Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [126]
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