Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [165]
The majority of city dwellers don’t fully understand what’s happening in the countryside. They’ve heard rumors, but they can’t reconcile them with being told crops grow to the sky on communes, hearing government officials report on the so-called years of bad weather that have destroyed fields of plenty, and what they see on the streets of Shanghai, where there’s no avoiding or covering up how people look as they wait in long lines to buy food with their coupons. They’re just moving past the first sign of starvation—losing weight—to the second stage—edema. They’ve begun to swell around their necks and in their faces. When people greet, they press thumbs into each other’s foreheads to see how deep the impression and how long it will last until the flesh resumes its normal shape. Everyone seems to walk in a listless haze. Still, no one complains, no one revolts. Only when people are truly hungry can you make them submit to you.
But the people in this house have seen starvation and its effects with their own eyes. Now they’re glad I’m here, because I understand what’s coming and I know how to survive. So does my mother. Her money and her special Overseas Chinese certificates have protected us, allowing us to buy provisions at exorbitant prices. In Shanghai, where the food is traditionally sweet, sugar is precious. Meat is hard to find and very expensive. My mom buys one quarter of a pork chop for fifty yuan or twenty-five dollars. Foodstuffs that once cost two or three yuan she now purchases at the equivalent of about thirty-five dollars. She procures wilted cabbages and other vegetables of inferior quality from farmers who’ve somehow skirted the checkpoints and sell their wares in dark alleys. She once paid a ridiculous price for a chicken, saying, “You need to be strong for our plan to work.” But none of this is enough to feed the ten people now living in the house.
I stand at the stove making “bitter cakes” from the grass I gathered at the Lunghua Pagoda yesterday. Later, when everyone goes to their jobs, I’ll soak the poplar leaves in water to get rid of their sour taste so I can make leaf pancakes tonight. I know how to make food out of almost nothing, and for this everyone not only tolerates but welcomes my presence.
“First, they tell us to kill sparrows, but now we have a campaign against bedbugs,” one of the dancing girls complains. “We don’t have bedbugs, so how are we going to prove we’re doing our part?”
“We’ll blame our lack of bedbugs on Old Big Brother,” the cobbler quips slyly. “We’ll say they took the bedbugs home with them.”
In July, Soviet experts pulled out of China, taking with them their machines, equipment, and technological expertise. Since then, the government has blamed Old Big Brother for everything.
“Yes, yes, yes! I’ve already heard that,” the widow chimes in. “We’ll say that’s why we don’t have bedbugs.”
“Now we have two enemies,” the cobbler continues, reaching out his arms so he can have a turn to hold the baby. “We must fight Soviet revisionism while continuing to fight American imperialism.”
Their logic makes no sense for many reasons, including that we’ve already been told the Soviets brought bedbugs with them and then left the pests to torture us, but then little makes sense anymore. The announcer on the radio tells us many things: that the USSR may join forces with the USA in the UN to further ostracize and diminish the PRC. (I was born in America and lived there for nineteen years. My family was victimized by red-scare tactics. I cannot imagine a single way that what we’re being told could ever come to pass.) In the meantime, other things are happening. Foreigners from countries other than the USSR have also been sent home. In fact, this is the smallest number of foreigners in China in centuries. All publications—except for two propaganda papers—have been barred from leaving the country. In other words, China has cut itself off from the rest of the world. What word escapes our borders, no one believes, as May pointed out in her letter. People