Dreams of Joy (23 page)

“I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore.”

A long silence follows this declaration. She knows that I’m a one-Goder and that this would hurt me.

“Joy.” The appeal in my voice is strong. She’ll have to respond.

“I don’t want you here. You’ll ruin everything.”

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Z.G. says in the calmest voice possible. “She’s your auntie.”

I drive my nails into my palms to keep the pain of that from overwhelming me.

“And you’re my father,” my daughter retorts. “That’s much more important.”

I feel all the things I’ve wanted to say to her about being ungrateful, cruel, spoiled, and self-centered—
-just like your birth mother
—pushing to fly out of my mouth. Z.G. steps forward. I put up a hand to stop him from coming closer or speaking.

“I love you very much, Joy. Please can we talk about why you ran
away?” Of course I know the reason—she didn’t want to deal with two mothers who had lied to her—but I need to get her to open up. “We never had a chance to talk that night. If you tell me what you felt, then maybe you’ll feel better about everything. And maybe I can help.”

And like that, my daughter is once again five years old. She pulls her upper lip between her teeth and bites down hard to hold in her emotions.

“Tell me, honey. Tell me so I can understand.”

When she shakes her head, I know that I’m approaching this the right way. We are back in a pattern we’ve lived as mother and daughter so many times.

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more for you after your baba died,” I say. “I apologize for that. We both loved him.” Tears begin to roll down Joy’s cheeks. “We should have been holding on to each other.”

But what she says takes me by surprise.

“You were right to ignore me after what I did.”

“What did you do?” I ask, confused. Again, this is not at all what I expected. My brain hurries to catch up.

“Oh, Mom, it was all my fault. Auntie May and I talked after your fight. She explained everything about Dad being a paper son—”

“May always puts blame on someone else.”

“No, Mom, listen to me. The FBI and INS never would have looked at our family if I hadn’t been involved with that group in Chicago. Agent Sanders approached Auntie May
because
of me. She was trying to help our family. She was trying to get you and Dad amnesty. She didn’t realize I was the real target. If you’d told me the truth about Dad, I would have been more careful, I wouldn’t have joined that club, and the government wouldn’t have noticed us.”

She’s right. If Joy hadn’t joined that club, it would have made a big difference. Still…

“That doesn’t change the fact that my sister betrayed us.”

“But Auntie May didn’t betray you! She was trying to help you in the best way she could. Amnesty, Mom. Do you even know what that means?”

A part of me thinks,
Even here, even after everything that’s happened, Joy takes May’s side
. But another part of me actually
hears
what my daughter has said. I’ve blamed May for everything, but what if she wasn’t to blame?

“Honey, your dad’s suicide wasn’t your fault. Don’t ever think that. Yes, maybe the FBI used you as a pawn, but they were always going to win the game.”

“Nothing you can say or do will change what happened, what I did, or where I’ve ended up. You can never punish me as much as I’ll punish myself.”

“Is that why you came here?” I ask. “To punish yourself? But this is too much punishment for anyone.”

“Mom, you don’t understand a single thing. I want to be part of creating something bigger than my own problems. I want to make up for all I destroyed—Dad’s life, our family. It’s my way of atoning.”

“The best thing you can do is come home. Uncle Vern misses you. And”—this is hard for me to say—“don’t you want to get to know May in a new way? And even if you are right—which you aren’t—Red China is not the place to atone.”

“Pearl is correct,” Z.G. says. “You should go home, because you don’t understand what you’re seeing and experiencing. Lu Shun wrote, ‘The first person who tasted a crab must have also tried a spider, but realized it was not as good to eat.’ You’ve only tasted the crab.” He glances at me and then back at Joy. “The last time I saw your mother was twenty years ago. I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know what happened to your mother and aunt. Why? Because I went to join Mao. I fought in battles. I killed men.”

He begins chronicling his hardships over the past two decades, because somehow he thinks this is about
him
. I guess we’re supposed to believe he’s really telling us his life story, but I once knew Z.G. very well and I can see there’s a lot he’s not revealing. And why would he? He’s only just met Joy. It’s nice to have your daughter look at you with eyes of love and respect, but I’m tired of lies.

“You ran off,” I say to him. “You became a famous artist and you destroyed May’s and my lives.”

“Destroyed? How?” Z.G. asks. “You got out. You got married. You had a family. You had Joy in your life. Some might say I’ve been successful in the regime, but others might say I’ve sold my soul. Let me tell you something, Pearl. You can sell and sell and sell, but sometimes that’s not enough.” He turns to Joy. “Do you want to know the real reason I went to the countryside?”

“To teach the masses,” she answers dutifully.

“I can try to teach all I want, but I cannot teach the uneducated.”

Did I forget to say a Rabbit is also a snob?

“Maybe you’re a bad teacher,” I say.

Z.G. gives me a look. “I’ve been teaching my daughter, and she’s learned a lot.”

“And you taught Tao too,” Joy adds.

I hear a sudden lightness in her voice as she says that name. “I praised him because I had to praise someone,” Z.G. says. “He’s not very good. Surely you see that.”

“I do not,” she says hotly.

Her face radiates indignation. It’s a look I recognize from when she was a very little girl and she was told something she didn’t want to hear. Her reaction makes me want to know who this Tao person is, but Z.G. asks again, “Do you want to know why I went to the countryside?” This time he doesn’t wait for an answer. We’re going to hear it whether we want to or not. “Last year, Shanghai was very different than it is now. Jazz clubs reopened for people like me—artists and, well, those who were part of the old elite. We also had dancing, opera, and acrobats. Then Mao launched Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.”

I remember how excited Joy was about this and how she got into fights with her uncle Vern, who believed the campaign would come to “a no-good end.”

“We were told we could say what we wanted without fear of recrimination,” Z.G. continues. “We criticized the things we thought hadn’t worked in the first seven years of the regime. We aired our views without reserve, and the complaints covered everything: that there should be a rotation of power, that cozying up to the Soviet Union was a mistake, and that contact should be renewed with the United States and the West. Artists and writers had their own list of complaints. We wanted to liberate art and literature from the Party. We didn’t feel that all art and all writing should serve workers, peasants, and soldiers. By May, Chairman Mao didn’t want to hear criticism. By summer, he didn’t like it, not one bit. When he made a speech about ‘enticing snakes out of their lairs,’ we knew the Campaign Against Rightists had begun. The spear hits the bird that sticks his head out.”

I’m not sure why Z.G. has gone off on this tangent, but Joy is mesmerized. She sits down and listens raptly. His story is hitting her in some deep place, that very place that so far I’ve been unable to reach. Is he sharing
his miseries with Joy, who he’s just learned has tragedies, sorrows, and guilt of her own—whether justified or not—to give her perspective? I join Joy on the couch and force myself to listen more closely.

“When rectification began, some cadres were sent ‘up to the mountains and down to the villages’ in remote areas to take up unimportant posts or work in the fields. It was even worse for writers and artists. When someone asked Premier Chou En-lai why this was happening, do you know his response?”

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 hear the word
rehabilitation
and I think of Sam. He too was persecuted by the government, but there was no rehabilitation for him. Joy doesn’t seem to pick up on this.

“But Chairman Mao likes you,” she repeats weakly.

“He likes you,” Z.G. responds. “It pleased him to see such a pretty girl
leave America to come here. Thank you for helping with my rehabilitation.”

“Rehabilitation?” Joy echoes, finally hearing the word.

“Don’t you remember his conversation with us at the exhibition?” Z.G. asks.

I don’t know what they’re talking about, but Joy nods in understanding.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks.

“I tried, but you wouldn’t listen. When we were in Canton, I wanted you to leave the country.”

“That’s right,” Joy acknowledges. “You did.”

“Well, obviously you didn’t try hard enough,” I cut in. They both turn to me, remembering I’m here.

“The truth is,” Z.G. admits, “I didn’t want her to leave.”

“She’s your daughter! You should have been protecting her!”

“She is my daughter,” Z.G. says. “I hadn’t known she existed. I was selfish. I wanted to know her.” He now addresses Joy. “But that doesn’t mean you should stay here.”

“I don’t want to stay here. I want to go back to the Green Dragon Collective.”

Concern passes over Z.G.’s face. I don’t know what this place is, but I know my daughter doesn’t belong in a collective.

“People are shaped by the earth and water around them,” he says. “You’re an American. You don’t know hardship or how to survive. If you go back to Green Dragon, you’ll be giving up city life. You won’t be able to return to Shanghai. And you certainly won’t be able to leave China.”

“I don’t want to leave China,” Joy says stubbornly. “This is my home now.”

“How do I explain things to her so she’ll understand?” Z.G. asks me. Joy stiffens at that, and I keep my mouth shut. He turns back to Joy. “I begged Mao and Chou for forgiveness with my paintings, but who knows what could happen tomorrow? Mao won’t admit when he’s wrong. He purges anyone who disagrees with him. Since the recent class struggle, everyone with a brain or a backbone has been sent to labor camp or been killed. Those who remain, like Chou En-lai, are afraid to go against Mao, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s stopped listening to others anyway. Who will protect China from bad ideas?”