Colors of the Mountain (39 page)

It was ironic to bring Mao into this drive for intellectual excellence. If Mao had known what his Little Red Guards were doing, he would have howled like a lonely wolf in his icy coffin and cried his smoke-ridden lungs out. Mao, the dictator, was the friend of the devils. He wanted China in perpetual turmoil so that he could rule forever. He had a simple philosophy: peace and leisure bred unrest and resentment
against leaders, while a sense of crisis strengthened his own leadership. That was why, ever since the Communists took over in 1949, Mao hadn’t stopped making fake smoke over fake fires. One political movement had followed another. And strewn down his long path lay the bones of millions of angry ghosts. He hadn’t cared about the young generation, whom he had ordered to walk out of school and into the countryside to get reeducated by the poor farmers in their muddy fields. He had simply wanted them to be ignorant, so they wouldn’t be aware of what a fiend he really was.

Young people loved it. Since the big guy didn’t want them in school, they packed up and moved to the countryside by the millions, singing the Red Guard songs and waving their Little Red Books. But soon, they found that all they could learn from farmers was backbreaking labor and antiquated farming techniques dating back thousands of years. So they started insulting the farmers and stealing their daughters, and stopped going to work. All day long the youngsters smoked, drank, gambled, and fell in love. There was nothing else out there to do. The lonely countryside became their trap. They roamed around the hills, but it was too late to move back to the cities they had come from, because of China’s population control system. A city person could easily give up his registration to move downward into the country, but not vice versa. They cried, and some committed suicide. Now they understood what their leader Mao had meant by finding your roots in the countryside. He had meant it literally. Go marry someone there, breed a litter of ignorant farmers, and never come back to the city to bother me again.

At eight sharp every morning the old bellman wobbled to the bronze bell that hung under an old pine tree. The sound of the bell echoed far and wide. In the school hallway, Peking Man snuffed out his cigarette and shuffled into our classroom. He smiled like a gorilla at the new slogan on the wall. He tried hard for a few seconds to conceal his laughter, but his thin lips were unable to cover his big teeth.

“Who put it there?” Peking Man asked. “Is that a joke or something?”

The class was very quiet.

“When Mao said study hard, I don’t think he meant the kind of stuff
we’re studying now,” he stuttered. “You should know that he was referring to his Little Red Book, but I doubt any college would give you credit for that.”

The whole class rocked with laughter. Only Peking Man could open the first class of the year that way. What he said was brave, because Mao’s ghosts still haunted the nation, but Peking Man was fearless and angry. He had been beaten and sent to labor camps not too long ago.

He snapped his fingers and the class calmed down. “About learning history, let me tell you a story.”

We were all ears.

“When I was at the university, I roomed with a medical student. Every night before going to sleep, the guy stuck his hand into a wooden box under his bed and mumbled things. Day in and day out. Finally, I couldn’t contain my curiosity and I asked him what he was doing. You know what he said? He had a whole collection of human bones in that box. He was trying to develop a feel for the bones blindfolded, because he wanted to be a good doctor.

“What are the bones of history?” He paused and looked at us. “From that day on, I did the same thing with all the historical facts: dates and names of the dynasties, all the important little things in the study of history. I had flash cards, stacks of them, under my bed next to my stinking shoes. Before we turned out the lights, he would be busy with his bones, and I with my cards. We had a grand time. We both graduated with honors.”

Peking Man didn’t ask us to do the same thing; he simply inspired and challenged us to follow in his footsteps. He was the perfect teacher for us to follow. His hairy chest, long limbs, formidable face, and that mountain of a jaw all attested to a man who knew the past well.

“Now I heard that you guys are going to take the Liberal Arts examination. We don’t have a lot of time left. Thousands of years of history have to be learned and relearned. I am here to guide you, but you have to do the rowing. Do you have any special requests before I begin?”

“How many questions did you guess right on the last national history examination?” one boy asked.

My question exactly.

“I would say I guessed them all, because I taught them all.”

“No. I meant in the final days, when you gave your cram session,” the boy persisted.

“Oh, that. Three out of the five essay questions. I gave my last graduating class the exact answers two days before the test. I considered it my gift to them. The smart ones went home and committed them to memory, and they came out of the test smiling from ear to ear.”

Another point driven home. Thou shalt heed my words. Peking Man had the mentality of a god, and we were brought down on our knees in the presence of his achievement.

“But,” he said, “my guessing is just a bonus. Sometimes I guess correctly, other times I don’t. You need to go home and chew up this thick volume.” He waved his textbook as if it were a Bible. “Digest this and make it become part of you. Every word in here, every fact, is a building block to your dream of a college degree. Young people like you belong there.” His eyes swept across me, and my heart warmed up ten degrees. “Remember, for the next few months you have to sleep, eat, walk, and talk with these books. And you students who are behind, you had better dream about them as well.”

I repeated the whole thing to Dia during the break and he was spellbound. It was exactly the kind of motivational speech he got excited about. He started hopping up and down the quiet hallway, cursing the teacher who had assigned him to L-Two, the Siberia of intellectual stimulus. He had spent the first class fighting for a good seat, then sleeping and waking to the foul smell of the guy in front of him who farted throughout the whole morning.

“Hey, calm down. Like the Peking Man said, you just have to study hard yourself. He can only do the guiding.”

“You don’t know how hard it is to be among those losers. Thinking about it makes me sick.”

Dia’s attitude surprised me. He was changing. He no longer saw himself as a loser the way he used to. I saw hope in him.

“You know, let’s study together tonight and see how effective it is.”

“How?”

“Well, I have a plan.” I whispered into his ear and he smiled.

After dinner that day, I told Mom that I was going to study in school
until late at night. I asked for a key to our door and got a bag full of food for Dia, who had sent word home that he was sleeping over at my house.

The school was locked, so we found a short wall and threw ourselves over. We ducked our heads and moved swiftly toward our classroom. The night guard was a middle-aged man who was still trying to impregnate his wife. He had been married for many years and had no kids. A monk from Ching Mountain had a secret recipe. He urged the night guard to drink a glass of grain liquor every night before mounting his wife. The guy had a natural aversion to alcohol. The taste of liquor drove him crazy, but his wife, a big woman by any standards, was said to pin him in the crook of her flabby arm and force the liquor down his unwilling throat. The man had passed out a few times, but the wife didn’t care. All that mattered was what was coming after the liquor took effect on her subdued husband. She had been heard singing lullabies at midnight on a good night.

The drinking drill took place every night. Through their window, you could see the silhouette of the little man facing a glass of liquor with a woman the size of a hill looming over him. The man had nightmares when darkness fell, rumor had it.

Dia stopped at the guard’s window. He was curious about what went on in there, but this was not the time. I kicked his bony behind and we lifted the window of our classroom like a couple of thieves and sat at our seats.

I planned to study history every night with Dia. It would save the oil my huge lamp at home burned, and Dia could smoke his lungs rotten while studying, a thing my mom despised. We would use candlelight to illuminate our books.

Dia took out the candles I had given him money to buy. All four of them gave off a mystic light, soft and calm. He rubbed his eyes and mumbled something to the effect that he could not see well with the tiny candles. I whacked his head and told him that once upon a time there was a scholar so poor yet so committed to his studies that he poked a hole in his neighbor’s wall to borrow the light coming through it. In the winter, he would sit by a large pile of snow and study in the silver light coming from the icy surface of the snow at night.

“All right, all right, enough of the historical bullshit. I need a smoke.”

I whacked him again playfully and opened my history book while he lit his thick one with the candle.

During the winter holiday, I had finished my history studies. They included Chinese ancient history, world history, and the stupid history of the Communist party. The subjects were contained in a thick volume of one thousand pages. In the beginning, I had been stunned by how many dynasties China had. The names of all the emperors and their successors piled up like endless waves of the Dong Jing River. Gradually, I developed a method of study. I charted them into a family tree and gave them funny names, like those I used to give to my dogs, chickens, and ducks. I carried the charts with me at all times and reviewed them again and again, even when I went to the bathroom. Every minute was quality time in my schedule.

“Have you read through the book at least once?” I asked Dia.

“I’m trying to, but I can’t remember a thing. All I remember is how many wives the first emperor of the Tan dynasty had, and how one of his wives eventually took control and ran the country. You know, I actually fell in love with her. I think I need a wife like that to run my pathetic life.”

I shook my head hopelessly, unable to help but be amused by him. I wished that everything we had to learn in school were that interesting. I bet our hero, Peking Man, must have had a blast studying the personal lives of those corrupt emperors. He had probably wished he were one of them. The emperor was above all law. He could have as many wives as he wanted. A lot of them were discarded after one night and locked in the back of his palace, forbidden forever to leave, left to entertain themselves with the eunuchs.

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “At least you remember something. Why don’t you try to think of the whole book as a story about us and the people who lived before us in this land called China. It will be fun.”

“Nah, the fun is just reading about the female parts. If I were living in those feudal times, I’d definitely apply for a job at the palace as a eunuch.”

“And have your balls cut off?”

“It would be worth it. I’d be in charge of the rejected ladies in the back of the palace and could enjoy every single one of them every day.”

“Come on. Let’s study. We’re not here to talk about girls. You read the first chapter and I’ll test you later tonight.”

Dia ducked his head and forced his eyes back to his book. I moved my two candles to the corner of the room and started reviewing my chapters. I normally began lightheartedly, then, as I thought about the big test just around the corner, every single fact in the thick book became important. Finally, I became paranoid and began to memorize the tiniest details. I even remembered the birthdays of each emperor. My brother, who had just started his preparation, was totally shaken when he found out that I could even remember the name of a small village where one emperor had stayed at the humble shelter of a blind villager when he was chased out of the capital city. It had appeared in a footnote.

The night was quiet and cool.

At first, I could hear Dia’s feet tapping the floor. He smoked a few times, then I became totally absorbed in the book. Dia was forgotten. A couple of times, he tried to get my attention with his out-of-tune whistling. I ignored him as a matter of discipline. When I finally turned to look at him during my break, Dia was sweetly snoring away in a puddle of drool. His candles had fallen to the table and burned themselves out.

I shook my head and walked over. Yanking a long strand of my hair out, I spun it in his nostrils. He frowned a few times, then suddenly woke up. “Shit, I drifted off.”

“How many pages did you do?”

“Three.”

“That’s it?”

“I need electric light. Candlelight makes me sleepy.”

“You numbskull! You don’t even have electric power in your village. How can you say that?”

“I’m a new Dia man and I don’t do well under candlelight.”

“Well, it should be safe now. The guard’s window is dark.” Dia ran and flipped on the light.

“It means something, you know?” Dia said.

“What means something?”

“That I can only study under this big light.”

“Yeah, it means something. It means you need some serious spanking right now.” I picked up our teacher’s stick and chased the lazy lout around the room until I nailed him down on the floor. I whipped him lightly and he begged for mercy.

“Admit that you’re lazy and don’t ever talk like that anymore.”

“Forgive me. I was just playing with you, pal.”

The next three hours we spent quietly studying. I could see him fighting off a yawn a few times. He pinched his nose, twisted his monkey ears, and at one point spanked himself with the stick I had used on him. I was proud of him. If I could discipline him like this every day, he would probably do all right.

“Now it’s test time,” I announced.

“No, it’s quitting time,” Dia retorted. “It’s eleven. The electric light is going out.”

“We’re just beginning.”

“Mercy, what’s the questions?”

I gave him three simple questions. He missed one only. Then he questioned me. I got them all right.