A Girl Named Faithful Plum by Richard Bernstein

Author:Richard Bernstein [Bernstein, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780375984341
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-09-12T14:00:00+00:00

14

The Country Bumpkin

“Good morning, girls.” A woman teacher greeted them after they’d filed into the studio. “My name is Zhu Huaimin,” she announced, “and this class is the single most important dance class you will ever take at this school, as important as all the other classes put together, because here you will establish the foundation for everything else that you will do at this school. I will expect every one of you to follow my instructions and to work very hard, and if you do, I can guarantee you that you will be ballet dancers of international caliber, among the best in the world.”

Zhongmei recognized Teacher Zhu right away. She was the thin, severe-looking woman with the plastic glasses who had sat next to Vice Director Jia on that day when Zhongmei had done her blade-of-grass improvisation, the one who had looked angry at the decision to give Zhongmei a second chance.

She sat on a wooden chair while the twelve eleven-year-old girls sat on the floor in front of her. “You will arrive promptly at eight o’clock every day, Monday to Saturday,” she said. “You will be on time. Any person arriving late will not be allowed to take the class that day. Three times late without a medical excuse and you will be expelled from school. We will practice here for one hour every day, and then you will go off to your regular schoolwork and your other activities.”

Teacher Zhu asked each of the girls to announce their names and where they came from, and Zhongmei noted that all of the girls came from big and famous cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Beijing itself. When it came her turn, she gave her name and said she was from a state farm in Heilongjiang Province called Baoquanling. There were barely audible twitters from some of the other girls, and Zhongmei thought—but she wasn’t sure—that she heard somebody whisper the Chinese words tu bao zi, which is the common term in Chinese for a country bumpkin, a hick, a rube, a local yokel. Zhongmei looked up at the semicircle of other girls to see who had whispered the phrase, but all she saw were portraits of goody-two-shoes innocence looking back at her. And yet, she had heard titters and whisperings. Why did they seem to think she was a little bit ridiculous?

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst came with an incident so strange and unlikely that it’s hard to believe it really happened, but it really did. As they introduced themselves, a couple of the girls boasted of having performed on television in their hometowns.

Now, in Chinese the expression for being on television uses the same figure of speech as English does. You go on television; you are seen on television. But to Zhongmei, who had never watched television before arriving in Beijing, it seemed that the people she saw on television were in the television, not on it. And so, innocently, she asked the obvious question:

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