Dreams of Joy (19 page)

I give him a skeptical look. How will he ever be able to leave?

“I can dream, can’t I?” he says.

“Let’s say Tuesday and Thursday evenings,” I tell him. “But no wine.”

“I KEEP TELLING
you, Deping, to hold your brush this way,” Z.G. instructs. “Concentrate! Your turnip doesn’t look at all like the one on the table. Look at it! Really look at it! What do you see?”

It’s been hard for us not to notice Z.G.’s impatience, but even I feel exasperated and disappointed. A few days ago, Party Secretary Feng Jin informed us that he’d received word from the capital that our time in Green Dragon is done. Z.G. and I are to leave in the morning and make our way south to Canton for a fair of some sort. He’s happy to leave. We’ve been here for two months and the villagers still refuse to hold their brushes the correct way. They ignore what Z.G. says about the amount of ink to soak into their brushes, and the paintings themselves have a crude quality.

“Everyone examine what Tao has painted,” Z.G. says. “He uses his brush to put down what he sees. You can
see
clouds moving across the sky. You can
see
cornstalks bending in the breeze. You can
see
a turnip!”

We all know that Tao is in a different category from the rest of us. He isn’t confined to black ink. Instead, Z.G. has given Tao (and recently me) a box of watercolors. The result is lusciously vivid images in which the greens, blues, yellows, and reds have great depth and luminosity.

“When you look at his painting,” Z.G. goes on, “you feel inspired but also tranquil. Tao believes in what he paints, and he makes us believe in it too.”

Tao sits back on his haunches and beams with pleasure. His clothes have been washed so many times they’ve been bleached nearly white by
the sun and many scrubbings. I’d love to be able to create that color—the hidden blues and grays that still linger in the fabrics—in a painting.

“Now let’s consider my daughter’s work,” Z.G. continues, as he makes his way over to me. Here it comes … again … the usual unfavorable critique. “As you know, she’s been working on a portrait of our great Chairman. She’s never met him, but she believes in him.”

“As we all do,” one of the students calls out.

“When we first came to your village,” Z.G. says, “my daughter was weak in her technique and she was afraid of color. But what she lacked in skill, she made up for in enthusiasm for the New China. Who can tell me what is best about her portrait?”

“She made his mole not too big and not too small.” This comes from Deping, who was so soundly criticized for his turnip.

“I like his blue suit. It fits him perfectly,” adds Kumei.

“Yes, and she’s made him a little thinner than he is in real life,” Z.G. adds with a chuckle, and the others laugh along with him.

“Didn’t you tell us that the best art glorifies Party leaders, Party history, and Party policies?” Tao asks.

“Absolutely,” Z.G. agrees amiably. “These things are the backbone of the New China.”

“The next best art recognizes workers, peasants, and soldiers,” Tao adds.

“They are the flesh of our country,” Z.G. agrees, but he’s not done with me. “My daughter has done a good job. I think”—he takes his eyes away from the others to look right at me—“that my daughter is not bad. She’s not bad at all.”

Which makes me feel like I’m learning … finally.

When the class ends, Tao helps Z.G. and me carry the art supplies back to the villa. I know that Tao and I are not allowed to be by ourselves anymore, but I want to have some private time with him before I leave Green Dragon. I’m trying to figure out how to ask Z.G. for permission when he says, “Just be back in an hour.”

Tao and I hurry out the gate, turn left, and then follow the stream until we reach the path that leads up to the Charity Pavilion. We’re barely inside the pavilion when Tao pulls me into his arms. I’m kissing him, he’s kissing me, and it’s all very frantic, hurried, and desperate. For too long we’ve been allowed only to look at each other across a table, separated by my father, during our private lessons. We’ve had to sit on opposite
sides of the ancestral hall while Z.G. conducted his art classes. We’ve purposely walked to the fields at different times and chosen different jobs to do: picking or shucking corn, harvesting or separating rice, packing or carrying baskets of tomatoes.

Tao’s lips are on my neck and he’s fumbling with the frogs on my blouse when I pull away. I take a breath and then another. Tao struggles to regain control of himself too. I take another deep breath, let it out slowly, and turn to face the view. When I first came here, the fields spread out before us like green satin. Now it looks like Los Angeles at this time of year, when weeds, grass, and gardens turn biscuit brown. I’m going to miss this place. I’m going to miss the smell of the earth, the sunsets, and the quiet paths that snake through the hillsides and into the valleys. But most of all I’m going to miss Tao. He stands behind me, his hands on my shoulders, his mouth by my ear, his body up against my back.

“May I call you Ai-jen—Beloved?” he asks. His voice holds neither fear nor brashness. He is merely frank and honest. I’ve heard many of the younger married couples refer to each other by this endearment. Can I really be Tao’s beloved?

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“I knew the night you arrived. Chairman Mao says women hold up half the sky. Can’t we hold up the sky together? My house is small, and we’d have to live with my family—”

“Wait!” I shake my head, certain that I’m hearing him wrong. “What are you saying?”

“You’re the right age. I’m the right age. We aren’t blood relatives up to the third degree of relationship. Neither of us has any diseases. Let’s go to the Party secretary and his wife to ask permission to marry.”

Marry? His proposal, such as it is, causes something wonderful to happen. My mind empties of all worries and memories.

“We barely know each other,” I say.

“We know each other a lot more than people did in feudal days. Back then, boys and girls didn’t meet until their wedding day.”

But marriage isn’t something I’ve been thinking about. Still, to stay here in what seems like a million miles and a million lifetimes from Los Angeles Chinatown, where no one knows me or my past, would be a cure for the guilt and shame I carry with me everywhere I go.

“We both want the same things—to paint, to grow crops, and to help build the New Society,” Tao continues.

“I agree, but do you love me?” I have a crush on Tao, no question about it. I can’t stop thinking about him. And the fact that he’s been forbidden to me these past weeks makes him all the more desirable.

“I wouldn’t ask you to marry me if I didn’t love you.” He grins. “And you love me too. I saw that the first time we met.”

I want to say yes. I want to make love to Tao. I want us to be together. But as sure as I am about how I feel for him, I’m not ready. I’ve just met my birth father and I hardly know him yet. Then there’s China. I’m nineteen, and I have an opportunity to do something few other girls get to do. I’d like to see Canton, Peking, Shanghai, and the rest of China while I can.

“Yes, I love you,” I say, and I believe I do. I’m
sure
I do. “But do you want people in the collective to think we were sneaking off together? And what about your mother and my father? I don’t think your mother is ready to have me in her house.” (This is an understatement. His mother clearly doesn’t like me.) “And I doubt my father’s ready to say good-bye to me just yet.”

“We don’t need their permission.”

“I know, but their blessing would be wonderful.”

He puts forth a few more reasons why we should act immediately, but after a while he gives in.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

Then he’s kissing me again, and I’m happy—truly happy.

“I wish you could come with me,” I whisper in his ear. “We could see China together.”

“I want to leave this place more than anything,” he responds, sounding hopeful and eager. “But I’d need an internal passport and I don’t have one of those. Maybe your father can get me one.”

Chairman Mao introduced the internal passport just last year. The government wants to keep peasants from flooding the cities, but the new passport has barred peddlers, doctors, and entertainers—apart from those sanctioned by the government—from traveling as well. This keeps villages pure, but it also keeps them isolated. It’s one of the things I’ve liked best about being here.

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe.”

Later, when we walk back to the village, Tao says, “I promise I won’t forget you, but you must promise to come back to me.”

—

THE NEXT MORNING
, Z.G. and I leave Green Dragon, walk to the drop-off point a couple of miles from here, and take the bus to Tun-hsi. From there, we go to Huangshan, where I’m inspired by the soaring peaks and the pines that jut from cliffs at improbable angles. I’m reminded—as so many artists have been before me—of man’s insignificance in the face of nature. We return to Hangchow and wander around West Lake as we did on our way to Green Dragon, only this time we stop to paint the Ten Views that Emperor K’ang-hsi enjoyed so long ago. Z.G. tells me Hangchow is China’s most romantic city, and I feel that. I long for Tao, and when I paint I feel his breath on my skin. But I also feel something opening in me … as an artist. I know I’m getting better every day.

At the beginning of November, we arrive in Canton for the Chinese Export Commodities Fair, which will last a week. The Artists’ Association wants Z.G. to represent the work that he so excels at: propaganda that sells China to Chinese and others who are sympathetic to the regime in the outside world. We walk the fair aisles and look at the merchandise: Chinese-made fabric, radios, thermoses, greeting cards, and rice steamers. I walk past 170 different types of tractors. People have literally come from all over the globe to buy steam shovels, auto parts, and fountain pens. Everything is for sale: hairnets, makeup, and mirrors. But isn’t it better to tie your hair in practical braids, let the sun rouge your cheeks, and see yourself in the reflection of a pond, stream, or water trough than buy all these things? Do you need plastic buttons or elastic when homemade frogs are so much more lovely and simple string works just as well as elastic to hold up your pants? And honestly, why do you need a tractor when you can work side by side with your comrades to do the same work by hand? I’m told over two thousand foreign businessmen and Overseas Chinese are attending the fair, and they’re buying stuff like mad. It’s the first time in two months that I see non-Chinese, and it shakes me.

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.”