on a placard in the windshield. Jiamusi had marked the farthest point in Zhongmei’s travels until now. When she went there before, Zhongmei had thought that Jiamusi was truly a big city. The department store was twice the size of Baoquanling’s. Jiamusi had a movie theater, which Baoquanling didn’t. Movies in Baoquanling were shown on occasional Saturday nights at a makeshift outdoor theater with a white sheet serving as the screen, which meant that they could only be shown during thewarm, mosquito-infested summer months. While Baoquanling consisted of one large intersection, Jiamusi was a real urban grid whose streets were choked with noisy, smoky traffic. Until the idea that she go to the Beijing Dance Academy had come along, Zhongmei’s dream had been to settle in Jiamusi and become a member of the song and dance troupe there.
The two sisters had to wait for a few hours in Jiamusi, since the Beijing train didn’t leave until early that night. They walked the streets. They ate the cold steamed bread that their mother had prepared for them, dipping it in shrimp paste. Neither of them would ever have thought of going into a restaurant for lunch. Neither of them had ever been inside a restaurant! Zhongmei and Zhongqin looked hungrily at the delicacies on offer at some outdoor food stalls—spiced lamb on skewers, slices of Hami melon, and noodles in soup. Zhongmei looked with particular longing at a stand selling five-fragrance tea-soaked eggs, but she didn’t ask Zhongqin to buy one for her. To her, eggs were a very special treat that happened only once a year, on her birthday, when Gao Xiuying gave her a single hard-boiled egg, doing the same for her brothers and sisters on their birthdays. It was the only present any of them would get.
They got only this one egg a year even though the children’s mother tended chickens and ducks that produced seven or eight eggs a day right there in the front courtyard. But the eggs weren’t for the family. They were a small business that Gao Xiuying ran to earn a little bit of extra money. The first thing she did when she got home from the fields at night wascheck the roosts and collect the eggs that had accumulated in them, sticking her hand under the bellies of the birds to get at them. But each and every egg had to be sold to help the family survive. Except on birthdays, when everybody got that gift of a single hard-boiled egg.
Zhongmei so treasured hers that she made it last for several days, cutting one thin slice each day and savoring its wondrous mixture of cool, translucent white and dense, mealy yellow. Once she kept her birthday egg in its shell in the pocket of her jacket, waiting for the perfect moment to eat it. After a good long time, maybe two or three weeks, she felt she had waited long enough, and, in a state of tremendous anticipation, she cracked it open. When she peeled away its shell, she noticed a distinctly unpleasant odor emanating from what had turned a kind of greenish purple. The egg had gone sulfurously rotten! Zhongmei’s disappointment at missing her once-a-year boiled egg was immeasurable.
Zhongmei had to say good-bye to Zhongqin at the Jiamusi train station, but she didn’t have to make the rest of the journey alone. Her parents knew of a young man named Huping, who, like Zhongmei’s dance teacher, had spent several years as a sent-down youth in a nearby village. He was now returning home to Beijing, and he was waiting for Zhongmei at the Jiamusi bus station so he could accompany her on the journey. Together they walked across the square from the bus station to the train station. Hundreds of people seemed to be camped out there, sitting with their backs against their bags, even cooking on small coal stoves or just stretched out on the cement, sleeping.
When the train pulled in to the platform, everyone pushed and shoved at the doors to the cars, but Huping lifted Zhongmei up and practically threw her directly through one of the train’s
The two sisters had to wait for a few hours in Jiamusi, since the Beijing train didn’t leave until early that night. They walked the streets. They ate the cold steamed bread that their mother had prepared for them, dipping it in shrimp paste. Neither of them would ever have thought of going into a restaurant for lunch. Neither of them had ever been inside a restaurant! Zhongmei and Zhongqin looked hungrily at the delicacies on offer at some outdoor food stalls—spiced lamb on skewers, slices of Hami melon, and noodles in soup. Zhongmei looked with particular longing at a stand selling five-fragrance tea-soaked eggs, but she didn’t ask Zhongqin to buy one for her. To her, eggs were a very special treat that happened only once a year, on her birthday, when Gao Xiuying gave her a single hard-boiled egg, doing the same for her brothers and sisters on their birthdays. It was the only present any of them would get.
They got only this one egg a year even though the children’s mother tended chickens and ducks that produced seven or eight eggs a day right there in the front courtyard. But the eggs weren’t for the family. They were a small business that Gao Xiuying ran to earn a little bit of extra money. The first thing she did when she got home from the fields at night wascheck the roosts and collect the eggs that had accumulated in them, sticking her hand under the bellies of the birds to get at them. But each and every egg had to be sold to help the family survive. Except on birthdays, when everybody got that gift of a single hard-boiled egg.
Zhongmei so treasured hers that she made it last for several days, cutting one thin slice each day and savoring its wondrous mixture of cool, translucent white and dense, mealy yellow. Once she kept her birthday egg in its shell in the pocket of her jacket, waiting for the perfect moment to eat it. After a good long time, maybe two or three weeks, she felt she had waited long enough, and, in a state of tremendous anticipation, she cracked it open. When she peeled away its shell, she noticed a distinctly unpleasant odor emanating from what had turned a kind of greenish purple. The egg had gone sulfurously rotten! Zhongmei’s disappointment at missing her once-a-year boiled egg was immeasurable.
Zhongmei had to say good-bye to Zhongqin at the Jiamusi train station, but she didn’t have to make the rest of the journey alone. Her parents knew of a young man named Huping, who, like Zhongmei’s dance teacher, had spent several years as a sent-down youth in a nearby village. He was now returning home to Beijing, and he was waiting for Zhongmei at the Jiamusi bus station so he could accompany her on the journey. Together they walked across the square from the bus station to the train station. Hundreds of people seemed to be camped out there, sitting with their backs against their bags, even cooking on small coal stoves or just stretched out on the cement, sleeping.
When the train pulled in to the platform, everyone pushed and shoved at the doors to the cars, but Huping lifted Zhongmei up and practically threw her directly through one of the train’s
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