Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [127]
“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