Dreams of Joy

by Lisa See

  “You can call her whatever you want,” my husband says dismissively. “We will call her Ah Fu.”

  It means Good Fortune, but it’s actually a terrible insult, because every girl baby is considered a misfortune. That’s all right. My grandfather always called me Pan-di—Hope-for-a-Brother. His name for me only made me stronger.

  I write letters to my mother and aunt, telling them of my baby’s birth and giving them her name. Then I wrap Sam in a piece of cloth and tie her to my chest. Together we walk down the hill and wait by the pond for the mailman to arrive. Today he brings a package from my mother. I take it home, excited, hoping it will be filled with food. But the package has already been opened and it’s half empty, so I know someone in the leadership hall has taken whatever he or she wanted. What’s left is some powdered baby formula and some homemade shoes. I hide the formula with the carton of formula Aunt May sent. (Hers came with a note saying I should protect my breasts from early aging and sagging by giving Samantha a bottle.) As for the homemade shoes, Fu-shee won’t let the children wear them even though it’s cold, saying they should be saved for special occasions.

  What’s worse, I wonder, to freeze or to starve to death? I’m a long way from starving, but a relentless cold draft comes through the window that must be stopped, especially with a newborn in the house. I ask one of Tao’s siblings to get water from the stream and another to add fuel to the fire outside. Once the water comes to a boil, they come and get me. Tao’s little brothers and sisters watch wide-eyed as I pour the water in a basin, bring it inside, and put one of the shoes my mother made for me in to soak. Very quickly the shoe begins to fall apart.

  The loudspeaker in the house is rarely quiet. Right now the announcer talks about natural calamities—drought, floods, typhoons, and monsoons. As I peel off each layer of paper from the soles, I realize we’ve seen none of these calamities. But if the loudspeaker says it’s true, then it must be. I take the layers of paper from the shoes and smooth them across the thin rice paper that’s already been pasted over the window opening, hoping to block the wind from entering through any cracks and create extra layers as a barrier from the elements. Maybe the dark paper will attract more of the sun’s warmth too. As I work, I understand what my mother has done. She’s sent little pieces of herself and Auntie May: their eyes, their lips, their fingers. Then, about halfway through the sole of the second shoe, I come across a different kind of paper. I carefully lift it off the sole, unfold it, and see six words written in my mother’s delicate calligraphy.

  My heart is with you always.

  I glance at the collage I’ve made over the window opening. I take the baby out of her sling and hold her up so she can see. “Look, it’s your yen-yen and your great-aunt. See how much they love us?”

  Then I put Sam back in her sling and return to my pasting. Tao’s little brothers and sisters rush out to tell our neighbors what I’m doing. They come, they look, they shake their heads.

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, Brigade Leader Lai brings militiamen from Tun-hsi to search our houses, because he no longer wants to do his own dirty work. “Where have you hidden your grain?” the men demand gruffly. “We know you stole it.”

  The amount we’ve hidden is small—just cupfuls—but we’ve spread it widely throughout the two-room house. We’ve slit open our padded jackets and sewn little packets of gleaned rice and wheat in with the cotton bunting. We buried some millet in a jar under the sleeping platform. We wrapped foraged peanut shells in an old rice sack and tucked it between a rafter and the roof. We’ll grind the shells to mix into porridge. Party officials have told us to “live an abundant year as if it were a frugal one.” To me, we’re living in a frugal year, doing everything we can to get by, and it still isn’t enough.

  Brigade Leader Lai’s men come to Green Dragon Village every day for two weeks. (I’ll say this: it’s easy to tell who’s been eating just by looking at their bodies. The brigade leader and his militiamen don’t show signs of starvation. They haven’t lost weight, developed concave stomachs, or had any of their limbs swell from edema.) People hope that if Lai’s men find a stash it will divert them from searching other houses in the village and that the punishment won’t be too harsh. The lucky are beaten with sticks, or have their hands tied behind their backs and then are hung from a tree by their wrists until they scream from the agony. Those less lucky are forbidden to eat at the canteen. The least lucky are sent to a distant irrigation project, but no one can work in icy water in this weather and survive. Those who’ve been sent away have not returned, but many who’ve been beaten have died, and not getting to eat in the canteen is also a way to die, only slower. The village, the fields, and the canteen begin to look like movie sets—just façades. The people around me seem fake too, putting on their smiling faces and shouting slogans about things they don’t believe. Everyone still pretends to be open, welcoming, and enthusiastic about the Great Leap Forward, but there’s a furtiveness to them that reminds me of rats slinking along the edges of walls.

  Even though our first winter wheat crop was paltry, Brigade Leader Lai hasn’t given up on the idea of converting still more of our rice paddies, vegetable fields, and tea terraces to wheat. Now he wants us to deep-plow too. We’re to dig ten feet under to make our furrows richer than ever before—or so he says. The farmers know that topsoil is precious and that what lies beneath it is useless, but the brigade leader won’t take no for an answer. Even though it’s winter, we’re ordered back to the fields. One man pulls a plow and two men push it, while the rest of us dig even deeper with shovels and hoes. The slogan is “Plow deep to bury the American aggressor!” When we aren’t reciting the slogan, we’re encouraged to chant, “We work all day! We work all night! We work all day! We work all night!” And we do, sometimes stopping only to nap by the side of the field or slurp down our single bowl of rice porridge. When someone asks the brigade leader why we have to use our own bodies to do what draft animals have always done, he responds, “An ox or a water buffalo can’t dig as deep as humans.”

  I remember the story Tao told me about the water buffalo and why it wore blinders. He said the animal’s suffering in this life was punishment for things it had done in a past life. Now I think of a different reason. To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That’s what the government is doing to the masses now. Why? Because peasants are China’s true beasts of burden. Still, no one blames Chairman Mao. “The Great Helmsman wouldn’t hurt us,” my neighbors say. “The people around him just aren’t telling him the truth. It’s not his fault.” They spout this even as they develop dark patches on their lips and limbs that quickly turn into running sores. They feel sick to their stomachs, yet hungry, dizzy, and unable to stop walking. It seems we’re all paying for things we did either in this or in our past lives. The only good news—if it can be called that—is that sometimes we’re given dried sweet potatoes, as draft animals once were, to supplement our half jin of rice.

  AT THE END of December, Brigade Leader Lai cuts our grain ration to one-quarter jin per person. That’s barely four ounces of starch—about half a bowl of rice porridge a day when we’re still working like animals, deep-plowing the bitterly cold fields.

  “There’s plenty of grain,” he assures us, “but you people have an ideological problem.”

  No, the real reason is that he delivered too much of our small harvest to the government. Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest. Now even Brigade Leader Lai understands that doubling the grain harvest in a single year can be achieved only on paper. But to keep his promise, our rice, wheat, millet, and sorghum have been shipped to national silos so people in cities can be fed, leaving the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune with almost nothing. Our meals in the canteen have strange ingredients—cornstalks, corn roots, dried sweet potato leaves, and wild grasses cooked into soup, or dried pea powder, sawdust, acorns, elm bark, and pumice stone ground into flour to make into heavy cake
s cooked on a griddle. Those labeled black elements—like Kumei, Ta-ming, and Yong—are allowed even less than the scant allotment of food. My mother and aunt don’t seem to understand what’s happening here. They continue to send packages with goodies for the children instead of real food. (My aunt’s letters arrive just fine, but entire paragraphs in my mother’s letters are completely blacked out.) Cookies and candies are more than other people have, so I suppose we’re fortunate. Still, not a day goes by when I don’t remember how cavalier I was about the special food coupons I was entitled to as an Overseas Chinese. What I wouldn’t do for those now.

  We stop shrinking and losing weight. We develop what everyone calls the swelling disease as our arms, legs, necks, and faces swell from edema caused by a lack of protein. Our new diet is terrible going in and worse coming out. Some of us are constipated; others have diarrhea. This isn’t so bad for the babies and smallest children who can’t make it to the nightstool. The slats in the floor are wide enough for the diarrhea to slip through. But things are more awkward for those of us who are older. This is a two-room house and we use a nightstool. Naturally, what leaves our bodies is as much of a concern for Brigade Leader Lai as what goes into them. Our house is not the only one with intestinal problems, so now he sends his men on cleanliness inspections.

  “Are you still brushing your teeth and washing your hands? Are you emptying and cleaning your nightstool every morning? What is this mess in the corner? Why do you have flies when it’s winter?”

  Things are happening very quickly. The members of the commune are moving from hunger to starving and from starving to death. Few die from a lack of food, however. Instead, they drop dead from heart attacks, get fevers and colds that bring on pneumonia, receive small cuts that become infected and lead to blood poisoning, or they eat the wrong thing and then lose all their water through diarrhea. Baby girls are the first to die, followed by young girls and grandmothers. Sons, fathers, and grandfathers don’t die. An old saying reminds us that there are thirty-six virtues, but to be without a son negates them all. That means all food must go to males first.

  “Otherwise who will take care of the family?” Tao asks.

  I want to say, “I was raised to believe that women and children should be saved first. My father was Chinese, but even he believed that.” But I know better than to argue with my husband, and I don’t want to talk about my father Sam. His sacrifice makes my hunger feel meager.

  Some of our neighbors try to sell their daughters, but no one wants to buy girls. Other families—ours included—send small children into the fields at night to cut unripe shoots from the new winter wheat crop. No one is supposed to leave the commune, but Brigade Leader Lai issues certificates permitting men—including my father-in-law—to leave the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune to beg or find work. We don’t know what will happen to them, but one thing is certain: fewer mouths mean more food for us.

  I DON’T KNOW what finally sends me to the leadership hall to ask for a divorce—that my husband has done everything possible to take credit for my mural, that he won’t touch our baby, that he ignores me completely, that he takes food from my bowl in the canteen and gives it to his brothers, or that he’s begun “sharing his time,” meaning he’s fooling around with some of the young women in the commune. When I was in school, girls had a name for boys and men like my husband: a dog. Tao is a dog—with all the worst characteristics of a Dog. If I were in a city, I’d go to the People’s District Court and plead my case before a judge, a prosecutor, a recorder, and a policeman, but I’m on a remote commune, which is one reason divorce is so uncommon in the countryside. Brigade Leader Lai, Party Secretary Feng Jin, and Sung-ling compose the tribunal, but this is not to be a private matter. I arrive at the canteen just as dinner ends. The members of the tribunal sit at one of the food-service tables, reminding those in our vast cornstalk room of all we lack. Without television, movies, books, magazines, or newspapers, the winter can be long. At the very least, my application for divorce is a break from the loudspeaker. I stand a few feet before the tribunal. Samantha sleeps in a cloth sling tied across my chest. Tao and our audience sit behind me.

  “What is the nature of your complaint?” Sung-ling, the only woman on the panel, asks.

  “I married Tao for the wrong reason,” I begin, gesturing to him. “To see if I was worthy of love—”

  “Love has no place in the New Society,” Sung-ling states.

  All right then.

  “When we first married, we got along all right,” I say. “Then we began to quarrel. Now he rarely speaks to me.”

  “These things happen in marriage,” Sung-ling says. “You need to try harder.”

  “My husband won’t touch our daughter,” I confess, sure this will show Tao for the kind of man he is.

  When people in the canteen titter, Party Secretary Feng shushes the crowd and then addresses me. “No one is glad when a girl is born.” He may be illiterate, but feelings about female children are so deep that even he can quote from Fu Hsüan’s famous poem that begins, “How sad it is to be a woman! Nothing on earth is held so cheap.” He must have learned to recite the poem from his father, who learned it from his father, as have probably all the men—and women—in the commune and perhaps the country.

  “Baby girls are equal too, aren’t they?” I argue back.

  But I get no sympathy on that point.

  “You aren’t doing your duty as a comrade,” Sung-ling scolds me. “Anything that doesn’t have to do with the revolution is a waste of time. Arms should be put to the work of improving the country, not to carrying babies.”

  And yet I’ve seen Sung-ling cuddle her daughter. We’ve often sat together to nurse our infants. We’ve walked with them in the late afternoons when they’ve cried. We’ve even plotted, as mothers do, about the two girls growing up to be best friends for life.

  I don’t want to accuse Tao directly of fooling around, so I list my other reasons. “He criticizes me all the time. He suspects me when I’m late. He rarely speaks to me, even though we live in two rooms. A woman shouldn’t have to suffer in marriage.”

  “You have serious complaints, but a divorce is not a trifle,” Brigade Leader Lai comments. “If we grant you a divorce, what will you do about your baby? Will you leave her with your husband? How will you support yourself? Where will you live? A woman is like a vine needing the support of a tree. What will you do?”

  I remember Z.G. saying something like this when I announced I wanted to marry Tao. I don’t like it any more now than I did then.

  “A woman is like a vine? We’ve been told that women hold up half the sky,” I respond.

  Before I can continue, Party Secretary Feng Jin jumps in. “Women are like water; men are like mountains.”

  “Bah!” Sung-ling snorts. “If a man is a mountain and a woman is water, then it is the woman who confirms the mountain’s existence. As water, a woman can go anywhere. It gives life. It nurtures life. A man is reflected in her water.”

  Could Sung-ling be alluding to my mural? I came up with the idea, mixed the paints, and allowed Tao to take the credit. The other judges—both men—look as though they’ve just swallowed cod-liver oil. When I first came here, I saw how the people of Green Dragon loved Tao for his artistic talents and took pride in him. I piggybacked on their good feelings to get my mural made. This won’t go well if they think I’m now trying to steal credit from him.

  “A hurried marriage is not a basis for a good marriage,” I stumble on before the two men can compose their thoughts. “We didn’t know each other well enough to know if we could get along. We do not treat each other as equals,” I add, hoping that, if I accept some of the blame, then they’ll be more compassionate in their deliberations.

  “Let us hear from the husband,” the brigade leader says.

  I sit down and Tao gets up. I don’t expect him to hold back. I embarrassed him by coming here, and his only hope is to make me look bad. But I haven’t prepared mys
elf for the slipperiness of his honeyed words as he picks up where Sung-ling left off.

  “It is natural for a man to go to a higher place, just as it is natural for water to flow to a lower place. When my wife came here, she was a broken-down shoe.”

  He just called me a low prostitute! Behind me, people mumble and shift their weight. I don’t turn around, but I imagine hundreds of bodies suddenly leaning forward, eager to hear what Tao will say next. Yes, this is most definitely more entertaining than the loudspeaker, but I’m worried and scared. I wrap my arms around Samantha, protecting her, protecting myself.

  “If you give her a divorce,” he continues, “no man will want her, because they only want fresh brides. And she’ll have to leave the baby with me. Ah Fu is mine until she marries out.”

  The brigade leader is not at all interested in my baby’s future, not when there’s something more titillating to pursue. “This is a serious accusation,” he says. “What proof do you have of your wife’s bad behavior?”

  “She kissed me in the Charity Pavilion before we married,” Tao answers truthfully. Again, the people in the canteen grumble and whisper among themselves. The brigade leader asks for quiet and Tao continues. “She touched me with her naked feet in the stream.” This elicits shocked ohs. “Once we were married, she wanted to do the husband-wife thing right next to my brothers and sisters.” He turns and addresses me directly. “Now you won’t do it at all.”

  I jump to my feet. All eyes turn to me, but what can I say? Everything he said is true. I can’t get mad, but I can’t let this go either.

  “When Tao and I first met, I was a virgin,” I say. “Now he insults me by saying I was a broken-down shoe—”