Dreams of Joy - Lisa See [97]
Kumei and her little boy are in the kitchen. Ta-ming holds a small slingshot, and he bounces from foot to foot eagerly. Kumei smiles.
“Do you want to walk with us this morning?”
She always asks the same question, and I always answer the same way.
“Of course!”
We leave the villa, turn left down a cobblestone path, cross a moss-covered footbridge, turn left again, and then follow the shaded creek. After about a half mile, we veer down a new path lined with poplar trees. It’s barely dawn, yet from the hills around us we hear banging. Apart from the noise, which is as unsettling as it’s supposed to be, these early morning walks along the stream are pleasant. Kumei is a nice young lady, and her son is quite dear. He’s only five years old but earnest. He stoops to pick up a small rock, which he loads into his slingshot and shoots into the trees, hoping to hit a sparrow.
“I missed again, Auntie Pearl!”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get one eventually. You just have to keep trying.”
We pick up food at the canteen and then hurry back to the villa, where Kumei dashes inside to drop off breakfast for Yong and Brigade Leader Lai. She returns a moment later, and we wait for Joy, Tao, his parents, and his eight siblings to make their way down the hill. Together we walk from the village to the main part of the commune to receive the day’s work assignments.
Mothers drop off babies and toddlers at the nursery. Older children grab younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands to go to school. Ta-ming puts his slingshot in his pocket and joins his classmates. Everyone else separates to follow their red-flag leaders, marching with their knees thrown high and singing Great Leap Forward songs as they head off to their workstations: some to the sewing room to make blankets, trousers, and blouses; some to the leadership hall, where letters, telephone calls, and telegrams are processed; and some to the fields. Today the farmers’ assignment is one I hardly believe: crushing glass sent from Shanghai and then working it into the soil as a “nutrient.” It’s ridiculous to me, but the farmers do it because the Great Helmsman can’t be wrong.
All mothers and grandmothers must now come out to work. Tao’s mother may no longer stay at home to wash, sew, and clean for her toolarge family. Even Yong may no longer remain hidden in the villa. Most women—and I include myself in this—are ordered back to jobs in their own villages. I stop by the villa to get Yong and take her elbow as she totters to our workstation.
Brigade Leader Lai has assigned “old” people—like Yong, Tao’s mother, and me—to the nation’s Overtake Britain Battalion. Some days those of us on the gray-power team work at the blast furnaces—stoking the fires, feeding whatever metal is left in the commune to the smelter, or carrying the cooled pig iron to the central square, where men with wheelbarrows load the blocks and push them the few miles to the main road. Other days we shuck corn, sort rice, or lay out sweet potatoes for drying. I’m not old and I don’t have any gray hair, but I put on my smiling face and do as I’m told. Many of the tasks remind me of the things I did with my mother-in-law when I first arrived in Chinatown years ago. Those chores brought me closer to her, just as these chores have brought me closer to Joy’s mother-in-law. (I say “Joy’s mother-in-law” because she doesn’t have what I would consider a proper name. She was born into the Fu family. She went by No Name until she married out at age fourteen. Then shee was added to her natal family name to indicate that she was now a married woman from the Fu clan—Fu-shee.) We’re a small group—all women of a certain age, but again, not that old. Today we sit together to tie garlands of garlic, share stories, and complain about husbands, housework, and the visit from the little red sister