Dreams of Joy (38 page)

“Let me finish my lunch,” he says, having made his decision. He orders the guard to fetch Party Secretary Feng Jin and Sung-ling. “Have them come here in fifteen minutes.” To me, he adds, “Wait here.” Then the brigade leader closes the door and goes back to his meal.

Fifteen minutes later, the guard escorts the three of us into the building’s
private dining room. The smell of food—meat—is tantalizing and painful at the same time. I glance at Sung-ling. As Kumei suggested, Sung-ling and I have become friends. When Sung-ling says her baby likes to kick, I tell her my baby kicks even more. When I say I’m going to have a son, she tells me she’s going to have twin boys. I’ve worked hard to establish this good-natured banter, because I need Sung-ling to help me. But now, as I look at her, I wonder if she can. She was plump when we first met. Now she’s pregnant and losing weight. As village cadres, she and her husband should have the same benefits as the brigade leader. Instead, they’ve decided to continue eating with the rest of us in the canteen.

The brigade leader motions for them to sit. I’m meant to stand before them as the supplicant I am.

“All right then,” Brigade Leader Lai says in his rough voice. “What do you want?”

“We should launch a Sputnik by painting a mural to show our pride in our new road,” I begin. They stare at me, sure I have more to say. “Chairman Mao says murals can teach people. They’re visible reminders of what the masses should and shouldn’t do.”

“We don’t have money to buy supplies,” Brigade Leader Lai says.

What a strange response. Is he fishing for a bribe?

“That’s all right, because we’re going to make our own pigments.” I open my satchel and pull out little jars of color. “This yellow I made using the flowers from the scholar’s tree in Green Dragon’s main courtyard. This red comes from the red soil in the hills. The black comes from the soot left over from the blast furnaces. We can use lime for white. I made blue and purple from flowers. Green is easy. I soaked some of our tea leaves to extract the color.”

Sung-ling smiles appreciatively. “You’re using what we have around us.”

But it’s not because I’ve embraced some Communist lesson or other. Rather, I’m doing exactly what my frugal mother and practical father taught me to do in Chinatown: conserve, manipulate, and utilize what others consider worthless.

“Yes, yes, but what is the subject?” Brigade Leader Lai asks. “This comrade has many black marks against her. How can we trust her to paint something that will not be reactionary?”

“I want to show the glories of the Dandelion Number Eight People’s
Commune. Here, let me show you.” I hand him my drawings. “Look, here is our magnificent harvest with the road leading right to it. And I want to do a portrait of you, Brigade Leader. Our dreams of socialism wouldn’t be coming true if not for your leadership.”

The brigade leader’s chest expands, but the Party secretary has lived in Green Dragon his entire life. He knows who’s who and what’s what.

“Tao is the artist in your family,” he notes. “Why isn’t he here?”

The short answer is because he doesn’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been working alone, sneaking up to the Charity Pavilion when I should have been washing clothes in the river or doing other chores. My announcement that I was pregnant didn’t bring the happy change in attitude toward me that I was anticipating. My husband and my in-laws have an interest in me now that I’m pregnant with what we all hope will be a son, but they’ve also been wary of me since the struggle session against Yong. They’ve been walking a fine line between possession of me and the baby and absolute distrust and distance. But I’ve thought about this and know how to respond.

“My husband asked me to come here. He’s the better artist, but he’s also the harder worker. That’s why he’s building the road and I’m here before you.”

The three nod approvingly, but how will Tao react to what I’ve just said? What I wish is that he’ll regard me as a good wife who supports him. Maybe that will happen, and maybe he’ll happily take credit for the mural, especially if he thinks word of it will reach others even higher than those in this room. Oh, but I do sound bitter.

“Where will this mural go?” Brigade Leader Lai asks.

“There’s only one place,” I answer. “On the outside of this building. You have four walls that will now sing the praises of our commune.”

“Think of the effect it could have on members of the commune,” Sung-ling says tentatively. “They’ll pass it every day when they come to eat, visit the clinic, leave their children at school—”

“More than just people in our commune!” I interrupt. “Everyone in the county will come to see it! They’ll walk on our new road and see what good jobs our cadres have done.”

The looks on their faces! I once respected and feared them. Now I see them—even Sung-ling, my supposed friend—as clowns.

“Launching a Sputnik is a very specific program,” Party Secretary Feng Jin, the most cautious of the three, observes. “Twenty-four hours is
not very long to create such an extraordinary amount of work. We want to launch a Sputnik”—he glances at the others uncertainly—“not an oxcart.”

He doesn’t have to tell us this. Everyone in the room knows how pointless the launching a Sputnik projects have been—building a well in twenty-four hours only to see it collapse in the first rain or sewing pants for everyone in the commune in twenty-four hours only to see mismatched pant legs sewn together.

Reminded of the potential traps, Brigade Leader Lai adds a new concern. “This can’t be an individual project. There’s no place for individual thinking or acting in the New Society.”

I don’t smile, but I surely want to because they’ve said exactly the things I predicted they would.

“That’s why I came to you,” I say. “Launching a Sputnik means improvising with what we have around us, but it also requires many hands. I respectfully ask that you assign a work team to the project. I propose we launch four Sputniks—one for each side of the building.”

“That’s four days!” the brigade leader exclaims. “And you’re pregnant. The Party says that expectant mothers will have light work.”

What a joke! Does he think painting a mural is harder than building a road under the blistering sun? Does he think it’s worse than having my shoulders swell from carrying heavy loads of rocks and dirt in buckets strung from poles in the struggle to remake nature, with little to eat? I’ve gone from optimism to disillusion very quickly. The Tiger leaps, but this time I keep my head on straight.

“Night and day, we make revolution!” I shout. “We will work longer than four days if necessary! We want to honor our commune cadres!”

“You’re sure it won’t cost us anything?” This comes from the brigade leader, who sleeps in the villa and eats wonderful meals by himself here in this building.

“Even if I buy a few materials,” I say, “they won’t cost more than two
yuan
. Remember, ‘More, faster, better, and cheaper!’ ”

The brigade leader grins. He’ll be getting what he thinks is a paean to his accomplishments, just like Chairman Mao has all over the country with his giant posters, for under a dollar.

FOUR WALLS, FOUR
Sputniks. We’ll do one mural each Tuesday during the month of July to cover the leadership hall’s four walls.

“My comrade-wife has been very helpful to me in planning my Sputnik,” Tao tells Kumei, Sung-ling, and the rest of the work team assigned to us. He smiles with his big white teeth, and everyone smiles back at him. Naturally, he thinks this is his project and he takes over all planning. He sketches some new ideas, which follow the five accepted themes for murals: the natural beauty of the motherland, scientific advances, technical knowledge and production, babies to promote population growth, and happy families. Everyone likes them, except for Sung-ling.

“These are festive pictures,” she says, “but this is not what the committee approved.” She gives me a questioning look. She may not know much about art, but apparently she can tell the difference between what Tao and I have drawn. I make my face as bland as possible. I may be a comrade with a questionable background, but I’m a wife first. Sung-ling understands that. After all, although she is a cadre in her own right, her husband is the Party secretary. Mao may say that women hold up half the sky, but it is the lesser half. Still, Tao must tread carefully. In an effort to show his socialist spirit, he graciously divides the walls between the two of us. We will each get one small wall and one long wall to paint as we wish.

In the first twenty-four-hour period, we paint the first of Tao’s murals. The hours during the day are brutal. Powdery dust rises from the scorched dirt. The air is oppressively hot. It feels as though we’re laboring inside a brick oven, but at least we aren’t building the road. We work with people who have little sense of perspective, shading, or proper dimensions. That’s all right, because the Great Leap Forward has lost these sensitivities too. In Tao’s mural, fishermen row on the sea in peanut shells the size of sampans (to show how great the peanuts are in the New Society) and pull in huge nets filled with gigantic leaping fish.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” Tao shouts at us. “We can’t fall behind. We have only four hours left!”

I did not know he had such ambition.

The following week, I lead the team to paint a pond on my small wall. On the surface, at the center of the mural, is a giant lotus. No one can complain about the size, which is in keeping with the exaggerations of the Great Leap Forward. The lotus symbolizes purity, because it rises out of the mud but looks pristine. The one I paint, however, is spattered and bruised. Flying above it all is Chang E, the moon goddess, looking down with tears in her eyes. When people ask why she weeps, I explain that her
tears of happiness are filling the pond and cleansing the lotus. In my heart I believe she weeps for the people of China.

I’m pregnant, living in a depressing place, trying to make the best of a bad situation, and hoping that working together will help change things between Tao and me. It’s unrealistic, I know, but so are Tao’s dreams. He’s looking at the mural as a way to leave the commune and go to Peking or Shanghai. “People will want to meet the artist,” he tells the pretty girls who gather around him when he paints. “Not everyone will come here. I will need to go to them.” He flirts with the girls, but he treats me with increasing formality—as a woman with black marks against her who happens to be the mother of his unborn son. I try to pretend I don’t care.

During the third week, Tao paints his long side of the leadership hall. The subject is one we all wish we could see: rice paddies stretching to the horizon, fat children climbing ladders to reach wheat heads, and babies sitting next to tomatoes larger than they are. Tao does a good job with the brigade leader’s portrait, placing him amid the happiness.

A week later, inspired by our project, Brigade Leader Lai decides to launch a whole new Sputnik. On the night of the full moon, while some of us paint the last mural—my painting—the rest of the commune works on the road, trying to reach the leadership hall by dawn.

People say there is poetry in painting and painting in poetry. I want my mural to stand on its own, yet be read differently by different viewers. I’ve been thinking about something Z.G. once said to me: People are shaped by the earth and water around them. I want my painting to reflect this idea. I outline the central figure in black and then ask my husband to fill it in: Chairman Mao as a god towering over the land and the people, removed from the masses, challenging nature itself. This is my secret criticism, but I’m sure the brigade leader, Party secretary, and other members of the commune will take it at face value. I assign groups of two and three to work on the sky and on the background, where figures rise up out of China’s earth—made from this land’s red mud to be molded into obedient peasants. I give Kumei the important job of leading a team as they paint humungous radishes, which again will make my painting recognizable to the members of the commune as a piece of Great Leap Forward art. Corncob spaceships filled with laughing astronaut babies—a supposed tribute to China’s agricultural and technical advances meant for the people of the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune,
who have never seen an airplane let alone a spaceship like Sputnik—fly through the sky.

That night, a full moon illuminates the fields around us. The road comes closer and closer. My mother-in-law brings more red paint made hastily from the soil. We can never use too much red, and it feels as if it glows in the moonlight.

On the left side of the mural, I paint a tree with its branches spread to form a cross. In the twists of the bark hangs an abstract Jesus, his head low, a slash of green representing the crown of thorns. On the right side, I paint another tree, so that the whole mural is framed by branches, roots, and leaves. An owl sits on an upper branch with one eye shut.

What is my message, if anyone asks? I will say that China’s best people come from this good earth, while the owl gazes at the world, offering its wisdom. But to me there are deeper meanings about blame, tolerance, and forgiveness. Yes, I’ve used too much black in contrast to the false bright red of the rest of the mural. Yes, I’ve painted an owl, which sees everything and is fooled by nothing. And yes, I have used a cross and Jesus upon it to show the suffering of the people. As far as I know, no missionaries ever came to this area. So if anyone asks, I will say that I’ve painted a tree god.

I think the mural will magically change my life. It doesn’t. No dignitaries come to the Dandelion Number Eight People’s Commune, Brigade Leader Lai doesn’t win any prizes for being a model leader, Tao doesn’t like me any more than he did before, and the people on the work teams quickly forget that I got them off the road crew for a few days.