Colors of the Mountain (19 page)

When I hunched over a little, he asked me, “Would you do that in front of an audience of a thousand people as you are giving your solo performance on the stage of a grand concert hall?” Of course not. I straightened up and never dipped my head again.

During my breaks, I would file the dentures with him and he would tell me about his family. They were all pious Christians, which made them a minority anywhere in Buddhist-dominated China. His father had been a famous dentist, who fought against the Communists for his Christian belief, was jailed, and died in prison four years later. His brothers and sisters, all talented musicians, were forced out of their mansion in the city of Putien and sent to the country just as he had been. His mother had come with him to Heng Tang. Their former mansion was divided up and used as the Red Guard’s headquarters. They now lived in a two-room dirt hut with a leaky straw roof. It had originally been an animal pen and still smelled like one.

Soong had learned dentistry from his dad, and by the age of eighteen was an accomplished one. Communist leaders loved him. He was personally responsible for all the gold dentures in their mouths. An employee of the commune, he worked five days a week, four hours a day. The rest of the time he was a daydreaming artist.

His neighbors complained about the eerie western music he played on the violin and “the bellows,” an upright organ that hissed when he
stepped on its pedals. Rocks and rotten fruit were thrown at his window, but it didn’t stop him. He put a sound dampener on his violin and played on.

I practiced constantly and was making fast progress, which Mom and Dad noticed with considerable pride. To thank Soong, Mom would sometimes ask me to bring fruit and meat to him, and Dad sent him cartons of cigarettes and liquor, gifts given him by his acupuncture patients. Soong would cook the food I brought and ask me to stay for dinner, then send me home on his bike in the evening. Sometimes, when his mother was visiting his brothers, I’d bring a lot of food and stay over for the weekend. There would be no violin lessons or any other music during those times. We would go hunting.

Summer attracted large flocks of the mountain birds called
woo yaa
to the hilly village. They were big birds with black-and-white feathers that made nests among the thick persimmon trees. Soong and I sneaked onto the mountain at night. He carried a hunting gun and I carried a flashlight and a large cotton bag. As we went along the meandering road, he would stop and ask me to focus the light at a bird a few feet away. Then he would aim and fire.
Boom!
The bird would fall with a thud. They weighed over a half-pound each, and within two hours I would be begging him to stop as the bag got too heavy for me to carry. The last leg of our nightly hunting expedition involved his jumping into a vegetable garden and stealing all the necessary ingredients for the night’s feast. Once at home, I would show him the liquor I brought, and we would drink it in his kitchen as we skinned the birds.

“Keep the heads on. They taste great sautéed with garlic, ginger, and wine,” he would say. I avoided them because I didn’t fancy eating anything that stared back at you.

Soong the dentist became Soong the chef. He peeled off his shirt, and the skinned birds, their heads making them look still alive, became a huge, steaming dish laced with green vegetables. We would eat and talk until sunrise.

Near the end of the summer, Soong said, “Da, there isn’t much I can teach you anymore. From here on, you have to practice and just figure it out for yourself. Besides, school is starting soon, right?”

“I’m not sure I’m going to high school.”

“What do you mean? Of course you’re going. You’re so young.”

“I haven’t got my notice yet. Others already did.” I hung my head.

“Come on, young fellow. Don’t feel bad, you could always come to learn dentistry with me. Kids are learning nothing in school now anyway.” He smiled. “But I want you to come and visit me on weekends and I’ll take you to Putien to meet some of the coolest young musicians in the city.”

“I promise.”

FINALLY I WAS
issued a notice stating that after careful consideration by the commune education board, I would not be given the opportunity to pursue my schooling any further. Neither was I allowed to do so at other schools in another commune.

No reason given. No reason needed.

A patient of Dad’s secretly told us that the board’s reason was simple. My ancestors and family had had enough education; it was time we made do without more.

I felt sad and isolated again. Everyone in my school went on to high school, even the worst of the students. I couldn’t go because my dad had gone to college, as had my grandpa. What kind of reasoning was that? Why did I have to carry the burden of my parents’ generation?

I walked around gloomily and was vague about it when friends asked what class I was in. My close friends were behind me totally. Yi offered to teach me carpentry, and Mo Gong said he would let his parents teach me the shoemaking business. Sen even suggested that we make wooden hives and raise some bees, collect the honey and sell it. High school was the last thing in their minds. They loved to have me around, not in school.

My eldest sister, Si, who by this time had grown to be a lovely lady with an eloquent mouth, took me to meet the high school administrators, trying to persuade them to take me in, the commune’s decision notwithstanding. The junior high school was under a different jurisdiction and had in the past reversed some of the commune’s rulings.

I would bring with me all the tools of my résumé: a Ping-Pong paddle, my flute, violin, school grades, and scrolls of calligraphy. I often had
to perform on the flute and especially on the violin on the spot to anyone who would listen. They had never seen the instrument before. They would applaud my performance, and I would feel used like a toy puppy, but the answer was always the same: great candidate, but
landlord
was a tough label to fight. I could have been on the school Ping-Pong team the next day, and they would have loved to have had me be the first violinist in the school orchestra, but sorry. The school authorities were friends of the commune education board. It would take much more than a good, even talented, student to move the mountains of bureaucracy.

Dad talked to my cousin Yan about sending me off to her remote school district on the island of Milon. She said she could try, but she was in an unfavorable position with the school authorities at the moment and in the long run it wouldn’t be good for me.

Mom prayed day and night, promising three chickens and four piglets to Buddha if any high school accepted me. I promised a thousand kowtows on my own. And then, good news came in an unusual way. Dad’s regular guest, the sugarcane farmer, casually mentioned that he had delivered some high-quality, fresh canes to the high school last night because the all-mighty principal’s aging father had just had a stroke. The only thing he could eat was juice squeezed from the fresh sugarcane. The principal was upset and restless and didn’t know what to do.

Dad ran into my room and interrupted my violin practice, a thing he had never done before, and said, “Son, I think you will be going to school soon.”

“Why? That’s wonderful!” I was so excited that I almost dropped my violin.

Dad told me about the principal’s father and predicted that he would be consulted the next day at the latest. Dad’s confidence was always his winning card. I believed him.

All day long, Mom was smiling and giggling and repeating, “Buddha did it again.”

That evening at dinner, a young high school teacher came hurriedly to our house and wanted to meet Dad privately. Dad took him into our back room. Five minutes later, Dad emerged and said he was going to
the see the principal’s father right away because the patient was still in critical condition.

We smiled with perfect understanding. Just as he stepped out the door, he excused himself from the young man for a moment and walked back to us. He bent over and gently whispered in my ear, “I will hold my needles until the principal says yes.”

I nodded, feeling a rush of tears fill my eyes.

He came back late. The news was good. I would be in the fourth group in grade one of junior high a month from now. The delay was due to the specific order from the commune that I was not to be admitted under any condition. They would sneak me in after all the hubbub died down. I thanked Dad and then crawled quietly to the attic, got on my knees, and kowtowed a whopping thousand and five times. Five extra were done to make up for any possible miscalculation in the hasty up-and-down motions.

I dragged my aching body to bed that night, and I lay there with my eyes open, too thrilled to feel sleepy. A high school badge, calculus, English, the school team, and the orchestra. And no more snakes like Quei, Wang, and Han.

Junior high, the only one for several counties, was ten times the size of my elementary school. The possibilities beckoned to me. Suddenly the nightmare of elementary school was over.

“
YOU’RE THE GUY
who plays the violin, I heard.”

“Yeah, what do you want?” I looked up from a stack of new textbooks to see a well-dressed fellow sauntering up to me. His clothes were neatly layered from the inside out. He wore shoes and socks with brightly colored patterns, a rarity among Yellow Stone boys. He was flanked by a couple of shorter fellows with toothy grins.

“Nothing, nothing, just a casual visit.” He stuck out his hand. As the sleeve rode up, a gold watch glistened in the morning sun that filtered through the window of our classroom. “Name is I-Fei. Do you care for a cigarette during the break?”

“Sure, I-Fei.”

“You could call him ‘Watch’ if you like to.” One of his followers commented, laughing.

I-Fei hit the guy’s head with his elbow and kicked his behind.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the kid said while making a funny face at me.

Another one of those
, I thought to myself.

During the whole hour of English, nothing sank in. I had missed an entire month of class. The grammar and phonetics sounded wacko. My attention kept turning to the fellow who had just introduced himself to me, I-Fei. I kept forgetting his name. He spent the first fifteen minutes of the hour spitting on his watch and polishing it carefully. He kept winding and rewinding it again and again. Then he positioned the face of the watch to reflect the morning sun right into another boy’s eyes.

The English teacher didn’t like what he saw. He asked I-Fei to stand up and read some simple sentences. I-Fei stumbled along, making the English language sound like some sort of Chinese local dialect. The whole class roared with laughter, especially the tall girl with a plump bosom who was sitting in a back seat. She laughed so hard she had to cover her face with her hands. I could see that I-Fei was a popular man on campus. The teacher failed to embarrass him, the attention evidently only made him feel glorified.

I-Fei whistled at me when the class was over and tilted his head, asking me to follow him, then effortlessly threw himself out of the paneless window. His two followers jumped through after him like two monkeys.
Why couldn’t they use the door?
I thought, closing my books, and leaving them in my desk drawer. I-Fei was winking at me from outside, so I climbed out of the window as well.

It was a smoking picnic. A line of young junior high boys sat along the wall, puffing away like small smokestacks. The ones without cigarettes were chasing others who had them, so that they could get a puff to quench their addiction during the short break. I-Fei pulled out a full pack of my favorite brand, Flying Horse, and let me pick one out for myself.

“Take a bunch, Da.”

I looked at him and shook my head.

“Friends share everything.” He stared at me, testing.

“They sure do.” I grabbed a few, thinking of my own friends awaiting me at Yi’s. One of I-Fei’s followers jumped in and grabbed one from the pack. He slapped the guy’s wrist and kicked him again. “Get lost, you beggar,” he shouted.

Slowly I pulled out an unopened pack of Flying Horse from my inside pocket and said, “Allow me to return the favor, my friend. If you want friendship, smoke one of mine.”

I-Fei’s face broke into a smile and he slapped my shoulder. He pulled one from my pack and lit it with a red lighter, after first lighting mine.

He became my best friend in class. His pomposity came from his family’s background. His father was the mayor of Han Jian, the second largest town in Putien. His mother was the president of the women’s federation at a government dried goods manufacturing factory. Both were seasoned Communist cadres. His parents had become too caught
up with their lives and had deposited him at his aunt’s, thus making him a big fish in a small pond. He lived on a fabulous monthly stipend and rode a brand-new bicycle to school once in a while, just to show it off to the girls. The teachers tolerated him because his mother controlled the supply of sugar and cooking oil in the county. She was all sugar and oil. Poorly paid, some teachers often could be seen begging I-Fei for oil and sugar coupons, which would allow them to buy those rare commodities that were unobtainable on their pathetic rations.