A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  Why isn’t the train moving? she asked herself. This was the second night on a train, and she longed to be able to lie flat someplace and sleep like she did every night on the kang back in Baoquanling. Her back hurt, her neck was stiff. Would this mournful journey ever end?

  Zhongmei looked over at Huping in the aisle. He was squatting in the aisle and leaning forward, his head against the edge of the seat in what must have been a very uneasy sleep. Finally, after what seemed to Zhongmei a long time, there was a jolt and a grinding of metal on metal and the train creaked forward again.

  Daybreak was marked by a few bars of bombastic music over the train’s scratchy loudspeakers, and then a dulcet female voice. “Comrades,” it said, “please pay attention to security and safeguard your possessions. Hygiene is very important. Cover your mouth when you cough, don’t spit or throw trash on the ground, be polite to your fellow passengers, and work hard to build our socialist motherland.”

  Zhongmei was used to these morning loudspeaker broadcasts. They were the same as the ones that awakened her parents every morning in Baoquanling. China had spent more than one hundred years in very poor and humiliating conditions. For decades the country was divided among warlords, who spent their time fighting each other. Its biggest cities were controlled by foreign countries; during the long, devastating years of World War II, when Zhongmei’s parents were children, the whole country was under constant attack by Japan. Almost twenty years before Zhongmei was born, the revolutionaries led by Chairman Mao had taken power. They eliminated the warlords, and the foreign armies were gone. China now was still poor, and it was certainly not free. Those who expressed any criticism of Chairman Mao especially would find themselves quickly in a large, remote prison camp, where they would spend a few years in what was called reform through labor. Everybody was called on to obey the government and to work hard for low wages, until the country was rich and strong again. That’s what all those morning broadcasts were about. That’s what the songs Zhongmei sang at noon in Baoquanling were about, and the revolutionary dances as well, millions of Chinese children armed with wooden rifles and pretending to shoot the enemy dead.

  But around the time Zhongmei took her trip to Beijing, all of this was just on the point of changing. Chairman Mao had died two years earlier. Mao’s closest backers had been arrested and put in jail and a new group of leaders was now in place and wanted China to calm down, to be a little less revolutionary and a bit more normal. The schools reopened, teachers who had been exiled to the countryside were allowed to come back, and so were sent-down youths like Huping. China was becoming more relaxed. People were being allowed to do more of the things they wanted to do without supervision, like falling in love, getting married, or, like Lao Lao, building little shrines to Buddha. Before, if you asked young people what they wanted to do when they grew up, they would all reply, “We want to be good soldiers of our great leader Chairman Mao and build the world revolution!” Now they could freely say they wanted to be teachers, or scientists, or dancers, and they didn’t have to say anything about Chairman Mao at all. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t all over the place, in pictures and statues. Everybody was still entreated almost every day to “work hard to build the new China.” Nobody was allowed to criticize the country’s new leaders. And there were, as always, all those loudspeakers, though the message was no longer “Fight, struggle, annihilate the enemy!” but “Please don’t spit; clean up after yourselves.”

  At about eight o’clock that morning, the train arrived in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, which signaled to Zhongmei that for the first time in her life she had ventured beyond the borders of Heilongjiang Province. A voice on the loudspeaker announced that the train would stop for half an hour, so Huping ran across the platform to buy some breakfast dumplings. Zhongmei fretted while he was gone, worried that the train would leave before he got back, certain that she would lose her precious seat if she left it to go look for him. She kept her eyes on the platform, trying to find him among the crush of passengers and vendors. A troop of soldiers in green uniforms with red collar tabs and visored hats marched by her window. Mothers held small children over the tracks on the other side of the platform, their pants, ingeniously slit at the crotch, opening so they could relieve themselves.

  The time went by and still there was no Huping. The man sitting next to her leaned out the window, cleared his throat, and spat onto the platform, making Zhongmei want to ask him if he hadn’t heard the announcement about politeness and hygiene just a while before, but she kept quiet. A vendor bearing trays of roasted chestnuts stood at the window and looked at Zhongmei expectantly, but she shook her head. And then, suddenly, there was Huping smiling happily at the window and handing Zhongmei a thin clear plastic bag of warm steamed-bread dumplings filled with chopped cabbage and noodles, which she gratefully devoured.

  The train resumed its march toward Bejing, passing Fuxin, Beipiao, Jianing, Pingquan, and Miyun, Zhongmei getting excited as she read the signboards on the stations, naming places that she’d never heard of before. China was so big, who could know it all? The countryside was flat now. Zhongmei could see the outlines of mud-brick villages on the horizon, marked by clumps of plane trees, gray birches, and locusts. Tree-lined roads extended away from the tracks, crowded with wagons and carts drawn by men on bicycles or by teams of oxen, just like the ones back home. Great mounds of hay dotted some of the fields. Others were filled with neat straight rows of beans, mustard greens, and cabbages. Groups of farmers leaned on their hoes and watched as the train went by. From time to time the train would cross a trestle bridge, which amplified the clackety-clack of the wheels as if somebody had opened a window to let the sound in.

  At the end of the afternoon just as dusk began to fall, the train rumbled past a kind of suburban sprawl. Zhongmei saw row after row of brick factory buildings with round chimneys issuing forth great plumes of black smoke. There were piles of cinder blocks and steel reinforcement rods, and an endless succession of barracks and sheds, brick kilns and piles of gravel, then gray cement apartment blocks with the usual rows of bicycles parked under tarpaulin-covered sheds in front of them and laundry hung out to dry on tiny balconies on every floor. Every building, every wall, seemed to be inscribed in large Chinese characters with one of the slogans of those days—STRIVE FOR EVER GREATER VICTORIES! LET’S RELY ON OURSELVES ONLY! RESOLUTELY BUILD A RADIANT SOCIALIST FUTURE! The train went past road junctions, and Zhongmei saw what seemed like thousands of people on bicycles jammed up behind security gates, all of them, men and women, dressed in identical blue jackets and trousers.

  Then there were glimpses of grand-looking buildings, wide avenues, big statues, streetlamps, and photographs of Chairman Mao. The train, running now on an elevated platform, offered a view of countless interior courtyards, each of which had a large red tablet inscribed with the slogan SERVE THE PEOPLE in the scrawled calligraphy that everybody knew was Chairman Mao’s. Finally the train pulled beneath a large canopy of leaded glass and came to a stop. Zhongmei saw the characters BEIJING mounted on a red signboard. They had arrived! She and Huping gathered their things and joined the throng as it pushed toward the platform, over a bridge, and then down into the terminal building.

  Zhongmei had never seen anything so vast or so crowded. High, grimy windows allowed feeble slants of light into the immense hall, which teemed with people, some rushing about, many more just camped out on the floor or leaning against pillars and walls smoking the inevitable Double Happiness cigarettes, surrounded by suitcases and striped plastic bags. There were long lines of people buying tickets or waiting to get onto platforms. Zhongmei and Huping stood in the middle of the hall hoping that they would be seen by the two people they were expecting to meet them, Li Zhongshan and Huping’s mother.

  After a few minutes, Huping’s mother arrived. She took one look at her son, whom she hadn’t seen in years, and burst into tears of joy. Naturally, she wanted to take Huping home right away. His father was waiting for
them there, she said. But first they had to be sure that somebody came for Zhongmei, and so far nobody had. The three of them waited amid the commotion of the station. The time passed. Thousands of people continued to push by. There were announcements over the loudspeaker, but the words were so lost in the vastness of the great hall that they could scarcely be understood. Anyway, Zhongmei was so eager to find her father’s friend, or to be found by him, that she didn’t really listen to them. Of course, she didn’t know what Li Zhongshan looked like, only that he was a policeman, so every time a policeman came near, Zhongmei would stand up straight and make herself as visible as she could. But no policeman or anybody else took any notice of her at all.

  7

  An Amazing Coincidence

  The windows of the station waiting room darkened as the light in Beijing began to fade. What could have happened to Policeman Li? Before Zhongmei left home, her father had sent his friend an old picture of Zhongmei. In China in those days, few people from the countryside could afford cameras or film, and having their picture taken was a rare and special event that took place in a photo studio, which meant that the picture Zhongmei’s father sent to Li Zhongshan was taken when Zhongmei was about seven years old. It showed Zhongmei as a very little girl, her bangs down to her eyes, and a gauzy scarf around her neck, and while she was now a good deal bigger, the eleven-year-old Zhongmei could still be discerned in the picture of the seven-year-old Zhongmei. Unbeknownst to Zhongmei, Policeman Li did come to the station, but he didn’t find Zhongmei. Maybe he looked for a girl exactly like the one in the photograph, and Zhongmei wasn’t that girl anymore.

  “What can we do?” Huping’s mother asked.

  “You go ahead home,” Zhongmei said bravely, even though she wasn’t feeling very brave. “I’ll wait here. I’m sure he’ll come. You don’t have to worry about me.” But she wanted very much for them to worry about her.

  “If he was going to come, he’d have been here long ago,” Huping’s mother said. “It’s pointless to wait any longer. You better come home with us.”

  Zhongmei looked around the station, which reverberated with noises and echoes, with a thousand shouts and murmurs, with the scraping of luggage being dragged across the floor, with the wailing of babies, with public announcements that seemed to be swallowed up by the very vastness of the place. The station was less crowded than before, less filled with rushing people, and Zhongmei stayed anchored to her spot, thinking that she’d now be easier to see. But nobody came, and, as the hall continued to empty, Zhongmei had the feeling that nobody would. But for Huping’s family, she was alone in China’s immense capital, and the person who had vowed to take care of her had vanished.

  She went home with Huping’s family. Huping’s mother’s surname was Chen. Zhongmei called her Chen Aiyi, Auntie Chen, and his father Shu-shu, Uncle. She gratefully accepted their hospitality, knowing that if it wasn’t for them, she would have been out on the streets like a beggar. She had food to eat and a roof over her head, and the family was nice. Nonetheless, she wondered what to do. It wasn’t going to be a simple thing to find Policeman Li. Unlike today in China, she couldn’t just flick on her cell phone and give her parents a call to find out Li Zhongshan’s address. Almost nobody in China had a home telephone in those days, much less a cell phone. On the rare occasion when they did make private calls, they used telephones tended by shopkeepers on the streets, paying a few fen per call. And in the entire country of one billion people there were no telephone books, so she couldn’t simply look up Li Zhongshan and get his number and address that way. Zhongmei could have written a letter to her father telling him to write to Li Zhongshan and give him the address of Huping’s family, where he could come to fetch her, but by the time all that could be done, the audition, which was to start in just a few days, would already be over.

  “Don’t worry,” Chen Aiyi said. “I’m sure we’ll find this Policeman Li, or he’ll find you. My husband is going to go to the main police station on his day off from work to ask about him.”

  But Zhongmei did worry. For hours she sat at the family’s house, which was actually a part of a larger house built in three sections around a narrow courtyard. An imposing entry gate of carved wood led from the lane into the courtyard. The rooms had large windows covered by lattices of dark wood. The roofs were of gray tile. Water came from a pump with a curved metal handle painted red in the middle of the courtyard. This courtyard was a crowded place, since lots of small rooms made out of cinder blocks or bricks with corrugated metal roofs had been put up next to the older ones, and it was crammed with stuff—crates for storing cabbage, sheds with cooking pots, plates, cups, teapots, and enamel basins for washing. Here and there were braziers for cooking, piles of coal-dust bricks that were used in the braziers, washtubs and corrugated scrubbing boards for doing laundry, a flotsam and jetsam of discarded pieces of furniture. Two pomegranate trees grew there as well, and small green fruits were beginning to take shape on their branches. Ropes suspended from hooks in the houses crisscrossed the yard and were used to dry the laundry that was done in the outdoor washtubs, using water drawn from the pump. As in Baoquanling, the toilet was a public one down the lane. So was the bath, where Chen Aiyi took Zhongmei on her first night to wash off the dust of her long journey.

  “This used to be a rich family’s house,” Chen Aiyi told Zhongmei as they came back to the courtyard, carrying their towels and a dish of soap, wearing fresh clothing, “but after the revolution, the place was divided up so some poor people could come live here, including us.”

  “Is the rich family still here?” Zhongmei asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Chen Aiyi said. “They’re in that room over there.” She pointed across the courtyard. “They’re just an old couple. Their children left years ago. But we don’t see much of them. They don’t mix with us.”

  Zhongmei was amazed that this part of Beijing wasn’t all that different from Baoquanling. Indeed, her house in Baoquanling, which was also down a narrow lane, was small, narrow, and dark, but it was bigger than the portion of the courtyard house that her new Beijing family occupied. Zhongmei slept on a narrow cot pushed against the whitewashed wall of the living room, while Aiyi and Shu-shu slept in a bed in the other half of the same room, which was blocked off by a screen made of pleated red cloth. But she didn’t sleep well. There was a lot of noise in the courtyard until late at night. Zhongmei could hear conversations, laughter, and infants crying in the neighboring rooms. One of Huping’s parents—was it Aiyi or Shu-shu? Zhongmei couldn’t tell—snored loudly.

  But even if Chen Aiyi’s house was modest and crowded, it was pretty different from Baoquanling. Intricate, delicate latticed woodwork covered the large windows, and the floor was of polished wood, not the cement of Zhongmei’s hometown. In the Chen living room, there was a large scroll painting showing a scene of mountains, forests, waterfalls, and winding paths, along which a monk in rust-brown robes, looking very small in the surrounding immensity of nature, rode on a donkey. On the steep, craggy hills above the man were pavilions with carved railings and sloping roofs. Nobody in Baoquanling had a painting like that. In Baoquanling, people had portraits of Chairman Mao or revolutionary posters showing farmers marching under a bright red sun into the fields, holding pitchforks in one hand, copies of a little red book of Mao quotations in the other. By contrast, the painting in this house in Beijing suggested to Zhongmei something deeper, quieter, more elegant; something very refined and civilized.

  Also, after just a day or so, Zhongmei noticed that the people in Beijing were different. They had smooth, pale faces. Many of them wore store-bought white or printed cotton shirts and blouses and leather shoes. The farmers that Zhongmei grew up with seemed grizzled and leathery by comparison, or the men did. The women in Baoquanling had ruddy complexions, made that way by the sun and the wind. They wore threadbare, patched clothing and cotton shoes with plastic or rubber soles mostly made at home. After only a day in Beijing, Zhongmei saw something she’d never see
n in Baoquanling—a beauty parlor. It was just down the lane from Chen Aiyi’s house. Inside, a row of women sat under machines that covered their heads, and when they extracted themselves from this device, their hair was curly and lustrous. Next to the beauty parlor was a photo studio, in the window of which were sample pictures of people in very fancy clothing, young women with that beauty-parlor hair and frilly white dresses standing next to men in dark jackets and white shirts against backgrounds of mysterious purple swirls, as if a heavy storm raged just behind them. In Beijing, Zhongmei saw young men wearing wraparound sunglasses, with small oval labels printed in a foreign language stuck to the outside of the lenses. There were no dark glasses in Baoquanling. There, when the sun was too bright, people just squinted.

  Dear Da-jie, Zhongmei wrote to Zhongqin, sitting in her bed on her second night in Beijing, using a pen and a piece of paper Chen Aiyi had given her.

  I miss you, but everything’s OK. Policeman Li didn’t meet me at the station, so I’m staying with Huping’s family. That was a surprise. Beijing is big and kind of scary. I don’t know why Policeman Li didn’t come for me. Maybe they changed their mind about letting me stay at their house. Don’t tell Ma and Ba. I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want you to worry either.

  Your sister Zhongmei

  That night, Zhongmei sat up for a long time in her bed, looking out the window and thinking. Across the courtyard, in front of the former owner’s room, she could see somebody sitting in a straight-backed chair. A cigarette glowed in the dark and reflected in the lenses of glasses of a person who was otherwise just a dark shape in the shadows.