Colors of the Mountain (27 page)

“The girl called him a drunk.”

“They must have had a good time.”

“How do you mean?”

“Liquor and women, they go hand in hand like a banana soaked with honey.” He smacked his mouth deliciously. Fatty sounded like an expert. I wondered why we hadn’t had this conversation earlier.

“Have you done it before?”

His fat face broke into a smile. “You may think so.”

“Well! With whom and how?”

He shook his head, looking at the tip of his cigarette.

“You’re not sharing it with me?”

“It was a long time ago and I don’t want to corrupt your little mind.”

I begged and begged.

“It’s bad for you to know, and besides, you heard enough from your neighbor. Next time get a telescope or poke a hole into her room and watch.”

“You shut up. I would never do that.”

“Hey, did you see the man’s face?”

“No, but I remember the limp.”

“The limp?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Show me how he limped.”

I stood up and limped around, dragging my right foot just a little, like a broom sweeping the floor.

“Was he big or small?”

“Big in the middle, small at both ends, like an olive.”

“Tall?”

“Yeah.”

“And a little drunk?”

“He talked with coins in his mouth, slurring.”

“It can’t be.”

“What can’t be?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? I answered all your questions. You’re not answering mine? Thanks for nothing.”

He just shook his head.

For the rest of the day, I couldn’t face the two women in my office. I pretended to read the newspaper, covering my face. A couple of times, they looked at me and smiled their knowing smiles. I looked away as soon as our eyes met.

In the factory cafeteria, I stayed away from the table where the two girls sat with the other factory girls at lunch, buried my face in my bowl, and gulped my food. As I left, I heard laughter coming from behind me. They must have been laughing at me, for I heard Ning’s voice. She was telling everyone about my naive encounter. I fled the scene like a convicted felon.

That night I returned to my boiler room with a strange feeling. I stared at the girl’s door for a long time. Her cries, the sinful, now pleasurable cries echoed in my mind. I tried to imagine what she looked like and wished I knew more about her. The idea of poking a hole through her wall crossed my mind. The mystery was only a thin wall away. What kind of a gypsy life did she live? Was she beautiful or not? Was she married or single? Was that man her lover or her husband?

I’d never get any answers. There was no one to ask. I poked some more holes in my wall and patiently waited for the next sighting. Her door became the shrine of my imagination and I would have my eye glued to the peephole at the first sign of any movement in the house.

One afternoon as we were playing poker in our office, we heard people yelling and shouting like at a ball game. We all put our cards down and went outside to see what was happening.

“Shit, it’s that bastard again.”

I saw our one-armed division manager being chased around the water tower by a big man with a red face. He was screaming and foaming like a drunk, and brandishing a bottle. And he limped.

“Who is that?” I asked urgently.

“The bodyguard of the factory’s party chief.”

“Why is he chasing our manager?”

“He’s drunk. Our manager was probably drinking with him.”

“Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

“He’ll attack anyone in his way. He’s an animal. Within the factory, he fears no one.”

“Where did he come from?”

“The party chief came from the army and brought the bodyguard with him. He drinks every waking hour and you don’t want to get in his way,” Fatty said.

The poor manager was still being chased up and down the road, and the bodyguard was getting tired. As he slowed down and limped across our office, his potbelly, fat ass, and small head paraded right before my eyes. When he walked by me, he turned his broad back on us and the images of the man in my boiler room holding the girl’s breast suddenly jumped to life. I almost let out a cry before I covered my mouth with my hands. It was the same man. I had no doubts. I had seen him limp in and out of our boiler room. He couldn’t fake a limp like that. It left me thoroughly disgusted. How could any girl sleep with a dog like that? His eyes, red and dirty like muddy water, had no light in them. His mouth flapped with white spittle. What a slob. I couldn’t imagine seeing him naked on top of the small frame of my invisible neighbor. The enormous belly must weigh seventy pounds and his nipples were so fat they looked like the breasts of a pregnant swine. His fat ass alone could have fed a party of four.

Finally the chase was over. The bodyguard collapsed in the middle of the road, the same way many previous chases must have ended. His face hit the dirt and his mountain of a body lay like a dead buffalo. Flies hovered over him, licking the sticky sweat from his neck folds. No one wanted to touch him. Our manager left the scene breathlessly, after sticking out his tongue at the limp carcass and waving to us.

Ten minutes later a decrepit electrician pulled out a water hose and sprayed the bodyguard. He awoke instantly, and shook his head wildly like a dog shaking off water. He hauled himself up and crawled to his feet, limping along the wall, leaving his wet footprints behind.

“Get out of here before you get hit by a truck, you lousy bastard,” yelled the old electrician. Because he was the founder of the factory and a revolutionary himself, he was the only one in the factory who dared to do that.

The bodyguard limped away, minus one shoe, into the shadows of the factory’s chimneys. Everyone watching him went back to work; the electrician rolled the hose up again till the next time. Everything went back to normal.

That night I came back to my room mourning the sad discovery. I stared at the door, feeling sorry for my neighbor. She had been raped, pleasurably. I was the witness. Not quite an eyewitness, but I had had an earful. Her door became the shrine of a heroine. I wanted to lay wild-flowers at its foot in sympathy.

The boiler room was never the same after that night. When darkness fell, there was always the possibility of drama and mystery, but such a scene never happened again, nor did the girl ever return.

HAN JIAN CANNED
Food Factory produced 80 percent of the canned mushrooms lining the shelves of supermarkets in the U.S. and the rest of the corrupt western world. It was a cash cow. The value of the U.S. dollars it brought in had made Mr. Tui, the goldfish-eyed general manager, the most important member of the Communist party in Fujian Province every year since the mushroom account had landed on this lowly food manufacturer a few years ago.

Mr. Tui, who also doubled as party secretary of the canned-food factory, rode around in a ’50s model Russian car with tinted windows. His bodyguard could be seen every morning running after the car, trying to put on his shirt as he was left behind by his angry boss, who invariably found him still recovering from another night’s heavy drinking. Mr. Tui lived with his family in a large new house built by the factory, but he was listed as the owner. He sent for a northern chef who cooked everything with pepper from his native province of Shangdong. Liquor flowed freely in that household, and every meal was a banquet. The party leaders discussed urgent political issues with the help of Peking ducks, barbecued piglets, French brandy, and filtered cigarettes from Hong Kong. In the background the music of love songs, also from Hong Kong, played continuously to help solve the tricky political problems.

The boss’s official salary was about a hundred and fifty yuan, the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars. But he made his real money the old-fashioned way, skimming a healthy percentage from individual mushroom
producers. For every ton of fresh mushrooms sold to the factory, he took 10 percent from the growers, that percentage coming from the inflated prices paid them by the factory. Happy growers worshiped him like a god, a horny little god who demanded sexual favors. The farmers would have the girls ready on demand, otherwise the mushrooms would just sit and rot and hundred of thousands would be wasted. Some angry farmers had reported his behavior to local authorities, but he himself was, in essence, the local authority, and most of the reports landed on Mr. Tui’s banquet table. Those disagreeable farmers found themselves in bankruptcy shortly thereafter. A couple of farms had even been burned down.

In a busy season, mountains of fresh mushrooms were piled up along the cement pits. The whole factory smelled like a large mushroom-soup kitchen. Everything I wore to the factory, including my underwear, told the tale of my whereabouts. Most of the employees followed their boss’s fine Communist example and had their own ways of stealing from the factory to supplement their income. A common one involved family participation. They invited family members to visit, and under cloak of night they ventured into the pits where the fresh mushrooms were stored. They bagged them, accompanied them through the side gate, and had the family member resell the mushrooms back to the factory early the next day, before the mushrooms yellowed. A brother of our one-armed division manager just lived in the factory while running an empty yet highly profitable mushroom-growing business. The factory drivers routinely unloaded mushrooms at their own houses and resold them back to the factory.

It was one happy family down there at the factory. The employees, about four hundred of them, lived in factory apartments and didn’t have to work at all. They made the factory hire temps like my sister and me, thousands of us, while they all stayed at home playing poker and raiding the local food and fish markets. Some division heads and team leaders used their temps as cooks and nannies, while others forced sex on the young girls who were eager to make a buck in this freewheeling mushroom paradise. The regular employees could be seen flying out the factory door on their bikes every morning, going to the local market to buy the freshest seafood off the boats, while the miserable temps crawled in to take up the morning shift. Soon, temps were running
the factory and the regular employees only dropped by to pick up their paychecks.

To my surprise, I was told one day that there were five regular employees at the water-treatment division who never showed up, and that the reason why the division manager was here once in a while was due to his brother’s mushroom business. The division had another temp who had never been seen. They said she was working at the division manager’s home, coaching his son in math.

One day I jokingly asked my manager whether he would consider letting me teach his son the flute. He said no thanks, the son was taking violin lessons. Oh well, it was a reasonable attempt to improve my lifestyle.

One of my biggest concerns, day in and day out, was food. The dried yams and rice I’d brought from home kept dwindling. I measured the portions of rice carefully each meal before putting it up to steam in the factory cafeteria. The portions got smaller and smaller. I found myself hungry all day long. I stayed away from the rest of the gang in the cafeteria because I didn’t want them to know that I was eating cheap yams while they were eating white rice that looked plump and delicious.

I had another reason to hide. I had been cooking mushrooms in my room, eating them for three meals a day. At one point I became so sick of them that I threw up at the faintest whiff of steaming mushrooms. Yet all I saw in the factory were mushrooms. I smelled mushrooms and talked about mushrooms. Each day I carried a small bag of them tucked under my shirt when I slipped through the heavily guarded gate. I sautéed them, fried them, baked them, and steamed the suckers until I ran out of options. I tried cooking them with salt, sugar, vinegar, and wine. Eventually, after having eaten them three times a day for thirty days, they all tasted the same. With the money I saved by eating mushrooms I used to buy rice from the local market. The rice tasted so good that sometimes I splurged and would have two pounds of rice steamed, then find a deserted corner where no one could see me and guzzle down the whole lot, plain. The others would have thought I was some starving Ethiopian, with my big head, skinny neck, countable ribs, and melon belly. I was sure I must have looked pathetic enough that my colleagues would raise a collection for me.

Fatty was the only one who noticed my dietary habits. He suggested we fish during our spare time, then I wouldn’t have to worry about my food anymore. We caught carp and yellowfish in the stream a mile from the factory. Now it was fish fillets sautéed with mushrooms every day. I tried it Hunan style, with spices and pepper, but it brought tears to my eyes and burned right through my stomach lining. I stuck to plain Canton style, simply steaming the fish with a touch of ginger and garlic, sprinkled with salt. My breath smelled unpleasantly fishy, so I ate more garlic to cover it, which was a disaster. People stared at me and stayed away. Good thing I wasn’t staying much longer or I would have had to start hunting game in the hills just for a change of diet.