Dreams of Joy: A Novel (35 page)

“I know,” Z.G. responds, world-weary. “It’s to be one of those events that’s so vexing in the New China. On the one hand, England is considered an ultraimperialist country, since it was the first foreign power to invade China and it still occupies Hong Kong. On the other hand, England is one of the few countries that recognizes the People’s Republic of China … even though it still aligns itself with the United States—the most ultraimperialist of all countries—in the United Nations to keep China from membership. We must do what we can to win over the few capitalists we’ve got. Ah, here we are.”

The car pulls into the grounds of the Garden Hotel, what used to be the French Club. The brightly lit façade and the walled garden bring back memories of parties I attended here with my sister. It feels strange to walk up the steps and enter the lobby with its crystal chandeliers, sweeping staircase, and marble walls and floors. The art deco grandeur looks dilapidated and musty, but young men and women dressed in old hotel uniforms take our coats, usher us through the lobby, and guide us upstairs to one of the banquet rooms. Inside, the people are divided into three groups: those in the usual gray suits of Communist China’s elite, those in colorful Hong Kong–made
cheongsams
, and some—like Dun and me—who wear Western-style clothes of twenty years ago.

Dun and I accept glasses of French champagne. As Z.G. scans the room, looking to see who’s important, Dun and I tip our glasses in a silent toast. He smiles. I smile. It seems we have a way to celebrate our engagement after all.

We sit down to an elaborate banquet. It’s more food than I’ve seen since I came to China, and it’s fabulous: whole roast squab served with fresh lemon slices and little bowls of salt for dipping; sweet sticky rice stuffed into the holes of lotus root and braised to bring out the greatest sugariness; thin slices of tofu as fresh and light as custard topped by fresh scallops; whole crab sprinkled with chopped scallions, fresh coriander, and chilies; pork belly in honey; soft-boiled eggs topped with caviar and garnished with tiny slivers of pickled vegetable; deep-fried greens coated with sweet syrup, and a whole steamed fish. Our table host tells the Hong Kong guests there’s so much food in China that it’s not necessary to serve rice. “That would be redundant,” he says, and the guests laugh in merry agreement.

Dun and I eat every delicacy designed to impress “our Hong Kong friends,” and we savor every bite. I speak in my best British English to a gentleman who owns a textile factory in Kowloon. He’s hoping to open a factory on the mainland. I listen to Dun practice his English with a woman on his left. He’s deft and humorous. Every once in a while, I glance over at Z.G. He looks good. He hasn’t lost any weight, and I can see why, if he’s been coming to banquets like this.

When dinner ends, we go to an adjoining room with a small stage, where we’re treated to a short program of provincial dances and songs. Then a screen is lowered, the lights dimmed, and a projector begins to whir. I expect a newsreel on the Great Leap Forward. Instead, we get a Laurel and Hardy short followed by
Top Hat
, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I saw it at the Metropole with May a year before we left Shanghai. After the film, the people from our table come up and ask questions.

“Do all Americans drive cars?”

“Do they all own airplanes?”

“Do all people live in houses like that?”

None of them are from Hong Kong.

Joy

A GOOD MOTHER

I WAKE ON
a Sunday morning in March to unnatural silence. The roosters and chickens in Green Dragon have all been eaten. The oxen, water buffalo, and village dogs have also been eaten. I don’t hear the scratching of mice or rats in the rafters and walls, because they’ve been eaten too. There are no birds in the trees, children playing between houses, or people going about their daily chores.

Tao’s brothers and sisters still sleep around us. They need the rest. Last night, they ran out to steal pubescent wheat heads, rub them between their fingers to separate the grain from the husks, and then eat the still-green kernels. It’s completely against the rules, and if you’re caught by the night patrols, punishment is swift and harsh. People have been tied to the scholar’s tree in the square to have their ears, noses, or scalps sliced off or the hair on their faces, heads, or private parts burned. Others have had their eldest sons killed to cut the roots of a family or been deprived of all food until the only thing they can eat is the cotton stuffing in their padded jackets, so they die full but naked.

I was seven years old when World War II ended. Later, in school, we often debated why Germans didn’t revolt against their leadership and why Jews didn’t fight harder for their lives. Now I understand how that happened, because there have been no riots, protests, or uprisings here either. We’re too weak, tired, and scared to do those things. We’ve been brainwashed through hunger, and people still believe in Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.

We’re told no one can leave the commune without written permission. Even if we ran away, what would we find? It’s not as though cafés, restaurants, or wealthy homes pepper the landscape. There’d be no point in begging. We live in constant fear and with constant hunger. We’re trapped by fate, and our destiny looks bleak. Still, we try to be optimistic, but in the darkest way, by reciting a variation of an old proverb. Instead of “It takes more than one cold day for a river to freeze three feet deep,” we tell each other it will take more than five months to starve to death. We don’t know if that’s true.

I’ve been receiving packages from my aunt sent through the family association in Hong Kong and from my mother in Shanghai. Whenever the officials in the leadership hall see the stamps on the packages, they open them, hoping to find officially sanctioned food remittances. They take all my food—except for the powdered baby formula, which no one here understands or wants. Even so, Brigade Leader Lai’s thugs still search our house—and those throughout the commune—looking for food. Anyone found with hidden food is sent away for reeducation through labor. This is certain death, but worse things can happen.

The children’s fearful looks tell it all. They aren’t deaf or blind. They’ve heard about—or maybe even seen—our neighbors who sneak out late at night to cut the flesh from the dead or yank apart the limbs of babies that have been put outside to die. They’ve heard about children who’ve been boiled alive in other villages that make up the commune. They’ve heard about classmates who’ve been strangled by their mothers before being cut up and put into the cooking pot. They’ve heard of fathers trying to convince their wives to eat their little ones, saying, “We’re still young. We can have other children.” It’s all horrifying, but my mind—so dulled by hunger—has a hard time absorbing any of it. I tell myself these things could never happen in our house. Fu-shee is a good mother and she loves her children too much.

Samantha sleeps in the crook of my arm. I peel the blanket away from her face. Her lips and tongue move in a sucking motion. Even in sleep, she’s hungry. She’s five months old but looks more like two months. My milk has dried up, but at least I have formula to give her. That’s more than Tao’s brothers and sisters have. Last night, when the younger ones cried from their hunger pangs, Fu-shee gave them hot water to drink and told them to sleep on their bellies so they’d feel full. They didn’t fall asleep though. Their stomachs can never acclimate to eating green crops, rotting tubers, dried sweet potato vines, or other scavenged leaves, bark, and roots, and one after another child ran to use the nightstool. The stench in the main room was beyond putrid.

I didn’t get much sleep either. Tao and I did the husband-wife thing last night. We had sex because it reaffirmed we’d be fine and reminded us that we’re still alive, but I was disgusted with myself as soon as it was over.

I want to visit Kumei and Yong to take my mind off my hunger and off what I did with Tao. I place the baby next to Jie Jie. I’ll be away only a few minutes. They’ll probably still be asleep when I return. I leave them snuggled on the floor, tiptoe out of the house, and plod down the hill through the village toward the villa.

Many of the houses and other buildings are crumbling, because either the metal that held them together was taken to make steel or the wood was seized to make fires for the blast furnaces. Even a wall in the old ancestral hall, where Z.G. gave his art lessons two and a half years ago, has collapsed. The people sent to live there as punishment died. The scholar’s tree that once stood so proud in the center of the main square has been stripped of its bark and leaves. The ground beneath it is bloody. The willows are as naked as they are in winter. The elm trees that once provided shade along the path out of the village have also been reduced to bare skeletons. The people? We drag ourselves from place to place, vacant looks in our eyes, thinking constantly of food, our legs, stomachs, and foreheads strangely bloated.

A week ago, Brigade Leader Lai made a new announcement over the loudspeaker. “Meals will no longer be served in the canteen. The masses may now pick up food from the canteen and take it back to their homes. You said you missed eating at home. Now you can be with your families again.”

What he meant was he didn’t want to hear people talk about food, which has become more dangerous than discussing politics. He also didn’t want to see any more people collapse from hunger, die right on the canteen floor, or—even more distressing—watch relatives weep over the dead. Now we send one family member to pick up our daily grain ration of a quarter of a
jin
of rice or some other starch—less than a fourth of what’s needed for survival—at the leadership hall and bring it home, without everyone having to expend extra energy walking to the canteen, so we can die with our families without others having to witness another death scene.

This isn’t like last year, when a few elders and babies died.
A lot
of people are dying. Two weeks ago, we received word that my father-in-law died from a fever after working in freezing water on an irrigation project a long distance from here. Brigade Leader Lai doesn’t want anyone to know how many of their neighbors have perished, so we couldn’t tack yellow paper outside the house to announce my father-in-law’s death. We were forbidden to mourn him in public. We weren’t allowed to make offerings to help him on his way to the afterworld. So, buried far from home, he is consigned to becoming a hungry ghost, forever wandering and lost. And we can seek no solace in Buddhism or Daoism for fear of being labeled reactionaries.

Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots, and search for wild grass. We’ll eat anything, and we have. But you can’t eat a leather belt like it’s a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days. Once we tried eating Kwan Yin soil—named after the Goddess of Mercy. You take dirt, mix in dried grass, boil it, and then eat it. You can imagine how it tasted, and none of us ate very much. That turned out to be a good thing, because a family up the hill ate it three days in a row. The mud hardened in their stomachs and they died painfully.

I know I should be crippled from the horrors I’ve witnessed, but I’m too hungry for emotions. My hunger is all I can feel or think about. It’s like a snake slithering through my brain, down to my stomach, out to my fingers, then down my legs and back up to my brain. It never stops.

I reach the villa and go straight to the kitchen, knowing I’ll find Kumei there. We speak in clipped sentences to save energy.

“Yong died,” she announces.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Hide her. Hope she isn’t found.”

“But the brigade leader lives here.”

“He moved out of the villa a few days ago. He’s gone to the leadership hall.” This is more than I’ve heard Kumei say in ages, and I can see the toll it takes. “He says he needs to protect what’s left of the commune’s grain supply.”

I think he had a different reason. The villa has twenty-nine bedrooms, but the leadership hall gives him total privacy. People will do anything for food. Many women in the commune have walked or crawled to the villa to prostitute themselves to the brigade leader in exchange for a single bun. Now they’ll go to the leadership hall, where Brigade Leader Lai won’t have to worry about anyone watching him. It’s a long way, and I wonder how many women will die either going or coming.

“The villa has lots of places to hide a body,” Kumei continues. “Yong’s too withered to stink. I hope I have the strength to keep moving her and still collect her food ration.”

Many families are doing this, hiding the corpse of mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, grandma, or grandpa in the house, so an extra ration can be picked up each day at the canteen.

I bite my lower lip, thinking of the old woman. She suffered so many indignities in the last ten years of her life. I swallow, and then say, “I’ll help move her, if you want.”

Starving is a grim business, but Kumei nods, grateful.

“Ta-ming is very weak,” she informs me. “He hasn’t gotten off his mat in two days.”

“Do you have anything to give him?”

She doesn’t respond. We both know the answer: no. And now that Brigade Leader Lai is gone, she can’t give his scraps to her son.

Kumei takes me to see Yong, who lies curled like a baby. Even in death she wears the white ribbon of denunciation. Kumei and I sit on the edge of the bed. I put a hand on Yong’s ankle, and then tell my two friends about having sex with Tao. Yong doesn’t respond, of course. Kumei tries to look sympathetic, but I know what she’s thinking:
I need food
.

We’re caught in the jaws of hunger, and our minds are tortured by this thought. And as hungry and weak as we are, we know that tomorrow and for the next six days, until next Sunday, we’ll have to work, pulling plows, digging wells, planting, and weeding from six a.m. until six p.m., followed by a political meeting or struggle session, with just a bowl of mirror soup—so thin you can see your reflection in it—to sustain us.

I catch a glimpse of myself in Yong’s mirror. My body is as thin as a ginseng root. My hands are as bony as dried twigs. My skin looks translucent. My hair hangs lifeless. My lips, which were soft and full, have shrunk to almost nothing. I’ll turn twenty-two on the twentieth of this month, but hunger has turned me into an old woman nearing death. I think of my friends Hazel and Leon back in Chinatown. Hazel’s probably gotten married, and Leon will have graduated from Yale by now. If I’d stayed home … What would be happening? Maybe I’d have a job, my own apartment, my first car…

Later, I take the long, slow walk back up the hill to my house. There’s still no activity on the terrace, but I can see my mother-in-law has put a pot of water on the outdoor stove: breakfast.

Inside, Tao, Fu-shee, Jie Jie, and some of the children are up and dressed. They sit on stools and boxes around the table. They don’t talk or make sounds. They don’t squirm or push each other. Their concentration is totally focused on something in the middle of the table. They’re waiting and watching. Their eyes somehow manage to gleam like those of animals and yet be dull as dirt.

I peer over their shoulders to see what they’re looking at. It’s something small and wrapped in a blanket.

“Samantha!” I scream.

Could she have died in the few minutes I was away? The bundle moves. As I reach forward to pick up my baby, I hear a strange barking sound. My hands draw back. It’s not Sam. I know her cry.

All the while, my husband has not moved. His eyes are like coal—dead and opaque. My body shakes as I reach over one of the children and pick up the bundle. I open the blanket. It’s Sung-ling’s baby, who looks hours, maybe minutes, from death.

“Where is Sam?” I ask.

They look at me, hungry, desperate, as though I’m holding their last meal. I step back in horror. I am holding their last meal! I’ve heard whispers about something the villagers have been doing in Black Bridge Village. They call it
I Tzu, Erh Shih
—Swap Child, Make Food—when mothers trade infants, let them die, and then feed them to their families.

“Where is Sam?” I shriek in terror, but no one responds.

I hold Sung-ling’s daughter close to my chest and run to her parents’ home. I push through the door and find a scene similar to the one I just left. Party Secretary Feng Jin and Sung-ling—who once were portly but now are wasted and waxy looking—stare at Sam. At least they have the decency to weep.