Review: Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See

Dreams of Joy is the long-awaited sequel to Lisa See's gorgeous Shanghai Girls, the story of two sisters' harrowing escape from 1930s China and subsequent struggle for normalcy as American immigrants.  If you have not read SG, you need to stop here and do so NOW.  It's a tremendous work, beautiful and memorable, and well worth the few days you will spend clinging to its pages before you pick back up here.

DoJ picks up where SG leaves off,  with the 17 year-old Joy overhearing a terrible argument between the two sisters that reveals the true status of her parentage.  It is now the 1950s, and the height of the cultural revolution in China, a time when some American Chinese, feeling persecuted by the American anti-communist movement, were returning to China; the traumatized Joy makes the misguided decision to flee to her family's homeland to find her father and participate in the 'rebirth' of China.  Once the Paris of Asia, Shanghai is no longer the cultural heaven it once was, and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution propaganda are posters atop a pit of despair.  Joy's discovery of her father leads her down a dark and horrible path to near-destruction, while May undertakes a harrowing, emotionally-fraught journey of her own to find her daughter and make peace with her painful past.

If you know nothing about the Cultural Revolution, I highly suggest you read up on it; it is a fascinating and terrifying historical example of humanity and government at its worst.  However, readers need not study up in advance of picking up See's novels, which in fact do an excellent job of portraying China's nightmarish period.  The events described in this novel follow closely what I have read in various non-fiction publications (I had a double-major in history in college, with a focus on China), and See allows the reader to discover and experience the perfumed stench via colorful descriptions and fully-realized characters who portray the growing terror of the underclasses at that time.  Joy's gradual awakening is delayed by the power of Mao's propaganda; the constant repetition and overwhelming enforcement of his increasingly insane decrees burrow a kernel into her mind, and the reader travels with her as she slowly realizes the horror she has inflicted upon herself and her family in her misguided guilt and grief.  For her part, May, once a Shanghai Beautiful Girl, is reduced to being a paper collector, literally clearing the city of shreds of her own past to make way for the 'New China', as she searches for her daughter and a way for them all to escape the mire.

Almost everything about this novel is wonderful.  Particularly engrossing and horrifying are the public 'confessions' that are forced from those who have been perceived to have wronged society in some way; See's descriptions of the way the masses figuratively clamber onto the backs of those poor sinners in order to find the momentum and political capital to survive are eviscerating.  Among the few quibbles I have with this novel is the ease with which May was able to communicate with the outside world, which was at the time nearly impossible.  That she was never betrayed by anyone along the lengthy line of stops her letters had to make in order to get out of the country is difficult to believe, as is the ease both women had in finding Z.G., Joy's birth father.  Really, though, these are small issues compared with the sweeping achievement that this novel represents. 

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.  A worthy sequel to a fantastic book; historical fiction at its finest.