A Girl Named Faithful Plum Page 9

  “They said I could do that,” Zhongmei replied. “Why not?”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of it,” Tianyuan said. “I have my sheet music.” She showed Zhongmei a plastic folder she was carrying.

  “Anyway,” Tianyuan said, “it really wouldn’t matter even if you did have a score since what you don’t have is guanxi. I guess you couldn’t, coming from a place nobody’s ever heard of like this Bao … what?”

  “Baoquanling,” Zhongmei said, feeling small and unworthy.

  “Baoquanling,” Tianyuan repeated. “They’re only taking twelve girls and twelve boys from all the auditions all over the country, and there are a lot more than twelve boys and twelve girls who are good and have guanxi. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

  A couple of hours later Zhongmei and Tianyuan split up, each going to a different studio for her prepared dance. Zhongmei went up to studio eight, where she found a few dozen girls sitting or standing in the corridor outside the door. Looking through the door’s glass pane, she could see a panel of three judges sitting at a table at the back of the room. One girl ahead of her was still doing her performance, accompanied on the studio piano by a man Zhongmei hadn’t seen up to that point. When the girl was finished, the head judge told her to wait in the corridor outside and signaled to Zhongmei to step forward.

  “Name please?” he said.

  “Li Zhongmei,” Zhongmei said.

  The man looked down at a ledger book in front of him and made a notation with his pen.

  “If you have sheet music for the accompanist, you may give it to him now,” the judge said.

  “I’m going to accompany myself by singing,” Zhongmei announced.

  “You’re going to sing?” The man sounded a bit incredulous.

  “Yes,” Zhongmei said.

  The man shrugged. “All right. Proceed.”

  Zhongmei took her place in the middle of the studio, wearing her special yellow dress with the brown straps and her green shoes. She did her dance and sang, her clear, flutey voice, so familiar to the farmers of Baoquanling, bouncing off the walls of the studio as she enacted the drama of the girl fighting against the men of the evil landlord. Her dance was very acrobatic, involving numerous high leg kicks and leaps, but despite the exertion, her voice never faltered.

  “Please wait outside with the others,” the head judge told her when she was finished.

  Zhongmei, flushed from her effort, found a spot to sit down along the wall of the corridor, already crowded with girls, and watched as more candidates were summoned into the studio, each of them emerging, their faces red, their upper lips beaded with sweat, back into the corridor a few minutes later. After a long time, the head judge appeared at the studio door with a piece of paper in his hand.

  “When I read your name,” he said, “please come up and take your card for tomorrow. If you don’t hear your name, that means you are dismissed, with our thanks for coming to the audition and our best wishes for your future.”

  The man started reading the names off his list, and with each name there was a scream of happiness and a girl running up to him and taking her card. Zhongmei counted the number of names—five, six, seven, then eleven, twelve, thirteen, but not hers, not yet. Her heart began to pound as the man read off the list. Until that moment, she had continued to think that she wouldn’t make it, and that each day of the audition merely extended what had become the main purpose of her visit, which was to see a bit of Beijing, to glimpse the big world outside her hometown, before she returned there for good. Yet, at the same time, she dreamed that she would be accepted, but since she knew she wouldn’t be, she had steeled herself against too much disappointment when the day on which she failed to get a card finally came.

  Now, however, her hope had become independent of her rational will. It was like a little animal gripping her chest from inside, making it hard even to breathe. “Please,” she said to herself, “give me just one more day. Please don’t bring this to an end now.” She thought of the girl she’d met outside and her claim that the whole thing was a sham, and she felt a mixture of anger and disbelief rise up inside her. It can’t be true what she said, she thought, even as she worried that maybe it was true. The girl had seemed awfully sure of herself, and her grandmother, dressed in that sleek wool suit, didn’t contradict her. She just told her not to talk about it. Well, if it was true, Zhongmei then thought, it would be no disgrace to be rejected at the audition, since it wouldn’t be her talent that was being judged, but her nonexistent guanxi. And yet, could it really be that the selections had already secretly been made? Could something so sneaky and deceitful take place in China?

  “Li Zhongmei.” Zhongmei was so intent on these thoughts that she didn’t hear her name at first.

  “Li Zhongmei” was pronounced again, and Zhongmei realized with a start that she was being called to pick up her card for the next day! Suddenly, like the girls before her, she screamed. She leaped up off the corridor floor and ran for her card, as if it might be withdrawn if she didn’t grab it right away. She was so out of breath that she had to gasp for air after her scream, and she realized she had hardly been breathing from the time the head judge had started reading the list.

  Zhongmei rushed into Policeman Li’s house that night happy and excited. “I made it to the next stage!” she told Da-ma, who smiled broadly and clapped her hands. Adding to her excitement was a letter from Zhongqin.

  Dear Zhongmei,

  Everybody’s really glad you finally found Policeman Li. Ma and Ba are fine. One of the hens hatched some eggs and the courtyard is full of little yellow chicks chirping all day. Your da-ge and your xiao-di and your er-jie are all fine. It’s getting cold here. Ma is making a quilted jacket for you for winter and she’ll send it to you. Everybody wishes you luck at the audition. Try your best. You can’t do more than that, but you have to be sure that it is your best. It’s your one chance. It’s no shame if you don’t make it, but it would be a shame if you don’t give it all you’ve got.

  Zhongqin

  Dear Da-jie,

  I’ve got good news. I did my dance from The Red Detachment of Women today, and guess what? I’ve made it to the fifth stage! So there’s no question I’m giving it all I’ve got. A girl I met told me it was a mistake to choose Red Detachment because it was a Gang of Four production, but I guess it didn’t matter. The girl was from Shanghai. She danced something from Swan Lake. That’s a famous foreign ballet. I didn’t see her perform. She told me I’m wasting my time, since all the girls who are going to get in have already been selected in secret. I asked Policeman Li about what she said, and he said it was nonsense, but then he shook his head in a way that made me feel he was only trying to make me feel better. Do you think it could be true? Have I done all this for nothing?

  Your little sister

  After she finished writing her letter, Zhongmei ate a bowl of Da-ma’s sweet red bean soup. She helped with the dishes, washing them in an enamel basin in the small courtyard of their house, spilling the dirty dishwater over the brick floor. Then she and Policeman Li sat on folding stools in the lane outside their house, enjoying the cool weather. There wasn’t much to do in Beijing at night in those years, before everybody had televisions and computers or the money to go out to restaurants and the movies, like they do today. The houses were built behind high brick walls and, except for their entranceways, couldn’t be seen from the street. But in the nice weather, everybody put little wooden chairs outside their front doorways and said hello to each other. Policeman Li smoked. Zhongmei listened to the twangy sound of an er-hu being played by an invisible person behind one of the lane’s walls, and Zhongmei asked Policeman Li if he knew who it was.

  “Oh, that’s Old Blind Ma,” Policeman Li said.

  “He’s blind?” Zhongmei said.

  “Can’t see a thing. He lives two houses down and across the lane. He gives people massages during the day. Did you know that that’s what a lot of blind people do?”

&n
bsp; Zhongmei had vaguely heard that.

  “You do what you can,” Policeman Li said, and sighed. “Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you do your best to be useful, right?”

  “Yes,” Zhongmei agreed. She thought about how Zhongqin had given her similar advice in her letter. You do your best. You can’t do any more, but be sure that it is your best.

  A short time later she and Policeman Li went inside to go to bed. People turned in very early in China then, even in big cities like Beijing. By nine o’clock the streets were pretty much deserted and a silence that reminded Zhongmei of Baoquanling settled over the city. Except on this night, the er-hu player continued to play, so that Zhongmei drifted off to sleep with Old Blind Ma’s melody pleasantly in her head, mingling with a new thought: she had made it this far. There were three stages to go. For the first time Zhongmei began ardently to want to succeed, no matter what Wang Tianyuan might have told her about her having no chance. This was no longer just a sort of excuse for an adventure, a chance to have her picture taken outside the Forbidden City while she pursued what she had come to accept was an impossible dream. Now she was determined to do everything she could to make the dream entirely possible.

  On the fifth day, Zhongmei went again to studio eight, where she found a crowd of other girls and a panel of three judges sitting at a table. A woman collected all the candidates’ cards at the entrance.

  “My name is Liu Lingzhang,” she said, “and I’ll be your instructor for stage five of the audition. I’m going to teach you a few dance sequences and then each of you will perform them in turn in front of the judges.” She turned toward the panel of two women and a man.

  Zhongmei watched the movements of the sequence carefully. She was nervous when it was her turn to perform them, but she was determined to do them all without a mistake, and she did. At the end of the day, once again she got the coveted card instructing her to return. It told her to report to the school’s main auditorium at the usual time, eight o’clock in the morning. Again, she and a few other girls skipped happily to the courtyard while most of the others trudged sadly down the stairs, knowing that they would never be coming back.

  The auditorium was a large room on the first floor of the academy, and when Zhongmei arrived there the next morning, she saw a long table set up at the head of the room directly under the portrait of Chairman Mao, and dozens of girls and boys milling about, the lucky few who were still in contention. Zhongmei tried to count the number of them, and she got up to sixty with quite a few left uncounted when a hush settled over the room and the judges, appearing from a side entrance, took their places at the table.

  “Good morning,” one of them said. He was the tall, elegant, and handsome man that Zhongmei instantly recognized as the very Jia Zuoguang whom she had seen getting out of his car outside the school two days before, the greatest dancer in China!

  “I want to congratulate all of you for getting to stage six of the 1978 audition for the Beijing Dance Academy, the first truly open audition the school has ever had,” he said. “That’s already a great achievement and you should all be proud. Every one of you has already shown that you have what it takes to be a dancer. But as you know, there are spots for only twelve boys and twelve girls in the class that will come to school at the end of August, and we are going to choose just seven boys and seven girls from the audition here in Beijing. There are still more than one hundred of you in the room today, one hundred and twenty to be exact, and that’s one hundred and twenty out of more than twenty thousand candidates who began this audition a week ago. That means that all of you have already done very well.”

  Zhongmei’s heart fluttered as she listened. The greatest dancer in China, and he was there right in front of her in the very same room! Zhongmei had never seen anybody famous before in person. But Jia Zuoguang seemed not only famous to her. There was a calm gentleness about him. He didn’t have the bluster and self-importance of so many officials in China. He seemed nice.

  “One more thing,” Jia continued. “Of course you should all try hard in the last two stages of the audition, but don’t be too disappointed if you aren’t one of the lucky fourteen. Of course I know that you will be disappointed, but I hope not so much that you’ll be discouraged from continuing to dance. You’re all good, and there are other schools in China for dance, other opportunities for you, and I’m sure you will all find them.”

  Don’t be disappointed? Other schools? Zhongmei heard those words, but to her they meant the exact opposite of what Jia intended them to mean. Seeing Jia made her feel that there was nothing else in the world that mattered other than being selected for the Beijing Dance Academy. There was no other school in the world for her but this one. There was no other place for her than right here where he was.

  “Today,” Jia was saying, “the procedure will change. Yesterday you went in a small group to a studio to perform some sequences that were taught to you. That part will not change. Some teachers will introduce you to a series of steps, and you will perform them, not in a small studio but right here in front of the main panel.

  “After that,” Jia continued, “the judges will meet to decide a list of fifty finalists—twenty-five girls and twenty-five boys—who will be invited back for stage seven of the audition. So as not to require that you wait here while our meeting takes place, instead of giving you cards at the end of the day, we will post the names in the display case in front of the school, and starting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, you will be able to come to see if your name is on the list. The final stage of the audition will start the day after tomorrow at the same time, eight o’clock.”

  Jia then waved at a teacher who emerged into the middle of the room to show the candidates the steps they would have to perform. The first ones were pretty easy, and Zhongmei, when her turn came, did them with no problem. They got harder as the day wore on, and Zhongmei watched as some of the candidates stumbled, and a few of them even fell. But she didn’t fail to notice that some of the girls were very good. Before Zhongmei was called for the final sequence of steps, she heard the name Wang Tianyuan called, and she watched the girl who was sure she had already been chosen do her steps. She looked good, Zhongmei felt. She was a good dancer, strong and sure, but Zhongmei also noted that she seemed a little short and slightly pudgy, not sleek and long-limbed like most of the other girls. Also, at the very end of her dance, during a movement that wound up with the dancer standing on one leg, the other raised behind her, her arms spread like a bird in flight, Zhongmei saw a bit of wobble, and that gave her some hope. If she could do that movement without wobbling, Zhongmei thought, then it would mean that she was better than Tianyuan and that would mean, guanxi or not, that she should be chosen ahead of her. It would be nice, Zhongmei thought, if both of them got into the school; if only one of them could make it, it should be the one who was better.

  Zhongmei didn’t wobble. And when the day finished, she felt that she had done well. But so had a lot of other girls, and anyway, maybe, as Tianyuan had told her, the whole audition was a sham.

  And so, naturally, she was in a state of high excitement when she arrived the next morning at eight o’clock sharp on Policeman Li’s motorcycle. Zhongmei bolted to the display case before they had come to a full stop. Two sheets of paper each with two rows of names were posted, and there was already a good deal of pushing and shoving as girls and their parents tried to get close enough to read it. Alongside was another display case, in front of which boys and their parents were doing the same thing.

  In Chinese, there is no alphabetical order, because there are no letters in Chinese like there are in languages like English, French, and Spanish. Instead, words are formed by what are called Chinese characters, each character representing a sort of picture of its meaning. Each last name is indicated by a single character, and characters are organized by the number of strokes it takes to form that character.

  When Zhongmei got near enough to the fateful piece of paper to read it, she quic
kly scanned down the list. Along the way she saw Wang Tianyuan. Wang has four strokes, so it is higher in the order of characters than Li, which requires six strokes. Despite her wobble the day before, she had made it to the final stage, which made Zhongmei think that maybe she was right, maybe the decision about who would be accepted had already been made, and that would be bad for Zhongmei, because she knew that no arrangement existed for her to get into the school. But she didn’t think about that for long. She scanned rapidly down the list to the surname Li. There were five of them, Li being a very common name, and Zhongmei frantically devoured the full names of each of them—Li Xiaohua, Li Zhaoping, Li Xuenian, Li Linghao, and then, there it was—Li Zhongmei, written in clear, squarish characters. She had been chosen for stage seven!

  10

  “I’m Not Going Back Until I Dance!”

  The next morning, Zhongmei found herself wishing that Policeman Li would drive faster. She sat on the back of his motorcycle, the wind ruffling her hair, hardly noticing as they negotiated the narrow lanes near Li Zhongshan’s old house, rolled down some broader avenues lined with gray cement-block apartment houses, and roared past a walled park and another neighborhood of narrow twisting lanes before pulling up to the Beijing Dance Academy.

  Stage seven would be held in a large studio on the second floor. Once again, Vice Director Jia greeted the candidates and made a short speech.

  “In the final stage of the audition,” he said, “we will ask every candidate, both boys and girls, to do an improvisation. Each candidate will pick a piece of paper out of a bowl. The word on the paper will be your theme. You will read it aloud, and then, right away, with no time for preparation, you will make up a three- to five-minute dance expressing that theme. You will be something from nature—a bird, a rabbit, the wind, a cloud, a peony, a rose, a tiger, a mouse, or something else.

  “You will take a piece of paper out of the bowl when it’s your turn,” Jia said, and Zhongmei noticed something new in his tone, something stricter, just a bit harder than before. There were no words of encouragement for those who wouldn’t be selected, like there had been the day before.