A Girl Named Faithful Plum (25 page)

“But you know,” Zhongqin resumed after a pause, “you can only do your best. And if you work as hard as you can and you don’t succeed, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“But I will be ashamed,” Zhongmei said. “The mayor himself came to our house to congratulate me. The picture of the whole family was in the newspaper. If I’m expelled at the end of the year and become a dance teacher in Baoquanling, I’ll be known forever as the girl who didn’t make good.”

The two sisters were walking at the very edge of the state farm near the river that divides China from Russian Siberia, Zhongmei lifting her feet high to stretch her leg muscles,
Zhongqin wheeling her bicycle alongside her. In the distance, the sun sparkled on the Heilong River, which had iced over and was covered in a layer of ruffled, twig-strewn snow. The trestle bridge to the Soviet Union was just around the bend, though there was no traffic on it, because relations between China and the Soviet Union were very bad and the border was closed. Zhongmei stamped her foot on the hard ground.

“I tell you,” she said, “I will die before that happens. I mean it. I will die.”

Zhongqin knew she was telling the truth.

“But don’t the other teachers like you?” she asked.

“Most of them do, yes,” said Zhongmei, “especially my Chinese classical dance teacher. She’s always telling me that I’m doing very well.”

“And then there’s Jia Zuoguang. He let you repeat your improvisation at the audition. He must like you. Surely he won’t allow you to be sent packing.”

“I don’t know about him,” Zhongmei said. “I’ve never even seen him since the audition. Do you think he pays attention to first-year students? Anyway, even if Teacher Zhu is my only enemy, she’s very important and powerful at the school. And also, none of the rehearsal teachers want me. There are only two girls who haven’t been taken for rehearsal, and I’m one of them.”

Zhongmei felt tears forming in her eyes and rolling icily down her cheek.

“You just can’t imagine how good the other girls are,” Zhongmei said. “They’re so pretty and graceful. Here in
Baoquanling, people think I’m good, but at the Beijing Dance Academy, I’m the worst.”

“No, Zhongmei,” Zhongqin exclaimed. “Don’t let them make you think that way. Don’t give up. The biggest embarrassment is to give up.”

“Well, I don’t want to give up, but I don’t have much of a chance whether I do or not.”

The truth is that it’s not easy for a young girl to believe in herself with somebody like Teacher Zhu against her, telling her that her pliés made her look like a duck. Zhongmei thought of the night Xiaolan had told her that she was the best of them all, and that encouraged her, but it was hard for her to banish all self-doubt from her spirit, especially when she thought of Jinhua lying on the floor of the dormitory and laughing with derision at her. Jinhua came from Shanghai. Her father was a big official in the city government. Her mother too. She was one of the girls who had performed on television before coming to the Beijing Dance Academy. She was a haughty, nasty girl, but she was pretty and she was a good dancer. Could it be true that a girl like Jinhua belonged and Zhongmei didn’t?

Reading her mind, Zhongqin said, “You told me in one of your letters that each student performs before the whole school at the end of the year. If you show everybody at the school how good you are, you couldn’t be expelled, right?”

“Do well in the year-end performance? How can I do that if I can’t even take the ballet class?”

“Can you take it on your own?” Zhongqin asked.

“On my own?” Zhongmei replied.

“Watch what the other girls do and practice it yourself. Go to the park on Sunday and do it there. I don’t know, but don’t give up. There must be a way.”

“There’s no way,” Zhongmei said, but Zhongqin had given her an idea. A way, a possible way to avoid the worst, began to form in her mind. Show the whole school at the end of the year what she could do! Suddenly she realized what the portrait of Chairman Mao was telling her the night before. There was a phrase of his that all Chinese schoolchildren were expected to memorize: “Dare to struggle; dare to win!”

Yes! she thought. She would struggle, and maybe if she struggled hard enough, she would win. But again, how? She looked at Zhongqin, who was laboring with her bicycle over the stubbly field. Farm trucks clattered in the distance. On the horizon was the huge chimney of the power plant, a plume of black smoke soaring above it toward the clear blue sky. Baoquanling was so different from Beijing, so barren, especially at this time of year. It was so far away that Zhongmei felt it wasn’t the edge of China but that it was beyond the edge, and that she and everything she knew had dropped into some abyss on the other side.

“You’re right, Da-jie,” Zhongmei exclaimed. “I am going to show them! I’m going to do it!”

“That’s the spirit!” Zhongqin said. She walked a little further. “How?” she asked.

And Zhongmei spent the rest of the time on the way home telling her her plan.

B
esides Xiaolan, the other person who was friendly to Zhongmei at the school was Old Zhou, the night watchman with the wispy beard whom Zhongmei had met her very first day at the Dance Academy. Everybody called him Lao Ye, Grandpa, and everybody saw him every day as they passed through the courtyard gate on their way to the morning Taoranting jog and on their way back. After greeting students in the morning, Old Zhou would then sleep for most of the day, because his main job, keeping watch over the buildings in case of thieves or other intruders, came at night. Every couple of hours or so he would walk around the Dance Academy perimeter, between the buildings and the outer wall. At six o’clock every morning he rang the wake-up bell. Whenever he saw Zhongmei emerge into the courtyard for the early exercise, he always gave her a friendly smile.

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.