A Girl Named Faithful Plum (12 page)

“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.

“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.

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?”

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.