Book
Dreams of Joy
First published 2011
Los Angeles, 1957. Nineteen-year-old Joy learns that the man she believed to be her father was not her biological parent and that the artist Z. G. Li is connected to the secrets Pearl and May have kept from her. Attracted by the promises of revolutionary China, she travels to Shanghai to find him and to participate in the construction of a socialist society. Pearl follows, returning to the country she fled in 1937.
Joy’s political idealism carries her from Shanghai’s artistic circles to a rural commune during the Great Leap Forward. Collectivisation, false production claims and coercion turn scarcity into famine, while marriage and local authority make departure increasingly dangerous. Pearl must navigate surveillance, old relationships and her own memories to reach Joy before revolutionary commitment and hunger close every route home.
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