Colors of the Mountain (23 page)

The class laughed.

I stayed down, quiet.

“If you had let me know earlier, I could have prepared something special for you, like an ABC lesson.” He laughed along with the class and as usual, ended up coughing until his face turned blue. He leaned on the desk until the spasm passed.

I felt embarrassed and ashamed, but I was angry, too.

Cough some more, you fool
, I thought.

Outside the window, I-Fei was making a face at me, gesturing for me to join him.

“Yeah, why don’t you just let yourself out and have a smoke with your pal down there?” The teacher caught his breath then threw another piece of chalk at I-Fei, which hit his forehead.

Laughter again.

I could feel my face turn red, then white. I decided to leave the room and never return. As I crossed the threshold, I heard him say, “Now we can start our lesson.”

I-Fei had already lit a cigarette for me. Quietly, I took a long drag as soon as I was out of the teacher’s sight.

“What did I tell you?” I-Fei said. “There’s no place for us there. We might as well be the kind of students that we have always been.”

“I wasn’t always like this,” I said, puffing.

“I know,” I-Fei said. “You should have learned then what you know now.”

“You know everything.”

“You’re my best friend. People told me things after we beat up that Han guy.”

“I used to be a very good student.”

“But you were a miserable wimp,” he said.

“That wasn’t my fault,” I said harshly.

I-Fei changed the subject. “Suppose you
were
a good student. Do you think the college would take you?”

“Do you mean with my family background?”

He nodded.

“But my aunt said it was regardless of one’s family background.”

“And you believe that?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because my dad said it was just a pretense. There will be different standards for admission. This society isn’t going to change that fast. No offense to you people.” He shook his head and threw a stone at a passing bird as we left school for the day.

From then on, miserably, I carried my schoolbag, heavy with untouched books, heading for classes I didn’t understand. I would ask this student and that student, humbly trying to catch up on my own. But the more I learned, the more I realized how much I had missed and the more depressed I got. I was too ashamed to talk about it to my parents or to any teachers, most of whom had given up on me by now.

But my parents had noticed that I had been spending more time in my room, using a kerosene light at night, looking at my textbooks, and occasionally gingerly trying out some English pronunciations. I often heard Sen and Mo Gong whistling outside my window to get my attention, but I tried to control myself.

One night, the whistling lasted longer and I knew they couldn’t wait anymore.

“You fucking become a bookworm nowadays,” Mo Gong said. “You can’t simply close the window and not answer us.”

“What’s going on, brother?”

“Well, Yi is leaving.”

“Where’s he going?”

“His grandpa is retiring from the factory and Yi is taking over his job as an office worker.”

We walked to Yi’s workshop, where there was a table of food waiting for us. Sen, Siang, and Yi rushed over, picked me up, and threw me onto the sawdust.

“The place is clean,” I exclaimed to Yi, dusting my coat. “You’re really getting the hell out of here?”

“Yeah. I was hoping you would get into the county performing troupe so that we could be working in Putien together.”

“You have to go alone for now,” I said.

“Let’s celebrate our first breakthrough among the brothers,” Sen said. “Yi, don’t you ever forget us. I’m still the eldest.”

“He’s going to marry a fair-skinned Putien city girl and she’s going to say she’ll leave if you keep those dirty friends,” Siang joked.

“Talk about marrying,” Sen said. “Da, you should write a letter for Yi to his old master’s daughter, Ping. Remember her? And tell her the news.”

“Maybe in English,” Mo Gong said. “I heard you making those funny sounds.”

“Shut up, you,” I said, good-naturedly.

“Don’t be shy. We want you to do good. I would want you, if anyone, to make us proud by being a college student,” Sen said. “The rest of us are history. You’re our only hope.”

“I guess I could jot down something. Hope it doesn’t backfire like last time,” I said.

“There’s no need for the letter,” Yi said. “Let’s eat.”

Grandpa had prepared the food for us. He was glad that his company had allowed Yi to take over his job, that his grandson would be doing exactly the same thing he had done his whole life. It was easier than carpentry. All he needed to do was keep a neat, clean inventory of the contents of the warehouse he was watching. So long, sawdust, good-bye, ball-swinging!

“But why?” Sen said.

“She came here yesterday,” Yi confessed.

“What did you do to her?” Sen said eagerly.

“Yi, you dog!”

“She said she was quitting the commune’s performing troupe and returning home to the village to get married.”

“What!”

“Yeah, she was promised by her mother to the Communist chief of her village. She came here to give us candies and cigarettes to celebrate.” Yi opened a box filled with her gifts. We chewed on the candies and smoked the cigarettes thoughtfully.

“Do you think she wants the party chief to be her husband?” I asked.

“I doubt it. I knew the guy when I was working there.” Yi took a drag after a sip of tea. “He’s about forty, with a pitted face. His wife committed suicide for an unknown reason. She hanged herself. They had three kids. He once wanted to sleep with a young teacher in the village. When she refused him, she was fired.”

“Sounds like a criminal.”

“Close. He was a local warlord. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had forced sex on my master’s wife first and then made her promise her daughter to him.”

“That sounds like foul play to me.”

“She was crying yesterday and didn’t tell me anything, but I guessed.”

“Shouldn’t you do something about it?”

“I don’t know.” Yi turned moody.

“I bet you could start a rumor that would somehow ruin the engagement,” I said, thinking of how my dad had helped my cousin Yan get rid of an unwanted suitor.

“He would ruin you all,” Yi said. “He has no enemies, because he has done all kinds of things to get rid of them. He is the Communist warlord in that corner of the country. Unless something changes, he is going to be there forever.”

The party ended with us wrestling each other on the soft sawdust. I promised to go with Yi to his factory the next day and help him carry the luggage. We chatted about the future until midnight. I told them I wanted to go to college. They laughed and said if I could master the art of that four-stringed thing the name of which they still didn’t quite know how to say, then I should have no problem. They were my true friends. There was a generous spirit among them, not jealousy. As I walked home alone in the darkness, whistling, I saw a star shine brilliantly over the top of our ancient pine tree to the east of Yellow Stone. I was like that, only a twinkle in the dark.

THE WESTERN TIP
of Yellow Stone was all river and ancient lychee trees that dipped low in the water. In summer, straw-hatted boatmen poled along slowly between the green branches that were in their way. The lychees, ripe and juicy, burned red like the cheeks of a gaudily painted woman, and made the branches droop even lower. Only cicadas disturbed the tranquillity.

When I was young, I would take off my shorts and jump into the river, swim underwater until I reached the lychee trees, then shoot up like a little fish, grab the red fruit, and fall back into the river. The napping old man guarding the lychee trees would wake up and blindly throw stones at me. I could hold my breath underwater until I reached the boats docked on the opposite side of the river, where I would emerge, naked, with the fruit in one hand and my shorts in the other, and run into the fields.

In the crook of the river, where the houses thinned and the trees thickened, nestled a three-story white house with a red-tiled roof. A tall wall fenced it off. It was a small world within itself. The entrance stayed closed at all times. Only the tops of papaya trees could be seen from the outside. The little white house belonged to twin sisters, the Weis, who were Baptists and had never married. In the town where Buddha called the shots, the little white house by the river was a symbol of something alien yet sacred.

I remembered that years ago I had tried to poke a hole through the
tall wall to see what lay inside that mysterious compound. The low growl of an angry dog had sent me running like a plucked rooster. I never got to see the rare roses they said the twins grew, or the tempting papayas hanging from the trees. People said the twins read the Bible in the sun and prayed under the moonlight. They lived a quiet life, and paid for a maid to do the shopping and cleaning for them. Occasionally, they had visitors on weekends. Townspeople whispered that they were secretly involved in some sort of ceremony. Their father was one of the first Chinese Baptist ministers in Putien, and the twins had grown up in a Baptist church run by American missionaries. The Americans taught them English, and they went on to become English professors at a teachers’ college in Fuzhou. When the college closed down, they retired into the country, where their father had held the first Sunday service in the history of Yellow Stone. During the Cultural Revolution, they had been shaved bald and paraded down the street as special American agents, who had brought the seed of western religion to corrupt local minds. But when the Cultural Revolution ended, the government declared the Weis religious leaders, and made them the head of a bogus government religious agency meant to give foreign countries the impression that China had some degree of religious freedom.

The white-haired twin sisters enjoyed a special status among the townspeople. They were the closest thing to real Westerners. Those few who had been inside the home had had a glimpse of a mysterious life behind those closed doors.

The old vegetable man claimed to have heard the twin sisters talking in “the language of the red hair,” probably English, one day when he was making a delivery. It was gentle, like singing, he said. The old cleaning lady insisted that the twins only used forks and knives. It puzzled the local people. It was such a terribly unlucky thing to do, using a knife at the dining table. Maybe it was the different god they believed in who helped them ward off the consequences of all the wrong things they did.

The blind fortune-teller, Mr. Mai, claimed to have felt the presence of Jesus Christ’s seal on one of the twin’s palms when they delivered some food to his house during a time of hardship. Then there was the inevitable subject of Buddha. The cleaning lady, slightly blind and very
deaf, had swept every corner of the house and sniffed every inch of space and she said that there was absolutely no sign of Buddha, no incense or shrine. But the sisters did a fair amount of singing, she noted. One played the organ, while the other sang foreign tunes at sunset every day. Their trembling, high-pitched voices flowed beyond the tall wall and lingered among the dense lychee trees. People would stop and listen. As time went by, the quaint western music somehow blended into the quietness of the town and became part of the sunset tradition at Yellow Stone. But one day the singing stopped. There was a rumor that one of the twins was under the weather. The respected country doctor was seen rushing through the entrance, and for the next few days their church friends filed in and out of the place, solemn-faced. The western end of the town became quieter without their singing and a hushed gloom hovered over the thick treetops.

One day, after dark, we heard a gentle knocking at our door.

Dad opened it. Outside stood the white-haired Professor Wei, one of the twin sisters. Upon recognizing her, Dad took a step back.

“May I come in, please?” Her voice was so gentle and sincere.

“Of course, of course.” Dad opened the door wide and let her in.

She bowed and smiled sweetly at us. We put down our chopsticks, and bowed back to her. She was a petite lady in her late sixties. Upright and dignified, she seemed taller than her mere five feet. Her white hair was braided and twisted into a bun in back, neat and elegant.

“How may I help you, Professor?” Dad asked politely. He gestured for us kids to leave the room. We hurried out, then stuck our ears against the closed door.

“Please forgive me for intruding at such a late hour.” She took out a handkerchief and continued. “My poor dear sister has had a minor stroke, and now her mouth is twisted to one side. I have heard of your reputation. Can you please help her?”

“I am flattered.” Dad rubbed his hands like a joyful kid. “I’ll be more than happy to see what I can do.” Dad was in his best mood when he was called upon to help others.

“Mother,” he called out to my mom, as if he knew that we were behind the closed door listening to every single word, “get me the blue jacket and a flashlight. I need to go out.”