Dreams of Joy

Lisa See’s 2011 novel, Dreams of Joy, is the sequel to Shanghai Girls, which first introduced the main characters. Dreams of Joy takes place in China during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, a program of wealth redistribution, collectivist farming, and industrial practices that took place from 1958 to 1961. The Leap was supposed to modernize China according to Communist ideals, but instead, extraordinary mismanagement of farms by Party bosses transplanted from cities resulted in an unfathomable death toll: somewhere between 30 and 45 million people died from starvation and disease.

Dreams of Joy is written from two first-person points of view: Pearl, one of the sister protagonists of the earlier novel, and Joy, Pearl’s nineteen-year-old adopted daughter.

Joy has grown up thinking that her parents are Pearl, a former Shanghai model who fled to Los Angeles after being gang-raped, and Sam, a loving man Pearl met in the U.S. However, in 1957, the FBI started investigating the family, worried they might be communists. Knowing that neither Pearl nor Sam was Joy’s real parent, the US government put tremendous pressure on Sam to reveal Joy’s parentage and to denounce her as a communist. Instead, he hanged himself in an effort to protect his adopted daughter. In the aftermath, Joy learned that Pearl was not her real mother, but her aunt—Joy’s mother is Pearl’s sister May. Joy’s father is Z.G., a propaganda poster artist. A week after Sam’s suicide, Joy steals her college fund and runs away to China to find Z.G. and help build the new communist nation.



In Shanghai, Joy quickly meets Z.G., only to learn that he is being sent to a collective farm for re-education as a potential imperialist (or, enemy of communism). Excited about the possibilities of communism she learned about at school, Joy eagerly joins him, expecting to see firsthand the benefits of communal living. At first, even though it lacks modern conveniences like indoor plumbing, Green Dragon Village lives up to Joy’s overblown expectations: Everyone is expected to work hard so that everyone can eat. Joy accepts the limitation on speech and the absence of material goods because she thinks she is contributing to a new, better way of life. The backbreaking labor and scarce food help her avoid thinking about Pearl and Sam. She also connects with Z.G. and falls in love with another artist, Tao.

Pearl follows Joy to China, despite not having been back since her rape. Once in Shanghai, she remembers how much she and her sister once both loved Z.G. He only had ever had eyes for May, and their dalliance resulted in May’s unexpected pregnancy with Joy. Because Pearl makes a scene in the Artist Association where Z.G. worked before being sent to the farm, she is forced into a quick bout of “thought rehabilitation”—basically, government-sponsored torture. This means that even if she finds Joy, it will be difficult for them to return to America. Pearl gets a job as a street sweeper, collecting poster scraps, which sometimes feature her and her sister’s faces from when they had been models. Pearl’s childhood home has been turned into a boarding house; she takes a room there and reconnects with her old friend Dun.

When Z.G. has served his rehabilitation sentence, he and Joy return to Shanghai and reunite with Pearl. However, Joy is still angry with Pearl for lying to her about her parentage, and she is eager to return to the communal farm. Again, she runs off—this time, to marry Tao against Pearl and Z.G.’s advice. After the wedding, Tao turns on a dime: He doesn’t actually love her and is using her to escape China. At the same time, life in the village disintegrates when the government issues orders for peasants across the country to plant many more crops than the fields can bear—directives issued by officials who know nothing about farming. The harvest predictably fails as too-closely planted seeds choke each other. Villagers starve, and rationing is extreme. As Joy sees peasants around her dying, she realizes that the government has made terrible mistakes, but she still believes in Mao’s vision. She also learns that Tao is cheating on her, but when she asks the Party for a divorce, they refuse. When she confronts Tao, he demands that she beg Z.G. to use his connections to get them travel cards.



Joy gives birth to a daughter, Samantha, named after her dead adoptive father. Tao rejects baby Sam because she is not a boy. The situation on the collective farm turns even worse as more and more people starve to death and others are completely desperate. Some turn to cannibalism, selling each other their babies in a trade they call “Swap Child, Make Food”—ostensibly because eating someone else’s baby is less horrifying than eating your own. Tao attempts to sell Sam in this way, and Joy realizes she has to escape immediately.

Joy sneaks photographs of herself and Sam to Z.G. and Pearl in Shanghai so they can make travel documents to rescue her and the baby. The novel ends happily, as Pearl, Z.G., Dun, and baby Samantha all escape from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and from there, back to America.