Colors of the Mountain (40 page)

He was hyped about his performance and we went on testing each other. When it was my turn again, Dia knelt on the floor and said, “Hey, stop it. I can’t take it anymore. College is yours, man.”

“Come on. Let’s do some more.”

“No, I’m dying right now. If I don’t close my eyes, I’ll drop on the floor.”

I was really in the mood. Nothing could stop me. Dia fell on the floor and started snoring while I walked around, repeating what I had just learned, telling the stories over and over to myself until I remembered them well. The big test was only months away. I was scared and didn’t need sleep.

Suddenly, I heard a knock on the window. It was pitch-dark out there. Who could it be?

I immediately turned off the light and squatted on the floor, pinching Dia’s ear to wake him up. The beam of a flashlight pierced through the window and swept around the room a few times.

A deep voice shouted, “Get out of there before I fire the rifle.”

“Wake up,” I whispered into Dia’s ear. He was sleeping like a dead man. I had to do something. I kicked him. He scrambled up like a shocked animal.

“The night guard’s up.”

“Shit, let’s run.”

We collected our things in the darkness and climbed out the window like rats. The light followed us until we’d gotten over the wall, where we collapsed, panting like hunted beasts.

“He said he would shoot us if we didn’t move. Do you believe him?” I asked Dia.

“Nah, the only gun he’s got is the one between his legs and it ain’t very effective as his wife could surely tell you.”

We laughed all the way back to my home. It had been a tiring night, but I felt satisfied because I had done a lot of studying and remembered everything perfectly. And Dia was making progress. The fright of being chased by the school guard was easily forgotten.

The next day, during the compulsory morning exercise, the principal stepped onto the stage. Something was up. He never appeared, except for very special reasons.

“Last night we had two intruders on our campus. We only have one of their names. We are still working on the other. They climbed the wall to get in. I was furious when I heard this.” He paused, frowning.

My legs were shaking and my knees felt weak. I didn’t need this public humiliation anymore. I silently begged the principal to forget it. Dia stole a look at me. The whole school was now in the field, busily guessing who these two guys could be.

“As I said, I was mad until I was told what these guys were doing in our classroom. Studying! I said to the night guard that I was shocked to hear that. It was a beautiful story. If I have my students studying until three o’clock in the morning, then I am looking to be the principal of a very promising school here. These guys are a good example, you all can learn from them.”

I was totally stunned by the twist. Dia was smiling at me now.

“To these two young men, I say continue working hard, but watch your health, and don’t climb the wall. You could break your legs, or worse. I praise you, but I ask that you don’t come to school at night
anymore. We will keep our school open until midnight for you, but no later. That’s my message. Now everyone, go back to your studies.”

It felt good being praised for our efforts. I was sure Dia felt the same way. He badly needed the boost. Maybe now he would pick himself up and start to run with the others.

EVERY MORNING I
rose with the sun. Then I shuffled to my brother’s room and woke him up. I would see a few books lying beside him. He had fallen asleep again, worrying about the exam. Each morning, he jumped out of bed, rubbed his red eyes, and stared at me as if I were crazy. I was.

I went through our backyard, opened the squeaky door, trotted down the steps to the river, and squatted by the clear, cool water to check my reflection. I had lost weight since I had begun rising at sunrise and going to bed at eleven every day. I splashed my face with water and wiped it with my sleeves. Six hours of sleep every day. I needed a lot of cold water to keep my eyes open.

It was already late April. The smell of summer was pungent everywhere. Our backyard was a colorful garden with red roses, yellow ga-gai blossoms, and white lilies. Mom had planted some lima beans, which had flourished in the most imaginative way and now crawled overhead along the wood frames of the doors and windows. I found a spot beneath the thick leaves away from the scorching sun, placed my favorite bamboo chair there, and munched on some bean pods as the gentle breeze ruffled my hair.

Every morning I woke up to tackle political studies, the most boring of the five subjects required in the big exam. It was all about the twisted philosophy of the Communist party. Some of the theories were so involved, they sounded like sophistry at best, and that was what they were.

It was like a carpet-cleaning salesman raving about this great revolution taking place in the carpet-cleaning industry, when actually none existed. And the machine he was trying to sell you wasn’t one bit as good as what he claimed. It was tedious self-promotion, mixed with a little bit of lying. Many times I wanted to throw the book into the river. What was this? Marxism combined with Mao’s superior thoughts? It was simply some foreign garbage, stir-fried with local flavor until it became a dish called communism, Chinese style. Moo goo gai pan with ketchup.

Some of the questions and explanations given were so far-fetched I felt like spitting. Like why in the beginning of the revolution Mao had ordered his armies into the countryside instead of starting a revolt in the big city. The book said Mao was applying Marxism to China’s unique circumstances. That was bull. Mao was just running for his life. He hadn’t even had time to wipe his ass. The Nationalist army was after his head and he had had to flee into the woods. There had been no Marxism in his mind at that time.

I almost puked as I read a whole chapter talking about the virtue of Mao’s one-liner: “True knowledge comes from practice.” Yeah, right. Well, he’d had plenty of practice, starting with dumping his ugly country-bumpkin first wife and crawling into bed with a chic Shanghai actress, while his army was chewing tree roots and getting their asses frozen in northern Shangbei, a hiding spot in which they were eventually able to revive.

But reality was reality. Political studies stayed, accounting for one fifth of the exam’s total five hundred points. I swallowed the sawdust and tried to keep my sentiments to a minimum.

Jin took another spot under the lima-bean foliage, sipping his tea and smoking as he buried his head in his own studies. After three months of intensive work, Jin was making amazing headway. I fed him all that I had and gave him my best guidance. He didn’t need much help. Neither did he need any motivational pep talk.

For ten years, since the age of thirteen, Jin had been a full-fledged farmer. There wasn’t any kind of farm work at which he wasn’t an expert. He was a quiet guy, one who had learned to be cunning just to survive. When he first left junior high to work on the farm, the farmers had laughed at him and let him do all the heaviest jobs. They sometimes
even doubled the load. My parents weren’t there to protect him. And had they been there, they wouldn’t have been able to do much. They were landlords, guilty humans who could not argue with anyone. They were just supposed to lower their heads and slave away until the day they died. My oldest sister, Si, who joined him on the farm at the same time, often came home crying about the unfair treatment. But Jin never cried or complained. He just grew quieter and firmer. He had to be the man. He began to hang out with the boys, and picked up smoking and drinking at the age of fifteen just as a way of blending in. Soon he became a respected farmer, skilled in some of the hardest tasks. He could carry more weight on his shoulders than anyone else, while running for a long distance uphill, taking no breaks. There were still times he had to fight against unfair treatment and discrimination, but he had thrived and made us all really proud.

Now his mentality was totally militant. If he could handle the back-breaking farm work, school should be easy. He wanted to go to college. It was his only future. Cousin Tan had paved the way for him, and I was right behind, pushing and shoving.

While we studied, our three sisters toiled under the sun, taking over the workload for my brother. Each day, they came back sweaty and exhausted. My brother and I would come to the door to greet and thank them. They would just smile and ask us how much we had studied that day. We would tell them, and they would be happy for us. There was such hope and caring in their eyes. Brother Jin couldn’t wait to jump back into farming again as soon as the tests were over. He couldn’t stand the thought that someone else was bearing his load for him. He knew how grueling the summer heat was, how sore your back could get, and that no matter how callused your hands were, cutting the rice with the ancient, blunt sickles gave you raw, open blisters every year. It was life at Yellow Stone we were trying to escape from.

On the farm, sarcasm surrounded Jin. They were the same familiar taunts that had been used against Cousin Tan. That he was old enough to be a college teacher. That his family background was politically incorrect. That he didn’t have the knowledge to succeed. Jin had been in junior high when he left school. None of the taunts bothered him. His buddies came by every evening to check on him and wish him good luck.

After a light breakfast—three bowls of rice porridge for Jin and two for me—we studied geology and history together at a long table in the living room, facing the lush garden. We drew history charts on our makeshift blackboard and more were spread all over the floor. We examined every detail of China’s long history and pored over every exotic city in the world.

Jin sometimes offered me a cigarette during our five-minute afternoon break as we talked about our dreams and desires. His were practical and comfortable, while mine were whimsical and somewhat far-fetched. He wanted to go to a solid college with a good economics department near home, become a manager of a company, marry a pretty girl with a solid temperament, and raise a family. I wanted to go to Beijing, the pearl of China and a fifty-hour train ride from home, and study English. From there, the sky was the limit.

Jin would nod with amusement at his younger brother, and offer candid advice, never a word of discouragement.

“You’re very young and the world is yours,” he would say. “Dream all you can dream.”

Once he told me he believed I could achieve anything and distinguish myself in anything if I applied all my energy toward it. That moved me, coming from my quiet, distant brother who was eight years older than I. He said that even as a very young kid I had dared to do things that were out of most people’s reach, such as becoming a Ping-Pong champion, playing the flute, and learning the violin. He had done none of those things. I hadn’t known that he had watched and been quietly proud of me. We had never talked much when we were growing up. He had been too busy playing the man of the house and I, the baby of the family.

Mom would bring in our lunches, rice with some meat soup. I knew that we didn’t have any money, so I asked Mom where the money to buy the meat came from. She was quiet for a bit, then said we needed nutrition to study, that I was not to worry, just to continue the good work. I knew that our family was probably piling up loans just to feed our two nonperforming mouths. Jin and I talked and we decided to tell Mom to stop doing it. It was getting a little too luxurious for us. We just wanted simple soup made with vegetables from our garden, and a lot of rice. April was when the green couldn’t meet the yellow, a phrase
used in Yellow Stone to describe the time right before harvest when the food from the last harvest is about to end. And we didn’t know where Mom got all that long-grained white rice. By now we should have been eating just cheap yams three times a day, but that was something we didn’t want to concern ourselves about just then.

I told Jin I would try to make some money after the exams, and repay the debts we had caused the family, but he told me the best thing to do was keep studying and make it to college. Nothing would mean more to the family. So we plowed on like the buffalo of Yellow Stone, furrow after furrow. In the evenings, we separated and studied our favorite subjects. He tackled math, and I did my English exercises. To keep us awake until eleven, we drank lots of tea and used the night pot a great deal.

One night, Jin accidentally knocked his teapot over. He came upstairs with his head hanging and told me that it was a bad omen, and that he probably wouldn’t make it to college this time. I told him it was silly to think that, and that my many kowtows for him should cover this insignificant mishap. We laughed; it made us feel better.

I decided a lot of time could be saved by not going to school anymore. Everything was in the books. By April, most of the real teaching had been accomplished.

Soon Dia began to do the same thing and found his uninterrupted sessions extremely useful. He would drop by sometimes, but mostly he stayed in his village and locked himself up in his room. The whole village thought he was crazy. He actually enjoyed it. In the villagers’ eyes the old Dia was just another harmless, smoking Dia man who quietly grew tobacco in the backyard and would eventually marry a decent girl and set up a nest for another generation of smoking men. Not this Dia. He wanted to be thought a dreamer in a village where dreamers were a laughingstock. He said he wanted to look like Einstein and be as great and crazy as he was, so he kept his hair long and disheveled. Staying indoors all day made him look pale in sharp contrast to the permanent tans of his fellow farmers, who got sunburned every day digging and shoveling their lives away in that nameless village. Some thought Dia was suffering from an incurable disease.