A Girl Named Faithful Plum (11 page)

Zhongmei walked through the door. It was the first time she set foot into what was to become her home for the next eight years, though she didn’t know that yet. Before she left
Baoquanling, Zhongmei had prepared a little dance, getting help from her ballet teacher. It was a two-minute solo part from
The Red Detachment of Women
, and as she walked up the two flights of stairs to studio eleven Zhongmei rehearsed it in her mind. Her moment was coming! She knew the odds were against her, but she was determined to dance well, to try to impress the judges.

She found studio eleven, where a young woman—she couldn’t have been more than twenty—took her card.

“Stand by the wall,” she said.

Zhongmei stood by the wall.

“Hold up your arms,” the young woman said. She took out a yellow cloth tape measure, put one end of it on Zhongmei’s shoulder, and measured the distance to the tips of her fingers. She wrote a number down in a notebook, and then measured the rest of Zhongmei’s body, the distance from elbow to shoulder, wrist to elbow, waist to just under her neck, her hips to her knees, her knees to her ankles.

“That’s pretty good,” the girl said, writing down numbers. “OK, stand with your back against the wall.”

Zhongmei did as she was told.

“Now rotate your hips. Keep facing front and try to touch the wall to the right with your right knee and then the wall on the left with your left knee.”

Zhongmei did it easily.

“You’re very flexible,” the young woman said appreciatively. She asked Zhongmei to do a few more exercises. Zhongmei held her leg up so that the front of her shin touched her
chin. She bent forward at the waist, keeping her legs straight, and was able to touch the floor with her elbows. The young woman held Zhongmei by the waist and told her to see how far she could bend backward. Zhongmei bent back so that the top of her head touched the floor.

“Very good,” the young woman said. “You’ve made it to the next stage.” She filled out a card, and wrote down a date and a time—the date was for the next day and the time was eight in the morning. “Show this at the entrance when you get here, and come back to studio eleven,” she said.

“But what about my dance?” Zhongmei said.

“What dance?” the young woman asked.

“I’ve prepared a dance for the judges,” Zhongmei said. “When do I get to do it?”

The girl laughed. “You may never get to do it,” she said. “You have to get through the first stages of the audition before you dance.”

“How many stages are there?” Zhongmei asked.

“Seven,” the young woman said.

“Seven!” said Zhongmei.

“That’s right, seven,” the young woman said. “You’ve made it past the first one. You’ve got a long way to go.”

A letter was waiting for Zhongmei when she got back to Policeman Li’s house that night. It was addressed to Chen Aiyi’s house on Old Stone Bridge Lane, but that address was crossed out and Policeman Li’s written under it, no doubt by Chen Aiyi.

Once again, Policeman Li’s motorcycle rumbled up to the Dance Academy gate and Zhongmei hopped off. She went up the two flights of stairs to studio eleven, where a different young woman took more detailed measurements of Zhongmei’s body. She spent a long time measuring distances and circumferences before nodding approvingly. “Your legs are sixteen inches longer than your torso,” she told Zhongmei. “That’s the best I’ve seen so far,” she said as she handed Zhongmei a card to return the next day.

Zhongmei was ecstatic, though she didn’t know why it was good to have legs longer than her torso, so she asked.

“It means you still have quite a lot to grow,” the second young woman explained, “and it’s good for dancers to be tall.”

By the third day there were a lot fewer girls at the school, and Zhongmei realized it was because thousands of the candidates had already been eliminated. She was getting used to the scene in the courtyard outside, where family members awaited the girls at the end of the day. Some girls came out of the building holding up the precious card that gave them an appointment for the next level, and there would be cheers from the waiting family members. But many girls emerged through the door with tear-streaked cheeks and no cards, and there was no mistaking the stricken looks, the dashed hopes written on the faces of their family members. Zhongmei felt so bad for those without cards that by the end of the third day she hid hers under her arm when she went down the stairs so as not to make anybody feel jealous.

On the afternoon of the third day, a new set of testers
appeared, older than the first. They seemed to be the people in real authority at the Dance Academy, teachers and administrators. Each girl was asked a few questions by one of these older people.

“Why do you want to come to the Beijing Dance Academy?” a short round woman with gray hair asked Zhongmei.

“Because I love dance,” Zhongmei said, feeling that it was a silly question with an all-too-obvious answer: because she would have a much more exciting life here than back home in Baoquanling, but she didn’t say that.

“Have you performed before?”

“Oh, yes, I performed a lot in my hometown.”

“It’s a rather small place, your hometown. You really had chances to perform there?”

“Yes, lots of chances,” Zhongmei said quite honestly. “I sang almost every day, and I danced a lot too with the Propaganda Brigade.”

“Are you ready to work very hard?”

“Yes,” Zhongmei said.

“I mean really hard, harder than most people will ever have to work in their lives,” the woman said. “This school is not for fun. It’s to train the best professional dancers in China, and I can tell you, it’s going to hurt every day. Are you really ready for that?”

“I’m ready!” Zhongmei exclaimed.

“Are you sure? I can promise you it will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do. You’ll be so tired at the end of the day you almost won’t be able to change into your pajamas and get into
bed. And if you don’t do well, you’ll be sent home, and you’ll never come back.”

“I’m sure,” Zhongmei said.

“OK,” the woman said. “I’m going to pass you into the fourth stage. Come back tomorrow at eight o’clock and be prepared to perform a dance you know. Go to studio eight. Maybe there’s something you did in Bao … what was it?”

“Baoquanling,” Zhongmei reminded her.

“Yes, there,” the woman said. “You’ll need music. Do you have music?”

“No,” said Zhongmei.

“You didn’t come with sheet music?”

“No, I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“Well, I guess they don’t know much up there in Bao … whatever,” the woman said. “You say you used to sing.”

“Yes.”

“Then be prepared to accompany yourself by singing. It’s a little unusual, but maybe the judges will remember you better that way.” The woman smiled. “Good luck,” she said.

O
n the next morning, there were hundreds of girls already forming a line in front of the Dance Academy entrance. It was a bit like the first day, though with fewer people. Parents and brothers and sisters nervously stood with their daughters and sisters under the row of locust trees on the street outside. As always, only Zhongmei was alone. She could see a long line of boys extending down the street on the opposite side of the gate. She waited and waited, rehearsing in her mind the dance she had practiced in Baoquanling from
The Red Detachment of Women
, a ballet about a girl chained in a dungeon by an evil landlord. She escapes and joins the revolutionary army led by Chairman Mao. Zhongmei had often sung one of the songs from the opera over the town loudspeaker—“Forward, forward under the banner of Mao Zedong; forward to victory”—and while the lyrics were pretty simple, she went over them again now, just to be sure that if she was seized with panic, she wouldn’t forget them. While she hummed, she felt the dance
movements inside her even though she didn’t actually do them out there on the sidewalk.

“What’s your name?” a girl next to her asked, interrupting her reverie. She was a little shorter and a little plumper than Zhongmei. She wore a black blouse printed with bright red butterflies that matched perfectly with a tailored red skirt. “I’m Wang Tianyuan.”

“Li Zhongmei,” Zhongmei said, and smiled, glad to have some company.

“I came from Shanghai with my grandmother,” Tianyuan said. She nodded at a short, chubby woman wearing a well-tailored Mao suit standing nearby. You could always tell the people in China who were officials of the government. Their tailored blue or gray suits, in the style made popular by Chairman Mao, were made out of fine cotton or wool, compared to the rougher, baggier, store-bought cotton jackets and pants worn by ordinary people. The pants were pleated and loose-fitting. The matching jacket had a collar that buttoned at the neck.

“Ni hao, xiao-mei”
—Hello, little miss—Tianyuan’s grandmother said to Zhongmei.

“Ni hao, ai-yi,”
Zhongmei said back.

“Where are you from?” Tianyuan asked her.

“I’m from Baoquanling,” Zhongmei replied, hesitating a bit because she knew that Tianyuan was unlikely to have heard of it.

“Where’s that?” Tianyuan said.

“It’s in Heilongjiang,” Zhongmei said, and Tianyuan looked
as mystified as if Zhongmei had said she had come to the audition from Mars.

“You came all the way from Heilongjiang?” she said in what seemed like wonderment but was actually a kind of criticism, because she then proceeded to tell Zhongmei that she had no chance of being accepted at the Beijing Dance Academy so it was silly to have made such a big effort to come to it.

“Don’t you know, they’ve already chosen all the students,” she said. “The audition is just for show, to make it look like everybody has a chance, but really, all the decisions have already been made.”

“Be quiet, Tianyuan,” her grandmother said. “You shouldn’t be telling people that.”

But Zhongmei was already absorbing this shocking piece of information. She was also noticing Tianyuan’s nice store-bought clothes and her pale soft skin, the skin of somebody who didn’t have to brave the scorching summers and numbing winters of northern Heilongjiang. Zhongmei felt coarse and leathery compared to her.

“They’ve already chosen everybody?” Zhongmei said, amazed and not quite believing that it could be true. “But …”

“I know that because my mother’s good friend is a teacher at the school, and she told me—my mother, I mean. That’s why we came here instead of going to the audition in Shanghai, because my mother’s friend is in Beijing.”

“Hush, Tianyuan,” the grandmother put in, but to no avail.

“You mean, you’ve been chosen?” Zhongmei asked, incredulous.

“Oh, yes,” Tianyuan said. “You have to have
guanxi.
” She used the term in China for “connections, friends in high places,” and Zhongmei remembered her father’s first reaction when she said she wanted to go to the auditions, that the Li family had no
guanxi
. And now here was another eleven-year-old girl saying the same thing: in order to get something really good, you had to know powerful people, and if you didn’t know powerful people, you would never get those things.

“We have great
guanxi
,” Tianyuan said proudly, “since my father is the head of the Shanghai Film School, and then there’s my mother’s friend who teaches here. She was once a famous ballerina. She studied with masters in Russia.”

As the girls were talking, there was suddenly a stir in the crowd as a green sedan pulled up to the school entrance and a handsome man in a well-tailored Mao suit got out.

“It’s him!” Zhongmei heard somebody say, as she was jostled by somebody behind her trying to get a better look. She watched as the man smiled at the people standing in line and then turned to walk into the school courtyard. He was the most elegant person Zhongmei had ever seen, tall, fine-featured, and clearly self-confident. But there was also something modest about him, a kind of embarrassment at attracting so much attention.