Dreams of Joy: A Novel (21 page)

I WAKE AT
five the next morning to the sound of announcements being read over a background of military music blaring from a loudspeaker in the villa: “Bring your woks. Bring your griddles. Bring your locks.” I dress quickly and go out to the sitting room that’s shared by the four bedrooms in this part of the villa. My mom sits at the table. Her eyes are shut and she massages her temples.

“Are you all right?” I remember my first morning here a year ago, when I was sicker than the village dog.

She opens her eyes, which are dulled by pain. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’ll be fine. It’s just—”

She doesn’t have a chance to finish, because Z.G. comes out of his room, looking cross. “What’s that noise?”

We head to the kitchen and find Kumei, Ta-ming, and Yong searching through cupboards. Brigade Leader Lai is already gone. He must go to the leadership hall very early each morning. The table in the center of the room, which has always been used for food preparation, has no vegetables or jars of pickles. Instead, cooking utensils and other metal items are laid out in a straight line from the smallest to the largest.

I introduce—or try to anyway, since I have to compete with the racket from the loudspeaker, which hangs from a rafter—Yong to my mother. She takes in Yong’s bound feet and then stares into her face.

“I’m honored to meet you,” my mom says.

“It’s been a long time since I met a real lady from Shanghai,” Yong responds.

“You know the city?” my mother asks.

“I was born there,” Yong answers, slipping into the Wu dialect. Kumei and I glance at each other. Yong never spoke to me in the Wu dialect when I was here before. I wonder if she spoke to Z.G. in the language of their shared city when I wasn’t around.

My mother and Yong share a look.
How did we end up here?

“Bring your cleavers,” the loudspeaker continues to trumpet. “Bring your door hinges. Bring your scissors.”

“We must hurry,” Kumei says. She gestures to the objects on the table. “You may take the wok, if you’d like.”

“For the blast furnace?” my mother asks.

Kumei nods.

“But a wok? Don’t you need it?”

“It’s our last one,” Kumei answers. “We had to give the others to the canteen.”

“But what will you use to cook?” my mother asks, appalled.

“We get all our meals in the canteen.”

“That’s a long way from here.” Then my mother gestures to Yong’s feet. “How can you go there for your meals?”

“They let Kumei and the boy bring me food,” Yong answers.

“Come on,” Kumei implores. “Grab something. We have to go.”

I pick up a soup ladle. I watch the others pick the smallest items possible—a Western-style spoon, a metal basket for fishing tidbits out of a hot pot, some hairpins. With our donations in hand, we troop to the village square. Everyone holds something made from metal—an old farm tool, the business end of a hatchet, some spikes, and more kitchen utensils. We give our pieces to a woman, who passes them to someone else, who feeds them into the blast furnace.

“This reminds me of when we used to gather tinfoil, bacon grease, and rubber bands during the war,” I say to my mom. “We had fun collecting those things, remember? What we did helped us win the war.”

My mother stares into the middle distance. I can tell her head still aches, but what she thinks remains a mystery. Then she pulls her shoulders back, steps forward, and says to the woman collecting metal, “In Shanghai, I worked the bellows for my street’s backyard furnace. May I help here?”

“Everybody works so everybody eats,” the woman replies. “We welcome your help, comrade.”

Just then, a few people pull out red flags and raise them above their heads. The villagers systematically fall in behind those with the flags. Military music bursts again from the loudspeakers. Tao grabs the hem of my blouse—careful not to touch my skin in public—and pulls me into the line led by Z.G. Then everyone except those working at the furnace marches behind the red flags, flowing out in different directions like streams of ants.

Our group heads to the main part of the commune, stopping outside the leadership hall, where we had lunch yesterday. Our project is simple but ambitious. We have one week to create seven thousand posters. Even though it’s easy and fast to print posters, Mao wants to show the world what the communes can do if people use their hands to work together in the Great Leap Forward. The content has been approved by the Artists’ Association. The image will show the masses harvesting a cornfield. Identical couplets will decorate the left- and right-hand borders. One side will read, “The longer the communes exist, the more prosperous they will be.” The other side will read, “The higher the sun rises, the brighter it will shine.” Although four thousand people live in the commune, not all of them can participate in our project. Each of the commune’s thirteen villages has sent about thirty people to help us. Every person on our team will need to produce about twenty posters in seven days. And, except for a few people I recognize from last summer, most of our helpers have had no art training and almost none of them are literate.

Z.G. hangs the sample poster on the cinder-block building’s wall. I distribute paper, brushes, and paint. The villagers do their best to copy the image on the sample poster, and I write the couplet when they’re done. We work until eleven, when we break for breakfast in the canteen, which is the largest of the cornstalk buildings, covering a huge piece of cleared land. The meal is plentiful and filling—porridge, dumplings stuffed with meat, and a hearty soup. Then we’re back outside for the worst heat of the day. Still, we work as hard and as fast as we can. We cheer each other on. We laugh. We’re contributing the best way we know how. At three, we break for lunch, sitting on long benches in the dappled shade under the dried cornstalk roof. Then we go back to work until the military music sends the message from the trees that it’s time to go home.

I gather the posters and give them to Z.G., who flips through them and observes drily, “A bumper crop of such works is nothing different from a harvest of misshapen trees and ugly weeds in a garden where not one rare plant or beautiful flower can be found.” What can I possibly say to that? He’s right.

I walk to the villa to pick up my mother and take her to dinner. When she says she wants to stay with Yong, I go back to the center of the commune and join everyone in the canteen. Families are encouraged to split up for their meals. Children sit with children. Women sit with women. Young men also like to group together. Some gather by work teams—the rice sowers, hullers, and packers; the tea planters, pickers, and curers; the women who run the nursery; the butchers; the animal breeders; the clothes and shoe makers; and the artists like us. The sounds of a good meal being shared—gossip, laughter, chatter—fill the air. Again, it’s a bounteous meal—oxtail soup, cured pork with vegetables, pickled bamboo shoots, and giant bins of steamed rice on every table. For dessert, we have slices of watermelon. After dinner, we pack up containers of food for my mother and Yong, and then Tao, Kumei, Z.G., and I retrace our steps to the villa.

“Why don’t your mother and father share a room?” Kumei whispers as Z.G. strides out ahead of us. “Do they do
things
differently in the cities?”

Tao looks at me curiously too. I wonder how many people in the commune know about my mother and Z.G.’s sleeping arrangements after just one night. Why didn’t we consider this before we arrived? Everyone must think my mother and Z.G. are married. I have to come up with an explanation to answer Kumei’s question in a way that will satisfy not only her but everyone in the commune. I can’t say they’re too old, because Tao’s parents are still making babies.

“In some communes, Chairman Mao has asked husbands and wives to sleep in separate dormitories,” I answer lightly. It’s true, but it has nothing to do with why my mother and Z.G. are in separate rooms.

“I hope that rule never comes here,” Tao says so somberly that Kumei breaks into giggles.

Z.G. waits for us at the villa’s front gate. Tao waves good-bye and then bounds up the hill toward his house. I’m tired but happy. As we near the kitchen, we hear Yong and my mother laughing conspiratorially.

“That man is a small radish—an insignificant person,” comes my mother’s voice. “A brigade leader! How ridiculous. He doesn’t look like he could lead anything.”

I’ll have to tell my mother to be more careful. Brigade Leader Lai lives in the villa, and sound travels.

“He’s better than Feng Jin and his wife.” Yong sniffs disdainfully. “Those two have been running the village since Liberation. She was once one of my husband’s servants. He was a peasant, who used to come begging at our door.”

“Illiterate too, I suppose.”

“Of course, and in charge.”

“Oh, but that Tao!” This again from my mother. I hear the humor, but it’s tinged with contempt.
“Hsin yan,”
she spits out just as Z.G. and I enter the kitchen.

Yong quashes her laughter. Kumei gives me a sideways look. Z.G. sets the food containers on the table. The silence is awkward and I know my cheeks are beet red. The literal translation for
hsin yan
is
heart eye
, but it means
mind
or
intention
. It can have a good interpretation—
kindhearted—
or a negative one, meaning that someone has done something nasty or is
tricky
. I know my mother, so I know which interpretation she’s using, and so does everyone else.

“We brought you dinner,” I say with what I’m sure is a very stiff smile on my face. “I hope you enjoy your meal.” Then I nod to everyone and step out of the kitchen and into the corridor. I breathe in the humid air and let it out slowly.

THE NEXT THREE
days follow the same pattern: waking before dawn to the sound of announcements accompanied by military music, taking something to the blast furnace, following our red-flag leader, painting all day, eating in the canteen, and stealing secret moments with Tao that have become more and more intense. Throughout the fourth day, I’m aware of him watching me. That night, after dinner, Tao helps pack up the food containers for my mother and Yong. He hands them to Kumei, who sets off with Ta-ming and Z.G. We follow behind them, and then we veer off the path and climb the hill to our secret spot. We kiss. We do other things. We kiss some more, and then we turn to the view. The glow from backyard furnaces glitters on the landscape as far as we can see—a galaxy of red stars.

I know what’s coming next, and I’m ready for it. I’ve turned twenty. I know myself and I know what I want. But going all the way is not what Tao desires, at least not right this second.

“Comrade Joy,” he says, “I asked you last summer and now I ask you again. Will you go with me to Party Secretary Feng and his wife to ask permission to marry?”

This time I don’t hesitate. “Yes!” It’s a yes to everything—the New China, the commune, Green Dragon, Tao, and doing the husband-wife thing—as my mom has always so delicately called it—without having to worry about getting in trouble.

Tao takes me straight to the Fengs’ house.

“It’s about time!” Sung-ling exclaims.

She and her husband are delighted. We meet all the criteria, so they immediately fill out the forms for us, which they’ll turn in to the district office.

“Do you want me to pronounce you married right now?” Feng Jin asks.

We’d both love that, but Tao wants to tell his family and I need to tell my mother and Z.G. We walk to the villa hand in hand. Never again will we have to worry about someone seeing us, though public shows of affection are discouraged, even between married couples. Tao says good night at the front gate. I pass through the various courtyards, making my way to the building where I’m staying with my mother and Z.G. They’re awake and sitting in the shared living space. The light from the oil lamp flickers. Shadows dance on the walls. Z.G. wears the same expression he had when he confronted me last summer about my visits with Tao. My mother has her hands folded tightly in her lap and her back is rigid, but I can tell she’s trying to hide her emotions, as she usually does.

“Where have you been?” she asks calmly. The stillness in her voice shows me just how upset she is.

“I’ve been with Tao. He asked me to marry him and I said yes.”

She nods almost imperceptibly. “Yes, I thought this might be coming.”

“It’s out of the question,” Z.G. says to my mother. “You must tell her no.”

She doesn’t acknowledge him in any way. “Of course, all I’ve ever wanted is your happiness,” she goes on in that same even voice. “You understand that, Joy, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I answer, uncertain.

“Will it be all right if I ask you a few questions?” she asks.

I know what she wants to do. She wants to guide me to a point where I’ll see I’ve made a mistake, but I haven’t made a mistake. I’m happy and this is the right thing to do. Nothing she says or asks will change my mind.

“Don’t you think you’re better than this village? Don’t you see that you’re better than this boy? You went to university and he’s illiterate. You don’t need to settle for a small radish. You’ve already made enough mistakes in your life. Don’t make another.”

“Dad was illiterate,” I say, homing in on something I can fight her on.

My mom cringes at that. I’ve hurt her, but she knows exactly what to say to wound me right back. “That’s correct. Your father was illiterate. He was a peasant. Do you remember how you used to make fun of him for his greasy food, his bad English, and his backward ways? Do you remember when you taunted him for not knowing the names of American presidents? Do you think Tao knows the names of the emperors?”

I doubt it, but I don’t worry about that, because I’ve hit on another argument. “Grandpa Louie always wanted me to come back to China. He wanted all of us to return.
You
sent me to Chinese school to learn traditions, rules, and the language. You wanted me to be a proper Chinese girl, because you longed to come back here too. How many times did you tell me that life was better in China?”