by Lisa See
Sung-ling smiles appreciatively. “You’re using what we have around us.”
But it’s not because I’ve embraced some Communist lesson or other. Rather, I’m doing exactly what my frugal mother and practical father taught me to do in Chinatown: conserve, manipulate, and utilize what others consider worthless.
“Yes, yes, but what is the subject?” Brigade Leader Lai asks. “This comrade has many black marks against her. How can we trust her to paint something that will not be reactionary?”
“I want to show the glories of the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune. Here, let me show you.” I hand him my drawings. “Look, here is our magnificent harvest with the road leading right to it. And I want to do a portrait of you, Brigade Leader. Our dreams of socialism wouldn’t be coming true if not for your leadership.”
The brigade leader’s chest expands, but the Party secretary has lived in Green Dragon his entire life. He knows who’s who and what’s what.
“Tao is the artist in your family,” he notes. “Why isn’t he here?”
The short answer is because he doesn’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been working alone, sneaking up to the Charity Pavilion when I should have been washing clothes in the river or doing other chores. My announcement that I was pregnant didn’t bring the happy change in attitude toward me that I was anticipating. My husband and my in-laws have an interest in me now that I’m pregnant with what we all hope will be a son, but they’ve also been wary of me since the struggle session against Yong. They’ve been walking a fine line between possession of me and the baby and absolute distrust and distance. But I’ve thought about this and know how to respond.
“My husband asked me to come here. He’s the better artist, but he’s also the harder worker. That’s why he’s building the road and I’m here before you.”
The three nod approvingly, but how will Tao react to what I’ve just said? What I wish is that he’ll regard me as a good wife who supports him. Maybe that will happen, and maybe he’ll happily take credit for the mural, especially if he thinks word of it will reach others even higher than those in this room. Oh, but I do sound bitter.
“Where will this mural go?” Brigade Leader Lai asks.
“There’s only one place,” I answer. “On the outside of this building. You have four walls that will now sing the praises of our commune.”
“Think of the effect it could have on members of the commune,” Sung-ling says tentatively. “They’ll pass it every day when they come to eat, visit the clinic, leave their children at school—”
“More than just people in our commune!” I interrupt. “Everyone in the county will come to see it! They’ll walk on our new road and see what good jobs our cadres have done.”
The looks on their faces! I once respected and feared them. Now I see them—even Sung-ling, my supposed friend—as clowns.
“Launching a Sputnik is a very specific program,” Party Secretary Feng Jin, the most cautious of the three, observes. “Twenty-four hours is not very long to create such an extraordinary amount of work. We want to launch a Sputnik”—he glances at the others uncertainly—“not an oxcart.”
He doesn’t have to tell us this. Everyone in the room knows how pointless the launching a Sputnik projects have been—building a well in twenty-four hours only to see it collapse in the first rain or sewing pants for everyone in the commune in twenty-four hours only to see mismatched pant legs sewn together.
Reminded of the potential traps, Brigade Leader Lai adds a new concern. “This can’t be an individual project. There’s no place for individual thinking or acting in the New Society.”
I don’t smile, but I surely want to because they’ve said exactly the things I predicted they would.
“That’s why I came to you,” I say. “Launching a Sputnik means improvising with what we have around us, but it also requires many hands. I respectfully ask that you assign a work team to the project. I propose we launch four Sputniks—one for each side of the building.”
“That’s four days!” the brigade leader exclaims. “And you’re pregnant. The Party says that expectant mothers will have light work.”
What a joke! Does he think painting a mural is harder than building a road under the blistering sun? Does he think it’s worse than having my shoulders swell from carrying heavy loads of rocks and dirt in buckets strung from poles in the struggle to remake nature, with little to eat? I’ve gone from optimism to disillusion very quickly. The Tiger leaps, but this time I keep my head on straight.
“Night and day, we make revolution!” I shout. “We will work longer than four days if necessary! We want to honor our commune cadres!”
“You’re sure it won’t cost us anything?” This comes from the brigade leader, who sleeps in the villa and eats wonderful meals by himself here in this building.
“Even if I buy a few materials,” I say, “they won’t cost more than two yuan. Remember, ‘More, faster, better, and cheaper!’ ”
The brigade leader grins. He’ll be getting what he thinks is a paean to his accomplishments, just like Chairman Mao has all over the country with his giant posters, for under a dollar.
FOUR WALLS, FOUR Sputniks. We’ll do one mural each Tuesday during the month of July to cover the leadership hall’s four walls.
“My comrade-wife has been very helpful to me in planning my Sputnik,” Tao tells Kumei, Sung-ling, and the rest of the work team assigned to us. He smiles with his big white teeth, and everyone smiles back at him. Naturally, he thinks this is his project and he takes over all planning. He sketches some new ideas, which follow the five accepted themes for murals: the natural beauty of the motherland, scientific advances, technical knowledge and production, babies to promote population growth, and happy families. Everyone likes them, except for Sung-ling.
“These are festive pictures,” she says, “but this is not what the committee approved.” She gives me a questioning look. She may not know much about art, but apparently she can tell the difference between what Tao and I have drawn. I make my face as bland as possible. I may be a comrade with a questionable background, but I’m a wife first. Sung-ling understands that. After all, although she is a cadre in her own right, her husband is the Party secretary. Mao may say that women hold up half the sky, but it is the lesser half. Still, Tao must tread carefully. In an effort to show his socialist spirit, he graciously divides the walls between the two of us. We will each get one small wall and one long wall to paint as we wish.
In the first twenty-four-hour period, we paint the first of Tao’s murals. The hours during the day are brutal. Powdery dust rises from the scorched dirt. The air is oppressively hot. It feels as though we’re laboring inside a brick oven, but at least we aren’t building the road. We work with people who have little sense of perspective, shading, or proper dimensions. That’s all right, because the Great Leap Forward has lost these sensitivities too. In Tao’s mural, fishermen row on the sea in peanut shells the size of sampans (to show how great the peanuts are in the New Society) and pull in huge nets filled with gigantic leaping fish.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” Tao shouts at us. “We can’t fall behind. We have only four hours left!”
I did not know he had such ambition.
The following week, I lead the team to paint a pond on my small wall. On the surface, at the center of the mural, is a giant lotus. No one can complain about the size, which is in keeping with the exaggerations of the Great Leap Forward. The lotus symbolizes purity, because it rises out of the mud but looks pristine. The one I paint, however, is spattered and bruised. Flying above it all is Chang E, the moon goddess, looking down with tears in her eyes. When people ask why she weeps, I explain that her tears of happiness are filling the pond and cleansing the lotus. In my heart I believe she weeps for the people of China.
I’m pregnant, living in a depressing place, trying to make the best of a bad situation, and hoping that working together will help change things between Tao and me. It’s unrealistic
, I know, but so are Tao’s dreams. He’s looking at the mural as a way to leave the commune and go to Peking or Shanghai. “People will want to meet the artist,” he tells the pretty girls who gather around him when he paints. “Not everyone will come here. I will need to go to them.” He flirts with the girls, but he treats me with increasing formality—as a woman with black marks against her who happens to be the mother of his unborn son. I try to pretend I don’t care.
During the third week, Tao paints his long side of the leadership hall. The subject is one we all wish we could see: rice paddies stretching to the horizon, fat children climbing ladders to reach wheat heads, and babies sitting next to tomatoes larger than they are. Tao does a good job with the brigade leader’s portrait, placing him amid the happiness.
A week later, inspired by our project, Brigade Leader Lai decides to launch a whole new Sputnik. On the night of the full moon, while some of us paint the last mural—my painting—the rest of the commune works on the road, trying to reach the leadership hall by dawn.
People say there is poetry in painting and painting in poetry. I want my mural to stand on its own, yet be read differently by different viewers. I’ve been thinking about something Z.G. once said to me: People are shaped by the earth and water around them. I want my painting to reflect this idea. I outline the central figure in black and then ask my husband to fill it in: Chairman Mao as a god towering over the land and the people, removed from the masses, challenging nature itself. This is my secret criticism, but I’m sure the brigade leader, Party secretary, and other members of the commune will take it at face value. I assign groups of two and three to work on the sky and on the background, where figures rise up out of China’s earth—made from this land’s red mud to be molded into obedient peasants. I give Kumei the important job of leading a team as they paint humungous radishes, which again will make my painting recognizable to the members of the commune as a piece of Great Leap Forward art. Corncob spaceships filled with laughing astronaut babies—a supposed tribute to China’s agricultural and technical advances meant for the people of the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune, who have never seen an airplane let alone a spaceship like Sputnik—fly through the sky.
That night, a full moon illuminates the fields around us. The road comes closer and closer. My mother-in-law brings more red paint made hastily from the soil. We can never use too much red, and it feels as if it glows in the moonlight.
On the left side of the mural, I paint a tree with its branches spread to form a cross. In the twists of the bark hangs an abstract Jesus, his head low, a slash of green representing the crown of thorns. On the right side, I paint another tree, so that the whole mural is framed by branches, roots, and leaves. An owl sits on an upper branch with one eye shut.
What is my message, if anyone asks? I will say that China’s best people come from this good earth, while the owl gazes at the world, offering its wisdom. But to me there are deeper meanings about blame, tolerance, and forgiveness. Yes, I’ve used too much black in contrast to the false bright red of the rest of the mural. Yes, I’ve painted an owl, which sees everything and is fooled by nothing. And yes, I have used a cross and Jesus upon it to show the suffering of the people. As far as I know, no missionaries ever came to this area. So if anyone asks, I will say that I’ve painted a tree god.
I think the mural will magically change my life. It doesn’t. No dignitaries come to the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune, Brigade Leader Lai doesn’t win any prizes for being a model leader, Tao doesn’t like me any more than he did before, and the people on the work teams quickly forget that I got them off the road crew for a few days.
Pearl
A ROSE-PETAL CAKE
NATIONAL DAY—CHINA’S Independence Day—takes place on October 1. This year—1959—is also the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, so the holiday is going to be the biggest and best yet. People labor day and night to beautify Shanghai. The city thrums with shoveling, hammering, and military music. Flags, lanterns, colored lights, and drapery festoon buildings, lamp poles, and bridges. Everything is in red, of course. An enormous arch is being built on the Bund, flanked by trees and flower beds. My work unit doubles its time on the streets, cleaning, stripping, and collecting every piece of paper we can find. I’m swept up by the enthusiasm around me and genuinely excited for and proud of my home country.
But as they say, everything always turns to the opposite. Just as I’m feeling truly good about being in China, we start to have food shortages in the city. In my household, we’re each allotted nineteen pounds of rice, a few tablespoons of cooking oil, and half a pork chop each month, which means, among other things, that the bickering in my family home is even worse than usual. I try to keep jealousies from boiling over by bringing home the occasional bag of rice or brown sugar bought at an exorbitant price on the black market or at the store for Overseas Chinese, where I can use my special certificates, for which I’m very grateful these days.
All this makes me worry about Joy. Could she be suffering from the same food shortages that we’re experiencing in Shanghai? I tell myself not to fret, because how could the members of a commune not have food? They grow it! But I’m a mother and I agonize. I write to Joy to ask how she is. “How are you feeling?” I send candies and dried fruit. “Tao’s brothers and sisters might like these.” But I don’t hear back from my daughter. In fact, I haven’t heard anything since she wrote to tell me she was pregnant, nearly five months ago. This causes me great apprehension and keeps me up late at night with anxiety. I tell myself she’s busy with Tao and preparing to have the baby. I tell myself to be calm, but I’m not calm. I have to see her. To see her, I’ll need a travel permit, but I’m still not having any luck with that.
I go to Z.G.’s house to see if he can help me, but even he can’t get a travel permit. I write to May about my concerns. She writes back two weeks later that she’s heard from Joy and that she sounds fine. I relax a bit, but I don’t lose my desire to see my child during this special time in her life. In the coming weeks, I return several times to Superintendent Wu’s office. I tell him I still haven’t heard from my daughter and I ask again for a travel permit. During one of my visits, he informs me that almost no permits are being issued for travel.
“It’s as though they don’t want anyone to go to the countryside,” he says.
“Why would that be?”
Superintendent Wu doesn’t know. But eventually he makes some inquiries—refusing to tell me where—and reports back that Joy is fine.
“Fine?” That’s what May said too, but I’m Joy’s mother, and something doesn’t feel right. “If she’s fine, why hasn’t she written to me?”
He doesn’t have an answer. I begin to mark time by how many more days until the baby’s due.
OCTOBER 1—NATIONAL DAY—finally arrives. It’s a golden autumn day, and I try to imagine what my daughter looks like in her eighth month of pregnancy. I imagine the commune commemorating the occasion with firecrackers, a big banquet, and the speeches in Peking broadcast over the loudspeakers. And then I tuck those images into my heart and get ready for the celebration here. Months ago, Z.G. invited me to go with him to Peking to see the festivities. He said we’d have a place with Mao on the dais to watch the parade and hear the speeches outside the Forbidden City. I admit it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but I stay in Shanghai to be closer to Joy in case I’m suddenly awarded a travel permit. I’ll celebrate with Dun, the other boarders, and Auntie Hu.
Our entire household dresses in matching red shirts and blouses, and then we head into the streets. We wave little red flags as the parade passes us. We see seas of children in white shirts, blue pants or skirts, and red bandannas tied around their necks. Brigades of the People’s Red Army march in brisk formation. The entire membership of one commune after another proceeds along the route, fists raised or waving red flags. Floats highlighting the country’s economic and military achievements move with a dig
nified air. For everything that’s bad here, for every moment I miss my home in Los Angeles, there are times like this when I feel great pride for what China has accomplished in ten years.
Dun and I leave before the local speeches begin and meet Auntie Hu at her house, since she can’t be on crowded streets on her bound feet. We sit in her salon, and she serves us rose-petal cake.
“Auntie Hu, you always have the best pastry,” I say after taking a bite. “How do you get something like this with the shortages?”
Auntie Hu’s eyes crinkle with pleasure. “I’m always trying to find the good old days in these bad new days. Come, lean close, and I’ll tell you.” I do as I’m told, and Madame Hu whispers, “Do you remember the Russian bakery on the Avenue Joffre, where your mother always bought your birthday cakes? One of the Chinese helpers now uses those recipes to make cakes in his apartment. He sells them only to the best people, those who can keep a secret. Shall we get one for Dun’s birthday? Do you know when it is?”
She relaxes back into her chair and stares affectionately at Dun, who sits on one of the salon’s velvet sofas, reading a book and feigning indifference to the big secret. Dun started accompanying me to Auntie Hu’s a few weeks ago after I told him about her collection of books in English. Auntie Hu took an instant liking to Dun, treating him like the son she lost years ago. The way she’s embraced Dun has made me surprisingly happy, as though I’m receiving approval from my own mother.
“Do you like chocolate cake or do you prefer vanilla?” she innocently asks Dun. “Or do you prefer more exotic cakes—grapefruit, butter cream, or rum?”
“I never tasted cake until I came here, Madame Hu,” Dun answers. “Even a single bite is a treat for me.”
These days a bite of anything made with sugar, eggs, milk, and flour is something beyond a “treat.”
“I wonder if we could send one of these cakes to Joy,” Auntie Hu says. “Wouldn’t a pregnant woman love a rose-petal cake?”
