A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  “There will be a piano accompanist,” he said. “And this is very important: you must begin right away, as soon as the music starts. Once you have performed, you may return home. A list of the boys and girls chosen to attend the Dance Academy will be posted, like yesterday morning, on a sheet of paper in the display case.”

  Jia told all the candidates to leave the auditorium and to wait in the courtyard until their names were called, and so everybody filed out of the building nervously to wait their turn. The atmosphere, always tense, was especially so now. Nobody spoke. Zhongmei saw Tianyuan standing with her grandmother, and she saw that Tianyuan saw her, but they didn’t say anything to each other. There were fifty eleven-year-olds there, and it made Zhongmei a little sad to think that all but seven of the girls and seven of the boys were going to be sent home. To have made it as far as stage seven and then in the end to be told that you had not been chosen seemed almost cruel to her.

  Finally Zhongmei heard her name called, and she entered the large room where the improvisations were taking place. She watched as the girl just in front of her finished her turn, and then Zhongmei stepped forward and faced the table of judges. She managed a smile, but she had never been so scared in her life.

  A large blue porcelain bowl materialized in front of her, held by one of the girls who had measured her body in what now seemed like an event from a long time ago. Zhongmei took a piece of paper, unfolded it, and gulped when she saw the word on it.

  “Tsao,” she said, looking at Vice Director Jia—grass. He didn’t smile. His previous gentleness had disappeared. He was now an official carrying out his duty, and Zhongmei, expecting a friendlier tone, was disconcerted. Instantly the accompanist started in on the piano. Zhongmei listened for just a bar or so before starting her improvisation. Grass, she thought. She had expected an animal, perhaps a flower, but grass? She remembered later that she was struck by the beauty of the music, and maybe she was waiting also for some sign of encouragement from Jia, and these two things and her puzzlement about grass were the reasons for her delay. But it was only a short one. She took her initial pose, and moved to take her first step when, at a signal from Jia, the accompanist stopped, and she was left on the floor in front of the judges frozen in place, not knowing what to do.

  “Next!” Jia said.

  Zhongmei stood in stunned silence.

  “Thank you,” the school’s vice director said. “You may step to the side.”

  Zhongmei didn’t move. “What?” she said.

  “Step aside,” Jia said, looking past Zhongmei. “Next candidate, please,” he said, and the girl who had been just behind Zhongmei in the line stepped alongside her.

  “But I haven’t done my improvisation!” Zhongmei said.

  “We waited for you, and you didn’t dance,” Jia told her. His voice was impatient. The nice man of a few days before seemed to have vanished.

  “But,” Zhongmei stammered.

  “Please move over for the next girl.”

  “But I didn’t have my chance yet!” Zhongmei protested. “I want to do my dance!”

  “You were given your chance, and you didn’t take it and that’s that,” came Jia’s no-nonsense voice. “Next candidate!”

  Zhongmei didn’t leave.

  “You’re holding up the line,” Jia said. “We don’t have time for anybody to perform twice.”

  “But I didn’t perform even once,” Zhongmei insisted.

  “I said very clearly at the beginning that you must begin your dance right away. You didn’t. So please step aside,” Jia commanded. He leaned forward and glared at Zhongmei, who shuddered at the force of his authority. Resigned, she took a step or two backward to leave the room, which seemed to be spinning slowly around her, the walls rotating on some invisible axis, the portrait of Chairman Mao, the table of judges, Jia himself, drifting to the right.

  Zhongmei closed her eyes for a second to try to get the room to stay still, and as she did so, standing there in the momentary darkness, she made a decision that changed her whole life. For no doubt, if she had obediently turned to the auditorium’s exit and walked away as ordered, she would have lost her chance to be a student at the Beijing Dance Academy forever, and the dream that had been taking shape in her mind as she passed each stage of the audition would have come to nothing. But standing there with her eyes closed in the rotating room, she heard a small voice inside her telling her, “No! You got this far. Don’t just meekly retreat like a wounded dog. Put up a fight. Be like that girl in The Red Detachment of Women who stood up to the evil landlord and his henchmen!”

  “I’m not leaving until I do my improvisation!” Zhongmei said, her words defiant but a quavering in her voice betraying her fear.

  She could hear the gasps of astonished disapproval of the people around her. She knew that what she was doing amounted to an extraordinary act of disobedience for any eleven-year-old girl, but it was especially extraordinary in China, where disobedience tended to be treated very harshly.

  As Zhongmei stood there, she saw Jia nod toward a man and a woman at the side of the room, their red armbands emblazoned with the word anquan, security in Chinese. The two guards stirred and walked across the floor toward Zhongmei, with the clear intention of dragging her out of the room and putting her on the next train to Baoquanling. Zhongmei watched them approach out of the corner of her eye. She noted the scowls of disapproval on their faces. She heard the stunned silence in the room. She felt the angry, astonished eyes of the judges upon her. She had never felt as completely alone as she felt at that moment.

  “I traveled for three days and two nights to get here!” she yelled suddenly, desperate for some understanding of her predicament, the loudness of her voice surprising even her. “My mother and father had to borrow money for the train ticket,” she said, lowering the volume just a bit, then raising it again, “and I’m not going back until I dance!”

  “I told you, no repeat performances, young lady,” Jia said.

  Now the man and the woman were standing next to Zhongmei, one on each side of her, waiting for further instructions on what to do with this disobedient girl. Zhongmei felt the strong hand of the woman grip her upper arm and start to pull her to the side.

  “It’s not my fault that the accompanist started playing so quickly,” Zhongmei said, pulling back. “He didn’t give me a chance.”

  There’s no doubt that Zhongmei would have lost this battle and been taken away ignominiously, but Jia detected something about her. Perhaps it was something in her country accent, or in her story about having spent three days traveling to the audition, or maybe he was touched by her homemade and somewhat overdone costume, the yellow skirt and the pink blouse and the two rows of embroidered ducks, so quaintly different from the fashionable store-bought clothes of the other girls. Or possibly it was simply the audacity of her refusal to go away obediently and never see the inside of the Beijing Dance Academy again. Zhongmei saw him signal to the security guards to wait, and she felt the grip on her shoulder loosen.

  “Where did you come from that’s so far it took you three days and two nights to get here?” he asked, and Zhongmei heard a faint softening of his tone, a little bit of the kindness she had detected before.

  “It’s a very small place; nobody here’s heard of it,” she said.

  In fact, as a little girl, Zhongmei always believed Baoquanling to be a rather big place, as it was a lot bigger than her and bigger than a lot of surrounding villages. Its paved main streets, lined with state-run shops and state farm administrative offices, seemed very wide to her, the distance from home to her school seemed far, and so did the wheat fields and pigpens where her parents went to work every day before dawn. It was only after Zhongmei had seen Harbin and gotten to Beijing and people like Tianyuan asked her where she was from that she realized Baoquanling was a very small place and that nobody had heard of it.

  “Well, where is it?” Jia asked.

  “It’s in Heilongjiang,” Zhongmei said. She
knew that Vice Director Jia would at least have heard of her province, which was itself bigger than most medium-sized countries in the world.

  “Where in Heilongjiang?” Jia asked.

  “Jiamusi District.”

  “Where in Jiamusi District?”

  “Luobei County,” Zhongmei said.

  “Where in Luobei County?”

  “It’s a very small place,” Zhongmei said. “You’ve never heard of it.”

  “Where in Luobei County?” Jia repeated.

  “It’s called Baoquanling,” Zhongmei said. “It’s very small and you’ve never—”

  “Baoquanling?” Jia said. Amazingly, with the word Baoquanling his whole countenance brightened. Suddenly he seemed very pleased. “You come from Baoquanling?”

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said, gladdened by this change in tone but mystified as to its meaning.

  “Baoquanling on the Heilong River?”

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said.

  “Right up there on the border with the Soviet Union?”

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said. “It’s a state farm,” she said, and repeated a few words of history that were drummed into every child at the Baoquanling Elementary School. “My father was in the army, and after he was demobilized, he and my mother followed the call of Chairman Mao to build socialism in China’s unsettled border areas. We can see the Soviet Union from our side of the river.”

  “I’ve been there!” Jia said, his earlier formal, distant mood changing to one of delighted surprise. “I performed there once!”

  “Really!” said Zhongmei happily. She remembered being told in Jiamusi that the greatest dancer in China had once toured the region.

  “You came all the way from Baoquanling?” Jia said. He turned to the other members of the jury, who were seated at the table to the left and right of him. “It’s a big state farm,” he said for their benefit. “It’s very impressive, built up by former army men from nothing.” Turning to Zhongmei, he asked, “How did you get here?”

  Zhongmei told him that she took the bus to Hegang and then another bus to Jiamusi and then the train to Harbin, and then another train …

  11

  Becoming Grass

  “It’s true that she has come a very long way,” Jia interrupted. He turned to a woman, thin and angular, with yellowing plastic glasses, sitting next to him, and the two of them whispered to each other for what seemed to Zhongmei like a very long time. First Jia spoke into the ear of the woman, who frowned with obvious displeasure as she listened. Then she whispered into Jia’s ear, waving her hand in the air as she did so, and when Jia whispered back, she looked aside with what seemed like an annoyed look on her face. Evidently the audition director’s ruling was not what she wanted.

  “You may perform,” Vice Director Jia said, his voice taking on an official tone once again, “but you must start right away this time. If you don’t, there will be no third chance. Your theme is grass. Proceed.”

  Needless to say, Zhongmei was very nervous, and for just the briefest of seconds, as she heard the accompanist start to play, she was gripped by a terrible fear. She felt everybody watching her, including the thin woman with the yellowing plastic glasses who had seemed to disagree with the decision to give her another chance. But knowing that she had to begin right away, before the first bar of the music had been played, she stepped toward the center of the room and raised her hands and swayed her body in what she supposed might be an approximation of grass. But she felt clumsy. Her legs, actually long and thin, seemed suddenly heavy and short. Her mind raced as she swayed a bit more and moved in a little circle, not because she had an idea for her improvisation but just to do something, anything, even as she knew that her raised arms and swaying body were neither very original nor very beautiful, just kind of obvious.

  But while she moved, she listened to the music, finding it once again beautiful, and it was the music and her concentration on it that enabled her to enter a different sphere. All of a sudden she felt that she was entirely alone, not in a Beijing performance space being watched by the unsmiling and slightly bored faces of a half dozen judges sitting at a table in front of her, but by herself in a field. Yes, a field in the village of Precious Water from the Mountain Peaks in the province of Black Dragon River, which formed the remote northernmost part of China. She blotted out the thin woman and the room itself with its stained walls, hanging fluorescent lights, and picture of Chairman Mao. Jia himself slipped from her consciousness along with everything else—her thoughts and anxieties, her hopes and dreams of being one of the girls who would actually be chosen evaporated from her consciousness.

  What occupied her mind’s eye instead was just one thing, her transformation from a girl with a weight of worries on her thin shoulders into a single blade of grass, which was a deep, glorious, translucent emerald green. Quickly, as the music stole into her mind, Zhongmei studied this blade of grass, which took on a beautiful shape, thinner at the top than at the bottom, like a small, curved, delicate dagger. It stood under the springtime sun so that it was brilliantly illuminated on its upper side and in shadow on the other. She saw that drops of dew clung to its inner, shade-darkened edge, that it leaned over gracefully as if it were peering at something crawling nearby until a breeze sprang up and the blade stood upright, quivering for a second, and then swiftly leaned to the other side. It was a lithe, supple, slender extract of nature, and it had a story to tell, the story that Zhongmei, whose arms were raised and whose slender upper body leaned to one side, shook slightly, then hurled itself to the other side as if propelled by a sudden wind, began to express in dance. It was a story of birth, near death, and survival, of being made strong by the sun, growing tall, but then weakened by the wind, pelted by the rain, frozen by hail, and trampled under the muddy boots of men before springing back bruised but undefeated.

  The blade of grass was like the servant girl in The Red Detachment of Women. She stood up to the injustices of man; the blade of grass endured the afflictions of both nature and man. Both were downtrodden. Both triumphed over adversity. Or, anyway, that’s how Zhongmei, feeling the power of the story of a single blade of grass, sensing its possibilities, unaware of the eyes upon her, unconcerned, temporarily, with what was at stake, incarnated the heroic spirit of a single blade of grass, which moved her. She felt its fright and its resolve and its fragile strength and she fashioned those things into a story, which ended with the blade of grass bruised but triumphant.

  She finished. The music stopped. Zhongmei emerged from her trance. The room, the table of judges, the Mao portrait, the security guards and other people standing along the walls, all of it having temporarily vanished, flickered back into existence. Zhongmei, flushed and breathing hard, bowed in the direction of the table, turned, and walked into the bright light of the courtyard outside.

  She waited until six o’clock, watching the other girls as they emerged from their improvisations. She went home on Li Zhongshan’s motorcycle as always. She heard the er-hu playing in her lane, and that soothed her jangling nerves, but she nonetheless slept fitfully, knowing that the announcement of the winning candidates would be made in the morning, on the usual piece of paper on the bulletin board.

  She was up before dawn. Da-ma served her a breakfast of rice porridge, roasted peanuts, and pickled cabbage, but she was too excited to eat. She roared off on Li Zhongshan’s motorcycle to the school.

  “Try not to be disappointed,” he told her on the way. “There were so many girls and they’re only taking—”

  “Yes, I know, and they’re only taking seven,” Zhongmei interrupted. “I won’t be disappointed.” But of course she knew that she was going to be crushed if her name was not on the list.

  When they arrived at the Dance Academy building, she again sprang off the motorcycle before it had completely stopped and ran to the display case. Her eye was drawn to a single piece of paper where, inscribed in small, official-looking Chinese characters, was the news that transformed her life. “List of
female candidates selected for attendance at the Beijing Dance Academy for the entering class of 1978,” it said in formal red Chinese characters at the top of the sheet. Below were seven names, each of them three Chinese characters. It didn’t take long to read them, and Zhongmei saw, with something like ecstatic stupefaction, that the characters Li, Zhong, and Mei were there. She was in!

  Or could it be a mistake? She looked at each of the characters to be sure she wasn’t hallucinating. Li, her family name, a long skinny character like this ; then there was Zhong, and then Mei. She was not dreaming! There was no mistake! That was her name! She leaped into the air and screamed so that Li Zhongshan looked over, alarmed that something terrible had happened to her.

  “They took me!” Zhongmei shouted, blissfully unconscious of the girls and boys who, having come so close, had not found their names on the list and were walking away dejectedly. She jumped up and down, both hands thrown above her head, not a blade of grass but a girl, triumphant. “My name is here!”

  It was only sometime later when she was back at Policeman Li’s house that she remembered the sad faces of those who had turned mournfully away even as Zhongmei expressed her happiness. One of the sad faces, she suddenly realized, had been that of Wang Tianyuan, with her grandmother looking shocked and grim alongside her. The girl who had been so sure of herself hadn’t been chosen after all. Zhongmei felt sorry. She didn’t want her happiness to come at the cost of somebody else’s happiness. Later, when she lay in her bed at Policeman Li’s house, trying to get to sleep, she remembered something else that in her excitement she had been too busy to notice at the time. Zhongmei summoned up the scene at the display case in her mind’s eye, and she shuddered when she realized that Tianyuan hadn’t just been sad, but that she had also been looking at Zhongmei with hatred in her eyes.