A Girl Named Faithful Plum Read online

  “Yes, that’s right,” Lao Lao said, “but do you know that she had to walk to get here?”

  “She walked?” Zhongmei said, disbelieving.

  “And do you know that she had to carry Zhongqin and Zhongling with her?”

  Zhongmei didn’t know.

  “Your mother was living with us at the time, me and Lao Ye, when she got a letter from your father asking her to come here,” Lao Lao said. Lao ye is the Chinese word for “grandpa.” “She wanted to come, but she had no money to buy a train ticket. She asked me and Lao Ye if we could help her with money, and we wanted to, but we didn’t have any money either, really none. You may not understand just how poor China was then. A lot of people were starving. They were boiling tree bark and grass to make soup to have something to eat. A train ticket to Heilongjiang seemed like a great luxury.

  “This was a few years before you were born. Zhongqin and Zhongling were very small. Zhongling wasn’t even a year old yet. So Lao Ye and I told your mother that with two children and no money she had no choice but to stay with us for a while longer until the situation improved.

  “But your mother couldn’t wait,” Lao Lao continued. “She didn’t listen to us. She just had to come right away. I remember it so well. She got a bamboo balancing pole. She put Zhongqin in one basket and Zhongling in another basket and she slung the baskets over the two ends of the balancing pole, and what do you think she did next?”

  “You just told me, Lao Lao. She walked all the way to Baoquanling.”

  “Yes, I already told you. She slung the balancing pole over her shoulders and walked to Baoquanling, the two girls bouncing up and down in their baskets. It’s a good thing I didn’t bind her feet, isn’t it, though at the time I wished I had because I thought she was making a terrible mistake. Do you know how far it is from Shandong to here?”

  Zhongmei didn’t know.

  “It’s eight hundred miles,” Lao Lao said.

  “Wow!” It seemed an impossible distance to walk. “Why did you think it was a mistake?” Zhongmei asked.

  “Lao Ye and I tried every argument to convince her not to make such a terribly long journey on foot. Your mother didn’t even have enough money to buy food along the way. We knew that she was going to have to beg for it. We thought it was dangerous. There were a lot of bad people on the roads in China in those days. There are bad people now too, but there were a lot more of them then. We told her that she could be robbed for the few coins she had. We said, ‘The children will starve to death. Even if they don’t starve, they’ll get sick. Don’t be foolish. Just wait a few months. Maybe the situation will change. Maybe Zhengping will be able to send you money for the train in a year or so.’

  “But your mother didn’t wait. She just put that balancing pole over her shoulders and started walking. For three months we didn’t hear any news about her. We were worried sick about all three of them. Then, finally, after a long time, a letter arrived, a very short letter. It said something like, ‘I’ve arrived safely in Baoquanling. Zhengping and the two girls are fine.’ ”

  “Did she really have to walk the whole way?” Zhongmei asked. Her mother was very small, not five feet tall, less than ninety pounds. Zhongmei knew that she was tough, tough enough to work ten or twelve hours a day in Baoquanling’s fields. But to walk eight hundred miles carrying her two babies! The story excited Zhongmei, but it also made her wonder if she was doing the right thing, going on a hunger strike to get what she wanted from parents who had already sacrificed so much.

  “From time to time your mother was able to get on a train, but most of the distance she walked, and somehow she made it. But when she got here, your mother was terribly sick,” Lao Lao continued. “She had hardly eaten in weeks. Everything nutritious that she was able to beg or steal she gave to the children. She had to be taken to the hospital or she would probably have died. Even now she’s not as healthy as she was before.”

  “Is that why you think I’m doing the wrong thing?” Zhongmei asked Lao Lao.

  “I don’t know,” Lao Lao answered. “Yes, it’s selfish of you, I suppose, but there’s more than one meaning to every story. Your mother came to Baoquanling even though Lao Ye and I couldn’t help her and told her not to do it. At the time we thought her decision was totally wrong and reckless, but in the end she made it. Who knows if she did the right thing? You can only know the result of the things you do, not the things you don’t.”

  “I guess it was the right thing,” Zhongmei said, thinking hard. Her mother had defied her mother, and now she was defying hers. Was it wrong or was it right? Zhongmei’s name was made up of two Chinese characters. There was Zhong, pronounced joong, which means “faithful,” or “loyal,” or “filial,” as in respectful or obedient to one’s parents. The second character, Mei, pronounced may, is the word for “plum” or “plum blossom,” the kind that comes out in the early spring and is a favorite of traditional Chinese painters. So Zhongmei means “faithful plum.” But faithful to what? That was the question. Faithful to her parents? Or faithful to her own dream?

  “So what do you think I should do?” Faithful Plum asked Lao Lao.

  “It’s hard to say,” Lao Lao said. “But now at least I know what you want.”

  She patted Zhongmei on the head. “You rest. Let me see what I can do.”

  Zhongmei lay back, her head on her pillow. She saw her lao lao wince as she got off the kang and put her small feet on the floor. It hurt her every time she walked. Zhongmei knew that she was fortunate to have nice big feet herself, not the cramped and crippled things some stupid tradition had given to her grandmother for her whole life.

  That evening, as she lay on the kang, Zhongmei heard someone knocking on the house’s front door, and then she heard a voice she recognized talking to her parents. It was the head of their neighborhood in Baoquanling. She couldn’t make out the whole conversation, but she heard bits and snatches of it. There was talk of money. She heard her father mention a policeman. Zhongmei didn’t know what it meant. She heard her father say, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” and Zhongmei wondered what idea they could be talking about. Was it the idea that she go to Beijing? Her father’s voice again: “This hunger strike thing, it’s extremely disobedient. If we let her have her way now, isn’t it like giving her a reward for behaving badly?”

  There was a silence, and Zhongmei thought for a moment that everybody had gone to sleep in the middle of their meeting. Then she heard her lao lao’s soft voice.

  “Isn’t one of the reasons you’ve worked so hard that you want your children to do things that you couldn’t do?” she said. Hearing that brought tears to Zhongmei’s eyes. She wanted her heart to stop beating so it would be quiet enough for her to hear more.

  But then there was just the murmuring of several voices talking at once. After a while longer, there was a scraping of chairs. And then, still weak from hunger despite Lao Lao’s secret dumplings, Zhongmei fell asleep.

  4

  An Outfit for the Big City

  Zhongmei thought about all this as her bus bounced down the road toward Hegang, especially the very end of the story of her hunger strike. As luck would have it the next day was a Sunday, when Zhongmei’s parents didn’t have to leave the house before dawn. Zhongmei was just rousing herself when her mother came into the room and sat next to her.

  “We’re going to let you go,” she said. Her tone seemed to Zhongmei to be somehow both gentle and annoyed. Light was streaming in through the kitchen window. Zhongmei could smell broth being prepared in the kitchen. Sunday was the day of a special breakfast of noodles in broth with vegetables and, sometimes, chunks of chicken or pork. Her mouth watered at the thought.

  “You have Comrade Wu to thank for this,” Xiuying said. “Comrade Wu and Lao Lao.” Comrade Wu was the head of the neighborhood committee, the man whose voice Zhongmei had recognized the night before. “He’s going to help us borrow money for you to take the train to Beijing. We know this is your dream, a
nd we want to give you a chance for it to come true. But you have to promise not to be disappointed if you don’t succeed in the auditions, and when you come home, if you ever go on a hunger strike again, we really will give you to the Wongs.”

  “You will?” Zhongmei said.

  “No, of course we won’t,” her mother said. “But you still have to promise never to go on a hunger strike again.”

  “I promise,” Zhongmei said, her feeling of happiness diminished because she knew she had cheated, eating those dumplings Lao Lao had given her.

  “Now get up and eat some noodles,” her mother said, heading into the kitchen. She took noodles out of a pot with chopsticks and put them into a blue earthenware bowl, then ladled some broth from the wok. Zhongmei sat in front of the bowl feeling that nothing in her life had ever smelled that good.

  “Ba knows somebody in Beijing. His name is Li Zhongshan. He’s the policeman who helped him when he went to Beijing to fetch back that silly girl who ran away, and he owes us a favor. He has a son who was living here and wanted to go home, and Ba talked to the leaders and convinced them to let him go. Ba’s going to write to him and ask him to take care of you in Beijing.”

  “Thank you, Ma,” Zhongmei said. She leaned over her bowl and felt the steam rising from it tickle her nose and cloud her eyes, or was it something else making her eyes moist like dew? Gratefully she started to eat. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her lao lao hobble into the kitchen. She looked at her and smiled, and Lao Lao smiled back.

  For the few days before she left, Zhongmei’s sisters helped her get ready. They got a bolt of the latest synthetic fabric to arrive at the Baoquanling Department Store, a luxuriant, silky yellow, with plans to make a fancy dress out of it so Zhongmei would fit right in with the sophisticated inhabitants of Beijing. To go with the dress, Zhongqin and Zhongling got Zhongmei the first store-bought shoes she’d had in her life. The department store was like most small-town department stores in China in those days. It was a squat rectangle at the dusty intersection of the town’s two big streets and it was filled with pretty dull stuff. There were heavy padded pants and jackets for men and women, either blue or gray or, most commonly, a pale army green, and slightly more colorful padded clothing for children. Unisex shoes were all made out of blue cotton with thin plastic soles or thicker rubber ones, except there was one fashionable-looking pair in the girls’ section—green with brown laces—and that’s the pair that Zhongqin and Zhongling bought for Zhongmei, even though it was a size too big.

  “You’ll grow into them in no time,” Zhongling, who was always cheerful and optimistic, said.

  Zhongmei was overjoyed. She looked over at Zhongqin and Zhongling, appreciating how lucky she was to have two older sisters like that. Since their parents were home so little, it was the older children who were responsible for taking care of the younger ones in the Li household, and so, since she had been a baby, Zhongmei had been raised largely by Zhongqin, with occasional help from Zhongling.

  Zhongqin had carried her on her hip just about everywhere she went, even to the Baoquanling Middle School, where she would deposit her younger sister on a little folding stool that she brought with her from home and set next to her desk in the classroom. Sometimes, when she got bored just sitting there and listening to Zhongqin’s lessons, Zhongmei would wander to the school entrance and sit on the doorsill there. Sometimes she would play in the school courtyard with children her age who were also being cared for by their older sisters. It got awfully cold in Baoquanling in the winter, so then the children stayed mostly indoors. When Zhongmei was ready for elementary school herself, Zhongqin brought her there in the morning, and picked her up and brought her home in the afternoon. Most important, perhaps, when Zhongmei began taking dance lessons from the young woman who gave them to young children, it was Zhongqin who took her little sister there and picked her up when the lesson was over.

  Zhongmei was in the second grade at the time. The children in her class—Young Pioneers all—learned some songs and dances from the Baoquanling Propaganda Brigade, which traveled the whole sprawling state farm and performed for the farmers, sometimes right out in the fields where they were working. The Chinese government in those days wanted everybody, children included, to do songs and dances to celebrate how brave workers and peasants led by Chairman Mao and the Communist Party defeated evil landlords and foreign invaders and created “the new China.” So, like the other children, Zhongmei held a wooden rifle and did a dance with it, crouching as though she were stalking an enemy, lunging forward a couple of steps, then back one, circling counterclockwise before finally springing ahead to shoot some landlord thug in the heart.

  A song went with the dance and years later Zhongmei would hum it to herself, not because she liked the lyrics but because of its catchy tune:

  We are sharpshooters,

  One bullet shot,

  One enemy dead.

  We are the soldiers of the revolution.

  No matter how high the mountain,

  Or how deep the river,

  We will make it through.

  “You have a very sweet voice,” the leader of the Propaganda Brigade told Zhongmei one day.

  “Thank you,” Zhongmei replied.

  Everybody called this young woman Big Xia, but in fact she was very small.

  “Would you like to take singing lessons?” Big Xia asked.

  “Sure!” Zhongmei said.

  “There’s a sent-down youth who gives ballet and singing lessons after school,” Big Xia told Zhongmei. Years before, Chairman Mao had ordered millions of students from the big cities to move to villages all over China, sometimes very far away, so they could learn what peasant life was like and help educate the local people. Baoquanling had several of these young people, who were known as the sent-down youth. Some of them got to like countryside life, but many of them felt stuck in remote places for years, their educations interrupted, and they yearned to go home. The girl who ran away and had to be fetched back by Zhongmei’s father had fallen in love with a sent-down youth from Beijing who himself had sneaked back home. Some of the members of the Baoquanling Propaganda Brigade were sent-down youths, and so was the ballet teacher who held classes in the primary school for local girls (and a smaller number of boys).

  “I’ll introduce you to her,” Big Xia said.

  From then on, once a week Zhongmei went to a small studio in the school to take dance classes. The studio had no barre. Its floor was rough cement, its walls a stained, peeling yellow. The only decorations were the usual color portrait of Chairman Mao and a slogan, square red characters on a white background saying STUDY HARD AND ADVANCE EVERY DAY! There, starting when she was about eight, Zhongmei learned her first curtsies, pliés, and jetés, her inaugural arabesques and battements.

  By the time Zhongmei got into the upper elementary school grades, she was deemed to be the prettiest and most talented girl in her class, certainly the best singer, which is the reason she was chosen to perform in front of that microphone in the town hall every day at noon. And every day, there was Zhongqin, escorting her little sister on her rounds. And, naturally enough, it was also Zhongqin who saw that little notice in the People’s Daily newspaper about the auditions at the Beijing Dance Academy. If it weren’t for Zhongqin, Zhongmei realized, she would certainly not be getting ready to go to Beijing.

  When the three girls got home from the department store, Zhongling went to work at their mother’s sewing machine. A few hours later, after several consultations with Zhongqin, who was busy in the kitchen, she had produced an entire outfit, and her two sisters watched as Zhongmei tried it on. The yellow material had been converted into a pleated yellow skirt coming down below Zhongmei’s knees. Wide brown straps crossed over her back and shoulders, and a pink blouse with a curled collar had been added to the ensemble. Green embroidered ducks waddled up and down on either side of the buttons. Zhongmei put on the green shoes with the brown laces, and Zhongling held up a small mirror so she co
uld see herself in her new costume. What she saw was a very slim girl with pigtails in slightly too big clothes, but it didn’t matter. Zhongmei had never had anything quite so colorful and elegant. She spun around so the skirt flared out, and gave a shout of joy.

  “You look great!” Zhongling said.

  “Thank you, Er-jie,” Zhongmei said, feeling happy but also a little bit sad. Zhongling was always so eager to please her that sometimes Zhongmei took advantage of it, even a couple of times earning Zhongling a spanking from their mother.

  Somehow the beautiful outfit made Zhongmei think about an incident that took place when she was still just a little girl. She was home for a reason she couldn’t remember, maybe because she wasn’t feeling well, and Zhongling, as she always did when Zhongmei was sick, was taking care of her.

  Suddenly Zhongmei declared, “I’m hungry.”

  There was no food in the house and Zhongling told Zhongmei that she’d have to wait until Zhongqin came home, and then she could go out and buy something at the market.

  “I need to eat something now,” Zhongmei moaned.

  “Well, you’re just going to have to wait,” Zhongling said.

  “I can’t stand it,” Zhongmei said.

  “Well, what do you want me to do? I can’t leave you alone to go to the market. You’re just going to have to wait. You won’t starve.”

  “But I really can’t wait,” Zhongmei insisted. “I am starving.”

  Desperate to stop Zhongmei’s suffering, Zhongling went to the back garden to see if she could find something there. Their mother had been working on the garden for weeks. She had planted peas when there was still frost on the ground, but they had already been harvested. The rest of the crop was young. Nothing was ripe, not the eggplants or the scallions or the green beans. But there were two rows of carrots, whose filigree of green shoots was sticking out of the ground. Maybe the carrots underneath are big enough to eat, Zhongling thought. She took hold of the largest of the shoots and pulled it up. A pale carrot-colored thread came out of the ground, a dark skinny thing, more like a rat’s tail than an edible vegetable.