Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [27]
Soon enough, we’ve left Canton behind and we’re on a raised dirt road taking us through flooded rice fields for what I’m told will be about a forty-five-minute drive to Wah Hong. Canton seemed like it had stepped back in time under communism, but now I feel like I’m jumping back a century or more. We pass small villages made up of a few peasant shacks clustered together. I shiver. I was raped and my mother killed in a shack like these. All these years I’ve longed for the gay and colorful streets of Shanghai, but I never once missed the Chinese countryside, yet here I am. Bad memories make me put on mental blinders. I’m here, but I’ll do my best not to see it.
When we get to Wah Hong, I ask the first person I come across if he knows Louie Yun. This is another of those tiny villages with at most three hundred inhabitants, all of them with the clan name Louie and all of them related to my father-in-law. I’m taken to Louie Yun’s home. Are they surprised to see me! Tea is poured. Snacks are brought out. Other relatives crowd in to meet me. But as much as I try not to see or feel that I’m in a shack, I am, and all kinds of recollections come rushing back.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles at the end of the Depression, my in-laws and all the people I met were poorer than anyone I’d known in Shanghai. We may have been cramped together in Chinatown—the seven of us in a three-bedroom apartment—but that was positively spacious compared with this two-room shack with what seems like ten or more Louie relatives living here. I hear terrible tales of what happened during so-called Liberation to those in the Louie family who benefited from the money we sent. They were called running dogs of imperialism, beaten, or made to kneel in glass in the public square. Some suffered even worse fates. The stories are just what I imagined, and they fill me with dread. But others praise Chairman Mao, thanking him for the gift of food and land.
The accepted practice would be for me to host a banquet, but I don’t want to be here that long. I pull Louie Yun aside, give him some cash, and promise more if he’ll handle letters for me. I explain the process, ending with “I’m not going to lie. It could be dangerous for you and the rest of the family.”
I don’t know if it’s gratitude for Father Louie’s gifts over the years, desire to stave off poverty, or indifference to the political danger, but he asks, “How much will you pay for this service?”
“How much do you want?”
We negotiate until we reach a fair price—balancing the hazards against the value of American dollars—which May will send to him each month. Then it’s back to Canton. I’m driven to the docks, where I find a ship to take me to Shanghai, which will be faster than taking a train and cheaper than flying. I tell myself I’ve bought Louie Yun’s loyalty, but I have no way of knowing.
FOUR MORNINGS LATER, I’m on the deck watching Shanghai come into view. A week ago, I stepped off a plane in Hong Kong and was enveloped by odors I hadn’t smelled in that particular combination in years. Now, as I wait to disembark, I breathe in the scents of home—the oil- and sewage-infused water, rice being cooked on a passing sampan, rotting fish moldering on the dock, vegetables grown upriver wilting in the heat and humidity. But what I see ahead of me looks like a badly rendered drawing of Shanghai. The buildings along the Bund—the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Shanghai Club, the Cathay Hotel, and the Custom House—look gray, neglected, and shabby. It doesn’t help that nets hang like trampolines from the façades. I don’t expect to see coolies. Isn’t this supposed to be the New China? But here they are on the wharf: barely dressed, scurrying back and forth, heavy loads on their backs.
This initial impression doesn’t dampen my mood. I’m home! I can’t wait to get off the boat and onto the streets. For a moment, I wish May were here with me. How many times have we sat together, talking about