Colors of the Mountain (34 page)

“What do you want to do with your life?” I asked him. He leaned back and yawned.

“No idea.”

“Why don’t you study with me?”

“I can’t. I ain’t cut out for that sorta stuff. Looks like I’m stuck here.” There was a sadness he wouldn’t admit. He avoided my eyes. “Son of a whore, a few years ago, even my fucking dad would tell me books were bad and ask me to tear out pages so that he could roll his tobacco in them. He would tell me to go be a carpenter, blacksmith, or something, or just hang out. The teachers didn’t care. Fucking Chairman Mao told everyone to screw your teachers, burn the schools, and just kick ass.
College was bad and all that shit. Now all of a sudden, they changed their minds on us who’d followed their great, stupid teachings.”

He looked helpless, then sort of let it go and started humming his favorite revolutionary song, the one that was called “Our Hope Is in the Green Fields.” The roll dangled from his lip and the notes emerged a little out of tune. He was pathetic and hurt, and unknowingly represented the bitter class that had obviously enjoyed the Cultural Revolution and detested its abrupt ending. The changed world was a little too much, and too soon in coming.

The school announced that teachers would use the results of the fall semester finals to help determine which majors the graduating students should concentrate on. I abandoned the leaking compartments of my ship, the science courses, and steered the good parts along the misty coast.

The teachers noticed I’d stopped going to science classes, but didn’t express concern. They took it as a sign of my total surrender. Dia still hung around those classes, not sure which major to take. Every day he would pass on to me statements made by the geeky science teachers. Science was the future; liberal arts students were doomed, because the enrollment was much smaller. The whole science class had a kind of cult following. Students came out of the classes red-faced, excited, and excitable. They thought they could conquer the world with the little they knew. They were the cool bunch, the talented, and we, the liberal arts students, were the leftovers who couldn’t crack it in the big league. I hated them all, especially the Head, who was now the ace of the graduating class, only a small percentage of which defected to liberal arts. Dia followed me without much conviction.

The phenomenon only pleased me. Fewer heads meant less competition. I had done some research. Most of the science students would end up being lab workers, agricultural researchers, industrial engineers, or worse, geologists digging for oil in the remote desert at the edge of China’s sprawling landscape. But liberal arts majors had a future in management on college campuses and in government offices. I figured that at worst I would lead them and they would work for me, and if I was successful as an English major, someday I might even be a star in the hall of international diplomacy, where champagne, cigars, limousines,
hotels, and exotically beautiful women abounded. The dream was dizzying.

I stopped going to Professor Wei’s for two weeks and reviewed the subjects within the liberal arts field. I was up at five in the morning, my hurting body to bed at eleven. Teachers held review sessions for every subject. I skipped all the sessions, sequestering myself in my private spot in the wheat field outside the school’s low wall, where I banged away at my books on my own.

Lunch was dried yams; I would take breaks by spreading a small blanket on the soft grass and sharing a nap with Dia under the soothing sun. The school wall blocked the sea breeze, and the ripening wheat danced in the wind, singing a busy song. Dia hogged the entire blanket. When I’d wake up half an hour later, he would still be snoring away. I reopened my books and attacked each of the untouched chapters before me.

I loved the endless wheat fields, which were turning golden as the new year approached. There was calm here. I sat with my legs crossed like a monk and spread my books on the ground. There were chapters of history so beautiful that I couldn’t help reading them out loud again and again. This was another time, with totally different people. There was so much I didn’t know about my own country, my own race. Geography had its own charm. It gave my imagination wings. The world appeared on those pages. The Amazon, the Nile, the Himalayas, and the thirteen colonies of America. The red leaves of New England. I sat on a small piece of Yellow Stone, but the world was within me.

This new knowledge filled me with joy. I read and read until the sun quietly fell below the horizon and daylight gave way to gray darkness. I jostled my faithful friend, who had ignored me the whole afternoon. He rubbed his eyes and followed me home like a man who had lost three days’ sleep. He groused about how I should have awakened him. Now he had lost another afternoon of precious time.

I feigned anger, turned around and caught his thin neck in a grip and pinned him to the dirt road. He grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at me. I let him go and he jumped on me and started tickling me. To please him, I played along. He was a dear friend who needed a push. I felt bad about not having spent time playing with him. Then I threw
him over, picked him up, and threatened to throw him into the nearby Dong Jing. He begged and begged, I put him down, and we laughed all the way home. It never took much to please my best friend.

The finals for the fall semester took three full days. At each test, I swaggered into the classroom empty-handed and chose a seat apart from everyone else. It was just me and the paper. I wanted the teachers to know that there was no possibility of cheating for this born-again student. My message was loud and clear; the teachers looked at me suspiciously. I scribbled quickly and answered all the questions in my best handwriting. Good presentation counted for a third of your score, Dad had cautioned me. I did the best I could. This was a defining moment: I was declaring my intention to join the race for college and if anyone had any problems with it, I couldn’t care less. I had been at the bottom before, crawling on my knees. Now I was limping along. Soon I would be running. I wanted the world to know that I wasn’t born in order for someone to step on me.

I handed in the papers early. The teachers kept calm, their curiosity at bay, pretending not to look at me. As I left each classroom, I could feel their hands grabbing my papers and checking the answers. I knew they would be shaking their heads in amazement. It wasn’t just my imagination, for my faithful Dia was never far behind with his on-the-spot reporting of what happened after I left each test.

“The teacher grabbed your paper and did this.” He rolled his large eyes and froze them in comic astonishment. “I think you’re real cool.”

“I hope so.”

“I’m sure so, pal.” Dia ran in front of me, blocked my way, and said with two thumbs up, “I’m damned fucking proud of you. You’re so cocky, but I love it.”

The results of the finals were significant, because the college entrance examinations were only seven months away. If you didn’t make this one, you might as well go home, sharpen the farm tools, and register as a proud farmer for life, just in time for spring harvest.

The howling wind would give you a hell of a welcome as your shoeless feet sank into the freezing mud. The memory of digging the hard, cold soil with a blunt hoe was still fresh in my mind. The harvested wheat and fava fields had to be softened so that rice could be planted
before it was too late in the season. The cold, piercing wind had slapped my face so that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and had left bloody cracks on my face and hands. My feet had sunk into the wet furrows and the cold water had shot up my ankles, stinging like an attack of pins and needles. No one in the entire town of Yellow Stone wore shoes to the fields. Barefoot was the norm, summer or winter. The farmers were proud of their big, callused freezable feet. They had worked this way for generations. Why change?

Admiration was an understatement. I feared their heroism. After three days in the cold field, I swore I’d rather be a monk, with nothing better to do than dream about nuns in the next monastery than be an unwrapped frozen chicken like the farmers of Yellow fucking Stone.

I sweated through the semester finals and the results blew me away.

On the public announcement wall on campus, my name hovered at the top in every liberal arts subject. My proudest achievement was English. I scored 91 percent, putting me head to head with a guy they called the English Wizard, Cing, an apple-headed rival of mine since first grade.

Silently I thanked Professor Wei, my secret weapon.

Dia was busy trumpeting my victory like a pimp. He hung around the wall, smoking his thick one, shouting to anybody passing to look at the results, particularly mine. When the Head came by, Dia showed him my glories. The snobby science major sneered, and told Dia that no one in the history of this lowly high school had ever dared dream of majoring in English. It was a major for the privileged city boys, not farm boys like us, who smelled like manure. It was an elegant major for high-class people: it had to do with the mysterious western culture and capitalism; it had to do with America. The Head knew how to hurt a fragile soul. Dia spit at his feet, cursed like a sailor, and walked back to me like a loser.

“Is that true that no one in our school has ever made it as an English major?”

“It’s true. Why?” I asked.

“You gotta make me proud. I was out there happy for you and the Head trashed me left and right. Now I’m totally busted up inside.”

“Let me ask you, was there anyone in the history of this lowly school who ever played the violin before?”

He blinked and cocked his head for a second before shaking it slowly. A broad grin spread across his sad face. “Right, you’re the first one.” He straightened up and hugged me violently.

“You could do it, man,” Dia spat out excitedly, “and you gotta do it for me and the fucking school. Then when you pack up and take the fabulous Fujiang–Beijing train, I’ll load a shotgun and shoot the fucking Head right on his shining skull, that son of a whore.”

“You got to study with me. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a chance, too,” I said.

“Forget it. You’re the real genius. Remember a couple a months ago I had to pass the answers to you through the window? You knew nothing then. Now you worked hard, and you’ve scored high. I know this ain’t the big one, but it shows you can do it. I ain’t got it. You gotta keep up. I’m ready to do anything for you, carry the bags, roll cigarettes, get water, anything. In fact, I’d even marry you if I were a girl and you fancied me. Just let me tag along, don’t desert me. I feel awful lonely nowadays since you changed.”

“I’m sorry. You could stay overnight at our house anytime you want,” I suggested. “You know my mom loves you, so does all my family. We could always spare a bowl or two at the dinner table.”

He nodded, almost in tears. I rolled him a thick one from his bag and he was as happy as a goldfish.

MR. KA, MY
new English teacher, was a dark-skinned young man with a head of feathery curls.

He summoned me into his office. “Congratulations,” he said. “You finally woke up.” He jerked his head violently. His curls were bothering him.

“I heard mixed things about you from some people, but it doesn’t matter what they said anymore,” he continued. “I like what I see now. You have potential.”

A brilliant opening line. He made a friend of me on the spot. It was us against them now.

“We have work to do to get you where you want to go.” He was good with abstract terms. “I’ll give you what I have and help you with what you need. Do you know what I mean?”

I was clueless. I shifted in my seat and nodded ambiguously.

“First thing to push for is membership in the Young Communist League. I checked your record and it’s pathetic. You weren’t even a Little Red Guard in elementary school.”

Not the memory of my miserable elementary school again.

“Someone screwed you up badly. It was wrong.” He narrowed his eyes and looked out of the window.

Damned right it was wrong. It was criminal. I was the only one in the whole fucking school who wasn’t a Little Red Guard because I was from a Black family and was personally on the suspect list as a counterrevolutionary. I still had nightmares about it.

“It’s time someone stood up for you. I’ll get you the membership before you graduate. It’ll enhance your chance of admission into a top-notch college like the one I went to. You don’t want to be second-guessed on such a minor point, do you?”

“No, sir, and thank you, sir.”

“No problem. I had the same conversation with Cing, another talented potential. You two are my only hopes for the year. I’ll personally involve myself with your growth. Together we’ll give it our best try.”

It brought to mind the pep talks from my Ping-Pong coach. The pep talks meant nothing, but they made you feel real good. A sort of national anthem in words.

Mr. Ka was doing what was commonly known among teachers as fishing, claiming credit for students who made it to prestigious colleges and using it to enhance their status and gain a promotion and a higher salary. Teachers at Yellow Stone High dropped names of former students now in college, and talked about their roles in propelling them there. They peppered their conversations in class, after meals, over tea, and even in bed with their wives with these names. They believed they’d made those kids college men, and they lived for the glory.

Mr. Ka had more at stake. He was new, and needed to establish a record. What a challenge he faced. No one in the history of the school had gone on to study English at a good college. He was the right man at the right time to do the right thing for the right person.

Within days, a small red poster was pasted on the school wall. It attracted almost no attention. It stated that I was belatedly being given
the glorious title of Little Red Guard and had been admitted into the Young Communist League. For a brief moment, I felt like the Peking Man, tickled by the emptiness of such a title. Communism had become a commodity with a price tag, its value plummeting a notch each time it was sold at a garage sale. Soon the membership would become a tradable commodity, one you could pick up for a penny with a cold drink thrown in.