A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  The bus rumbled and bounced on the rutted track. Trucks, crowded with farm workers whose legs dangled over the edges of their flat wooden beds, passed from the other direction. They were being taken to Baoquanling’s more distant fields, and Zhongmei strained to see if her mother was among them, since she was a fieldworker herself who often traveled that way, but she caught no glimpse of her. Her bones beat to the vibration of the engine. Her bottom was warm.

  In the distance on the left side of the bus was a range of purple hills where, in the spring and summer, members of Zhongmei’s family searched for medicinal herbs and mushrooms. These were the peaks in the name of Zhongmei’s hometown, whose three Chinese characters, Bao Quan Ling, mean “Precious Water from the Mountain Peaks,” and Zhongmei remembered her excursions there with her two sisters. As the youngest, Zhongmei was only allowed to go to the crest of the first hill, where the sisters gathered pine nuts and mushrooms. Wolves lived beyond that spot and over the next hills, and often at night the Li family could hear their distant howling. Sometimes one of Zhongmei’s older cousins went deep into the mountains to hunt for wild turkey and pheasant, and when he was successful, there was meat for dinner, a rare event for the people of Baoquanling.

  Once Zhongmei’s younger brother, Li Feng, got sick, and her second sister, Zhongling, took it upon herself to go into the mountains to gather a special grass that could be brewed into a medicinal tea. Zhongling climbed through the woods and over the first hill, where the sisters usually stopped for their mushrooms and nuts. She walked over the second hill and into a valley where, as she gathered the grass, she noticed two puppies in a nest of leaves and twigs under a big tree. Or at least she thought they were puppies. They were cute and playful. Happily Zhongling put them into her sack and brought them home, shepherding them under a table in the kitchen and feeding them some scraps.

  That night, the howling of the wolves wasn’t as far away as it usually was. It was alarmingly close. There was a scraping noise just outside the house, canine nails sliding down the brick walls. Suddenly the gray head of a wolf, its fangs showing, appeared in a window, just like Zhongmei imagined in the story of the three pigs, which she’d read at school. It seemed to be looking inside the house, trying to find what everybody now knew were wolf pups, not dog pups. Zhongmei remembered not sleeping much that night as she huddled against her big sisters, listening to the wolves as they prowled outside, sniffing at the window, scratching the walls, howling at the moon just outside the gate.

  “Don’t be scared,” Zhongqin said to Zhongmei and to Li Feng, who was equally terrified. “It’s a strong brick house.”

  Zhongmei finally fell asleep, and when she woke up at dawn, the wolves had left. A car belonging to the state farm was called. Zhongling put the two adorable wolf pups in her sack, scurried through the yard, ran out the gate, and jumped into the car, looking out for the wolves she feared might still be roaming the alley outside the house. Carrying the sack over her shoulder, she climbed over the first hill and, not daring to go any farther, released the two pups, and then watched as they scampered over the hill toward the deep forest. That night, Zhongmei remembered, now smiling at the thought, the howling of the wolves was reassuringly far away, though it was still a little scary.

  On the right, Zhongmei caught glimpses of the sun glinting on the Heilong River, which formed the border between China and Russia. Between the hills and the river were the vast flat farm fields of the state farm, the cement factory, brick kiln, elementary school, and low-slung residential areas that made up the only world Zhongmei had ever known.

  Zhongmei had never been so full of nervous anticipation as she was now, facing both thrilling possibilities and scary unknowns. She had never been on a train before, or, for that matter, even seen one close up, and now here she was, soon to be on one that would take her all the way to China’s fabled capital, which, to a country girl like her, seemed unimaginably glamorous. Beijing was where China’s most famous people lived. It was the home of the country’s greatest palaces and monuments, not to mention gigantic Tiananmen Square, which Zhongmei had seen in countless pictures in the newspaper. Movie stars lived in Beijing and so did China’s leaders, including of course Chairman Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, whose picture was everywhere, though he had died two years before, and whose most famous pronouncements were memorized by every Chinese schoolchild. It was big and important, but it was also a place where Zhongmei didn’t know a single person, which was not comforting for an eleven-year-old girl who had never been alone. But even in her state of excitement, Zhongmei could not have known that everything in her life was going to change from this moment of departure. If she had any idea just how hard these changes were going to be, she might never have gotten on that bus to Hegang in the first place.

  2

  An Impossible Dream

  A few weeks before, Zhongmei had been sitting at home early in the evening copying Chinese characters into her school notebook when Zhongqin, who was nine years older than Zhongmei and the person who most took care of her, casually mentioned seeing an interesting notice in the People’s Daily newspaper, which she’d read at work.

  “It said that the Beijing Dance Academy is going to have open auditions,” Zhongqin said. She was standing in front of a large pot in which she was boiling dumplings for dinner.

  Zhongmei immediately perked up. She loved to dance. She danced at her elementary school’s performances. She went to ballet classes in the Workers and Peasants Cultural Center, given by a woman who had been sent to Baoquanling from one of China’s big cities. She danced in the lane outside her house, just for fun, humming to give herself some musical accompaniment.

  “Open auditions? What’s that?” she asked.

  “The school was closed during the Cultural Revolution,” Zhongqin said. The Cultural Revolution was ten terrible, violent years in China from 1966 to 1976 when the country’s top leaders struggled against each other for power and the whole of society was turned upside down. Bands of eager teenagers called Red Guards roamed the country ganging up on anybody, including their teachers and even their parents, if they felt they didn’t give their total, loving support to Chairman Mao. They destroyed old things like antiques, temples, and priceless works of art because they felt that there should be nothing old in the brand-new China being built under Chairman Mao’s brilliant supervision. The universities and schools like the Beijing Dance Academy, and even the elementary and high schools, closed for three years.

  “Even after it opened again a couple of years ago, the students were chosen directly by the school,” Zhongqin said. “But now anybody who wants to go can audition.”

  Zhongqin began to ladle dumplings into blue earthenware bowls and passed them to her four brothers and sisters. Zhongmei put down her notebook. She plucked a pair of chopsticks out of the clay vase on the counter where they were kept, and picked up a dumpling.

  “Anybody can go?” she asked, holding the dumpling in midair and looking at it as though it were a rare specimen of butterfly. She dipped it in some soy sauce spiced with chopped chili peppers and devoured it.

  “It’s only for eleven-year-old boys and girls,” Zhongqin informed her.

  “Well, I’m eleven years old!” Zhongmei shouted. “I want to go!”

  “She wants to go,” Zhongqin said to the other children dismissively.

  “Well, why not?” Zhongmei said.

  Zhongqin thought for a moment.

  “Why not? The paper says that something like sixty thousand girls are going to go to the auditions all over the country, in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, and Chengdu”—China’s biggest cities. “And out of those sixty thousand girls they’re going to select a grand total of twelve. Twelve! Maybe two or three from each audition. So how good do you think your chances will be?”

  “Well, somebody’s going to get it,” Zhongmei said. “My chances are the same as everybody else’s.”

  “No, they’re not,” Zhon
gqin replied. “You’re a little nobody from a nothing little town like Baoquanling. You really think you’re going to be one of those twelve girls?”

  “If everybody thought that way, nobody would go,” Zhongmei said.

  “Yes, they would,” Zhongqin replied, “because they live in big cities and don’t have to travel for days to get to the audition, and they attend famous ballet schools, where they know the people who can help them get into a place like the Beijing Dance Academy. People like us from so far away don’t know anybody. And anyway, you have school. You’d miss two weeks.”

  “Well,” Zhongmei hesitated, not knowing what to say about school, where she had always been a dutiful student. “But I go to ballet school too,” she continued, avoiding the issue by changing the subject. “And I’m the best in my class.”

  “The best according to you,” Zhongmei’s older brother, whose name was Guoqiang, put in.

  “No, not according to me,” Zhongmei replied, “according to everybody who knows anything, which you don’t.”

  “Even if it’s true, which it probably isn’t, being the best in Baoquanling doesn’t make you good enough to go to the best dance school in all of China,” Guoqiang said.

  It was true that Zhongmei was the best dancer in her ballet class, and she had other qualifications besides. For a couple of years she’d been a well-known performer in Baoquanling. She had been chosen at her school to be the girl singer at a noontime performance that was held every day to entertain the town’s farmers when they broke for lunch, these farmers working in the far-flung wheat fields, pigpens, and chicken coops that surrounded the town. For a while Zhongmei had gone every day to the microphone in the town hall, a two-story brick-and-mortar edifice adorned by orange stucco pillars and a portrait of Mao. There, in her flutey voice, she sang a song that was carried on loudspeakers set up in every corner of the district—often, but not always, songs in praise, you guessed it, of Chairman Mao. Zhongmei didn’t really think all that much about Chairman Mao, though she certainly heard people speaking of him with reverence as China’s great helmsman, the man who had led the country’s Communist revolution. His picture hung on the wall behind her teacher’s desk in her classroom at school. An identical picture was on a wall at home, and it scared her because the chairman’s eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went. She sang the words because they were the words to the song:

  He was our good chairman,

  He saved our country and our people,

  He’s our own red sun.

  After a while, Zhongmei recorded some songs, accompanying herself on the yang-qin, which is a kind of Chinese xylophone. Some of her classmates played the er-hu, a two-stringed Chinese violin with a horsehair bow and a sound box made of snakeskin, in the background. From then on, the farmers were treated to Zhongmei’s recordings, and she didn’t have to go to the microphone herself every day. She was famous. She used to be stopped by total strangers on the street wanting to say hello to her. Once her ballet teacher took her to Jiamusi to study for a few days with a song and dance troupe there. It was the only other time in her life that Zhongmei was away from home.

  Like good Chinese girls, Zhongmei was properly modest and well behaved, but she was also ambitious. She was convinced that she was meant to do something special in her life, something more thrilling than being a Baoquanling farm girl. Not that there was anything wrong with farm girls. So far that’s what she had been, and that’s what her two sisters were also. But Zhongmei had always had the idea that she was destined for something else, and the little bit of fame she enjoyed in Baoquanling encouraged her in this thought. The truth is that she was rather special, pretty in her wiry, tomboyish way and naturally graceful. She was tall for her age and very slender, with long, skinny limbs, her hair, tied up in the pigtails that all girls her age wore in those days, swinging behind her shoulders.

  At dinner that night she wore her usual blue cotton pants, made by her mother, a simple white schoolgirl’s blouse also homemade, and, around her neck, the knotted red scarf of the Young Pioneers, a sort of Chinese Boy and Girl Scouts that all children Zhongmei’s age belonged to. She had a delicate oval face, full lips, and a clear complexion, though her skin, darkened by the sun and dried by the stinging winds of her hometown, marked her as a girl from the countryside. She was a sweet girl, polite, well liked by her friends and teachers, but she wasn’t meek or shy. She could run faster than most boys her age. Her dark eyes always glinted with something untamed and fiery, but never more so than on that night when Zhongqin told her about the Beijing Dance Academy auditions.

  “Well, I want to go,” she said, turning to Guoqiang, “and you can’t stop me.”

  “Forget it,” Zhongqin said. She spoke sharply, but then she looked at her little sister and she felt a surge of tenderness. Zhongmei, having snapped at Guoqiang, stared at the swirl of steam rising from her bowl, no doubt conjuring up fantastic possibilities. Nobody could understand her dreams better than Zhongqin, because Zhongqin herself had been a performer and she had also had dreams. In high school she was chosen to play the heroine in the plays and ballets that were very popular at the time. Zhongqin had gotten the most important part in The White-Haired Girl, which was a famous story about poor farmers fighting against injustice and mistreatment. Zhongqin’s character, named Xi-er, is cruelly treated by an evil landlord and his equally evil mother, who pours hot soup over her face and locks her in a dungeon in her son’s fancy house. Xi-er’s suffering makes her hair turn white—which it remains even after she is saved by the brave soldiers of the revolution.

  The performance was at Baoquanling’s Workers and Peasants Cultural Center, near the main intersection of town. The audience had applauded warmly when Zhongqin took her bows, and ever since she had yearned to be onstage again, to dance and sing in front of an audience and soak up its appreciation—but she never had that chance, and one big reason was that she was needed at home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters while her parents put in their long hours on the state farm. She had, quite simply, no time for dance and music lessons or to take part in plays or ballets.

  Instead, when she finished high school, Zhongqin went to work for a factory in Baoquanling that made sugar out of locally grown beets and sold it all over China. She was very bright and quick, so she was assigned to the office to keep the factory’s files in order. That was how she happened to see the notice about the Beijing Dance Academy auditions in the People’s Daily. At that time, very few people in Baoquanling read the newspaper. There was no local newspaper and only a few copies of the national papers circulated in offices like Zhongqin’s, usually arriving a few days late. In Baoquanling, the news was announced over loudspeakers, or it was written in chalk on large blackboards set up in several places in the town and around the sprawling state farm. Zhongqin saw the notice, and knowing how much Zhongmei loved to dance, she thought she’d mention it.

  “I’d like you to be able to go,” Zhongqin said now. “Even if you don’t make it—and, let’s be realistic, you probably wouldn’t—you’d have a chance to see Beijing. I’ll never have a chance to see Beijing, so it would be nice if you did. You could bring back pictures. But maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, because now I’ve given you all sorts of ideas. But there’s no way. I mean, do you think for a second that Ma and Ba can afford to let you go?”

  “Well, they have some money, don’t they?” Zhongmei said.

  “Not very much, and they can’t spend it all on you,” Zhongqin said. “You see how hard they work, going out before we even wake up and coming home after dark. And for all that work, they can barely afford to feed us. And now there’s also Lao Lao and Da Yeh.” Lao Lao was Grandma, the Li children’s mother’s mother, who had come to live in Baoquanling a few months earlier because the Li children’s grandpa had died and she was too old to take care of herself. Da Yeh was the children’s uncle, who also lived with the Li family at that time, because poor as Baoquanling was, other places were even poorer.<
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  “Well, if I go to Beijing,” Zhongmei said, trying genuinely to be helpful, “there will be one less person Ma and Ba will have to feed.”

  Zhongqin smiled. “Be reasonable, Zhongmei,” she said. “It costs a lot to travel to Beijing, and for what? Yes, maybe there’d be a miracle and you’d be chosen, but twelve girls out of sixty thousand? And one of them is going to be a farm girl from Baoquanling? Come on.”

  For a minute the Li children ate their dumplings in silence.

  “But I want to go,” Zhongmei said stubbornly. “I mean, why should other girls have a chance like that but not me? It’s not fair.”

  “I understand how you feel,” Zhongqin said. “It would be an amazingly wonderful thing to do. But you’ve got to forget it. It’s the silliest idea that ever was.”

  Silly or not, Zhongmei that night thought only of going to the Beijing Dance Academy. She roamed the Li family’s narrow, soot-darkened house and yard, entertaining visions of beautiful costumes and flying jetés and wondering what her parents would say when she asked them if she could go to the audition. The Li family’s house was connected to a row of identical houses inside a neighborhood of unpaved lanes shaded by ginkgo and locust trees. There was a brick wall facing the lane, then the small earthen courtyard where Zhongmei’s mother had built roosts for her chickens and ducks, along with a pen for the occasional goat or pig.

  A small foyer led into the house. It had wooden floorboards that could be lifted up to give access to an underground storage area where the Li family kept a large mound of cabbages in the winter, cabbages and potatoes being the mainstay of the Baoquanling cold-weather diet. When you walked into the house between September and April, the first thing you noticed, after passing the chickens and ducks, was the sour, briny, and sweet odor of slightly fermented cabbage leaves. Zhongmei would never forget it.