Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [36]
A few minutes later, I push through the front door. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I wasn’t expecting to be hauled off and questioned by the police, and it’s left me feeling terrorized and panicked.
“Are you all right?” someone asks. I look up, and there’s Dun-ao. I’m very relieved to see him, and surprised too that he would go out on a limb for me. “I followed you here. I waited to make sure you would come out.”
He’s voicing my exact fear—that I’d been arrested. If that happened, no one would ever know what became of me. Worse, I’d never find Joy.
“Let’s go home,” he says. “We’ll have some tea. Maybe I can help you.”
When we arrive home, I make tea for the two of us. I tell Dun-ao about Joy’s running away, my following her, Z.G.’s problems, my need to wait until they return, and all the rules the policeman told me I must follow. I do it because I’ve been intimidated and scared and I’m not thinking properly. Dun—as he says he prefers to be called—informs me that I’m actually quite lucky.
“You’ll have to attend thought-reform sessions, as we all do,” he says, “but as long as you aren’t labeled a backward element, you’ll have many benefits. You’ll have your special certificates. You can get an exit permit promptly and without delays or questions.”
“But what about my daughter?” I ask. “I won’t leave without her.”
“It’s better that you’re both here,” he responds. “It’s a well-known fact that the regime treats Overseas Chinese families as hostages to extort remittances from abroad. That’s the whole purpose of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. They exploit people here, so their relatives will send more money to use to build the country. For this reason, they’re reluctant to allow family members to leave China.”
“But you just told me that Overseas Chinese can easily obtain exit permits.”
“Ah, good point. Applications for exit permits which are considered prejudicial to the regime’s interests are not granted.”
“Well, which one is it?”
“Maybe both,” he says, unsure.
“In any case,” I go on briskly, trying to sound confident, “those requests for remittances are blackmail. Still, if I were in Los Angeles and Joy were here, I would send every dollar I had, hoping to get her out. Now I have to think about how to get the two of us out. I can’t be perceived as being rich, but I can’t be perceived as being poor either. I need to stay in Shanghai so I can wait for Z.G. and my daughter to return from wherever it is they’ve gone. I need coupons to live, and I also need to appear invisible while doing those things.”
But the police know about me, and in days the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission will be familiar with me too. Quite apart from that, the last thing I want is to act like a widow by being invisible, a coward, or a victim. It’s against a Dragon’s nature to wait, but that’s all I can do. I need to be a wily, quiet, and cautious Dragon.
“You’re going to need a job,” Dun recommends.
“I told Superintendent Wu I wanted one. Maybe I could go to work with the dancing girls. They make pens modeled on the Parker 51.” I reel off the factory’s slogan, which the girls recite whenever they have a chance. “Catch up with Parker!”
“I have a better idea. You should become a paper collector.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“We have always had a reverence for lettered paper,” he explains, sounding professorial. “In the Song dynasty, Lettered Paper Society members collected paper with writing on it, burned it in special ceremonial fires, and then ritually stored the ashes. Every three years, members escorted the ashes to a river or to the ocean, where the ashes would be plunged to be reborn as new words and images. Do you remember the bamboo baskets that used to be on street corners here in Shanghai, where people could properly dispose of their lettered paper?”
I have a vague memory of those baskets, but my sister and I didn’t have an iota of reverence for lettered paper, considering that we modeled for advertisements, which were clearly lettered paper of the most