A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  “They’re too young,” Zhongling told Zhongmei, who was standing inside the open backyard door.

  “Try that one,” Zhongmei said, pointing down the carrot row. “That one looks bigger.”

  “They’re probably all the same,” Zhongling pleaded.

  “Go ahead, try just one more.”

  Zhongling pulled out another carrot top, but again there was only the stringy hint of the carrot to come.

  “That one over there,” Zhongmei shouted, pointing again.

  “It’s no use,” Zhongling protested. “They’re too young. Mama will be angry when she sees—”

  “I’m starving!” Zhongmei screamed. “Pull that one out!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Zhongling, eager as she usually was to do something to please her troublesome little sister, and pulling out carrot shoots one by one, hoping to find at least one big enough for Zhongmei to eat. After a few minutes, she had entirely uprooted both rows. Then, seeing the mess she’d made, she spent a desperate half hour trying to reinsert the carrot threads back into their holes. Maybe they can still take root, she thought. She tried her best, smoothing out the soil around the plants when she was done, sprinkling them with water before she went back inside to tend to Zhongmei, who was still loudly demanding food.

  The first Sunday after that, Xiuying went into the garden to tend to her plants, and she saw the two rows of torn and wilted carrot heads. She investigated, and Zhongling told her what had happened, getting a good spanking for her mistake, while Zhongmei remained unscathed.

  “You’re the one screaming at me to tear out the carrots or you’ll die of hunger, and I’m the one that gets the beating,” Zhongling later told Zhongmei.

  “I’m sorry, Er-jie,” Zhongmei said. “I was too hungry to think.”

  Now, wearing the costume that Zhongling had made for her, feeling bad over her lack of appreciation for her wonderful second sister, Zhongmei began to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” Zhongling asked. “Don’t you like the dress?”

  “I love it,” Zhongmei said. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

  “Well, what’s the matter, then?” Zhongling asked.

  “I feel bad because Mama spanked you after you ruined her carrot bed,” Zhongmei said as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. “You were just trying to find me something to eat.”

  “You’re still thinking of that?” Zhongling asked, amazed.

  “I feel terrible about it,” Zhongmei said, looking down. “You pulled out every carrot and there wasn’t a single one to eat.”

  “Well, I forgive you,” Zhongling said, smiling. “I guess.”

  Zhongqin came into the room from the kitchen. “Life is going to be a lot less trouble with you gone,” she said, then, when Zhongmei’s face darkened with worry, she hastily added, “Hey! I’m only joking.”

  “Well, if everybody’s right that I have no chance at the audition, I’ll be back pretty soon,” Zhongmei said, “so you might not have to miss me.”

  “In that case we’ll be happy if you come back and happy if you don’t,” Zhongqin exclaimed. “What could be better?”

  The three sisters’ peals of laughter could be heard all the way to the lane outside. They laughed and laughed and laughed and fell into one another’s arms.

  5

  Second Thoughts

  The two girls got off the bus in Hegang, which was about the same as Baoquanling, with one large intersection, a few large buildings, and flat, open agricultural fields stretching into the distance. They stood for a while in the dusty station, looking for the bus to Jiamusi. Every once in a while a bus would pull in; other buses pulled out, leaving clouds of stinging blue-gray smoke in their wake.

  “There it is!” Zhongqin shouted, and sure enough there was a bus arriving with the Chinese characters for Jiamusi on a placard in the windshield. Jiamusi had marked the farthest point in Zhongmei’s travels until now. When she went there before, Zhongmei had thought that Jiamusi was truly a big city. The department store was twice the size of Baoquanling’s. Jiamusi had a movie theater, which Baoquanling didn’t. Movies in Baoquanling were shown on occasional Saturday nights at a makeshift outdoor theater with a white sheet serving as the screen, which meant that they could only be shown during the warm, mosquito-infested summer months. While Baoquanling consisted of one large intersection, Jiamusi was a real urban grid whose streets were choked with noisy, smoky traffic. Until the idea that she go to the Beijing Dance Academy had come along, Zhongmei’s dream had been to settle in Jiamusi and become a member of the song and dance troupe there.

  The two sisters had to wait for a few hours in Jiamusi, since the Beijing train didn’t leave until early that night. They walked the streets. They ate the cold steamed bread that their mother had prepared for them, dipping it in shrimp paste. Neither of them would ever have thought of going into a restaurant for lunch. Neither of them had ever been inside a restaurant! Zhongmei and Zhongqin looked hungrily at the delicacies on offer at some outdoor food stalls—spiced lamb on skewers, slices of Hami melon, and noodles in soup. Zhongmei looked with particular longing at a stand selling five-fragrance tea-soaked eggs, but she didn’t ask Zhongqin to buy one for her. To her, eggs were a very special treat that happened only once a year, on her birthday, when Gao Xiuying gave her a single hard-boiled egg, doing the same for her brothers and sisters on their birthdays. It was the only present any of them would get.

  They got only this one egg a year even though the children’s mother tended chickens and ducks that produced seven or eight eggs a day right there in the front courtyard. But the eggs weren’t for the family. They were a small business that Gao Xiuying ran to earn a little bit of extra money. The first thing she did when she got home from the fields at night was check the roosts and collect the eggs that had accumulated in them, sticking her hand under the bellies of the birds to get at them. But each and every egg had to be sold to help the family survive. Except on birthdays, when everybody got that gift of a single hard-boiled egg.

  Zhongmei so treasured hers that she made it last for several days, cutting one thin slice each day and savoring its wondrous mixture of cool, translucent white and dense, mealy yellow. Once she kept her birthday egg in its shell in the pocket of her jacket, waiting for the perfect moment to eat it. After a good long time, maybe two or three weeks, she felt she had waited long enough, and, in a state of tremendous anticipation, she cracked it open. When she peeled away its shell, she noticed a distinctly unpleasant odor emanating from what had turned a kind of greenish purple. The egg had gone sulfurously rotten! Zhongmei’s disappointment at missing her once-a-year boiled egg was immeasurable.

  Zhongmei had to say good-bye to Zhongqin at the Jiamusi train station, but she didn’t have to make the rest of the journey alone. Her parents knew of a young man named Huping, who, like Zhongmei’s dance teacher, had spent several years as a sent-down youth in a nearby village. He was now returning home to Beijing, and he was waiting for Zhongmei at the Jiamusi bus station so he could accompany her on the journey. Together they walked across the square from the bus station to the train station. Hundreds of people seemed to be camped out there, sitting with their backs against their bags, even cooking on small coal stoves or just stretched out on the cement, sleeping.

  When the train pulled in to the platform, everyone pushed and shoved at the doors to the cars, but Huping lifted Zhongmei up and practically threw her directly through one of the train’s windows onto a seat and then dove in behind her. Zhongqin stood on the platform outside their window and gave last-minute instructions. “Don’t forget to keep your address in your pocket,” she said. “Don’t lose your ticket. Make sure you get plenty of pictures in Beijing. I want a picture of you in Tiananmen Square. See everything you can because you may never get another chance to go to Beijing in your whole life. Don’t forget the name of Ba’s friend who’s going to meet you. I’ve written it down on this piece of paper. Put it in your po
cket right away so you won’t lose it. Remember you have to change trains in Harbin. You’ll arrive there at six in the morning and you have to wait until six that night to get the train to Beijing, so you’ll have the whole day in Harbin, but don’t wander too far from the train station because you might get lost. Harbin is a big city and there are bad people there. Stay close to Huping and be careful.”

  With that, Zhongqin thrust two ice sticks that she’d bought on the platform through the window frame, giving one to Zhongmei and the other to Huping. Zhongmei took hers and held it in her hand, hardly noticing it. She was so excited that she’d barely listened to Zhongqin’s final instructions. She was off to Beijing! She’d go first thing to Tiananmen, the giant square in Beijing where huge crowds gathered to watch colossal fireworks exhibitions on China’s national day. She’d sung a song about Tiananmen often enough on the Baoquanling loudspeakers. Now she’d actually see it! And the Forbidden City, the vast palace with great curved roofs and marble statues of lions and tall rust-red walls where China’s emperors once ruled the country. Beijing had huge theaters, stadiums, parks, and the Great Hall of the People, where the country’s leaders had their meetings. It had everything that Baoquanling didn’t have, including China’s greatest dance academy, to which the country’s future stars were summoned. She would see it all, and she would be the first in her family, maybe the only one in her family, to do so!

  Suddenly the train shook. It rocked back and forth and then creaked into motion. There was a piercing scream of metal scraping on metal as it began ever so slowly to move forward, and as it did, all of Zhongmei’s excitement turned at once into a terrible fear, the inescapable dread of the unknown, which she would have to face without her family, without Zhongling and without Zhongqin, who had been at her side ever since she was born and who was now walking alongside the train trying to keep pace as it gathered speed, shouting good-bye and good luck and have a smooth journey and be sure to write every day!

  It was only when the train began to move that Zhongmei fully realized what she had decided to do and what it meant. Instantly she began to miss Baoquanling and all the things she knew of it, their narrow brick house, the little schoolhouse that was so cold in winter that the children wore mittens and earflaps to class, the sound of her own reedy voice carried by loudspeakers at noon over the wheat fields, the tick tick of her mother’s sewing machine as she made clothes for the family, her friends from her fourth-grade class who teased her about being so skinny, the smell of cabbage at the entrance to her house and the warm broth simmering in the kitchen, the clucking of the chickens and the quacking of the ducks in the front yard, the warmth of the kang at night, Lao Lao, the smell of incense burning in front of her statue of Buddha, her mother and father even if she did barely see them, the view of the Heilong River and the distant shore of Russian Siberia on the other side, even Teacher Wang, her fourth-grade teacher, who rapped her ruler on the desk and glared at her when she whispered to her neighbor in class.

  Tears now streamed down Zhongmei’s cheeks as she thought about it all, blurring her vision so that she could barely see Zhongqin, who had now stopped running but was still standing on the platform waving, getting smaller and smaller as the train picked up speed. It suddenly dawned on Zhongmei that Zhongqin had been right all along, and there really was no chance for her to be chosen at the Beijing Dance Academy. Yes, this whole thing was a stupid act of selfishness and self-delusion. She felt a pang of shame when she thought of her stubbornness, her hunger strike, her family’s generosity, and the debt they had incurred to put her on this train, which she was thinking now was carrying her to a place she didn’t want to go.

  But it was too late for second thoughts. The train was pulling out of the station and picking up speed. It clattered past factories with huge smokestacks, its whistle shrieking to warn pedestrians and bicyclists who waited at intersections behind security gates that flashed red warning lights. There were rows of cement apartment blocks with laundry hanging from bamboo poles on their terraces and open-sided shelters crowded with rows of black Flying Pigeon bicycles. Then, as darkness fell, the wide-open landscape of North Manchuria passed by Zhongmei’s window, immense fields bounded by high hills that rose into the sky like the humps of mythological animals. Zhongmei leaned back on her hard seat and readied herself for the long trip.

  “Hey, your ice stick is melting!” It was Huping, shaking Zhongmei out of her reverie.

  In all the tumult of her mind, she had entirely forgotten to eat the one Zhongqin had thrust through the train window, and it was now dripping syrupy liquid over her hand and onto her blue cotton pants. She licked it, glad to have it, noting that, like this departure for Beijing, it had a distinctly sweet and sour taste.

  6

  Stranded

  Zhongmei and Huping arrived in Harbin after a mostly sleepless night just after dawn the next morning. Harbin was the capital of Heilongjiang, which means “Black Dragon River” and is the northernmost province of China. They had the whole day to wait before their next train, and in the morning they wandered the streets, broader and busier than any Zhongmei had ever seen, but in the afternoon they stayed in the station waiting room, watching the crowds of people surging into the high-ceilinged concourse and out of it again. Outside, through the open station doors, Zhongmei could see a large plaza with groups of people sitting on their bags, lying on the ground and sleeping, taking cigarette after cigarette out of red and white packs labeled DOUBLE HAPPINESS and smoking them while squatting on their haunches. People also smoked in the waiting room, which was filled with an acrid haze. They read newspapers or played cards or Chinese chess, using crinkly plastic sheets for boards and round wooden pieces with the Chinese characters for “general,” “major,” “lieutenant,” “foot soldier,” and “commander-in-chief” printed on them. Across from Zhongmei a man in a well-tailored gray tunic, matching pants, and silver-framed glasses sat and read the People’s Daily. He had a large metallic watch on his wrist and a black plastic satchel with the characters for Beijing inscribed on it. Zhongmei knew from his refined clothes and watch that he was an official of the government, and she wondered how high up he was.

  Finally the time to board their train came. Zhongmei and Huping headed for the hard-seat cars in the rear of the train. Hard seat was the lowest of the three classes of service in China’s supposedly classless socialist society. Hard seat meant that they would sit squeezed in among countless others on straight-backed wooden benches, a little like church pews. Above, the luggage racks were crammed with cloth suitcases and red-and-blue-striped plastic bags. In those days, Chinese trains were crowded, dilapidated, uncomfortable, and usually dirty. The next class above hard seat was hard sleeper, which was better than hard seat because there were plastic-covered berths, three levels of them, so passengers were able to lie down, but still it was dingy, smoky, and jammed with people and jumbled with their stuff. The highest class was soft sleeper, but soft sleeper was reserved for high officials, military officers, and the rare foreign visitors who went to China in those days, these privileged passengers enjoying spacious separate compartments each with four comfortable bunk beds, clean white sheets, pillows, and blankets, and large red thermoses full of piping hot tea. But even soft sleeper was hot in summer and freezing in winter, and the other classes of service, hard sleeper and hard seat, were overcrowded all year round. The smells of sweat, garlicky breath, and twice-breathed air were pervasive. All the bathrooms on the train were filthy, dank, and slippery, and they stank horribly. Sometimes they were occupied by passengers who couldn’t find room anyplace else. Mothers in hard seat would even let their children pee under the seats, and the smell of children’s urine got stronger as the trip stretched from hours to days. Zhongmei was too old to do that, so she tried hard not to go, until she just couldn’t wait any longer, and then it was a matter of balancing on treacherously slimy footrests while squatting over a metal-rimmed hole, clinging to a small bar alongside to avoid being thrown to th
e disgusting floor when the train lurched.

  For much of the time between Harbin and Beijing, Zhongmei sat between two men with patchy beards, rough blue clothes, and breath sour from the smell of pickled garlic. From time to time one or the other of them would hawk noisily and spit on the floor between his feet. At night her fellow passengers slept in their seats sitting straight up, their heads thrown back, their mouths agape, showing blackened teeth and snoring loudly, but Zhongmei was both too excited and too uncomfortable to sleep much at all.

  But at least she was sitting. Huping, who didn’t get a seat, gallantly stood in the aisle or squatted on his haunches for the entire twenty-four-hour trip. At every stop there was a mad commotion as more and more people tried to get on the train. Vendors would lean into the train’s open windows trying to sell various edibles—peanuts, roasted corn on the cob, plastic packages of crackers, balls of cold steamed rice wrapped around dollops of sweet red bean paste, bottles of Chrysanthemum-brand orange soda pop, which Zhongmei coveted but didn’t drink because there was no money for such delicacies. Anyway, by not drinking soda pop, she wouldn’t have to go to the terrible toilet so often. When the train started up again, the vendors would run with it, reaching into the cars for the money for their final sales.

  Sometime after midnight Zhongmei managed to doze off, wedged as she was between her fellow passengers, but she woke up frequently when, for some reason, the train would just stop, and the mesmerizing clickety-clack of its movement would be replaced by the overpowering silence of China’s vast, dark, and lonely countryside. The train would sit for a long time, the interior lit by a ghostly yellow light coming from the weak lamps on the ceiling above. The sounds of snoring and the murmuring of voices seemed louder than before, but it was only because the train itself had become so quiet. Zhongmei tried to look out the streaked and stained windows beyond her seat to see what was outside, but nothing was visible but her own dim reflection.