A Girl Named Faithful Plum (16 page)

“Better not do that,” said Zhongmei. “You heard the rules.”

“Yes, Old Maid Tsang is pretty tough,” Xiaolan said.

“Old Maid Tsang?”

“Didn’t you know? She’s almost forty and never been married, so the students call her Old Maid Tsang.”

“That’s not very nice,” Zhongmei said, but she couldn’t stop herself from smiling. Old Maid Tsang seemed appropriate enough.

That night after going to bed, Zhongmei lay in the regulation position, facing a window next to her bunk. She was too excited to sleep and so probably were most of the other girls. They all must have heard the click as the door of the dormitory opened, and, like Zhongmei, they must all have frozen in their beds as they followed the sound of somebody’s footsteps walking the length of the room and then back, until, once again, there was the sound of the door opening and closing and the
footsteps disappearing down the corridor outside. It had been Old Maid Tsang making her first inspection, no doubt.

Feeling that the coast was clear, Zhongmei, still wide awake, slowly turned her head to look into the room, knowing that she was already breaking the rules. The light from a streetlamp outside that filtered through the dormitory window cast the bunks across from her in an eerie pale glow. It seemed to her, though she couldn’t be sure, that Xiaolan had also turned her head and was looking in her direction. Zhongmei wiggled her fingers and in the semi-darkness she saw that Xiaolan wiggled her fingers in response.

Then one of the girls started laughing softly to herself. The other girls started to laugh also, until the whole room was filled with a kind of stifled hilarity, each girl sure that to be caught laughing would mean immediate expulsion from the school and yet unable to stop. Zhongmei, choking back her giggles, turned her head back toward the wall and tried to think of something sad, like how much she missed her family, but the more she tried not to laugh, the more she laughed, until her stomach and sides ached and she thought she would die from a lack of air. Old Maid Tsang, she said to herself over and over until, finally, after a good long while, the choked-back giggles died down, and the six girls in dorm room number one went to sleep, all of them facing a wall.

T
he morning bell came, as promised, at exactly six o’clock. Zhongmei climbed down from her upper bunk and dressed in a pair of cotton pants and knit pullover that each girl had been given the day before. She splashed water on her face in the bathroom, which was at the end of the corridor outside, made her bed, folded her pajamas, and put them in her drawer. Little Zhou, the girl who had helped her get settled the day before, appeared at the dormitory doorway carrying a box full of what looked like clear-colored plastic sheets. “These are your
jian fei ku
,” Zhou said—weight-loss clothes. “Find a size that fits you and put it on over your regular sweats,” she said, “and then go downstairs to the outside courtyard for morning exercise.” Zhongmei grabbed a set of the strange plastic clothes and pulled it on. It fit tightly at the neck, the wrists, and the ankles and made a funny crinkly sound as she ran down the stairs with the other girls, joining the six girls from dorm room number two, and running into the first-year boys, who were
bounding out of the first-floor corridors in identical plastic suits.

“Form a line,” an instructor told the assembly in the courtyard. It was a clear, bright day, already warm. Zhongmei heard the steady sound of bicycle bells and the intermittent roaring of buses outside the gate. All the students of the school seemed to be there, from the youngest, like Zhongmei, to teenagers, and the courtyard was full. “Hold the hand of the person in front and the person in back, go out the gate and across the street to Taoranting Park,” he called. Zhongmei looked for Xiaolan and grabbed her hand and the hand of another girl, and went across the street to the park entrance. The instructor led them across an esplanade on one side of the park to a lake. It was a beautiful sight, the lake sparkling in the early-morning light, willows and chestnut trees lining its distant shores. A narrow paved roadway went around the lake under the canopy of trees. On the left, an arched bridge soared over a narrow inlet.

“Everybody is now going to run once around the lake, and that’s what you’ll do every morning,” the instructor said. “But running for dancers is not the same as running for other people. We run like this,” he said, and he demonstrated a kind of leaping, prancing motion. “Go as high with each step as you go far,” he said, jumping off his left foot, extending his right leg, and coming down on his right foot in a sort of jeté. “We don’t so much run around the lake as we leap around it, like antelopes, or kangaroos, or, if you prefer, frogs. So now, go!”

Zhongmei began bounding down the path as instructed.
At first it was fun to leap high, her pigtails flying and brushing the low-hanging willow branches. Even the crinkling sound of her plastic suit seemed sort of funny. But by the time she’d reached what she estimated to be the halfway point around the lake, she had realized why the plastic was called a weight-loss suit. She was sweating profusely underneath it, and before long her heavy cotton pants and jersey were soaked through. The morning was still cool, but she was broiling, running out of breath, and wondering if she was going to make the whole distance, which was longer than it had first looked. I’m skinny as it is, she thought. Why do I have to wear a weight-loss suit?

After another couple hundred yards, some of the first-year students had stopped and were leaning against trees, red-faced, panting, and holding their sides. Zhongmei kept going, lumbering over the arched bridge, gasping for breath now, the pain in her side almost unbearable. It felt as if her insides were about to erupt. Her thighs burned. When she got back to the park entrance, her legs were so tired, she wished somebody would carry her back across the street.

“Now,” the instructor called out, “to the courtyard for calisthenics.”

“Calisthenics?” Zhongmei moaned to herself. “I’m going to die.”

But she did the calisthenics too, grimacing through the pain, her body heating up still further inside her suit, the sweat pouring down her face, stinging her eyes, making her hands slippery. Jumping jacks were first, done to an accompaniment of military-sounding music that blared over an outdoor
loudspeaker, then deep knee bends, stretching movements forward, to the sides, and back, followed by sit-ups and push-ups on the none-too-spotless courtyard ground. Zhongmei groaned, though not more loudly than many of those around her. She was straining so hard it was almost funny. When she’d done fifty push-ups, at least half of which were weak upper-body thrusts, not real push-ups, she breathed a sigh of relief, only to find out that she wasn’t finished yet.

“Leg kicks,” the instructor said. “There are three kinds, so watch carefully. First, forward kicks, like this,” and he kicked his foot up in front of his face to a level well above his head. “Side kicks are second,” and the instructor kicked first his right leg up and to the side, then the same with the left. “Third is the circle kick,” and he kicked up and forward with his right leg, describing a clockwise arc whose high point was about a foot above his head. As his foot passed the middle point of its upper arc, he reached up his hand so that foot and hand slapped loudly together. This was followed by a counterclockwise motion with the left leg and another slap of foot and hand. “With each kick you advance a little bit, so that you kick your way from one end of the courtyard to the other.

“Do it!” he shouted, and then led the way, once across the courtyard with forward kicks, then back with more forward kicks, and then two more round trips, one for side kicks and another for circle kicks. This was no longer funny. Zhongmei gulped air, but no matter how much she gulped, she couldn’t seem to get enough. Her sides were howling in protest. She could feel the blood throbbing in her temples. Her heart was racing so fast she feared it would leap out of her chest. By the
end, her kicks, which had started nicely at head level, were barely above her waist and utterly out of reach of the hand upraised to meet her foot, but, thankfully, everybody else seemed to be in about the same condition.

The exercise over (until the next day! Zhongmei reminded herself), Little Zhou led the first-year girls up the stairs to the dormitory, where they were mercifully allowed to get out of their weight-loss suits and change into dance clothing, baggy blue shorts and light blue tops.

Zhongmei listened to the commentary around her. “I can’t move,” one girl said. “I feel like I was left out in the rain for a month, I’m so soaked,” another one said. “My feet are killing me,” a third girl said. Zhongmei remembered the woman who told her during the auditions that the Dance Academy would be the hardest thing she ever did, and only now did she understand what she meant. “Only six years to go!” yelled a girl, and all of the first-year students collapsed in a combination of exhaustion and laughter.

“Breakfast first, then ballet class,” Little Zhou announced, and the girls went in a bunch down the stairs and across the courtyard to the cafeteria. Zhongmei poured a glass of cool water down her throat and then devoured some
man-tou
, steamed bread dipped in tangy shrimp paste. She drank a bowl of warm soybean milk mixed with a bit of sugar. She had a second bowl and another
man-tou
. And at precisely eight o’clock, still swallowing her breakfast, she followed Little Zhou back across the courtyard to the classroom building and up a flight of stairs to the second floor and studio two, for the class called fundamentals of ballet.

“G
ood morning, girls.” A woman teacher greeted them after they’d filed into the studio. “My name is Zhu Huaimin,” she announced, “and this class is the single most important dance class you will ever take at this school, as important as all the other classes put together, because here you will establish the foundation for everything else that you will do at this school. I will expect every one of you to follow my instructions and to work very hard, and if you do, I can guarantee you that you will be ballet dancers of international caliber, among the best in the world.”

Zhongmei recognized Teacher Zhu right away. She was the thin, severe-looking woman with the plastic glasses who had sat next to Vice Director Jia on that day when Zhongmei had done her blade-of-grass improvisation, the one who had looked angry at the decision to give Zhongmei a second chance.

She sat on a wooden chair while the twelve eleven-year-old girls sat on the floor in front of her. “You will arrive promptly
at eight o’clock every day, Monday to Saturday,” she said. “You will be on time. Any person arriving late will not be allowed to take the class that day. Three times late without a medical excuse and you will be expelled from school. We will practice here for one hour every day, and then you will go off to your regular schoolwork and your other activities.”

Teacher Zhu asked each of the girls to announce their names and where they came from, and Zhongmei noted that all of the girls came from big and famous cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Beijing itself. When it came her turn, she gave her name and said she was from a state farm in Heilongjiang Province called Baoquanling. There were barely audible twitters from some of the other girls, and Zhongmei thought—but she wasn’t sure—that she heard somebody whisper the Chinese words
tu bao zi
, which is the common term in Chinese for a country bumpkin, a hick, a rube, a local yokel. Zhongmei looked up at the semicircle of other girls to see who had whispered the phrase, but all she saw were portraits of goody-two-shoes innocence looking back at her. And yet, she had heard titters and whisperings. Why did they seem to think she was a little bit ridiculous?

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst came with an incident so strange and unlikely that it’s hard to believe it really happened, but it really did. As they introduced themselves, a couple of the girls boasted of having performed on television in their hometowns.