A Girl Named Faithful Plum: The True Story of a Dancer from China and How She Achieved Her Dream

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About A Girl Named Faithful Plum: The True Story Of A

Product Description In 1977, when Zhongmei Lei was eleven years old, she learned that the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy was having open auditions. She'd already taken dance lessons, but everyone said a poor country girl would never get into the academy, especially without any connections in the Communist Party of the 1970s. But Zhongmei, whose name means Faithful Plum, persisted, even going on a hunger strike, until her parents agreed to allow her to go. She traveled for three   days and two nights to get to Beijing and eventually beat out 60,000 other girls for one of 12 coveted spots. But getting in was easy compared to staying in, as Zhongmei soon learned. Without those all-important connections she was just a little girl on her own, far away from family. But her determination, talent, and sheer force of will were not something the teachers or other students expected, and soon it was apparent that Zhongmei was not to be underestimated. Zhongmei became a famous dancer, and founded her own dance company, which made its New York debut when she was in just her late 20s.  In A Girl Named Faithful Plum, her husband and renowned journalist, Richard Bernstein, has written a fascinating account of one girl's struggle to go from the remote farmlands of China to the world's stages, and the lengths she went to in order to follow her dream. Review "The book reads more like a novel than a biography.  It's full of re-created dialogue, letters, and visual detail. The vivid descriptions bring China in the post-Cultural Revolution, pre-Tiananmen Square era to life" -- School Library Journal "The narrative...is packed with cultural information....Inspiring for would-be dancers, Zhongmei Li's gritty success story is also a revealing window into post-Mao China" -- Booklist "A Girl Named Faithful Plum is rich with genuine heart, inspiring readers as well as making them consider what it takes to achieve true greatness"-- New York Times,  Dec. 18, 2001 About the Author Growing up in the small town of East Haddam, Connecticut, RICHARD BERNSTEIN always dreamed of seeing the world, and after he finished university he figured a great way to do that would be to become a newspaper reporter. So he became a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine and then the New York Times, which sent him all expenses paid!) to lots of countries, including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, France, Germany, Poland, South Africa, Mozambique, and about 20 others. Along the way, he wrote thousands of newspaper articles and seven books, mostly for grownups.  A Girl Named Faithful Plum is his first book for young readers, but he's sure it won't be his last. After moving around for most of his life, Richard settled in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, Zhongmei (who is Faithful Plum!), his son, Elias, and their cat, Lucky. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Leaving Home One sunny morning in 1978 in the remote, very northernmost part of China, a slight eleven-year-old girl named Zhongmei Li got on a bus for the first leg of a journey to Beijing, China's capital. Zhongmei had gotten up that morning as she always did, to the sound of roosters crowing and hens clucking in nearby yards. She was so excited, hopeful, and nervous that she could barely eat the breakfast of rice porridge and corn fritters that her older sister Zhongqin made for her, because this was indeed a very big event in the life of a young girl who had never been more than a few hours from her hometown. It was even a noteworthy event for the town itself, a place called Baoquanling, most of whose residents had never been to Beijing and never expected to go. When Zhongmei got to the bus station, just a patch of open ground alongside the town's main street, she found that most of the people she knew were there to see her off--her classmates from her fifth grade in elementary school, her neighbors, and a few of her teachers. Her two older sist