Colors of the Mountain (29 page)

“It’s hard, isn’t it?”

I nodded, red-faced and mortified.

“I don’t want you to pronounce those letters from your imagination. You made up some of the sounds as you went along, didn’t you? Now follow me.” She half closed her eyes and read each letter slowly.

“A, B, C, D, E.”
She stopped and looked at me. “You made
E
sound like
A.
Now try again.” Her voice was like music to my ears. I wondered how different my life would have been had my goldfish-eyed teacher in school had one tenth of her elegance.

I imitated the movements of her mouth. She stopped at
E
, tilted her
head, and listened quietly as I went over the letter until I beat it to death. Then she nodded reluctantly. We moved on.

The last letter,
Z
, took us a good three minutes. No matter how hard I stretched my neck, I could not get it. She looked at me patiently, with a slight frown, like a doctor trying to decide which remedy to use. I felt totally useless and stupid.

“So much for today.” She was declaring me a failure. I wasn’t wanted back. Because of my dirty feet and ignorance, I was sure. She was going to give a weak excuse to spare me, but when I was gone, she would say to herself in English,
what a terrible kid!
Not only ignorant, but also impossible to cultivate. Perfect farmer material. My head went wild.

“You are very, very smart, I can tell from our first lesson.” She cupped her tiny hands, which were still beautiful, under her elegant chin. “I am full of hope for you,” she said. “If only you would come every day.” Her eyes were glowing with light as she looked at me. She was asking me to come back, I couldn’t believe it. Hope filled me up again as if I were a sagging balloon. I was ready to fly.

“Good-bye, Da.”

I fumbled around for words, couldn’t find any, and bowed several times.

I collected my bag and backpedaled toward the door, where my dear old friend the dog was staring at me. He breathed angrily through his dark wet snout.
You were lucky to stay that long and still be breathing
, he seemed to say. He looked disdainful now. He had heard my terrible pronunciation, so bad that it had ruined his appetite. He, the defender of the elegant, wanted to kill me for mangling such a beautiful language.

You loser, don’t ever come back again.
His ears popped up, his eyes narrowed.

“Be a good boy, back to your house,” Professor Wei said gently. The monster dragged its bushy tail and shot a hateful look at me over his shoulder before heading for his house. What a character, did I have to deal with this grump every single day? When would it end? The day I lost my ass to him?

I picked my way gingerly behind the monster, darted through the
door, and let out a huge sigh as I fished out a Flying Horse. My eyes darted around, making sure Professor Wei wasn’t witnessing another deadly sin from her lofty window upstairs. I would have waited if I could, but my vocal cords were screaming with desire to be smoked red and blue, and my heart throbbed with the excitement of surviving this landmark day. I needed to calm down or I would find myself jumping into the cool river. I was overcome with mixed feelings of joy and sadness. This was a new start to my boring and hopeless life, but it would be a long, uphill ride from the very bottom. The hill was Everest and I was starting out somewhere under the Pacific Ocean.

THE SCHOOL WAS
without I-Fei now, and I had stopped going to the rehearsals. My classmates stared at me as though I were a dinosaur. Most of them hated me because I was arrogant, pompous, and too much of an artistic star. In elementary school, they would have ganged up and beat the crap out of me, but times had changed. I was the big guy, sitting in the back seat, angry, ignorant, a fallen star of yesterday, a hostile sight to avoid. They cold-shouldered me. The rest of the school carried on as if I wasn’t there. I watched them disdainfully and quietly. A few smaller guys in class still speculated that I had dated the most beautiful girl in the school’s performing troupe. They winked at me when they saw her pass our classroom window. I said nothing, and kept them guessing in order to maintain the last ounce of respect I commanded among the students.

Dia was one of the guys who warmed up to me after he saw the vacancy left behind by I-Fei. He was a thin fellow who seemed to jump rather than walk. He had monkey ears and his hair was always a messy lawn that seemed as if it hadn’t been mown for ages. He lived in a poor village ten miles west of Yellow Stone and walked to school every morning at sunrise, returning home at about eight each night. He was one of those kids known around the school as
walkers
to distinguish them from the students who bunked at the school dorm. He was the only person I knew who made thicker and longer tobacco rolls than Yi. And he used old newspaper to roll them. Sometimes when he ran out of old newspaper he would run around school looking for any scrap paper he could find.

This thin little guy carried a large schoolbag with him during the course of the day. Most of the space in it was taken up by the two cold meals he had to carry around, and the rest was divided up equally between books, a bag of foul-smelling homegrown tobacco, and an ugly pipe made from a twig. His nicotine addiction was legendary. He was the only person I knew who smoked before and after each meal and stopped halfway to squeeze in another thick, long tobacco roll.

The more time I spent with Dia, the less I felt like smoking at all. He was a great example of what happens to smokers. At the age of fifteen, he had a chronic cough and spit up sticky green stuff like an old man of ninety. His lungs wheezed loudly through his bony chest, outlined by countable ribs. His teeth were dark in front and back and he had a pale, lifeless look. The only gleam in his eye came from the reflected light of the matches with which he lit his rolls.

“How can you smoke like that?” I asked once, after we became better friends.

“Look who’s talking.” Dia stared at me, puzzled. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Well, the shitty tobacco and the old newspapers you’re using will kill you soon.”

“I’m not dying anytime soon, Da. Grandpa rolled his first roll at the age of four and he’s still kicking. He taught Dad to smoke at the age of five and
he’s
still breathing. I didn’t smoke till seven. The Dias are living legends. We’ll live on.”

“Yeah, while wheezing.”

“That ain’t funny.”

“I know. From tomorrow on, I’m going to bring you some of my dad’s tobacco paper. That way you don’t have to use the old paper anymore.”

“No way am I gonna smoke with that pure-white crap. It’ll make everything as tasteless and plain as wax. The old ink on the paper adds a kick to the tobacco.”

“Yeah, so do bullets.”

One day I hid his tobacco bag under a thick layer of fallen leaves to see if he could do without a puff for a while. He couldn’t. Dia ran around kicking the leaves like a crazy animal before attacking me and drumming my chest till I gave the bag back to him. He needed to
smoke. In the end I felt sorry for him, watching him squat behind a tree trunk, puffing frantically as if there were no tomorrow. He had tears in his eyes.

“Don’t joke like that no more.”

“I was trying to do you some good. I’m sorry.”

Every morning he made his first stop at my house, after his ten-mile walk. I treated him to some hot tea. He would sneak to our backyard for a smoke, and then reappear refreshed. Then we walked to school together. In the afternoon, he played with me for a while before the long journey home. Some weekends I would offer him my bunk bed so that he could stay for a night. He fought the invitations valiantly, but in the end never refused the offers. When he slept over, we talked about our lives and future late into the night. He wasn’t a demanding guest, all he required was a chair to step on so that he could climb to the attic windowsill like a cat and smoke in the open air while staring at the bright stars.

THE MIDTERM EXAMS
came sooner than I liked. It was the first time I was paying attention to them. It had been a breezy school without serious tests for years. Now, the concept was arcane. The good students in class applauded and chatted excitedly about how they were going to review courses and score well. The losers put their heads on the desks and drummed the desktop, hating every word uttered by the good students.

The teacher enthusiastically answered questions the good students raised, and even threw in a smile or two when it came to the pretty girls in class. But when I raised my hand and asked which English book we would be tested on, the whole class burst into uncontrollable laughter. It was a big joke. The good students huddled together and laughed. Enjoying my humiliation, the teacher leaned back in his chair.

“What do you think?” he said slowly, tossing the chalk in his hands.

More laughter.

“I don’t know.”

“Since when did you become interested in tests? Shouldn’t you be in rehearsal at this time of the day?” He looked at his watch, smirking. “For your information, it will be book four that you will be tested on. Are you sure you have book four in your possession?”

Continued laughter.

I felt Dia’s eyes on me. He was the only one feeling sorry for me. The rest of them probably thought I was a drunk, just waking up to the glaring sunlight. I was human garbage in their eyes, victimized by changing times, with no idea of how to pull myself out of the hole I had sunk into. The talents I had, playing the flute and violin, were talents of yesterday. Now it was college, and whoever could jump the hoop and be that lucky 1 percent to go on to college was the hero of the day. I still stunk with yesterday’s staleness. Most of them were happy to see me fall on my face, hoping I would break a few bones in the process.

I felt the presence of I-Fei, my hero of yesterday, outside the window, waving to me with the tip of his cigarette. For one moment, I wanted to jump out the window, have a smoke, and forget about the class, the test, and these hateful people. Why couldn’t people be more like animals and the creatures of nature? They didn’t laugh at each other or kick each other’s ass. Small birds sang the same tune on the same twig every day, and ants carried bits of food on their backs and passed them along to the next one in line, regardless of their sex, looks, background, or popularity.

The tests offered scant surprise. I stared at each paper for a good five minutes, scribbled down something, and turned them in. I answered half the questions on the math test with ease, but the rest looked like a foreign language. And I only did one third of the physics test. History and geography were the hardest subjects to guess on, and whatever English I had mastered from the professor, a secret, was a mere scratch on a pyramid. Chinese was the only subject I excelled in. I had studied classics with my grandpa.

At the end of the week of tests, I felt as if I had gone to the Olympics and ended up sweeping the floor after everyone had left. I was sad, angry, and lost. What was I going to do with my life?

I thought about the buffalo pulling the heavy plows in the endless fields. Farming, Chairman Mao had once said, was the lifeline of our country. If I continued to stay at the bottom of the class, it looked like it would be the lifeline of Comrade Chen Da as well.

DIA AND I
found a new spot behind the school wall, where we met and chatted as he polluted his lungs with dark tobacco. He told me the secret of the Dia tobacco. Since his grandpa’s time, they had kept a plot of land in their backyard the size of a basketball court, where they grew broad-leaved tobacco. The rich, bitter flavor was attributed to the fact that young Dia each morning watered the plants with the contents of three full night pots used overnight by the men in the Dia household. The thick, smelly piss nourished the young plants and added a special flavor not found with other growers. Thus Dia’s brand worked like a double-barreled shotgun, powerful and potent. It remained the only tobacco known to be able to quench their nicotine addiction, not a small feat.

One afternoon, I came to the spot earlier than usual. The leafy guava tree shaded the place like a benevolent umbrella. I took a short nap on some old newspapers and covered my face with my English book. The four lessons that morning had left me with minimum interest in life. The hovering flies didn’t trouble me a bit. I didn’t care if ants were crawling all over my sweaty, naked feet. My body lay limp on the rough ground, feeling the chill of the red soil beneath.