Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [110]
“I smelled food when I came in,” Sung-ling continues accusingly. “You must be smelling the hot water we make to drink, since we no longer have leaves to make tea.”
That night I write to my mother:
They say mothers-in-law are awful creatures put on earth to torture their daughters-in-law, but Fu-shee isn’t so bad. She’s pregnant again. I’m not. I’d like to have a baby. A son, of course. It would make Tao happy. It would please my in-laws. I hope it would make you happy too.
In Chinese, the word womb is made up of characters for palace and children. At night, lying next to Tao, I send propitious wishes to my womb. If marriage doesn’t cure my sadness, maybe a baby will.
AT CHINESE NEW YEAR, food is found in a neighbor’s house during an inspection. The house is torn down. The family has nowhere to go, so they sleep in the ancestral hall. Also, as a result of our neighbors’ sloppiness, all the locks in the commune are taken away.
“If you don’t give up your locks,” Brigade Leader Lai tells us, “we’ll take away your doors.”
He doesn’t stop there. In a flurry of activity, gates and courtyards that separate property are taken down to prevent the hiding or hoarding of food—and to keep everyone and everything visible. If clear lines of sight still aren’t available, then the entire house is destroyed. “Our new policy benefits the motherland,” Brigade Leader Lai remarks, “since the last remaining metal from hinges and locks can now be smelted and we can use the wood from houses and furniture to stoke the fires in the furnaces.” The villa, where he lives, remains untouched.
Three days later, we come home from the fields and find Fu-shee squatting in the corner, a bucket filled with blood and little bits of tissue under her. I’m told to clean the bucket, which is sickening and revolting. I try to be helpful in other ways too, but whatever gains I’ve made with my mother-in-law disappear. Now she looks at me reproachfully. Soon other pregnant women in the commune walk the other way if they see me or turn their backs on me. Women who haven’t given birth are believed to bring bad luck to unborn and newborn babies.
My only friends are Yong and Kumei, who repeatedly tell me not to be concerned. “We’re between the yellow and the green,” they say, as though that will make me less hungry, pregnant women less likely to ignore me, or my mother-in-law less upset with me. “It’s worse than usual, but it happens every year.”
I have an American perspective: Should we accept something just because it’s always happened that way? I come up with ideas to help ourselves.
“Let’s buy a few chicks to raise, so we’ll have chickens to lay eggs,” I suggest to my husband’s family.
“Where would we hide them?” my father-in-law asks. “What would happen when the brigade leader comes for his inspection?”
“We could make tofu,” I say. “When I was a little girl, my grandfather made tofu in our bathtub.”
“Where will we get soy milk?” my husband asks.
“What’s a bathtub?” Fu-shee asks.
“Maybe we could start a wheelbarrow business,” I try again. “People always need things hauled to the main road.”
“Where will we get money to buy them?” my father-in-law asks.
“I have some money,” I say. “We’re a family. I want to help in any way I can.”
I buy three wheelbarrows. We earn four yuan—a little less than two dollars—a day carrying coal, bricks, and grain, until we’re told we have to stop. The village cadres criticize us and remind us that no private enterprise is allowed. The next time I make a suggestion to improve our situation, Fu-shee snaps, “Instead of bragging about your money, why don’t you buy us some food?”
But I can’t buy food, because there’s no food to buy. Even if there were,