A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  Zhongmei thought about that smile on the terrible train ride back to Beijing, another three days and two nights of misery. She got some relief from her new friends at the metal workshop in Harbin, but on the endless trip from there to Beijing, she was so exhausted, so cramped, so desperate to lie down, that she held her nose and crawled under her hard-seat bench. There, amid the dust and grime and awful smells of the train floor with the muddy feet of the other passengers in front of her eyes, she managed a few hours of sleep. But when she woke up and crawled back out between the legs of her fellow passengers, she felt angry that she had had to do something so terrible, lying under the seat like a rat hiding on a ship. Her coat was smudged and her hair matted, and she imagined that she looked like a wreck. And there were still hours and hours to go to Beijing. With nobody to travel with her this time, Zhongmei felt her solitude painfully, and she was overjoyed when, at long last, the train arrived at the Beijing station and there was Policeman Li standing on the platform waiting for her with a big smile on his face.

  Zhongmei spent one night with him and Da-ma, who took one look at Zhongmei and swept her off to the public bath down the lane so she could wash off the grunge of the trip. Zhongmei gratefully untied her pigtails and washed her hair, not once but three times, and she splashed herself with warm, sudsy water while Da-ma rubbed her down with a wet cloth. Afterward, drinking a bowl of hot soup, she felt much, much better, and yet that night, even though she lay in a clean, comfortable bed muffled in a heavy quilt, the clackety-clack of the train reverberated in her head and she had trouble sleeping. In the morning, knowing she had to go back to the Dance Academy, she got on Policeman Li’s motorcycle with a feeling of anxiety gnawing at her stomach.

  When she arrived, the first thing she did, after depositing her small suitcase in her room, was to visit Old Zhou in his guardhouse.

  “Lao Ye, I need your help,” Zhongmei said.

  “I’ll do whatever I can for you, xiao-mei-mei,” Old Zhou said.

  “Can you come into the dormitory early in the morning, at four o’clock, and wake me up?”

  “When? Tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes, tomorrow morning and every morning after that,” Zhongmei said.

  “At four?” Old Zhou exclaimed. “Why on earth would you want to get up so early?” It was a reasonable question.

  Zhongmei told him about her problems with Teacher Zhu.

  “Oh, that one,” Old Zhou said. “She’s a mean one.”

  “I don’t know why she hates me,” Zhongmei said.

  “Well, she’s prejudiced against us ordinary people,” Old Zhou said. “But what can I do to help? It would be against the rules if I came creeping into the dormitory to wake you up. If I got found out doing that, I’d be in trouble,” he said.

  “But I’ll never tell anyone,” Zhongmei pleaded. “Nobody will ever know.”

  “I believe you, but we’d get found out sooner or later. What if one of the other girls woke up just then and saw me shake you awake? What if you forgot yourself and cried out? What if Comrade Tsang was up and saw me? You know what she’s like. It’s not a good plan, little miss. And anyway, you can’t wake up at four in the morning. It would be bad for your health. You need your sleep.”

  “Lao Ye, please. I need you to help. If you won’t help me, I’m going to be sent home at the end of the year for sure.”

  “Sent home? Who told you that?”

  “Everybody knows one or two girls will fail after the first year, and they’ll be sent home,” Zhongmei said.

  “Ah,” said Old Zhou. “That’s very cruel, very cruel. Even so, what can I do? I wish I could help, but I don’t see how I can.”

  The two stood and looked at each other for a moment, and then Zhongmei turned to leave. She had thought a lot about Old Zhou since she came up with her plan during her trip home, and now she felt a sharp stab of disappointment at his unwillingness to help.

  “Well, never mind,” Zhongmei said, her shoulders sagging, her head bowed. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Don’t go quite yet,” said Old Zhou, stopping Zhongmei at the door. He stroked his chin. His eyes twinkled. “Is your bed next to the window, by any chance?”

  “Yes, it is,” Zhongmei replied, wondering what that had to do with anything.

  “Well, what if there were to be a string dangling down the side of the building?” Old Zhou said. “And what if that string happened to dangle out of the window next to your bed? Naturally I would want to know what that string was doing there, so I’d give it a pull. And if you happened to have tied that piece of string around your wrist, you would feel a tug and wake up—not that waking you up was my intention.”

  “You’re a genius, Lao Ye,” Zhongmei said, her spirits lifting.

  “And it just so happens that I have a length of string right here,” said Old Zhou, opening a drawer jumbled with papers, pencils, some tools, and a roll of string. He looked at Zhongmei conspiratorially and whispered, though nobody was nearby. “And here’s a little saw.” He took a small serrated knife out of the drawer. “You might need this to make a little notch in the windowsill so you can get the string out. Just open the window a crack and hang one end of the string outside. Make sure you push enough of it outside so I can reach it. I’ll wake you at four.”

  “Thank you,” Zhongmei said, her eyes welling with tears at finding somebody willing to help her.

  “Give a tug back so I’ll know you’re awake,” Old Zhou said.

  “I will,” said Zhongmei.

  “And good luck, little comrade,” Old Zhou said.

  “Dare to struggle,” Zhongmei replied.

  Every day now, as she sat in her corner in the fundamentals of ballet class, Zhongmei closely observed what the other girls did. She remembered the movements. She rehearsed them in her head. She imagined herself doing them. And then, while everybody else in the Beijing Dance Academy slept, she practiced them in defiant solitude in studio two. Without fail, Old Zhou pulled on the length of string that always dangled down the brick wall below Zhongmei’s window. Every morning, she tugged back, got dressed, rolled the string into a ball and put it in her drawer so nobody would see it, and crept down the stairs, which were empty, silent, and dark. She dashed across the courtyard, moving like a shadow to the main school building, where she flew up the stairs to the second floor, staying as light as she could on her feet as she stole along the corridor, the floorboards nonetheless creaking loudly enough to make her think she would wake up the whole school. But she didn’t. Except for Old Zhou in his guardhouse outside, she was probably the only person awake in the entire Dance Academy.

  And it was like that every morning in those weeks after Zhongmei’s return from the Chinese New Year break. Every morning in fundamentals of ballet she sat in her corner and watched closely as the other girls did their exercises under Teacher Zhu’s supervision. She concentrated on every movement and every combination, imagining how she would do them. And then, in the wee hours of the next morning, she made her secret visit to studio two, where she spent two hours doing exactly the drills she wasn’t allowed to learn in the very class that had been created to teach them to her, the five positions, the eight basic poses, and the encyclopedia of ballet movements and combinations. She got into the habit of imagining that Teacher Zhu was in the room telling her what to do, almost hearing her voice saying, “Wu zi bu”—fifth position—“and leg up, and half turn, that’s right, and demi-plié, and on pointe, and grand plié—that’s good, and fouetté en tournant to the count of eight—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and two, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and three, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight”—all the way to “eight, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” She watched herself in the mirror that lined the studio wall, examining the position of her head, the angle of her arms and hands, the nature of her glance, the curve of her legs, comparing herself to what she had seen in Teacher Zhu’s class, and, maybe even more, imitating the
pictures that she and Xiaolan looked at every night before going to bed.

  On that very first morning, she did the impossible stretching and balancing exercise that had defeated all the girls in Teacher Zhu’s class just before the Chinese New Year’s break. She lifted her right leg and held it in the crook of her arm; then as she went on pointe on her left foot, she let go of the barre, and she started to topple over right away and had to grab hold again with her left hand to stop her fall. She did it again with the same results, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Once she missed her grab at the barre and she did end up spread-eagle on the floor. And she was still trying it, without success, when Old Zhou appeared at the door of studio two.

  “It’s time to stop,” he whispered. “Hurry downstairs.”

  Zhongmei flew back to her dormitory, gently pushed open the door so it would make no sound, kicked off her ballet slippers, hoisted herself up onto her upper bunk, and crawled under her quilt so when the bell sounded nobody would suspect she hadn’t been sleeping all along. She would lie in bed for two or three minutes ardently wishing that she could sleep for hours. But when Old Zhou rang the school bell for the compulsory six o’clock wake-up, she roused herself, stretched, put on her sweats and her weight-loss suit, and went downstairs with the other students for the run in Taoranting Park, the calisthenics and stretching exercises in the courtyard, then fundamentals of ballet, the academic classes, Chinese dance, martial arts, and gymnastics—the whole exhausting day ending with dinner with her leg extended across the table in front of her, evening stretching and practice, and, finally, at nine o’clock, lights-out, face to the wall, sleep. And then, in the pitch blackness of the next morning would come the tug on the string, the misery of being dragged awake like a person yanked by a rope from someplace warm and cozy to someplace cold and inhospitable, and then two more hours of clandestine, solitary self-instruction, undertaken as though learning ballet at a dance academy were some kind of a transgression, a violation of the rules.

  22

  Lucky

  Winter turned to spring, and one Saturday about two months after Zhongmei began her early-morning practice, she went to the cafeteria for lunch to find a scene of commotion. A terrified kitten was in the room, and some boys were gleefully chasing it, throwing aluminum soup spoons at it as it scampered along the walls and between the tables. The kitten was white with orange patches over its frightened eyes. It was meowing in terror and limping on a hind leg. The boys knocked over chairs and slid over tables trying to get to it. The kitten scrambled as best it could behind a door, but now it had no way out, and at that point, Zhongmei, whose tender heart was already bleeding for it, could take no more.

  “Stop!” she shouted, and placed herself between the kitten and its pursuers. “You’re going to kill it!”

  “It’s going to die anyway,” one of the boys said. “It’s a stray. Nobody will feed it. It’s better to kill it now and put it out of its misery.”

  True, it must have been a stray. It must have found an open door or window to get into the building and then followed its nose to the cafeteria. Zhongmei picked it up and held it close. She could feel its heart pounding inside its skinny chest.

  “I’ll feed it,” she said.

  “It’s dirty,” the boy said.

  “I’ll give it a bath,” said Zhongmei, and she ran, the kitten in her arms, back to the dormitory.

  Keeping a cat was absolutely forbidden at the Beijing Dance Academy, and Zhongmei knew it. But she already had plans to spend the next day with Policeman Li’s family. She would bring the kitten there, and they would take care of it. She knew that they would. But what to do with it in the meantime? She had to hide it for one night. There was no doubt that if Comrade Tsang found out about it, the kitten would be removed from the premises and Zhongmei would be severely reprimanded and required to write an abject self-criticism admitting that she had been selfish, self-centered, and weak, and begging the forgiveness of the school, her teachers, her classmates, and all of China.

  But most likely it would be safe in the dormitory. All of the girls would want to protect it. So Zhongmei put the kitten into her dresser drawer. She ran to the cafeteria, ate quickly, and ran back to the dormitory with a steamed bun for the kitten, the kind of food a cat would normally disdain, but not this cat. It was too hungry to be fussy and it devoured the food as though it were a chicken liver or a piece of fish. Then, seeming to know that Zhongmei was trying to save it, it went peacefully back into the dresser drawer and fell asleep so Zhongmei could go off to her afternoon classes.

  “It’s for your own good,” Zhongmei whispered, sliding the drawer shut. “Be quiet. If you make a lot of noise, you’ll get us both in trouble.”

  Zhongmei went impatiently through the afternoon. She did her academic classes, reading, math, and calligraphy, her Chinese classical dance class, acrobatics, and martial arts, thinking always about the kitten. It was when she was practicing her hand and arm movements in classical Chinese dance that she thought of a name for it, Yunqi, which means “lucky” in Chinese. Because lucky it was—saved from death at the hands of the boys, protected by the girls, who would keep its presence a secret. Only one night and a morning, and as long as the kitten didn’t go crazy in the drawer, make a lot of noise, and get found out by one of the teachers or security guards or, the worst possibility of all, by Old Maid Tsang, everything would be all right.

  When Zhongmei got back to the dormitory, she fed Yunqi another steamed bun. She hid the cat under her sweatshirt and ran down to the laundry room, where she filled a plastic bucket with warm water and some soap and gave Yunqi, who didn’t like this aspect of being rescued at all, a bath. Later, she smuggled it out of the dormitory down a narrow path between the building and the compound wall, where Yunqi could do its duty. She brought it back up to the dormitory and made a little nest out of some clothes in her drawer where the kitten could sleep.

  “Oh, it’s so cute,” one of the girls said, and carried Lucky off to another bunk, where some of the other girls began to play with it. For the first time, Lucky started behaving like the kitten it was, despite its limp. It chased after a bit of ribbon that the girls dangled in front of it. Zhongmei, already tired, sat on Xiaolan’s bed and the two girls did what they did almost every night, which was look through a book. Soon their attention was riveted by a photograph of a Chinese ballerina doing one of the most difficult steps in the repertoire, a step that Teacher Zhu had told them would only come in their second year of fundamentals of ballet. It was that counterclockwise pirouette, done with the leg raised and the body curved. The dancer in the picture wore a jade-green robe over a flowing white skirt, her hair tied back in a jeweled clasp and hanging down her back. The movement required her to spiral downward until she was almost folded in two and then to spiral back up. The picture showed something magnificent, a true mastery of a movement that required years of practice to get right.

  “You shouldn’t even look at pictures like that. They’ll only make you dream of doing things that you’ll never be able to do.”

  It was Jinhua, of course. Zhongmei and Xiaolan had been so absorbed in the photograph that they hadn’t even noticed her peering at the book over their shoulders.

  “And you will?” Zhongmei said.

  “Oh, sure,” Jinhua said. “I did stuff just like that on television in Shanghai when I was just a little girl.”

  “Like that?” Xiaolan said, pointing at the picture.

  “It’s hard,” said Jinhua, “but look.” She took an open space near the entrance to the dorm room, struck a pose, and then whirled into action, her body turning gracefully counterclockwise. She did two good turns, very impressive, but then struggled with her balance on the third turn and had to stop.

  “Wooooo-wooo!” Jinhua shouted with delight, ignoring her less-than-perfect ending. A few of the other girls applauded and shouted. Jinhua curtsied and bowed as if to an audience of thousands. She blew kisses. She did a little jeté
and turned triumphantly in Zhongmei’s direction.

  “You shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. “In Shanghai, we start ballet when we’re five years old. It’s not your fault that you’re so far behind. Anyway, you won’t be here much longer. You’ll have to go home after you come in dead last in the final performance.”

  Zhongmei, trying not to pay attention, kept looking at her book.

  “Soon you’ll be back home, where you can do the rooster dance,” Jinhua said, laughing at her own cleverness, and scratching at the floor in imitation of a chicken. A few of the other girls, not all of them, laughed with her.

  Zhongmei’s ears burned. She looked up at Jinhua, anger flashing in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. She got up, smiled wanly at Xiaolan, and turned to the spot where Jinhua had just done her turn.

  “I think the farm girl’s gonna try something,” Jinhua said.

  Zhongmei pretended not to hear. She saw Xiaolan motioning to her, trying to tell her not to do anything. She was afraid it would just open her up to more ridicule. But Zhongmei very calmly took up a position there in the dormitory, and she did what she always did when she needed to perform a difficult movement. She entered into a closed world, the world of a story that she would tell with emotion and movement. She shut out Jinhua and the other silly creatures in the dormitory and concentrated on the story, the story of a girl who stands still, erupts into motion, spirals downward, then upward, and then, after several rotations, returns to motionlessness. It would be the story of a girl who believes at first that something is impossible but, with time, discovers that she can do it.