A Girl Named Faithful Plum (20 page)

Zhongmei was enthralled. She had studied some of the movements of Beijing Opera in her class on classical Chinese dance, but she had never seen an actual opera before, and she loved everything about it, the stunning costumes, the masks, the leaps and flying somersaults, the martial arts, the clever dialogue, the tender love scenes, the many different voices, and the music, made by cymbals and gongs, flutes, mandolins, zithers, wooden clappers,
er-hus
, and other stringed instruments. Every once in a while a member of the audience, unable to contain his excitement at some especially
well-executed aria or gesture, would shout out a throaty
hao!—
good—and Zhongmei found that especially thrilling. And she was mesmerized by the story of this particular opera itself, the injustice that was done, the bad judgment of the emperor, and the very long time it took for vengeance to be exacted. This was an opera, and her life was real, but wasn’t she too the victim of an injustice, and didn’t she too deserve revenge? Would it come? Was there a Zhao family orphan waiting for her someplace in her future? She couldn’t imagine that there was, and yet the opera gave her hope that in the end justice does win out.

That night, as usual, Zhongmei was told to share a bed with Da-ma, while Policeman Li slept on the living room couch, and, as usual, Zhongmei protested.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “I can sleep on the couch.”

“Oh, let us spoil you a little,” Da-ma said. “You have a hard enough time at that Dance Academy as it is.”

“I slept on the hard, cold ground when I was in the army,” Policeman Li would always say. “I’m very comfortable on the couch.”

“We want you to feel like this is your home in Beijing,” Da-ma said. “Come anytime you want. You don’t have to let us know beforehand. Just show up. We love you.”

Zhongmei, fighting back tears, realized that this was the first time in her eleven years of life that anybody had ever said that to her. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t love her. She knew they did. It was just that with five children and such long hours of work, they never really thought to say it.

After a few weeks, Zhongmei learned how to take the bus
to the Lis’ home so that Policeman Li didn’t have to come to pick her up, though he always brought her back on his motorcycle on Sunday. In the first couple of months, when Zhongmei went to Comrade Tsang to ask for the bus fare, she would tell her she needed it to go to the Li family residence in the Ximen District. After a while, when she decided to spend the night with the Lis, she would simply tell Comrade Tsang, “I’m going home.”

Zhongmei didn’t go “home” every weekend. The girls were expected to stay at school some Sundays in order to take part in the weekly cleanups, though they were allowed to sleep until eight o’clock, two hours later than usual. Once they were up and had breakfast, they were given assignments. Some swept the dormitory. Others dusted the furniture. Still others took the bedsheets off the beds and brought them to a laundry room for washing. The bedsheets came in pairs and were sewn onto each other, one on top and the other on the bottom of a feather comforter, so first the thread that held them together had to be removed before the girls could put the sheets into basins filled with soap and water and walk on them with bare feet to get them clean. When they were dry, they had to be sewn back onto the comforters.

That first Sunday, two of the girls accidentally sewed their own loose trousers onto the sheets, and when they got up to put the comforters back on the beds, they found they were attached to them! There were howls of dismay from the two and shrieks of laughter from the others. Then some of the others threw the sheets over the girls who had accidentally sewed themselves to them, and everybody ended up in a tangled, giggling heap on the floor.

“What is going on here!” The voice, commanding and angry, could only be that of one person. Comrade Tsang stood in the doorway of the laundry room glowering.

“Everybody, up!” she commanded.

All the girls stood at attention, Zhongmei included, but the two unfortunates who were sewed to their sheets were still tangled together on the floor.

“You two,” Comrade Tsang said. “You are vandalizing state property. This is a serious offense.”

“But,” one of the girls began, finally managing to extricate herself from the other and to stand straight, though still attached to her sheet, which draped around her waist, “it was an accident. We sewed—”

“Be quiet!” Comrade Tsang bellowed. “I see what you’ve done. It was careless and stupid and it has damaged state property. You will both reimburse the school for the damage you’ve done.”

Zhongmei swallowed hard. Reimburse the school? If she had been one of the girls who had sewed the sheets onto herself by mistake, she wouldn’t have had the money for that.

Slowly, solemnly, nervously, their fingers trembling, the two girls pulled at the stitches and freed themselves from the sheets. The other girls helped. It took a long time.

“Come with me,” Comrade Tsang said when the job was finished. “The rest of you, finish cleaning up at once. You saw these two girls damaging state property and all of you thought it was funny. You should be ashamed, all of you. Each and every one of you will write a self-criticism and hand it in to me before lights-out tonight.”

With that, Comrade Tsang led the two more guilty girls out of the laundry room. When they returned later that afternoon,
they told the others that they had had to write self-criticisms, and to turn over one yuan each for damage to the sheets.

“One yuan!” Zhongmei had exclaimed, thinking about her parents, who together made only about thirty yuan a month.

Zhongmei turned and sat at the little desk that was reserved for her schoolwork and wrote her self-criticism:

On most afternoons, those that involved no interference from Comrade Tsang, the girls who had spent the weekend at school took the bus to Tiananmen Square, and on one early Sunday, Zhongmei went along with the others. It was exciting to go there, and Zhongmei’s troubled heart swelled with pride in her country when she did. She gazed anew at the magnificence of the Forbidden City, the arched marble bridges leading up to the outer gate, the immensity of the rust-red wall that extended along the whole edge of the square, the astonishing beauty and height of the curved roofs soaring above the
portrait of Chairman Mao. Huge letters reading
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
and
LONG LIVE THE UNITY OF THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
extended outward on either side of the gate.

This was the magnificent palace where, before modern times, only the emperor, his high officials, his wives and other family members, and their servants were allowed to set foot. Ordinary people were banned—for example, farmers’ daughters from Heilongjiang—which is why it was called the Forbidden City. Now it was a museum that thousands of people visited every day. A kind of grandstand extended to the left and right, above the great red wall, and that was where China’s leaders stood and watched giant parades on October 1, China’s National Day, and on other holidays.

On this first Sunday excursion, Zhongmei went along to the square with about half the girls from her class. Xiaolan, who was going also, had urged her to join the little expedition. The girls dutifully went to see Comrade Tsang for their bus fare and a little money for a snack, though Zhongmei only took the bus fare. They fought their way onto a crowded bus, and twenty minutes later they were strolling on the vast esplanade.

Zhongmei wore her yellow dress, the pink blouse with the embroidered ducks, and her green shoes, and she felt people turning their heads to look at her as she passed. She thought it was because she was very pretty and very elegantly dressed, and, it is true, she was very pretty and the costume did have some elegance to it. The pleated skirt was narrowly cut and fell gracefully to her knees. But people weren’t only looking
because Zhongmei was pretty. What caught their eyes was the color scheme, which was just a bit too much, the yellow, the pink, the green. City people recognized it as the kind of overdone color combination that somebody from the countryside might think she should wear in Beijing, when, actually, something a bit more subdued was the fashion. The other girls wore store-bought clothing, print blouses, red scarves, cotton pants, and black cloth shoes, for example.

“Oh, ice sticks!” one of the girls shouted. A man in baggy blues wheeled a metal cart into the square. She used the Chinese word
bing-gwer, bing
meaning “ice,”
gwer
meaning “stick.” “I’m buying!” the girl said.

Her name was Jinhua, and she had been one of those who snickered most obviously at Zhongmei when she had made her error about going on television.

“We’ll take turns,” she cried. “Every week somebody else will invite all the others. That way it will all even out.”

The ice-stick man opened the lid to his cart.

“Let’s see,” Jinhua said. “How many of us are there? Um … eight!”

“Um,” said Zhongmei, “don’t get one for me.”

“Why not?” said Jinhua. “Don’t you farm girls from Baoquanling know what an ice stick is?” She giggled and so did some of the others. Zhongmei’s ears turned red. She had stretched out the words
Bao
 … 
Quan
 … 
Ling
as if the name of Zhongmei’s hometown itself was something strange and unfashionable, like a place on another planet. Jinhua was from Shanghai, China’s biggest city.

“Ice sticks aren’t really sticks,” Jinhua said mockingly. “They’re not from trees, so don’t worry, you won’t have to eat bark.” Some of the other girls laughed at the joke.

Zhongmei looked at the ground. She was furious at Jinhua but tried to pretend that she wasn’t bothered by her mockery. There were more important things. Zhongmei thought about Lao Lao and vowed to write her a letter as soon as she got back. Who cared about ice sticks? Ice sticks weren’t important. Once she had gotten poor Zhongling into serious trouble with their mother because of an ice stick, and Zhongmei remembered that time now, with yet another pang of remorse.

It happened when Zhongmei was home sick, which meant that Zhongling had to stay home from school also, like she did the time she had ruined their mother’s carrot bed. In the middle of the day, Zhongmei suddenly thought how nice it would be if she could eat an ice stick. In Baoquanling, there was a small stand in the center of town where ice sticks were sold—only one flavor, a sort of milky syrup—and every once in a while, the Li children were able to have one, but it was a rare treat. But now Zhongmei felt it would soothe the soreness in her throat. The cold sweetness of it would make her happy when she wasn’t feeling very good.

“I’m so hot,” she had complained to Zhongling. “I have a sore throat. An ice stick will be good for me.”

“An ice stick!” Zhongling said. “You know Ma and Ba won’t let me spend five fen on an ice stick for you.”

“But I need it,” Zhongmei protested. “I have a fever. I’m burning up.”

“I can’t leave you alone to go get one,” Zhongling said.

“Take me with you!” Zhongmei shouted. “I really want an ice stick. Please.” With every second Zhongmei’s craving increased until she felt she would die unless she could experience that icy sweetness, the wondrous texture of coldness melting in her mouth. She was bored at home anyway. There was nothing to do but read the book of stories she had from school, and she’d done that several times already. Needless to say, there were no toys in the Li household, no dolls or stuffed animals, no board games or trading cards or video games of the sort that Chinese kids play with today.

“Please,” Zhongmei said again, as plaintively as she could.

“No!” Zhongling said.

“Yes!” Zhongmei shouted back.

“You’re a greedy little girl,” Zhongling said. “Anyway, I don’t have five fen.”

“Liar!” Zhongmei shouted. “You have money in the yogurt jar you keep in your drawer.”

“Are you a spy? Keep your snotty little nose out of my things, you brat.”

“I’m hot, and an ice stick will cool me down,” Zhongmei replied. “Besides, it’s my birthday.”

“It’s your birthday? Are you sure?”

Baoquanling wasn’t the sort of place where a fuss was made over children’s birthdays, especially in a family with five children. There was that single hard-boiled egg, and Zhongmei was expecting to get that when her mother got home that night. But there were no parties, no presents wrapped in shiny paper with smiley faces on it, no cakes, no candles, no singing
of “Happy Birthday,” no grandparents calling from across the country. One egg—that was it, and there were years when Zhongmei’s busy, harried mother forgot even that.

“What day is it today?” Zhongling asked.

“It’s June twenty-seventh, my birthday,” Zhongmei said.

“But you’re sick,” Zhongling said. “You can’t walk all the way to the ice-stick stand. It’s too far.”