A Girl Named Faithful Plum (4 page)

“I’d like you to be able to go,” Zhongqin said now. “Even if you don’t make it—and, let’s be realistic, you probably wouldn’t—you’d have a chance to see Beijing. I’ll never have a chance to see Beijing, so it would be nice if you did. You could bring back pictures. But maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, because now I’ve given you all sorts of ideas. But there’s no way. I mean, do you think for a second that Ma and Ba can afford to let you go?”

“Well, they have some money, don’t they?” Zhongmei said.

“Not very much, and they can’t spend it all on you,” Zhongqin said. “You see how hard they work, going out before we even wake up and coming home after dark. And for all that work, they can barely afford to feed us. And now there’s also Lao Lao and Da Yeh.” Lao Lao was Grandma, the Li children’s mother’s mother, who had come to live in Baoquanling a few months earlier because the Li children’s grandpa had died and she was too old to take care of herself. Da Yeh was the children’s uncle, who also lived with the Li family at that time, because poor as Baoquanling was, other places were even poorer.

“Well, if I go to Beijing,” Zhongmei said, trying genuinely to be helpful, “there will be one less person Ma and Ba will have to feed.”

Zhongqin smiled. “Be reasonable, Zhongmei,” she said. “It
costs a lot to travel to Beijing, and for what? Yes, maybe there’d be a miracle and you’d be chosen, but twelve girls out of sixty thousand? And one of them is going to be a farm girl from Baoquanling? Come on.”

For a minute the Li children ate their dumplings in silence.

“But I want to go,” Zhongmei said stubbornly. “I mean, why should other girls have a chance like that but not me? It’s not fair.”

“I understand how you feel,” Zhongqin said. “It would be an amazingly wonderful thing to do. But you’ve got to forget it. It’s the silliest idea that ever was.”

Silly or not, Zhongmei that night thought only of going to the Beijing Dance Academy. She roamed the Li family’s narrow, soot-darkened house and yard, entertaining visions of beautiful costumes and flying jetés and wondering what her parents would say when she asked them if she could go to the audition. The Li family’s house was connected to a row of identical houses inside a neighborhood of unpaved lanes shaded by ginkgo and locust trees. There was a brick wall facing the lane, then the small earthen courtyard where Zhongmei’s mother had built roosts for her chickens and ducks, along with a pen for the occasional goat or pig.

A small foyer led into the house. It had wooden floorboards that could be lifted up to give access to an underground storage area where the Li family kept a large mound of cabbages in the winter, cabbages and potatoes being the mainstay of the Baoquanling cold-weather diet. When you walked into the
house between September and April, the first thing you noticed, after passing the chickens and ducks, was the sour, briny, and sweet odor of slightly fermented cabbage leaves. Zhongmei would never forget it.

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.

“W
hy 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.”