A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  A hallway extended from the foyer all the way to the back of the house, where a door led to a fenced-in backyard. There the Li children’s tireless mother cultivated green beans, carrots, scallions, pea shoots, eggplants, and other vegetables during the summer. Just after the entryway on the right was a narrow kitchen with a brick floor and a smoky coal-fired stove. A large wok sat on the stove, whose top had been cut out to accommodate the wok’s rounded bottom. Next to it was an iron cauldron where water, brought from a well at the end of the lane, was boiled to make it safe to drink. There was no toilet. The homes of Baoquanling did not come with indoor plumbing. There was a public toilet at the opposite end of the lane from the well. It was used by the whole neighborhood and smelled accordingly.

  Bathing was done in a large public bath in the center of town, and it wasn’t done all that often. The cost was ten Chinese cents per person, five cents for children, which is less than one American penny. Some families went to the public bath just once or twice a year, almost always before the Chinese New Year, which is in the middle of winter and is China’s biggest holiday. They brought soap and boxes of baking soda, which served as shampoo, and they luxuriated for hours, using scrubbers of soft wood to scrape away dead skin. When Zhongmei and her younger brother were small, Zhongqin used a basin in the kitchen to wash them, supplementing their sessions in the public baths, though now only the youngest, Li Feng, got help bathing. Bathtubs and showers in the homes were as unheard of as indoor running water.

  The rest of the Li family’s house consisted of a single long room containing the kang. This was a raised brick platform covered with mattresses of stuffed straw. It was heated by coal bricks placed underneath it at night and served as a bed for the entire Li family. Lao Lao and Da Yeh slept on the same kang. During the day, the mattresses were rolled up and a low table was put on the kang, and that’s where the Li family ate their meals and where the children did their homework. It was where Zhongmei was sitting and practicing her calligraphy when her sister told her about the auditions.

  Zhongmei’s mother and father, whose names were Gao Xiuying and Li Zhengping, worked long hours. Every morning before dawn, while the children still slept, they would be awakened by music blaring over the same loudspeakers that later in the day carried Zhongmei’s girlish voice to the farthest corners of the Baoquanling State Farm. Working at the state farm meant that the farmers didn’t farm their own land or raise their own animals—except for the few chickens and ducks that they kept in their courtyards. The land and animals belonged to the government, which paid its workers salaries—small ones. It was a bit like being in the army. Groups of men and women, shovels, rakes, and pitchforks over their shoulders, would appear along the paths and lanes of town marching to the fields while military music played on the loudspeakers. Zhengping, however, had had two years of training as a mechanic, so he was picked up by a truck and rode in the back of it to the transportation brigade, a workshop a few miles away where he repaired cars, trucks, and farm machinery. He rarely got home before dark, except for the two months in summer when it stayed light until ten o’clock.

  Zhongmei’s mother worked in the fields, and she also left before dawn and came home after dark. She tended to the chickens and ducks and to the vegetable garden in the back, and she made all the clothes worn by all the members of the Li family, including their shoes, their hats, and their mittens. She did a lot of this by hand, especially the shoes, which required big needles to attach the cloth uppers to the thick soles, made of wads of rubber that the children’s father salvaged from old tires at the repair shop where he worked. But mostly she pressed into service her most prized possession, a nonelectrical sewing machine that she operated with a foot pedal. She cut out swatches of fabric from larger pieces that she bought at the Baoquanling Department Store and fashioned blouses and trousers, padded jackets, shirts, and pajamas. Zhongmei would never forget the rhythmic sound of the sewing machine’s foot pedal rocking back and forth under Xiuying’s right foot, and the staccato tick tick tick of the needle as she worked. Some years, especially for a few days before the New Year, Xiuying stayed up all night so each of the children would have a new set of clothes. The children would find the new clothes when they got up at daybreak. Their mother, having sewed all night, would already have left for the fields.

  Except for five days off during the New Year, there were no holidays at the Baoquanling State Farm, no vacations, not even any long weekends. The only regular day off was Sunday, when Zhengping and Xiuying were busy with chores around the house, so it was only in the evening that they could spend any time at all with their children. Often Zhongmei would go to sleep before both of her parents got home, but on this night she waited up, and when both were home, she stood in front of them, hands at her sides, and asked if she could try out for the Beijing Dance Academy.

  “No!” was the immediate and emphatic answer.

  3

  The Hunger Strike

  “Why not?” Zhongmei said, disappointed but not really surprised.

  “Because people like us don’t do things like that,” Zhongmei’s father, Zhengping, said.

  “Why? What’s different about us?” Zhongmei asked.

  “To begin with, we don’t have money to send you to Beijing,” her father replied.

  “It can’t be that expensive, one little train trip,” Zhongmei protested.

  “One little train trip! Do you realize how far it is to Beijing?” Xiuying asked. “Your father went there once when he was sent by the state farm, so he knows.”

  That one time was a big event in the life of the Li family and of Baoquanling. People talked about it for months. A girl from the town had run away there to be with a boy she had fallen in love with. But this was at a time in China when nobody could go to live in a big city without special permission from the government, and when nobody could get married without permission either. So Zhengping, a trusted and respected member of the state farm, had been sent to Beijing to find the girl and bring her back. This took some weeks and required the help of the Beijing police, after which he promised the girl that she could marry the boy if they agreed to stay in Baoquanling.

  “It was three days and two nights to get there,” Xiuying said, “and the cheapest ticket costs thirty yuan, sixty for a round trip. Your father and I only earn that much money in two months!”

  “Secondly, we have no guanxi,” Zhengping continued. He used the Chinese word that meant “connections,” because in China it helped a lot to have powerful friends. “Do you think the Beijing Dance Academy is going to take anybody who shows up?” Zhengping said. “They’re going to take the children of their friends, who already live in big cities and don’t have to go so far that they’ll miss weeks of school, not like you.”

  “Ba,” Zhongmei insisted, “I still want to go.”

  “Nobody in our family has ever been to Beijing, except for that one time when Ba went,” Xiuying said. “Nobody else, not me, none of your grandparents or your uncles or aunts or your brothers and sisters, have ever been to Beijing. They all feel that Baoquanling is good enough for them. But you feel you should go?” Xiuying said.

  “It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Zhongmei said, her voice mixing determination with uncertainty.

  “Ma and Ba have more important things than to indulge your fantasy about getting into the Beijing Dance Academy,” Guoqiang volunteered. Guoqiang was a good student at the local high school, and he liked to use big words like indulge.

  “You keep out of this,” Zhongmei retorted.

  “Hey,” Guoqiang exclaimed. “Maybe I could go to Beijing too! Hey, Ba, Ma, send me to Beijing! I want to be a movie star!”

  “Well, can I go or not?” Zhongmei asked her parents.

  “You can’t go,” they replied in unison, “and that’s final.”

  But now, here was Zhongmei getting on a bus for the first leg of her fateful journey to Beijing, and this was because nobody in the Li family, not her parents, not even
Zhongqin, who knew her best, had quite understood how stubborn and determined she could be. From the moment her older sister had first talked about the Beijing Dance Academy, Zhongmei felt that either she would go to the audition or her life would be pointless, without meaning or hope. As the bus roared off in the direction of Hegang, Zhongmei thought about how she had stewed angrily for a few days and then decided to take drastic action to force her parents to yield to her demand. She knew it was a kind of blackmail, and that made her feel a little ashamed, but she did it anyway.

  For two days she stayed home, refusing to go to school and refusing to eat. She was so weak at the end of the second day that she could only lie on the kang and stare at the stained plaster ceiling of their little brick house. When she sat up, she felt so dizzy she had to lie right back down again. The gnawing in her stomach was almost unbearable. She dreamed of a bowl of the thick noodles in broth that Zhongqin made for the family.

  “You won’t eat?” her father said to her on the morning of the third day. It was still dark outside. He was on his way out of the house. “Fine. Starve to death.”

  “Do you know how hard we work to put food on the table?” Zhongmei’s mother said. “Do you see your father and me getting up before dawn and coming home after dark? And you won’t eat?”

  “No,” Zhongmei said. She reminded herself of a radio drama she had once listened to at home, about a farm girl who refused to marry the emperor’s son, because she was in love with a simple boy from her village. “I’d rather die,” the girl had said, a line that deeply impressed the eleven-year-old Zhongmei.

  “Zhongmei, this is silly and bad for your health,” her mother told her. “Please eat something.”

  “You won’t have to take care of me anymore,” Zhongmei said, that radio drama in her mind, tears wetting her cheeks. “I’m going to die.”

  “Stubborn girl!” Ma said, mightily annoyed. “I should have given you away like I planned to do.”

  Zhongmei was shocked into silence by that remark. Growing up, she had always known that her parents, being poor and already having two girls and a boy, had decided before she was born that they would give her to a couple that lived nearby in the village and had no children of their own. But Zhongmei came into the world on December 27, 1966, so small and sickly that her mother had to nurse her for several months, and after she’d done that, looking every day into her new little girl’s innocent eyes, she no longer had the heart to give her away.

  This story was told often in the Li household. Zhongmei had heard it since she was small. Everybody knew it. And everybody in Baoquanling also knew that the couple that had been slated to become her parents, whose name was Wong and who lived just a few doors down the lane from the Li house, were sorely disappointed when Zhongmei’s mother decided to keep her. They had no children and the Lis now had four, and Zhongmei imagined whenever she saw them that they looked at her longingly. Worse, when her mother got angry at her, which didn’t happen often but it did happen, she would tell her that the Wongs still wanted her and she could still be given away.

  “If you don’t behave, I’m going to give you to Mr. and Mrs. Wong,” Xiuying would snap.

  Zhongmei knew that this wasn’t true. It was only her hardworking and hard-pressed mother’s way of expressing her annoyance. Still, the idea that the Wongs had hoped to have her embarrassed her and frightened her. It gave her mother’s annoyance a special sharpness. Whenever Zhongmei walked past the Wongs’ gate, which she did almost every day on her way to school, a kind of nervousness crawled over her skin and she would shiver until she had reached the end of the lane. And now with her hunger strike she had carried disobedience to a new level. Would her mother really give her away this time?

  No, Zhongmei said to herself, lying on the kang, feeling her hunger like an empty space inside her. Or would she?

  “Can I talk to you?”

  Zhongmei, who had been facing the wall, turned and watched Lao Lao hobble to the kang and sit down next to Zhongmei. She hobbled because she had bound feet. As with many Chinese women of her generation, born near the beginning of the twentieth century when China was still ruled by an emperor, Lao Lao’s feet had been wrapped tightly in cloth bands when she was a small girl so their growth would be stunted. Lao Lao had told Zhongmei how horribly painful it was, and that Zhongmei was lucky to be a girl at a time when the practice had stopped. But the custom had been carried out for centuries, because for centuries the Chinese thought tiny feet made a woman desirable. The story of Lao Lao’s bound feet fascinated Zhongmei, but it also horrified her and made her indignant. How could people inflict such terrible pain on young girls? It was almost painful just to look at Lao Lao’s feet, tiny and curved so that her toes faced backward toward her heel. She could walk, but only very slowly with steps almost as tiny as her feet. It was because of those feet that Zhongmei felt a special tenderness toward her lao lao, who seemed to her like a delicate porcelain cup that would shatter in a million pieces if it were rudely handled.

  “You know, it’s not a good thing what you’re doing, this not eating,” Lao Lao said.

  “Oh, Lao Lao,” Zhongmei said. “But nobody will listen to me. What else can I do?”

  “Well, you can eat something,” Lao Lao said. She gave her granddaughter a conspiratorial look as she took a small bowl of dumplings from behind her back.

  Zhongmei looked at her uncertainly.

  “Go ahead,” Lao Lao said. “Eat. I won’t tell anybody.”

  Zhongmei wolfed the dumplings down, feeling both greedy and guilty.

  “Your ma and ba are worried about you,” Lao Lao said in her soft voice when Zhongmei was finished.

  “Ma told me she’s going to give me away to the Wongs,” Zhongmei said, “so how much does she really care about me?”

  “Oh, you know that’s just talk,” Lao Lao said. “She loves you very much and she’d never, ever give you away. You can be sure of that.”

  “If she really cared about me, she’d figure out a way for me to go to the audition.”

  “Well, let me try to explain to you why that’s not exactly right.”

  Lao Lao had such a sweet way about her that nothing she did could make Zhongmei angry. When she had come from Shandong, she had brought a small statue of the Buddha and a bronze incense burner with her. Such things had been strictly banned during the Cultural Revolution, and even now they certainly weren’t encouraged by the government. China’s government wanted Chairman Mao to be the country’s only god, not the Buddha or Jesus or anybody else. Still, Buddhist shrines at home were permitted. Every morning Lao Lao lit an incense stick, held it in her hand as she bowed to the Buddha, and then placed it in its holder, where it gave an agreeable sandalwood scent to the whole house. Zhongmei had been taught at school that such practices were nothing but old people’s superstitions, and maybe they were, but she liked them anyway, and sometimes she asked if she could light an incense stick and bow to the Buddha too. It couldn’t do any harm, she figured.

  “Your parents are like any other parents,” Lao Lao said, “and they care about you a great deal. But do you know how hard they’ve had to work just so your family could survive?”

  “Yes, I know they work very hard,” Zhongmei said. She had learned a little about the history of Baoquanling in school, and her mother had told her stories of what it was like in the beginning. Her father had been a soldier in China’s army when he was a young man. His whole division, many thousands of men, had been released from the army and sent to this place on the border with Siberia, where almost nobody lived, in order to build it up. When they arrived, there was nothing, hardly any people, no towns, no houses, no electricity, just a vast desolation of thick forests and parched fields.

  “It used to be called the Bei Da Huang,” Zhongmei said, meaning the Great Northern Wilderness. “They had to cut down the trees and dig out the stumps to make the fields. For a long time the soldiers lived in tents, even in the winter. They had to build a brick kiln to mak
e the bricks so they could build our houses. We learned all that in school. But what does it have to do with whether I can go to the audition in Beijing?”

  “Well, this,” Lao Lao said. “It seems strange to your mother and father that, after all the work they’ve done, you’re not happy to be here. They’re a bit insulted that it doesn’t seem good enough for you, and you want them to spend money they don’t have to try for something that’s probably impossible.”

  “Well, maybe it is selfish,” Zhongmei admitted, “but there was an advertisement in the newspaper. It said anybody could go as long as they’re eleven years old. Lots of girls and boys will go. Why is it selfish if I want to go also?”

  “From your point of view that’s all very understandable,” Lao Lao said.

  “Baoquanling is good enough for me,” Zhongmei continued, “except I can’t be a dancer here, a real dancer.”

  “Is it your true dream?” Lao Lao asked. “Is it what you want more than anything in the world?”

  “Yes,” said Zhongmei. Her eyes clouded over. She felt a tear well up in her eye. She didn’t mean to think only of herself. She did understand how hard her parents worked—Zhongqin too, who cooked for the whole family and took care of Zhongmei and her younger brother. But did that mean it was wrong for her to have her own dream?

  “It’s what I want to do more than anything in the world, Lao Lao,” Zhongmei said. “And this is my only chance.”

  “I see,” Lao Lao said. She was silent for a minute. Zhongmei looked at the wrinkles around her kind eyes. A few strands of gray hair had fallen out of their clasp and brushed against her cheek.

  “Well,” Lao Lao resumed, “I’m going to tell you a little story and you can make of it what you will. Do you know the story of how your mother got here?”

  “I know she was in Shandong and she got permission from the government to come here after Ba got out of the army.”

  Shandong is a large province that juts out into the Pacific Ocean far from Heilongjiang.