Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

This is the sequel to Shanghai Girls and it is about the Great Leap forward. I had read and heard a little about this time and was not just horrified but also fascinated by it because it's difficult to imagine that such things could happen. And yet they did. Actually when I first started reading the Hunger Games it took me a while to get into it because I immediately made a comparison to the Cultural Revolution in China and decided that indeed, the world of the Hunger Games didn't seem all that bad in comparison.
Most of what I had read about the Great Leap Forward was either from a History book or from Jung Chang's "Wild Swan's" While these books mention things about peasants, there not really from the perspective of a peasant. I thought it was pretty ingenious of Lisa See to create Joy, an American Born Chinese, who goes back to China for various reasons but is also a believer in Communism from what she learned in College.
It helps the American reader see things through the eyes of the peasant. But how can the American born reader ever really identify with that. It is too much of a jump. There are too many cultural differences that need to be explained. Joy is that Bridge because while she comes to live there, she is one of us (an American) and through her eyes we can understand what is going on. Even though the book is fiction, the events are real and there is something more real about it when it is told in the form of a novel instead of just mentioned in a statistic. 45 million strangers dying is not the same as really trying to figure out how and why through story telling. Horror stories about children being eaten is not the same as getting to know those children and the parents in a fictional story and then having that situation come about. Shanghai girls really has to be read before this book though. And I really think that anyone that is Chinese American or remotely interested in Chinese Americans or Chinese culture really should read both of these books. I hope there is a third to this series. It would be nice to see what the characters do when China becomes more economically powerful. When China and America come closer together but still have a strained relationship.Things like that. I mean just look at the news with Snowden fleeing to Hong Kong. And before that the 2008 olympics. So much has changed since the Cultural Revolution with the U.S. owing most of the National Debt to China. Such a thing would have seemed impossible back then. And yet it is true. Maybe the novel would not be as politically exciting. But I would love to read what Lisa See could do with these characters in well, the present situation.