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Brigade Leader Lai pulls Z.G., my mom, and me aside, and leads us to a cinder-block building. He calls it the leadership hall, although he doesn’t invite Feng Jin or Sung-ling to join us. I glance back to see Kumei, Tao, Feng Jin, and Sung-ling drop to their haunches in the shade of a ginkgo tree. Inside the leadership hall are three spacious rooms—a dining room, a kitchen, and a large storeroom—plus another five rooms that look like they could be bedrooms or barracks. A table has been set for four people. Peasant women hurry from the kitchen to lay out an elaborate lunch of eight dishes. The meal is perfect—the vegetables are fresh on the tongue, the chilies give a wonderful bite, the flesh falls delicately from the bones of the whole fish, and the cured pork with salted black beans is properly tasty—but I want to eat with Tao and my other friends. Even if this meal is only for very important persons, why haven’t Feng Jin and Sung-ling been invited?
After lunch, we go back into the bright sunlight. I blink, trying to clear the black spots from my eyes. Tao, Kumei, and the others jump up when they see us. On the way back to Green Dragon and the villa, Tao and I lag behind. When we reach the turnoff to the Charity Pavilion, Tao dips onto it. I don’t hesitate for a moment. I run after him, scampering up the path as fast as I can. I reach the pavilion and throw myself into his arms. Our kisses are sweet yet frantic. So many months have passed. Instead of my feelings for Tao cooling, they have only grown. I can tell his have grown for me as well.
I WAKE AT five the next morning to the sound of announcements being read over a background of military music blaring from a loudspeaker in the villa: “Bring your woks. Bring your griddles. Bring your locks.” I dress quickly and go out to the sitting room that’s shared by the four bedrooms in this part of the villa. My mom sits at the table. Her eyes are shut and she massages her temples.
“Are you all right?” I remember my first morning here a year ago, when I was sicker than the village dog.
She opens her eyes, which are dulled by pain. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’ll be fine. It’s just—”
She doesn’t have a chance to finish, because Z.G. comes out of his room, looking cross. “What’s that noise?”
We head to the kitchen and find Kumei, Ta-ming, and Yong searching through cupboards. Brigade Leader Lai is already gone. He must go to the leadership hall very early each morning. The table in the center of the room, which has always been used for food preparation, has no vegetables or jars of pickles. Instead, cooking utensils and other metal items are laid out in a straight line from the smallest to the largest.
I introduce—or try to anyway, since I have to compete with the racket from the loudspeaker, which hangs from a rafter—Yong to my mother. She takes in Yong’s bound feet and then stares into her face.
“I’m honored to meet you,” my mom says.
“It’s been a long time since I met a real lady from Shanghai,” Yong responds.
“You know the city?” my mother asks.
“I was born there,” Yong answers, slipping into the Wu dialect. Kumei and I glance at each other. Yong never spoke to me in the Wu dialect when I was here before. I wonder if she spoke to Z.G. in the language of their shared city when I wasn’t around.
My mother and Yong share a look. How did we end up here?
“Bring your cleavers,” the loudspeaker continues to trumpet. “Bring your door hinges. Bring your scissors.”
“We must hurry,” Kumei says. She gestures to the objects on the table. “You may take the wok, if you’d like.”
“For the blast furnace?” my mother asks.
Kumei nods.
“But a wok? Don’t you need it?”
“It’s our last one,” Kumei answers. “We had to give the others to the canteen.”
“But what will you use to cook?” my mother asks, appalled.
“We get all our meals in the canteen.”
“That’s a long way from here.” Then my mother gestures to Yong’s feet. “How can you go there for your meals?”
“They let Kumei and the boy bring me food,” Yong answers.
“Come on,” Kumei implores. “Grab something. We have to go.”
I pick up a soup ladle. I watch the others pick the smallest items possible—a Western-style spoon, a metal basket for fishing tidbits out of a hot pot, some hairpins. With our donations in hand, we troop to the village square. Everyone holds something made from metal—an old farm tool, the business end of a hatchet, some spikes, and more kitchen utensils. We give our pieces to a woman, who passes them to someone else, who feeds them into the blast furnace.
“This reminds me of when we used to gather tinfoil, bacon grease, and rubber bands during the war,” I say to my mom. “We had fun collecting those things, remember? What we did helped us win the war.”
My mother stares into the middle distance. I can tell her head still aches, but what she thinks remains a mystery. Then she pulls her shoulders back, steps forward, and says to the woman collecting metal, “In Shanghai, I worked the bellows for my street’s backyard furnace. May I help here?”
“Everybody works so everybody eats,” the woman replies. “We welcome your help, comrade.”
Just then, a few people pull out red flags and raise them above their heads. The villagers systematically fall in behind those with the flags. Military music bursts again from the loudspeakers. Tao grabs the hem of my blouse—careful not to touch my skin in public—and pulls me into the line led by Z.G. Then everyone except those working at the furnace marches behind the red flags, flowing out in different directions like streams of ants.
Our group heads to the main part of the commune, stopping outside the leadership hall, where we had lunch yesterday. Our project is simple but ambitious. We have one week to create seven thousand posters. Even though it’s easy and fast to print posters, Mao wants to show the world what the communes can do if people use their hands to work together in the Great Leap Forward. The content has been approved by the Artists’ Association. The image will show the masses harvesting a cornfield. Identical couplets will decorate the left- and right-hand borders. One side will read, “The longer the communes exist, the more prosperous they will be.” The other side will read, “The higher the sun rises, the brighter it will shine.” Although four thousand people live in the commune, not all of them can participate in our project. Each of the commune’s thirteen villages has sent about thirty people to help us. Every person on our team will need to produce about twenty posters in seven days. And, except for a few people I recognize from last summer, most of our helpers have had no art training and almost none of them are literate.
