Free A Girl Named Faithful Plum by Richard Bernstein Page A

entire country of one billion people there were no telephone books, so she couldn’t simply look up Li Zhongshan and get his number and address that way. Zhongmei could have written a letter to her father telling him to write to Li Zhongshan and give him the address of Huping’s family, where he could come to fetch her, but by the time all that could be done, the audition, which was to start in just a few days, would already be over.
    “Don’t worry,” Chen Aiyi said. “I’m sure we’ll find this Policeman Li, or he’ll find you. My husband is going to go to the main police station on his day off from work to ask about him.”
    But Zhongmei did worry. For hours she sat at the family’s house, which was actually a part of a larger house built in three sections around a narrow courtyard. An imposing entry gate of carved wood led from the lane into the courtyard. The rooms had large windows covered by lattices of dark wood. The roofs were of gray tile. Water came from a pump with a curved metal handle painted red in the middle of the courtyard. This courtyard was a crowded place, since lots of small rooms made out of cinder blocks or bricks with corrugated metal roofs had been put up next to the older ones, and it was crammed with stuff—crates for storing cabbage, sheds with cooking pots, plates, cups, teapots, and enamel basins for washing. Here and there were braziers for cooking, piles of coal-dust bricks that were used in the braziers, washtubs and corrugated scrubbing boards for doing laundry, a flotsam and jetsam of discarded pieces offurniture. Two pomegranate trees grew there as well, and small green fruits were beginning to take shape on their branches. Ropes suspended from hooks in the houses crisscrossed the yard and were used to dry the laundry that was done in the outdoor washtubs, using water drawn from the pump. As in Baoquanling, the toilet was a public one down the lane. So was the bath, where Chen Aiyi took Zhongmei on her first night to wash off the dust of her long journey.
    “This used to be a rich family’s house,” Chen Aiyi told Zhongmei as they came back to the courtyard, carrying their towels and a dish of soap, wearing fresh clothing, “but after the revolution, the place was divided up so some poor people could come live here, including us.”
    “Is the rich family still here?” Zhongmei asked.
    “Oh, yes,” Chen Aiyi said. “They’re in that room over there.” She pointed across the courtyard. “They’re just an old couple. Their children left years ago. But we don’t see much of them. They don’t mix with us.”
    Zhongmei was amazed that this part of Beijing wasn’t all that different from Baoquanling. Indeed, her house in Baoquanling, which was also down a narrow lane, was small, narrow, and dark, but it was bigger than the portion of the courtyard house that her new Beijing family occupied. Zhongmei slept on a narrow cot pushed against the whitewashed wall of the living room, while Aiyi and Shu-shu slept in a bed in the other half of the same room, which was blocked off by a screen made of pleated red cloth. But she didn’t sleep well. There was a lot of noise in the courtyard until late at night. Zhongmeicould hear conversations, laughter, and infants crying in the neighboring rooms. One of Huping’s parents—was it Aiyi or Shu-shu? Zhongmei couldn’t tell—snored loudly.
    But even if Chen Aiyi’s house was modest and crowded, it was pretty different from Baoquanling. Intricate, delicate latticed woodwork covered the large windows, and the floor was of polished wood, not the cement of Zhongmei’s hometown. In the Chen living room, there was a large scroll painting showing a scene of mountains, forests, waterfalls, and winding paths, along which a monk in rust-brown robes, looking very small in the surrounding immensity of nature, rode on a donkey. On the steep, craggy hills above the man were pavilions with carved railings and sloping roofs. Nobody in Baoquanling