Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [63]
I can’t wait to leave the fairgrounds, but I’ve been in the countryside so long that Canton surprises me with its bustle. Business enterprises—bookstores, barbershops, banks, photo studios, tailors, and department stores—vie for space. I see hospitals, clinics, bathhouses, and theaters. Music, announcements, and news blare from loudspeakers on what seems like every corner. The traffic is a bit like I remember from my brief visit to Shanghai: bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. Entire families—mother, father, and two or three children—balance on handlebars and fenders. Bicycles are also used for hauling gallon drums, boxes and crates, pigs in baskets, and great bales of hay that sometimes rise four feet above the cyclist’s head and can be as wide as ten feet in diameter, depending on the number of bamboo poles used for balance. The bicycles I like the most transport a bride’s dowry gifts—although in the New China I suppose it would be more accurate to call them wedding presents—down the street for all to admire. A bedroom suite with headboard, side tables, vanity, and dresser is very popular, and to see all that piled on a single bicycle is really something.
On our last night in Canton, Z.G. knocks on my hotel room door. (How strange it’s been these past few days to have running water, flush toilets, a bathtub, and even a television.) He enters, pulls the straight-backed chair away from the desk, and sits down.
“I’ve now been ordered to go to Peking,” he says. “I’m to submit my work to a national art competition.” He pauses. I can see he’s struggling to tell me something. Finally, he says, “We’re very close to Hong Kong. This is your chance, with so many other foreigners here, to leave. You could see if you could get an exit permit and then go to Hong Kong by ferry or train with one of the delegations. From there, you could fly home.”
It’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears.
“Don’t you want me?”
I asked him this when I first arrived at his house. I still don’t know the answer. He’s my blood father, but we haven’t talked about that. I don’t call him baba or Dad; except for the occasional words of praise for my drawings, he hasn’t had any endearments for me either. I’m not his little dumpling, as my father Sam sometimes called me, or even Pan-di—Hope-for-a-Brother—as my grandfather referred to me. But I’m still disappointed that Z.G. would want to send me away.
“It’s not a matter of wanting you,” he explains. “No one of any importance knows you’re here. If you go to Peking and people learn about you, you won’t be able to go home.”
I think of everything I’ve seen and experienced—singing in the fields with Kumei, kissing Tao in the Charity Pavilion, helping build the New Society—and then I weigh that against the secret my mother and Aunt May kept hidden from me, how they’ll want to fight over me, my uncle Vern languishing in the back bedroom forever an invalid in his body and mind, and my mother’s face when she looks at me and thinks about my father’s suicide.
“I don’t want to go back there,” I say. “My place is here.”
Z.G. tries hard to talk me out of it, but I refuse to listen. A Tiger can be stubborn, and I’ve made up my mind. Still, I realize how close I was to being sent away. I need to get to know Z.G. better, and he needs to learn to appreciate that he has a daughter.
The next day when we board the train to Peking, Z.G. sits across from me, his long legs crossed. He’s changed