Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

Reading this book was such an overwhelming experience that I’m finding it hard to write about it. This is not to say it was bad, quite the contrary, it was excellent. I knew a little bit about the Great Leap Forward before, but this novel humanized it to the point where I was left sobbing.
Though it’s a sequel to Shanghai Girls and contains many of the same characters, Dreams… works as a stand alone book as well. It opens in the summer of 1957 in Los Angeles, where sisters May and Pearl are living with their daughter, Joy. Home from college, Joy blames herself for recent family troubles and inspired by the propaganda she’s heard in student groups, decides to go to China and help them build up their country. When Pearl discovers her gone, she follows Joy to China in order to rescue her. The chapters alternate in Pearl and Joy’s voices, giving us sometimes rather different views of events. Joy’s journey into the unknown is sometimes frightening and always unsettling as she tries to match the reality with idealism. Pearl, who grew up in Shanghai and fled the country in a harrowing ordeal, is more cynical, yet nostalgic, seeing how all that was familiar has changed.
After traveling to a small village, Joy falls in love and decides to stay, especially when the village becomes part of a collective, one of the giant farming communes. Pearl is determined to rescue Joy, so she stays in China too, becoming a paper collector, gathering up paper garbage on the streets of Shanghai. She moves back into her family’s old home, a mansion which has become a boarding house. In this way she can keep in touch with Joy, hopefully persuading her to return to the U.S. in time.
Mao institutes The Great Leap Forward, where China is supposed to overtake the West in food and industry production. The ill informed dictums of this program led to a huge disaster. People were forced to melt down household items, some as small as door hinges, in backyard smelting ovens to make useless steel that was too flimsy to build anything with. Collectives planted seeds too close together to yield anything but weak, puny plants. What little grain grew was shipped off to cities, leaving thousands of people in starvation. As Mao celebrated the 10th anniversary of the revolution, widespread famine killed nearly as many people as WW2 did. See portrays the famine in all of its horrific and heartbreaking detail. What is most frustrating, is that it could’ve been prevented, but for the idiotic ideas of politicians thinking only of their own egos. A character sums up the mood of the country, “We live in constant fear with constant hunger. We’re trapped by fate and our destiny looks bleak.”
While Mao made a fetish of peasants, their lives were actually worse than in feudal times and he was willing to sacrifice thousands of them for the sake of paranoid competition. Women, who were supposed to be equal under the new regime, had the traditional responsibilities at home, while doing heavy labor in the fields during the day. It’s true there were no more beggars and prostitutes in the city streets, but corruption still reigned among those with authority. Instead of bribes, payoffs were called fees. And during the worst of the famine, politicians and leaders of the collectives hoarded food, while dealing out harsh punishments to those found with a few grains of rice.
See does a masterful job of showing these events through the eyes of Pearl and Joy. The reader comes to care deeply about what happens to these very likable characters. Their hopes and dreams, as well as themes of family devotion and Chinese culture, are woven through the story, making it a universal and memorable book.

Random House 2011 368 pp. ISBN-13:978-1400067121 available in ebook and traditional formats