Colors of the Mountain (17 page)

In school, my popularity didn’t exactly soar, but I could sense that people began to look at me differently. The morning I was back, Teacher Sing announced my “victory.” I was the first elementary representative in our commune ever to be in a semifinal, a fact that even I hadn’t known. The whole school, all but the principal, cheered.

BY THIS TIME
my dad had become quite an acupuncturist. Before Grandpa died, he had had a minor stroke, and Dad, unable to afford an acupuncturist for him, would study books on the ancient art, staying up late every night, sometimes even taking the old classics on Chinese herbal medicine to bed with him. After Grandpa died, Dad began offering free services to some close friends and neighbors. Soon his reputation spread. He began to see patients in our home, and sometimes even made house calls.

Ar Duang was a local merchant’s wife. She had skin as rough as a turtle’s and spoke with a strong Fuzhou accent. Every morning at seven she would knock at our front door and bring us a bucket of fresh fruit, anything her husband was selling that day in the market. Her son had recently had a stroke and his right arm and leg were paralyzed. Dad was treating him. Mom would fight with Ar Duang each time she arrived with the fresh produce. We couldn’t accept it, Mom said, but she never won, for Ar Duang was a tough woman with a raspy voice who had seen the world and saw fit to pay back my dad in her own way. She would spin my tiny mom around, making her walk to the kitchen with the basket, then sit down for a cup of hot tea with Dad. I liked watching the blue of her cigarette smoke spiral in the sun up to the ceiling. She would cross her legs like a man and tell Dad how many times she had had to wake up and clean or feed her son, because her daughter-in-law wouldn’t do it.

“My daughter-in-law used up all his goodies and now she doesn’t want to clean the shit,” she would complain. “What do you say, Dr. Chen? You give my son a little heavier dose of those needles for the next few days and see if he responds better.” She negotiated like a merchant, crossing and recrossing her legs.

“I can’t do that. It’s like MSG. If you don’t use it in the right proportions, you will spoil everything.”

“MSG.” She would nod with understanding.

The conversation was always the same, even though the fruit she brought was different every day.

Another daily fixture every morning in Dad’s living room was a thin, neatly dressed countrywoman named Tien. She wore an old-fashioned blouse buttoned down the side. She came from the village of Heng Tang, where her elderly mother was paralyzed from the waist down. Dad wanted her to report her mother’s condition to him whenever she shopped in Yellow Stone. Once a week, he would borrow a bike from Ar Duang and have me carry him on the backseat to visit Tien’s mother.

Dad said that a generous patient would pay me for the sweaty ride, but at the least, I would earn some free food. And so every week I would pedal, breathless under the scorching sun, along the narrow road to the village of Heng Tang, which lay hidden among persimmon trees
about eight miles from Yellow Stone. Dad would sit in the backseat telling me what pressure points he would use for the next treatment. When the road became too hilly, Dad would jump down and push the bike with me. The patient’s family usually treated me like my dad’s driver. They graciously sat me in their living room and gave me a bowl of noodles or rice with meat piled on top. Sometimes, they would give me cigarettes and pour tea for me while I waited.

The patients’ families welcomed Dad as though he were a savior sent to them by the grace of Buddha. But his presence was always a double-edged sword to the patients themselves. They wanted to get better, but dreaded the prick of the needles. Sometimes Dad would ask me to observe a patient’s reaction closely. He would insert needles and spin them to stimulate the dead nerves. At first, there would be nothing. The family watching would sigh and worry that the legs or the arms would never be active again. Then suddenly one day, the patient would scream, feeling the pain, and everyone would smile with relief.

Dad lived for moments like that. He would laugh and talk all the way home as I pedaled along the narrow road.

Under Dad’s care, a few patients regained their basic ability to go to the bathroom and eat on their own. As his renown spread, a truck often drove him to treat patients in remote towns. Dad was shy about charging a fee, which would have made him an illegal practitioner. But people brought grain, rice, bananas, fish, shrimp, and all manner of food to repay him for his services. One of the patients even secured a temporary job at the county’s canned food factory for one of my sisters.

Dad was a happier person. Even though he still had to work at a few more labor camps, he was treated differently. At one camp near the Ching Mountain, Mon Hai, a burly man with an unsightly birthmark over his right eye, was the supervising cadre. One evening he sent for Dad to be brought to his cabin. Much to my father’s surprise the cadre offered him a cigarette. Dad bowed humbly. Normally, the campers summoned to Mon Hai’s cabin were there to be lectured or humiliated until midnight.

“I need a favor from you,” Mon Hai said in an unusually low voice, after first closing his door and window.

“Anything, sir, I am here to be reformed.”

“No, no, no, please sit down. I wanted you here for a different matter—shall I say, a private matter.” The Communist smiled, revealing his gold-capped front teeth. “My dad fell last night and had a stroke. He is still in a coma and the doctor says he is paralyzed.”

“I am sorry to hear that.”

“You know what the doctor also said?” Mon Hai lit a cigarette for my father.

“What did he say?”

“That you are the only one in this area who could cure him.”

“No, no, I’m an amateur. It is purely a hobby, that’s all. I did try treatments on my own now-dead father, but I would not call myself a doctor or anything like that. You should really seek other help,” he mumbled nervously.

“Are you saying no to me?”

“I’m not, cadre. You don’t understand,” Dad said.

“Then what is it?” Mon Hai asked. “Money? That’s no problem. My brother is the head of a fertilizer factory and he has loads of money.”

“No, it is not money.” Dad shook his head.

“I know what it is. You are afraid.”

Dad remained silent.

“It’s totally understandable. I would be also if I were you, but please don’t be. Just try to treat me as if I’m one of your regular patients.”

Yeah, right. Dad could still feel the pain inflicted on his back where Mon Hai had kicked him for slowing down at another campsite. Mon Hai’s father sounded as if he was in critical condition, and if anything happened to him, Dad would be blamed.

“I really wouldn’t feel comfortable, cadre.”

“Look at me, doctor, I also have a heart.” He pulled open his shirt for emphasis. “I apologize for what I have done to you.”

“No, no. There is no need for that.”

“I shouldn’t have kicked you.” His eyes turned misty. “I’m sorry. I will make it up to you.”

Dad was quiet, watching this bear of a man tearing his guts out. “Even if I agree to take a look, I wouldn’t be able to do so. We are not allowed to leave the campsite.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

Dad was told to stay in his cabin the next morning while the rest of the campers rolled out of their beds and headed for the chilly mountain to dig some more hills and fill some more valleys. At nine o’clock, a biker came by and picked Dad up, carrying him to Mon Hai’s house a few miles away.

It turned out to be a light stroke. Mon Hai’s old man was only sixty-five and in good health. It took Dad about two months to bring him back to where he could walk with only a slight limp.

At the reform camp, Dad hardly had to touch his farming tools. He had been ordered to stay behind and write confessions, but in fact all he did was read his medical books and be taken to see the patient every day. He was allowed to come home for dinner after dark three times a week. The rest of the time he spent at the cadre’s cabin, where Mon Hai would do his drinking and pour out his admiration for Dad. It was there that Dad learned that the good food, liquor, and cigarettes that Mon Hai shared with him all came from the campers, who bribed Mon Hai for lighter work and a guarantee that they would avoid punishment. In one of his drunken states, Mon Hai even revealed that he had occasionally slept with the young wife of a newly branded counterrevolutionary, a camper under his supervision. He further admitted that he slept with the wife at her request because she wanted to ensure that the poor young man would live to see his infant son.

Dad itched to inflict some pain on that son of a whore, and offered Mon Hai the use of his needles to cure his drinking addiction, but he refused.

One day Mon Hai was suddenly rushed back from the worksite where he spent an hour a week on inspection. Two strong, young men took turns carrying him on their backs.

“Chen, come here,” they said to my father. “Mon Hai was hurt.” A rock had rolled down the side of the hill and landed on his waist, bruising him badly before bouncing off into a ditch.

“Doctor, I think I could use some of those needles you got there,” Mon said, looking up in pain from his bed.

“I think so, too,” Dad replied.

During the following weeks, Dad gave Mon Hai double the number of treatments necessary. He chose longer, thicker needles, and spun
them harder, telling Mon that he would improve faster that way. Mon Hai would shake with fear as he watched Dad slowly prepare the needles, wiping them on an alcohol pad. He would squirm in anticipation of the pain until the needles were actually inserted under the skin, then his hysterical and terrifying screams could be heard for miles around.

Before each session Mon Hai begged for more, and during every session he cursed and rolled in agony. After each of my father’s visits, he would shed tears of gratitude. His pain soon disappeared, and Gang Chen openly became known as “the Doc” around camp.

Dad was discharged from labor camp early that year, and received a glorious report on how his anti-Communist way of thinking had improved. The report was signed in big letters by the now-healthy Mon Hai, who ironically was selected by the people of Yellow Stone as an outstanding member of the Communist party. His picture appeared on a wall outside the commune headquarters, only to be washed off a week later by a cold winter rain.

ZHANG TIE SHAN
, an army recruit from north China, wrote on his college exam paper a big zero, accompanied by the following words: “To make revolution, one need not answer above questions.”

Instantly, he became a hero throughout China, epitomizing the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution. School was chaos. Everyone ran around mindlessly, doing nothing. Everyone wore red armbands bearing the words “Little Guard.” Teachers could do almost nothing to remedy the situation for fear of being branded a stinking intellectual or a counterrevolutionary.

Our fifth grade classes were made up of three categories: labor, politics, and self-study. We dug up the playground and turned it into vegetable plots so that young kids could labor under the scorching sun and have empty but healthy minds. We had to bring all the necessary tools to water, weed, and harvest the vegetables, then sell them back to the teachers at a discount, using the money to buy more seeds and plant more vegetables.

In the political science classes, teachers read the newspaper to the students. When we were left to study on our own, the chairs became hurdles. We jumped them and counted the minutes until it was time to go home.

Every day after class, Dad read me classics that we had buried under the pigsty, and I learned to play the bamboo flute in the morning. Dad said a real scholar should know poetry, chess, calligraphy, and music. The flute was the cheapest thing to study. Dad bought me one from the
local market. At sunrise every morning, I got up, pulled the skinny bamboo flute from under my pillow, and tiptoed to the backyard and down the steps that led to the Dong Jing River. I’d wash my face with the refreshing water and hold in my shit because it gave me more power as I blew the flute. Each day, I broke the silence of the morning in Yellow Stone, standing by the river and playing innocent folk melodies. The sound bounced off the water, crossed the vast green fields, and ended in a lingering echo as it reached the mountains on the horizon. The occasional mooing from the buffalo told me that at least someone was listening.

One day, Dad came back from a month’s stay at a labor camp and rushed to the backyard where I was practicing.

“Son, you play beautifully now,” he said, surprised. He gathered me into his arms and roughed me up excitedly. “I hardly believed my ears as I walked along the fields. I could hear you a mile away from here.”

“Dad, do you really like it?” I asked.

“Like it? I love it. I think with a little tuning here and there, you’re ready to perform in an amateur troupe somewhere and eventually graduate to a professional one.”

“Do you want me to be a professional?”

“Well, school is doing nothing now, not with that Zhang-something guy in fashion. It’s wonderful that you have a skill. You have an edge over others.”