A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  “You’ve come a long way,” she said as she recorded Zhongmei’s information in a large ledger on the table in front of her. “Go to studio eleven. It’s that way,” the woman said, gesturing toward the door of the school. “Up the stairs, third floor. Give them this,” she said, and she handed Zhongmei a card with her name and a number on it.

  Zhongmei walked through the door. It was the first time she set foot into what was to become her home for the next eight years, though she didn’t know that yet. Before she left Baoquanling, Zhongmei had prepared a little dance, getting help from her ballet teacher. It was a two-minute solo part from The Red Detachment of Women, and as she walked up the two flights of stairs to studio eleven Zhongmei rehearsed it in her mind. Her moment was coming! She knew the odds were against her, but she was determined to dance well, to try to impress the judges.

  She found studio eleven, where a young woman—she couldn’t have been more than twenty—took her card.

  “Stand by the wall,” she said.

  Zhongmei stood by the wall.

  “Hold up your arms,” the young woman said. She took out a yellow cloth tape measure, put one end of it on Zhongmei’s shoulder, and measured the distance to the tips of her fingers. She wrote a number down in a notebook, and then measured the rest of Zhongmei’s body, the distance from elbow to shoulder, wrist to elbow, waist to just under her neck, her hips to her knees, her knees to her ankles.

  “That’s pretty good,” the girl said, writing down numbers. “OK, stand with your back against the wall.”

  Zhongmei did as she was told.

  “Now rotate your hips. Keep facing front and try to touch the wall to the right with your right knee and then the wall on the left with your left knee.”

  Zhongmei did it easily.

  “You’re very flexible,” the young woman said appreciatively. She asked Zhongmei to do a few more exercises. Zhongmei held her leg up so that the front of her shin touched her chin. She bent forward at the waist, keeping her legs straight, and was able to touch the floor with her elbows. The young woman held Zhongmei by the waist and told her to see how far she could bend backward. Zhongmei bent back so that the top of her head touched the floor.

  “Very good,” the young woman said. “You’ve made it to the next stage.” She filled out a card, and wrote down a date and a time—the date was for the next day and the time was eight in the morning. “Show this at the entrance when you get here, and come back to studio eleven,” she said.

  “But what about my dance?” Zhongmei said.

  “What dance?” the young woman asked.

  “I’ve prepared a dance for the judges,” Zhongmei said. “When do I get to do it?”

  The girl laughed. “You may never get to do it,” she said. “You have to get through the first stages of the audition before you dance.”

  “How many stages are there?” Zhongmei asked.

  “Seven,” the young woman said.

  “Seven!” said Zhongmei.

  “That’s right, seven,” the young woman said. “You’ve made it past the first one. You’ve got a long way to go.”

  A letter was waiting for Zhongmei when she got back to Policeman Li’s house that night. It was addressed to Chen Aiyi’s house on Old Stone Bridge Lane, but that address was crossed out and Policeman Li’s written under it, no doubt by Chen Aiyi.

  Dear Zhongmei,

  We just got your letter and everybody is very worried about you. Ba can’t understand why Policeman Li didn’t pick you up at the train station. We all think you should come home. Use the rest of the money you have to buy a ticket, and send a telegram, so we will know when you will get here. Everybody is fine. We know you are staying with Huping’s family, so you are safe. But we’re worried and hope you will be home soon.

  From Da-jie

  Dear Da-jie, Zhongmei wrote back.

  The mail is slow, and you didn’t get my last letter yet, but when you do, you’ll see that everything is fine. (Please write to me at Policeman Li’s from now.) And I have good news. The audition started today, and I passed the first stage! I didn’t do any dancing. They just measured my body and tested me for flexibility. The girl said I was very flexible. I got a card. You need a card to go to the next stage, and there are seven stages all together. I was very happy to get a card today, but who knows if I’ll get one tomorrow. A lot of other girls were crying today because they didn’t get cards. I’m going to keep mine in a very safe place.

  Once again, Policeman Li’s motorcycle rumbled up to the Dance Academy gate and Zhongmei hopped off. She went up the two flights of stairs to studio eleven, where a different young woman took more detailed measurements of Zhongmei’s body. She spent a long time measuring distances and circumferences before nodding approvingly. “Your legs are sixteen inches longer than your torso,” she told Zhongmei. “That’s the best I’ve seen so far,” she said as she handed Zhongmei a card to return the next day.

  Zhongmei was ecstatic, though she didn’t know why it was good to have legs longer than her torso, so she asked.

  “It means you still have quite a lot to grow,” the second young woman explained, “and it’s good for dancers to be tall.”

  By the third day there were a lot fewer girls at the school, and Zhongmei realized it was because thousands of the candidates had already been eliminated. She was getting used to the scene in the courtyard outside, where family members awaited the girls at the end of the day. Some girls came out of the building holding up the precious card that gave them an appointment for the next level, and there would be cheers from the waiting family members. But many girls emerged through the door with tear-streaked cheeks and no cards, and there was no mistaking the stricken looks, the dashed hopes written on the faces of their family members. Zhongmei felt so bad for those without cards that by the end of the third day she hid hers under her arm when she went down the stairs so as not to make anybody feel jealous.

  On the afternoon of the third day, a new set of testers appeared, older than the first. They seemed to be the people in real authority at the Dance Academy, teachers and administrators. Each girl was asked a few questions by one of these older people.

  “Why do you want to come to the Beijing Dance Academy?” a short round woman with gray hair asked Zhongmei.

  “Because I love dance,” Zhongmei said, feeling that it was a silly question with an all-too-obvious answer: because she would have a much more exciting life here than back home in Baoquanling, but she didn’t say that.

  “Have you performed before?”

  “Oh, yes, I performed a lot in my hometown.”

  “It’s a rather small place, your hometown. You really had chances to perform there?”

  “Yes, lots of chances,” Zhongmei said quite honestly. “I sang almost every day, and I danced a lot too with the Propaganda Brigade.”

  “Are you ready to work very hard?”

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said.

  “I mean really hard, harder than most people will ever have to work in their lives,” the woman said. “This school is not for fun. It’s to train the best professional dancers in China, and I can tell you, it’s going to hurt every day. Are you really ready for that?”

  “I’m ready!” Zhongmei exclaimed.

  “Are you sure? I can promise you it will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do. You’ll be so tired at the end of the day you almost won’t be able to change into your pajamas and get into bed. And if you don’t do well, you’ll be sent home, and you’ll never come back.”

  “I’m sure,” Zhongmei said.

  “OK,” the woman said. “I’m going to pass you into the fourth stage. Come back tomorrow at eight o’clock and be prepared to perform a dance you know. Go to studio eight. Maybe there’s something you did in Bao … what was it?”

  “Baoquanling,” Zhongmei reminded her.

  “Yes, there,” the woman said. “You’ll need music. Do you have music?”

  “No,” said Zhongmei.


  “You didn’t come with sheet music?”

  “No, I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  “Well, I guess they don’t know much up there in Bao … whatever,” the woman said. “You say you used to sing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then be prepared to accompany yourself by singing. It’s a little unusual, but maybe the judges will remember you better that way.” The woman smiled. “Good luck,” she said.

  9

  “Have I Done All This for Nothing?”

  On the next morning, there were hundreds of girls already forming a line in front of the Dance Academy entrance. It was a bit like the first day, though with fewer people. Parents and brothers and sisters nervously stood with their daughters and sisters under the row of locust trees on the street outside. As always, only Zhongmei was alone. She could see a long line of boys extending down the street on the opposite side of the gate. She waited and waited, rehearsing in her mind the dance she had practiced in Baoquanling from The Red Detachment of Women, a ballet about a girl chained in a dungeon by an evil landlord. She escapes and joins the revolutionary army led by Chairman Mao. Zhongmei had often sung one of the songs from the opera over the town loudspeaker—“Forward, forward under the banner of Mao Zedong; forward to victory”—and while the lyrics were pretty simple, she went over them again now, just to be sure that if she was seized with panic, she wouldn’t forget them. While she hummed, she felt the dance movements inside her even though she didn’t actually do them out there on the sidewalk.

  “What’s your name?” a girl next to her asked, interrupting her reverie. She was a little shorter and a little plumper than Zhongmei. She wore a black blouse printed with bright red butterflies that matched perfectly with a tailored red skirt. “I’m Wang Tianyuan.”

  “Li Zhongmei,” Zhongmei said, and smiled, glad to have some company.

  “I came from Shanghai with my grandmother,” Tianyuan said. She nodded at a short, chubby woman wearing a well-tailored Mao suit standing nearby. You could always tell the people in China who were officials of the government. Their tailored blue or gray suits, in the style made popular by Chairman Mao, were made out of fine cotton or wool, compared to the rougher, baggier, store-bought cotton jackets and pants worn by ordinary people. The pants were pleated and loose-fitting. The matching jacket had a collar that buttoned at the neck.

  “Ni hao, xiao-mei”—Hello, little miss—Tianyuan’s grandmother said to Zhongmei.

  “Ni hao, ai-yi,” Zhongmei said back.

  “Where are you from?” Tianyuan asked her.

  “I’m from Baoquanling,” Zhongmei replied, hesitating a bit because she knew that Tianyuan was unlikely to have heard of it.

  “Where’s that?” Tianyuan said.

  “It’s in Heilongjiang,” Zhongmei said, and Tianyuan looked as mystified as if Zhongmei had said she had come to the audition from Mars.

  “You came all the way from Heilongjiang?” she said in what seemed like wonderment but was actually a kind of criticism, because she then proceeded to tell Zhongmei that she had no chance of being accepted at the Beijing Dance Academy so it was silly to have made such a big effort to come to it.

  “Don’t you know, they’ve already chosen all the students,” she said. “The audition is just for show, to make it look like everybody has a chance, but really, all the decisions have already been made.”

  “Be quiet, Tianyuan,” her grandmother said. “You shouldn’t be telling people that.”

  But Zhongmei was already absorbing this shocking piece of information. She was also noticing Tianyuan’s nice store-bought clothes and her pale soft skin, the skin of somebody who didn’t have to brave the scorching summers and numbing winters of northern Heilongjiang. Zhongmei felt coarse and leathery compared to her.

  “They’ve already chosen everybody?” Zhongmei said, amazed and not quite believing that it could be true. “But …”

  “I know that because my mother’s good friend is a teacher at the school, and she told me—my mother, I mean. That’s why we came here instead of going to the audition in Shanghai, because my mother’s friend is in Beijing.”

  “Hush, Tianyuan,” the grandmother put in, but to no avail.

  “You mean, you’ve been chosen?” Zhongmei asked, incredulous.

  “Oh, yes,” Tianyuan said. “You have to have guanxi.” She used the term in China for “connections, friends in high places,” and Zhongmei remembered her father’s first reaction when she said she wanted to go to the auditions, that the Li family had no guanxi. And now here was another eleven-year-old girl saying the same thing: in order to get something really good, you had to know powerful people, and if you didn’t know powerful people, you would never get those things.

  “We have great guanxi,” Tianyuan said proudly, “since my father is the head of the Shanghai Film School, and then there’s my mother’s friend who teaches here. She was once a famous ballerina. She studied with masters in Russia.”

  As the girls were talking, there was suddenly a stir in the crowd as a green sedan pulled up to the school entrance and a handsome man in a well-tailored Mao suit got out.

  “It’s him!” Zhongmei heard somebody say, as she was jostled by somebody behind her trying to get a better look. She watched as the man smiled at the people standing in line and then turned to walk into the school courtyard. He was the most elegant person Zhongmei had ever seen, tall, fine-featured, and clearly self-confident. But there was also something modest about him, a kind of embarrassment at attracting so much attention.

  “Who’s that?” Zhongmei asked Tianyuan.

  “You don’t know who that is?” Tianyuan said.

  “Don’t talk like that, Tianyuan,” the girl’s grandmother said. “Not everybody knows the dance world as well as you do.”

  “That’s Jia Zuoguang,” Tianyuan said.

  Jia Zuoguang. The name rang a distant bell for Zhongmei. It was a name she had heard before, but she wasn’t sure where or when.

  “He’s only the greatest dancer in China,” Tianyuan said. “Now he’s the vice director of the Beijing Dance Academy, but even though he’s only the vice director, he’s really the person in charge. He’s the one who can have you accepted if he likes you. But I’ve already told you, if you don’t have guanxi, you don’t stand much of a chance.”

  Zhongmei remembered where she had heard the name Jia Zuoguang before. It had been during her week with the song and dance troupe of Jiamusi, when she had gone there with her teacher from Baoquanling. She remembered now that the members of the troupe had all watched a dance movie and Jia Zuoguang had been the lead male dancer in it. She remembered his strength as a dancer, the grace and height of his leaps. Somebody had said that he had even once been to Jiamusi when he had toured northern Heilongjiang Province a few years before.

  “But he can’t help you really,” Tianyuan was saying. “There’s already a list of names. My mother’s friend has seen the list, and my name is on it. It’s all the sons and daughters of important people like my father. No farmer’s daughter from Heilongjiang is going to get on that list.”

  Zhongmei watched as Jia Zuoguang disappeared through the main gate of the school, gently pushing his way through the crowd.

  “Is that all you need, guanxi?” Zhongmei said. She suddenly had a vision of important people who worked in offices and wore fine woolen tailored suits and were chauffeured around in big black Red Flag limousines. Once she had seen such a car in Baoquanling, as long as an ocean liner, carrying the governor of Heilongjiang Province in an inspection tour of the state farm. Of course these important people had children. Were they the ones already chosen?

  “You mean you don’t even have to be a good dancer?” Zhongmei asked. “You just have to have high-ranking parents?”

  “Oh, no, you have to be a good dancer too. I’m already very famous in Shanghai. I was the best dancer in the Shanghai Children’s Dance Troupe. Everybody knows me!”

  “Well, I was famous too
,” Zhongmei said truthfully.

  “But you have no guanxi, being from … what was the name of that place again?”

  “Baoquanling,” Zhongmei reminded her.

  “What dance are you going to do today?” Tianyuan asked.

  “It’s from The Red Detachment of Women,” Zhongmei said. “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m doing a solo from Swan Lake,” Tianyuan replied. “That’s real ballet. The Red Detachment of Women was really a Gang of Four ballet,” she said. “I don’t think the judges are going to like it.”

  The Gang of Four were a group of high officials in China who were close to Chairman Mao. One of them, the leading one, was Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had created a few ballets and operas that for about ten years were just about all the Chinese people were allowed to see or hear. The Gang of Four were the ones who had instigated a lot of the violence during the Cultural Revolution, and they were reviled for that all over China. A few months after Mao died, the new government arrested them, put them on trial, and sent them to jail. It’s true what Tianyuan said, that The Red Detachment of Women had been one of Jiang Qing’s favorites, and it was full of bombastic praise for Mao and the Communist Party. But even though Mao’s wife was now in prison, it was still performed a lot, especially in the countryside. Foreign ballets like Swan Lake had been banned in China during the Gang of Four time, but they were making a comeback now, especially in the big cities.

  “Well, it’s what I prepared,” Zhongmei said worriedly. “I don’t have time to switch to something else.”

  “Do you have the music? Can I see it?” Tianyuan asked, as if that would somehow help.

  “I don’t have any music. I didn’t bring any.”

  “You don’t have music? But how are you planning to perform it, then?”

  “I’m going to sing,” Zhongmei said, her worries increasing.

  “You’re going to sing?” Tianyuan spoke with a kind of mirthful astonishment, the tone an adult might use on a child when the child says something very foolish but also cute.