Colors of the Mountain (32 page)

I lugged my schoolbooks to another neighbor, Gan, who was a teacher at an elementary school. He was willing to go over the science and math courses with me. The first few nights were a success. I was a natural at math, and a helping hand went a long way. I was just beginning to enjoy it when his younger sister, a tall, skinny girl a couple of years younger than I, began to hang around the study. All my dreams of peace and quiet were dashed. She would get her books and sit opposite me. She played with her hair and admired herself in a handheld mirror, murmuring like a baby. Then she’d sit there, bored. I would bury my face in the books and work on my studies, pretending to be unaffected. Occasionally, I caught her staring at me. Whenever our eyes met, she would bite her lip and run out of the study. The next night was a circus. She brought a couple of her noisy girlfriends. They nibbled each other’s ears and laughed. And they had these mouths that went on and on and on. All the while, they cast their eyes in Gan’s and my direction. One minute she came over to borrow a pencil, the next minute, a piece of paper. Gan was a patient man and a doting brother. Understandable, he had to live with the child. He went on talking and coaching. All was peaceful. It had nothing to do with him. I got the feeling he might miss the fuss if she weren’t around, heaven forbid.

My previous study hole might have been the Middle East, but this
was no Switzerland. My brain screamed
SOS.
I quit the place that very night and swore never to return. The next day I went down to our storage room, which was decorated with spiderwebs and housed hundreds of unknown, lethal, crawling creatures. Flashlight in hand, I kicked and fumbled among legless, armless pieces of furniture. It was my cave; there were treasures to be explored. I had Grandpa’s old gambling lamp in mind. It was a huge, infamous object with ornate bronze designs, and had been given to him as a gift from his gambling buddy to prevent cheating in the dark. It was put in storage because of its gigantic appetite—it burned a whole bottle of oil a night, and its smoke stained the white mosquito nets black.

I flashed the light around the dark room; in the corner my old friend glistened like a beacon at sea. As I stepped over cautiously, my big toe caught a round thing that rolled until it hit the wall with a healthy clang. I turned the light onto it, and there, standing on its bottom, was an aged, elegant pot shaped like a short, flat pumpkin. It was Grandpa’s liquor jar. It used to sit on his lap and sleep by his pillow. He sipped blissfully from it when it was full and whistled into it when it was empty. It was his other child, the child Grandma didn’t have any part of bearing. Nor was it one she approved of.

I scooped up both of Grandpa’s legacies and dodged my way out, without ruining too many of the webs guarding the room.

“What are you doing with those things?” Mom asked. She had been standing by the door waiting for me.

“Well, I decided to study by myself in my room in the evenings, so I need a good lamp for light and a teapot.” I clutched my two treasures.

Anything for my studies. Mom could have objected, but she didn’t. She knew my ways of tackling a problem. If I danced around something long enough, I would eventually give it my total attention. Mom was a little goddess that the big god had sent into our lives. She understood my vices and tried to forgive me as much as her limited powers allowed her.

I let the old treasures soak in the river for a few hours, and then rubbed them roughly with the wild grass that grew along the riverbank. The lamp shone in the afternoon sun, but the liquor jar still carried the heavy scent of alcohol. Grandpa had told me that the jar was
the work of a gifted potter from the mountains of Fujian. He had used the local soil in creating his pots, and if the jar was filled with liquor long enough, the cells of the jar wall would become saturated. Forever after, one could just pour water into the jar and out would pour liquor. I hoped the cells hadn’t become saturated yet because otherwise I would be hallucinating all night, whistling into its tiny mouth, and college would forever remain a dream.

That night after dinner I officially locked my door, lit my big lamp, and filled up the old jar with dark, steaming tea. I made sure a night pot stood by, prepared to take a larger than usual output. I was ready to burn.

But as I picked up physics, I thought about chemistry. When I leafed through chemistry, the math book screamed for my attention. I fought the temptation of the green English book, which by now had become my favorite, and there were the books on history, geology, and philosophy moaning and groaning at the bottom of the pile like stepchildren. Only Chinese history was a given. My midterm results in that subject put me legitimately at the top of the class. I juggled all these books like parts on an assembly line, finally dropping them and resting my head in the cradle of my hands.

Four years of work, and only a year before the biggest exam of my life. Not an ideal situation. I could probably handle half the material and be mildly successful, but not all of it. And the horror stories of how difficult the examination questions were flooded my mind. You had to really know your stuff. The most perplexing, complicated questions on each subject appeared on the tests. The government made sure that 30 percent of the test-takers fainted upon seeing the questions. Another 40 percent puked at their own ignorance. The remaining 29 percent would climb the cliff, but only 1 percent, their hands bleeding, would make it to the top. It was equality. It was even democracy, compared to the previous system. It was a hundred times better than Communist slavery.

Finally, I settled for the English book. I was showing decent progress, I was told. There was the usual vocabulary, grammar, drills, tests, and conversations. These simple conversations were silly, but thought-provoking. I often wondered why Englishmen greeted each other with
phrases like “Good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good night.” Simply “good” everything. If I walked around the dirt street of Yellow Stone and greeted people with the “good” formula, they would think I was crazy. Some might even knock my teeth out and ban me from the town forever. Those folks were content asking each other, “Have you had breakfast [lunch or dinner] yet?” After all, nothing was “good” about a day till your stomach was filled.

Then there was this “thank you” for this and “thank you” for that stuff. Being thanked by Professor Wei for not smoking gave me goose bumps. Was that the same as not thanking someone for doing something?

I thought about the “thank you” word in my own dialect. We said “
bua
” to show appreciation and gratitude.
Bua
was the word for a shallow bamboo basket. In the old days, you would put some food in the basket, kneel before the local official with the basket raised above your head, and present it to him to show gratitude for governing the town effectively. Thus
bua
, the tool, became
bua
, thank you. If you were very grateful, you would say a very big
bua.

As an experiment, I once told Dia that I would give him a little
bua
for not lighting that foul-smelling tobacco roll of his in my room. He stared at me long and hard like I was crazy, and lit a jumbo nonetheless.

But all this interested me tremendously. I often thought about the people who actually used the language every day. What a controlled way of speaking! In my mind, all the men were gentle and mustached, wore tall hats, carried a timepiece and a cane. In the crook of their arms leaned ladies, snake-waist thin, with long dresses, yellow hair, and blue eyes. They didn’t walk, they strolled, the hems of their dresses sweeping the ground, the men’s canes measuring their strides. Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. London. New York. I had no idea it was the time of the hippies, gangsters, druggies, rock ’n’ roll, that Gable was long gone and that Leigh was in a wheelchair with wrinkles even on her toes.

The burning question, which I found impossible to ask my professor, was how the Englishmen and women cursed. Or did they? How very naive of me. I later came to know that a thick encyclopedia could be made of all the curse words used in that great language.

I was awakened by Mom’s knock on the door. It was five in the morning and I was in my bed, my English book still on my desk. The lamp had used up the whole bottle of oil. The teapot was empty. I had no recollection of undressing myself or putting the light out.

“How did I go to sleep last night?” I asked Mom, whose face was now inside my door.

“Dad saw your light still on at two and found you asleep with your face on the book.”

I must have drifted off.

“No more irregular hours like that. You are going to ruin your health.”

“But Mom, I need to study longer hours to catch up.”

“You won’t catch up that way. You need to have a good, healthy schedule.”

Such intense conversation made my head throb. I slipped under the warm quilt and had another fifteen minutes in bed before I kicked off the blanket and splashed my face with icy water from the river.

One afternoon, as I was on my way to Professor Wei’s house, the rain began to penetrate the thick foliage that covered the narrow road. It was so loud and urgent it sounded as if a machine gun were spraying the leaves with bullets. It saved me the trouble of bending down in the river to wet my hair. I combed my mop with my hands as I saw the thick clouds gathering on the western horizon. A storm was coming.

I skidded along the wet road and was happy to finally arrive at Professor Wei’s door. It had been left open, and as I ran upstairs I could hear her voice coming from the second-floor window. She waved to me. I smiled back.

Not surprisingly, the dog was standing in the rain, greeting me with his mean dark glare. He dug his back feet firmly into the ground, as if warming up to attack me. He gave a throaty rumble, a weak threat that I had gotten used to, and blocked my way. There was something different in his eyes today, a knowing look. I checked the second-floor window for help. Professor Wei was gone. It was just me and the dog, and he had the upper hand. I wished I had a rifle. The spot between his eyes looked very tempting.

He sniffed my thoughts and shook his head in defiance. Water
splashed all over me. I shook my own head. Not as much water. The cunning animal was enjoying seeing me get drenched by the storm. He wanted to see me chilled, sneezing, then on the floor begging for mercy, at which time he would walk over and sink his teeth into a juicy part of me. A dinner in the rain was better than no dinner at all.

Sudden lightning cleaved the dark sky followed immediately by deafening thunder no more than half a mile away. The loudness brought me to my knees. I closed my eyes, and plugged my ears with my thumbs, waiting for the imminent attack from both the thunder and the dog, but nothing happened. The thunder trailed down to spasmodic firecracker mutterings, and vanished. I opened my eyes and saw the dog crawling in the mud toward his house, his tail tucked between his legs. At that moment, I lost all respect for the animal, and wanted to shoot myself for having put up with his cruel, unfair treatment.

Professor Wei greeted me with a dry towel as I sauntered toward the door like a real man for the first time, fearless and dignified. I could feel the weak look in the dog’s eyes now that he had been brought to his knees by the thunder. I had withstood the uproar. I took the towel and gave my head a good drying. Professor Wei found me a T-shirt and I was once again comfortable. But no feeling surpassed the sweetness of winning. That dog was forever crossed off my fear list. It was, after all, a man’s world out there, pal.

“You look happy today,” Professor Wei said, rather surprised.

“Thank you, I’m happy to be here,” I said in English.

“Maybe you know something already,” she said in Chinese.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I heard from my friend in Putien that for the next college examination, if you choose English as your major, you don’t have to take tests in science or math at all.”

“Is that right?” I pinched my thigh, almost jumping out of the seat. I tried to imagine life without math, chemistry, and physics. It would be like a honeymoon forever. I felt like standing up and singing an aria. “Oh, but why?”

“Well, the government lacks English majors in all the major universities. I think you should shoot for a college in, say, Beijing.”

Beijing! Only the best went there. Yes, ma’am, whatever you say!

“You think I am going to be that good?”

“You will be if you work hard. You have shown tremendous progress.”

“Really?”

“I am going to cram you until you are full.”

Cram me, please. I never felt emptier.

“Here you go.” She pulled out a bagful of books and printed papers. “These are the exercises and all the English vocabulary that you need to know to pass the test.” She patted the stack like an insurance man talking about a rainy day.

I rushed over and touched the pile with a shaking hand. This would be my salvation.

It was getting late. The storm persisted outside and the sky remained dark. My heart was pounding with excitement. I couldn’t wait to run home and tell my family the wonderful news.

“Would you like to stay and join me for dinner?” Professor Wei asked. Her sister was away visiting.

An image came to mind of my stomach looking like the cracked Sahara desert beneath the baking African sun. I banished the image quickly and said, “Thank you for your invitation, but I eat late.”

Who was I kidding? I could eat anytime, anyplace, anything.

“You look hungry.” She could be blunt when it suited her.

A hungry man was after all a hungry man. It probably showed, either the sunken midriff, or the hunger in my eyes. Maybe it was my pale face. But it would be highly improper for me to stay for dinner. I should be the one bringing food to my teacher, not the other way around. Mom would think I was greedy. She had taught us that no matter how poor you are, you should never covet another’s food. There was more. My reputation as a gentleman would be at stake. I was afraid of letting go of my horrendous appetite and eating up her meal as well. In the end, I wouldn’t even burp. I could just see myself guzzling down a whole bowl of rice at the speed of an Olympic skater while she, a rabbit, nibbled away at a carrot, both of us embarrassed for our own reasons.