Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [167]
“I wish you could be too, but everything must appear as matter-of-fact as possible. I learned that from Auntie Hu,” she tells me.
Then she’s out the door with her dozen eggs.
Keeping to our usual schedule is important, so at nine I pack up the baby and Ta-ming and we take a bus to Z.G.’s, as we’ve done every day for the last two months. Tao is still living with Z.G. I wish more than anything that I didn’t have to see Tao, because I hate him and because nothing is more dangerous than an uneducated peasant—someone who can claim redness while painting black the people who helped him—but I have to see him to make our actions seem normal. “You just have to tolerate him awhile longer,” my mother often reminds me. I have, but it’s hard.
One of the servants lets me in, and I go straight upstairs to a bedroom Z.G. recently converted to a studio. Light streams through the window. Easels with canvases or watercolors in progress painted by Tao, Z.G., and me are propped around the room to take advantage of the natural light. Tao is here already. He’s still handsome, no doubt about that, but he doesn’t smile to show me his beautiful teeth or even turn to acknowledge my presence. He waits until I put Samantha in a baby tender—a wooden box that allows her to move around but not escape—and then he wanders over to pat his Ah Fu’s head.
Ta-ming goes to the window seat, where he can look out on the walk street below. The poor boy is not the same happy child I first met in Green Dragon. He doesn’t talk about his mother, the villa, being hungry, or that terrible time he spent in the dark by himself in the trunk of Z.G.’s car. He rarely smiles, but I guess that’s to be expected. Dun asked a friend of his, who teaches Western music at the university, to give the boy some simple violin lessons. He says the landowner’s violin is quite old and quite valuable. Now the things that make Ta-ming happy are his violin lessons and the time he gets to practice in our room at night. The rest of the time he’s quiet and pensive.
Z.G. enters the room. “Good morning,” he says. “Is everyone ready to paint?” He strides over to Tao, and they talk about what he’s working on. “I like the way the fields look so raw and cold …”
In many ways, our time together reminds me of when Tao and I had our private lessons with Z.G. in the villa, minus our crazy love, of course. Z.G. still treats Tao and me differently. He admires Tao’s work, praising him for the model artist he’s become. It’s a charade that helps to build my husband’s inflated opinion of himself. Z.G. teaches me the rub-and-paint technique he once used to paint the beautiful-girl posters of my mother and aunt—working carbon powder over an image and then applying watercolors to get the warmth and depth for cheeks, fabric, hair, furniture, and sky.
In my work, I’ve been trying to achieve what Z.G. told me when I first arrived on his doorstep is the true essence of Chinese artistic striving: depict the inner world of the mind and heart. I was physically saved by my mother and Z.G., but in my most hopeless moment I found my true voice, which saved my heart and soul. Art for art’s sake is not what motivates me. Certainly politics are not what motivate me anymore. Emotions are what motivate me. Of those emotions, the strongest is love—love for my two mothers, my two fathers, and my baby. During the days of my recovery, I began to see something. I remembered moments from my childhood: stringing peas with my grandmother, walking with my grandfather through China City, playing dress-up on movie sets with my aunt. And, of course, anything and everything my mother did with me: pinning me into a jumper she’d sewn, helping me spell the names of all the kids in my class on my Valentine’s Day cards, taking me to church, to the beach, to Chinese school, doing all those things that helped turn me into the person I am.
It’s the New Year’s poster—where beautiful girls once and still reside—that has become my art form and the way for me to realize my vision. The