Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [146]
We’re told no one can leave the commune without written permission. Even if we ran away, what would we find? It’s not as though cafés, restaurants, or wealthy homes pepper the landscape. There’d be no point in begging. We live in constant fear and with constant hunger. We’re trapped by fate, and our destiny looks bleak. Still, we try to be optimistic, but in the darkest way, by reciting a variation of an old proverb. Instead of “It takes more than one cold day for a river to freeze three feet deep,” we tell each other it will take more than five months to starve to death. We don’t know if that’s true.
I’ve been receiving packages from my aunt sent through the family association in Hong Kong and from my mother in Shanghai. Whenever the officials in the leadership hall see the stamps on the packages, they open them, hoping to find officially sanctioned food remittances. They take all my food—except for the powdered baby formula, which no one here understands or wants. Even so, Brigade Leader Lai’s thugs still search our house—and those throughout the commune—looking for food. Anyone found with hidden food is sent away for reeducation through labor. This is certain death, but worse things can happen.
The children’s fearful looks tell it all. They aren’t deaf or blind. They’ve heard about—or maybe even seen—our neighbors who sneak out late at night to cut the flesh from the dead or yank apart the limbs of babies that have been put outside to die. They’ve heard about children who’ve been boiled alive in other villages that make up the commune. They’ve heard about classmates who’ve been strangled by their mothers before being cut up and put into the cooking pot. They’ve heard of fathers trying to convince their wives to eat their little ones, saying, “We’re still young. We can have other children.” It’s all horrifying, but my mind—so dulled by hunger—has a hard time absorbing any of it. I tell myself these things could never happen in our house. Fu-shee is a good mother and she loves her children too much.
Samantha sleeps in the crook of my arm. I peel the blanket away from her face. Her lips and tongue move in a sucking motion. Even in sleep, she’s hungry. She’s five months old but looks more like two months. My milk has dried up, but at least I have formula to give her. That’s more than Tao’s brothers and sisters have. Last night, when the younger ones cried from their hunger pangs, Fu-shee gave them hot water to drink and told them to sleep on their bellies so they’d feel full. They didn’t fall asleep though. Their stomachs can never acclimate to eating green crops, rotting tubers, dried sweet potato vines, or other scavenged leaves, bark, and roots, and one after another child ran to use the nightstool. The stench in the main room was beyond putrid.
I didn’t get much sleep either. Tao and I did the husband-wife thing last night. We had sex because it reaffirmed we’d be fine and reminded us that we’re still alive, but I was disgusted with myself as soon as it was over.
I want to visit Kumei and Yong to take my mind off my hunger and off what I did with Tao. I place the baby next to Jie Jie. I’ll be away only a few minutes. They’ll probably still be asleep when I return. I leave them snuggled on the floor, tiptoe out of the house, and plod down the hill through the village toward the villa.
Many of the houses and other buildings are crumbling, because either the metal that held them together was taken to make steel or the wood was seized to make fires for the blast furnaces. Even a wall in the old ancestral hall, where Z.G. gave his art lessons two and a half years ago, has collapsed.