Dreams of Joy

by Lisa See

  “Thank you for helping,” Sung-ling praises me.

  “Thank you for letting me participate,” I respond. “I’m happy I got to—”

  “Don’t plump your feathers too high,” Sung-ling cuts me off. “Individuals should never take credit for a good job. The glory goes to our team and to our collective.”

  She gives a sharp nod and turns to leave. Tao and I are left nearly alone on the square. I wish we could go somewhere to have a Coke or some ice cream the way I used to do at home, because I’m not ready to go back to the villa. Emboldened by the adrenaline still coursing through my body, I ask if he’d like to take a walk. It’s too dark to go up the hill to the Charity Pavilion, so we stay on the footpath that borders the stream. After a while, we stop and sit on rocks at the water’s edge. I peel off my shoes and socks and dip my feet in the cool water. Tao slips off his sandals and submerges his feet next to mine. In elementary school, Hazel and I used to tease other girls about their wanting to play footsie with some boy or other. It was the kind of dumb taunting that little girls do when they know absolutely nothing about sex, boys, or romance. But now I let my toes—wet and soft—slip along the arch of Tao’s right foot. The sensations I feel from this are not located in my feet however. The performance has given Tao courage too, because he takes my hand and puts it in his lap. I feel his startling hardness and I don’t pull away.

  LATER, WHEN I GET back to the villa, everyone is in the front courtyard. Ta-ming sleeps with his head in Kumei’s lap. Yong perches on a ceramic jardiniere, her bound feet barely touching the ground. And Z.G. roosts on a step, his elbows on his knees, his head thrust forward. I’m feeling buoyed, but he looks angry, and it really rubs me the wrong way.

  “You come from far away, and everyone is trying to be understanding of your different ways.” His tone is stern and harsh. “But no one in this house can afford your bourgeois activities.”

  “What bourgeois—”

  “Leaving the village with Tao and doing who knows what. This has to stop.”

  My first response is indignation. Who do you think you are? My father? I want to ask him, except he is my father. Well, he may be my father, but he doesn’t know me. He can’t tell me what to do. I look for help from Kumei and Yong. We’ve just seen a series of skits on the liberation of women. Kumei and Yong should be on my side, but their faces are white with what I take to be fear.

  “We’re in the New China, but one thing hasn’t changed,” Z.G. continues. “Your actions reflect on all of us.”

  My actions? I think about the stuff Tao and I just did. Shame, embarrassment, and remembered pleasure burn my face. Still, I respond defiantly. “Nothing happened!”

  “If you’re caught,” Z.G. goes on, “you will not be the only one punished. We all will have to attend struggle sessions and make self-criticisms.”

  “I doubt that,” I say petulantly, like I did when I used to get in trouble with my dad. I mean, really. I walked in here feeling really high—from the show, from the way the audience reacted to my performance, and from going to third base with Tao. Why does Z.G. have to ruin it?

  “You don’t know anything about anything. What you’re doing is dangerous for our hosts,” he says. “In the last two years, over two million people have been moved by force to the far west to cultivate wasteland as punishment for criticizing the government, being social misfits, or acting like counterrevolutionaries. Some of those people were peasants like Kumei, Yong, and Ta-ming, who did something to upset the local Party cadre. How long do you think these three would last out there? They would die very quickly, don’t you think?”

  “You sound like my uncle,” I retort. “Always crying wolf. I haven’t seen anything bad.”

  “What about what just happened to Ping-li’s husband?”

  “He deserved it!”

  Z.G. shakes his head. We haven’t known each other very long, but it’s clear I’m frustrating to him, and he really bugs me.

  “I’m going to say this again,” he says, attempting to add gentleness to his voice. “Your actions are dangerous—not only to yourself but to our hosts.”

  “I refuse to believe that. Why would what I do have any consequences for them or anyone else for that matter?”

  “It’s also dangerous to me,” Z.G. confides. “What do you think Party Secretary Feng Jin will report to the Artists’ Association about who I’ve brought to Green Dragon Village and how you’re corrupting the masses?” He switches to English. “You’re a foreigner. I still haven’t figured out how to keep you safe when we go back to Shanghai.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to go back—”

  He brushes aside my comment with an impatient wave of his hand. He takes a deep breath to calm himself before continuing. “I want you to understand that I’m not immune to love. You of all people should know that. I know it’s impossible to keep young people apart if they want to be together. It takes only a few minutes, after all.”

  His crudeness and bluntness shock me. I can’t imagine my father Sam ever saying anything like that to me.

  “I see only one thing to do,” Z.G. says. “Keep the two of you near me. You will walk to and from the fields with Kumei from now on. No more going to the Charity Pavilion with Tao.”

  “How do you know—”

  “This is a small village. There is no privacy here. Everyone sees everything. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” He pauses to let that sink in. “In the evening, you will walk with me to the ancestral hall for the political-study session and our art lessons. You will hand out the paper and brushes by yourself. You don’t need help.”

  “Then I’ll never get to see him—”

  “Next Saturday night,” Z.G. goes on, speaking right over me, “we’ll have an exhibition of everyone’s best work. You and Tao will display your paintings of the Charity Pavilion.”

  “But I haven’t done any paintings there,” I admit. “And neither has Tao.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he says drily. “You and Tao are going to need to work on those right away. So, after our lesson in the ancestral hall, the two of you will return to the villa with me.”

  “I don’t want anyone to think I’m special—”

  “They won’t think you’re special when they see how I treat you. I’m going to teach you how to draw and you’re going to learn. I’m going to give you homework and you’re going to do it. I’m not going to be nice. Everyone accepts that Tao has talent. You? I’m not so sure you have great talent, but you’re better than anyone else in this place. Therefore, from now on the three of us will have private lessons in the front courtyard. We will keep the gate open, so everyone can see us. Soon people will understand that your visits to the Charity Pavilion were only about drawing and painting. Nothing else. If you’re lucky, they’ll forget about you in a day or two. Once that happens, if I have to step away for a few minutes …”

  Maybe this won’t be so bad. Maybe this will even be a good thing. Tao and I can work a full day in the fields and then at night have our special lesson. We’ll learn from Z.G., but we’ll also be together in a way that won’t lead to anything too dangerous. I’m nineteen and I’m not dumb. Things have happened very fast with Tao. And, as Z.G. pointed out, I know perfectly well where making out can lead.

  “What happens after Saturday?” I ask.

  “Let’s see when Saturday comes. Just remember, a person is his—or her—history. If your history isn’t good, then you won’t be good. A rebel as a five-year-old will be a rebel as a young man and will die a rebel. So what are you, Joy? What is your history and what are you going to be?”

  ___

  AND SO MY art training begins. As Z.G. promised, he’s not easy on me. “Your outlines are good, but your expression still is not deep enough,” he pronounces. “Our great Chairman has said there can be no art for art’s sake. You must express the thoughts and feelings of the people. It must be realistic!”

  I work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. Z.G.’s ju
dgments are tough, but his lessons also allow me to be with Tao, whose presence makes obvious to those who crowd around us at night in the villa’s courtyard that the teacher isn’t showing favoritism to his daughter.

  “Tao has a gift,” Z.G. tells the villagers. “My daughter … She is learning to paint the same bamboo leaf over and over again. Artists in the Ming dynasty perfected this technique of painting the exact same bamboo leaf again and again and again.”

  That’s right. He still has me painting bamboo sprigs, just as we did on the first night we arrived. I don’t understand why, given his criticisms.

  “The Ming artists were trying to create the essence of bamboo with their simple strokes,” he goes on. “Now consider the way my daughter has painted the bamboo around the Charity Pavilion. It’s pretty, but look closer. There’s nothing behind her strokes. I tell her she must cut to the bone to find her emotional heart.”

  Pearl

  DUST AND MEMORIES

  MY DAY STARTS at six thirty a.m. I wake to the sound of rhythmic thumping—the boarders doing physical exercises to a radio program that everyone is encouraged to listen to and follow each day. By the time I’ve gotten dressed and gone downstairs, the boarders are in the kitchen, bickering and fighting for space, as usual.

  “It’s my time at the stove,” one of the dancing girls snaps at the policeman’s widow.

  The widow tries reason. “I just want to set my bun near your pot. The warmth from the stove will heat it.”

  “You know the rules. Go away!”

  The widow backs off and bumps into the cobbler. When some of his rice porridge slops onto the floor, he shouts, “Hey! Watch out, you fat water buffalo!”

  “Why are you yelling at me?” the widow shoots back. “You caused the problem. You have to make room for everyone in the New Society.”

  The cobbler grunts, and then puts the bowl back to his lips and slurps noisily. His other hand scratches his rump. No one moves to clean the white mess off the floor, but then it looks like no one has cleaned the floor since Liberation, maybe longer. I rise from my place at the table, pour some hot water from the thermos onto a cloth, and wipe up the porridge. Layers of grime come up, and the tile’s cracked-ice pattern that my mother so loved reappears. Thousands of greasy meals cooked by the multiple people living in my family home and maybe not one mopping, but the beautiful tile is still here. I fold the cloth over and scrub my clean spot a little larger. The early morning squabbling ceases and the room falls silent. Six pairs of eyes stare at me: the policeman’s widow in contempt, the cobbler with scorn, the two dancing girls in amusement, Cook in concern, and the professor in sympathy. I get up off my knees, rinse the cloth, and return to my cup of tea.

  After breakfast, I walk back up the stairs, where, now that I look, the carpet probably hasn’t been cleaned since May, my mother, and I left the house. I reach my room and shut the door behind me. I brush my teeth, wrap a scarf around my hair, push my jade bracelet up my arm until it squeezes in place around my flesh, put on a light jacket, and go back downstairs and out the front door on my way to work. No one calls good-bye or wishes me well. It’s been this way for six weeks now. Some days I despair that Z.G. and Joy will ever return to Shanghai or that I’ll ever hear from May. I’ve been writing to my sister once a week and haven’t yet heard back. Has she received any of my letters? Or was the man at the family association full of baloney when he said my sister and I could send mail to each other through him and Louie Yun in Wah Hong Village? All I can do is wait, and follow one day after the next.

  Today the mid-October sky is blue and the air is perfect. The watermelon men of late summer have been replaced by the persimmon sellers of fall. A vendor with a high, thin voice touts his radish and cabbage cakes fried in liver oil. A bean-curd maker pushes a wooden cart and sings the praises of his perfect little white squares. Women—even in this New Society—spend at least three hours a day in food preparation, visiting numerous markets, chopping, cooking, and cleaning. At this hour, they carry thermoses to the hot water store or baskets to government-run shops for fresh soy milk and crullers. I see plenty of servants: peasant girls from the countryside—bumpkins recognizable in their floral-patterned blouses, cotton pants tied up with string, and homemade paper-soled shoes—standing in long lines with their masters’ food coupons in hand.

  When my bus arrives, I jam myself in with other workers—most of us dressed in monotonous blue and gray, with only the rare splash of red or yellow in the form of a scarf wrapped around a neck or a kerchief covering hair. The bus pulls back into a sea of thousands upon thousands of people on Eternal brand bicycles. We make our way through Hongkew, over the Garden Bridge, and onto the Bund. I get off at my stop and hurry to my place of employment. It’s important not to be late for the work of socialist construction.

  I sign in with my boss, pick up my basket and other tools, and head back out to the Bund. I now know why the once-grand Western-style buildings are strung with nets. It’s to catch people who try to commit suicide. I avert my eyes and gaze out to the Whangpoo. Every morning and every evening I watch the comings and goings of the vessels that ply the river. Twenty years ago, May and I left China by fishing boat, but that would be impossible now. Inspection ships can stop any craft on the river or at sea, and the docked naval ships make me nervous too.

  All right then, on to work. I’m one tiny cog in the big machine the Communists call ground cleaning. If everything works perfectly, then soon all that was perceived to be Western, “sinful and corrupt,” or individualistic, unique, and beautiful will be eradicated. Today I’ve been assigned to what was once the French Concession. All the old names—the French Concession, the International Settlement, even the Old Chinese City—have disappeared. It’s just Shanghai now. I’ll spend the next ten hours patrolling streets and alleyways, collecting scraps of paper that have fallen to the ground, or ripping old posters and advertisements from the walls of houses and shops.

  They say that returning to your native land is like coming back to your mother, but I don’t see it that way at all. Doing this job has allowed me to see the changes that have happened in my home city—from the most intimate details of daily life to the larger impact of communism on what was once the Paris of Asia. I see sweepers, garbage vans, and people like me—scavengers of every sort—and yet every day there is new paper and other trash to be found. It’s as though people are afraid to throw it all out at once. I’ve stumbled upon old labels and wrapping paper for products and companies that no longer exist in the city—Flaubert’s Furs, Lion Brand tooth powder, and British American Tobacco. I’ve peeled old political announcements and notices off walls and doors. I’ve found long-discarded love letters, temple offerings, and photographs. I’ve even picked up wedding couplets that have fallen from overflowing trash bins and onto the street. Many times I’ve wondered, as I stuff the couplets into my basket, if marriage in the New Society is just something to be thrown away with no regard to custom, tradition, love, or good wishes. Today I find a bill of sale from a scale factory. Farther along, loose sheets of Overseas Banking Company stationery scuff along the street like dust motes.

  Around ten, I arrive at an open-air, government-owned market. The morning rush is over, and the area outside the market is heaped with discarded cabbage leaves, bad fruit, and fish scales and guts. A garbage truck stops and picks up everything. By the time it pulls away, the street is once again clean. That, to me, sums up the new Shanghai. The life of the city has been cleaned away. The foreigners, who once populated and ran Shanghai, are gone. The only exceptions are Soviet experts, or the few Americans, Frenchmen, or Germans who, guided by what I believe is absolute stupidity, either decided to stay when China closed or abandoned all they had in the West to come here.

  The clubs May and I once frequented have disappeared. Where are their taxi dancers, musicians, waiters, and bartenders now? Dead, shipped off to the interior for land reclamation, or working in a factory like the former dancing girls in my fam
ily home. The White Russians who lived on the Avenue Joffre are also gone, but so is the Avenue Joffre. It’s now called Huaihai Road, which commemorates the second great campaign of 1949, when Mao’s soldiers advanced from the Huai River to the sea, putting them in position to take Shanghai. The Race Club off the Avenue Edouard VII in the International Settlement, where my father lost so much money, has been turned into People’s Square on what is now called Yen’an Road.

  Dead babies no longer lie discarded on sidewalks. They used to be so common that I can remember walking past one or two or three a day without stopping or thinking about it. I haven’t seen rickshaw pullers or beggars who’ve starved or frozen to death overnight either. Still, I’ve seen plenty of death: a man—probably an unreformed capitalist, who jumped from a building far enough off the Bund that no nets had been strung as a barrier; and another man—a reputed piece of “bourgeois vermin,” who was beaten to death by his former employees right on the street.

  Once prostitutes were like flowers decorating the city. Now people dress so identically and inconspicuously—in trousers, shirts, and gray caps—that sometimes you can’t tell who is a man and who is a woman. Surprisingly enough, Western-style clothes still hang in department store windows—leftovers from better times. In shops, I’ve found Pond’s cold cream and Revlon lipstick. They’re outdated and won’t be replenished, but I buy them when I see them because I might not have another chance. Once I run out, I’ll have to start using Russian-made toiletries, although the scents are sometimes repugnant.

  How is it that I can feel nostalgia for prostitutes and beggars? But then I miss everything—the purring foreign cars, the elegant gentlemen in their tailor-made suits and jaunty hats, the laughter, the champagne, the money, the foreigners, the aromatic French and Russian bakeries, and the sheer fun of being in one of the great cities on the planet. I wish I’d brought my camera so I could send photographs to May. Nothing I write could be as vivid or believable as seeing it with her own eyes.