Colors of the Mountain (30 page)

This morning, both the math and English teachers had stared at me a little longer. As expected, there was sarcasm in their eyes and a sneer in their voices. What pissed me off was that not only did they not welcome me back to the classes I used to cut, but they also made snide comments that brought cheap laughter from the other students.

The young math teacher never gave up until he got the girls in class to laugh. He was a fat fellow with drooping eyes and thick, floppy lips. Whenever he looked at the tall girls in the back row, his eyes shone with lust. He would lecture and walk around the class, intentionally rubbing the girls’ backs, lingering there to drive a mathematical point home. He would touch their shoulders, and sometimes hold their hands a little too long, patting their soft young skin.

Dia kept count of all these rubbings in a logbook. One day, he said, he would report it to the authorities and have the fat teacher locked up for besmirching the purity of those lovely girls. Dia was a vengeful brat who was loyal to his friends and a pain in the neck to his enemies. The fat teacher had snubbed him a few times, so Dia had declared him his enemy. The fat teacher often suggested we come to his dorm if anyone needed help. Young Dia had been there and the fat teacher wasn’t helpful. In fact, he hadn’t even opened the door after looking through the peephole. Dia had waited in the bushes by his dorm room; not five minutes later, he saw several girls being ushered in by the fat teacher.

As I dreamed away, snoring, I felt an intolerable itch around my nose and mouth. I twitched my face violently. I twisted some more. The itch stayed. I opened one eye and saw Dia smiling down, dangling an ear of wheat over my face. I grabbed the little brat and threw him under me. He slipped out and climbed onto my back and we started wrestling. The spot where we were was on a slope, which we rolled down until we landed in a soft bed of wheat. Then we laughed while trying to get to our feet. We helped each other dust off and climbed back up to our spot again.

“Have a smoke.” Dia sat down and rolled me a thick one.

“No thanks, not after you told me the piss story.”

“You’ll need some sorta smoke for what I gotta tell you.”

It sounded bad. I looked into his eyes and he looked down. I took the roll and let him light it for me. Instantly, I felt the potent kick. The Dia piss worked miracles. I spit like a fisherman. “What’s the matter?”

“The midterm grades are out.” He had a dead man’s tone, flat.

“How are ours?” I could feel my heart begging for mercy from the good Buddha. Make it presentable, I promised him, and I’ll give you another thousand kowtows this very night.

“Well, mine are terrible.”

“And?”

“Yours are real bad.”

Kowtowing wouldn’t be necessary anymore. I had hit bottom and I deserved it. I puffed on the bitter smoke. For the first time, I felt good as I inhaled. I felt the rush go to my head; it was comforting, and I was satisfyingly numb. I leaned back on the red dirt wall limply, like a piece of smashed tofu. There wasn’t an ounce of strength left in my body.

I was a failure, shaming myself, and my family. I should change my last name and never return home to beg for meals anymore. Maybe I would take to the road like Mo Gong and Siang. The burden of failure made me despise myself.

“That’s not all,” Dia added, stealing a careful look at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Someone pasted the results of all your exams on the wall outside our classroom. Now the whole school knows.”

“Son of a whore! It must be our principal teacher.” I gritted my teeth and slammed my fists into the soil. Now I was the laughingstock of the whole school. All my enemies, old and new, would be rejoicing over my downfall. Not only was I the son of a landlord, but I was stupid and lazy. Wise people could forgive the former but not the latter. I had shamed my whole family tree. My esteemed great-grandpa was at the top, and I was the loose, rotten screw at the bottom, the one who ruined the family’s reputation. Dia shook my shoulder to make sure I was still alive and passed me another Dia-brand stogy. My hands shook from anger and humiliation; the only hope of steadying them any time soon was what my young friend was offering me.

I lay there with the afternoon sun caressing my face. The school bell rang like the call of a ghost. I could just see the smirks on the faces of my obnoxious schoolmates awaiting my entrance. I gestured to my friend to go to class while I lay unmoving, desperate for the sun to set so that the darkness would veil my shameful face.

Dia left his tobacco bag with me and said he would come to check on me. I managed a slight nod as he backpedaled away from me. My hopes of going to college were dashed. I was a breathing dead body. There was no dignity, shame, or respect left in me, only regrets, tons of them. I had lived my life vicariously and now I was to suffer forever.

When the sky finally darkened, I collected my books and took the
small dirt road home, staying away from the street. I bumped into old farmers lugging muddy plows on their shoulders, walking behind their buffalo as they headed home after a long day’s work. The narrow path between the green wheat fields couldn’t accommodate both the muddy animals and me at the same time, so I had to wade into the wet field to let them through. I did this a few times, but it was better dealing with a mute animal than a dozen yelling boys and girls who took pleasure from another human’s sufferings. I gladly gave way to the buffalo.

When I sneaked through our back door, Mom wasn’t surprised or angry that I was late and all covered with mud. While getting a bowl of rice ready for me, she watched me silently. They knew. Dia must have told them.

As I sat on the last step to the river, I took my time washing my feet, dangling them in the warm water and letting the tiny fish nibble on them. I tried to think of a way to avoid the disastrous subject of midterm tests. There was no easy way.

My family of tired young farmers would have no patience when the only student in the household came home with disgraceful academic results. They worked their butts off in the fields, callused their hands, bent their young backs, and lost their dream of being young. I had been wasting my time smoking, playing around, and not making use of the great opportunity offered me. It was a sin they couldn’t have afforded to make.

With my head bent and eyes downcast, I stumbled into our dining room. The whole family stopped talking as I entered.

Silence.

I damned well deserved it. I slid into my seat and stared at the tip of my chopsticks, eating carefully so that they didn’t clink on the edge of the bowl and anger anyone. I heard myself slurp in the rice. The silence was getting heavier with each passing second.

Dad scooped a big spoonful of green beans into my bowl. It was a good sign. The head of the family had spoken with his action. I stole a look at him. He looked back.

“You broke a record, they say.”

I was quiet.

“It’s time you do something about it. Your brother here wants to take time off to prepare for the college exam, but the commune won’t
allow him. Even if they do allow him, we’re not sure we could do without his food rations.”

He pointed at the rice that was getting cold in my bowl. I stared at it and my guts twisted with guilt and sorrow. I wished I were dead. If I had been the older one, I would have been out there hustling. I witnessed the hardships my brother and sisters endured every day. They were in their late teens and early twenties. They had no new clothes and no money, just bodies filled with aches and pains such as only older folks should have. But the worst was that they thought they would be forced to be farmers for life, unable to marry anyone else but another farmer, to bear another generation of lowly farmers, on into infinity. The sun would never rise in their minds. It was modern-day slavery on the farm, with the promise of little in return. In contrast, all I did was go to school. And what had I achieved? A shameful performance.

“You have a year and a half to get your act together; the farming tools will all be ready and waiting for you in the pigsty, just in case.”

It sounded like probation. No improvement, and I would be condemned to a life sentence on the Communist farm. I looked up at everybody after the sentencing, feeling a load being lifted off my back. They all wore mixed expressions of reproach and criticism, along with a touch of encouragement and even hope; the whole spectrum. I loved my family.

That night before going to sleep I asked Mom to wake me at five from the following day on and every day afterward. I promised her that I would use the precious morning hours before breakfast when my mind was uncluttered to take a bite out of those unopened books of mine. She nodded thoughtfully, half doubting my sincerity.

I went to my room and knelt before the makeshift shrine to Buddha for a good ten minutes, not knowing what to beg from his benevolence. I was a total mess. Guilt ate away at my soul for goofing off what precious time I had before the national entrance examinations. I banged my head on the floor, swearing to work hard from now on. In the end, I became dizzy and went to sleep with a big smile on my face. I was sure that Buddha, my smiling, chubby spiritual light, had heard me this time. I’d banged hard enough.

At dawn, I heard a gentle knock at my door and saw Mom’s nose sticking through the crack.

I moved my fingers slightly to let her know that I had heard her. She closed the door and went back to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for the family. My room was still dark and chilly, the morning sea breeze blowing through the window frames. A little voice in the back of my head sang the awful get-up song while the rest of my body lay sleepily under the warm quilt. This was the time when the sweetest dreams were made. The birds were just beginning to sing, not too noisily yet, because they, too, had just awoken, and the insects from the surrounding fields were ending their nightly jazz session. Tired and dragging a little, a few hard workers still hummed along with the gurgling of the frogs. Their voices filtered down and thinned as light invaded the universe. I could hear their yawns.

Sleep took over and dreams knocked me on the head. I shrunk myself into a little meatball, the cocoon of my blanket feeling like a velvet nest in which my dream ship rocked gently among the waves of sleep. Long live lazy autumn mornings. Let the sun be warm and the air cool forever. And someone please shoot the commune team leader, who was banging the gong along the street, urging his members to hit the fields.

Knock, knock.

It was Mom again. She knew her son, and didn’t trust me with a pillow. This time she stuck her whole head inside and tapped her finger on the wooden wall, a severe warning. I moved one limb at a time, slowly dragging myself out of bed like a rusty old machine. I could hear each drowsy part of me creaking and tearing. I slipped into the cool sandals that stood neatly at the foot of my bed. My toes curled and twitched. Good sign. The chill was waking my feet up. I put on my shirt and stumbled into the backyard and down the stone steps leading to the river. I squatted and splashed my face with the icy water of the Dong Jing. It was a shock to my system. Now I was awake.

I climbed back up the steps, took out my schoolbag, and laid all the books on a small table in the backyard. I figured that with eighteen months left until the national exam, I simply had to use every waking moment of my life for studying. It would be four years’ worth of work squeezed into eighteen months. My life was over for the time being. No friends, no movies, no chatting. No sitting in class passively awaiting the inept teacher to feed you. It had to be a flat-out attack on all the books I hadn’t touched. I was going to breathe and live those books.

But which book did I start with? I looked at them, puzzled. I needed a scheme, a method, or I would never beat the competition. Only one out of a hundred made it in. I could easily kiss the books and my life good-bye and say hello to rice paddies.

A wise man once said that the difference between going to college and not going was the difference between wearing genuine leather shoes and going barefoot. To me, it was more like life and death.

In all the books I had read, college men were tall and handsome, wore western suits, ties, and glasses, and had their hair well oiled and neatly parted in the middle. All the girls dreamed about them, they kicked ass in society. If they happened to be from a rich family, they were the rebels who ran off with the sexiest, prettiest maid in the household. If they were from a poor family, they ended up marrying a rich girl, but were still rebels. It was only their due.

Girls, money, with no need to shovel manure or plow the fields. They simply moved their fingers and out flowed the most romantic poems, words that moved people’s hearts. They were the intelligent and privileged winners. All others were born to the destiny of mud and manure, working in the same fields as the cows and the buffalo.

A cold breeze swept across the fields. I shuddered at the thought of getting up this early, rolling up my pants, and wading into the chilly fields to weed the wheat. Many had lived like that for generations. I’d rather die. Quickly I opened my English book and attacked the first thing that appeared before me.

A BIG OFFICIAL
poster about the new college system was posted conspicuously on the wall of the commune’s headquarters. Hundreds of young people traveled miles just to stand before it for hours, half believing what it said in black and white. Some copied it down on a small piece of paper and brought it back for others to see, as if they couldn’t trust their memory. Confusion reigned among the people of Yellow Stone.

Only months ago, Chairman Mao was alive and kicking on his sickbed under the loving care of his young nurses, who saw it as a heroic, patriotic act to mix their business with his pleasure. School was bad and revolution was good. Young people had gotten used to it. They
liked it that way. They beat up the teachers, burned down schools, marched out of classes, and drank and smoked as they saw fit. There were no tests, no grades, no good students, no bad students. They were all bad, therefore all good. Everything was fine because Mao said so.