A Girl Named Faithful Plum Read Online Free Page A

Baoquanling was, other places were even poorer.
    “Well, if I go to Beijing,” Zhongmei said, trying genuinely to be helpful, “there will be one less person Ma and Ba will have to feed.”
    Zhongqin smiled. “Be reasonable, Zhongmei,” she said. “Itcosts a lot to travel to Beijing, and for what? Yes, maybe there’d be a miracle and you’d be chosen, but twelve girls out of sixty thousand? And one of them is going to be a farm girl from Baoquanling? Come on.”
    For a minute the Li children ate their dumplings in silence.
    “But I want to go,” Zhongmei said stubbornly. “I mean, why should other girls have a chance like that but not me? It’s not fair.”
    “I understand how you feel,” Zhongqin said. “It would be an amazingly wonderful thing to do. But you’ve got to forget it. It’s the silliest idea that ever was.”
    Silly or not, Zhongmei that night thought only of going to the Beijing Dance Academy. She roamed the Li family’s narrow, soot-darkened house and yard, entertaining visions of beautiful costumes and flying jetés and wondering what her parents would say when she asked them if she could go to the audition. The Li family’s house was connected to a row of identical houses inside a neighborhood of unpaved lanes shaded by ginkgo and locust trees. There was a brick wall facing the lane, then the small earthen courtyard where Zhongmei’s mother had built roosts for her chickens and ducks, along with a pen for the occasional goat or pig.
    A small foyer led into the house. It had wooden floorboards that could be lifted up to give access to an underground storage area where the Li family kept a large mound of cabbages in the winter, cabbages and potatoes being the mainstay of the Baoquanling cold-weather diet. When you walked into thehouse between September and April, the first thing you noticed, after passing the chickens and ducks, was the sour, briny, and sweet odor of slightly fermented cabbage leaves. Zhongmei would never forget it.
    A hallway extended from the foyer all the way to the back of the house, where a door led to a fenced-in backyard. There the Li children’s tireless mother cultivated green beans, carrots, scallions, pea shoots, eggplants, and other vegetables during the summer. Just after the entryway on the right was a narrow kitchen with a brick floor and a smoky coal-fired stove. A large wok sat on the stove, whose top had been cut out to accommodate the wok’s rounded bottom. Next to it was an iron cauldron where water, brought from a well at the end of the lane, was boiled to make it safe to drink. There was no toilet. The homes of Baoquanling did not come with indoor plumbing. There was a public toilet at the opposite end of the lane from the well. It was used by the whole neighborhood and smelled accordingly.
    Bathing was done in a large public bath in the center of town, and it wasn’t done all that often. The cost was ten Chinese cents per person, five cents for children, which is less than one American penny. Some families went to the public bath just once or twice a year, almost always before the Chinese New Year, which is in the middle of winter and is China’s biggest holiday. They brought soap and boxes of baking soda, which served as shampoo, and they luxuriated for hours, using scrubbers of soft wood to scrape away dead skin. When Zhongmei and her younger brother were small, Zhongqin used a basin inthe kitchen to wash them, supplementing their sessions in the public baths, though now only the youngest, Li Feng, got help bathing. Bathtubs and showers in the homes were as unheard of as indoor running water.
    The rest of the Li family’s house consisted of a single long room containing the
kang
. This was a raised brick platform covered with mattresses of stuffed straw. It was heated by coal bricks placed underneath it at night and served as a bed for the entire Li family. Lao Lao and Da Yeh slept on the same
kang
. During the day, the mattresses were rolled up