Colors of the Mountain

  Superstitious farmers stirred up all kinds of eerie stories that I had never heard before. They said Mao was a devilish son from heaven who got away and wreaked havoc on this earth and now would be punished for the next nine lives. No wonder he had no offspring. People even claimed to have heard laughter at night from the old site of Buddhist temples, temples that had been toppled down by Mao’s revolutionaries. For the first time in my life, I heard people talk about ghosts as though they were a part of our lives, only living when we were all sleeping. Only the insomniacs got to hear and see what the ghosts had to say.

  But Buddha wasn’t the only one laughing. I saw the uncontrollable joy in Mom and Dad’s eyes. Long after we kids went to sleep, they could be heard whispering and laughing in the dark. Once, I overheard them talking about our lost land and houses behind the closed door of their bedroom. When they sensed my hesitant footsteps outside, Dad slowly opened the door and winked at me, asking me to go away.

  Mao’s funeral was held nationwide. People of Yellow Stone gathered in long columns in a public square, thousands of them, wearing only black and white.

  As though the rift between the Red families and the landlords’ families were widened by the death of Mao, I was told by the school authorities not to attend the ceremony. Landlords’ families were not invited. I was saddened, humiliated, confused. I thought I was slowly blending into the system after changing schools. Now they told me I couldn’t go and mourn the most forbidding leader, the only leader, I knew. In my heart, there was no other leader who mattered as much to me, regardless of how good or bad he was. I had been told not to analyze him because he was wiser, no, the wisest. I was to follow him and love him with all my heart. As a young boy, I had once shouted the slogan “Long Live Chairman Mao!” so many times that by the next day I had lost my voice. Even though my parents’ generation hated him, I had embraced him in my own way. I didn’t know any better. A cult mentality had already been forged on me, and it hurt me deeply to be separated from such an event. I wanted to say good-bye to him, the dead Chairman Mao, but I didn’t even have a black armband.

  I stayed at home while the crowd marched in the street, heading for the square. Dad said there was nothing to it and that even if he had been paid to attend such an event, he wouldn’t go. Such a bore, he said. The fat guy should have been dead a long time ago. Mom quickly asked him to stop. He smirked to himself. Then he brewed himself a large pot of red tea, made himself a fat tobacco roll, and stretched out in his comfortable rocking chair with an old medical book, his favorite spare-time activity. He was a happy man.

  Ten minutes before the funeral, one of Dad’s patients stopped by our house on his way to the ceremony and Dad treated him to some tea.

  “I’m really not up to standing for such a long time in the square,” he said. “My feet will be killing me.” He looked at me, a picture of gloom and sadness, and said, “Young man, you can have my black band and go stand in my spot.”

  I bounced out of my seat, grabbed his band, and ran as quickly as I could to the square, which was guarded by armed militiamen wearing serious looks. Sneaking into the entrance with my head down, I felt like a thief as I tried to avoid familiar faces.

  I waded through columns of people, surprised that some of them were actually smoking and joking with each other while waiting for the massive funeral to begin. When I finally located the man’s villagers and joined them at the edge of the dirt square, a couple of farmers were sitting on the grass, taking a nap. There were crying children and toothless old people among them. I was quietly moved by their devotion until a man napping next to me said that his brigade would count their participation as a day’s work in the field and pay by the head, including children.

  Dad was right. The ceremony was long and boring. The life story of Mao, the long list of his titles, dirgelike music, and silence. They said at that moment the whole country was silent, even the most important machines were turned off. The trains stopped. In my mind, the whole country was silent and sad, except my dad. I could imagine him blowing on the steam of his hot tea before he sipped and spitting loose tobacco leaves out of his mouth after each drag, while he dangled his feet from his chair. I smiled, unable to stop thinking about him.

  One day, sometime later, on my way home from school, I saw a large crowd gathered at the market square. A young man with a large brush was splashing characters on a white wall that read, DOWN WITH THE GANG OF FOUR!

  Who were the Gang of Four?

  I stood closer at the edge of the crowd, watching. The young man wrote the names one after another, to the total surprise of all.

  JIANG QING (FORMERLY KNOWN AS MADAM MAO), YIAO, ZHANG, AND WANG.

  It couldn’t be. How could Mao’s wife be down while Mao’s bones were still warm? Mao’s wife had been running the country since Mao had been sick. Someone was taking over the government, I thought with alarm. Maybe there would be a war, like Dad said. I rushed home and breathlessly told Dad the news.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “They could throw you in jail if you spread untrue rumors.”

  I told him I didn’t make it up. He grabbed Mom and closed the door behind them. I could hear them whispering and laughing again.

  That evening the bikers, who spent their days carrying passengers back and forth from the city of Putien and Yellow Stone for thirty fens each trip, confirmed the breaking news. They said people were painting the names of the Gang of Four on the cement streets in Putien and then crossing them out. Some even made effigies and burned them. At nine o’clock that night, through a crackling radio system, there was a special announcement from the central government confirming the downfall of the Gang, which had consisted of some leading figures in Mao’s cabinet.

  Soon, we heard that the party chief of Putien County had been arrested and put in jail and that another group of leaders was taking over. Two days later, the other cadres disappeared into the mountains. During the next several months, massive executions of former leaders followed. Among those executed was the arrogant Putien police chief. They shot him in the head and gave his son a life sentence for corruption, rape, and embezzlement.

  On my way back from school one day, I saw a large crowd standing outside the house belonging to the party chief of Yellow Stone commune. You could hear a boy sobbing amid the chatter. I stopped, jumped on a vegetable peddler’s stool, and strained to see what was happening. Two cops were brushing glue on the front door of the house and pasting white paper over it. They were sealing the house, as they had done to those of the landlords and counterrevolutionaries just a few years ago. And the chief’s son was wiping his eyes with his sleeves, standing obediently by a bicycle packed with his belongings.

  I asked an old man standing next to me what was going on. He said that they had gone to arrest the chief today, only to find that he had escaped early this morning, leaving his son behind. And now they were sealing his house and sending his son away to his grandpa, who lived in the mountains.

  Well, I thought to myself, the chief, the formidable chief, was now a criminal fugitive and he had abandoned his son. I still remembered it was he who had spat at me in the school hallway and plotted with my teacher, La Shan, to kick me out of school in third grade. I don’t think he ever thought this would happen to him. I thought about La Shan, secretly hoping that he might end up being hunted like the party chief, with whom he had tried so hard to ingratiate himself.

  Dad wasn’t surprised to hear the news. He said that soon we would be able to do what others could do—like going to school and finding a job. I nodded in disbelief as Dad kept saying, “Son, you could be the lucky one.”

  At night I dreamed about becoming a real artist, performing before thousands of people in a cavernous concert hall. During the day, I rehearsed with my schoolmates for another lengthy show that would celebrate the downfall of the Gang of Four.

  This time, Mr. Ma, the school drama teacher, even cast I-Fei and me in the play. I was to take the part of the former cultural min
ister, Yiao, and I-Fei was to play Madam Mao, two of the Gang of Four. We all wore masks with an opening at the mouth. We went to school in the morning and took to the road in the afternoon to do the show for villagers miles away, often coming back at midnight. We were carried around in narrow boats along the rivers to get to the villages near water, and the mountainous communes would send their noisy tractors to haul us back and forth. For each show, I would pad my stomach to appear fat, and I wore a pair of shiny, leather shoes two sizes too big. My part was not much of a speaking role. It was I-Fei’s role that brought laughter from the audience each time he appeared. He wore a long wig, a tight red dress, high heels, and did an amazing, catlike walk, twisting his tiny waist and narrow hips. He would curl his little finger as he held a cigarette, and push his boobs up once in a while, whenever the sponges inside his dress dropped too low. He spoke in a high-pitched, rather raspy voice. Older schoolmates grabbed his bottom behind the curtain—he looked like a really attractive, mature woman.

  He enjoyed the role so much that he began to walk and talk like Madam Mao, even outside school. When I asked him how he was able to do such a good female imitation, he said that as a young boy he used to dress up in his mother’s clothes and shoes and copy her walk. Locked in the house for hours, he would do this while she was away doing her revolutionary work as the women’s federation president.

  In school, I was getting by with the help of others. I had become everything I was not in elementary school, popular with friends, with nobody picking on me. But teachers looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. I was behind in all the subjects. They didn’t try to help me. They generally left me alone, and I was forgotten. They thought I was the rotten type that they had to cut off, so they never inquired about my homework and never asked me questions in class. They knew I hadn’t prepared for it. I was always with I-Fei, leaving early to rehearsals or coming back late from them. It was a wonderful feeling for a while, because now I had finally become what I had wished to be and could not be in elementary school. There were no enemies chasing me at every corner, concocting dirty tricks behind my back every day. I was respected and had a lot of friends, significant friends. I was my own master. I did not have to fear, worry, or fight. I felt safe and anchored.

  But soon I was feeling empty about school. I used to love studying, and had known the joy of being at the top of the class. I knew about basking in affirming smiles from the teachers, people my family had taught me to respect. Though I was having a good time, I felt as if I was violating something special.

  In class, serious teachers began to talk about the possibility of restoring our country’s college system. During the Cultural Revolution, all colleges were either closed, or they enrolled only a small number of students from politically correct families through a corrupt system of selection. The teachers would end their speeches by saying that even the musicians had to pass other tests to go to art school. They would cast a look my way.

  The more they talked about college, the more I was determined that I wanted to be an artist, because I was doing so badly in school. I was sure I was beyond hope, academically speaking. I had to do something with my life.

  One day that winter, Mo Gong ran breathlessly to our home and told me that our county’s performing troupe was holding public auditions for actors and instrument players. I was so excited that the next day I-Fei and I rode his bike and headed for Putien, so that I could sign up for the audition. During the next few days, Dad dug out some old music scores, traditional classics that had been banned for the last twenty years, and said, “The Red Guard music is over. Pick one of these for your audition.” He understood my feelings and appreciated my passion for art. After all, it was he who had inspired me.

  His friends had only to make the slightest demand, and he would nudge me into playing a few songs on my violin, which his friends mysteriously called “the western instrument.” He would introduce the violin, explaining the relationship between the four strings, and show off the amazing range of such a tiny instrument by plucking the strings with his fingers. Sometimes he would ask me to tag along on his occasional gigs playing classic Chinese folk music for weddings, which probably made me the first to render the thousand-year-old melodies on such an instrument. At those gigs, traditional instruments—gongs, drums, and flutes—usually drowned out my tiny violin.

  Soong had warned me of the temptation to play everything on the violin. Being a purist, he had asked me how I could play that stupid, traditional music on something on which so many magnificent masterpieces had been played. He said it would ruin my style, but I had ignored him. I wanted to make Dad happy. He was proud because I was the only one of his five kids who played an instrument as he had done when he was young. We shared an intimate bond.

  Since the classic romantic plays were coming back into fashion as Dad had foretold, I concentrated on my flute, not the western instrument, for the audition. For three days, I practiced only three short classical pieces while Dad listened and coached. It was his territory and he was a master. He knew every fluttering of the finger and softening of breath to capture the true spirit of the piece. He would demonstrate and I would work on it until the melody came naturally to me. I would never have imagined myself imitating his rougher, stronger, less refined, less flowery style. It reminded me of ancient times, when the emperors were entertained in the luxurious courts by flutes made of jade and when people fought on horseback with long swords. I wished I could play one tenth as well as he did.

  On the day of my audition, my sister Si carried me on the bike to Putien at sunrise, where we waited in a long line of self-proclaimed artists, eating our packed breakfast of cold and dried yams. My teeth kept clicking as the line began to move. I had to run to the smelly bathroom every five minutes for a two-second pee. Si saw how nervous I was and said that I was still very young and that if I failed this time, I could always try again. I thought about my friends and about I-Fei. If they had been here, they would have lit a good cigarette for me, kicked me in the butt, and tried to make me smile. I yearned for a cigarette but the thought of having a coughing fit during the performance stopped the terrible urge.

  To seek peace, I closed my eyes and said aloud in my head a few words to all the gods that I had kowtowed and prayed to thousands of times before. Now I regretted taking money from my brother and sisters for kowtowing for them. The gods would probably teach me a lesson today, one that I would never forget. I prayed again that they delay punishing me for such greed until later.

  When I heard my number called, my sister patted my back and I walked slowly into the hall. It was an old, small theater. As I walked, my footsteps echoed. Before me sat six of the most prominent musical figures in our county.

  Teacher Dong, a big fish stranded in a small town, was the only college graduate with a music major from Fuzhou Music Conservatory. He wore his glasses on the tip of his nose and looked at me without an ounce of interest in his drooping eyes. Ding, the famous Putien opera singer, was filing her nails. Flutist Min, the first flute of the county, known for his long breath and unusually large testicles, was slumped low in his armchair. Drummer Jia was reading an old newspaper, and Director Liao, a bearded man, smoked a pipe, fighting the numbing boredom without much success.

  I felt small and unworthy.

  “What will you do?” Flutist Min asked. “Not another flutist again?”

  I hoped he was joking.

  I nodded and announced the title of my piece.

  “‘A Trip to Gu Su,’” I mumbled. My teeth were still chattering. There were hundreds of people pressing their noses against the windows, watching the contestants. It was hard to conjure up the environment of a scenic lake with sweeping willows on a moonlit night, a mental picture my dad told me I should have when playing this piece. It was a romantic, melodious solo, depicting a lonesome young man strolling beside a lake, seeking love on a beautiful night.

  All I could think of was my sister’s worried look as I left her, the fetid p
ublic bathroom, the faces at the window, and the sagging eyes of the music teacher. I closed my own eyes and forced the first sound out of my old flute. The flute sounded as if it was crackling and getting dry, so I started again. It was a steep uphill ride. I felt I couldn’t breathe at all. After only a few long bars, I felt my lungs wheezing. My heart pounded like a rat in an iron cage.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw an uncomfortable twitching of Flutist Min’s nose. He must be so disgusted. I was sure I had ruined it with the first note. Gradually, I forced my eyes to close and tried to think of the peaceful Dong Jing River by which I had practiced every morning, the green fields that stretched beyond it, and the colors of the mountain at sunrise. Soon the desire to win started to churn within me. I remembered every twist and turn Dad had taught me during the last three days. When the final note had faded away, I opened my eyes to see that all the judges were making busy notes.

  Flutist Min was the first to look up. He smiled at me and said, “Well done. It didn’t start out right but you handled the piece unusually well.”

  I blushed, not knowing what to say. “Who teaches you?” he asked.

  I thought for a second. “My dad,” I answered.

  “What is his name?”

  “Ar Gang.”

  “I have heard of him. An acupuncturist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come here. Let me have a word with you.”

  I heard another name being called, and a girl walked in, a ballerina with her feet turned out like a duck’s. I walked over to Min’s chair. “One of my distant cousins was getting treatments from your dad,” he told me. “I heard he was doing a wonderful job. I didn’t know he was also a flutist. Here, let me tell you the truth about this audition. We have enough flutists already. Do you play any other instrument?”

  “The violin.”