Dream of the Blue Room

by Michelle Richmond

  A couple of hours later, as I tried unsuccessfully for the umpteenth time to place a phone call to my boyfriend back in New York, there was a knock at the door. It was a teenaged boy, very shy, bearing a few bottles of water and a small wad of colorful paper money. I tried to ask him when Tony was coming back and where I might buy food, but he just nodded, said “Thank you,” and left. I took out my laptop, thinking that if I couldn’t call home or feed my growling stomach, at least I could write. But the battery was dead, and my charger didn’t fit into the electrical outlets. So I did what people used to do, long ago, in the dark age of letters: I took out a pen and a sheet of paper. Thus began my adventures in China.

  As it turned out, Tony had very little time to be tutored. He would frequently call on a Tuesday to tell me that he would be traveling until Friday, and I could use the time as I pleased. The freedom suited me. I spent my days walking around the city, eating at roadside stalls, shopping in the flea market behind Tiananmen Square, wandering down ancient streets crowded with centuries-old hutongs. When I needed a break from the constant noise and crowds of the capital, I’d take a taxi to the Forbidden City and find an empty corner within the majestic walls to read. One of the books I read in China was Dream of the Red Chamber, the classic seventeenth-century novel by Tsao Hsueh-Chin. Eventually, I would turn to Hsueh-Chin as the inspiration for the title of my first novel.

  I also took several trips outside the city. One of the most interesting was to Xi’an, where I saw the legendary terra-cotta warriors. On the bus ride into Xi’an from the airport, I met a Chinese geologist who was surprisingly candid about the Three Gorges Dam, the construction of which was then underway. I had been doing some reading about the dam, so I knew the basic facts. Millions of people who lived along the Yangtze would be forced to evacuate their homes to make way for the dam’s reservoir, which would be the largest manmade lake in the world. Hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts would be destroyed. Thousands of towns and cities would be inundated. According to the geologist, the dam was a disaster waiting to happen; he was certain it would eventually result in catastrophic flooding. Although there was a great deal of antidam sentiment, it wasn’t a subject many were willing to talk about. Despite recent nods to a more open society, speaking out against the communist government was still a very dangerous thing to do in China.

  I found myself writing a lot about the dam during those months, as well as about the people I met during my travels. Upon returning home, however, I realized that my heart wasn’t in the memoir. There was another story I wanted to tell, and it wasn’t about myself. The story I wanted to tell was about Amanda Ruth, an eighteen-year-old Chinese American girl who is mysteriously murdered in a small town in Alabama. As soon as the idea for the story came to me, I knew it would be told by her best friend, who journeys up the Yangtze River more than a decade later to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes near her ancestral village. I was interested in racial and sexual prejudice, in the ways we use the concept of difference and the fear of things we do not understand to define ourselves against others. I was interested in the damage this kind of thinking can do. While Amanda Ruth’s early death may make her a tragic character, she is also a courageous character; it was her courage that drew me to her. This is a young woman who defies the constraints her own closed society—living life without apology, and on her own terms.

  While I was in China, I filled notebook upon notebook with observations. A good deal of the material from those notebooks made it into the novel. Several characters are influenced by people I met on my travels, especially Elvis Paris. One of the staff members at my apartment building had business cards bearing that very name, which he had chosen because Elvis Presley was his favorite singer, and his lifelong dream was to go to Paris. An Australian gentleman I met in Guilin was the inspiration for Graham. The real Graham was traveling with his wife, a handsome woman from Dalian, and the two of them provided excellent company on a brief cruise down the Li River.

  But the most vivid character, in my mind, is probably the landscape itself, which made such an unforgettable impression on me. To me, this ancient nation in flux seemed like the ideal backdrop for the story of a woman who is traveling back into her own past.

  Dream of the Blue Room was my first book-length foray into the subject of memory. A massive inundation of water, one of nature’s most powerful forces, threatens to destroy a nation’s collective memory. Since the writing of this novel, the dam has come almost to completion. The Three Gorges as they appear in this book no longer exist. Many of the towns mentioned here are now buried beneath a massive, stagnant lake, their inhabitants eking out an existence far away from the homes where their families lived for generations. The dam threatens the loss of memory on a massive scale. But it may also be the starting point of a new kind of oral history. When the physical things that define us are gone, what are we left with but story? Stories, after all, do not live in things. They live in the words we pass down from one generation to the next.

  Years later, in The Year of Fog, I would return to the theme of memory—its complexities, its power to restore. In No One You Know, I would tackle the idea of story—how narratives, both true and false, define the lives of individuals and of families, and how one woman must rewrite her own narrative twenty years after her sister’s death. Three novels and one short story collection into my life as a writer, I understand something I could not have imagined when I first stepped foot in Beijing twelve years ago: that certain themes would haunt me, would grow and converge over time, and that the big questions about life and the world we live in which perplexed me in my late twenties would follow me into my late thirties, and beyond.

  I keep coming back to a line in Lars Gustafsson’s beautiful book, The Death of a Beekeeper: “We begin again. We never give up.” For me, each novel is a process of beginning again. But each one, in some way, traces back to the beginning, to the first stories I attempted to tell. It is possible that in Dream of the Blue Room, my first novel, one can find the seeds of the books I have written since then, and the ones I have yet to write.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What causes the rift in Jenny and Dave’s relationship? What is their fundamental difference that causes their marriage to fail? Before they part ways in China, Jenny wonders if all Dave needs is “some slight indication that I’m losing my way, that I won’t make it without him—and that if I can give him this, not just now but forever, he’ll come back to me”. Could she have saved her marriage in this way? Should she have?

  2. What attracts Jenny to Graham? Graham to Jenny?

  3. Do you believe sexuality is a dichotomy or a spectrum? Do you think a person can love—and be physically attracted to—a person of the same sex but not be gay?

  4. Amanda Ruth embraced her otherness—her race, her lesbianism—at an age when so many young women try to be like everyone else. Was this courage? Rebellion? How was Amanda Ruth able to stand out so gracefully?

  5. Why does Richmond describe the announcements on their boat as “The Voice”? What does it represent?

  6. Place is a recurring theme in Dream of the Blue Room. What about the characters’ origins defined them? How can a person’s geographical origins affect his or her story?

  7. Graham explains his decision to end his life before he is incapacitated by ALS: “Imagine—to choose one’s own time and place of death. To make a conscious decision to leave this earth while you’re still intact, still functioning.” What might you do in Graham’s place? Would you stick it out to the end, alive but not living? Or would you choose the time and place of your own death?

  8. Jenny explains her love for Dave when she muses that “it is possible to love a person for being sturdy and reliable in a single, impossible moment, for responding with perfect timing and absolute precision to your unspoken needs.” Do you agree with her? Who else in Dream of the Blue Room loves another character for their actions in a single moment? Have you ever experienced this? Is it
ever possible to build a lasting relationship on this kind of love?

  9. What does Amanda Ruth’s yellow scarf symbolize? Do you agree with Jenny that she betrayed Amanda Ruth by denying that she had a romantic relationship with her? Why or why not?

  10. For many years after Amanda Ruth’s murder, Jenny believed that it was the one defining moment of her life, “that other events would never hold for me any real sense of drama.… I have lived my entire adult life with a sense that the timing is all off.” Did other defining moments follow? Have you experienced one of these moments yet in your life? Might there be others?

  11. After days, almost weeks, of insomnia, why is Jenny finally able to sleep in Yeuyang?

  12. The author retains some mystery about Amanda Ruth’s killer for most of the novel. Why? When did you first realize it was her own father?

  13. What is it about Jenny that convinced Graham she could help him die? What is it about her that allowed her to identify her cousin’s body? Kill the rat in her neighbor’s bathtub with no emotion? Do you think she still retains these characteristics when the novel closes?

  14. Consider the drowned river victims whom the cruise staff refuses to acknowledge, the staged funeral procession, Yuk Ming’s fabricated “Chinese experience.” Jenny calls her visit to China “an amusement park version of the country”. Why might this “amusement park” sensation be amplified in China? Do you think you have ever had an authentic experience of a foreign place?

  15. What is the significance of QiQi the baiji, Jenny’s dream about him, and the baiji’s appearance as she leaves Fengdu?

  16. Do you agree with Graham and Jenny that “to be away and adrift, distant and foreign and lost, alone, is to be somehow free”?

  MICHELLE RICHMOND is the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestselling author of The Year of Fog, No One You Know, and The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American, and elsewhere. She has received the 2009 Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.

  Dream of the Blue Room is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2010 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2002 by Michelle Richmond

  Reading group guide copyright © 2010 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

  MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, in 2002.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Richmond, Michelle.

  Dream of the blue room / by Michelle Richmond.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90700-1

  1. Yangtze River (China)—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction.

  3. Young women—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Death—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3618.I35 D74 2003 813′.6—dc21 2002153552

  www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright