Free A Girl Named Faithful Plum by Richard Bernstein Page B

had a painting like that. In Baoquanling, people had portraits of Chairman Mao or revolutionary posters showing farmers marching under a bright red sun into the fields, holding pitchforks in one hand, copies of a little red book of Mao quotations in the other. By contrast, the painting in this house in Beijing suggested to Zhongmei something deeper, quieter, more elegant; something very refined and civilized.
    Also, after just a day or so, Zhongmei noticed that the people in Beijing were different. They had smooth, pale faces. Many of them wore store-bought white or printed cotton shirts and blouses and leather shoes. The farmers that Zhongmei grew up with seemed grizzled and leathery by comparison, or the men did. The women in Baoquanling had ruddy complexions, made that way by the sun and the wind. They wore threadbare, patched clothing and cotton shoes with plastic orrubber soles mostly made at home. After only a day in Beijing, Zhongmei saw something she’d never seen in Baoquanling—a beauty parlor. It was just down the lane from Chen Aiyi’s house. Inside, a row of women sat under machines that covered their heads, and when they extracted themselves from this device, their hair was curly and lustrous. Next to the beauty parlor was a photo studio, in the window of which were sample pictures of people in very fancy clothing, young women with that beauty-parlor hair and frilly white dresses standing next to men in dark jackets and white shirts against backgrounds of mysterious purple swirls, as if a heavy storm raged just behind them. In Beijing, Zhongmei saw young men wearing wraparound sunglasses, with small oval labels printed in a foreign language stuck to the outside of the lenses. There were no dark glasses in Baoquanling. There, when the sun was too bright, people just squinted.
    Dear Da-jie
, Zhongmei wrote to Zhongqin, sitting in her bed on her second night in Beijing, using a pen and a piece of paper Chen Aiyi had given her.
    I miss you, but everything’s OK. Policeman Li didn’t meet me at the station, so I’m staying with Huping’s family. That was a surprise. Beijing is big and kind of scary. I don’t know why Policeman Li didn’t come for me. Maybe they changed their mind about letting me stay at their house. Don’t tell Ma and Ba. I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want you to worry either.
    Your sister Zhongmei
    That night, Zhongmei sat up for a long time in her bed, looking out the window and thinking. Across the courtyard, in front of the former owner’s room, she could see somebody sitting in a straight-backed chair. A cigarette glowed in the dark and reflected in the lenses of glasses of a person who was otherwise just a dark shape in the shadows.
    Why, oh why, had she made this journey? she thought. How was she going to get to the auditions if Policeman Li didn’t find her, and how was he going to find her in this big city? Chen Aiyi told Zhongmei not to worry, but what explanation could there be for his not turning up at the train station, other than that he didn’t want her anymore? The information about the train that Zhongmei’s family had sent ahead had been entirely accurate, and the train had arrived on time. And anyway, Li Zhongshan was a policeman. He was just the kind of person who ought to be able to find somebody arriving at the Beijing train station, and if he hadn’t found Zhongmei, it must be because he didn’t want to find her. That was very mean, Zhongmei thought, very unkind. Policeman Li and his wife must have known that Zhongmei had nowhere else to go, and yet he hadn’t shown up. Maybe that was the way people behaved in Beijing. Nobody in Baoquanling would ever act like that, she felt.
    The first day in Beijing, Huping had taken her for a walk around the neighborhood, which was one of Beijing’s oldest. The family’s lane was called Da Shi Qiao Hutung, which means “Big Stone Bridge Lane,” and it led to a street called Old Drum Tower Street, which was