Colors of the Mountain (21 page)

“That I couldn’t help you with,” he said earnestly. “If you want to be a teacher or something, my dad might be able to help get you a job.”

“I don’t need your help. I’ll study hard and make it on my own.”

“Study? Are you crazy?”

I nodded.

He offered me a cigarette. For the first time, I refused.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Just don’t feel like one.”

He lit one for himself. I took it out of his mouth and threw it away. He tried to hit me but I was already a few steps beyond him. We ran back to the headquarters. All the way, I felt the eyes of Wen and his wife staring at me, smiling and hoping.

ON THE NINTH
day of the ninth month in 1976, Chairman Mao died like an ordinary man. Superstitious farmers said nine was the number of an emperor, and heaven had intended that he die like an emperor. It could have been a coincidence, but the sun, covered by clouds, didn’t shine over Yellow Stone for ten days following his death. Rumor had it that it was mourning the loss of a great leader, but Dad thought the sky was upset because Mao hadn’t died earlier. But a leader, no matter how rotten, was almost a supernatural figure. Confucianism had taught people to be obedient to the emperor unconditionally. Mao’s rule had reinforced such a tradition. For days after his death, people gathered in knots, in the fields, under the trees, whispering quietly and mysteriously as though a disaster were about to befall the whole nation.

Mom and Dad told me to be especially careful about what I said. We, the enemy of Mao, should not appear to be gleeful about the news. The leaders of the commune would thrash every one of us before the system could change. We could be easy targets for their wrath in mourning. There might be martial law, even civil war, Dad cautioned.

Leaders and cadres of Yellow Stone commune held long meetings, during which some were said to have cried until they collapsed. There was a sense that they had lived their golden days and that what might be ahead was totally unknown.

Everyone in the street wore a black band on his right arm. Day and night, the gloomy and weeping sounds of Mao’s funeral music haunted
every dusty corner of Yellow Stone, transmitted through temporary loudspeakers. It never stopped.

Superstitious farmers stirred up all kinds of eerie stories that I had never heard before. They said Mao was a devilish son from heaven who got away and wreaked havoc on this earth and now would be punished for the next nine lives. No wonder he had no offspring. People even claimed to have heard laughter at night from the old site of Buddhist temples, temples that had been toppled down by Mao’s revolutionaries. For the first time in my life, I heard people talk about ghosts as though they were a part of our lives, only living when we were all sleeping. Only the insomniacs got to hear and see what the ghosts had to say.

But Buddha wasn’t the only one laughing. I saw the uncontrollable joy in Mom and Dad’s eyes. Long after we kids went to sleep, they could be heard whispering and laughing in the dark. Once, I overheard them talking about our lost land and houses behind the closed door of their bedroom. When they sensed my hesitant footsteps outside, Dad slowly opened the door and winked at me, asking me to go away.

Mao’s funeral was held nationwide. People of Yellow Stone gathered in long columns in a public square, thousands of them, wearing only black and white.

As though the rift between the Red families and the landlords’ families were widened by the death of Mao, I was told by the school authorities not to attend the ceremony. Landlords’ families were not invited. I was saddened, humiliated, confused. I thought I was slowly blending into the system after changing schools. Now they told me I couldn’t go and mourn the most forbidding leader, the only leader, I knew. In my heart, there was no other leader who mattered as much to me, regardless of how good or bad he was. I had been told not to analyze him because he was wiser, no, the wisest. I was to follow him and love him with all my heart. As a young boy, I had once shouted the slogan “Long Live Chairman Mao!” so many times that by the next day I had lost my voice. Even though my parents’ generation hated him, I had embraced him in my own way. I didn’t know any better. A cult mentality had already been forged on me, and it hurt me deeply to be separated from such an event. I wanted to say good-bye to him, the dead Chairman Mao, but I didn’t even have a black armband.

I stayed at home while the crowd marched in the street, heading for the square. Dad said there was nothing to it and that even if he had been paid to attend such an event, he wouldn’t go. Such a bore, he said. The fat guy should have been dead a long time ago. Mom quickly asked him to stop. He smirked to himself. Then he brewed himself a large pot of red tea, made himself a fat tobacco roll, and stretched out in his comfortable rocking chair with an old medical book, his favorite spare-time activity. He was a happy man.

Ten minutes before the funeral, one of Dad’s patients stopped by our house on his way to the ceremony and Dad treated him to some tea.

“I’m really not up to standing for such a long time in the square,” he said. “My feet will be killing me.” He looked at me, a picture of gloom and sadness, and said, “Young man, you can have my black band and go stand in my spot.”

I bounced out of my seat, grabbed his band, and ran as quickly as I could to the square, which was guarded by armed militiamen wearing serious looks. Sneaking into the entrance with my head down, I felt like a thief as I tried to avoid familiar faces.

I waded through columns of people, surprised that some of them were actually smoking and joking with each other while waiting for the massive funeral to begin. When I finally located the man’s villagers and joined them at the edge of the dirt square, a couple of farmers were sitting on the grass, taking a nap. There were crying children and toothless old people among them. I was quietly moved by their devotion until a man napping next to me said that his brigade would count their participation as a day’s work in the field and pay by the head, including children.

Dad was right. The ceremony was long and boring. The life story of Mao, the long list of his titles, dirgelike music, and silence. They said at that moment the whole country was silent, even the most important machines were turned off. The trains stopped. In my mind, the whole country was silent and sad, except my dad. I could imagine him blowing on the steam of his hot tea before he sipped and spitting loose tobacco leaves out of his mouth after each drag, while he dangled his feet from his chair. I smiled, unable to stop thinking about him.

One day, sometime later, on my way home from school, I saw a large crowd gathered at the market square. A young man with a large brush
was splashing characters on a white wall that read,
DOWN WITH THE GANG OF FOUR
!

Who were the Gang of Four?

I stood closer at the edge of the crowd, watching. The young man wrote the names one after another, to the total surprise of all.

JIANG QING
(
FORMERLY KNOWN AS MADAM MAO
),
YIAO, ZHANG, AND WANG
.

It couldn’t be. How could Mao’s wife be down while Mao’s bones were still warm? Mao’s wife had been running the country since Mao had been sick.
Someone was taking over the government
, I thought with alarm. Maybe there would be a war, like Dad said. I rushed home and breathlessly told Dad the news.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “They could throw you in jail if you spread untrue rumors.”

I told him I didn’t make it up. He grabbed Mom and closed the door behind them. I could hear them whispering and laughing again.

That evening the bikers, who spent their days carrying passengers back and forth from the city of Putien and Yellow Stone for thirty fens each trip, confirmed the breaking news. They said people were painting the names of the Gang of Four on the cement streets in Putien and then crossing them out. Some even made effigies and burned them. At nine o’clock that night, through a crackling radio system, there was a special announcement from the central government confirming the downfall of the Gang, which had consisted of some leading figures in Mao’s cabinet.

Soon, we heard that the party chief of Putien County had been arrested and put in jail and that another group of leaders was taking over. Two days later, the other cadres disappeared into the mountains. During the next several months, massive executions of former leaders followed. Among those executed was the arrogant Putien police chief. They shot him in the head and gave his son a life sentence for corruption, rape, and embezzlement.

On my way back from school one day, I saw a large crowd standing outside the house belonging to the party chief of Yellow Stone commune. You could hear a boy sobbing amid the chatter. I stopped, jumped on a vegetable peddler’s stool, and strained to see what was happening. Two cops were brushing glue on the front door of the
house and pasting white paper over it. They were sealing the house, as they had done to those of the landlords and counterrevolutionaries just a few years ago. And the chief’s son was wiping his eyes with his sleeves, standing obediently by a bicycle packed with his belongings.

I asked an old man standing next to me what was going on. He said that they had gone to arrest the chief today, only to find that he had escaped early this morning, leaving his son behind. And now they were sealing his house and sending his son away to his grandpa, who lived in the mountains.

Well
, I thought to myself,
the chief, the formidable chief, was now a criminal fugitive and he had abandoned his son.
I still remembered it was he who had spat at me in the school hallway and plotted with my teacher, La Shan, to kick me out of school in third grade. I don’t think he ever thought this would happen to him. I thought about La Shan, secretly hoping that he might end up being hunted like the party chief, with whom he had tried so hard to ingratiate himself.

Dad wasn’t surprised to hear the news. He said that soon we would be able to do what others could do—like going to school and finding a job. I nodded in disbelief as Dad kept saying, “Son, you could be the lucky one.”

At night I dreamed about becoming a real artist, performing before thousands of people in a cavernous concert hall. During the day, I rehearsed with my schoolmates for another lengthy show that would celebrate the downfall of the Gang of Four.

This time, Mr. Ma, the school drama teacher, even cast I-Fei and me in the play. I was to take the part of the former cultural minister, Yiao, and I-Fei was to play Madam Mao, two of the Gang of Four. We all wore masks with an opening at the mouth. We went to school in the morning and took to the road in the afternoon to do the show for villagers miles away, often coming back at midnight. We were carried around in narrow boats along the rivers to get to the villages near water, and the mountainous communes would send their noisy tractors to haul us back and forth. For each show, I would pad my stomach to appear fat, and I wore a pair of shiny, leather shoes two sizes too big. My part was not much of a speaking role. It was I-Fei’s role that brought laughter from the audience each time he appeared. He wore a long wig, a tight red dress, high heels, and did an amazing, catlike walk,
twisting his tiny waist and narrow hips. He would curl his little finger as he held a cigarette, and push his boobs up once in a while, whenever the sponges inside his dress dropped too low. He spoke in a high-pitched, rather raspy voice. Older schoolmates grabbed his bottom behind the curtain—he looked like a really attractive, mature woman.

He enjoyed the role so much that he began to walk and talk like Madam Mao, even outside school. When I asked him how he was able to do such a good female imitation, he said that as a young boy he used to dress up in his mother’s clothes and shoes and copy her walk. Locked in the house for hours, he would do this while she was away doing her revolutionary work as the women’s federation president.

In school, I was getting by with the help of others. I had become everything I was not in elementary school, popular with friends, with nobody picking on me. But teachers looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. I was behind in all the subjects. They didn’t try to help me. They generally left me alone, and I was forgotten. They thought I was the rotten type that they had to cut off, so they never inquired about my homework and never asked me questions in class. They knew I hadn’t prepared for it. I was always with I-Fei, leaving early to rehearsals or coming back late from them. It was a wonderful feeling for a while, because now I had finally become what I had wished to be and could not be in elementary school. There were no enemies chasing me at every corner, concocting dirty tricks behind my back every day. I was respected and had a lot of friends, significant friends. I was my own master. I did not have to fear, worry, or fight. I felt safe and anchored.

But soon I was feeling empty about school. I used to love studying, and had known the joy of being at the top of the class. I knew about basking in affirming smiles from the teachers, people my family had taught me to respect. Though I was having a good time, I felt as if I was violating something special.