A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  Dance is like learning to play the piano or another musical instrument. The first stage is learning to hit the notes. It’s only after you’ve learned to do that that you start to make real music, music that moves toward a destination, guided there by the feelings and skill of the musician. You feel the music’s motion in your body and your soul. You vary the tone and the tempo; you hit the note sharply and hard or you caress it so that it is soft and lingering. You connect the note before with the note after so that they have a point, tell a story.

  That’s what Zhongmei did with her Chinese pirouette. She was no longer practicing, she was dancing. She was no longer doing an exercise but was experiencing the joy of art as she strove against gravity, abandoned herself to energy, motion, and perfect balance. That was the difference between her and Jinhua. Jinhua was very skillful technically, but for her, dance was a way of displaying herself, winning admiration, showing off. For Zhongmei it was something beautiful in itself, something to be entered into, lived, and breathed. It could be done in front of an audience, but the dancer could dance when perfectly alone, and the art of it would be just as great.

  Zhongmei turned counterclockwise, her right leg steady and strong as a spike buried in the ground, her raised left leg pulling her around, her long, slender body thrown back like a stalk of bamboo swayed by the wind, gracefully curved in the middle. She went once, twice, three times around, spiraling downward on the fourth turn, back up on the fifth and sixth, and coming to a stop on the eighth in exactly the position she was in when she started. She did this not just with more precision and grace than Jinhua had achieved, but with something like ferocity, with a wildness and even a recklessness that had been utterly absent from Jinhua’s mechanical reproduction of a schoolgirl’s lesson.

  The room was quiet as Zhongmei went back to her bed and picked up the book she had been reading. The other girls looked at her.

  “Wow!” one of the girls whispered. “We’ve never seen her do Chinese ballet before. She’s good!”

  “She’s not very good!” Jinhua said desperately, looking around for support. “Her arms and legs were all over the place. It just shows that she doesn’t have the background.”

  “Not very good?” Xiaolan retorted. “She did eight turns. You did two and a half.”

  “You have to admit, that was pretty amazing,” another girl said.

  Jinhua’s face went red, and she turned angrily away and, when nobody was paying attention to her, slipped out of the room. Zhongmei could tell that her little unplanned, impromptu performance had changed the other girls’ attitudes toward her, and that was good enough for now. If only she could change Teacher Zhu’s attitude, everything would be different, but she still didn’t know how to do that. Meanwhile, she took a little pleasure in Yunqi, whom she collected from across the room. She held it close, feeling its fragile, furry, and now clean little body and murmuring, “I love you, Yunqi. You brought me luck.” She sat on her bed with the kitten in her arms and listened contentedly as it purred.

  23

  Disaster

  Suddenly the door swung open with a bang, and Zhongmei’s brief moment of happiness came crashing to an end. Old Maid Tsang stood red-faced and scowling at the head of the room, the abused door swinging shut behind her. Zhongmei tried to hide Yunqi under her covers, but Comrade Tsang knew exactly what she was looking for and where to find it. She strode swiftly across the room to Zhongmei’s bed and snatched up the kitten.

  “You know that animals are not allowed,” she hissed.

  “I know,” Zhongmei pleaded, “but I’m taking it to my foster family tomorrow. I’m only keeping it here for one night. It won’t do any harm. It’s just a little kitten.”

  “That’s against the rules,” Comrade Tsang said.

  “Please, Comrade Tsang,” Zhongmei pleaded. “Can’t I keep it, just one night?”

  But Comrade Tsang was paying no attention. She was holding Yunqi by the scruff of the neck and swinging her back and forth, up and down, as she shouted in that seemingly amplified voice of hers.

  “You selfish, disobedient little brat,” she said. Zhongmei had never seen her so furious. “You think the rules are for other people but not for you?”

  “You’re hurting it!” Zhongmei screamed. “Give it back to me!” She lunged at Tsang to try and pull Yunqi away, but she wasn’t quick enough.

  “Give her to you?” Tsang shouted, holding the cat out of Zhongmei’s reach. She went to a window and yanked it open. Outside was a narrow passageway between the building and the brick wall that went around the entire compound. On the other side of the wall was the busy street.

  “Here, take it,” Comrade Tsang said, holding Yunqi as if for Zhongmei to take her back. But as Zhongmei reached for her, Tsang raised the kitten over her head and with a windmill motion of her arm hurled it through the open window.

  There was a sound of a screech as Yunqi disappeared into the darkness and then there was silence. There was no sound from the ground below. There wasn’t a peep from any of the girls in the dormitory, who stood there in a state of shock and disbelief.

  Tsang wasn’t finished. She whirled around, her red face twisted in fury. “Follow me,” she said to Zhongmei, but then, rather than let Zhongmei follow her, she grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the room, and Zhongmei, trembling, stricken, horrified, allowed herself passively to be pulled. She remembered as she stumbled out the door that the last person she saw was Jinhua, standing in the corner of the dormitory near the door. She was pale and trembling, and Zhongmei knew instantly: she was the one who had tattled, though she also seemed shocked at the measures Tsang had taken.

  Zhongmei and Tsang went downstairs and out of the courtyard.

  Am I going to be expelled right away? Zhongmei wondered. She thought that Tsang was going to do the same thing to her that she’d done to Yunqi, kick her out of the school right away and thrust her through the gate and into the night, where she’d have to fend for herself. But she was dragged instead to another building inside the compound where she knew Tsang had her office. She had gone there to ask her for money when she needed something like toothpaste or toilet paper or the bus fare to the Li house.

  “Sit down,” Tsang told Zhongmei, pointing to a chair. From someplace she produced a single sheet of paper and put it on a desk in front of Zhongmei.

  “You will sit there and write a self-criticism,” she said. “You will criticize yourself for selfish behavior, putting yourself first, ahead of the Dance Academy and its rules, and you will ask the teachers and staff of the Dance Academy and the Communist Party and the whole Chinese people to forgive you. The sincerity of your self-criticism will determine whether you are able to stay at the school after this infraction.”

  With that, she turned away, leaving Zhongmei alone in the small room, with a ballpoint pen and a sheet of paper. Zhongmei heard Tsang close the door behind her. Then she heard the sound of a bolt turning and she knew she had been locked into the room from the outside.

  Zhongmei could scarcely breathe, she was crying so hard. The tears streamed down her face and fell onto the desk, where she saw them soaking the single piece of paper on which she was supposed to write her self-criticism. She tried to stop crying, feeling that if she couldn’t take in some air, she would choke and die. And then she thought the most terrible thought she’d ever thought in her life. She didn’t care if she died. It would serve Tsang right. She could have it on her conscience for the rest of her life, assuming she had a conscience. She was hateful. She deserved to die, not Zhongmei, whose terrible crime was to have tried to save a little kitten. Where was the wrong in that? Why had she ever even thought about coming to this cursed school with its cursed people, so sure that everything they did was right when the truth was that what they did was terribly wrong.

  Zhongmei banged her hand on the table. She tried to stand up, but as she did so, the light seemed to fade. Her heart felt like it was going to explode. She felt sweat begin to pour out of
her. There was a strange high-pitched ringing in her ears, like the sound of the morning bell, only louder, sharper. Her head began to throb and thrum. She felt as if the room was beginning to spin around her, while, miraculously, she stayed motionless. The ringing grew louder, the throbbing more powerful, the spinning accelerated. It seemed as if an icy wind was blowing across her body, and then everything went dark.

  24

  The Banquet at Hongmen

  The next thing she knew, Zhongmei was waking up in a bed with clean sheets. Sunlight was pouring into the room through a curtainless window. Zhongmei looked to one side and saw a row of beds with people lying in them. Bewildered, she turned her head in the other direction and there were Policeman Li and Da-ma standing beside her, a look of concern on their faces.

  “You’re awake!” Policeman Li said.

  “Where am I?” asked Zhongmei.

  “You’re in the hospital,” Policeman Li said.

  “The hospital?”

  “But you’re fine,” Policeman Li said. “You got sick. You must have passed out and you were brought here. You slept all night and all morning, and it looks like you needed the rest.”

  “Oh, my,” Zhongmei said, remembering the night before, and how the world was spinning and roaring before she blacked out. “How did I get here?” she asked.

  “They found you unconscious and lying on the floor at school, and they brought you here,” Policeman Li said. “Early this morning they called the police station to tell me.”

  Zhongmei remembered the sound of the bolt turning as Comrade Tsang had locked her in the room. The building had been entirely empty at that time of night. Only Tsang knew where Zhongmei was, so it had to have been Tsang who found her and gotten her to the hospital.

  “You’ll come home with us,” Da-ma said, “and get some rest, and after a few days you’ll be fine.”

  “And after that?” Zhongmei asked. “When do I go back to Baoquanling?”

  “Baoquanling?” Policeman Li said. “Do you want to go home?”

  “No, but I’m being expelled, aren’t I?”

  “You’re not being expelled,” Policeman Li said. “You made a mistake, but Comrade Tsang also made a mistake. She reacted too strongly. After you’ve rested, you’ll go back to school.”

  “I don’t want to go back there,” Zhongmei said. “I hate everything about that place.”

  “Well, you’ll have some time to think about it. But if you go back, Comrade Tsang will apologize to you. She knows that she treated you too harshly. She should have shown a little sympathy. And after she apologizes to you, you can apologize to her for breaking the rules. It’s going to be fine, Zhongmei. Don’t worry.”

  Zhongmei spent two easy weeks at Policeman Li’s and Da-ma’s house. Da-ma wouldn’t let her do a thing, except eat her favorite dumplings, drink plenty of hot soup, and get plenty of rest. On her last night at “home,” the three of them went to the Beijing Opera and saw a performance of The Banquet at Hongmen. It’s a two-thousand-year-old story based on a real episode from Chinese history in which a powerful, ambitious warlord named Xiang Yu lures his chief rival, a man named Liu Bang, to a supposedly friendly banquet at Hongmen, or Red Gate Palace, with the intention of murdering him. Zhongmei sat breathless for the whole performance. By now she knew the standard devices of Chinese opera. When Xiang Yu, for example, entered the stage wearing a white mask, Zhongmei knew immediately that he was a schemer, full of cunning and deceit, because that’s what white represents in Beijing Opera. Liu Bang, who was later to become emperor, wears a red mask. Red means loyalty and virtuousness.

  Xiang Yu wore elaborate white robes and a long beard. Accompanied by deafening gongs and cymbals, he walks around the stage for a long time fluttering his hands and fingers at his sides, meaning that he is nervously composing his plot. All sorts of characters make their appearance, including Liu Bang’s honorable wife and Xiang Yu’s unscrupulous one. There are young, beautiful dancing girls with intricate, colorful headdresses; generals strut the stage in ornate costumes surmounted by curving peacock feathers. Court clowns do amazing acrobatics on the stage. Soldiers streak and bound across the stage, wearing body armor and brandishing broadswords.

  In the story, Liu Bang, dressed in long robes of red and black silk brocade, gets advance notice from his spies inside Xiang Yu’s camp of the plot to murder him. Still, he goes to the banquet, which gives rise to tense duets between him and Xiang Yu. The audience in the drafty Beijing Opera theater is in a state of suspense. Will Liu Bang react to the plot in time, or will he be killed? Just as Xiang Yu’s henchmen are about to slit Liu Bang’s throat, loyal guards burst into the hall, and a climactic battle takes place involving slashing swords and spears, acrobatic kicks, whirling jumps and somersaults, all of it precisely choreographed and timed so the stage is transformed into an elaborate panorama of moving parts.

  When Zhongmei got home that night, she thought about the story of Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, and how, in a way, it reflected her own story. She was like Liu Bang, loyal and honest. One of the Chinese characters in her given name, Zhong, means “loyal, faithful, honest.” Unsuspecting, she had been lured to a sort of Hongmen Palace—in her case, the Beijing Dance Academy—only to be betrayed there by a tricky and powerful enemy, a sort of Xiang Yu, or maybe Xiang Yu’s treacherous wife. She imagined herself in an audience watching her own drama, murmuring with excitement, asking the question: Would she, like Liu Bang, be able to survive this dastardly attack and turn the tables on her enemy?

  Policeman Li had told her not to worry; everything would be fine. But she wasn’t sure. The episode with the kitten had earned her a new adversary, Comrade Tsang, adding to the adversary she already had, Teacher Zhu. When she got back to school, she was supposed to apologize to Comrade Tsang, a distasteful duty if ever there was one, but Zhongmei would do it. She couldn’t afford to have both Teacher Zhu and Comrade Tsang against her, or Zhongmei’s own Banquet at Hongmen would not have a happy ending.

  25

  Caught!

  Policeman Li brought her to school on the back of his motorcycle the next afternoon, Sunday. Zhongmei ran up to the dormitory, where most of the girls greeted her warmly, even Jinhua, who seemed both sheepish and friendly. Xiaolan threw her arm over Zhongmei’s shoulder, and the two of them marched off to the cafeteria for the evening meal. Zhongmei wasted no time in telling her only true friend everything that had happened, from the moment Old Maid Tsang dragged her out of the dormitory to her waking up in the hospital and the two weeks she had spent with Policeman Li’s family.

  “Things are going to go better,” Xiaolan told her. “I’m sure they’re going to treat you differently from now on.”

  Zhongmei hoped so. But first there was the not very enticing matter of the meeting with Comrade Tsang that she needed to take care of. Policeman Li had told her to do that as soon as she got back to school.

  “Tell her you realize that you should have asked her permission to keep the cat for one night,” he had told Zhongmei. “She’ll accept your apology and then she’ll apologize for the way she treated you, and the way she treated the cat. That way everybody will say they’re sorry and will save face at the same time.”

  That night, Zhongmei went across the courtyard to Tsang’s office and knocked on the door. “Come in,” she heard Comrade Tsang say, and so nervous she was short of breath, she pushed open the door. Tsang was sitting with her back to the office entrance, and as Zhongmei stood behind her, she noted how thick her neck was and how severely her hair was cut.

  Zhongmei cleared her throat to announce her presence. Comrade Tsang turned around and did something that Zhongmei had never seen her do before. She smiled.

  “I’ve come to say I’m sorry for breaking the rules,” Zhongmei started, encouraged by the look on Comrade Tsang’s face. She had practiced what she was going to say as if it were a performance that she was going to do in front of an audience.

  “I know it was wrong of me,” she said. �
�I ask you to forgive me for my bad behavior. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never do anything like that again.”

  Comrade Tsang looked at her, and Zhongmei felt she saw a softening in her eyes.

  “You know,” Comrade Tsang said. “It’s not easy to be in charge of almost one hundred and fifty students. That’s how many we have here, counting all the grades. Rules are for a purpose. We have to maintain order, so everybody can do their work, and maintaining order happens to be my job.”

  She fell silent as if waiting for Zhongmei to agree.

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said. “It’s a very important responsibility.”

  “But there’s also room for understanding and for kindness,” Comrade Tsang said, “and I’m sorry I didn’t show you any of that on the night in question. That was my mistake.”

  Zhongmei looked down, glad, but not knowing what to say.

  “You don’t know what to say,” Comrade Tsang said. “That’s all right. I wouldn’t know quite what to say either if I were in your shoes. Let’s leave it at that. Thank you for coming. Let’s consider this matter settled.”

  Comrade Tsang smiled again, and then, a bit awkwardly, she turned back to her desk. Zhongmei backed out of her office and into the courtyard outside, feeling as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She had done it. She had apologized. And Comrade Tsang had even apologized to her! She was human after all!

  The next morning very early, Zhongmei got up by herself, without Old Zhou pulling on the string outside her window. After her absence of two weeks, she hadn’t told him to start waking her up again. She didn’t even know what time it was, only that she had been sleeping for quite a while, that it was still pitch dark, and that she had to resume her secret practice sessions. She climbed stealthily down from her upper bunk, got dressed, pulled on her ballet slippers, and stole across the courtyard to studio two.