A Girl Named Faithful Plum

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Book: A Girl Named Faithful Plum Read Online Free PDF
Author: Richard Bernstein
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
event in the life of the Li family and of Baoquanling. People talked about it for months. A girl from the town had run away there to be with a boy she had fallen in love with. But this was at a time in China when nobody could go to live in a big city without special permissionfrom the government, and when nobody could get married without permission either. So Zhengping, a trusted and respected member of the state farm, had been sent to Beijing to find the girl and bring her back. This took some weeks and required the help of the Beijing police, after which he promised the girl that she could marry the boy if they agreed to stay in Baoquanling.
    “It was three days and two nights to get there,” Xiuying said, “and the cheapest ticket costs thirty yuan, sixty for a round trip. Your father and I only earn that much money in two months!”
    “Secondly, we have no
guanxi
,” Zhengping continued. He used the Chinese word that meant “connections,” because in China it helped a lot to have powerful friends. “Do you think the Beijing Dance Academy is going to take anybody who shows up?” Zhengping said. “They’re going to take the children of their friends, who already live in big cities and don’t have to go so far that they’ll miss weeks of school, not like you.”
    “Ba,” Zhongmei insisted, “I still want to go.”
    “Nobody in our family has ever been to Beijing, except for that one time when Ba went,” Xiuying said. “Nobody else, not me, none of your grandparents or your uncles or aunts or your brothers and sisters, have ever been to Beijing. They all feel that Baoquanling is good enough for them. But you feel you should go?” Xiuying said.
    “It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Zhongmei said, her voice mixing determination with uncertainty.
    “Ma and Ba have more important things than to indulge your fantasy about getting into the Beijing Dance Academy,”Guoqiang volunteered. Guoqiang was a good student at the local high school, and he liked to use big words like
indulge
.
    “You keep out of this,” Zhongmei retorted.
    “Hey,” Guoqiang exclaimed. “Maybe I could go to Beijing too! Hey, Ba, Ma, send me to Beijing! I want to be a movie star!”
    “Well, can I go or not?” Zhongmei asked her parents.
    “You can’t go,” they replied in unison, “and that’s final.”
    But now, here was Zhongmei getting on a bus for the first leg of her fateful journey to Beijing, and this was because nobody in the Li family, not her parents, not even Zhongqin, who knew her best, had quite understood how stubborn and determined she could be. From the moment her older sister had first talked about the Beijing Dance Academy, Zhongmei felt that either she would go to the audition or her life would be pointless, without meaning or hope. As the bus roared off in the direction of Hegang, Zhongmei thought about how she had stewed angrily for a few days and then decided to take drastic action to force her parents to yield to her demand. She knew it was a kind of blackmail, and that made her feel a little ashamed, but she did it anyway.
    For two days she stayed home, refusing to go to school and refusing to eat. She was so weak at the end of the second day that she could only lie on the
kang
and stare at the stained plaster ceiling of their little brick house. When she sat up, she felt so dizzy she had to lie right back down again. The gnawing in her stomach was almost unbearable. She dreamed of a bowl of the thick noodles in broth that Zhongqin made for the family.
    “You won’t eat?” her father said to her on the morning ofthe third day. It was still dark outside. He was on his way out of the house. “Fine. Starve to death.”
    “Do you know how hard we work to put food on the table?” Zhongmei’s mother said. “Do you see your father and me getting up before dawn and coming home after dark? And you won’t eat?”
    “No,” Zhongmei said. She reminded herself of a radio drama she had once listened to at
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