A Girl Named Faithful Plum (9 page)

T
he windows of the station waiting room darkened as the light in Beijing began to fade. What could have happened to Policeman Li? Before Zhongmei left home, her father had sent his friend an old picture of Zhongmei. In China in those days, few people from the countryside could afford cameras or film, and having their picture taken was a rare and special event that took place in a photo studio, which meant that the picture Zhongmei’s father sent to Li Zhongshan was taken when Zhongmei was about seven years old. It showed Zhongmei as a very little girl, her bangs down to her eyes, and a gauzy scarf around her neck, and while she was now a good deal bigger, the eleven-year-old Zhongmei could still be discerned in the picture of the seven-year-old Zhongmei. Unbeknownst to Zhongmei, Policeman Li did come to the station, but he didn’t find Zhongmei. Maybe he looked for a girl exactly like the one in the photograph, and Zhongmei wasn’t that girl anymore.

“What can we do?” Huping’s mother asked.

“You go ahead home,” Zhongmei said bravely, even though she wasn’t feeling very brave. “I’ll wait here. I’m sure he’ll come. You don’t have to worry about me.” But she wanted very much for them to worry about her.

“If he was going to come, he’d have been here long ago,” Huping’s mother said. “It’s pointless to wait any longer. You better come home with us.”

Zhongmei looked around the station, which reverberated with noises and echoes, with a thousand shouts and murmurs, with the scraping of luggage being dragged across the floor, with the wailing of babies, with public announcements that seemed to be swallowed up by the very vastness of the place. The station was less crowded than before, less filled with rushing people, and Zhongmei stayed anchored to her spot, thinking that she’d now be easier to see. But nobody came, and, as the hall continued to empty, Zhongmei had the feeling that nobody would. But for Huping’s family, she was alone in China’s immense capital, and the person who had vowed to take care of her had vanished.

She went home with Huping’s family. Huping’s mother’s surname was Chen. Zhongmei called her Chen Aiyi, Auntie Chen, and his father Shu-shu, Uncle. She gratefully accepted their hospitality, knowing that if it wasn’t for them, she would have been out on the streets like a beggar. She had food to eat and a roof over her head, and the family was nice. Nonetheless, she wondered what to do. It wasn’t going to be a simple thing to find Policeman Li. Unlike today in China, she couldn’t just flick on her cell phone and give her parents a call to find out Li Zhongshan’s address. Almost nobody in China
had a home telephone in those days, much less a cell phone. On the rare occasion when they did make private calls, they used telephones tended by shopkeepers on the streets, paying a few fen per call. And in the entire country of one billion people there were no telephone books, so she couldn’t simply look up Li Zhongshan and get his number and address that way. Zhongmei could have written a letter to her father telling him to write to Li Zhongshan and give him the address of Huping’s family, where he could come to fetch her, but by the time all that could be done, the audition, which was to start in just a few days, would already be over.

“Don’t worry,” Chen Aiyi said. “I’m sure we’ll find this Policeman Li, or he’ll find you. My husband is going to go to the main police station on his day off from work to ask about him.”

But Zhongmei did worry. For hours she sat at the family’s house, which was actually a part of a larger house built in three sections around a narrow courtyard. An imposing entry gate of carved wood led from the lane into the courtyard. The rooms had large windows covered by lattices of dark wood. The roofs were of gray tile. Water came from a pump with a curved metal handle painted red in the middle of the courtyard. This courtyard was a crowded place, since lots of small rooms made out of cinder blocks or bricks with corrugated metal roofs had been put up next to the older ones, and it was crammed with stuff—crates for storing cabbage, sheds with cooking pots, plates, cups, teapots, and enamel basins for washing. Here and there were braziers for cooking, piles of coal-dust bricks that were used in the braziers, washtubs and corrugated scrubbing boards for doing laundry, a flotsam and jetsam of discarded pieces of
furniture. Two pomegranate trees grew there as well, and small green fruits were beginning to take shape on their branches. Ropes suspended from hooks in the houses crisscrossed the yard and were used to dry the laundry that was done in the outdoor washtubs, using water drawn from the pump. As in Baoquanling, the toilet was a public one down the lane. So was the bath, where Chen Aiyi took Zhongmei on her first night to wash off the dust of her long journey.

“This used to be a rich family’s house,” Chen Aiyi told Zhongmei as they came back to the courtyard, carrying their towels and a dish of soap, wearing fresh clothing, “but after the revolution, the place was divided up so some poor people could come live here, including us.”

“Is the rich family still here?” Zhongmei asked.

“Oh, yes,” Chen Aiyi said. “They’re in that room over there.” She pointed across the courtyard. “They’re just an old couple. Their children left years ago. But we don’t see much of them. They don’t mix with us.”

Zhongmei was amazed that this part of Beijing wasn’t all that different from Baoquanling. Indeed, her house in Baoquanling, which was also down a narrow lane, was small, narrow, and dark, but it was bigger than the portion of the courtyard house that her new Beijing family occupied. Zhongmei slept on a narrow cot pushed against the whitewashed wall of the living room, while Aiyi and Shu-shu slept in a bed in the other half of the same room, which was blocked off by a screen made of pleated red cloth. But she didn’t sleep well. There was a lot of noise in the courtyard until late at night. Zhongmei
could hear conversations, laughter, and infants crying in the neighboring rooms. One of Huping’s parents—was it Aiyi or Shu-shu? Zhongmei couldn’t tell—snored loudly.

But even if Chen Aiyi’s house was modest and crowded, it was pretty different from Baoquanling. Intricate, delicate latticed woodwork covered the large windows, and the floor was of polished wood, not the cement of Zhongmei’s hometown. In the Chen living room, there was a large scroll painting showing a scene of mountains, forests, waterfalls, and winding paths, along which a monk in rust-brown robes, looking very small in the surrounding immensity of nature, rode on a donkey. On the steep, craggy hills above the man were pavilions with carved railings and sloping roofs. Nobody in Baoquanling had a painting like that. In Baoquanling, people had portraits of Chairman Mao or revolutionary posters showing farmers marching under a bright red sun into the fields, holding pitchforks in one hand, copies of a little red book of Mao quotations in the other. By contrast, the painting in this house in Beijing suggested to Zhongmei something deeper, quieter, more elegant; something very refined and civilized.

Also, after just a day or so, Zhongmei noticed that the people in Beijing were different. They had smooth, pale faces. Many of them wore store-bought white or printed cotton shirts and blouses and leather shoes. The farmers that Zhongmei grew up with seemed grizzled and leathery by comparison, or the men did. The women in Baoquanling had ruddy complexions, made that way by the sun and the wind. They wore threadbare, patched clothing and cotton shoes with plastic or
rubber soles mostly made at home. After only a day in Beijing, Zhongmei saw something she’d never seen in Baoquanling—a beauty parlor. It was just down the lane from Chen Aiyi’s house. Inside, a row of women sat under machines that covered their heads, and when they extracted themselves from this device, their hair was curly and lustrous. Next to the beauty parlor was a photo studio, in the window of which were sample pictures of people in very fancy clothing, young women with that beauty-parlor hair and frilly white dresses standing next to men in dark jackets and white shirts against backgrounds of mysterious purple swirls, as if a heavy storm raged just behind them. In Beijing, Zhongmei saw young men wearing wraparound sunglasses, with small oval labels printed in a foreign language stuck to the outside of the lenses. There were no dark glasses in Baoquanling. There, when the sun was too bright, people just squinted.

Dear Da-jie
, Zhongmei wrote to Zhongqin, sitting in her bed on her second night in Beijing, using a pen and a piece of paper Chen Aiyi had given her.

That night, Zhongmei sat up for a long time in her bed, looking out the window and thinking. Across the courtyard, in front of the former owner’s room, she could see somebody sitting in a straight-backed chair. A cigarette glowed in the dark and reflected in the lenses of glasses of a person who was otherwise just a dark shape in the shadows.

Why, oh why, had she made this journey? she thought. How was she going to get to the auditions if Policeman Li didn’t find her, and how was he going to find her in this big city? Chen Aiyi told Zhongmei not to worry, but what explanation could there be for his not turning up at the train station, other than that he didn’t want her anymore? The information about the train that Zhongmei’s family had sent ahead had been entirely accurate, and the train had arrived on time. And anyway, Li Zhongshan was a policeman. He was just the kind of person who ought to be able to find somebody arriving at the Beijing train station, and if he hadn’t found Zhongmei, it must be because he didn’t want to find her. That was very mean, Zhongmei thought, very unkind. Policeman Li and his wife must have known that Zhongmei had nowhere else to go, and yet he hadn’t shown up. Maybe that was the way people behaved in Beijing. Nobody in Baoquanling would ever act like that, she felt.

The first day in Beijing, Huping had taken her for a walk around the neighborhood, which was one of Beijing’s oldest. The family’s lane was called Da Shi Qiao Hutung, which means “Big Stone Bridge Lane,” and it led to a street called Old Drum Tower Street, which was crowded with small shops selling
ready-made clothing, bolts of cotton and woolen cloth, enameled basins, Golden Bridge toothpaste and Bee and Flower soap, along with framed pictures of Chairman Mao, the
People’s Daily
newspaper,
Red Flag
magazine, and coal-dust bricks for cooking. A particularly fascinating shop displayed shelf after shelf of clear glass jars of medicinal roots, curled-up snakes, and the gall bladders and hearts of rabbits, civet cats, and other animals. On a counter were bowls of powdery substances, including (or so the sign proclaimed) tiger bone and rhinoceros horn, and dried mountain herbs and grasses that, steeped in a tea, were believed effective against rheumatism, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, fatigue, anemia, and nightmares.

Old Drum Tower Street rang to the sound of a million bicycle bells and the occasional clang of a streetcar bell, because old green electrical streetcars still ran there, connecting the Dongcheng District with the center of Beijing. Despite her worries, Zhongmei loved walking down narrow Big Stone Bridge Lane to Old Drum Tower Street and gazing at the passing throngs, more people every hour than you’d see in Baoquanling in a month. After a day, Huping went away to visit his grandparents, whom he hadn’t seen since he’d been sent down to the countryside years before, and that left Zhongmei alone during the day, since both Aiyi and Shu-shu had to work. So every day she took a walk around the neighborhood, thinking about her situation.

Old Drum Tower Street led to a massive structure called, not surprisingly, the Drum Tower. It was a six-hundred-year-old building that had formed part of the massive wall that surrounded the entire city when the emperors of China’s past lived
there, and Zhongmei thought it was the most magnificent thing she had ever seen. It was enormously tall and wide, but it didn’t seem heavy. In fact, it seemed to soar. A set of stone steps led up to a tall red-painted foundation, above which were three sets of curved roofs, one atop each of the tower’s floors, with each floor marked by an ornate latticed railing, and the whole thing surmounted by a roof that curved upward into the sky.

Lots of people visited the Drum Tower, and Zhongmei could see them standing and looking out at Beijing from behind one or another of the upper railings. She read the information placard at the Drum Tower gate, which informed her that in ancient times the drum had sounded every hour to keep people informed of the time. But the entry ticket cost ten fen, and Zhongmei didn’t feel right about spending the money.

No, she would have to save every penny of the small sum her parents had given her for the journey. Walking was free and enjoyable, but there could be no paid-for small pleasures, not even a ride on the electric streetcar, which would take her to some of Beijing’s other great monuments. That would have to wait. Zhongmei simply walked around, circling the Drum Tower several times, looking up at it, enjoying its delicate power. She cut a small and lonely figure, her head bent as she contemplated her situation, so far from home and so seemingly hopeless. She was furious at Policeman Li for not having come for her at the train station. She was angry at her father for having chosen so unreliable a person to care for her, somebody who manifestly didn’t want to care for her. She missed her friends, her brothers and sisters, especially Zhongqin, who had always been at Zhongmei’s side and now was so far away.
Zhongmei squatted in front of the Drum Tower gate and traced lines in the dust with a twig. People came and went, people she didn’t know, people who paid no attention to her. In Baoquanling, she knew everybody and everybody paid attention to her.