over the past two decades, because somehow he thinks this is about him. I guess we’re supposed to believe he’s really telling us his life story, but I once knew Z.G. very well and I can see there’s a lot he’s not revealing. And why would he? He’s only just met Joy. It’s nice to have your daughter look at you with eyes of love and respect, but I’m tired of lies.
“You ran off,” I say to him. “You became a famous artist and you destroyed May’s and my lives.”
“Destroyed? How?” Z.G. asks. “You got out. You got married. You had a family. You had Joy in your life. Some might say I’ve been successful in the regime, but others might say I’ve sold my soul. Let me tell you something, Pearl. You can sell and sell and sell, but sometimes that’s not enough.” He turns to Joy. “Do you want to know the real reason I went to the countryside?”
“To teach the masses,” she answers dutifully.
“I can try to teach all I want, but I cannot teach the uneducated.”
Did I forget to say a Rabbit is also a snob?
“Maybe you’re a bad teacher,” I say.
Z.G. gives me a look. “I’ve been teaching my daughter, and she’s learned a lot.”
“And you taught Tao too,” Joy adds.
I hear a sudden lightness in her voice as she says that name. “I praised him because I had to praise someone,” Z.G. says. “He’s not very good. Surely you see that.”
“I do not,” she says hotly.
Her face radiates indignation. It’s a look I recognize from when she was a very little girl and she was told something she didn’t want to hear. Her reaction makes me want to know who this Tao person is, but Z.G. asks again, “Do you want to know why I went to the countryside?” This time he doesn’t wait for an answer. We’re going to hear it whether we want to or not. “Last year, Shanghai was very different than it is now. Jazz clubs reopened for people like me—artists and, well, those who were part of the old elite. We also had dancing, opera, and acrobats. Then Mao launched Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.”
I remember how excited Joy was about this and how she got into fights with her uncle Vern, who believed the campaign would come to “a no-good end.”
“We were told we could say what we wanted without fear of recrimination,” Z.G. continues. “We criticized the things we thought hadn’t worked in the first seven years of the regime. We
aired our views without reserve, and the complaints covered everything: that there should be a rotation of power, that cozying up to the Soviet Union was a mistake, and that contact should be renewed with the United States and the West. Artists and writers had their own list of complaints. We wanted to liberate art and literature from the Party. We didn’t feel that all art and all writing should serve workers, peasants, and soldiers. By May, Chairman Mao didn’t want to hear criticism. By summer, he didn’t like it, not one bit. When he made a speech about ‘enticing snakes out of their lairs,’ we knew the Campaign Against Rightists had begun. The spear hits the bird that sticks his head out.”
I’m not sure why Z.G. has gone off on this tangent, but Joy is mesmerized. She sits down and listens raptly. His story is hitting her in some deep place, that very place that so far I’ve been unable to reach. Is he sharing his miseries with Joy, who he’s just learned has tragedies, sorrows, and guilt of her own—whether justified or not—to give her perspective? I join Joy on the couch and force myself to listen more closely.
“When rectification began, some cadres were sent ‘up to the mountains and down to the villages’ in remote areas to take up unimportant posts or work in the fields. It was even worse for writers and artists. When someone asked Premier Chou En-lai why this was happening, do you know his response?”
Neither of us answers.
“He said, ‘If intellectuals do not join in manure labor, they will forget their origin, become conceited, and be unable to wholeheartedly serve the laboring masses.’ But shoveling manure isn’t enough punishment for those who’ve been labeled counterrevolutionaries, rightists, spies, Taiwan sympathizers, or traitors—”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with my taking Joy home,” I say.
“She sees only what she wants to see, and I’m trying to make her understand,” Z.G. explains. “When things changed, I was accused of being a poisonous weed and no longer a fragrant flower. The day Joy arrived in Shanghai, I was being struggled against at the Artists’ Association, where my friends accused me of being too Western in my outlook, of using Western techniques of shading and perspective in my paintings, and of being too individualistic in my brushstrokes. I didn’t go to the countryside to teach art to the masses. I didn’t go to observe and learn from real life. I went to avoid being sent to a state camp for reform through labor.”
“That can’t be right,” Joy says, uncertain.
Oh, how sorry I feel for her. To have to see things in a whole new way … again. To know that the person she’s run to has also been running.
“Think about it, Joy,” he says. “They housed us in the landowner’s villa because that’s where they put the other unsavory and questionable people in the Green Dragon Collective.”