Dreams of Joy

Near the end of Dreams of Joy, 21-year-old Joy stands in a Shanghai kitchen, making “bitter cakes” for dinner. It is 1961 and the cakes are made from grass: there’s a famine raging across China – the result of Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign.

Joy, born and bred in Los Angeles, says with pride that she knows “how to make food out of almost nothing” but this knowledge has come at a cost. The two years she has spent in China, explored over the course of the novel, have taught her to chi ku – a Chinese maxim literally meaning to “eat bitterness”, or to suffer without complaint. When she arrived as a spoiled teenager, Joy had little idea of how to chi ku but the clear-eyed woman at the end of the book knows how to swallow some of life’s bitterest pills.

In previous novels, including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, American author Lisa See has chronicled the often bleak lives of Chinese women across the decades. Shanghai Girls (2009) told the story of Pearl and May Chin, privileged Chinese sisters who are forced to leave war-torn Shanghai in the 1950s for arranged marriages in California, which bring them much suffering and pain. When Pearl’s husband kills himself towards the end of the novel, the sisters have a showdown and reveal a long-held family secret: Pearl’s daughter Joy is actually May’s biological daughter.

Dreams of Joy picks up where Shanghai Girls left off. On learning the truth about her mother, 19-year-old Joy decides to run away to communist China to find her birth father, the Chinese artist ZG Li, and to join Mao’s red revolution. Without a visa, a map, or a clue as to how to find her father, Joy somehow manages to navigate her way to Shanghai by plane, car and boat, miraculously finding her father the very afternoon of her arrival. The story settles into a vivid portrayal of Joy’s encounters in communist China. Pearl, horrified by Joy’s flight, chases after her to persuade her to return to the US but by the time she arrives in Shanghai Joy and her father have left for a village in the countryside. There Joy barely has time to yearn for indoor plumbing before jumping into the revolution with both feet: romanced by the idea of communism, she dutifully takes up hoeing cornfields and falls for a local peasant.

When she catches up with Joy, Pearl is aghast at her squalid living conditions, new romance and, most of all, by her plans to stay in China for good. This episode is particularly well-conveyed. As in all her novels, See is adept at portraying complex relationships between women: here, she adroitly captures the bond between mother and daughter with its potent mix of guilt, love and cruelty. Their alternating first-person narrations build a nuanced dynamic and we find ourselves empathising both with Pearl’s anger and sadness and with Joy’s defiance of her adoptive mother.

Meanwhile the ongoing political action provides a tragic backdrop. Chairman Mao, who makes a rather convincing cameo appearance, sweeps China into the calamitous Great Leap Forward campaign, leading to terrible famine and the death of millions. See brings the disaster to life with her meticulous eye for detail: we encounter trees stripped bare of leaves and bark, people dying from eating mud that has hardened in their stomachs and desperate families swapping their young for cannibalistic purposes – an abominable practice that was called “Swap Child, Make Food”. Amid all the suffering, Joy struggles to stay alive, despite Pearl’s efforts to rescue her daughter and remove her from China.

Dreams of Joy provides a rare and harrowing view into one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century. Yet, despite its bleakness, this is a compulsively readable novel that teaches us much about the human condition and how we are hard-wired for survival.

Ruiyan Xu is author of ‘The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai’ (Bloomsbury)

Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See, Bloomsbury, RRP£11.99, 368 pages