Dreams of Joy

by Lisa See

  “Maybe,” I say. “Maybe.”

  Later, when we walk back to the village, Tao says, “I promise I won’t forget you, but you must promise to come back to me.”

  —

  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.

  “Like these?” he asks. “They have the bamboo, the vegetables, the junk. No old motors or used electrical conduit though. No one here has access to that kind of gear, but people have salvaged other things.”

  He’s right. Plenty of other stuff—broken earthenware jars, a bent bicycle wheel, burlap rice bags—has been collected and saved. I’d always thought people in Chinatown kept all their junk because they’d lived through the Depression; now I see that Hazel’s mother and everyone else were trying to re-create South China. Z.G. has helped me understand something about my life in a purely visual way that I never grasped before.

  “Exactly like these,” I say. “I always thought of the garden as my mother’s domain, but she was from Shanghai. Why did she want a South China garden?”

  “Maybe the garden was a reflection of the community where she lived, a community filled with South China peasants.”

  Once again, he’s right. My mother and Auntie May were Shanghai girls, but my father, grandparents, uncles, and all our neighbors were South China peasants. Even those who’d been in Los Angeles for two or more generations—some of whom were well educated, spoke good English, and dressed like Americans—were still, at heart, South China peasants. Somehow they’d maintained the visual idea of how things should look—the lushness of South China re-created in the desert of Los Angeles. More important, they still had their South China frugality.

  “I’m from Shanghai,” Z.G. says, “and May was most definitely a product of Shanghai. You may have these gardens in your blood, but you too are a Shanghai girl.”

  He says that with such confidence, and in some ways it makes me happy. I’m glad I decided to talk to him, but I can’t stop thinking about the woman I always believed was my mother. Judging from her garden, she must have had memories of her home village. Either that or her home village was deep, deep inside her soul, as my love for the countryside is in mine through my father Sam. Through my blood parents, I should be a Shanghai girl through and through, as Z.G. says. Instead, I feel connected to the people outside the window: China’s peasants, like the people in Green Dragon Village, like the people in Chinatown, like my father who loved me so much. Now, sitting on the train, I understand in part why I love Tao. He reminds me of my father—not the one sitting across from me in his elegant suit but the one who worried when I was sick, who made special treats for me, who told me bedtime stories.

  IN PEKING, Z.G. and I go on excursions to the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, and the Forbidden City. All my life I’ve known about these places from Chinese school and from the photos and pictures my grandfather clipped from magazines to hang on the wall. The sights are beautiful, but I bet they’re a lot more enjoyable in the spring, when it isn’t bitterly cold. At night, we go to parties, where Z.G. teaches me how to distinguish people of importance. “A regular cadre has one fountain pen in his pocket,” he explains at a party in the compound next to the Forbidden City, where the most important members of the Communist Party live and work. “A two-pen cadre is more important. The most powerful carry several pens in their breast pockets. Those are high officials.”

  Z.G. seems to know everyone. He has good guan-hsi—connections—which function like a web that links government relationships, family, influence, and power. People are happy to see him, especially the women, who bring him drinks, cover their mouths to hide their giggles when he speaks, and generally act like they’ve never seen a man before. We meet plenty of Americans, who make up the largest group of foreigners in Peking after the Soviet experts. We even attend a couple of parties where Chairman Mao and Premier Chou En-lai circulate through the room. I see them nod to Z.G. a couple of times, but they never come our way. These are people I’ve read about and who have inspired me. They’ve made history and changed a country. As a little girl, I met lots of movie stars when I worked on film sets. I even sat on Clark Gable’s lap once. But none of them have the charisma of China’s leaders. When they walk into a room, the air changes, becoming electric in the true sense of that word—sparkly and powerful. I’m utterly in awe.

  It’s all wonderful, but two things disturb me. First—and I know it’s minor—it’s freezing around here. Every party we go to has barely any heat. Sometimes a coal brazier or a rickety radiator that looks about a thousand years old pumps out warmth, but that doesn’t help much in a big hall or in a drafty house that dates to the Ming dynasty. I take to wearing flannel underwear and undershirts beneath the practical wool dresses Z.G. has bought for me, along with a sweater, scarf, hat, and coat. The other thing that gnaws at me is what I guess I’d have to call hypocrisy. We’re supposed to be in a classless society, yet I’m going to parties and banquets with the highest echelon of people in China. It’s exciting to be in a room in the capital with Chairman Mao, but this is a long way from the simplicity—and poverty—of Green Dragon Village, and it doesn’t make sense to me. That’s not to say I’m not having fun. I’m having a great time, but this aspect of China isn’t what I expected.

  These conundrums aside, I’m swept up in a whirlwind of sightseeing and parties. I eat steamed dumplings, red dates, and candied crab apples on sticks from street vendors during the day and indulge in course after course at extravagant banquets at night, but nothing tastes as sweet to me as the food did in Green Dragon. And certainly no one is as dear to me as Tao.

  ON THE DAY of the national art competition—sponsored by the Artists’ Association and the China Art Gallery, both of which are government controlled—Z.G. and I attend the opening party. Artists from around China and from all backgrounds have submitted entries for the best New Year’s painting. We enter the gallery just as the head judge makes his opening remarks. As I listen, I see that Chairman Mao is here, as are several other important political figures. A few smile our way, but as usual the Chairman gives us only a curt nod.

  “Today we’re looking for the best painting to celebrate the coming new year,” the judge addresses the crowd. “If your work is selected, the masses will hang it on the walls of their homes, factories, and collectives. You’ll be serving the people in the best way by inspiring them to help build the road from socialism to communism. To the judges, I remind you that old habits and feudal taste have no place in the New China. Fantasy, superstition, and other reactionary elements won’t be tolerated. But remember, the masses don’t want to see history on their walls at the New Year either!” With that confusing message, he invites everyone to enjoy the exhibition.

  Z.G. stops at every painting. He asks what I think of it, and then he tells me if I’m right or wrong. He clearly sees things I don’t and understands their deeper meanings in ways I can’t fathom. We pause at a picture titled The Great Victory of the People’s War of Liberation. I tell Z.G. that it should encourage people to reminisce about their joy and celebration at that time.

  “Yes,” Z.G. agrees, “but is it a proper New Year’s pi
cture? The Ministry of Culture tells artists to show politics and history in our work, but as the judge just said, the masses don’t want to see those things in their New Year’s posters. They long for the old styles, which will call to mind their hopes for good luck, prosperity, and new sons, as well as their moral and religious principles.”

  “But the judge also said—”

  “That we should avoid traditional subjects.” He leans in and whispers in my ear. “That instruction must come from Chairman Mao. It’s up to us to decipher what he wants while keeping him from losing face. If he loses face, many people suffer.”

  I draw back, shocked that Z.G. would say such a thing in public. I’m glad that the crowd is noisy and that no one could have heard him.

  He drifts away, and I continue through the exhibition. I see how Mao’s desires and Z.G.’s suggestion of their meaning have been captured by different artists. Some have chosen to send a political message through images from the past: door gods in military dress or goddesses in peasant clothes. Others have ignored politics and history entirely, focusing instead on good-luck symbols.

  I come to Tao’s painting, which Z.G. submitted. The style looks childlike next to that of the professional artists. It shows peasants harvesting rice. The colors are bright but flat, with little or no perspective. Nevertheless, there’s something very much alive about the image. I can almost feel myself in Green Dragon’s fields, the hot sun above me and the smell of the earth filling my nostrils.

  Z.G. has several entries. My favorite shows a young Mao, wearing a long scholar’s gown, striding across a field with peasants and soldiers behind him, almost like a god leading his followers. The hills around the Green Dragon Village Collective form the background. I’m sure the Chairman will like it, and I wonder if the judges will too.