By Adera Causey
With its cloak of secrecy, Cultural Revolution-era China has long been a source of fascination and speculation for many Westerners. Lisa See heightens this curiosity by immersing us within this culture in her latest novel, “Dreams of Joy.”
Joy in the title references not only an emotion but also a young woman, the daughter of one of the Shanghai Girls who served as the main characters of her best-selling previous book. This new novel, clearly written to court the fan base from the earlier book, also is a full story in its own right, accessible to those without knowledge of the preceding tale. She brings us into the mind and life of Joy, a mid 20th-century college student of Chinese descent who grew up wholly in Los Angeles and, prior to college, had been encouraged to be as westernized as possible.
When away at school, her involvement in a campus heritage group brings about a socialist zeal for the workings of Mao. Socialist solutions begin to look increasingly attractive to her after her father, or rather the man she thought was her father, dies and her mother shares family secrets that reveal her to have a new set of birth parents.
A vicious brew of anger, rebellion and desperation lead her to run away to China to find her real birth father and to separate herself from her problems. And as can be expected in a book of this type, through this experience she learns much more than she ever expects.