Colors of the Mountain

  I picked my way gingerly behind the monster, darted through the door, and let out a huge sigh as I fished out a Flying Horse. My eyes darted around, making sure Professor Wei wasn’t witnessing another deadly sin from her lofty window upstairs. I would have waited if I could, but my vocal cords were screaming with desire to be smoked red and blue, and my heart throbbed with the excitement of surviving this landmark day. I needed to calm down or I would find myself jumping into the cool river. I was overcome with mixed feelings of joy and sadness. This was a new start to my boring and hopeless life, but it would be a long, uphill ride from the very bottom. The hill was Everest and I was starting out somewhere under the Pacific Ocean.

  THE SCHOOL WAS without I-Fei now, and I had stopped going to the rehearsals. My classmates stared at me as though I were a dinosaur. Most of them hated me because I was arrogant, pompous, and too much of an artistic star. In elementary school, they would have ganged up and beat the crap out of me, but times had changed. I was the big guy, sitting in the back seat, angry, ignorant, a fallen star of yesterday, a hostile sight to avoid. They cold-shouldered me. The rest of the school carried on as if I wasn’t there. I watched them disdainfully and quietly. A few smaller guys in class still speculated that I had dated the most beautiful girl in the school’s performing troupe. They winked at me when they saw her pass our classroom window. I said nothing, and kept them guessing in order to maintain the last ounce of respect I commanded among the students.

  Dia was one of the guys who warmed up to me after he saw the vacancy left behind by I-Fei. He was a thin fellow who seemed to jump rather than walk. He had monkey ears and his hair was always a messy lawn that seemed as if it hadn’t been mown for ages. He lived in a poor village ten miles west of Yellow Stone and walked to school every morning at sunrise, returning home at about eight each night. He was one of those kids known around the school as walkers to distinguish them from the students who bunked at the school dorm. He was the only person I knew who made thicker and longer tobacco rolls than Yi. And he used old newspaper to roll them. Sometimes when he ran out of old newspaper he would run around school looking for any scrap paper he could find.

  This thin little guy carried a large schoolbag with him during the course of the day. Most of the space in it was taken up by the two cold meals he had to carry around, and the rest was divided up equally between books, a bag of foul-smelling homegrown tobacco, and an ugly pipe made from a twig. His nicotine addiction was legendary. He was the only person I knew who smoked before and after each meal and stopped halfway to squeeze in another thick, long tobacco roll.

  The more time I spent with Dia, the less I felt like smoking at all. He was a great example of what happens to smokers. At the age of fifteen, he had a chronic cough and spit up sticky green stuff like an old man of ninety. His lungs wheezed loudly through his bony chest, outlined by countable ribs. His teeth were dark in front and back and he had a pale, lifeless look. The only gleam in his eye came from the reflected light of the matches with which he lit his rolls.

  “How can you smoke like that?” I asked once, after we became better friends.

  “Look who’s talking.” Dia stared at me, puzzled. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Well, the shitty tobacco and the old newspapers you’re using will kill you soon.”

  “I’m not dying anytime soon, Da. Grandpa rolled his first roll at the age of four and he’s still kicking. He taught Dad to smoke at the age of five and he’s still breathing. I didn’t smoke till seven. The Dias are living legends. We’ll live on.”

  “Yeah, while wheezing.”

  “That ain’t funny.”

  “I know. From tomorrow on, I’m going to bring you some of my dad’s tobacco paper. That way you don’t have to use the old paper anymore.”

  “No way am I gonna smoke with that pure-white crap. It’ll make everything as tasteless and plain as wax. The old ink on the paper adds a kick to the tobacco.”

  “Yeah, so do bullets.”

  One day I hid his tobacco bag under a thick layer of fallen leaves to see if he could do without a puff for a while. He couldn’t. Dia ran around kicking the leaves like a crazy animal before attacking me and drumming my chest till I gave the bag back to him. He needed to smoke. In the end I felt sorry for him, watching him squat behind a tree trunk, puffing frantically as if there were no tomorrow. He had tears in his eyes.

  “Don’t joke like that no more.”

  “I was trying to do you some good. I’m sorry.”

  Every morning he made his first stop at my house, after his ten-mile walk. I treated him to some hot tea. He would sneak to our backyard for a smoke, and then reappear refreshed. Then we walked to school together. In the afternoon, he played with me for a while before the long journey home. Some weekends I would offer him my bunk bed so that he could stay for a night. He fought the invitations valiantly, but in the end never refused the offers. When he slept over, we talked about our lives and future late into the night. He wasn’t a demanding guest, all he required was a chair to step on so that he could climb to the attic windowsill like a cat and smoke in the open air while staring at the bright stars.

  THE MIDTERM EXAMS came sooner than I liked. It was the first time I was paying attention to them. It had been a breezy school without serious tests for years. Now, the concept was arcane. The good students in class applauded and chatted excitedly about how they were going to review courses and score well. The losers put their heads on the desks and drummed the desktop, hating every word uttered by the good students.

  The teacher enthusiastically answered questions the good students raised, and even threw in a smile or two when it came to the pretty girls in class. But when I raised my hand and asked which English book we would be tested on, the whole class burst into uncontrollable laughter. It was a big joke. The good students huddled together and laughed. Enjoying my humiliation, the teacher leaned back in his chair.

  “What do you think?” he said slowly, tossing the chalk in his hands.

  More laughter.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Since when did you become interested in tests? Shouldn’t you be in rehearsal at this time of the day?” He looked at his watch, smirking. “For your information, it will be book four that you will be tested on. Are you sure you have book four in your possession?”

  Continued laughter.

  I felt Dia’s eyes on me. He was the only one feeling sorry for me. The rest of them probably thought I was a drunk, just waking up to the glaring sunlight. I was human garbage in their eyes, victimized by changing times, with no idea of how to pull myself out of the hole I had sunk into. The talents I had, playing the flute and violin, were talents of yesterday. Now it was college, and whoever could jump the hoop and be that lucky 1 percent to go on to college was the hero of the day. I still stunk with yesterday’s staleness. Most of them were happy to see me fall on my face, hoping I would break a few bones in the process.

  I felt the presence of I-Fei, my hero of yesterday, outside the window, waving to me with the tip of his cigarette. For one moment, I wanted to jump out the window, have a smoke, and forget about the class, the test, and these hateful people. Why couldn’t people be more like animals and the creatures of nature? They didn’t laugh at each other or kick each other’s ass. Small birds sang the same tune on the same twig every day, and ants carried bits of food on their backs and passed them along to the next one in line, regardless of their sex, looks, background, or popularity.

  The tests offered scant surprise. I stared at each paper for a good five minutes, scribbled down something, and turned them in. I answered half the questions on the math test with ease, but the rest looked like a foreign language. And I only did one third of the physics test. History and geography were the hardest subjects to guess on, and whatever English I had mastered from the professor, a secret, was a mere scratch on a pyramid. Chinese was the only subject I excelled in. I had studied classics with my grandpa.

  At the
end of the week of tests, I felt as if I had gone to the Olympics and ended up sweeping the floor after everyone had left. I was sad, angry, and lost. What was I going to do with my life?

  I thought about the buffalo pulling the heavy plows in the endless fields. Farming, Chairman Mao had once said, was the lifeline of our country. If I continued to stay at the bottom of the class, it looked like it would be the lifeline of Comrade Chen Da as well.

  DIA AND I found a new spot behind the school wall, where we met and chatted as he polluted his lungs with dark tobacco. He told me the secret of the Dia tobacco. Since his grandpa’s time, they had kept a plot of land in their backyard the size of a basketball court, where they grew broad-leaved tobacco. The rich, bitter flavor was attributed to the fact that young Dia each morning watered the plants with the contents of three full night pots used overnight by the men in the Dia household. The thick, smelly piss nourished the young plants and added a special flavor not found with other growers. Thus Dia’s brand worked like a double-barreled shotgun, powerful and potent. It remained the only tobacco known to be able to quench their nicotine addiction, not a small feat.

  One afternoon, I came to the spot earlier than usual. The leafy guava tree shaded the place like a benevolent umbrella. I took a short nap on some old newspapers and covered my face with my English book. The four lessons that morning had left me with minimum interest in life. The hovering flies didn’t trouble me a bit. I didn’t care if ants were crawling all over my sweaty, naked feet. My body lay limp on the rough ground, feeling the chill of the red soil beneath.

  This morning, both the math and English teachers had stared at me a little longer. As expected, there was sarcasm in their eyes and a sneer in their voices. What pissed me off was that not only did they not welcome me back to the classes I used to cut, but they also made snide comments that brought cheap laughter from the other students.

  The young math teacher never gave up until he got the girls in class to laugh. He was a fat fellow with drooping eyes and thick, floppy lips. Whenever he looked at the tall girls in the back row, his eyes shone with lust. He would lecture and walk around the class, intentionally rubbing the girls’ backs, lingering there to drive a mathematical point home. He would touch their shoulders, and sometimes hold their hands a little too long, patting their soft young skin.

  Dia kept count of all these rubbings in a logbook. One day, he said, he would report it to the authorities and have the fat teacher locked up for besmirching the purity of those lovely girls. Dia was a vengeful brat who was loyal to his friends and a pain in the neck to his enemies. The fat teacher had snubbed him a few times, so Dia had declared him his enemy. The fat teacher often suggested we come to his dorm if anyone needed help. Young Dia had been there and the fat teacher wasn’t helpful. In fact, he hadn’t even opened the door after looking through the peephole. Dia had waited in the bushes by his dorm room; not five minutes later, he saw several girls being ushered in by the fat teacher.

  As I dreamed away, snoring, I felt an intolerable itch around my nose and mouth. I twitched my face violently. I twisted some more. The itch stayed. I opened one eye and saw Dia smiling down, dangling an ear of wheat over my face. I grabbed the little brat and threw him under me. He slipped out and climbed onto my back and we started wrestling. The spot where we were was on a slope, which we rolled down until we landed in a soft bed of wheat. Then we laughed while trying to get to our feet. We helped each other dust off and climbed back up to our spot again.

  “Have a smoke.” Dia sat down and rolled me a thick one.

  “No thanks, not after you told me the piss story.”

  “You’ll need some sorta smoke for what I gotta tell you.”

  It sounded bad. I looked into his eyes and he looked down. I took the roll and let him light it for me. Instantly, I felt the potent kick. The Dia piss worked miracles. I spit like a fisherman. “What’s the matter?”

  “The midterm grades are out.” He had a dead man’s tone, flat.

  “How are ours?” I could feel my heart begging for mercy from the good Buddha. Make it presentable, I promised him, and I’ll give you another thousand kowtows this very night.

  “Well, mine are terrible.”

  “And?”

  “Yours are real bad.”

  Kowtowing wouldn’t be necessary anymore. I had hit bottom and I deserved it. I puffed on the bitter smoke. For the first time, I felt good as I inhaled. I felt the rush go to my head; it was comforting, and I was satisfyingly numb. I leaned back on the red dirt wall limply, like a piece of smashed tofu. There wasn’t an ounce of strength left in my body.

  I was a failure, shaming myself, and my family. I should change my last name and never return home to beg for meals anymore. Maybe I would take to the road like Mo Gong and Siang. The burden of failure made me despise myself.

  “That’s not all,” Dia added, stealing a careful look at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone pasted the results of all your exams on the wall outside our classroom. Now the whole school knows.”

  “Son of a whore! It must be our principal teacher.” I gritted my teeth and slammed my fists into the soil. Now I was the laughingstock of the whole school. All my enemies, old and new, would be rejoicing over my downfall. Not only was I the son of a landlord, but I was stupid and lazy. Wise people could forgive the former but not the latter. I had shamed my whole family tree. My esteemed great-grandpa was at the top, and I was the loose, rotten screw at the bottom, the one who ruined the family’s reputation. Dia shook my shoulder to make sure I was still alive and passed me another Dia-brand stogy. My hands shook from anger and humiliation; the only hope of steadying them any time soon was what my young friend was offering me.

  I lay there with the afternoon sun caressing my face. The school bell rang like the call of a ghost. I could just see the smirks on the faces of my obnoxious schoolmates awaiting my entrance. I gestured to my friend to go to class while I lay unmoving, desperate for the sun to set so that the darkness would veil my shameful face.

  Dia left his tobacco bag with me and said he would come to check on me. I managed a slight nod as he backpedaled away from me. My hopes of going to college were dashed. I was a breathing dead body. There was no dignity, shame, or respect left in me, only regrets, tons of them. I had lived my life vicariously and now I was to suffer forever.

  When the sky finally darkened, I collected my books and took the small dirt road home, staying away from the street. I bumped into old farmers lugging muddy plows on their shoulders, walking behind their buffalo as they headed home after a long day’s work. The narrow path between the green wheat fields couldn’t accommodate both the muddy animals and me at the same time, so I had to wade into the wet field to let them through. I did this a few times, but it was better dealing with a mute animal than a dozen yelling boys and girls who took pleasure from another human’s sufferings. I gladly gave way to the buffalo.

  When I sneaked through our back door, Mom wasn’t surprised or angry that I was late and all covered with mud. While getting a bowl of rice ready for me, she watched me silently. They knew. Dia must have told them.

  As I sat on the last step to the river, I took my time washing my feet, dangling them in the warm water and letting the tiny fish nibble on them. I tried to think of a way to avoid the disastrous subject of midterm tests. There was no easy way.

  My family of tired young farmers would have no patience when the only student in the household came home with disgraceful academic results. They worked their butts off in the fields, callused their hands, bent their young backs, and lost their dream of being young. I had been wasting my time smoking, playing around, and not making use of the great opportunity offered me. It was a sin they couldn’t have afforded to make.

  With my head bent and eyes downcast, I stumbled into our dining room. The whole family stopped talking as I entered.

  Silence.

  I damned well deserved it. I slid into my seat and s
tared at the tip of my chopsticks, eating carefully so that they didn’t clink on the edge of the bowl and anger anyone. I heard myself slurp in the rice. The silence was getting heavier with each passing second.

  Dad scooped a big spoonful of green beans into my bowl. It was a good sign. The head of the family had spoken with his action. I stole a look at him. He looked back.

  “You broke a record, they say.”

  I was quiet.

  “It’s time you do something about it. Your brother here wants to take time off to prepare for the college exam, but the commune won’t allow him. Even if they do allow him, we’re not sure we could do without his food rations.”

  He pointed at the rice that was getting cold in my bowl. I stared at it and my guts twisted with guilt and sorrow. I wished I were dead. If I had been the older one, I would have been out there hustling. I witnessed the hardships my brother and sisters endured every day. They were in their late teens and early twenties. They had no new clothes and no money, just bodies filled with aches and pains such as only older folks should have. But the worst was that they thought they would be forced to be farmers for life, unable to marry anyone else but another farmer, to bear another generation of lowly farmers, on into infinity. The sun would never rise in their minds. It was modern-day slavery on the farm, with the promise of little in return. In contrast, all I did was go to school. And what had I achieved? A shameful performance.

  “You have a year and a half to get your act together; the farming tools will all be ready and waiting for you in the pigsty, just in case.”

  It sounded like probation. No improvement, and I would be condemned to a life sentence on the Communist farm. I looked up at everybody after the sentencing, feeling a load being lifted off my back. They all wore mixed expressions of reproach and criticism, along with a touch of encouragement and even hope; the whole spectrum. I loved my family.

  That night before going to sleep I asked Mom to wake me at five from the following day on and every day afterward. I promised her that I would use the precious morning hours before breakfast when my mind was uncluttered to take a bite out of those unopened books of mine. She nodded thoughtfully, half doubting my sincerity.