A Girl Named Faithful Plum (13 page)

“My name is Liu Lingzhang,” she said, “and I’ll be your instructor for stage five of the audition. I’m going to teach you a few dance sequences and then each of you will perform them in turn in front of the judges.” She turned toward the panel of two women and a man.

Zhongmei watched the movements of the sequence carefully. She was nervous when it was her turn to perform them, but she was determined to do them all without a mistake, and she did. At the end of the day, once again she got the coveted card instructing her to return. It told her to report to the school’s main auditorium at the usual time, eight o’clock in the morning. Again, she and a few other girls skipped happily to the courtyard while most of the others trudged sadly down the stairs, knowing that they would never be coming back.

The auditorium was a large room on the first floor of the academy, and when Zhongmei arrived there the next morning, she saw a long table set up at the head of the room directly
under the portrait of Chairman Mao, and dozens of girls and boys milling about, the lucky few who were still in contention. Zhongmei tried to count the number of them, and she got up to sixty with quite a few left uncounted when a hush settled over the room and the judges, appearing from a side entrance, took their places at the table.

“Good morning,” one of them said. He was the tall, elegant, and handsome man that Zhongmei instantly recognized as the very Jia Zuoguang whom she had seen getting out of his car outside the school two days before, the greatest dancer in China!

“I want to congratulate all of you for getting to stage six of the 1978 audition for the Beijing Dance Academy, the first truly open audition the school has ever had,” he said. “That’s already a great achievement and you should all be proud. Every one of you has already shown that you have what it takes to be a dancer. But as you know, there are spots for only twelve boys and twelve girls in the class that will come to school at the end of August, and we are going to choose just seven boys and seven girls from the audition here in Beijing. There are still more than one hundred of you in the room today, one hundred and twenty to be exact, and that’s one hundred and twenty out of more than twenty thousand candidates who began this audition a week ago. That means that all of you have already done very well.”

Zhongmei’s heart fluttered as she listened. The greatest dancer in China, and he was there right in front of her in the very same room! Zhongmei had never seen anybody famous
before in person. But Jia Zuoguang seemed not only famous to her. There was a calm gentleness about him. He didn’t have the bluster and self-importance of so many officials in China. He seemed nice.

“One more thing,” Jia continued. “Of course you should all try hard in the last two stages of the audition, but don’t be too disappointed if you aren’t one of the lucky fourteen. Of course I know that you will be disappointed, but I hope not so much that you’ll be discouraged from continuing to dance. You’re all good, and there are other schools in China for dance, other opportunities for you, and I’m sure you will all find them.”

Don’t be disappointed? Other schools? Zhongmei heard those words, but to her they meant the exact opposite of what Jia intended them to mean. Seeing Jia made her feel that there was nothing else in the world that mattered other than being selected for the Beijing Dance Academy. There was no other school in the world for her but this one. There was no other place for her than right here where he was.

“Today,” Jia was saying, “the procedure will change. Yesterday you went in a small group to a studio to perform some sequences that were taught to you. That part will not change. Some teachers will introduce you to a series of steps, and you will perform them, not in a small studio but right here in front of the main panel.

“After that,” Jia continued, “the judges will meet to decide a list of fifty finalists—twenty-five girls and twenty-five boys—who will be invited back for stage seven of the audition. So as not to require that you wait here while our meeting takes
place, instead of giving you cards at the end of the day, we will post the names in the display case in front of the school, and starting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, you will be able to come to see if your name is on the list. The final stage of the audition will start the day after tomorrow at the same time, eight o’clock.”

Jia then waved at a teacher who emerged into the middle of the room to show the candidates the steps they would have to perform. The first ones were pretty easy, and Zhongmei, when her turn came, did them with no problem. They got harder as the day wore on, and Zhongmei watched as some of the candidates stumbled, and a few of them even fell. But she didn’t fail to notice that some of the girls were very good. Before Zhongmei was called for the final sequence of steps, she heard the name Wang Tianyuan called, and she watched the girl who was sure she had already been chosen do her steps. She looked good, Zhongmei felt. She was a good dancer, strong and sure, but Zhongmei also noted that she seemed a little short and slightly pudgy, not sleek and long-limbed like most of the other girls. Also, at the very end of her dance, during a movement that wound up with the dancer standing on one leg, the other raised behind her, her arms spread like a bird in flight, Zhongmei saw a bit of wobble, and that gave her some hope. If she could do that movement without wobbling, Zhongmei thought, then it would mean that she was better than Tianyuan and that would mean,
guanxi
or not, that she should be chosen ahead of her. It would be nice, Zhongmei thought, if both of them got into the school; if only one of them could make it, it should be the one who was better.

Zhongmei didn’t wobble. And when the day finished, she felt that she had done well. But so had a lot of other girls, and anyway, maybe, as Tianyuan had told her, the whole audition was a sham.

And so, naturally, she was in a state of high excitement when she arrived the next morning at eight o’clock sharp on Policeman Li’s motorcycle. Zhongmei bolted to the display case before they had come to a full stop. Two sheets of paper each with two rows of names were posted, and there was already a good deal of pushing and shoving as girls and their parents tried to get close enough to read it. Alongside was another display case, in front of which boys and their parents were doing the same thing.

In Chinese, there is no alphabetical order, because there are no letters in Chinese like there are in languages like English, French, and Spanish. Instead, words are formed by what are called Chinese characters, each character representing a sort of picture of its meaning. Each last name is indicated by a single character, and characters are organized by the number of strokes it takes to form that character.

When Zhongmei got near enough to the fateful piece of paper to read it, she quickly scanned down the list. Along the way she saw Wang Tianyuan. Wang has four strokes, so it is higher in the order of characters than Li, which requires six strokes. Despite her wobble the day before, she had made it to the final stage, which made Zhongmei think that maybe she was right, maybe the decision about who would be accepted had already been made, and that would be bad for Zhongmei, because she knew that no arrangement existed for her to get
into the school. But she didn’t think about that for long. She scanned rapidly down the list to the surname Li. There were five of them, Li being a very common name, and Zhongmei frantically devoured the full names of each of them—Li Xiaohua, Li Zhaoping, Li Xuenian, Li Linghao, and then, there it was—Li Zhongmei, written in clear, squarish characters. She had been chosen for stage seven!

T
he next morning, Zhongmei found herself wishing that Policeman Li would drive faster. She sat on the back of his motorcycle, the wind ruffling her hair, hardly noticing as they negotiated the narrow lanes near Li Zhongshan’s old house, rolled down some broader avenues lined with gray cement-block apartment houses, and roared past a walled park and another neighborhood of narrow twisting lanes before pulling up to the Beijing Dance Academy.

Stage seven would be held in a large studio on the second floor. Once again, Vice Director Jia greeted the candidates and made a short speech.

“In the final stage of the audition,” he said, “we will ask every candidate, both boys and girls, to do an improvisation. Each candidate will pick a piece of paper out of a bowl. The word on the paper will be your theme. You will read it aloud, and then, right away, with no time for preparation, you will make up a three- to five-minute dance expressing that theme.
You will be something from nature—a bird, a rabbit, the wind, a cloud, a peony, a rose, a tiger, a mouse, or something else.

“You will take a piece of paper out of the bowl when it’s your turn,” Jia said, and Zhongmei noticed something new in his tone, something stricter, just a bit harder than before. There were no words of encouragement for those who wouldn’t be selected, like there had been the day before.

“There will be a piano accompanist,” he said. “And this is very important: you must begin right away, as soon as the music starts. Once you have performed, you may return home. A list of the boys and girls chosen to attend the Dance Academy will be posted, like yesterday morning, on a sheet of paper in the display case.”

Jia told all the candidates to leave the auditorium and to wait in the courtyard until their names were called, and so everybody filed out of the building nervously to wait their turn. The atmosphere, always tense, was especially so now. Nobody spoke. Zhongmei saw Tianyuan standing with her grandmother, and she saw that Tianyuan saw her, but they didn’t say anything to each other. There were fifty eleven-year-olds there, and it made Zhongmei a little sad to think that all but seven of the girls and seven of the boys were going to be sent home. To have made it as far as stage seven and then in the end to be told that you had not been chosen seemed almost cruel to her.

Finally Zhongmei heard her name called, and she entered the large room where the improvisations were taking place. She watched as the girl just in front of her finished her turn,
and then Zhongmei stepped forward and faced the table of judges. She managed a smile, but she had never been so scared in her life.

A large blue porcelain bowl materialized in front of her, held by one of the girls who had measured her body in what now seemed like an event from a long time ago. Zhongmei took a piece of paper, unfolded it, and gulped when she saw the word on it.

“Tsao,”
she said, looking at Vice Director Jia—grass. He didn’t smile. His previous gentleness had disappeared. He was now an official carrying out his duty, and Zhongmei, expecting a friendlier tone, was disconcerted. Instantly the accompanist started in on the piano. Zhongmei listened for just a bar or so before starting her improvisation. Grass, she thought. She had expected an animal, perhaps a flower, but grass? She remembered later that she was struck by the beauty of the music, and maybe she was waiting also for some sign of encouragement from Jia, and these two things and her puzzlement about grass were the reasons for her delay. But it was only a short one. She took her initial pose, and moved to take her first step when, at a signal from Jia, the accompanist stopped, and she was left on the floor in front of the judges frozen in place, not knowing what to do.

“Next!” Jia said.

Zhongmei stood in stunned silence.

“Thank you,” the school’s vice director said. “You may step to the side.”

Zhongmei didn’t move. “What?” she said.

“Step aside,” Jia said, looking past Zhongmei. “Next candidate, please,” he said, and the girl who had been just behind Zhongmei in the line stepped alongside her.

“But I haven’t done my improvisation!” Zhongmei said.

“We waited for you, and you didn’t dance,” Jia told her. His voice was impatient. The nice man of a few days before seemed to have vanished.

“But,” Zhongmei stammered.

“Please move over for the next girl.”

“But I didn’t have my chance yet!” Zhongmei protested. “I want to do my dance!”

“You were given your chance, and you didn’t take it and that’s that,” came Jia’s no-nonsense voice. “Next candidate!”

Zhongmei didn’t leave.

“You’re holding up the line,” Jia said. “We don’t have time for anybody to perform twice.”

“But I didn’t perform even once,” Zhongmei insisted.

“I said very clearly at the beginning that you must begin your dance right away. You didn’t. So please step aside,” Jia commanded. He leaned forward and glared at Zhongmei, who shuddered at the force of his authority. Resigned, she took a step or two backward to leave the room, which seemed to be spinning slowly around her, the walls rotating on some invisible axis, the portrait of Chairman Mao, the table of judges, Jia himself, drifting to the right.

Zhongmei closed her eyes for a second to try to get the room to stay still, and as she did so, standing there in the momentary darkness, she made a decision that changed her whole life. For no doubt, if she had obediently turned to the auditorium’s exit
and walked away as ordered, she would have lost her chance to be a student at the Beijing Dance Academy forever, and the dream that had been taking shape in her mind as she passed each stage of the audition would have come to nothing. But standing there with her eyes closed in the rotating room, she heard a small voice inside her telling her, “No! You got this far. Don’t just meekly retreat like a wounded dog. Put up a fight. Be like that girl in
The Red Detachment of Women
who stood up to the evil landlord and his henchmen!”