A Girl Named Faithful Plum

by Richard Bernstein

  “That’s fine,” Teacher Zhu said, and she walked slowly along the line of girls, looking at each one. But when she came to Zhongmei, who was near the end of the line, she said, “You, come with me,” and walked to a corner on the other side of the studio from the piano.

  “You sit here,” she said, and she pointed to a spot on the bare wooden floor.

  Zhongmei looked at her uncertainly.

  “You sit down here for now,” Teacher Zhu said, and she pointed again to the floor.

  Not understanding, and thinking that Teacher Zhu was going to tell all of the girls to take a place on the floor, Zhongmei settled down on the cool, hard wood. She watched as Teacher Zhu walked to the middle of the studio, faced the other girls, and said, “Everybody, listen carefully. Face the barre in ding zi bu”—basic position—“one foot straight, the other foot pointing at the first with the heel, like a ding-zi”—a nail. She walked down the row of girls, adjusting a foot position here, pushing in a bottom or lifting a chin there.

  “The Beijing Dance Academy trains professional dancers, not amateurs, so the first thing you have to do is forget everything you’ve learned until now, because what you’ve learned until now was full of mistakes,” Teacher Zhu said. “We stress Russian ballet here, but we add in many elements from Chinese classical dance. In my day I was the best ballerina in China. I studied in Moscow. I danced with the Bolshoi Ballet there. But when I came back to China, I blended what I learned with the best elements of our own tradition. There is a reason why I am your teacher in the fundamentals of ballet class.

  “Now, face the barre and hold it lightly with both hands—chin up, shoulders down, pi-gu”—behind—“in, not sticking out, but in a vertical line with the back of your feet. All the weight on your heels, which should feel like they’re dug into the ground so that if you got hit by a car and your legs are sliced in half, your heels would still be planted there like fence posts.”

  Again, while Zhongmei watched from her spot on the floor, Teacher Zhu surveyed the line of girls. “OK, not great, but not disastrously bad either.” She nodded at the accompanist, who began to play. “Everyone plié,” she said, speaking over the music, “like this.” She demonstrated a perfect half plié, and then watched as eleven of the twelve girls followed suit. “Back straight, pi-gu straight down, not pushed back—that’s very important if you want to look like dancers rather than clowns.” She curtsied, straightened, and then bent her knees, holding her back straight in the classic position.

  “That’s it. Curtsy, on pointe, demi-plié, and, again, on pointe. Bu tsuo,” Teacher Zhu said—not bad.

  Zhongmei looked on in amazement. Was she to sit there while all the other girls were given the ballet class? Was her punishment for her gaffe of the previous day continuing? She sat and waited, hoping that Teacher Zhu would still summon her to the barre maybe for the second half of the class. This must be some mistake, Zhongmei said to herself. She can’t want me just to sit here.

  The class proceeded. Teacher Zhu went over the eight directions of the body, the five positions of the feet. The girls now alternated between demi-pliés and full pliés; they practiced what American ballet girls learn as battements tendus, because in the United States we use the French terms for the various ballet steps and movements, though in China these terms have been translated into Chinese. While the other girls did their first arabesques and jetés, Zhongmei sat on the floor in a corner of the room, listening to the music and watching in mystified sadness, the tears welling up in her eyes.

  “It’s like somebody is taking your foot and throwing it,” Teacher Zhu said, “and the rest of your body follows. But here is the difference between Russian ballet and our ballet, because we have altered Russian ballet, made it our own. In Russian ballet, the body is straight, but in China, the body is gracefully curved.” Teacher Zhu demonstrated this with the step known in the West as the fouetté en tournant, where the dancer makes a full turn on her heel, snapping her head forward so that it stays facing front. “In Russia, Europe, and America,” Teacher Zhu said, “the dancer turns clockwise. In China, we turn the other way. We raise our left foot like this,” and she held her foot to a point just above the knee and pointed it backward, “and we follow it around, not moving our heads, so that it is much more difficult to know when a full circle has been completed.” She did a turn, her narrow figure arching backward, in the classical Chinese pirouette.

  “But that’s just a foreshadowing of what’s to come, girls,” Teacher Zhu said. “We won’t get to that for months. It’s just something to keep in mind as an objective. Right now, class is dismissed, until tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure she’ll let you take the class tomorrow,” Xiaolan said as the two girls looked at the pictures of Margot Fonteyn and Suzanne Farrell in the dormitory that night. The rest of Zhongmei’s first day had, at least, been better. After the ballet class, there had been a few hours of regular schoolwork—reading, writing, and math—and then there was a class in Chinese dance, where Zhongmei was treated the same as the other girls. Gymnastics followed that, and then wu-shu, or martial arts, since in China several dance forms involve acrobatic fights like the ones you’ve probably seen in kung fu movies.

  Zhongmei did fine in those classes too. But her sleep was nonetheless troubled at night as she remembered how she had been made to sit in the corner in fundamentals of ballet while the other girls went through their movements at the barre. Would she be allowed to take the class the next day? How long would this punishment last?

  The next day, Teacher Zhu allowed Zhongmei to take her place at the barre, but after just a few minutes she said, “You don’t look very strong today; are you feeling sick?” And though Zhongmei protested that she felt fine, Teacher Zhu insisted that she go to the nurse, and by the time she got back—the nurse having given her a clean bill of health—the class was over. As the days of September went by, Teacher Zhu would occasionally and without explanation allow Zhongmei to take the ballet class, criticizing her harshly to be sure, but she criticized, mocked, and harangued the other girls too, so Zhongmei didn’t feel bad, as long as she was at the barre with everybody else. But most days, Zhongmei would line up at the barre only to see Teacher Zhu signal to her to go to the corner and sit. Teacher Zhu often sent Zhongmei to the nurse, saying that she didn’t look very healthy, and the nurse always told her there was nothing wrong with her. Sometimes Teacher Zhu would tell her to step into the corridor and practice some simple movement by herself, which meant, of course, that Zhongmei couldn’t see the movements that the other girls were doing. When that happened, she would ask Xiaolan or one of the other girls to show her what she had missed, and in the time between dinner and lights-out, she would try to practice those movements. At times, when class resumed the next day, Zhongmei did those very movements, prompting a surprised Teacher Zhu to exclaim, “How did you learn to do that?” But Teacher Zhu refused to accept that as proof that she was able to take the ballet class. After a few minutes, the teacher would say, “You look tired. Why don’t you take a spot on the floor and just watch for a while.”

  Her life was divided between the agony of her exclusion from fundamentals of ballet and the pleasure she took in her other classes. To be sure, the daily routine was exhausting, but it was exhausting for everybody. The woman at the audition had warned Zhongmei that she would be so tired at bedtime that she would almost not have the energy to wash and change into her pajamas. But Zhongmei didn’t complain about that, not even secretly to herself, and much of what she did every day thrilled her. She especially loved the graceful movements of traditional Chinese dance, which the girls practiced over and over again in the afternoon classes. For weeks at a time, they would spend an entire class rehearsing just one or two of the hand movements of Chinese dance, or the special way of walking, or a single signature movement of one of the characters in Chinese opera, the soldiers, the emperors and empresses, the clowns, the princesses and prime ministers, and the character known as the monkey
king, whose acrobatic leaps and somersaults had thrilled Chinese audiences for centuries. Zhongmei took to all of that naturally and her teachers praised her for her hard work and talent, so that she would finish her day happily enough, until she would remember that the next day, after the sweat-inducing run around Taoranting Lake and the calisthenics and kicking exercises in the courtyard, she would again suffer ignominiously in a corner on the floor in fundamentals of ballet.

  After Zhongmei had been at the Dance Academy for a few weeks, she screwed up the courage to ask Teacher Zhu why she was so rarely allowed to take the ballet class.

  “Is it because of my mistake about going on television?” Zhongmei said. “I really didn’t—”

  “Oh, no, it’s not that,” Teacher Zhu interrupted, seeming suddenly almost friendly. “I’d forgotten all about that. It’s because you’re not ready for this class,” she said. She peered down at Zhongmei for a long minute through her plastic glasses, cocked her head, and then turned to walk away.

  “But I can do it as well as the others,” Zhongmei protested.

  Teacher Zhu turned back and glared.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t. I can see that already. First of all, you’re not strong enough. I always feel you need to see the nurse. I’ve had experience with you country girls before. You just don’t have enough …” she stopped to search for a word. “Refinement,” she said at last. “You don’t have refinement. You’re too coarse for ballet. You can do folk dancing and minority dances and maybe even Beijing Opera dances,” she said. “They’re easy enough for you. But ballet? No. Ballet involves the sublime, and the sublime is out of reach for country girls.”

  “But I can do ballet,” Zhongmei insisted. “I did ballet in my hometown.”

  Teacher Zhu only laughed. “Yes,” she said, “I can just imagine the ballet company in … what’s the name of the place you come from?”

  “Baoquanling,” Zhongmei replied meekly.

  “Yes,” Teacher Zhu resumed. “I can just imagine the clumsy imitation of real ballet they must do there.” She laughed some more, greatly amused at the very idea of a ballet company in Baoquanling, and then she walked briskly away.

  16

  Ice Sticks

  School was six days a week for the girls and boys of the Beijing Dance Academy, and almost every minute was scheduled—the six o’clock wake-up, the run in Taoranting Park, the calisthenics in the courtyard—about seventy girls from all six of the school’s grade levels on one side, an equal number of boys on the other. The boys, whose dormitory was on the first floor, did a few activities together with the girls, including the run around the lake in the morning and all the academic classes. They took their meals in the same cafeteria at the same time, but they tended to eat at separate tables. All the dance classes were separate also. During off hours, the boys tended to spend time with other boys, and the girls with girls.

  After breakfast came both the dance and regular academic classes, with a break in the middle for lunch and a nap. Dinner was from five-thirty to six-thirty, and then came what a lot of the students thought was the hardest part of an already hard day. For two hours, they exercised, stretched, and practiced. The girls spent almost an hour on leg exercises alone. They would kick a leg straight up in front of them, catch hold of it with their hands at the highest point of its arc, pull it to their forehead, and hold it there until the pain was unbearable. Then they would do the same exercise to the side, pulling their legs up by the calves, holding them to the sides of their head so that their toes would tangle with their hair. And finally they would throw their legs back, pull them to the backs of their heads, and hold them for as long as they could bear it. After that, they lay on their stomachs and simultaneously raised their chests and their legs off the floor and then down again—fifty times. They lay on their backs with their legs ramrod straight, kicked them upward together while jackknifing forward from the waist so they could slap their feet with their hands—one hundred times every night.

  Almost no activity was unconnected to dance. The girls rarely walked up the stairs in the dormitory or classroom building in the ordinary way, alternating feet. They hopped up stairs on one foot and then the next time on the other foot, so as to strengthen the muscles in their legs. Stretching was perpetual. The girls ate their meals standing, one leg on the ground, the other stretched across the table in front of them. They bent over the stretched-out leg and between bites they touched foreheads to their toes. In their academic classes—Chinese, calligraphy, and math—they sat at desks like any other middle school students. But when they did homework, they would stretch like they did at meals, legs thrust across a table, heads hovering over their books. This regimen caused a lot of pain. Muscles ached with fatigue.

  When it came time to go to sleep, the girls were so tired that they protested having to shower and change into their pajamas. They just wanted to flop down and sleep, sleep, sleep, and they had no energy left for clandestine giggling. Obediently they faced the wall. Sometimes Zhongmei would awaken. Once or twice in those first few months she heard the door open and somebody come into the room. The first time, she very quietly turned her head just enough to see Comrade Tsang walking between the rows of bunks, peering at each sleeping girl, making sure she was in the regulation position. One night not long after that, she was awakened by a scuffling sound, and she saw Comrade Tsang leading two of the girls out of the dormitory. In the morning, she found out that Comrade Tsang had caught them whispering to each other after lights-out, and she made them go to her office right away to write self-criticisms.

  But nobody complained. Everybody understood that this was the price that had to be paid to go to the Beijing Dance Academy. Whenever she got discouraged or felt she couldn’t go on, Zhongmei remembered the warning she had gotten during the auditions that this would be the hardest thing she would ever do. She had said then that she was ready for it, and that was that. She was.

  Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays did they get a little break, but only a little one. Once a month or so, Policeman Li came to pick Zhongmei up on his motorcycle and whisked her off to his house for a home-cooked meal and a sleepover. These were the times when Zhongmei could relax a little and forget her troubles. The truth is Policeman Li and Da-ma did their best to spoil her. Da-ma cooked dumplings, which Zhongmei loved. She refused to allow Zhongmei to help, or even to clean up. “You need to take it easy,” she’d say.

  In the evening, sometimes they would go to the movies, Policeman Li, Da-ma, Zhongmei, and occasionally Li Guang. But one evening Policeman Li and Da-ma told Zhongmei they had something special for her, and they wanted it to be a surprise. They took a bus to Wang Fu Jing, Beijing’s main shopping street, where the big Number One Department Store was. But they didn’t go there. They walked to a darkened part of the street to a small theater, and Zhongmei saw a sign advertising an opera called The Zhao Family Orphan. She settled back to watch. A man with a long black beard and a fantastic red costume appeared on the stage to a crescendo of wooden clappers and cymbals. Two officials, Zhao and Tu, are enemies of each other, and they vie for the emperor’s favor, each giving him advice that is the opposite of the other’s. Zhongmei and every other member of the audience can tell from the way the two men speak and the advice they give that Zhao is the good official while Tu is a conniving and mendacious flatterer. But the emperor is too vain to realize this. Not knowing which man to heed, he says he has been given the gift of a dog with extraordinary powers. It is able to distinguish good men from bad. The emperor has the dog (played by an actor in a fantastic dog costume) brought to his chambers. In a scene full of intricately choreographed movements, he allows the animal to inspect the two officials. The dog bites Zhao, and Tu, seemingly shocked, calls him a traitor and urges the emperor to have him and his entire clan of three hundred people—his wife, his children, and all of his relatives—executed.

  Zhongmei gasped with horror at seeing this terrible injustice done before her very eyes. She ho
ped for it to be rectified, and as the opera unfolds, it is. It turns out that one of the emperor’s own daughters, and therefore a princess, is married to a member of the Zhao family, so naturally she is spared the fate of the rest of the Zhao clan. The princess is pregnant. Learning this, the evil Tu plots to have the infant killed as soon as it is born. He orders one of his henchmen to do the deed, but faced with the task of murdering a baby, the henchman falters, and the child is spirited out of the palace and hidden. The years pass, and eventually the child, the Zhao family orphan (who is also the grandson of the emperor), learns what has happened, and, in a scene full of thrilling martial arts and acrobatics, of brilliantly costumed soldiers, slashing swords, thrusting spears, and deafening music, he exacts revenge on the evil Tu and his guards.

  Zhongmei was enthralled. She had studied some of the movements of Beijing Opera in her class on classical Chinese dance, but she had never seen an actual opera before, and she loved everything about it, the stunning costumes, the masks, the leaps and flying somersaults, the martial arts, the clever dialogue, the tender love scenes, the many different voices, and the music, made by cymbals and gongs, flutes, mandolins, zithers, wooden clappers, er-hus, and other stringed instruments. Every once in a while a member of the audience, unable to contain his excitement at some especially well-executed aria or gesture, would shout out a throaty hao!—good—and Zhongmei found that especially thrilling. And she was mesmerized by the story of this particular opera itself, the injustice that was done, the bad judgment of the emperor, and the very long time it took for vengeance to be exacted. This was an opera, and her life was real, but wasn’t she too the victim of an injustice, and didn’t she too deserve revenge? Would it come? Was there a Zhao family orphan waiting for her someplace in her future? She couldn’t imagine that there was, and yet the opera gave her hope that in the end justice does win out.