Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [149]
I hand Sung-ling her infant and swoop up my daughter. I hold her so tightly, she cries. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a happier sound. I begin to back out of the house.
“Please don’t report us,” Feng Jin says weakly. “If you do, we’ll be sent away for reeducation through labor.”
“What does it matter?” I ask. “You’re going to die anyway.”
It’s a curse, but it’s also a pronouncement of truth. My heart is racing and I feel more weak and terrified than I thought imaginable, but I manage to step back into the morning air. It’s spring. I can see the day is beautiful. We should be out planting, but we’re dying and becoming animals in the process. I may have failed as a daughter, but I can’t fail as a mother. My mother used to tell me that Heaven never seals off all exits. There has to be a way out of here. I return to Tao’s hut. Fu-shee and the children have gone back to the mats on the floor. The children have coiled into little clumps against their mother, waiting to die. I don’t care. Tao still sits at the table, his legs spread, one arm dangling, his jaw slack.
I get a piece of cloth and tie Samantha to my body. I won’t let her leave my touch again. I step over and around those on the floor. Their eyes look up at me like sea creatures. I pack the last of the baby formula, get my American money and a few clothes for Sam and me. I go outside and pour some of the boiling water into bottles. Then, without looking back, I walk down the hill, past the villa, up the next hill, and down again. I don’t have written permission to leave, but no one stops me. Eventually, I’ll reach the main road. From there, I’ll walk to Tun-hsi. It’s not a big town, but I’m sure I’ll find someone desperate enough or dumb enough to change some of my American dollars into yuan. Then I’ll take a boat to Shanghai and my mom.
MANY TIMES DURING the last few weeks, I’ve wondered if only the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune has suffered and if our food shortages were merely a matter of bad leadership. I don’t walk very far before I get answers. I just left what I thought was the ultimate horror, but I pass many other frightening sights on the road. A man offers to sell me “rabbit” meat. His wife sits a few feet away, her eyes blank, two large, wet splotches on her blouse from the milk that drips from her breasts. Others pull themselves hand over hand along the road, through the fields, and around dead bodies. Are they looking for food? Are they trying to escape? Are they so deranged and weak from hunger that they don’t know what they’re doing? How can the dead and dying be out here at all when we’ve been told runaways will be caught and sent away for reeducation? Maybe the number of people fighting razor-sharp hunger is too great for local authorities to do anything about. Maybe the famine has spread across the country. If so, then millions of people must be dead and dying.
When I can walk no farther, I sleep by the side of the road with Sam tied tightly to my body. In the morning, I continue on to Tun-hsi, where I go straight to the river landing to buy a boat ticket for Shanghai. I’m turned away at a checkpoint by a guard, who tells me that the schedules have been cut in half because there’s no fuel. But even if a boat were scheduled, I wouldn’t be allowed to board.
“You’re a country woman,” he says brusquely. “You don’t have an internal passport or a travel permit. You aren’t allowed to go to a city. Forget about Shanghai. Go home.”
I’m not going to do that. I hire a pedicab to take me to the bus station, where again I’m not allowed past the entry checkpoint. I take another pedicab to the train terminal. A train is not the easiest or fastest way to Shanghai, but it’s my last option. A checkpoint is set up here too, but I find a way around it by waiting until the guards are distracted by an entire starving family making a ruckus and then ducking around them. Inside the station, I’m told, once again, that the schedules have been curtailed, but this time I’m lucky. I only have to wait three hours for the train. I buy more hot