A Girl Named Faithful Plum (23 page)

T
he fall turned into winter, and Beijing was battered by the blasts of cold air that sweep over the North China Plain every year. In the mornings, the girls’ feather comforters would be covered in a fine layer of yellow dust, blown in from faraway Mongolia. The air smelled of coal burning in ten million furnaces and cooking stoves in the city. Outside, the city’s sidewalks were piled high with cabbages, which people kept in great, aromatic mounds wherever they had room—in their stairwells, in kitchen sheds, along the walls that divided their homes from the street. Cabbage was the only vegetable readily available during the winter in those days in China. People pickled it with hot peppers to make a condiment called
pao tsai
. They cooked it in soup, or chopped it for dumplings, or fried it in garlic and oil, and ate it with steamed bread or rice.

Whenever the girls left the academy, even just to go to buy toothpaste at the general store down the main street
across from Taoranting Park, they would see people bundled in padded cotton, waiting in long lines to get their monthly allotments of rice or, if they had small children, powdered milk. China in those days was very poor. Meat was rationed at about half a pound per person per month. Even toilet paper, which was brown and rough, was considered a luxury, and most people made do with squares of paper they cut out from the newspaper. In the early evening, as dark enveloped the city, there would be masses of people waiting curbside for a bus to take them home. And when, after what always seemed a long time, it arrived, there would be a near violent rush for the door because there was never enough space for everybody inside. Whenever she saw that, Zhongmei felt glad that she lived at the school and only took the bus when she went to spend a Saturday with Policeman Li and Da-ma, and the bus wasn’t so crowded on Saturdays.

The New Year in China usually falls in late January, and when it does, the whole country closes down for a week, and so of course did the Beijing Dance Academy—a few days longer than a week in the case of the Dance Academy, to give time for out-of-town students to get home and back. It was the only time of the year, aside from a few weeks during the summer vacation, when everybody was required to go home, and, in any case, every Chinese person wants to be home for the New Year. Zhongmei packed her small suitcase and Policeman Li came to the school and took her to her Beijing home for a day of pampering by Da-ma. Then he brought her to the train station for the trip that Zhongmei dreaded, the two nights and three days
on the train to Harbin, then to Jiamusi, the bus to Hegang, and another bus to her hometown, which she never wanted to leave again as long as she lived—only to have to leave again after a few days or so for the long, grueling trip back to Beijing.

As expected, the trip was awful, interminable. Because so many people were traveling for the holidays, the train stations were a pandemonium of desperate crowds of people bunching up at ticket windows, pressing together at turnstiles, scrambling to find places on trains. Zhongmei had a ticket—the Dance Academy helped with that—but to be a small girl traveling alone on China’s grim and creaky transportation network was a waking nightmare. The hard-seat cars were ice cold, drafty, and crowded. The toilet was slimy and smelly. Suitcases and plastic satchels were jammed under the seats and between them, in the aisles, and on the overhead luggage racks, from which every once in a while one would get dislodged and drop down with a menacing thud. It was a miracle nobody got knocked unconscious. Zhongmei squeezed into a seat, her shoulders compressed by the two much larger people on either side of her. She managed to doze a little during the long first night as the train rumbled northward passing one brown village after another, but mostly she stayed awake, unable to sleep, yearning for the night to be over. At long last, dawn broke, and out the stained, streaked window she saw brick kilns sitting in the middle of stubbly fields, crumbling stone walls, bicycle carts, smokestacks on the horizon, and the outlines of distant hills a dark purple under the pale gray sky.

The train stopped at deserted platforms, and in the great
silence Zhongmei thought about her situation. In the last few weeks before the New Year’s break, a new disappointment had been added to her life. Every morning a list went up on a bulletin board outside the cafeteria assigning the first-year girls to studios for afternoon rehearsals. These rehearsals were aimed at teaching the skills of partnering, and it was the only time in the first year when boys and girls practiced together. The students in Zhongmei’s class did simple duets. The boys learned to lift and support the girls, the girls to be lifted and supported. In addition, a special group of rehearsal instructors separate from the regular faculty taught some of the basic Chinese dances, the kind that the students would perform before audiences later, and these instructors chose the students for their particular class.

On the first morning when the rehearsals were announced, Zhongmei and all the others scurried to the bulletin board to learn their assignments, but Zhongmei didn’t find her name on any of the lists. This must be a mistake, she thought. She went to the school office.

“I can’t find my name on the rehearsal list,” she told the secretary.

“Well, none of the rehearsal teachers put it down, then,” the secretary answered.

“But what about my rehearsal?” Zhongmei asked.

“You don’t have rehearsal,” was the response.

“What am I supposed to do during that time?”

“I don’t know. Do what you want. You can watch the rehearsals through the studio door if you want.”

“But why aren’t I assigned to a rehearsal?” Zhongmei persisted.

“Because none of the rehearsal teachers wanted you,” came the cruel response.

There was one other girl who didn’t get called to rehearsals, and the rumors around the school were that she and Zhongmei were going to be sent home at the end of the year. Meanwhile, for the last few weeks before the vacation, Zhongmei and that girl, whose name was Tiehua, wandered the hallways looking in the doorways as the other first-year students rehearsed. Or they went to the dormitory and wrote letters home, like this one that Zhongmei wrote to Zhongqin:

The train rumbled on for another interminable day and another night, Zhongmei feeling like a prisoner inside it. When it arrived in Harbin at dawn, Zhongmei had to wait the entire day for her connection to Jiamusi. Miserably tired already, she settled onto a bench in the waiting room. Just
as she began to doze off, a uniformed attendant wearing a peaked cap and a red armband that said
SECURITY
on it asked to see her ticket.

“But your train doesn’t leave until tonight,” she told Zhongmei.

“That’s right,” Zhongmei said, and closed her eyes, wanting to go back to sleep.

“That’s almost twelve hours from now,” the security guard said.

“Yes, I have a long time to wait,” Zhongmei replied.

“It’s against the rules to use the waiting room for more than an hour before the departure of your train,” the attendant announced coldly.

“But,” Zhongmei sputtered, “where can I go?” The security guard shrugged and pointed to the station door.

Zhongmei walked the streets of Harbin, carrying her suitcase, her hands and feet growing icier by the minute, her nose so cold she feared it would freeze solid and fall off her face. People bundled in green padded overcoats with brown fur collars and hats with earflaps tied under their chins rushed by, hunched against the cold, indifferent to a small girl with a suitcase and no place to go. Buses roared and spewed plumes of black smoke into the air. Cars honked their horns to warn careless pedestrians to get out of the way. Zhongmei saw a narrow lane full of outdoor cooking stalls, steam emanating from large iron pots where noodles in soup were being prepared. She was hungry, but she had so little money she didn’t dare buy a bowl for herself. Shivering, not knowing how she could last outside
for the entire frigid day, she took refuge in a department store, standing among aisles of cotton padded jackets and pants.

“What are you doing here?” a tall man, evidently a salesman, asked her, not in a friendly tone.

“I’m coming from Beijing and I have to wait all day for the train to Jiamusi,” Zhongmei replied.

“Where are your parents?” the man asked.

“My parents? They’re in Baoquanling. They’re not with me.”

“Well, your parents need to take care of you,” he said. “You can’t just stay here all day. You have to find someplace else.”

Zhongmei went back out onto the street, the cold hitting her like a wall. She wandered aimlessly into a maze of small streets of metal workshops, her feet so cold that she knew she was in danger of frostbite. How could that man in the store have been so mean to a small girl? she wondered. What harm would it have done for her to stay in the store? Her shoes were too thin, inadequate for Harbin in the middle of winter. She wiggled her toes to try to stimulate her circulation, but it was no use. Her feet were aching so much that she had tears in her eyes from the pain. Can a girl just freeze to death in the middle of a city and nobody care? she thought. She saw a group of men through a half-open doorway sitting around a table in a room with a potbellied stove. Desperate to get out of the cold but afraid to go in, she stood uncertainly on the street peering inside, until one of the men noticed her.

“You look ice cold,
xiao-mei-mei
, come on in,” he said in a friendly voice. His use of the term
xiao-mei-mei
, little miss, gave Zhongmei some comfort.

The room smelled of smoke, pickled garlic, and sweat, but it was warm inside, and Zhongmei felt it was a refuge.

“What are you doing out on the streets on a day like this?” the man said. He was large and round in his blue padded suit. He had a stubble of beard and bushy eyebrows. Around the table were five or six men smoking and pouring tea out of a large red thermos into glass fruit jars with screw-on caps. Their huge green overcoats were thrown over the backs of their chairs.

Zhongmei explained that she was a student at the Beijing Dance Academy on her way home to Luobei County and had to wait all day for the train.

The Beijing Dance Academy! This impressed her new friends, and they asked her if she would do them a little dance. Zhongmei put down her suitcase. She found a little bit of space on the earthen floor in front of the stove and, warm for the first time in several hours, she performed the movements she had studied in her classes of classical Chinese dance, the hand and head movements, the princess’s walk, the jerky motions of the monkey king. First-year students didn’t do entire dances, but only parts of them. Sometimes whole hour-long classes would be devoted to the repetition of just a single gesture of hand or head or foot. But there in front of the coal stove on a narrow lane in Harbin, Zhongmei, humming the music, performed a whole dance, one that tells the story of a peacock transformed into a woman. When she was finished, the men applauded loudly. One of them went out and came back with a bowl of noodles in soup to give to her, and she devoured it as though she hadn’t eaten in days.

The men, who were on their midmorning rest break, returned to work in the yard behind the room where she’d performed, but they told her to stay there until it was time to go to her train. What a relief! Zhongmei gratefully sat on a chair in front of the stove, listening to the metallic clang emanating from the back of the workshop, smelling the musky coal smell of the stove, feeling drowsy, warm, and safe. She knew that from then on, every time she made the long journey from Beijing to Baoquanling and back, she would go to this narrow street of metal workshops and do a little dance in exchange for a bowl of noodles in soup. She knew she would always be welcome. But that made the big question in her mind all the more vexing: Would she, after this year was over, be returning to Beijing, or would she just stay in Baoquanling, probably for life?

I
t was four o’clock in the morning. The dormitory was cold because it was too early for the radiators to provide their loud noises and paltry heat. Zhongmei was awakened by the tug of a length of string tied around her wrist. She stirred. She sat up on her upper bunk and pulled the string to let the person on the other end of it know that she was awake. Very quietly, so as not to disturb the sleep of the other girls, she climbed down and changed from her pajamas into her blue jersey and shorts, the clothes all the girls wore to ballet class. Shivering, she pulled on her cotton shoes and, oh so quietly, stole out of the room, crept down the stairs and out the door, making sure it shut soundlessly behind her. She flew like a phantom across the courtyard outside to the classroom building, the cold penetrating to her bones. She gingerly pushed open the door and felt her way up the stairs to studio two on the second floor. Once inside, she flicked a switch, turning on just one light, so it was in a semi-illuminated gloom that she stood at the barre and began to go through the movements that
she had seen the other girls doing the day before in Teacher Zhu’s fundamentals of ballet class.