Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [0]
Shanghai Girls
Peony in Love
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Dragon Bones
The Interior
Flower Net
On Gold Mountain
Dreams of Joy is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure into the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Lisa See
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
See, Lisa.
Dreams of Joy: a novel/Lisa See.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60489-1
1. Families—China—Fiction. 2. China—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title
PS3569.E3334D75 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011003891
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Lynn Buckley and Ruby Levesque
Jacket illustration: © Vincent Lexington Harper/ Zhiying Studio, Shanghai, China
v3.1
For my father,
Richard See
Author’s Note
In 1958, a People’s Republic of China government committee developed the Pinyin style of transliteration for Chinese words, but it took some years before it was widely used on the mainland and it wasn’t adopted by the International Organization of Standardization until 1982. For these reasons, I have used the Wades-Giles system of transliteration for Chinese words in keeping with the times and with Pearl’s background and education. Those who read Shanghai Girls will remember that Pearl also uses a combination of Cantonese and Mandarin when speaking.
The Great Leap Forward began in 1958 and ended in 1962. Although the number of people who died in the resulting famine will never be fully known, archival material recently released by the Chinese government along with research done by scholars and journalists suggest 45 million fatalities.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One: The Tiger Leaps
Joy: Life Savers
Joy: Two Shadows Lengthening
Joy: A Sprig of Bamboo
Pearl: A Widow Should …
Pearl: Forever Beautiful
Joy: Observing and Learning from Real Life
Part Two: The Rabbit Dodges
Joy: Standing Against the Wind and Waves
Pearl: Dust and Memories
Joy: Loyalty of Redness; Expertise of Brush
Pearl: Scars on her Breast
Pearl: The Sorrow of Life
Joy: A Small Radish
Pearl: Riding a Flowered Palanquin
Part Three: The Dog Grins
Pearl: A Smiling Face
Pearl: A Perfect Circle
Joy: Between the Yellow and the Green
Joy: Glass Clothes
Pearl: The Ladder of Life
Joy: Launching a Sputnik
Pearl: A Rose-Petal Cake
Joy: Living an Abundant Year
Pearl: A Brave Heart
Joy: A Good Mother
Part IV: The Dragon Rises
Pearl: Separated by a Thread
Joy: This is Joy
Joy: The Heartbeat of the Artist
Pearl: A Place of Memory
Pearl: Fate Continues, Fortune Abounds
Acknowledgments
About the Author
THE WAIL OF a police siren in the distance tears through my body. Crickets whir in a never-ending chorus of blame. My aunt whimpers in her twin bed at the other end of the screened porch we share—a reminder of the misery and embarrassment from the secrets she and my mother threw at each other during their argument tonight. I try to listen for my mother in her room, but she’s too far away. That silence is painful. My hands grab the bedsheets, and I struggle to focus on an old crack in the ceiling. I’m desperately attempting to hang on, but I’ve been on a precipice since my father’s death, and now I feel as though I’ve been pushed over the edge and am falling.
Everything I thought I knew about my birth, my parents, my grandparents, and who I am has been a lie. A big fat lie. The woman I thought was my mother is my aunt. My aunt is actually my mother. The man I loved as my father was not related to me at all. My real father is an artist in Shanghai whom both my mother and aunt have loved since