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is 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!”
