Dreams of Joy is Lisa See’s sequel to Shanghai Girls, and what
a sequel it is! I didn’t even realize it
was a sequel when I hastily selected the book, but I quickly caught on. Shanghai Girls was so memorable that
I was back in the story almost immediately.
See moves us ahead many years, and the baby in Shanghai
Girls is now a Los Angeles
resident and a college student at the University
of Chicago China
is still a part of their lives. Much has
happened in China
over the years—especially the Communist Revolution led by Mao tse-tung. The horrors caused by Japan
are over, and the utopian era of communism has begun.
Or so Joy, the impressionable 19 year old college student, vaguely
embarrassed by her family’s old-fashioned ways and immersed in the perfection
of the communist vision through activity in the university’s Chinese Students
Democratic Christian Association (and her boyfriend Joe), believes. Additionally, as the novel opens, Joy reveals
that she has just learned the truth about her mother, father, and aunt. The
combination of these influences lead her to return to China—a country inviting
Overseas Chinese to come back, to leave their evil capitalistic habits behind and to become a builder in the new and perfect communist world.
Every reader knows that outlook will lead to heartache, but
Lisa See weaves a tale that is at once universal in nature—a young girl
searching for her identity and her independence—and specific—a story that
reflects the horrors of Mao’s leadership and speaks to the horrors
of Mao’s Great Leap Forward where millions of Chinese starved to death. Actual numbers of victims could not even be
counted because the dead simply piled up and littered the roadsides and fields. Cannibalism occurred especially when one
family traded their baby for another. In
the end, there were simply too many to bury.
So we are also getting a chapter in China ’s
recent history.
With the first page of the book, Joy reveals that she has
learned the truth about her lineage; her aunt is really her mother. Her “parents” are really her aunt and her
husband, Sam. Her real father is Z.G.,
an artist still in China . Sam recently committed suicide rather than
face possible deportation to China . The FBI’s interest in Sam stemmed from Joy’s
involvement with the communist-leaning Chinese Students Democratic Christian
Association at the University of Chicago China
to try to atone.
The year is 1957.
Joy’s world is topsy turvy, and she intends to return to China
to find her real father and to help build the ideal communist world—a world her
American family has warned is a farce and lie time and again.
See does a wonderful job creating a narration by the two
main characters, Joy and Pearl, her "mother" and original Shanghai Girl . The reader feels the voice of each: the
differences in age, experience, and aims.
Each one needs to grow in understanding not only of the world around her
but also of each other. All of that universal
growth occurs within the context of a crazed, violent, repressive, and, in many
cases, ignorant world that must be navigated with great care and
duplicity.
As readers, we get to see how “mother love” is not always a
product of giving birth to a child, and that at its height, mother love is selfless even
if the child is lost or selfish or rebellious.
We see another unfortunate example of how an entire people can be lured into submissiveness to the
point of death or can be submissive enough for oppressive leadership to gain
such power and control that the people lose their options and freedom.
Dreams of Joy, obviously a title with a symbolic meaning, is
rich in description of a country relatively few of us have visited and which we
certainly have not seen as it is depicted here.
See’s scholarly research and journeys in today’s much more open China
with people like Amy Tan give her an insider’s view that she shares with us.
Lisa See is certainly one of our great contemporary
authors. Read Shanghai Girls first, and
you will want to follow up with Dreams of Joy.
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