It’s the beginning of November and it’s been seven months since my mother and Z.G. rescued us. We are ghosts brought back from the dead, and today is a vision of what life can be. We have a need to forget, if only for a few hours. When I leave China—if we’re able to get out—what I’ll remember most are Sundays, the one day of the week when we’re free to do more or less as we please. We’ve come to the Lunghua Pagoda. I’ve been told that Z.G., my mother, and my aunt used to fly kites here years ago. Back then, the pagoda stood in empty land taken over by young Chinese soldiers, waiting for battle. Later, the Japanese had a detention camp here for British citizens. Now it’s a park. Elm, ginkgo, and camphor trees—green and lush—breathe life. Peddlers sell little toys—paper lions for good luck and dragons mounted on sticks that dance and writhe. A musician plays an erhu, singers warble folk songs, and jugglers, contortionists, and magicians awe with their mysterious ways. Old men shuffle along with their hands behind their backs. Old women sit on stone benches with their legs spread wide, their hands on their knees. If you have enough money, and we do, you can buy a little treat—a toffee, a chocolate bar, or an ice sucker. The Great Leap Forward continues elsewhere. Vast numbers of people are dying, but here we are happy … and healthy.
I glance at my mother, who stands by my side. She shields her eyes as she stares up at Z.G.’s kites. Then she looks at me and smiles.
“True suffering has taken away my taste for brooding about the past,” she says. “Look at what I have here on earth. My daughter, my granddaughter, Z.G., Dun, and Ta-ming are all right here with me. We’re a family. More than that, maybe we’re the family …” She stops to laugh. “Maybe we’re the families we were supposed to be all along.”
She raises her arms as though embracing the world. What she calls out tells me just how American she’s become—and remained here in China—with her open expression not only of her feelings and physical demonstrativeness but also her desire for happiness, as though it’s her right. “This is joy, and I want to hang on to it for as long as possible!”
I do too.
Nursing Tao, Ta-ming, Samantha, and me back to life must have been agonizingly slow and terrifying for my mom. Ta-ming was the first to regain energy, although he still doesn’t say much and his bones are crooked and weak from undernourishment. Maybe that will be permanent, but I hope not. The baby responded quickly to bottles of formula and fresh soy milk, although none of us know what the consequences of malnutrition will be for her down the line. If she has problems, well, then … My uncle Vern had problems too, and we all loved him. I presented the most worrisome case. I ate little and said little. I wouldn’t release the baby to anyone but my mother. How could I with Tao nearby? Z.G. and my mom thought they were doing the right thing by bringing Tao back to Shanghai, and for a while I was too weak to tell them otherwise. Even so, several times I asked my mother to take me to her family home.
“But there’s so much more room here,” she always answered. “When you’re well enough to climb the stairs, you, Tao, and the baby can go to your room. You’ll have servants here. It will be more comfortable for you.”
We had variations of this conversation several times, but she never caught my hints and I wouldn’t say anything in front of Tao out of fear of what he might do. It wasn’t until Tao got up from his couch in Z.G.’s living room and volunteered to wash the rice for dinner—what my mother, Z.G., and Dun considered a huge turning point in his recuperation—that I had my chance. As my husband wandered off, I motioned for my mother to come to me. Just then, Tao called for help. Dun, Z.G., and my mother followed Tao’s voice and found him in the downstairs bathroom.
“I’m having trouble washing rice in the rice washer,” he said.
I’ll say he was. He was washing rice in the toilet! I could hear them all laughing like crazy. When my mom returned to the salon, leaving the men to clean up the toilet, I told her about Swap Child, Make Food. Mom had the baby, Ta-ming, and me out of Z.G.’s house and in her childhood room within an hour.
“Let Z.G. deal with Tao!” she fumed.
“But tomorrow, I’ll—”
It was all I could do to keep her from reporting him to the police. That’s when I told her what I really wanted.
“Forget about him,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
That night, in the room my mother once shared with my aunt, we began to plot. Obviously, the first thing to do was contact Auntie May.
“I’ve waited a long time to write this letter,” Mom said as she put pen to paper. “Joy and the baby have returned to Shanghai,” she read to me as she wrote. “How wonderful it would be if we could have a family reunification visit at our old home in Hong Kong.” She looked up and explained. “She’ll know I’m talking about the hotel we stayed in twenty-three years ago.”
I had to trust my mother’s judgment on this, because it didn’t seem all that clear to me, but then my mother and aunt have always communicated in a way I’ve never fully understood.
“From our Hong Kong home, please send an official invitation for family reunification,” Mom continued. “Ask for a twenty-four-hour visit. As soon as I receive it, I’ll take it to the police station and Foreign Affairs Bureau to request travel permits. And one more thing …”
My mother put down her pen, put her hands together, and laid them in her lap in such a prim and decorous way I was tempted to laugh.
“I’m going to ask my sister to include Dun in her invitation. He’s asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted.”
“Mom!” I was totally surprised.
“I don’t want to leave here without him.”
I could have been upset—why wasn’t she more loyal to my father?—but her face radiated happiness in a way I’d never seen before, which in turn gave me the purest feeling of joy. So one of the first things that would need to be done as part of our escape plan would be for my mother and Dun, whom I’d met only a few times, to start filing the papers for permission to get married—a process far more difficult in the city than in the countryside.
“What about Z.G.?” I asked. “Won’t he want to come too?”
Here’s how much my mom loves Dun: she didn’t even flinch at the idea that May and Z.G. might be reunited.
“Let’s ask him,” she responded. “But I don’t think he’ll want to come, do you?”
I didn’t think so either, not when he’s so famous here. In America, he’d have to start at the bottom. Maybe my mom would give him a job as a dishwasher in the café. I didn’t see that at all. And even though he clearly still loves May, a Rabbit is not born to fight for what he wants. He’ll choose what’s easy, comfortable, and familiar every time. Which is exactly what Z.G. did.
“It’s better if I help you with your plan,” he said.
In fact, he’d be playing a pivotal role, but we didn’t know that at the time, and my mom, who was writing the letter, said, “Let’s not bring it up to May just yet. I don’t want her to be disappointed.”
Later, after she finished her letter, my mother tucked the baby and me into Auntie May’s bed. Never could I have imagined how she would look at us right then. She glowed with love and happiness. Nor could I have imagined the way she allowed Ta-ming to snuggle close to her in her own twin bed. I saw that my mother—somehow, and at last—had found solace and comfort in physical affection, whether hugging me, comforting the baby, protecting Ta-ming from the dark, or looking forward to her new life with her professor.
Happiness out of horror, that’s what I felt. When I tried to explain that to my mom, she said from her bed, “I look at you and I see a double rose—two beautiful colors, one in soft yellow, the other in bright pink. You are part me and part May, and I’m so happy for that.” She regarded me again with her surprisingly open and tender eyes of love. “What else can make a woman happy?”
“A husband who loves her, will support her, and encourage her to be a whole human being—like you had with Dad,” I answered. “And will have with Dun too.”
My mother had found two men to love her, and I…
“I’m really sorry your marriage didn’t work out,” she said sympathetically. “You couldn’t have known the kind of person Tao was.”
The response to that was, But you and Z.G. did!
Before I married Tao, Z.G. said he was using me to try to escape village life, while Tao’s mother often insinuated that I wanted to steal him and take him to Shanghai. We now know who was right. Tao’s wish has been fulfilled: Shanghai. And it’s worked out very well for him. Once we recovered some of our strength, the Artists’ Association held a ceremony to give Tao a prize as a model artist. Z.G. and my mom told me I had to attend, because the Artists’ Association had also sponsored my return to the city and because I added interest to Tao’s story. What a pathetic pair Tao and I made. Our clothes drooped. Our eyes were still dark and hollow shells. But now my husband is a bit of a celebrity. He tells us, and anyone who will listen, that he came up with the idea of the mural and then painted it with “a little help” from some members of the commune. Fortunately, he’s often out of town, touring the country as a model peasant artist. In July and August, he went to the Third National Congress of Literary and Art Workers in Peking. “I was one of twenty-three hundred cultural delegates,” he boasted when he returned. “The people’s life is rich and varied. Art should reflect this. It’s going to be a new period of blooming!” This is nothing to get excited about, since the last blooming period ended with the Campaign Against Rightists. But that’s my husband: a small radish who thinks he knows something.
But long before any of these other things happened, and my mom and I were in her bedroom, she said, “Remember, Joy, you still have your whole life ahead of you. You’re only twenty-two. You’re going to find a good man. Or maybe he’ll find you. For all you know, you’re already acquainted. I’m sure Violet’s son is still waiting for you—”
“Leon?” I giggled. My mother and her friend Violet have been trying to set the two of us up since forever.
“Well, why not?” she asked, all innocence. “Happiness, Joy, that’s all I’m trying to tell you.” She paused to let that sink in. “Another thing that makes a woman happy is to find work that will make her life bigger—whether hiring your neighbors to work as extras in the movies as May does or working at her husband’s side as I did with Sam in the café. For you, I think it’s going to be your art.”
Memories of Tao, the mural, and the commune had ruined art for me. “I don’t want to paint again,” I told her, and I meant it.
“You say that now, but things will change.”
And, of course, my mother was right about that too.
It took nearly a month to hear back from May. We received a letter and a package, both of which were sent through the regular route from Grandfather Louie’s family in Wah Hong Village. The letter was May’s formal invitation for us to take to the police station. The package had some dried bread and crisp rice—most welcome—and a frilly white dress for Samantha with smocking done in pink, a matching bonnet, and bloomers to cover her diaper. Before I could stop her, my mother had ripped apart the bonnet.
“May knows to hide things for me in hats,” she explained.
All I could think was, Those two sisters! But there, lying flat against the sizing for the bonnet’s visor, was an additional letter from Auntie May:
I’ve arrived in Hong Kong. I’ve left the café in the care of Uncle Charley. Mariko is taking care of my business. As for my acting job, I told the producers what I was going to do. They said I was nuts, but the cast all got together and gave me $1,000. Look elsewhere in this and other packages to find it.
You must hurry, but you must also be careful. The man at the family association tells me that many people are leaving China. Officials here and in the U.S. don’t believe the stories refugees are telling about the famine. At the same time, the PRC is inviting people in Hong Kong to send food and money to their relatives on the mainland. The lines at the post office are terrible. Those who are generous are rewarded with a banquet. Do they not see the irony in that?
I don’t think the Chinese government sees the irony in much of anything.
I’m so close to you now. Please tell me what else I can do.
We continued to correspond and we found all the cash, but we were careful about transmitting the details of our plan, feeling it would be safer that way.
“Just stay in our old home,” my mother wrote back, meaning the hotel. “One day soon we will arrive.”
So here I am today, months later, flying kites on a blustery afternoon with this improvised family. At a very deep level, I’m no longer afraid and no longer pinched by guilt. Is it possible to be happy in the People’s Republic of China? Absolutely, because I am happy right now.
Our escape plan has evolved into something very simple, with just two components. First: travel permits. Z.G., having gone to the Chinese Export Commodities Fair in Canton at the beginning of November the last couple of years, has asked for and received permission to attend and bring with him Tao (a model artist) to give a joint painting demonstration—showing the old and new styles of art in China. Accompanying them will be a baby, her amah (my mother), and me (the wife of the model artist). Second: exit permits and passports. My mother and Dun will get married tomorrow, and then we’ll go to the police station and the Foreign Affairs Bureau to pick up passports for those of us who need them, travel permits to Canton for Dun and Ta-ming, and exit permits for my mother, Dun, Ta-ming, Samantha, and me to go to Hong Kong for a family reunification visit. (We’ve been going to interviews for six months now, pushing and begging everyone to get things done in time for our departure date. Tomorrow we have just one more set of appointments. If we don’t get our papers, then none of this will work.) Once we reach Canton, Z.G. will keep Tao occupied at the fair, allowing the rest of us to slip away and take the train to Hong Kong. Once there, we’ll go to May’s hotel.
It sounds simple, but many obstacles still need to be overcome. What if someone suspects something—at my mother’s work unit, at the Artists’ Association, in our house or Z.G.’s house. So, we must try to stay focused, not let fear overwhelm us, and keep moving forward.
As the others help Z.G. reel in his kites, I pick leaves from the poplars and gather some grass. They will be nice additions to tomorrow’s meals.
Joy
THE HEARTBEAT OF THE ARTIST
MONDAY MORNING, MY mother’s wedding day. My mom and Dun help me prepare breakfast for the household. The boarders sit around the kitchen table, arguing and gossiping. My position in the house has changed since I first came to live here. Back then, the boarders were frightened by my presence. I didn’t have a residency permit, a work unit, or food coupons. I was half dead and brought with me two additional mouths to feed. I wasn’t shown sympathy or kindness, except by Cook, who clearly loves my mother and therefore loves her daughter and granddaughter. Fortunately, he was the only one who mattered, since he was in charge of the household and made all reports to the block committee, which then passed information on to the neighborhood committee, and on up the chain. Now he holds Samantha, giving her a bottle. Soon he’ll pass her to someone else at the table. She’ll have her first birthday in a couple of weeks, but she’s still frightfully small—a constant reminder that something isn’t right in the country.
The majority of city dwellers don’t fully understand what’s happening in the countryside. They’ve heard rumors, but they can’t reconcile them with being told crops grow to the sky on communes, hearing government officials report on the so-called years of bad weather that have destroyed fields of plenty, and what they see on the streets of Shanghai, where there’s no avoiding or covering up how people look as they wait in long lines to buy food with their coupons. They’re just moving past the first sign of starvation—losing weight—to the second stage—edema. They’ve begun to swell around their necks and in their faces. When people greet, they press thumbs into each other’s forehe
ads to see how deep the impression and how long it will last until the flesh resumes its normal shape. Everyone seems to walk in a listless haze. Still, no one complains, no one revolts. Only when people are truly hungry can you make them submit to you.
But the people in this house have seen starvation and its effects with their own eyes. Now they’re glad I’m here, because I understand what’s coming and I know how to survive. So does my mother. Her money and her special Overseas Chinese certificates have protected us, allowing us to buy provisions at exorbitant prices. In Shanghai, where the food is traditionally sweet, sugar is precious. Meat is hard to find and very expensive. My mom buys one quarter of a pork chop for fifty yuan or twenty-five dollars. Foodstuffs that once cost two or three yuan she now purchases at the equivalent of about thirty-five dollars. She procures wilted cabbages and other vegetables of inferior quality from farmers who’ve somehow skirted the checkpoints and sell their wares in dark alleys. She once paid a ridiculous price for a chicken, saying, “You need to be strong for our plan to work.” But none of this is enough to feed the ten people now living in the house.
I stand at the stove making “bitter cakes” from the grass I gathered at the Lunghua Pagoda yesterday. Later, when everyone goes to their jobs, I’ll soak the poplar leaves in water to get rid of their sour taste so I can make leaf pancakes tonight. I know how to make food out of almost nothing, and for this everyone not only tolerates but welcomes my presence.
“First, they tell us to kill sparrows, but now we have a campaign against bedbugs,” one of the dancing girls complains. “We don’t have bedbugs, so how are we going to prove we’re doing our part?”
“We’ll blame our lack of bedbugs on Old Big Brother,” the cobbler quips slyly. “We’ll say they took the bedbugs home with them.”
In July, Soviet experts pulled out of China, taking with them their machines, equipment, and technological expertise. Since then, the government has blamed Old Big Brother for everything.