A Girl Named Faithful Plum (26 page)

On that very first morning, she did the impossible stretching and balancing exercise that had defeated all the girls in Teacher Zhu’s class just before the Chinese New Year’s break. She lifted her right leg and held it in the crook of her arm; then as she went on pointe on her left foot, she let go of the barre, and she started to topple over right away and had to grab hold again with her left hand to stop her fall. She did it again with the same results, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Once she missed her grab at the barre and she did end up spread-eagle on the floor. And she was still trying it, without success, when Old Zhou appeared at the door of studio two.

“It’s time to stop,” he whispered. “Hurry downstairs.”

Zhongmei flew back to her dormitory, gently pushed open the door so it would make no sound, kicked off her ballet slippers, hoisted herself up onto her upper bunk, and crawled under her quilt so when the bell sounded nobody would suspect she hadn’t been sleeping all along. She would lie in bed for two or three minutes ardently wishing that she could sleep for hours. But when Old Zhou rang the school bell for the compulsory six o’clock wake-up, she roused herself, stretched, put on her sweats and her weight-loss suit, and went downstairs with the
other students for the run in Taoranting Park, the calisthenics and stretching exercises in the courtyard, then fundamentals of ballet, the academic classes, Chinese dance, martial arts, and gymnastics—the whole exhausting day ending with dinner with her leg extended across the table in front of her, evening stretching and practice, and, finally, at nine o’clock, lights-out, face to the wall, sleep. And then, in the pitch blackness of the next morning would come the tug on the string, the misery of being dragged awake like a person yanked by a rope from someplace warm and cozy to someplace cold and inhospitable, and then two more hours of clandestine, solitary self-instruction, undertaken as though learning ballet at a dance academy were some kind of a transgression, a violation of the rules.

W
inter turned to spring, and one Saturday about two months after Zhongmei began her early-morning practice, she went to the cafeteria for lunch to find a scene of commotion. A terrified kitten was in the room, and some boys were gleefully chasing it, throwing aluminum soup spoons at it as it scampered along the walls and between the tables. The kitten was white with orange patches over its frightened eyes. It was meowing in terror and limping on a hind leg. The boys knocked over chairs and slid over tables trying to get to it. The kitten scrambled as best it could behind a door, but now it had no way out, and at that point, Zhongmei, whose tender heart was already bleeding for it, could take no more.

“Stop!” she shouted, and placed herself between the kitten and its pursuers. “You’re going to kill it!”

“It’s going to die anyway,” one of the boys said. “It’s a stray. Nobody will feed it. It’s better to kill it now and put it out of its misery.”

True, it must have been a stray. It must have found an open door or window to get into the building and then followed its nose to the cafeteria. Zhongmei picked it up and held it close. She could feel its heart pounding inside its skinny chest.

“I’ll feed it,” she said.

“It’s dirty,” the boy said.

“I’ll give it a bath,” said Zhongmei, and she ran, the kitten in her arms, back to the dormitory.

Keeping a cat was absolutely forbidden at the Beijing Dance Academy, and Zhongmei knew it. But she already had plans to spend the next day with Policeman Li’s family. She would bring the kitten there, and they would take care of it. She knew that they would. But what to do with it in the meantime? She had to hide it for one night. There was no doubt that if Comrade Tsang found out about it, the kitten would be removed from the premises and Zhongmei would be severely reprimanded and required to write an abject self-criticism admitting that she had been selfish, self-centered, and weak, and begging the forgiveness of the school, her teachers, her classmates, and all of China.

But most likely it would be safe in the dormitory. All of the girls would want to protect it. So Zhongmei put the kitten into her dresser drawer. She ran to the cafeteria, ate quickly, and ran back to the dormitory with a steamed bun for the kitten, the kind of food a cat would normally disdain, but not this cat. It was too hungry to be fussy and it devoured the food as though it were a chicken liver or a piece of fish. Then, seeming to know that Zhongmei was trying to save it, it went peacefully
back into the dresser drawer and fell asleep so Zhongmei could go off to her afternoon classes.

“It’s for your own good,” Zhongmei whispered, sliding the drawer shut. “Be quiet. If you make a lot of noise, you’ll get us both in trouble.”

Zhongmei went impatiently through the afternoon. She did her academic classes, reading, math, and calligraphy, her Chinese classical dance class, acrobatics, and martial arts, thinking always about the kitten. It was when she was practicing her hand and arm movements in classical Chinese dance that she thought of a name for it, Yunqi, which means “lucky” in Chinese. Because lucky it was—saved from death at the hands of the boys, protected by the girls, who would keep its presence a secret. Only one night and a morning, and as long as the kitten didn’t go crazy in the drawer, make a lot of noise, and get found out by one of the teachers or security guards or, the worst possibility of all, by Old Maid Tsang, everything would be all right.

When Zhongmei got back to the dormitory, she fed Yunqi another steamed bun. She hid the cat under her sweatshirt and ran down to the laundry room, where she filled a plastic bucket with warm water and some soap and gave Yunqi, who didn’t like this aspect of being rescued at all, a bath. Later, she smuggled it out of the dormitory down a narrow path between the building and the compound wall, where Yunqi could do its duty. She brought it back up to the dormitory and made a little nest out of some clothes in her drawer where the kitten could sleep.

“Oh, it’s so cute,” one of the girls said, and carried Lucky off to another bunk, where some of the other girls began to play with it. For the first time, Lucky started behaving like the kitten it was, despite its limp. It chased after a bit of ribbon that the girls dangled in front of it. Zhongmei, already tired, sat on Xiaolan’s bed and the two girls did what they did almost every night, which was look through a book. Soon their attention was riveted by a photograph of a Chinese ballerina doing one of the most difficult steps in the repertoire, a step that Teacher Zhu had told them would only come in their second year of fundamentals of ballet. It was that counterclockwise pirouette, done with the leg raised and the body curved. The dancer in the picture wore a jade-green robe over a flowing white skirt, her hair tied back in a jeweled clasp and hanging down her back. The movement required her to spiral downward until she was almost folded in two and then to spiral back up. The picture showed something magnificent, a true mastery of a movement that required years of practice to get right.

“You shouldn’t even look at pictures like that. They’ll only make you dream of doing things that you’ll never be able to do.”

It was Jinhua, of course. Zhongmei and Xiaolan had been so absorbed in the photograph that they hadn’t even noticed her peering at the book over their shoulders.

“And you will?” Zhongmei said.

“Oh, sure,” Jinhua said. “I did stuff just like that on television in Shanghai when I was just a little girl.”

“Like that?” Xiaolan said, pointing at the picture.

“It’s hard,” said Jinhua, “but look.” She took an open space near the entrance to the dorm room, struck a pose, and then whirled into action, her body turning gracefully counterclockwise. She did two good turns, very impressive, but then struggled with her balance on the third turn and had to stop.

“Wooooo-wooo!” Jinhua shouted with delight, ignoring her less-than-perfect ending. A few of the other girls applauded and shouted. Jinhua curtsied and bowed as if to an audience of thousands. She blew kisses. She did a little jeté and turned triumphantly in Zhongmei’s direction.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” she said. “In Shanghai, we start ballet when we’re five years old. It’s not your fault that you’re so far behind. Anyway, you won’t be here much longer. You’ll have to go home after you come in dead last in the final performance.”

Zhongmei, trying not to pay attention, kept looking at her book.

“Soon you’ll be back home, where you can do the rooster dance,” Jinhua said, laughing at her own cleverness, and scratching at the floor in imitation of a chicken. A few of the other girls, not all of them, laughed with her.

Zhongmei’s ears burned. She looked up at Jinhua, anger flashing in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. She got up, smiled wanly at Xiaolan, and turned to the spot where Jinhua had just done her turn.

“I think the farm girl’s gonna try something,” Jinhua said.

Zhongmei pretended not to hear. She saw Xiaolan motioning to her, trying to tell her not to do anything. She was afraid
it would just open her up to more ridicule. But Zhongmei very calmly took up a position there in the dormitory, and she did what she always did when she needed to perform a difficult movement. She entered into a closed world, the world of a story that she would tell with emotion and movement. She shut out Jinhua and the other silly creatures in the dormitory and concentrated on the story, the story of a girl who stands still, erupts into motion, spirals downward, then upward, and then, after several rotations, returns to motionlessness. It would be the story of a girl who believes at first that something is impossible but, with time, discovers that she can do it.

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.