Colors of the Mountain (9 page)

“Look who is here,” Han said in a mocking tone, referring to my mom.

“It’s Mommy.” Wang’s ugly, fat face twisted jeeringly. The three of them laughed.

“Get out of here!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. My heart raced and I felt myself losing control.

“Stop it!” Mom said again, pulling the tail of my coat.

They bullied me cockily, not expecting any retaliation. I had never fought back in the past. But school was over and these bad boys still wouldn’t leave me alone, even at home. What was I going to do? I wanted to smash their three, hideous faces into pieces. Ignoring Mom, I picked up the chair and threw it with all my might. It startled them
and they turned to run, but the chair caught Han’s right foot. He screamed like a bitten dog running for cover as he limped away behind his friends. The chair was broken into pieces.

To my surprise, Mom wasn’t angry with me, nor did she talk about it later. We picked up the bits of chair and closed our front door. Years later, Mom told me it was at that moment that they realized I was a strong boy who could stand on his own feet.

Later in the evening, Han’s parents came to our house and loudly accused me of hurting their son and almost breaking his ankle.

“He started the whole thing!” I cried bitterly. “Your son has made my life miserable in school. He hit me, cursed me, and set all his friends against me, but I had to help him with his homework. Go ask him how many times he made me let him copy my homework.” His parents were shocked at the outburst. I sobbed heavily.

“But you shouldn’t have hit him with the chair,” Han’s father scolded. “I’m a carpenter and I know how heavy a chair is.”

“Then you better ask your hooligan son not to beat me up anymore,” I said, doing most of the talking as my family looked on.

“Don’t say that,” Mom jumped in.

“He
is
a hooligan!” I shouted. “You don’t know the bad things he does. He even uses money to buy things to bribe his friends against me.”

“Money? What money?” his dad asked.

I gauged the man’s surprise. “He has a lot of money. He buys cigarettes and smokes with his friends.”

“A lot of money and smoking?” his dad said, taken aback.

“Where does he get the money?” his mom asked. “Do you know?”

“From home, I heard,” I replied, still crying.

“That rat!” His parents abruptly left.

I knew I was the winner of this match. It would do Han good to get a beating at home and taste the flavor of being ratted on.

Normally, my righteous family would have scolded me, telling me how wrong I was to fight, making me sit in the corner. But that night they didn’t. At dinner, with the door closed, everyone laughed and chatted. There was tacit forgiveness, even a sense of victory in the air. They listened to my fishing stories and my version of life on the island.
I demonstrated “the right way” to eat the mackerel, and they laughed and relished the seafood I had brought home.

But in bed that night, I knew what lay before me during this New Year’s holiday. The threesome wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t hang out in the regular places where the children normally played. Nor could I skip town again. I just had to make do and fight as I went along. I tucked myself in, thought about the island and the kids a little more, then fell asleep with a smile on my face.

On New Year’s Eve, money was traditionally handed out to children in small red envelopes called “
hon baos
,” which meant
red bags.
The good kids spent money on toys, candies, movies, and plays. The bad ones hit the gambling pits, where they cheated, hustled, and hoped to win enough money to lead a good life of bad habits. Smoking, drinking, and women were never far from their minds. I collected five yuan and thought about what weapons to buy to protect myself.

Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, I helped Mom prepare all kinds of sacrifices before our makeshift shrine of numerous gods. There was Buddha, his Kitchen God, the Earth God, Rice God, Water God, and all our dead ancestors. It was pretty much like the administration of a government, Mom explained. There were local gods, provincial gods, and the big Buddha on top. She had designated a spot for each, with different displays of food as sacrifices. There was chicken, fish, shrimp, clams, crabs, whole piglets painted in red, greasy ducks, colored eggs, wine, peaches, pears, bananas, rice, and a lot of incense and paper money to burn.

With incense clutched in her hands, Mom knelt and said the prayers. I waited on the side and kowtowed as many as fifty to a hundred times before each god, doing extras for my sisters and brother. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten into the business of kowtowing for my siblings. All I knew was that I was a little more religious than they were. I had always been afraid of ghosts, and believed in the power of good gods. I prayed like a monk and didn’t mind bending down on my skinny knees to kowtow for as often as Mom thought appropriate, usually imagining a hundred to be her lucky number.

By the end of the ceremonies, though my back and knees ached, I was quietly content with the prospect of having bought my insurance
with gods at all levels for the new year to come. I told my sisters and brother that I had also done favors before the gods in their stead and had them pay me back in monetary terms. They believed enough to pay me five fens each.

For breakfast on New Year’s Day, long, thin, handmade noodles were prepared, served in elegant little bowls and decorated on top with slices of fried egg, marinated meat, fried peanuts, oysters, crispy seaweed, and lightly sautéed crunchy snow peas. Long noodles promised longevity. Oysters, in my local dialect, meant “alive.” Eggs were round and perfect. Peanuts indicated countless offspring, and if you twisted the pronunciation of
seaweed
a little, it sounded a lot like the word that meant
fortune.

I fought down the long noodles, donned a new jacket that Mom had tailored herself, and ran off to offer New Year’s greetings to our neighbors. I clasped my hands, bowed my head, and wished wealth to the garlic-nosed Liang Qu, an old man with seven sons, who made a living selling cigarettes to children behind closed doors at a huge markup. He wiped his big, dripping nose and threw me a cigarette with dark tobacco in it. “Thanks and happy New Year, young fella. Have a smoke,” he said.

“It’s not one of those moldy ones, is it?” I teased as I pocketed it. He was known to pass the kids rotten products. Since the children were smoking secretly, they never complained. Only on New Year’s Day could I get away with a joke like that.

I crossed the bridge to greet the white-haired country doctor, who peered at me through his thick glasses, trying to figure out who I was. “I’m the younger son of the Chens,” I said.

He nodded, pointed with his cane at the seat next to him, and offered some tea. I politely told him I had just had breakfast. He asked how my grandpa was. “He’s gone,” I said. I couldn’t believe how forgetful the doctor was. Only half a year ago, he had been telling us that Grandpa didn’t have long to live.

“Oh, I’m sorry. But the living has to go on, ain’t that right?”

“Right, doctor. Happy New Year.”

He nodded in silence and watched me run off down the dirt road.

It was a tradition that for good luck you should greet as many as you could on New Year’s Day. To me, it was the easiest way to score
brownie points with people, for they were in the best of spirits then and you could get a lot of goodwill for nothing.

By noon, I had greeted no less than fifty people. There was the brigade leader, the neighborly teacher, Mr. Lan, the kind tailor who sometimes let Mom use his sewing machine, the blacksmith who made good farming tools for us, and the locksmith who stuttered when he became excited. His son had gone to Chinghua University in Beijing, the equivalent of MIT. He had the hardest time saying the name, and always ended up stuttering “Chin…Chin…Chin…Chinghua University.” By the time he did the third
hap, hap, hap
of his unfinished “happy New Year” greeting, I was long gone.

When I got home for lunch, our living room was already filled with well-wishers. Dad was holding court, busily pouring hot tea and lighting the water pipe for his visitors.

I often thought that if Dad hadn’t been the unfortunate son of a landlord, he probably would have ended up being one of the Communist leaders. He was a big man, who commanded attention the moment he entered a room. Dad loved laughing, and could charm your boots off, but when he was angry, his temper thundered and his tongue lashed out mercilessly. He was a natural, a dramatic leader in a sleepy, little town like Yellow Stone.

The commune leaders put him down like trash; bad neighbors and ignorant militiamen spat in his direction when they passed him in the street. But villagers from the surrounding towns and remote farms still came to him for all sorts of advice. They came in groups of five and ten and treated Dad as if he were still the son of an old family that had once headed the local gentility.

He wrote persuasive letters for those whose relatives resided in rich places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, helping them to squeeze money from their rich relatives. Defenseless widows sought his aid in drawing up complaints about neighbors who had encroached on their properties and families who had abandoned them. They paid Dad with money or a sack of rice or yams. But a lot of advice was offered free, with a smile.

Gradually, Dad’s reputation spread, with villagers dropping by daily when they were in town to shop. They came here for a cup of hot tea, a puff on the water pipe, or just to rest their feet. If Dad wasn’t away at
a reform camp, by eleven every morning the living room was always full of all sorts of personalities. Dad felt comfortable in the role and presided over the affairs of others like an unpaid civil servant. The only rule was that there was to be no spitting on the clean floor that Mom scrubbed daily.

On this special day, all the friendly, familiar faces were crowded into our sun-drenched living room. In the corner was the mason. His son was a miner in the high mountains of Fujian; the illiterate mason depended on my father to write monthly letters to him. Next to him was Stone Knife, so named because of his shrewdness. He was one of those villagers who never went to school but who seemed to know everything. Dad was his idol. Stone Knife could play many traditional Chinese musical instruments and write prose, compose music, and direct plays like Dad, but he depended heavily on my father to get him his gigs.

Then there was the sugarcane man, who was literally the king of sugarcane. Each morning in the early hours he presided over the sugarcane market and set the local daily price for fresh sugarcane. At the end of each day, he always dropped off the leftovers and grabbed a cup of tea with us before heading for his village. And there was the widow from a village ten miles away. She had brought her second son to wish Dad a happy New Year. He was visiting his mother from his navy base in another province. The young man beamed with pride and handed out cigarettes with filters, a rare commodity he had bought at the navy post. The crowd bubbled with excitement as they lit their good cigarettes.

The young navy man gave me one also, which I sniffed with satisfaction and slipped into my coat pocket when Dad wasn’t looking. I sat there, as I had for many years, listening to Dad’s friends doing their New Year’s version of a daily chat for a little bit.

But on New Year’s Day, I felt a need for something more festive and entertaining, only there wasn’t much I could do. I could just see my enemies, Han, Quei, and Wang, chomping cigarettes and lurking among the crowds, plotting their revenge against me. And I couldn’t fight today, it would be bad luck.

Mom, wearing her new apron, called me back to the kitchen. I slipped out of the living room and had a large bowl of rice with some delicious meat and fish. I had never seen our kitchen so full of good food, but I knew it wouldn’t be there for long. The thought made me
go for a second bowl of rice and two more chunks of Mom’s famous well-roasted pork knuckles.

After lunch, when my brother Jin was out playing poker and my sisters had long since gone out giggling with their friends, doing whatever girls did, I told Mom I was heading out to a basketball game at school.

“I didn’t hear about a game there,” Mom said.

“Yeah, well it should be starting soon,” I lied, and streaked out the door. I walked cautiously along the small path meandering among the wheat and sugarcane fields, staying away from the crowded streets that were now filled to the brim with villagers who had flocked to town for the New Year. It was an event locally known as
Yu Chun
, or “Spring Outing.” They came in groups of boys and girls, nicely dressed in new and colorful outfits. They sang, laughed, flirted, and ogled each other. The spring, now ripening with flowers and blossoms, seemed to stir a nameless angst among the youngsters and to give an added luster to the world. I envied the simplicity of their lives. Why was mine so damned complicated?

Soon I was alone, looking for a shortcut to the secret gambling pits somewhere among the tall sugarcane fields. Children my age whispered about them and raved over the heroism of some of the big-time winners whenever news mysteriously found its way out of the pit. But none dared venture near the place. A few really bad older boys from our neighborhood were said to make their homes there during the whole New Year’s holiday.

If I couldn’t have fun in normal places, then I was determined to find something else to do, either watching the game or even running errands for those bad boys. I had only brought half a yuan with me, that way if they wanted me in the game, I wouldn’t have too much to lose. I was mentally prepared for any roughing up that might occur.

I checked over my shoulder to make sure nobody was following me, then slipped into the sugarcane field. The leaves were thick and sharp. I ducked beneath them and walked with bent knees toward the heart of the field.

After ten minutes, I heard vague, hushed voices. Then I suddenly saw lights and a clearing ahead of me. Twenty yards of sugarcane had been felled and trampled down, and there were at least two dozen young
people sitting at tables, squatting, and standing in clusters around the cleared area.