Dreams of Joy (13 page)

A month ago, I didn’t know how to do this work. I did my best, but I was hopeless and exhausted. I kept thinking about one of my professors, who said that the Chinese peasant is “the twin brother to the ox.” I wasn’t at all like an ox. I’d come back from the fields with an aching back, sore muscles, and blisters on my hands. The hot sun was brutal, and I didn’t understand that I needed to keep drinking boiled water and tea. But as they say around here, “Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.” I’ve been learning and observing from real life. I’m still a long way from becoming one of Mao’s “shock team” women, but I’ve found what the villagers call an iron spirit.

All around me I hear people working: the
shush shush
as they glide between the cornstalks, the hacking of hoes as they aerate the furrows, and the melodies of a recently authorized harvest song rising into the air from the hayfield adjacent to us. This is everything I imagined the New China would be: rosy-cheeked peasants helping one another and sharing the benefits, the sun warming my back, the sound of cicadas and birds accompanying our songs.

At eleven, some married women arrive from the village with tin canisters tied to the ends of poles and strung over their shoulders. They serve us rice and vegetables—cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, and onions, all of which were grown by the collective—and then we go back to work. A little after noon, Z.G. appears. He wears a big-brimmed straw hat and carries a satchel and an easel. He works in the field for an hour or so before going to sit under a tree to draw. No one objects. He’s recording our work.

At four, the hottest time of the day, the married women return, bringing tea thermoses and more rice. During our break, people gather
around Z.G. to look at his sketches, often exclaiming and laughing as they recognize themselves and others.

“Look, there’s Comrade Du’s bat-shaped scar!”

“Are my legs as bowed as that?”

“You can see the girls from the irrigation team walking together in this one. You put those girls together and all you get is laughter. They think life is so carefree.”

These compliments should be hard for Tao to hear, since he once received them himself, but he knows he’s in the presence of a far better artist.

After our break, we return to the furrows. It’s almost the end of the day when I hear a woman shriek. The singing stops, but the cicadas continue to whine as we listen through the warm air for the source of the sound. We begin to hear shouts and a woman’s pained cries. Kumei and I rush through the cornstalks and into the adjacent hayfield. The harvest has begun in this field, and the far end has already come under a sharp-bladed hay cutter. It’s there, in the cleared area, that a group of people cluster together. We run to them and elbow our way through the crowd. A man, splattered with blood, stands over a woman. He looks pale and distraught. The woman’s neck has been torn open, and her arm is nearly gone from her body. Blood spurts and pools around her. Three women have stripped off their kerchiefs and are using them to try to stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.

The smell of the blood under the hot sun is thick at the back of my throat. I feel sick and repelled, but flies and other insects have been attracted to the scent and are buzzing about the woman, swooping in to drink her blood. I’ve seen her before—in the village, at our evening art classes, and on the paths to the fields—but I don’t know her name.

“It’s not my fault,” the blood-splattered man says in a shaky voice. “I was working in my furrow. Comrade Ping-li was next to me. The next thing I knew, she threw herself in the hay cutter’s path—low, so I couldn’t miss her. She must not have seen me. But how can that be?” He looks at us, searching for an answer, but none of us have one. “She had to see me. We work next to each other every day.”

“You’re not responsible, Comrade Bing-dao,” someone says from the crowd. “These things happen.”

Murmurs of assent greet this assessment. But I’m thinking,
These things happen? Who throws herself in front of a hay cutter?
And then more practical
thoughts:
Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the hospital?
But no ambulance or hospital exists within miles of here. And there isn’t a tractor, truck, or car to use for transportation even if there were a hospital. All that doesn’t matter anyway. The woman is dying. Her skin has gone waxy. The pool of blood has continued to grow, but the spurting has slowed. Her eyes are glassy and she seems unaware of her surroundings. The kneeling women comfort her as best they can.

“The collective will take care of your children,” one says. “There are no orphans in the New China.”

“We’ll make sure your children remember you,” promises another.

“Red blood is a sign of socialist purity,” the third adds. “And your blood is very red.”

Once again, murmurs of approval.

I glance away as the dead woman’s eyes are closed and see Z.G. The piece of charcoal in his hand moves quickly over a sheet of paper in his sketchbook.

LATER, I’M IN
the villa’s front courtyard gathering art supplies for tonight’s lesson when Tao peeks around the front gate. He asks if I’m all right. I answer yes, but I’m still upset—by seeing that woman die. Tao nods sympathetically and then says, “I want to show you something. Will you come with me?”

“I need to get things ready for class.”

“For a few minutes only, please?”

I look to see if anyone is watching us. I don’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean that someone can’t hear us the way sound travels in here.

“Comrade Tao,” I say formally, just in case, “I will come with you. I want to be useful to everyone in the village.”

He grins when I join him outside the front gate. He turns left, and I follow as he walks on the path that runs next to the villa’s high wall. He crosses over a small stone footbridge and turns left again onto a path that parallels Green Dragon’s stream. If he smells like gasoline, I don’t notice, because I now wear that scent myself. I wear it with pride, knowing that I’ve truly joined village life.

We don’t go far before Tao takes my hand and pulls me off the main path. Touching was taboo in Chinatown, but the rules are even more stringent here. I can’t believe that Tao’s touching me at all or that I’m following him up a very steep set of stone steps built into the hillside. He
doesn’t let go of my hand. Farther up the hill, nearly hidden in a bamboo grove, is a pavilion about ten feet wide. I’m out of breath by the time we reach it. Round posts with peeling red paint rise up to rafters. Soft green bamboo surrounds three sides of the pavilion. A low stone railing on the fourth side protects us from a long fall into the valley below. Hills, villages, and fields stretch out before us.

“It’s lovely,” I say. I turn from the view to meet Tao’s dark eyes. The air suddenly hangs heavy. I sense what’s going to happen next. Maybe I
will
it to happen. When Tao pulls me into his arms, I go easily and submissively. His mouth tastes fresh—like white tea. I feel his heart beat against mine. He holds me and again stares into my eyes. I feel I’m looking into his soul. I see kindness, sympathy, and generosity. I see an artist.

Then he releases me and takes a step back. I don’t care what Kumei said. There is no “free” love in China. We don’t even have it in America. All love comes at a price, as my aunt May learned. Tao and I were only kissing, true, but what we’ve done is beyond forbidden in the New China. What am I saying? It was forbidden in the old China too! And let’s face it. I’m a good Chinese girl, who was raised in Chinatown. I don’t do things like this.

“What is this place?” I ask, desperate to create some distance between what I
want
to do and what we
should
do.

“It’s the Charity Pavilion,” Tao answers. His voice is strong. Not a single quaver. “It was built by the grandfather of the landowner who once possessed the villa where you’re staying. All this was his land. He owned the pavilion, the villa, every building in Green Dragon, and the fields where we work.” He gestures to the undulating green hills. “This is how our village got its name. It’s like a green dragon running through the countryside.”

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—and realizing I don’t measure up in some way.

“Maybe your New China isn’t so perfect after all,” he says to me in English, causing Kumei’s eyes to widen in surprise.

“You speak Russian!” Kumei beams. Everyone—from Chairman Mao down to this illiterate village girl—wants to emulate the Soviet Union, which they call Lao Da Ge—Old Big Brother. “Today’s Soviet Union is like our tomorrow!” She recites the popular saying. Neither of us corrects her. It’s better that she thinks I understand Russian than that she suspect I’m from America. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, people hate what they call the American imperialists.

I glance across the hall to Tao. Almost the entire village is present, yet the way he stares at me makes me feel like we’re in a room by ourselves. Just the idea of being alone together feels forbidden, and it takes my mind away from the dead woman and the memory of my father hanging in the closet. Tao gives me an encouraging smile. It’s as if he wants me to know everything will be fine.

“We came out of our homes during collectivization,” one of the women grumbles loudly. “We were told we’d receive equal pay for equal work. We were told we’d have the new Marriage Law to guide us. But where is help when we need it?”

Sung-ling, the portly wife of the Party secretary, marches up to an old altar table and leans her two closed fists on it. “Feudal ways are hard to
change,” she says in a shrill voice. “When the Eighth Route Army came through our county during the War of Liberation, they taught us to Speak Bitterness. We women were encouraged to complain about the humiliations we endured—rapes, beatings, loveless marriages, and living under the thumbs of heartless mothers-in-law. We directed our sad stories of anguish and suffering into collective anger about the feudal system. If a husband teased us or belittled us, together we beat him in the square until he was motionless like a dead dog, with his mouth, eyes, and nose full of mud, and his clothes reduced to rags.”

This speech has the effect of inflaming instead of calming the women, but Sung-ling isn’t done.