Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction.In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. The former novel ends with the suicide of Pearl’s husband Sam and the shattering discovery by Joy that May is really her mother, Pearl is her aunt, and Z.G., the famous Chinese artist, is her father.

Dreams of Joy is organized in four sections -- The Tiger Leaps, The Rabbit Dodges, The Dog Grins, and The Dragon Rises. Joy is the Tiger – romantic, artistic, rash, and impulsive. In this novel, unlike Shanghai Girls, Joy and Pearl are both narrators. Driven by anger at Pearl and May for lying to her about her identity and filled with guilt because of her role in Sam’s death, Joy hastily leaves Los Angeles Chinatown to find her biological father Z.G. and to join the new Chinese society.

Finding her father rather quickly in Shanghai, Joy goes with him to a village collective where he is forced to teach art to the peasants. Joy throws herself enthusiastically into the life of the collective and into a hasty marriage with Tao, a peasant artist. Only through motherhood and terrible suffering is Joy able to find her true identity and to exorcise her inner demons. See has written about the difficulty she faced in developing Joy’s character: “At first, Joy was hard to write about because she’s so naïve and stubborn. She makes such terrible mistakes, which, as a mother and her writer, I found hard to watch . . . But what an experience it was to watch her go through all the terrible things she experiences and see her grow up to be a wonderful artist and courageous mother