A Girl Named Faithful Plum by Richard Bernstein Page A

nearby. You could always tell the people in China who were officials of the government. Their tailored blue or gray suits, in the style made popular by Chairman Mao, were made out of fine cotton or wool, compared to the rougher, baggier, store-bought cotton jackets and pants worn by ordinary people. The pants were pleated and loose-fitting. The matching jacket had a collar that buttoned at the neck.
    “Ni hao, xiao-mei”
—Hello, little miss—Tianyuan’s grandmother said to Zhongmei.
    “Ni hao, ai-yi,”
Zhongmei said back.
    “Where are you from?” Tianyuan asked her.
    “I’m from Baoquanling,” Zhongmei replied, hesitating a bit because she knew that Tianyuan was unlikely to have heard of it.
    “Where’s that?” Tianyuan said.
    “It’s in Heilongjiang,” Zhongmei said, and Tianyuan lookedas mystified as if Zhongmei had said she had come to the audition from Mars.
    “You came all the way from Heilongjiang?” she said in what seemed like wonderment but was actually a kind of criticism, because she then proceeded to tell Zhongmei that she had no chance of being accepted at the Beijing Dance Academy so it was silly to have made such a big effort to come to it.
    “Don’t you know, they’ve already chosen all the students,” she said. “The audition is just for show, to make it look like everybody has a chance, but really, all the decisions have already been made.”
    “Be quiet, Tianyuan,” her grandmother said. “You shouldn’t be telling people that.”
    But Zhongmei was already absorbing this shocking piece of information. She was also noticing Tianyuan’s nice store-bought clothes and her pale soft skin, the skin of somebody who didn’t have to brave the scorching summers and numbing winters of northern Heilongjiang. Zhongmei felt coarse and leathery compared to her.
    “They’ve already chosen everybody?” Zhongmei said, amazed and not quite believing that it could be true. “But …”
    “I know that because my mother’s good friend is a teacher at the school, and she told me—my mother, I mean. That’s why we came here instead of going to the audition in Shanghai, because my mother’s friend is in Beijing.”
    “Hush, Tianyuan,” the grandmother put in, but to no avail.
    “You mean, you’ve been chosen?” Zhongmei asked, incredulous.
    “Oh, yes,” Tianyuan said. “You have to have
guanxi.
” She used the term in China for “connections, friends in high places,” and Zhongmei remembered her father’s first reaction when she said she wanted to go to the auditions, that the Li family had no
guanxi
. And now here was another eleven-year-old girl saying the same thing: in order to get something really good, you had to know powerful people, and if you didn’t know powerful people, you would never get those things.
    “We have great
guanxi
,” Tianyuan said proudly, “since my father is the head of the Shanghai Film School, and then there’s my mother’s friend who teaches here. She was once a famous ballerina. She studied with masters in Russia.”
    As the girls were talking, there was suddenly a stir in the crowd as a green sedan pulled up to the school entrance and a handsome man in a well-tailored Mao suit got out.
    “It’s him!” Zhongmei heard somebody say, as she was jostled by somebody behind her trying to get a better look. She watched as the man smiled at the people standing in line and then turned to walk into the school courtyard. He was the most elegant person Zhongmei had ever seen, tall, fine-featured, and clearly self-confident. But there was also something modest about him, a kind of embarrassment at attracting so much attention.
    “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