Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [76]
Neither of us answers.
“He said, ‘If intellectuals do not join in manure labor, they will forget their origin, become conceited, and be unable to wholeheartedly serve the laboring masses.’ But shoveling manure isn’t enough punishment for those who’ve been labeled counterrevolutionaries, rightists, spies, Taiwan sympathizers, or traitors—”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with my taking Joy home,” I say.
“She sees only what she wants to see, and I’m trying to make her understand,” Z.G. explains. “When things changed, I was accused of being a poisonous weed and no longer a fragrant flower. The day Joy arrived in Shanghai, I was being struggled against at the Artists’ Association, where my friends accused me of being too Western in my outlook, of using Western techniques of shading and perspective in my paintings, and of being too individualistic in my brushstrokes. I didn’t go to the countryside to teach art to the masses. I didn’t go to observe and learn from real life. I went to avoid being sent to a state camp for reform through labor.”
“That can’t be right,” Joy says, uncertain.
Oh, how sorry I feel for her. To have to see things in a whole new way … again. To know that the person she’s run to has also been running.
“Think about it, Joy,” he says. “They housed us in the landowner’s villa because that’s where they put the other unsavory and questionable people in the Green Dragon Collective.”
“You’re wrong,” she insists.
“I’m not wrong. Kumei, Yong, and Ta-ming were the landowner’s concubine, one of his bound-footed wives, and his only surviving son.”
“Kumei couldn’t have been a concubine—”
“You thought the villagers were treating us as special guests, but I’m telling you they put us in the villa as punishment.”
“But we were serving the people,” Joy argues. “We were helping with collectivization.”
“In volunteering to go to the village, I was trying to control my punishment,” Z.G. says. “I expected to be in Green Dragon for at least six months, but that would have been better than the years I might have spent in a labor camp … if I ever even got out. Your arrival on my doorstep complicated things. How could I have a daughter from America—our most ultraimperialist enemy? If anyone asked about your mother, what was I going to say? That she was a beautiful girl? Everyone would have concluded she had Nationalist ties, otherwise she wouldn’t have left China. That would have been another black mark against me.”
“But Chairman Mao likes you,” Joy practically whines. “He told me all those things you did together in the caves in Yen’an.”
“We were comrades then,” Z.G. acknowledges, circling back to the past. “I met up with him and became a member of the Lu Shun Academy of Art in the winter of 1937. I trained those who joined our cause to do cultural propaganda. Who better to do this than someone who’d been making advertising posters for so many years? It’s not hard to switch from painting beautiful girls in imaginary landscapes to painting people like Mao, Chou, and other Party leaders posing in imaginary situations with smiling workers, soldiers, and peasants.”
“Those things aren’t imaginary—”
“Really? Have you seen the Great Helmsman actually walk through the fields with peasants?” Z.G. asks. He waits for an answer, and when he doesn’t get one, he goes on. “As he told you, when we marched into Peking, he offered me an important post, but by then I was disenchanted. In feudal times, people said, ‘Serving the emperor is like a wife or concubine serving her husband or master. The greatest virtue is to be loyal and submissive.’ This is what Mao wants from us, but I’m afraid I’m good at being loyal and submissive only if the alternatives are labor camp or death. Fortunately, my rehabilitation came after only a couple of months. It began when Mao sent me to Canton.”
I