“Ai-ya!” Mrs. Hu exclaimed when she saw Zhongmei at the door. “We’re just watching you on television! Come in quickly so you can see yourself.”
“I should have told you,” Zhongqin whispered as they went through the Hus’ front courtyard, lined with roosts for chickens and ducks, just like the Lis’ front courtyard. “They’re the ones in our lane who have the television.”
Mrs. Hu practically pushed Zhongmei into the main room of the house, where Zhongmei saw a long kang along one wall and, facing it on a small table, a color television, its screen glowing. As Zhongmei arrived, she heard an announcer saying, “A model performer from Baoquanling is working hard to become a star for the whole country.” She watched with amazement as an image flashed on the screen showing her arrival the day before at the Jiamusi train station. She saw herself run across the platform and throw her arms around Zhongqin. She heard herself speaking into the microphone that the television journalist had held in front of her on the bus ride to Hegang. She was saying how honored she was to represent Luobei County and the Baoquanling State Farm at the Beijing Dance Academy. Next, she saw Baoquanling’s mayor arrive at her house and pose for the cameraman with Zhongmei’s entire smiling family.
“We’re so proud of you!” a beaming Mrs. Hu cried. “You’ll show them what we countryside people can do!”
That night, even though she was exhausted and craved sleep, Zhongmei lay awake for a long time on the kang and thought. All that attention! It was flattering, of course, a great honor. The mayor himself at their home! The cameraman and reporter at the train station. But it didn’t make her happy. Quite the contrary, it increased her already heavy burden, because it brought home to her that for her to fail at the Beijing Dance Academy would be to let down the entire state farm of Baoquanling with its thousands of people excited about her being chosen. It would be an unbearable embarrassment for her family and a humiliation for her. She would never be able to show her face again. And yet, what could she do? How could she stay at the Dance Academy and succeed there if one of the most powerful dance teachers in China was against her?
She lay awake as the heat that had earlier radiated from beneath the kang faded and the cold from outside crept into the room. Zhongmei pulled a heavy quilt over her, but sleep just wouldn’t come. She asked herself the same questions over and over: Why did Teacher Zhu hate her so much? Was it true that girls like her from the countryside just couldn’t compete with the city girls? Could Teacher Zhu be right? Had she started too late and was it impossible for her to catch up? If that was true, then, plainly, she just wasn’t good enough. And if it wasn’t true, and Zhongmei was deeply confused on that question, what difference did it make anyway, so long as Teacher Zhu remained her enemy?
“We’re all proud of you,” the mayor had said, echoing Mrs. Hu and many other people. Lao Lao had said the same thing. Well, they wouldn’t be so proud if she were expelled from school, would they? Zhongmei thought of a lot of things. She pictured herself sitting on the floor of the ballet studio watching the other girls in her class take the fundamentals of ballet. She remembered how she had almost been given away to neighbors when she was a baby, and now she felt that she had been given away, or at least that she was as alone in the world as she used to imagine she would feel if she had gone to live with strangers. She thought of Chinese classical dance, where her teacher always praised her. She rehearsed in her mind the movements of the peacock dance that she had done for the metalworkers in front of the stove in Harbin, and she smiled. She remembered the day she had left on the bus for Hegang on the first leg of her trip, excited and scared at the same time, the ice sticks Zhongqin had bought for her and Huping in Jiamusi, hers dripping down her fingers. She opened her eyes and looked around the room, at her family members, one after another asleep on the kang. The picture of Chairman Mao that had once frightened Zhongmei surveyed the scene with those unblinking eyes.
The picture of Mao was saying something to her, something important, she felt, and she tried to grasp it, to know what it was. It was something bold, something audacious, something about turning the situation to her advantage, but what was it? Zhongmei felt the weight of the heavy quilt on her as she lay on her back and looked at Mao. Then she rolled over, closed her eyes, and, finally, fell into a deep and restful sleep.
Early every morning after that night, as the farmers of Baoquanling walked to work, they were greeted with the sight of Zhongmei jogging down the pounded earth paths between the wheat fields, except Zhongmei didn’t jog exactly, she ran with the high-stepping antelope motion she used every morning as she ran around Taoranting Lake. It was icy cold in Baoquanling, and Zhongmei was bundled up in padded clothing, a green army hat with fur earflaps fastened under her chin. The air felt like powdered ice as she breathed it in great gulps, reemerging as plumes of steam. Often Zhongqin would accompany her on a bicycle, and the townspeople would see the two sisters in the middle of the flat stubbly fields silhouetted against the distant purple hills, their visible breath swirling around them.
It’s a safe bet that the Baoquanling farmers who saw her running in the mornings understood that Zhongmei was in training for her regimen at the Beijing Dance Academy. What they didn’t know was that she was afraid of returning in disgrace and was determined to do everything she could to avoid that fate, including this early-morning effort to stay in tip-top shape. Even the other members of the Li family were unaware of Zhongmei’s secret struggle, all the members except for Zhongqin, from whom Zhongmei never kept anything.
“She wants to stop me from returning for a second year,” Zhongmei said after her run was finished on her second morning back home. Zhongmei was speaking of course of Teacher Zhu. “She told me that I shouldn’t have been accepted in the first place.”
“I can’t be sure why she’s so against you, and whatever reason she has, it’s a bad reason,” Zhongqin said. “I hate her even though I’ve never met her. But I think I know the reason.”
“What is it?” Zhongmei said, stopping in her tracks and looking at her older sister.
“She’s from Shanghai, right?”
“I think so. A lot of the people from the Dance Academy are from Shanghai,” she said.
“Well, you know, a lot of people from Shanghai look down on us people from the countryside,” Zhongqin said. “They think we’re all hopeless bumpkins.”
Zhongmei thought of Jinhua, who was very proud of being from Shanghai, which was China’s biggest and most sophisticated city.
“Also,” Zhongqin continued, “people like Teacher Zhu suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution.”
Zhongmei of course had heard stories of the Cultural Revolution, which started around the time she was born, and she knew it caused a lot of suffering for a lot of people, but her family, being poor countryfolk, were pretty much unaffected by it, and she didn’t understand what it could possibly have to do with Teacher Zhu’s dislike of her.
“You were too young to know everything that was happening, so you don’t know just how crazy things were,” Zhongqin explained. “Everything was upside down. People who were rich and educated were taught by poor people with no education. If you came from a family that had, maybe, a piano or some old paintings, or if you were a university professor or maybe just a dance teacher, that meant you had to be reeducated by ordinary people, and people got reeducated by working in factories or on farms. We had professors from Harbin University right here, working in the beet fields.
“They had to work in the fields during the day and then have political education at night,” Zhongqin said. “They weren’t used to the hard life of the countryside. It was very difficult for them.”
Zhongmei found this interesting and disturbing, but she didn’t understand what it had to do with her.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you, or it shouldn’t,” Zhongqin said. “Anyway, that’s all over now. Things have returned to normal. The professors went back to Harbin University right after the Gang of Four
were arrested. But it was exactly people like Teacher Zhu whom the Red Guards attacked. If the Red Guards didn’t like somebody, they could hold a big meeting, put a dunce cap on their head, accuse them of being traitors to Chairman Mao, and beat them. I don’t know if that happened to Teacher Zhu, but it surely happened to lots of people she knew. And she was probably terrified.”
“I see,” said Zhongmei, soaking up this lesson in recent history.
“Maybe you remind Teacher Zhu of the way everything was upside down,” Zhongqin continued. “She wants everything to be right side up again, and right side up means students from the best schools, students who’ve been on television and had ballet lessons since they were three years old, cultivated students from big cities like Shanghai, not rough country girls who don’t know what ‘going on television’ means.”
“Yes, I see,” Zhongmei said. “Like that girl who talked to me on the line during the auditions once. Remember, I wrote to you about her. She told me I had no chance to get in because all the places were already taken and the audition was just a show.”
“Yes, I remember when you wrote to me about her. She must have been pretty surprised when you did get in,” Zhongqin said.
“I remember her name,” Zhongmei said. “It was Wang Tianyuan. She said her family was very close to one of the Dance Academy teachers, and that’s how she knew her name was on the list. But then she didn’t get chosen.”
“She didn’t?” Zhongqin said. “You never told me that.”
“No, her name wasn’t on the list. She didn’t get in. And I remember she was pretty upset about it.”
“Hmmm,” Zhongqin said. “I wonder.”
“You wonder what?” Zhongmei asked.
“I wonder if Teacher Zhu was the teacher that girl’s family knew at the Dance Academy.”
“I don’t know, but what if it was?”
“Well, they’re both from Shanghai, right?”
“Right,” Zhongmei said, still not sure where her older sister was going with this.
“Well, maybe Teacher Zhu did know this girl Tianyuan and she had promised her family that she was going to be selected, but then you got the place that was intended for her. Don’t forget, in Teacher Zhu’s mind, you’re the clumsy bumpkin, and Tianyuan is exactly the kind of girl the Dance Academy was meant for.”
Zhongmei thought about that. It was just a theory, of course, and it seemed kind of far-fetched. Could it really be that of all the thousands of girls lining up for the audition that day, she had met the very one who was favored by Teacher Zhu?
“I can’t believe that could be the reason,” Zhongmei said. But then she remembered the look of annoyance on Teacher Zhu’s face when Vice Director Jia had given her a second chance at the audition. And she remembered word for word what Teacher Zhu had told her that humiliating day when she tricked her into doing a special audition for the ballet class, when she told her she looked like somebody trying to kick a ball. “This place is only for those who can be great dancers, and you’re just not in that category,” Teacher Zhu had said, and the words now reverberated in Zhongmei’s ears. Then Zhongmei remembered the look on Tianyuan’s face that morning when Zhongmei learned that she had been selected, and Tianyuan learned that she hadn’t been. It was a look not just of hatred but of amazement, the look of somebody who’s been robbed of a precious possession, who thinks that something that belongs to her has been taken away by somebody else.
The girls crossed a rutted path. The sky was blue, the day crystal clear. The more she thought about it, the more Zhongmei felt that Zhongqin’s theory might just be right. In a way, it made her feel better, because if her sister was right, then Teacher Zhu’s attitude toward her had nothing to do with what kind of a dancer she was really. It was just Teacher Zhu’s preference for somebody else. But then she had a worrisome contrary thought. What if Teacher Zhu was right? What if she really wasn’t in “that category,” the category of the best of the best, the ones who could not just be good but were likely to be great? The thought haunted Zhongmei. But in any case it was too late. She had gotten on that bus to Hegang a half year earlier. She had started. People had lent her money to go to Beijing, and they were expecting her to prove that people like them were as good as anybody else. Whatever Teacher Zhu’s reasons for picking on her, there could be no turning back now, no giving up.
“But you know,” Zhongqin resumed after a pause, “you can only do your best. And if you work as hard as you can and you don’t succeed, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But I will be ashamed,” Zhongmei said. “The mayor himself came to our house to congratulate me. The picture of the whole family was in the newspaper. If I’m expelled at the end of the year and become a dance teacher in Baoquanling, I’ll be known forever as the girl who didn’t make good.”
The two sisters were walking at the very edge of the state farm near the river that divides China from Russian Siberia, Zhongmei lifting her feet high to stretch her leg muscles, Zhongqin wheeling her bicycle alongside her. In the distance, the sun sparkled on the Heilong River, which had iced over and was covered in a layer of ruffled, twig-strewn snow. The trestle bridge to the Soviet Union was just around the bend, though there was no traffic on it, because relations between China and the Soviet Union were very bad and the border was closed. Zhongmei stamped her foot on the hard ground.
“I tell you,” she said, “I will die before that happens. I mean it. I will die.”
Zhongqin knew she was telling the truth.
“But don’t the other teachers like you?” she asked.
“Most of them do, yes,” said Zhongmei, “especially my Chinese classical dance teacher. She’s always telling me that I’m doing very well.”
“And then there’s Jia Zuoguang. He let you repeat your improvisation at the audition. He must like you. Surely he won’t allow you to be sent packing.”
“I don’t know about him,” Zhongmei said. “I’ve never even seen him since the audition. Do you think he pays attention to first-year students? Anyway, even if Teacher Zhu is my only enemy, she’s very important and powerful at the school. And also, none of the rehearsal teachers want me. There are only two girls who haven’t been taken for rehearsal, and I’m one of them.”
Zhongmei felt tears forming in her eyes and rolling icily down her cheek.
“You just can’t imagine how good the other girls are,” Zhongmei said. “They’re so pretty and graceful. Here in Baoquanling, people think I’m good, but at the Beijing Dance Academy, I’m the worst.”
“No, Zhongmei,” Zhongqin exclaimed. “Don’t let them make you think that way. Don’t give up. The biggest embarrassment is to give up.”
“Well, I don’t want to give up, but I don’t have much of a chance whether I do or not.”
The truth is that it’s not easy for a young girl to believe in herself with somebody like Teacher Zhu against her, telling her that her pliés made her look like a duck. Zhongmei thought of the night Xiaolan had told her that she was the best of them all, and that encouraged her, but it was hard for her to banish all self-doubt from her spirit, especially when she thought of Jinhua lying on the floor of the dormitory and laughing with derision at her. Jinhua came from Shanghai. Her father was a big official in the city government. Her mother too. She was one of the girls who had performed on television before coming to the Beijing Dance Academy. She was a haughty, nasty girl, but she was pretty and she was a good dancer. Could it be true that a girl like Jinhua belonged and Zhongmei didn’t?
Reading her mind, Zhongqin said, “You told me in one of your letters that each student performs before the whole school at the end of the year. If you show everybody at the school how good you are, you couldn’t be expelled, right?”
“Do well in the year-end performance? How can I do that if I can’t even take the ballet class?”
“Can you take it on your own?” Zhongqin asked.
“On my own?” Zhongmei replied.
“Watch what
the other girls do and practice it yourself. Go to the park on Sunday and do it there. I don’t know, but don’t give up. There must be a way.”
“There’s no way,” Zhongmei said, but Zhongqin had given her an idea. A way, a possible way to avoid the worst, began to form in her mind. Show the whole school at the end of the year what she could do! Suddenly she realized what the portrait of Chairman Mao was telling her the night before. There was a phrase of his that all Chinese schoolchildren were expected to memorize: “Dare to struggle; dare to win!”
Yes! she thought. She would struggle, and maybe if she struggled hard enough, she would win. But again, how? She looked at Zhongqin, who was laboring with her bicycle over the stubbly field. Farm trucks clattered in the distance. On the horizon was the huge chimney of the power plant, a plume of black smoke soaring above it toward the clear blue sky. Baoquanling was so different from Beijing, so barren, especially at this time of year. It was so far away that Zhongmei felt it wasn’t the edge of China but that it was beyond the edge, and that she and everything she knew had dropped into some abyss on the other side.
“You’re right, Da-jie,” Zhongmei exclaimed. “I am going to show them! I’m going to do it!”
“That’s the spirit!” Zhongqin said. She walked a little further. “How?” she asked.
And Zhongmei spent the rest of the time on the way home telling her her plan.
21
A Piece of String
Besides Xiaolan, the other person who was friendly to Zhongmei at the school was Old Zhou, the night watchman with the wispy beard whom Zhongmei had met her very first day at the Dance Academy. Everybody called him Lao Ye, Grandpa, and everybody saw him every day as they passed through the courtyard gate on their way to the morning Taoranting jog and on their way back. After greeting students in the morning, Old Zhou would then sleep for most of the day, because his main job, keeping watch over the buildings in case of thieves or other intruders, came at night. Every couple of hours or so he would walk around the Dance Academy perimeter, between the buildings and the outer wall. At six o’clock every morning he rang the wake-up bell. Whenever he saw Zhongmei emerge into the courtyard for the early exercise, he always gave her a friendly smile.
A Girl Named Faithful Plum Page 17