Colors of the Mountain (6 page)

Wen and his lovely wife met me at the door and invited me in.

“Da, this is your home. We want you to enjoy your stay here,” Wen said, relieving me of my sack. “Don’t be afraid here.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Do you think they will find me?”

“No,” his wife said firmly. “We will not let anything happen to you. You’re only a child. Who are these damned, heartless people?” she exclaimed, her eyes misty. “They won’t find you. If they come looking, I will hide you in a safe place. They can’t do anything to me. I’m the daughter of a worker’s family, remember?” She laughed and wiped away her tears. “Besides, Wen is the personal bookkeeper and fortune-teller of our commune’s party secretary. He wouldn’t do a thing without checking with Wen first.”

They fed me and gave me a bundle of old books to read. At night, they were the same hopeless romantics I had known from before. They read each other poems, shared old photos, and sang songs, while the candlelight danced in the mountain breeze coming through the window. Wen’s parents, who lived upstairs, called them crazy, but their love for each other warmed my heart in that lonely and remote village so far away from home.

I stayed there for a week before it was deemed safe for me to return. I did not go back to school for the rest of the semester. I heard that at the public humiliation meeting Yu Xuang was sentenced to four years of labor reform in a juvenile prison. He was beaten unconscious after being thrown off the stage. No one had come to inquire about me. Mom said later that she had spent the entire day on her knees in front of Buddha, praying for my safety.

I QUIT SCHOOL
after I came back from hiding. I kept expecting the teacher, the principal, or the police chief to show up any day for my capture. I asked Jie and Buckle, who still talked to me occasionally, whether they had heard anything about a public meeting to be held soon in the school. They said no.

Every morning at eight-thirty I climbed up to our attic, which was the highest point of our house, and sat on the windowsill, looking out the large window and listening to the melody of the distant school bell ring from afar.
“Ding, dong…Ding, dong.…”
It was time for classes to begin. A skinny teacher nicknamed “Monkey” threw his entire weight on the rope, pulling the giant bell and grinning like a buffoon each time it tolled.

In the afternoons, I sat behind our closed front door and shelled the fresh fava beans that my brother and sisters had harvested in the fields. I was working to justify my existence. On a good day, I could pick three large baskets with only a ten-minute break for lunch and a few pee runs in between. At four, I would crack our door open just enough to peer out at my classmates as they made their way home from school. They were so happy and carefree. None of them felt like a criminal in hiding, condemned to petty labor. They all went to school and learned wonderful things about the world.

I missed school terribly, and would ask Buckle what lesson they were on, and who was sitting in my seat. But deep inside, I was sick of being
such a weak person. If Dad knew I was being so nostalgic about a place that had treated me like dirt he would think me a wimp. So I looked away from the door and continued shelling my endless baskets of fava beans.

One day Dad came home on a short leave, sat me down beside him. “Maybe you should go and apprentice as a carpenter or a blacksmith,” he said. “They make a decent living. But they have to work their balls off.” I remembered seeing our town blacksmith’s balls swinging in and out of his loose shorts as he hammered away at his anvil. I smiled at my Dad’s humor, which was meant to cheer me up, but I wasn’t too keen on those options. They weren’t my choices. I had watched carpenters at construction sites, dangling dangerously from rooftops. Blacksmiths made good money, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life swinging heavy hammers near a blazing fire.

“How about learning to play a flute or something?” I suggested.

“Those are nice jobs,” he agreed, “but you have to go to music school and I don’t think they would take anyone from a landlord’s family.”

I nodded with understanding.

He sensed my lack of enthusiasm. He suggested we wait a while before sending me off to a carpentry shop somewhere in the mountains, where young apprentices not only did the most menial tasks, but also washed the teacher’s feet, brewed his tea, fed his babies, and paid a huge tuition. At the end of three years, the qualified student had to work for the teacher, free of charge, for one additional year.

The following month I spent my time weeding the sweet potatoes in the fields, building a dirt wall in our backyard, carrying lunches and dinners to my brother and sisters in the fields in little bamboo baskets slung over my shoulders, and spreading wet hay to dry before storing it in the evenings. Bugs crawled everywhere and the moist hay’s sharp, blade-like edges made my skin itch constantly.

As I became more and more settled into the routine of a young farmhand, part of me was dying inside. I felt old and rejected, a misfit. The people I worked with were all older farmers who could no longer work the fields. One was a toothless mute, who yelled at me like an animal, made obscene gestures behind young women’s backs, and laughed
like a hyena when I repeated his gestures back to him. I was merely keeping him company.

I no longer played out in the street. I had aged and had become an outcast. By now, everyone knew the reason why I had quit school. Sometimes the kids shouted outside my house, calling me the “little counterrevolutionary,” daring me to come out and fight them. I would clutch a sharp spade and wait behind the door in case they burst through and attacked us. A few times, stones were thrown against our windows. One morning Mom found a dead bird in our backyard, headless. I suspected the teacher had urged his gang to come after me. Whenever Mom asked me to run out to buy some soy sauce, I checked the street first, then darted out and back. The last thing I wanted to do was cause any more trouble.

But every night before I went to sleep, I wrote in my diary, trying not to forget the words I had learned. I made up a lot of signs for the words I didn’t know. There was nothing good to write about. Often I found myself drawing a picture of La Shan, the chinless skunk, and adding a huge bullet hole on his forehead. Someday I wanted to avenge all the things that had been done to me. Maybe when I grew up or maybe when the world changed.

Then one day a kindhearted teacher named Mr. Lan from our neighborhood dropped by to have tea with us. He casually mentioned that he had brokered a deal with the school to allow me to enter group eight of the fourth grade. He said, smiling, “It’s better than being a farmer and genuine pearls shine even in darkness.”

I remembered that line for a long time.

With mixed feelings of joy, fear, curiosity, and suspicion, I dusted off my books and prepared for the frightening ordeal of going back to face the very same people I had tried to avoid.

On Monday morning, shock hit me as I stepped into the classroom of the fabled group eight. The kids hooted at me. It took me a second before I noticed the seating arrangement was unlike that in any other classroom. The desks were separated into two corners. One was for eight girls in the front. The other was in the far back corner for the boys. There was a large, empty space in the middle of the room where trash and paper planes were piled up.

The teacher gestured with his cigarette in the direction of the boys’ group and absentmindedly said, “Pick a chair for yourself over there.”

“Which one?” I asked. The dirty faces from the boys’ corner looked dangerously back at me.

“Any seat, I said.” The teacher, whom I came to know as Mr. Chu, swiped his arm in the general direction again.

I nervously walked down the open space in the middle, and took a seat at the edge of the group next to a fat, ugly little guy.

“Whaddya doing here, big shot?” my new neighbor shouted, stretching his arms to mark his territory line on the desk we shared. Somehow, I had a feeling they knew I had been kicked out from group one, where all the brightest students and the snobs were.

“Why didja send him in here?” another wise guy asked the teacher. “We ain’t no garbage can.” The whole class erupted with laughter like a bunch of drunks in a rowdy bar.

Mr. Chu had a puffy face with big pouches under his eyes. The bags seemed to drag his eyelids down with their weight.

“Shuuut up,” he screamed. “You rascals don’t deserve better, and for your information, you
are
a garbage can.”

Laughter.

“And…?” a few boys teased.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, breathed heavily, and continued as if in a play. “No, no, no! You’re worse than that. You’re a bunch of animals that belong in a zoo! You have no discipline…”

“And…” the class chanted.

“No willpower…”

“And…”

“No brains…”

“Huh…and…”

“No manners, no hygiene…”

“And…”

“Stop interrupting me!” He stomped on the floor and threw a wooden ruler in the boys’ direction. It landed on top of the pile of paper planes. “And no future!” Finally he ended his tirade. My neighbor, the fat boy, picked up the ruler and threw it back to the teacher.

“Hey, hey, hey, Mr. Chu. You might wanna be careful there,” a calm,
deep voice said from behind me. I turned and saw an older boy with a big square face, a nose like a fat bulb of garlic, and a nasty cut across his forehead. His eyes twinkled with mischief. A wicked smile creased his face. “My dad wouldn’t like hearing that part about there being no future for me. You got to be careful there.”

“Don’t you mention your dad again. I’m not scared of him.”

“Yeah? Well if that’s the case, how come you weren’t around when he showed his face here last time he was mad at you?”

“He was lucky I wasn’t here that day. I could have your dad and you arrested if he were trouble. Let’s turn to page twenty and waste no more time.”

More laughter and grunts. Slowly the class moved along, like an old freight train going up a hill. Mr. Chu kept shouting and screaming and the students kept laughing and teasing. It was like a circus where everybody was a clown. Even the girls cursed like mean old bitches at boys who didn’t know to stay out of their corner.

By the second class, I was able to answer 80 percent of the math questions, and by the third, the class had found a new star. At the end of the day, the big guy with the nasty cut, who was known as “the King,” walked over and patted my shoulder, announcing, “From now on, ya can sit next to me and do my homework whenever I feel like it.”

I was flattered by the intimacy and readily agreed. It wasn’t as if I had any choice. The boy was a head taller than me and was surrounded by all his lieutenants, each more devilish than the other. They seemed to be the class Mafia. I later came to know that he had been in the same grade for the last three years and that his father, whom he often used as a shield, was a high-ranking officer in the Chinese navy, captain of a huge ship that cruised the Pacific, guarding against a Taiwanese invasion. He carried a gun around Yellow Stone, even on home visits.

That night, lying in bed, I was convinced that I couldn’t have found a more nurturing environment to revive my student career. My classmates were animals, but they couldn’t care less where I had come from. They respected me.

Our school was like any town. It had its fancy parts and seedy corners. Our side of the playground was the Wild West, complete with hooligans and hustlers, where the law was written by the biggest fists and guys such as the King moved around with supple, pantherlike ease,
calling the shots. It was a world away from the intellectual ivory tower of group one. The windows on our side had broken glass that had remained unrepaired for years, weeds that had long since strangled all the flowers, and mud that pooled at the classroom door as though nature had favored the other side by tilting the surface of the earth a little and letting us have the soupy muck when it rained. Nonetheless, I was proud to walk on this frontier. To me, this was a place to begin, not end. Among these tough but simpler kids, I had space to breathe. All my new friends in school had to help their families on the farm as soon as they got home. They were kids from distant villages without a school of their own and had to walk an hour each way to come to Yellow Stone.

It was here that I learned to hit people with my fists for the first time. One day, as I sat at my desk doing homework, my neighbor, Yian, the fat, ugly boy, ran by and snatched my rubber ball. I chased him around the classroom, demanding he give it back to me. He teased me by sticking the ball up his crotch. All the boys laughed while the girls turned their faces away in disgust. I jumped at him, but missed. He suddenly stopped. “Fight me, fight me,” he taunted. His fat face turned into a meatball as he pushed his chubby chest against mine. The close body contact made me nervous and angry, but I was too afraid to punch him. I had never done it before. His nose kept coming closer and closer. He started pushing me.

“Fight him or I’m not speaking to you,” the King said in my ear.