I agonized for days over a piece of blank paper. It was harder than a love letter. I gave up the idea.
Dad started a campaign to find a used violin for me. Word spread among his friends and patients. One day, an old man with a long beard dropped off a bag and told Dad that it contained a peanut-shaped wooden box with a long neck.
“That sounds like a violin to me. Where did you get it?” Dad asked him.
“My son brought it back from the navy. It used to have a case but his brother uses it as a pillow.”
Dad thanked him and offered to pay for it. The old man pointed at his leg and shook his head. “I have to pay you, Doc. You cured my pain down there.”
I was thrilled. The only problem was that there were no strings on the thing. Dad asked another friend to send some from Fuzhou. I waited day and night while Yi and I made a square box for the instrument. After a month, the strings finally came: thus the first violin was born in the town of Yellow Stone, many years before its destined time. Neighbors and friends marveled at the strange instrument, shaking their heads. No one knew anything about it, much less how to play it.
Once again, Dad came through like a champ. This time he contacted a young man named Soong, originally from the city of Putien. He was the son of a Christian dentist who had died in jail. The family had been labeled as counterrevolutionaries because of their dogged belief in God and had been sent to live in exile in a tiny village near Yellow Stone.
Dad had heard of him on one of his house visits to a patient who was a neighbor of Soong’s and who had complained often about the strange, foreign music the young man played at night.
Having met with Soong, Dad reported that the young man had readily agreed to teach me the basics if I was willing to walk there every day during the summer vacation.
The fifth grade finished without the expected finals and report cards. Everyone graduated. But whether I was going to high school remained a mystery. Politics was in; grades were out. My fate stood undecided, wavering in the wind like a blade of grass along the Dong Jing River.
A VIOLIN, A straw hat, a pair of shorts, a cutoff shirt, and dirty bare feet. I was dressed for my first violin lesson in the village of Heng Tang. It would be an hour-long journey if I ran a little and didn’t stop to play with the geese that swam by the Dong Jing.
The narrow dirt road simmered under the summer sun, and my toughened feet curled on contact with the burning earth. I tiptoed in the patchy grass on the roadside and dipped my feet once in a while into the river’s cool water. As they headed for the market, occasional bikers whistled by me, carrying tall piles of vegetables on their backseats. An old goose farmer waved to me as he smoked his bamboo pipe and dangled his feet over the riverbank. He cast a bag of tiny, dried fish into the water, and hundreds of white geese glided in, chasing after the food with a vengeance.
As I passed a deserted temple, overgrown with weeds and wild sunflowers, my superstitious nature got the better of me. I stopped and looked over my shoulder. There wasn’t a soul within half a mile except for a stray dog sniffing gingerly at a pile of manure along the roadside. I took out a Flying Horse cigarette, lit it, puffed on it a few times, then held it between my hands and pretended it was incense. I got on my knees, facing the torn-down entrance of the temple, closed my eyes, and rapidly murmured the words of prayer I’d learned from Mom. I begged for a bright future as a musician. I paused and puffed on the cigarette to keep it going, then begged for good health for the entire family.
I checked behind me again. It would have been quite embarrassing to be caught hitting one’s head against the baking ground, here out in the middle of nowhere. Assured that no one was around, I gave the Buddha inside three deep kowtows.
Heng Tang was nestled at the foot of Hu Gong Mountain. When the sky was overcast, the village floated like a mirage among the clouds. When it rained, it totally disappeared. During the summer, it was hidden under the thick foliage of persimmon trees, but in spring the village blossomed like a wild garden.
I finally arrived at Mr. Soong’s dental office, located in an old temple at the edge of the village.
“Da, right?” Soong greeted me warmly, taking off his surgical mask. He had just finished with a teary-eyed young boy who was being comforted by his mom.
“Mr. Soong. How did you know it was me?”
“The violin.” He smiled and revealed the whitest teeth I had ever seen. I supposed it came with the business. He shook my hand and invited me into his office. “I like the wooden box. You made it?”
“A good friend made it,” I said, a little embarrassed about its primitive appearance.
“It looks sturdy.” He smiled with his teeth. I smiled back, hiding mine, regretting not having brushed them again before coming. I studied him as he washed his hands and hung up his white coat. He was in his twenties, fair-skinned and good-looking, with long hair that touched his collar. He wore a pair of tight, bell-bottom trousers and a silk shirt. A city dude to the bone.
“A barefooted violinist?” he said, smiling at me. “Let’s see what you’ve got there.”
I took out the violin and he plucked a few notes on it, adjusted the pegs, redid the bridge, tightened the bow, then cradled it between his neck and shoulder. He closed his eyes and a soothing melody flowed out of my instrument. His fingers ran quickly along the strings, up and down, and the bow jumped, making curt sounds. I was amazed at his skill and was falling in love with the music when he stopped suddenly. “You got a great violin here.” He put it down carefully. “Smoke?”
I shook my head.
“Want to be an artist?”
I nodded, not knowing where he was heading.
“Then take one.” He threw me a filtered cigarette and lit it for me with a lighter. I puffed on it and inhaled deeply. “I’m no teacher. Don’t call me teacher or anything, but I could use a friend like you.” He looked out his small window, then at a pile of dentures lying on his messy desk. “It’s boring here. In fact, if you want to be a dentist, I can teach you that as well. I have plenty of time on my hands and all these teeth need to be filed to fit into patients’ mouths.”
“I’ll do the violin first,” I replied, “but I can help with your work during my break.”
“No need, I was joking.”
It didn’t take me long to like him.
The next few days I spent walking around his office, holding my violin between my shoulder and neck and practicing bowing. It was a painful experience that made my neck swell and left my shoulder raw, but he kept saying I was making progress. He showed me pictures of stone busts of Beethoven and Mozart and told me stories about them, amazing stories.
When I hunched over a little, he asked me, “Would you do that in front of an audience of a thousand people as you are giving your solo performance on the stage of a grand concert hall?” Of course not. I straightened up and never dipped my head again.
During my breaks, I would file the dentures with him and he would tell me about his family. They were all pious Christians, which made them a minority anywhere in Buddhist-dominated China. His father had been a famous dentist, who fought against the Communists for his Christian belief, was jailed, and died in prison four years later. His brothers and sisters, all talented musicians, were forced out of their mansion in the city of Putien and sent to the country just as he had been. His mother had come with him to Heng Tang. Their former mansion was divided up and used as the Red Guard’s headquarters. They now lived in a two-room dirt hut with a leaky straw roof. It had originally been an animal pen and still smelled like one.
Soong had learned dentistry from his dad, and by the age of eighteen was an accomplished one. Communist leaders loved him. He was personally responsible for all the gold dentures in their mouths. An employee of the commune, he worked five days a week, four hours a day. The rest of the time he was a daydreaming artist.
His neighbors complained about the eerie western music he played on the violin and “the bellows,” an upright organ th
at hissed when he stepped on its pedals. Rocks and rotten fruit were thrown at his window, but it didn’t stop him. He put a sound dampener on his violin and played on.
I practiced constantly and was making fast progress, which Mom and Dad noticed with considerable pride. To thank Soong, Mom would sometimes ask me to bring fruit and meat to him, and Dad sent him cartons of cigarettes and liquor, gifts given him by his acupuncture patients. Soong would cook the food I brought and ask me to stay for dinner, then send me home on his bike in the evening. Sometimes, when his mother was visiting his brothers, I’d bring a lot of food and stay over for the weekend. There would be no violin lessons or any other music during those times. We would go hunting.
Summer attracted large flocks of the mountain birds called woo yaa to the hilly village. They were big birds with black-and-white feathers that made nests among the thick persimmon trees. Soong and I sneaked onto the mountain at night. He carried a hunting gun and I carried a flashlight and a large cotton bag. As we went along the meandering road, he would stop and ask me to focus the light at a bird a few feet away. Then he would aim and fire. Boom! The bird would fall with a thud. They weighed over a half-pound each, and within two hours I would be begging him to stop as the bag got too heavy for me to carry. The last leg of our nightly hunting expedition involved his jumping into a vegetable garden and stealing all the necessary ingredients for the night’s feast. Once at home, I would show him the liquor I brought, and we would drink it in his kitchen as we skinned the birds.
“Keep the heads on. They taste great sautéed with garlic, ginger, and wine,” he would say. I avoided them because I didn’t fancy eating anything that stared back at you.
Soong the dentist became Soong the chef. He peeled off his shirt, and the skinned birds, their heads making them look still alive, became a huge, steaming dish laced with green vegetables. We would eat and talk until sunrise.
Near the end of the summer, Soong said, “Da, there isn’t much I can teach you anymore. From here on, you have to practice and just figure it out for yourself. Besides, school is starting soon, right?”
“I’m not sure I’m going to high school.”
“What do you mean? Of course you’re going. You’re so young.”
“I haven’t got my notice yet. Others already did.” I hung my head.
“Come on, young fellow. Don’t feel bad, you could always come to learn dentistry with me. Kids are learning nothing in school now anyway.” He smiled. “But I want you to come and visit me on weekends and I’ll take you to Putien to meet some of the coolest young musicians in the city.”
“I promise.”
FINALLY I WAS issued a notice stating that after careful consideration by the commune education board, I would not be given the opportunity to pursue my schooling any further. Neither was I allowed to do so at other schools in another commune.
No reason given. No reason needed.
A patient of Dad’s secretly told us that the board’s reason was simple. My ancestors and family had had enough education; it was time we made do without more.
I felt sad and isolated again. Everyone in my school went on to high school, even the worst of the students. I couldn’t go because my dad had gone to college, as had my grandpa. What kind of reasoning was that? Why did I have to carry the burden of my parents’ generation?
I walked around gloomily and was vague about it when friends asked what class I was in. My close friends were behind me totally. Yi offered to teach me carpentry, and Mo Gong said he would let his parents teach me the shoemaking business. Sen even suggested that we make wooden hives and raise some bees, collect the honey and sell it. High school was the last thing in their minds. They loved to have me around, not in school.
My eldest sister, Si, who by this time had grown to be a lovely lady with an eloquent mouth, took me to meet the high school administrators, trying to persuade them to take me in, the commune’s decision notwithstanding. The junior high school was under a different jurisdiction and had in the past reversed some of the commune’s rulings.
I would bring with me all the tools of my résumé: a Ping-Pong paddle, my flute, violin, school grades, and scrolls of calligraphy. I often had to perform on the flute and especially on the violin on the spot to anyone who would listen. They had never seen the instrument before. They would applaud my performance, and I would feel used like a toy puppy, but the answer was always the same: great candidate, but landlord was a tough label to fight. I could have been on the school Ping-Pong team the next day, and they would have loved to have had me be the first violinist in the school orchestra, but sorry. The school authorities were friends of the commune education board. It would take much more than a good, even talented, student to move the mountains of bureaucracy.
Dad talked to my cousin Yan about sending me off to her remote school district on the island of Milon. She said she could try, but she was in an unfavorable position with the school authorities at the moment and in the long run it wouldn’t be good for me.
Mom prayed day and night, promising three chickens and four piglets to Buddha if any high school accepted me. I promised a thousand kowtows on my own. And then, good news came in an unusual way. Dad’s regular guest, the sugarcane farmer, casually mentioned that he had delivered some high-quality, fresh canes to the high school last night because the all-mighty principal’s aging father had just had a stroke. The only thing he could eat was juice squeezed from the fresh sugarcane. The principal was upset and restless and didn’t know what to do.
Dad ran into my room and interrupted my violin practice, a thing he had never done before, and said, “Son, I think you will be going to school soon.”
“Why? That’s wonderful!” I was so excited that I almost dropped my violin.
Dad told me about the principal’s father and predicted that he would be consulted the next day at the latest. Dad’s confidence was always his winning card. I believed him.
All day long, Mom was smiling and giggling and repeating, “Buddha did it again.”
That evening at dinner, a young high school teacher came hurriedly to our house and wanted to meet Dad privately. Dad took him into our back room. Five minutes later, Dad emerged and said he was going to the see the principal’s father right away because the patient was still in critical condition.
We smiled with perfect understanding. Just as he stepped out the door, he excused himself from the young man for a moment and walked back to us. He bent over and gently whispered in my ear, “I will hold my needles until the principal says yes.”
I nodded, feeling a rush of tears fill my eyes.
He came back late. The news was good. I would be in the fourth group in grade one of junior high a month from now. The delay was due to the specific order from the commune that I was not to be admitted under any condition. They would sneak me in after all the hubbub died down. I thanked Dad and then crawled quietly to the attic, got on my knees, and kowtowed a whopping thousand and five times. Five extra were done to make up for any possible miscalculation in the hasty up-and-down motions.
I dragged my aching body to bed that night, and I lay there with my eyes open, too thrilled to feel sleepy. A high school badge, calculus, English, the school team, and the orchestra. And no more snakes like Quei, Wang, and Han.
Junior high, the only one for several counties, was ten times the size of my elementary school. The possibilities beckoned to me. Suddenly the nightmare of elementary school was over.
“YOU’RE THE GUY who plays the violin, I heard.”
“Yeah, what do you want?” I looked up from a stack of new textbooks to see a well-dressed fellow sauntering up to me. His clothes were neatly layered from the inside out. He wore shoes and socks with brightly colored patterns, a rarity among Yellow Stone boys. He was flanked by a couple of shorter fellows with toothy grins.
“Nothing, nothing, just a casual visit.” He stuck out his hand. As the sleeve rode up, a gold watch glistened in the morning sun that filtered through t
he window of our classroom. “Name is I-Fei. Do you care for a cigarette during the break?”
“Sure, I-Fei.”
“You could call him ‘Watch’ if you like to.” One of his followers commented, laughing.
I-Fei hit the guy’s head with his elbow and kicked his behind.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the kid said while making a funny face at me.
Another one of those, I thought to myself.
During the whole hour of English, nothing sank in. I had missed an entire month of class. The grammar and phonetics sounded wacko. My attention kept turning to the fellow who had just introduced himself to me, I-Fei. I kept forgetting his name. He spent the first fifteen minutes of the hour spitting on his watch and polishing it carefully. He kept winding and rewinding it again and again. Then he positioned the face of the watch to reflect the morning sun right into another boy’s eyes.
The English teacher didn’t like what he saw. He asked I-Fei to stand up and read some simple sentences. I-Fei stumbled along, making the English language sound like some sort of Chinese local dialect. The whole class roared with laughter, especially the tall girl with a plump bosom who was sitting in a back seat. She laughed so hard she had to cover her face with her hands. I could see that I-Fei was a popular man on campus. The teacher failed to embarrass him, the attention evidently only made him feel glorified.
I-Fei whistled at me when the class was over and tilted his head, asking me to follow him, then effortlessly threw himself out of the paneless window. His two followers jumped through after him like two monkeys. Why couldn’t they use the door? I thought, closing my books, and leaving them in my desk drawer. I-Fei was winking at me from outside, so I climbed out of the window as well.
It was a smoking picnic. A line of young junior high boys sat along the wall, puffing away like small smokestacks. The ones without cigarettes were chasing others who had them, so that they could get a puff to quench their addiction during the short break. I-Fei pulled out a full pack of my favorite brand, Flying Horse, and let me pick one out for myself.