Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [42]
If he can be so straightforward, then I should be as well. I glance around the pavilion. Couplets are painted on the three rafters: BE KIND AND BENEVOLENT. MAKE A CASUAL STOP ON THE ENDLESS WAY TO THE FUTURE. and PUT ALL TROUBLES FROM YOUR MIND.
“ ‘Make a casual stop on the endless way to the future,’ ” I read aloud. “Is that what we’re doing?”
Tao gives me a look I don’t understand.
“Is that what we’re doing?” I repeat.
“But why do we need to stop?”
I hear this with my American mind. I’ve been kissed by only three boys. Once by Leon Lee, the son of my parents’ friends Violet and Rowland Lee. From the time Leon and I were children, our parents plotted that we would marry one day. That was never going to happen. Leon was too serious for me, and I never wanted to end up striving, striving, striving for the American Dream, buying a house, a dishwasher, and a lawn. Joe Kwok and I kissed a few times in college, and I thought we were serious about each other. I learned he wasn’t serious about anything except his own future. And now Tao. I’m a virgin, but I know the dangers, and there’s no way I’m going to second base.
“It was fated that you would come to my village,” Tao says. “It was fated that your father would be an artist who would teach me. Perhaps it’s fated that we should be together.”
“I need to get back,” I mumble. “I need to help my father.”
As I start to leave, he pulls me to him again. There’s nothing shy in the way he holds me or the way he runs his hand up inside my blouse to my breast. Now that’s something that’s never happened to me before, and my mind empties. The pleasure of that. The yearning and desire it awakens startles and unsettles me. He nuzzles my neck, pushing aside the pouch my aunt gave me with his lips. His tongue darts out, tasting my flesh, sending shivers of cold from my neck to my nipples. How does he know what to do?
“You should go back first,” he says, his voice surprisingly husky. “I’ll come a little late to the meeting, so no one suspects anything.”
I nod and pull away.
“We have to be careful,” he says. “No one can know … for now.”
I nod again.
“Go,” he says, and I obey.
ATTENDING OUR political-study class and art lesson in the ancestral hall doesn’t calm my restless emotions. I’m walking in the darkness of seeing a woman die and the light of Tao’s touch. My feelings are confused, but that doesn’t explain the agitation around me. Tonight the men cluster together, keeping their heads down and their voices low, while the women gather on the other side of the hall, with their heads up and their tongues scissor sharp.
“In feudal days, women had to follow their husbands no matter what their lot,” a woman states loud enough for the sound to carry to the men. “Husbands said, ‘A wife is like a pony bought. I’ll ride her and whip her as I like.’ Comrade Ping-li’s husband forgot that we’re now living in the New Society.”
“Ping-li was a woman, but she was a person first.”
“We’re told we’re masters of our own fates, but Ping-li was a slave to that husband of hers.”
I’m baffled by the anger and the accusations. “Wasn’t today an accident?” I ask Z.G., as we sort the brushes and paper that Kumei and I will hand out after the political meeting.
When he gives me an exasperated look, Kumei whispers in a low voice, “Everyone says it was suicide. Comrade Ping-li’s husband beat her. He made her work very hard. She asked for a divorce many times, but that only made him beat her more. What other choice did she have?”
Without thinking, I put a hand to my throat as images of my father Sam flood my mind. No one in Green Dragon knows what I left to come here. I make my hand drop as casually as possible and try to wash all feelings from my face. I catch Z.G. staring at me—weighing me, as he always seems to do