A Girl Named Faithful Plum by Richard Bernstein Read Free Book Online

except there was one fashionable-looking pair in the girls’ section—green with brown laces—and that’s the pair that Zhongqin and Zhongling bought for Zhongmei, even though it was a size too big.
    “You’ll grow into them in no time,” Zhongling, who was always cheerful and optimistic, said.
    Zhongmei was overjoyed. She looked over at Zhongqin and Zhongling, appreciating how lucky she was to have two older sisters like that. Since their parents were home so little, it was the older children who were responsible for taking careof the younger ones in the Li household, and so, since she had been a baby, Zhongmei had been raised largely by Zhongqin, with occasional help from Zhongling.
    Zhongqin had carried her on her hip just about everywhere she went, even to the Baoquanling Middle School, where she would deposit her younger sister on a little folding stool that she brought with her from home and set next to her desk in the classroom. Sometimes, when she got bored just sitting there and listening to Zhongqin’s lessons, Zhongmei would wander to the school entrance and sit on the doorsill there. Sometimes she would play in the school courtyard with children her age who were also being cared for by their older sisters. It got awfully cold in Baoquanling in the winter, so then the children stayed mostly indoors. When Zhongmei was ready for elementary school herself, Zhongqin brought her there in the morning, and picked her up and brought her home in the afternoon. Most important, perhaps, when Zhongmei began taking dance lessons from the young woman who gave them to young children, it was Zhongqin who took her little sister there and picked her up when the lesson was over.
    Zhongmei was in the second grade at the time. The children in her class—Young Pioneers all—learned some songs and dances from the Baoquanling Propaganda Brigade, which traveled the whole sprawling state farm and performed for the farmers, sometimes right out in the fields where they were working. The Chinese government in those days wanted everybody, children included, to do songs and dances to celebrate how brave workers and peasants led by Chairman Mao and theCommunist Party defeated evil landlords and foreign invaders and created “the new China.” So, like the other children, Zhongmei held a wooden rifle and did a dance with it, crouching as though she were stalking an enemy, lunging forward a couple of steps, then back one, circling counterclockwise before finally springing ahead to shoot some landlord thug in the heart.
    A song went with the dance and years later Zhongmei would hum it to herself, not because she liked the lyrics but because of its catchy tune:
    We are sharpshooters
,
    One bullet shot
,
    One enemy dead
.
    We are the soldiers of the revolution
.
    No matter how high the mountain
,
    Or how deep the river
,
    We will make it through
.
    “You have a very sweet voice,” the leader of the Propaganda Brigade told Zhongmei one day.
    “Thank you,” Zhongmei replied.
    Everybody called this young woman Big Xia, but in fact she was very small.
    “Would you like to take singing lessons?” Big Xia asked.
    “Sure!” Zhongmei said.
    “There’s a sent-down youth who gives ballet and singing lessons after school,” Big Xia told Zhongmei. Years before,Chairman Mao had ordered millions of students from the big cities to move to villages all over China, sometimes very far away, so they could learn what peasant life was like and help educate the local people. Baoquanling had several of these young people, who were known as the sent-down youth. Some of them got to like countryside life, but many of them felt stuck in remote places for years, their educations interrupted, and they yearned to go home. The girl who ran away and had to be fetched back by Zhongmei’s father had fallen in love with a sent-down youth from Beijing who himself had sneaked back home. Some of the members of the Baoquanling Propaganda Brigade were sent-down youths,