Dreams of Joy: A Novel (23 page)

Joy pulls away and looks at me in surprise. I draw her close again. “Remember what you learned in church too. No matter what you’re feeling or how desperate you become, always take a moral position. If you do that, God will watch over you.”

People file out of the house, coming to get the bride, sweeping her away. I follow right behind, determined to be a proper mother of the bride, no matter what I feel inside or what memories the shack stirs up in me. Jie Jie, Tao’s fourteen-year-old sister, hangs red couplets outside the door to what for this night has been designated the wedding chamber. One side reads:
SONGS FLY THROUGH THE AIR
. The other side reads:
HAPPINESS FILLS THE ROOM
. People step forward with gifts. Some have brought red azaleas picked in the surrounding hills. Others give packets of tea grown on Green Dragon’s slopes, a jar of pickles, a piece of embroidery. Brigade Leader Lai presents a gift from the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune: a hundred feet of cotton cloth for Joy to make wedding quilts.

“When your children are born, you’ll get another fifteen feet,” he proclaims.

Yong offers the bride and groom a Golden Cock alarm clock. Tao and Joy won’t need an alarm clock, not with the loudspeaker and all the small children in this house, but the gift is both generous and mysterious. How did Yong acquire it? Was it preserved from happier days with her husband?

The time arrives for us to enter the bridal chamber. The room has been decorated with red paper cutouts: carp for harmony and connubial bliss, orchids for numerous progeny and the superior man, and peaches for marriage and immortality. In contrast, a couplet has been pasted over the single lattice window, which reads
WITH MEN AND WOMEN EQUAL, WORK GOES WELL. FREE MARRIAGES ARE HAPPY MARRIAGES
. Another large sheet of red paper has been pasted over the platform that serves as the bed for this family. In the old days, the paper would have been painted with the character for
double happiness
. Instead, Z.G. has written in his elegant calligraphy something to match the times:
THE MANDARIN DUCK AND HIS MATE SWIM IN THE REVOLUTIONARY OCEAN. MARRIED COUPLES ARE COMRADES
.

Two red candles flicker, sending shadows dancing on the walls. A couple of young men give speeches, making the usual suggestive comments about Tao’s prowess in the bedroom and the bride’s blushing ways. No one asks me or Z.G. to speak, but Kumei addresses the crowd with her customary cheerfulness.

“Why did we love weddings? We went to weddings to rejoice in the happiness of others and to swell our own joy.”

Then Yong sways forward. “Heaven created the world,” she says, “but it forgot to make happiness. This is especially true for women. When I married, my father hired people to cry. He wanted so many people to cry that the Yangtze would overflow its banks. For seven days, broth was my only sustenance, so I would be weak and obedient. A veil covered my face. When my husband lifted it, I saw a stern face. This was to make me understand that I needed to be compliant. Only since Chairman Mao came have we found happiness. I wish all gladness for Tao and Joy.”

A few more bawdy jokes, unrefined quips, and rowdy laughs erupt from the guests. More cups of rice wine are drunk. Then it’s time. Everyone but Tao and Joy backs out of the room. The door is closed. The young men go outside. They clap their hands, whoop, and bang together whatever they can find to make noise—all in an effort to break their friend’s concentration and prolong the duration of the husband-wife thing. The young women, with Kumei and Jie Jie as their leaders, linger by the door to the wedding chamber to eavesdrop. They begin to giggle. Have they heard something already?

THE NEXT DAY
is the end of Z.G.’s assignment. Today we’ll be going south to another commune. We pack our bags. I wrap a scarf around my camera and the few rolls of film I brought with me. I walk up the hill to where Joy lives. It’s early, and the bamboo mats and bedding for most of the family still cover the floor of the main room. The children stand around in their birthday suits. They seem even grimier with their clothes off.

The door to the other room is still closed. My mind shies away from the thought of Joy in there with Tao and what they did last night. Joy emerges. She has a look on her face I don’t understand. Doubt? Confusion? Disgust? I wonder if Joy’s father-in-law is going to examine the wedding sheets for bloodstains as my father-in-law did so many years ago. At least that doesn’t happen. Either the tradition is gone in the New China or this family owns no sheets.

Tonight will Joy and Tao sleep in the main room with the other children? In the future, when Joy and Tao want to do the husband-wife thing, will they sneak out of the house and find a spot in a field? I catch Joy’s eyes. The gleaming light that shone from them last night has disappeared. I remember the feeling of disappointment I had after my wedding night—is that what all the fuss is about?—but my circumstances were very different. Joy insisted she was in love. So maybe the husband-wife thing isn’t the problem. Maybe she woke up this morning in a small village in the middle of nowhere in the second room of a shack that’s home to twelve people and finally realized what she’s done.

I want to ask her what’s wrong, but I don’t feel like I can. Instead I say softly to her in English, “One last time, I ask you to come home with me. It’s not too late …”

My daughter—tremulous and uncertain—stares out the open door. A sheen of sweat glistens on her upper lip. She stands very still.

“Walk out of here with me, Joy,” I continue in English—a language that seems so open and free to me in this claustrophobic place. “Please.”

When she shakes her head, I give her my wedding presents—my camera, film, and the scarf. “Take some photographs,” I say. “Send me the film and I’ll get it developed. I’ll send some of those pictures to May. She’ll want to see you here.”

Joy walks me down the hill to the villa. Z.G. and I pick up our bags. Then she escorts us up the hill that leads out of the village. Above us, clouds like fish scales drift across the sky. Cicadas screech. We say our good-byes at the welcome sign. My girl doesn’t cry and neither do I, but looking into her face I see not the gloriously strong bride of last night but someone unsure. Z.G. and I are halfway down the other side of the hill when I glance back. I expect to see my daughter still standing there, but she’s already started her journey to her husband and her new life.

Z.G. continues along the path. He’s loaded down with his suitcase and various other satchels. The art supplies and all the posters that were done in the commune were sent ahead of us in a caravan of wheelbarrows earlier this morning. I want to say that I’m torn between my daughter and going off alone with Z.G. for the next several weeks, but this decision is easy.

“Z.G.,” I call. He stops and looks back at me. I set my bag in the dirt and hurry to him. “I’m staying here.” He unburdens himself of his bags, preparing for an argument. “I can’t leave Joy,” I rush on. “I’ve come this far, and I love her too much.”

He regards me, clear-eyed. What I’ve learned these past five months is that, while he may not be the best father or give the best advice, he feels some connection to Joy.

“I wish I could stay here with you,” he says at last, “but my status is too unstable.”

“You don’t have to explain. Dog today, cat tomorrow,” I recite, quoting his servant from when I first arrived in Shanghai. The success he’s had with his New Year’s poster and his recent Mao portraits helped get him out of the political trouble he was in, but that could change on a whim.

“I’ll return in three months to take you to the trade fair in Canton. I used my
guan-hsi
to get permission to bring both you and Joy with me. Joy probably won’t want to come. In any case, she can’t because she’s married into the countryside. You’ll need to attend the fair with me though.”

Or else he’ll be in trouble again.

“I understand,” I say, “but I may not want to leave.”

“You say that now, but by then you’ll know if Joy is happy. If she can show you that, then you’ll be able to come with me.”

For the first time, I feel something like admiration for Z.G. He’s finally beginning to understand the kind of woman I am. He puts his hands on my upper arms and squeezes them. He stares into my eyes. I hold his gaze.

“Pearl.”

“Yes?”

“You’re a good mother. I can never thank you enough for that.”

He lets go of my arms, picks up his satchels, and heads down the path toward the road, where he’ll catch the bus. I watch for a few moments, then turn, walk back to my suitcase, and continue on to Green Dragon Village.

Pearl

A SMILING FACE

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG
.

I roll over and pull the pillow over my head. I had another restless night, getting woken up a couple of times by the sound of someone prowling through the corridor outside the building where I sleep in the villa. I could use a little extra sleep.

Bang, bang, bang, bang
.

It’s no use. The loudspeaker hasn’t even come on yet to tell us to get up, but the Campaign Against the Four Evils—sparrows, rats, insects, and flies (which, for some reason, have their own special category)—isn’t for lazybones. The worst of the evils are sparrows. They’re said to devour seeds and grain, and now they must be eliminated. If the masses make enough noise—beating drums, clapping sticks, clanging pots and any cooking utensils that haven’t already been fed to the blast furnace—then the sparrows will keep flying, never landing, until they fall from the sky, dead from exhaustion. I put on a smiling face and leave my room.

Kumei and her little boy are in the kitchen. Ta-ming holds a small slingshot, and he bounces from foot to foot eagerly. Kumei smiles.

“Do you want to walk with us this morning?”

She always asks the same question, and I always answer the same way.

“Of course!”

We leave the villa, turn left down a cobblestone path, cross a moss-covered footbridge, turn left again, and then follow the shaded creek. After about a half mile, we veer down a new path lined with poplar trees. It’s barely dawn, yet from the hills around us we hear banging. Apart from the noise, which is as unsettling as it’s supposed to be, these early morning walks along the stream are pleasant. Kumei is a nice young lady, and her son is quite dear. He’s only five years old but earnest. He stoops to pick up a small rock, which he loads into his slingshot and shoots into the trees, hoping to hit a sparrow.

“I missed again, Auntie Pearl!”

“Don’t worry. You’ll get one eventually. You just have to keep trying.”

We pick up food at the canteen and then hurry back to the villa, where Kumei dashes inside to drop off breakfast for Yong and Brigade Leader Lai. She returns a moment later, and we wait for Joy, Tao, his parents, and his eight siblings to make their way down the hill. Together we walk from the village to the main part of the commune to receive the day’s work assignments.

Mothers drop off babies and toddlers at the nursery. Older children grab younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands to go to school. Ta-ming puts his slingshot in his pocket and joins his classmates. Everyone else separates to follow their red-flag leaders, marching with their knees thrown high and singing Great Leap Forward songs as they head off to their workstations: some to the sewing room to make blankets, trousers, and blouses; some to the leadership hall, where letters, telephone calls, and telegrams are processed; and some to the fields. Today the farmers’ assignment is one I hardly believe: crushing glass sent from Shanghai and then working it into the soil as a “nutrient.” It’s ridiculous to me, but the farmers do it because the Great Helmsman can’t be wrong.

All mothers and grandmothers must now come out to work. Tao’s mother may no longer stay at home to wash, sew, and clean for her toolarge family. Even Yong may no longer remain hidden in the villa. Most women—and I include myself in this—are ordered back to jobs in their own villages. I stop by the villa to get Yong and take her elbow as she totters to our workstation.

Brigade Leader Lai has assigned “old” people—like Yong, Tao’s mother, and me—to the nation’s Overtake Britain Battalion. Some days those of us on the gray-power team work at the blast furnaces—stoking the fires, feeding whatever metal is left in the commune to the smelter, or carrying the cooled pig iron to the central square, where men with wheelbarrows load the blocks and push them the few miles to the main road. Other days we shuck corn, sort rice, or lay out sweet potatoes for drying. I’m not old and I don’t have any gray hair, but I put on my smiling face and do as I’m told. Many of the tasks remind me of the things I did with my mother-in-law when I first arrived in Chinatown years ago. Those chores brought me closer to her, just as these chores have brought me closer to Joy’s mother-in-law. (I say “Joy’s mother-in-law” because she doesn’t have what I would consider a proper name. She was born into the Fu family. She went by No Name until she married out at age fourteen. Then
shee
was added to her natal family name to indicate that she was now a married woman from the Fu clan—Fu-shee.) We’re a small group—all women of a certain age, but again, not
that
old. Today we sit together to tie garlands of garlic, share stories, and complain about husbands, housework, and the visit from the little red sister as mothers, sisters, and friends have done for millennia.

“We’re lucky we live where we do, where we can use sand to catch the blood,” one of the women says. “Do you remember when I joined the Eighth Route Army after they came through our county? We used dirt wrapped in cloth between our legs. Sometimes we used soft flowers and other plants. When we went to the tundra in the far north, the local women showed us how to use dried grass.”

“When I was a girl and still lived in my natal village, we used a leaf from a tree that grew by the river,” Fu-shee recalls. “My mother gave me ten dried leaves to use for my entire life. Each month, the blood goes in. It dries, and then you use the same leaf the following month. Every month throughout your life those leaves get harder and harder. I was happy to marry into this village.”

I worry that someone will ask what I use. Would they believe that I bought sanitary supplies in Hong Kong or that my sister sent me some from America? That I throw the napkins out after every use? It wouldn’t sound good. It might even be a bad reflection on my daughter. But there’s someone even more suspect to question than me.

“What about you, Yong?” someone asks. “You lived in the villa. We always heard you used something special.”

“I regret those days and I admit my mistakes,” Yong responds contritely. In other communes, women with bound feet are going through a process of slowly unbinding their feet, preventing emotional and physical trauma—which would leave them completely crippled—and allowing the feet to regain their original shape gradually so the women can work in the fields. We have only one bound-footed woman in our commune, and so far her feet have been left alone. Still, they are a visible reminder of her privileged past. The others lean forward, ready for her confession. “The women in the villa used the scented ash from incense burned in the ancestral hall.”

“
Aiya!
From the ancestral hall?”

“Bah!”

The women shake their heads in disbelief. If this weren’t a matter for women alone, Yong would probably be attacked during one of the political-study sessions or be forced to make a public self-criticism.

“You were of the landowner class,” someone says. “You could do whatever you wanted.”

“It may have looked that way to you,” Yong responds, “but I had to obey not just my husband but also the first, second, and third wives. How cruel they were—worse than the worst mother-in-law.”

It’s awkward for me to hear about bad mothers-in-law, since Fu-shee has not been as welcoming to my daughter as Joy would like. But then Joy doesn’t understand how some relationships are so deep and fundamental that they cannot change just because Chairman Mao says they must. She knows, but doesn’t understand, that on a bone-and-blood level mothers-in-law don’t get along with daughters-in-law. I’ve told her that the written character for
quarrel
is two women under a roof. I’ve recited the old saying—“a bitter wife endures until she becomes a mother-in-law,” meaning that a wife must slowly climb the ladder of position in a family before she can command respect. According to Joy, however, this kind of thinking has no place in the new social order. She can say what she wants, but mothers-in-law will be the same long after I’m dead, Joy’s dead, and that Chairman Mao is only a bad memory.

At eleven, we recess for breakfast in the canteen, which is one thing I absolutely love. In the New Society, women no longer have the burdens of cooking for their families. Everything is prepared for us. Some people grumble that communal dining halls are destroying the heart of the Chinese family. After all, the family is built around breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I say we’re still eating together, aren’t we? Since I’ve been here, the canteen has been expanded (which didn’t take much—just more cornstalks tied together to form walls and a flimsy roof over bamboo framing) so that it can hold about a thousand people at a time. This morning, as at every meal, children run between the tables, old women gossip, and everyone else talks about the weather and the coming harvest. In this way, every meal is like a banquet, except that, over the chatter and laughter, loudspeakers blast news from the capital, patriotic music, and encouragements to keep building a better China.

I find Joy, kneeling before her husband and father-in-law, tending their badly cut feet. I sit on the floor beside her to help. They have no leather shoes. They rarely even wear sandals. Their feet are tough, but not tough enough to walk through fields filled with glass shards. I look sideways at Joy. Her lips are set in a determined line as she picks slivers of glass out of her father-in-law’s callused, cracked, and bleeding foot. Doesn’t she see how insane this is? Doesn’t anyone here see the mistakes that are being made? Sensing me staring at her, she glances my way. Her mouth spreads into a smile, and I automatically smile in return. Is her smile an apology or an expression of embarrassment? I tell myself I’m not here to criticize, even though I want to very badly. I tell myself that Joy looks happier than the morning after her wedding. I tell myself she’ll confide in me, if I give her time.

BANG, BANG, BANG
.
A new week, a new month. I put on my same clothes and my same smiling face.

In the canteen, people
ooh
and
aah
about reports of extraordinary activities in other communes that come to us over the loudspeaker. “Go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better, and more economical results in building socialism,” the announcer reads enthusiastically. “In Hunan, they’ve produced radishes as big as babies. In Hopei, they’ve grown melons larger than pigs. In Kwangtung, schoolchildren have crossed a pumpkin with a papaya, farmers have crossed a sunflower with an artichoke, and government scientists have crossed tomatoes with cotton to produce red cotton!” These accomplishments can’t possibly be real, but everyone loves hearing them. We need to find inspiration wherever we can, if we’re to bring in what everyone says will be the best harvest in years.

Today the commune holds a contest. Which village—Moon Pond, Black Bridge, or Green Dragon—can harvest crops the fastest? I’ll be putting in my first full day in the fields, since every hand is needed if Green Dragon is going to win.

“Drink plenty of water,” Joy recommends. “When we break, eat some pickled vegetables. They’ll help with the loss of salt. Oh, and empty your shoes at every chance, because you don’t want to get blisters. I learned that the hard way!” She grins happily. “Stay with me. I’ll show you what to do.”

She ties a kerchief over my hair and places a big straw hat on my head. She gives me a scythe. I’ve never held one before. Joy swishes hers back and forth to show me the motion. Then she picks up a basket and we take positions with others from the Green Dragon work teams in a field of golden rice stalks. Brigade Leader Lai blows a whistle. Joy and I work side by side as fast as we can.
Slash, slash, slash
. There’s nothing neat about what we do, and a lot of stalks aren’t cut.

“What about the grain that falls to the ground?” I ask.

“Don’t worry about it,” Joy answers. “Just hurry.”

It doesn’t make sense, but I’m with my daughter and she’s speaking to me. Every step brings me closer to her, doesn’t it?

Moon Pond Village wins the rice-cutting contest. Next, three small cornfields need to be harvested. Moon Pond rushes through their field—claiming another win, even though Green Dragon and Black Bridge fill more baskets with corn. And on it goes. We stop for lunch. The mood in the canteen is ebullient. I see sweaty faces streaked with dirt. I hear laughter and good-natured goading. We’re all hungry, and the meal is plentiful: melon soup, stewed beef in red sauce, tofu with cured ham, sautéed water greens with garlic and chilies, and shredded fresh baby bamboo shoots.

“You did really well, Mom,” Joy whispers to me in English. I hear the pride in her voice. This time when I smile, I actually mean it.

Then it’s back to the fields for another series of contests: more corn, more rice, and then a quick change of pace to pull old and tough leaves from tea plants. The morning’s enthusiasm dissipates as the afternoon wears on. We’re tired but still determined. The Black Bridge teams fall out of contention, but Moon Pond and Green Dragon win an equal number of contests.

“For the last challenge, you will harvest sweet potatoes,” Brigade Leader Lai announces.