A Girl Named Faithful Plum (8 page)

Finally the time to board their train came. Zhongmei and Huping headed for the hard-seat cars in the rear of the train. Hard seat was the lowest of the three classes of service in China’s supposedly classless socialist society. Hard seat meant that they would sit squeezed in among countless others on straight-backed wooden benches, a little like church pews. Above, the luggage racks were crammed with cloth suitcases and red-and-blue-striped plastic bags. In those days, Chinese trains were crowded, dilapidated, uncomfortable, and usually dirty. The next class above hard seat was hard sleeper, which was better than hard seat because there were plastic-covered berths, three levels of them, so passengers were able to lie down, but still it was dingy, smoky, and jammed with people and jumbled with their stuff. The highest class was soft sleeper, but soft sleeper was reserved for high officials, military officers, and the rare foreign visitors who went to China in those days, these privileged passengers enjoying spacious separate compartments each with four comfortable bunk beds, clean white sheets, pillows, and blankets, and large red thermoses
full of piping hot tea. But even soft sleeper was hot in summer and freezing in winter, and the other classes of service, hard sleeper and hard seat, were overcrowded all year round. The smells of sweat, garlicky breath, and twice-breathed air were pervasive. All the bathrooms on the train were filthy, dank, and slippery, and they stank horribly. Sometimes they were occupied by passengers who couldn’t find room anyplace else. Mothers in hard seat would even let their children pee under the seats, and the smell of children’s urine got stronger as the trip stretched from hours to days. Zhongmei was too old to do that, so she tried hard not to go, until she just couldn’t wait any longer, and then it was a matter of balancing on treacherously slimy footrests while squatting over a metal-rimmed hole, clinging to a small bar alongside to avoid being thrown to the disgusting floor when the train lurched.

For much of the time between Harbin and Beijing, Zhongmei sat between two men with patchy beards, rough blue clothes, and breath sour from the smell of pickled garlic. From time to time one or the other of them would hawk noisily and spit on the floor between his feet. At night her fellow passengers slept in their seats sitting straight up, their heads thrown back, their mouths agape, showing blackened teeth and snoring loudly, but Zhongmei was both too excited and too uncomfortable to sleep much at all.

But at least she was sitting. Huping, who didn’t get a seat, gallantly stood in the aisle or squatted on his haunches for the entire twenty-four-hour trip. At every stop there was a mad commotion as more and more people tried to get on
the train. Vendors would lean into the train’s open windows trying to sell various edibles—peanuts, roasted corn on the cob, plastic packages of crackers, balls of cold steamed rice wrapped around dollops of sweet red bean paste, bottles of Chrysanthemum-brand orange soda pop, which Zhongmei coveted but didn’t drink because there was no money for such delicacies. Anyway, by not drinking soda pop, she wouldn’t have to go to the terrible toilet so often. When the train started up again, the vendors would run with it, reaching into the cars for the money for their final sales.

Sometime after midnight Zhongmei managed to doze off, wedged as she was between her fellow passengers, but she woke up frequently when, for some reason, the train would just stop, and the mesmerizing
clickety-clack
of its movement would be replaced by the overpowering silence of China’s vast, dark, and lonely countryside. The train would sit for a long time, the interior lit by a ghostly yellow light coming from the weak lamps on the ceiling above. The sounds of snoring and the murmuring of voices seemed louder than before, but it was only because the train itself had become so quiet. Zhongmei tried to look out the streaked and stained windows beyond her seat to see what was outside, but nothing was visible but her own dim reflection.

Why isn’t the train moving? she asked herself. This was the second night on a train, and she longed to be able to lie flat someplace and sleep like she did every night on the
kang
back in Baoquanling. Her back hurt, her neck was stiff. Would this mournful journey ever end?

Zhongmei looked over at Huping in the aisle. He was squatting in the aisle and leaning forward, his head against the edge of the seat in what must have been a very uneasy sleep. Finally, after what seemed to Zhongmei a long time, there was a jolt and a grinding of metal on metal and the train creaked forward again.

Daybreak was marked by a few bars of bombastic music over the train’s scratchy loudspeakers, and then a dulcet female voice. “Comrades,” it said, “please pay attention to security and safeguard your possessions. Hygiene is very important. Cover your mouth when you cough, don’t spit or throw trash on the ground, be polite to your fellow passengers, and work hard to build our socialist motherland.”

Zhongmei was used to these morning loudspeaker broadcasts. They were the same as the ones that awakened her parents every morning in Baoquanling. China had spent more than one hundred years in very poor and humiliating conditions. For decades the country was divided among warlords, who spent their time fighting each other. Its biggest cities were controlled by foreign countries; during the long, devastating years of World War II, when Zhongmei’s parents were children, the whole country was under constant attack by Japan. Almost twenty years before Zhongmei was born, the revolutionaries led by Chairman Mao had taken power. They eliminated the warlords, and the foreign armies were gone. China now was still poor, and it was certainly not free. Those who expressed any criticism of Chairman Mao especially would find themselves quickly in a large, remote prison camp, where they
would spend a few years in what was called reform through labor. Everybody was called on to obey the government and to work hard for low wages, until the country was rich and strong again. That’s what all those morning broadcasts were about. That’s what the songs Zhongmei sang at noon in Baoquanling were about, and the revolutionary dances as well, millions of Chinese children armed with wooden rifles and pretending to shoot the enemy dead.

But around the time Zhongmei took her trip to Beijing, all of this was just on the point of changing. Chairman Mao had died two years earlier. Mao’s closest backers had been arrested and put in jail and a new group of leaders was now in place and wanted China to calm down, to be a little less revolutionary and a bit more normal. The schools reopened, teachers who had been exiled to the countryside were allowed to come back, and so were sent-down youths like Huping. China was becoming more relaxed. People were being allowed to do more of the things they wanted to do without supervision, like falling in love, getting married, or, like Lao Lao, building little shrines to Buddha. Before, if you asked young people what they wanted to do when they grew up, they would all reply, “We want to be good soldiers of our great leader Chairman Mao and build the world revolution!” Now they could freely say they wanted to be teachers, or scientists, or dancers, and they didn’t have to say anything about Chairman Mao at all. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t all over the place, in pictures and statues. Everybody was still entreated almost every day to “work hard to build the new China.” Nobody was allowed to criticize the country’s new leaders. And there were, as always, all those loudspeakers,
though the message was no longer “Fight, struggle, annihilate the enemy!” but “Please don’t spit; clean up after yourselves.”

At about eight o’clock that morning, the train arrived in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, which signaled to Zhongmei that for the first time in her life she had ventured beyond the borders of Heilongjiang Province. A voice on the loudspeaker announced that the train would stop for half an hour, so Huping ran across the platform to buy some breakfast dumplings. Zhongmei fretted while he was gone, worried that the train would leave before he got back, certain that she would lose her precious seat if she left it to go look for him. She kept her eyes on the platform, trying to find him among the crush of passengers and vendors. A troop of soldiers in green uniforms with red collar tabs and visored hats marched by her window. Mothers held small children over the tracks on the other side of the platform, their pants, ingeniously slit at the crotch, opening so they could relieve themselves.

The time went by and still there was no Huping. The man sitting next to her leaned out the window, cleared his throat, and spat onto the platform, making Zhongmei want to ask him if he hadn’t heard the announcement about politeness and hygiene just a while before, but she kept quiet. A vendor bearing trays of roasted chestnuts stood at the window and looked at Zhongmei expectantly, but she shook her head. And then, suddenly, there was Huping smiling happily at the window and handing Zhongmei a thin clear plastic bag of warm steamed-bread dumplings filled with chopped cabbage and noodles, which she gratefully devoured.

The train resumed its march toward Bejing, passing Fuxin,
Beipiao, Jianing, Pingquan, and Miyun, Zhongmei getting excited as she read the signboards on the stations, naming places that she’d never heard of before. China was so big, who could know it all? The countryside was flat now. Zhongmei could see the outlines of mud-brick villages on the horizon, marked by clumps of plane trees, gray birches, and locusts. Tree-lined roads extended away from the tracks, crowded with wagons and carts drawn by men on bicycles or by teams of oxen, just like the ones back home. Great mounds of hay dotted some of the fields. Others were filled with neat straight rows of beans, mustard greens, and cabbages. Groups of farmers leaned on their hoes and watched as the train went by. From time to time the train would cross a trestle bridge, which amplified the
clackety-clack
of the wheels as if somebody had opened a window to let the sound in.

At the end of the afternoon just as dusk began to fall, the train rumbled past a kind of suburban sprawl. Zhongmei saw row after row of brick factory buildings with round chimneys issuing forth great plumes of black smoke. There were piles of cinder blocks and steel reinforcement rods, and an endless succession of barracks and sheds, brick kilns and piles of gravel, then gray cement apartment blocks with the usual rows of bicycles parked under tarpaulin-covered sheds in front of them and laundry hung out to dry on tiny balconies on every floor. Every building, every wall, seemed to be inscribed in large Chinese characters with one of the slogans of those days—
STRIVE FOR EVER GREATER VICTORIES! LET’S RELY ON OURSELVES ONLY! RESOLUTELY BUILD A RADIANT SOCIALIST FUTURE!
The train
went past road junctions, and Zhongmei saw what seemed like thousands of people on bicycles jammed up behind security gates, all of them, men and women, dressed in identical blue jackets and trousers.

Then there were glimpses of grand-looking buildings, wide avenues, big statues, streetlamps, and photographs of Chairman Mao. The train, running now on an elevated platform, offered a view of countless interior courtyards, each of which had a large red tablet inscribed with the slogan
SERVE THE PEOPLE
in the scrawled calligraphy that everybody knew was Chairman Mao’s. Finally the train pulled beneath a large canopy of leaded glass and came to a stop. Zhongmei saw the characters
BEIJING
mounted on a red signboard. They had arrived! She and Huping gathered their things and joined the throng as it pushed toward the platform, over a bridge, and then down into the terminal building.

Zhongmei had never seen anything so vast or so crowded. High, grimy windows allowed feeble slants of light into the immense hall, which teemed with people, some rushing about, many more just camped out on the floor or leaning against pillars and walls smoking the inevitable Double Happiness cigarettes, surrounded by suitcases and striped plastic bags. There were long lines of people buying tickets or waiting to get onto platforms. Zhongmei and Huping stood in the middle of the hall hoping that they would be seen by the two people they were expecting to meet them, Li Zhongshan and Huping’s mother.

After a few minutes, Huping’s mother arrived. She took
one look at her son, whom she hadn’t seen in years, and burst into tears of joy. Naturally, she wanted to take Huping home right away. His father was waiting for them there, she said. But first they had to be sure that somebody came for Zhongmei, and so far nobody had. The three of them waited amid the commotion of the station. The time passed. Thousands of people continued to push by. There were announcements over the loudspeaker, but the words were so lost in the vastness of the great hall that they could scarcely be understood. Anyway, Zhongmei was so eager to find her father’s friend, or to be found by him, that she didn’t really listen to them. Of course, she didn’t know what Li Zhongshan looked like, only that he was a policeman, so every time a policeman came near, Zhongmei would stand up straight and make herself as visible as she could. But no policeman or anybody else took any notice of her at all.