Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [82]
None of us is perfect. I’m not the good woman I always believed myself to be. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t write back, because I could say things that would really hurt her. Ever since Joy came to visit me by herself, she and Z.G. have been taking me out to dinner once a week. I could tell May that just last night Z.G., Joy, and I had a meal of stewed crab with clear soup, duck triplet, and Mandarin fish—all Shanghai delicacies—at a restaurant on the Bund. I could write about how beautiful Joy looked and how the tension between us seems to be lifting, but that Z.G. stared at me in my red dress that May herself loved so long ago. I could write that sometimes the three of us go for walks in the Yu Yuan Garden. Or that we’ve worked together at the backyard furnaces either in my neighborhood or in Z.G.’s. We’ve been having a nice time, and I don’t want to break the spell by sharing it with my sister. But while I may not be perfect, I can’t not write to my sister. That would be brutal and unnecessary, and she would worry too much. Again, though, I stick to politics.
June 20, 1958
Dear May,
It’s been almost three months since the first people’s commune opened. A commune is made when several collectives or villages are brought together to share in the work and the profits. Now communes are everywhere! Some have 4,000 members, some as many as 50,000. We Shanghainese are helping our comrades in the countryside. We’ve always sent our nightsoil on barges to farmers. Now we all wait for those moments in the day when we can add what comes out of our bodies to the building of socialism and the attainment of our targets. What indescribable happiness, excitement, and pride we feel when the nightsoil barges leave the Bund and head upriver to the communes.
The steel the people have produced has given Chairman Mao great confidence in our abilities. First we were to overtake Britain in steel production in fifteen, then seven, then five years. Now we’re to do it in two years! At the same time, he’s announced we’ll double our grain harvest. Chairman Mao says that communes are the gateway to Heaven. China will be able to leapfrog over socialism and go straight to communism. I wish you were here to see all the changes. You’d be laughing and crying with happiness at the same time.
How fortunate Joy never feels homesick for the land of her birth. She relishes the land of her blood. She understands that true free thought comes when everyone obeys the commune. Her heart brims with idealism.
You should remember your motherland and send remittances to help build the nation.
Love, Pearl
I’m sure May will understand my not-so-hidden messages about the craziness of these communes, the ridiculousness of the Great Leap Forward targets, and the fear I feel for Joy.
On July 28, I receive a package from Wah Hong. Inside I find a skirt and a blouse. I cut through the stitching on the collar and find twenty dollars and a short note from May.
I have great faith in my sister, but you must work harder to convince Joy to come home. And you still haven’t told me about Z.G. Has Joy found him?
If I’ve been sending her coded messages—and leaving out things that surely she would notice—then she has sent a note she must have known would upset me. I must “work harder to convince Joy” to leave China, as though I haven’t given up my life to be here, as though I’m not struggling every single day to keep myself strong for the moment I can break through to her? And, of course, there’s the part about Z.G.
I hide the letter with the others I’ve received and write back what I consider to be a chatty missive.
Often when I come home from work, Dun—do you remember the student boarder who lived in the second-floor pavilion?—makes tea for me and we sit in the salon and talk about books. The other day I went to a pawnshop and found one of Mama’s etched glass vases. I bought it, and now it sits on our dressing table. I filled it with roses I cut from our garden and their aroma scents the room.
I don’t write any of the things that would mean nothing to the censors