Colors of the Mountain (2 page)

Mom taught us to beg Buddha for his protection and help. This was easier than potty training. All you needed to do was wash yourself really clean, button your buttons, get on your knees, and bang your head on the floor before the hidden shrine of the big, fat, smiling Buddha. Ask all you want to ask and you will be answered, Mom told us.

I followed her to the shrine every day—the shrine that was hidden behind a window curtain in the attic, because religion was not allowed in Communist China. I knelt behind Mom and banged my head on the floor noisily, whispering my small requests. My list grew from two items to many. I asked for Dad not to get beaten by the Red Guards, for Grandpa to be well, for Mom not to cry as much. My last request was always for food—more of it, please.

GRANDPA LIVED THE
life of a mountain cat. He rose with the moon and dozed off in his small, wooden bed when the sun came out. Each midnight he would sneak into the kitchen, boil a pot of water, and brew some green tea. He said he was careful not to make too much noise, but he talked out loud to himself, and often dropped his plate or cup as he fumbled around the dark room. And when he bumped into something, you could hear him curse like a fisherman who has let the big one get away. Then there was his coughing. The foul, cheap tobacco made his lungs scream, and I had to stuff my ears with my thumbs until his nerve-racking coughs faded.

At midnight Grandpa had his first smoke of the day, then he was ready to start his secretive life as one who deserved, not the light, but darkness.

Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the commune cadre in charge of landlord reform had set the following rules: Grandpa could not visit his friends, he could not leave town without advance permission, and he was to write a detailed diary of his life every day. This was to be turned in every week. He wasn’t welcome in any public places, could not engage in any political discussions, and should look away if someone spit in his face. If they missed, he was to wipe the spit off the ground. There were more rules, but Grandpa forgot some when he came home to tell us about them.

When he tried walking the street one day, children in the neighborhood threw rocks at him, and he ran home with bruises all over his
face. Dad was mad at him for being so reckless. He could have been beaten to death and no one would have cared. From then on, Grandpa woke up at night and crept out into the deserted street, breathing the air of freedom in darkness. He could have danced, tumbled, or practiced kung fu and no one would have known. He’d come back before sunrise and tell us about his adventures. He’d talk about the addition to the Lius’ backyard, the fight with the Dengs’ mean dog, and the tasty fruits on the Changs’ trees. Not your typical grandfatherly routine.

That same year, we lost our grandma to ovarian cancer. Grandpa was a changed man. He couldn’t understand the order in which Buddha had called them to wherever dead people went. He had planned on going ahead of Grandma, and had even told her about the burial. Burn me to ashes, he said, and spread them on the farm as fertilizer. There was no will, no inheritance. He couldn’t wait to leave this world. He was still hoping to join his gambling friends in the other one.

He was like a flimsy candle, flickering in the wind. He slept in short spurts, dozing here and there. And something changed in him. He became more daring, less afraid.

The diary he was required to turn in became cynical and sarcastic, filled with complicated puns and metaphors that confused the cadre, who had never gone to school. When the cadre told him to stop writing that way, Grandpa suggested that if he couldn’t read what was written, then maybe it was time someone else did. The cadre slapped him across the face a couple of times and threw him out of the office. Back home, Grandpa laughed when he told us the story, wiping his face with a cold towel. He considered he’d won a victory.

He once slipped out of the house when we weren’t watching and went to the market square to buy some bananas. He dawdled along, stopping at fruit stands and vegetable counters, having a grand time. He wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. People had spit in his face. Smiling, he wiped off the spittle. They had beaten him, and he’d been able to get up and ask for more.

He finally came to a banana stand and fished out twenty fens for two bananas. As he was paying for them, the cadre came up behind him.

“What are you doing here, you dirty landlord?” the cadre said.

“Oh, it’s you. I’m doing what you are doing.” Grandpa smiled.

“Let’s see if you can do what I’m doing now,” the cadre said, slapping
Grandpa so hard that he fell down on the muddy ground. Rolling in the dirt, he struggled to get to his knees, but he kept slipping. The cadre just watched him. A large crowd had gathered, but no one offered to help the old man. They threw rotten vegetables and rocks at him. Grandpa got less sympathy than a street rat being beaten by a gang of wild children.

Just as Grandpa steadied himself, the cadre kicked his head and brought him down again. This time he was quiet. His thin, hunched body stirred a little. His hands reached out. He wanted to get up, but he couldn’t. He moaned weakly and stared at the crowd. The people dispersed and the cadre sauntered off like a hero.

A kind old woman came to our house and told my dad what had happened. Dad quickly found Grandpa and carried him home on his back. Grandpa was in bed for two weeks, and before he was fully recovered, the cadre ordered him to go to a construction site to watch the lumber at night. Every night at nine, he would bundle up in his torn cotton coat, a cane in one hand and a lamp in the other. I’d stand by the door and watch him disappear into the darkness. We all worried about him, but he was as happy as a monkey. He couldn’t wait to go to work. He wanted to walk the new frontier, watch the stars twinkle, and enjoy the sunrise.

One morning, he came back limping badly. Grandpa wasn’t one to fake illness. He had tripped over a rock and had fallen while chasing a bunch of hooligans trying to steal the lumber. A doctor gave written testimony and the cadre temporarily let him off night duty.

When summer came, Grandpa was ordered to chase the birds, thousands of them, off the fields that were strewn with seeds. By then, he was getting weaker and weaker every day. His lungs were failing, his kidneys were failing, and so was his liver.

On a bad day, when every organ in his body seemed to be aching and liquor couldn’t ease the pain, Grandpa asked Dad to write an excuse; I ran with it to the cadre’s office. The cadre glanced at it and asked me how serious it was. I said Grandpa could die. The cadre pounded his desk, which startled me, and said that maybe I could go in his place. I said I would be happy to. So that was the deal.

The next day, I waited at our door for Grandpa’s friend, a fellow landlord, to come pick me up. Mr. Gong wasn’t really a landlord. Dad
said he had only owned a little bit of land, but had been unluckily mislabeled. He had been jailed, and looked like a shell of a man, with high cheekbones, a tall forehead, and a black beard. He had kind but shifty eyes, which Dad said was from the fear he felt. When he arrived, I followed ten yards behind him. I was afraid of being seen with a landlord. I was only seven, and had a long life before me. The kids might start throwing stones. They could do anything they wanted and no one would defend us. Landlords were open game. We separated and walked quietly at the edge of the street.

The field we were to watch was five miles away from the town of Yellow Stone. The Dong Jing River slithered like a serpent along the fields. The mountains on the horizon blurred in the summer heat. The insects sang their songs, hidden among the rice plants. The soil smelled like summer. The young seeds were spread over ten acres in the middle of nowhere. The commune was growing rice for the next season, and had sowed the seeds as soon as the ripened rice was harvested and the field plowed.

Mr. Gong asked me to cover the south end. He would watch the north. When we got there, I was amazed by the number of sparrows picking at the seeds. They were having a free breakfast, and were undisturbed by the two humans. From the bushes, where they’d been hidden, Mr. Gong took out a huge bronze gong, and two long bamboo poles with some shreds of red cloth attached to the ends. I eyed them doubtfully.

I decided to do something drastic for a change. I took the gong and started beating it while running along the field. The birds flew furiously away and I stood before Mr. Gong, waiting for him to praise my youthful energy. He smiled and asked me how long I could keep running like that. I said every ten minutes. He shook his head mildly, not at all impressed. He said that the farmers deliberately sowed ten times more seed than they needed—they had already thought about the birds, and knew that we couldn’t keep running forever.

I asked him what we should do. He pointed vaguely at the river nearby and asked me if I wanted to fish in the river to kill some time. I asked him if that was all right. Who was around to say it wasn’t? he asked. The cadre couldn’t come here to count how many seeds were missing. Mr. Gong would keep an eye on the road, and if I heard him
beat on his gong three times, I was to jump out of the river right away.

That first day I swam for three hours, then napped for two. In between, I beat the gong for fun. The second day I was bored, so I sat next to Mr. Gong and chatted about my school. During the lulls, I would quietly play with his beard. On the third day, he started talking and I couldn’t get him to stop. He talked about language and how he loved the beauty of words. He used to write poems and prose. It was his prose that had made his wife fall in love with him at a college campus up north. His father had owned a little land, so he had come back after college with his wife and had volunteered to be a landlord. His wife had died an angry woman, but he was very proud of his sons because they were all writers who wrote better than he did. He had high hopes for them as poets. Then he recited some of their favorite lines, moved at times to tears. I forgot about the scorching sun and the boring, quiet, deserted fields, where we saw only an occasional fisherman sailing by in his bamboo boat.

I was getting so tanned that Mr. Gong fondly called me “Eel.” We set a nice routine for ourselves: I fished in the morning, while he napped at noon. Then I napped for two hours. Afterward, I would run around for half an hour scaring the birds, then we would talk and watch the sunset while waiting for the last bird to fly off. Soon we stopped separating when we walked down the street. Going to and coming back from work, I walked right behind Mr. Gong like his shadow, no longer afraid of being associated with him. We joked and laughed. He kept his shifty eyes alert, and, knowingly, we shut up when there were people around.

When my time of substituting for Grandpa was over, I missed the swims in the cool water, the naps in the vast quiet of the rice fields, and the conversations we had while watching the beautiful sunsets. I wished I were a poet like Mr. Gong, able to immortalize those moments in words.

YELLOW STONE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
sat a mile away down the street. It was an old Confucian temple with tilted roofs and lots of wood carvings on the walls. Ancient trees shielded the buildings from the sun, and there was a pond full of lotus blossoms.

When registration day came for the new school year, I got up early and studied my appearance in front of a piece of mirror, broken off from my brother’s bigger one. I was as dark as charcoal and as thin as sugarcane. My crew cut, Mom’s handiwork, had uneven furrows left behind by rusty scissors and a not-too-experienced hand, as though a clumsy farmer had plowed the fields. I didn’t mind it too much. The hair would grow again and the pain of having your hair yanked out by blunt scissors was soon forgotten. My sisters cut each other’s hair and Mom took care of the four men in the family. We saved a lot of money that way. The only time I had my hair cut by the barber was on the day of my grandma’s death.

The skin on my forehead was peeling like a snake casting its skin in the springtime. I rubbed hard, and pulled off the larger pieces, but I finally gave up. I would grow out of this terrible tan when the scorching summer changed to a mild, breezy autumn, with deep blue skies and thin white clouds that chased each other like lovers.

I put on a white shirt—a hand-me-down from Jin—and ran to school. The red poster in the schoolyard said that Mr. Sun was to be our new teacher. The tuition was three yuan, a staggering amount on the Chen economic scale. I checked the information twice, wrote it down for Mom to read, and parked myself by the window, watching parents take their kids by the hand and march happily to the teachers to register. It was an all-cash deal. They came out laughing, the kids jumping up and down with a bunch of new books in their hands. It was all cozy for them, but I had to find some resources for my education. I knew well enough that we would be out of rice and yams in a matter of weeks. Dad was away at camp and the food ration kept going down each day. Mom was saving every fen for food. There was no money for tuition. The three yuan I needed would buy us ten pounds of rice, or a hundred pounds of yams. How much knowledge could it buy?