A Girl Named Faithful Plum Read Online Free

from the countryside. She was a sweet girl, polite, well liked by her friends and teachers, but she wasn’t meek or shy. She could run faster than most boys her age. Her dark eyes always glinted with something untamed and fiery, but never more so than on that night when Zhongqin told her about the Beijing Dance Academy auditions.
    “Well, I want to go,” she said, turning to Guoqiang, “and you can’t stop me.”
    “Forget it,” Zhongqin said. She spoke sharply, but then she looked at her little sister and she felt a surge of tenderness. Zhongmei, having snapped at Guoqiang, stared at the swirl of steam rising from her bowl, no doubt conjuring up fantastic possibilities. Nobody could understand her dreams better than Zhongqin, because Zhongqin herself had been a performer and she had also had dreams. In high school she was chosen to play the heroine in the plays and ballets that were very popular atthe time. Zhongqin had gotten the most important part in
The White-Haired Girl
, which was a famous story about poor farmers fighting against injustice and mistreatment. Zhongqin’s character, named Xi-er, is cruelly treated by an evil landlord and his equally evil mother, who pours hot soup over her face and locks her in a dungeon in her son’s fancy house. Xi-er’s suffering makes her hair turn white—which it remains even after she is saved by the brave soldiers of the revolution.
    The performance was at Baoquanling’s Workers and Peasants Cultural Center, near the main intersection of town. The audience had applauded warmly when Zhongqin took her bows, and ever since she had yearned to be onstage again, to dance and sing in front of an audience and soak up its appreciation—but she never had that chance, and one big reason was that she was needed at home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters while her parents put in their long hours on the state farm. She had, quite simply, no time for dance and music lessons or to take part in plays or ballets.
    Instead, when she finished high school, Zhongqin went to work for a factory in Baoquanling that made sugar out of locally grown beets and sold it all over China. She was very bright and quick, so she was assigned to the office to keep the factory’s files in order. That was how she happened to see the notice about the Beijing Dance Academy auditions in the
People’s Daily
. At that time, very few people in Baoquanling read the newspaper. There was no local newspaper and only a few copies of the national papers circulated in offices like Zhongqin’s, usually arriving a few days late. In Baoquanling,the news was announced over loudspeakers, or it was written in chalk on large blackboards set up in several places in the town and around the sprawling state farm. Zhongqin saw the notice, and knowing how much Zhongmei loved to dance, she thought she’d mention it.
    “I’d like you to be able to go,” Zhongqin said now. “Even if you don’t make it—and, let’s be realistic, you probably wouldn’t—you’d have a chance to see Beijing. I’ll never have a chance to see Beijing, so it would be nice if you did. You could bring back pictures. But maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, because now I’ve given you all sorts of ideas. But there’s no way. I mean, do you think for a second that Ma and Ba can afford to let you go?”
    “Well, they have some money, don’t they?” Zhongmei said.
    “Not very much, and they can’t spend it all on you,” Zhongqin said. “You see how hard they work, going out before we even wake up and coming home after dark. And for all that work, they can barely afford to feed us. And now there’s also Lao Lao and Da Yeh.” Lao Lao was Grandma, the Li children’s mother’s mother, who had come to live in Baoquanling a few months earlier because the Li children’s grandpa had died and she was too old to take care of herself. Da Yeh was the children’s uncle, who also lived with the Li family at that time, because poor as