“Is that true that no one in our school has ever made it as an English major?”
“It’s true. Why?” I asked.
“You gotta make me proud. I was out there happy for you and the Head trashed me left and right. Now I’m totally busted up inside.”
“Let me ask you, was there anyone in the history of this lowly school who ever played the violin before?”
He blinked and cocked his head for a second before shaking it slowly. A broad grin spread across his sad face. “Right, you’re the first one.” He straightened up and hugged me violently.
“You could do it, man,” Dia spat out excitedly, “and you gotta do it for me and the fucking school. Then when you pack up and take the fabulous Fujiang–Beijing train, I’ll load a shotgun and shoot the fucking Head right on his shining skull, that son of a whore.”
“You got to study with me. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a chance, too,” I said.
“Forget it. You’re the real genius. Remember a couple a months ago I had to pass the answers to you through the window? You knew nothing then. Now you worked hard, and you’ve scored high. I know this ain’t the big one, but it shows you can do it. I ain’t got it. You gotta keep up. I’m ready to do anything for you, carry the bags, roll cigarettes, get water, anything. In fact, I’d even marry you if I were a girl and you fancied me. Just let me tag along, don’t desert me. I feel awful lonely nowadays since you changed.”
“I’m sorry. You could stay overnight at our house anytime you want,” I suggested. “You know my mom loves you, so does all my family. We could always spare a bowl or two at the dinner table.”
He nodded, almost in tears. I rolled him a thick one from his bag and he was as happy as a goldfish.
MR. KA, MY new English teacher, was a dark-skinned young man with a head of feathery curls.
He summoned me into his office. “Congratulations,” he said. “You finally woke up.” He jerked his head violently. His curls were bothering him.
“I heard mixed things about you from some people, but it doesn’t matter what they said anymore,” he continued. “I like what I see now. You have potential.”
A brilliant opening line. He made a friend of me on the spot. It was us against them now.
“We have work to do to get you where you want to go.” He was good with abstract terms. “I’ll give you what I have and help you with what you need. Do you know what I mean?”
I was clueless. I shifted in my seat and nodded ambiguously.
“First thing to push for is membership in the Young Communist League. I checked your record and it’s pathetic. You weren’t even a Little Red Guard in elementary school.”
Not the memory of my miserable elementary school again.
“Someone screwed you up badly. It was wrong.” He narrowed his eyes and looked out of the window.
Damned right it was wrong. It was criminal. I was the only one in the whole fucking school who wasn’t a Little Red Guard because I was from a Black family and was personally on the suspect list as a counterrevolutionary. I still had nightmares about it.
“It’s time someone stood up for you. I’ll get you the membership before you graduate. It’ll enhance your chance of admission into a top-notch college like the one I went to. You don’t want to be second-guessed on such a minor point, do you?”
“No, sir, and thank you, sir.”
“No problem. I had the same conversation with Cing, another talented potential. You two are my only hopes for the year. I’ll personally involve myself with your growth. Together we’ll give it our best try.”
It brought to mind the pep talks from my Ping-Pong coach. The pep talks meant nothing, but they made you feel real good. A sort of national anthem in words.
Mr. Ka was doing what was commonly known among teachers as fishing, claiming credit for students who made it to prestigious colleges and using it to enhance their status and gain a promotion and a higher salary. Teachers at Yellow Stone High dropped names of former students now in college, and talked about their roles in propelling them there. They peppered their conversations in class, after meals, over tea, and even in bed with their wives with these names. They believed they’d made those kids college men, and they lived for the glory.
Mr. Ka had more at stake. He was new, and needed to establish a record. What a challenge he faced. No one in the history of the school had gone on to study English at a good college. He was the right man at the right time to do the right thing for the right person.
Within days, a small red poster was pasted on the school wall. It attracted almost no attention. It stated that I was belatedly being given the glorious title of Little Red Guard and had been admitted into the Young Communist League. For a brief moment, I felt like the Peking Man, tickled by the emptiness of such a title. Communism had become a commodity with a price tag, its value plummeting a notch each time it was sold at a garage sale. Soon the membership would become a tradable commodity, one you could pick up for a penny with a cold drink thrown in.
I went to Mr. Ka’s office to thank him. He slapped my shoulder and grabbed me with his strong hands.
“Congratulations, young comrade. You are the future of communism.” He spoiled the serious words by winking at me. Then, in an un-Communist gesture, he threw me a Flying Horse and said, “Let’s celebrate.” He put a match to the cigarette before I could refuse. We smoked in silence, staring out the window.
Professor Wei did the soprano thing when I told her the results. Her hands cupped beneath her chin and her silver head tilted to one side, she shook her head, speechless. She was in heaven. Her happiness for me was genuine. God bless her.
The school authorities regrouped the entire graduating class, which amounted to just over five hundred students. They were now formed into six science and two liberal arts classes. S-One, which was what Science One was commonly called, comprised the best of the science students and was where the Head and other snobs were. The school placed the best of its faculty into that class. The rest of the science classes were left to rot. Students held strikes against the school, threw rocks at S-One, and some snobs were even beaten for showing off their exclusivity. But the separation stayed.
L-One, or Liberal Arts One, also got the best Yellow Stone High had, which included the venerable Peking Man and an assortment of liberal arts buffs. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had. Apple-headed Cing took the back seat on the right; I took the one on the left. Poor Dia was regrouped into L-Two, where he claimed to sleep through most of the mornings without being disturbed by the teachers. They didn’t care. Students smoked in class and propped their feet on the desks. Teachers found a warm sunny spot and read novels.
L-Two was the Siberia of Yellow Stone High. Students there settled their daily intellectual disputes with fists. The school principal had joked about putting shackles and handcuffs on the podium in case of extreme violence. Dia was considered a good student and became a leader. He actually felt fine about it and often snubbed his followers in my presence. I liked the change in him. A good student in a bad class, he became more responsible. I was happy for him. I tried to get our English teacher, the hustler, to reconsider Dia’s case and have him moved to L-One, but he said he would wait until Dia showed some real progress on paper. I fed him with the crumbs from the Peking Man, and he didn’t miss much. He just had to face the fact that he might be stuck in a loser’s hole.
Cousin Tan returned home for a visit. His hair was longer and his shoes would be shiny if he’d bothered to polish them. His sunken cheeks had filled out, and he sported a few ballpoint pens lined up evenly in his jacket pocket. His crossed his legs, tapping his right foot languidly, his speech coming easily, filled with college jargon. He was on his spring break, with not a burden in the world. He sat in our living room, surrounded by my whole family.
“It’s all good meat they serve there at AU.” That stood for Amoy University.
“Even for breakfast?” I asked.
He nodded. “Pi
ckled meat.”
What a luxury. I had never heard of such a thing, but I believed him.
“But I stay away from pickled meat for breakfast for health reasons.” He shook his head ever so slightly. It was a shake we should feel rather than see. The movement was at least fifteen degrees gentler than that of a typical Yellow Stone farmer.
My mouth watered and I had to swallow a few times at the delicious thought of meat steaming on a plate. My lofty goals about going to college vanished, and my desires became very basic. My whole body yearned for meat. Simmered, roasted, sautéed, boiled, fried, smoked, or pickled. What difference did it make? The bloody flesh tasted good whatever you did to it.
“We spent a whole long month on MT,” he said casually.
The whole family shrugged. MT? What was that? Meat Truck?
“Military Training, that is, for all AU students,” Cousin Tan explained.
“Look at my hands.” He stretched out his hands for us to see. “They’re all callused now. See how hard the rifles have made them.”
It wasn’t AU or MT that had made his hands rough, I thought. It was FFW, Fucking Farm Work.
“I heard you are preparing for an English major,” he said, fingering the callus on his right hand.
“Yeah, what do you think?” Mom had urged me to seek his advice; now I was all ears.
“How should I say it?” He recrossed his legs and leaned back. “I’ve met some English majors at AU. They were all rich kids from the large city of Fuzhou and, of course, Amoy. You know, the kind that wear expensive clothes and watches, ride fancy bikes, and have lots of spending money. They’re artistic and romantic.”
His eyes narrowed as if he were staring at a mirage, close but untouchable. “There was one pretty slender girl, jeans and all, who was so talented she could speak English more fluently than some of the teachers there. She was from HK, you know.” Hong Kong. “I wouldn’t try for English. You have all the disadvantages. Those guys all have big, foreign tape recorders complete with American-language tapes. Have you seen a recorder before?” He shook his head. “Of course not.”
I still didn’t believe it was humanly possible to preserve the sound of a human voice once it had spoken. It was like trying to gather water once it had spilled.
“Those guys have beautiful, perfect accents. It’s talent. You have to be artistic and musical. I don’t think anyone at YSH [Yellow Stone High] could teach you that. And even if they could, we would be stuck, given our thick lips and slow tongues. If I were you, I would consider something else, maybe agricultural management.”
I saw my dad lose interest in talking to this new city man. He rolled a thick one and offered it to my cousin. I knew Dad was being funny. He should know that they wouldn’t do thick ones on the AU campus. Cousin Tan refused it, pulled out a Wing cigarette, and offered it to Dad and my brother.
“What is it?” Dad asked.
“Oh, it’s the most popular brand on campus. Even the chairman of my department at AU smokes these.”
Dad shook his head like a Yellow Stone farmer, violently from side to side. “Not my type. It’s too light, it’ll make me sneeze.” He broke the cigarette in half and dropped it on the floor. “Why don’t you stay for lunch?” Dad’s way of saying good-bye. Mom frowned warningly at him.
“No, no. I have to go to Putien to see some AU classmates, you know.”
Sure, we knew. Socializing. It was a part of high society. We had no meat for lunch in any case. We watched him comb his longish hair with his hands and walk with a straight back down the narrow street of Yellow Stone, greeting people with a wave of his hand like a victorious Napoleon.
I retreated to my room after he left, taking two hours to rebuild the spirit he had so gently and carelessly dashed. But no matter how tacky he had become, I still liked it better than seeing him locked up in his attic. He had the freedom to vent his airs now. That was what it was all about. I renewed my determination, wanting to be in his shoes, if not necessarily like him.
“Do you still want to pursue the English major?” Dad asked me later.
“Yes, even more so.”
“Why?”
“Because I think they’ve got a bunch of losers and playboys at AU. I’m not afraid of city folks. They’re wimpy, I’m tough. They already have everything without college. I don’t. I’ll work my butt off and beat every one of those pompous spoiled brats. Don’t you think I can do it?”
Dad smiled, and nodded confidently. He blew a perfect smoke ring. I caught it with my index finger, cutting it in half.
FIRECRACKERS FILLED YELLOW Stone’s narrow street with thick smoke. It was Chinese New Year again. Farming was halted and half the town was into serious gambling. The well-off smoked their Flying Horses and bet with cash; the stingy made do with grains or animals as bets; and the desperate smoked their thick handmade rolls and even put their wives on the betting table. Time-share concept at its most basic. A villager fifteen miles west of Yellow Stone was heard to have lost his wife twelve times at one sitting. When she got word, she drove him out of their house and had the commune arrest him, disclaiming her association with such a shameless loser.
The burning smell of firecrackers filtered through the window and the sound, similar to the beating of hollow bamboo poles, woke me up at the crack of dawn. I opened my eyes; it was still dark outside. Superstitious townspeople believed that the firecrackers scared the devils and demons away. No New Year’s celebration could start without a lot of ghost-chasing early on New Year’s Day.
I stared at the remaining stars, still twinkling in the east. I badly wanted to snuggle under the thick cotton blanket and sleep until the sun smiled through my window, to dream a delicious dream of the long, tender noodles with succulent meat, oysters, and crispy eggs that I knew awaited me at the breakfast table. I dozed off, only to be awakened by another burst of noisy firecrackers.
“Wake up, I’m ready.” It was my mom at the door. Her voice was gentle but firm. By now, I had become her regular sidekick in this yearly kowtow ritual. I wondered how she managed before I became her self-appointed altar boy. What had happened to my four able-bodied siblings? She must have been busy since midnight preparing the food for sacrifices and arranging them before each of her dozen gods. I remembered that dinner last night hadn’t ended until midnight. That meant Mom had skipped a whole night of sleep, maybe dozing off in between her preparations.
“Another half hour,” I declared from under the blanket.
There was a brief lull. Then she said, “I want to start early this year, for you and your brother’s good luck.”
Somehow Mom believed that the earlier you knelt before the gods in the morning to thank them, the more luck it would bring. This was going to be a big year for us. It was her way of making sure that Jin and I would go as far as Tan had done. Ever since the day Tan had mentioned his college life and all the meat they ate, Mom had been dropping hints. Her favorite was, “If you like meat so much, you should try to go to college like Cousin Tan.” She was a smart woman, and her little hints worked on me better than ever. Only she could see that a lofty idea like going to college could be reduced to the simple word meat. She mentioned it whenever I was hungry and stuck my head into the kitchen in search of food; it would send waves down to my empty stomach, making me even hungrier. When I was bored with studying, I’d lick my lips and imagine the devilishly good taste of meat in my mouth. Then, sighing, I’d struggle on, just like the cows of Yellow Stone thinking of the delicious hay awaiting them when the plowing was done for the day.
The word luck jerked me out of bed. I wouldn’t want to second-guess Mom’s wisdom. Besides, all those good gods must be watching. I put on the New Year’s attire that had been neatly folded on my bench and walked downstairs quietly so as not to awaken the rest of my family. I splashed my sleepy eyes with icy water, scrubbed every inch of my face, and brushed my teeth extra carefully, using a new tube of toothpaste. Mom wouldn’t let me near the little shrines if I wasn??
?t considered clean.
It was time to hit the floor in front of those who held my miserable fate in their invisible hands. I stretched my knees and my back in preparation for the torture to come, then rubbed the skin on my forehead and massaged my temples with both thumbs. I knew that my head would ache, my knees would hurt, and my back might break, but I was willing to do it anyway. I told myself if I didn’t have the brains to crack open the door to college, I surely had the thick forehead to kowtow my way there. Nothing could stop me once I had a dozen gods behind me.
As usual, we started with the God of Earth. Mom, on her knees, said her words of gratitude, followed by wishes for the new year. In her rapid, almost unintelligible chanting, the word college was squeezed into the flow. She had said those prayers morning and night, and they slipped in and out of her mouth like well-oiled noodles. The prayers were for the general welfare of the whole family, for health and prosperity. And then there were the special requests. The order of importance and significance was predetermined in her mind. There would be no mistakes, no faltering. This was where her expertise lay. She was the voice of the Chen household. By now, the gods should have no problem recognizing her.
I looked at her humble, pious face. Her eyes were closed for maximum spirituality. There was both joy and peace in her gestures. She was begging before her forbidding gods. At that moment, Mom was a little girl pleading for candy. I had never really seen her in this light before. Finally, she opened her eyes and smiled happily, as though she had just gotten what she had prayed for. She gestured to me.