Colors of the Mountain

by Da Chen

  I had somehow gotten used to my living arrangement. Each night I walked the long, dark, narrow road to the boiler room and down the squeaky hallway before it turned completely dark. I brought a pee-pot with me and placed it under the bed. I had hidden a small knife beneath my pillow that I grabbed whenever there was a disturbance in the house. One night, I heard a crash at around four in the morning, and I spent the rest of the night holding the knife in my hand, curled up under the blanket like a shrimp getting fried. The next morning, I saw that a huge piece of ceiling tile had dropped on top of the old boiler. The rats must have been having a party up there.

  During all those lonely nights, I never heard any sound or movement from my invisible neighbor. I was hoping she would show up someday and make the place a little noisier. Anything was more welcome than being alone, but then that night finally arrived. It was drizzling, and the sea breeze was picking up. The clouds, thick and dark, were gathering on the western horizon. I had my dinner early and went back to bed, reading an old warlord story. The thought of an impending storm kept me up past midnight. As I was slipping into a dream, through my thin wall I heard laughter roaring from the hallway. The wall consisted simply of boards pasted with old newspapers to cover the cracks so soundproofing was worse than zero. A sneeze made the walls tremble. There was a man and a woman. The man mumbled something incoherent, his tongue thick, and the girl was giggling and cursing teasingly. Unsteady footsteps made the hallway shake.

  I nimbly crawled out of the bed and removed a piece of tape from an existing hole, what I called my watch hole, glimpsing the back of a heavy man with an arm around the girl. His other hand was on her chest. He was a big, bearish guy and she was a shadowy, petite figure under the dim, fifteen-watt lighting. They stumbled into the wall and stopped at the door as the girl fumbled for the key. The man did something quick and the girl laughed and slapped his wrist, like a mom admonishing her naughty son. They disappeared behind the door and the light went off. It must be her husband, I thought, and thanked Buddha for saving me from a miserable night alone in the storm.

  Soon enough, there was noise. Unbearable noise, like water falling from a tall mountain. There was a loud moan from a desperate, helpless-sounding man and a loud cry of pain from the girl. The man was doing something rhythmic and the girl yelled to his beat. There was heavy breathing and the bed squeaked. Something was knocked off the table, dropping to the ground. It went on for four or five unbearable minutes before the man let out a cry. It sounded like he was beating the girl. Suddenly it ended. I could hear the raindrops drumming on the roof. My heart was racing and my ears echoed with my neighbors’ cries. I squatted at the foot of the wall, puzzled, worried, and curious. I wondered whether I should storm out with some sort of weapon and help her.

  “Now get out of here,” I heard the girl say.

  “No, please. I’m not going.”

  “Get out, you drunk.”

  I heard the crash of a bottle, and then heard the man stumbling into the hallway. I glued my eye to the hole. He limped and rubbed his face with his hand. I saw just his back, and the slight limp. The girl slammed the door and I heard her breath catching unevenly.

  Something had gone wrong, but it wasn’t my business to interfere. I rolled into my bed and tried to think of what those desperate moans and cries had been about. I wished my brothers in Yellow Stone were here to explain. The storm began to pick up and the wind made my walls rattle. At such times I would usually curl up and paste my back to the wall, covering myself with the sheet from head to toe, but I was too preoccupied with the mystery to be scared that night. I stayed up long afterward, waiting for the man to storm back and for the girl to scream again, but there was only the rain and the sound of the girl’s snoring, light and even.

  Like the face of a child, the next day the sun crawled along the window bar shamelessly, as if there had never been a drop of rain last night. I checked the alarm clock. It read seven. I jumped out of bed and flattened my nose to the crack in the wall, watching for my neighbor. Not a sound. I opened the door and looked up and down the hallway. No traces of a broken bottle. I sauntered along, hands in pockets, whistling, and slowed as I passed the girl’s room. It was quiet, like before. Then I opened the window at the head of the hallway and the sun flooded the floor. Only in the light did I see the evidence of glistening bits of broken glass, glass that hadn’t been there yesterday. So it hadn’t been a nightmare last night. There had been a girl, a man, and a bottle. As I looked closer, there were traces of a broom having touched the surface of the dusty floor. She had tried to clean up the evidence. She had probably left before I woke up.

  When I went to work, I couldn’t help telling everyone about what happened in my boiler room last night. My listeners—Ying, Ning, and Fatty—laughed at me hysterically.

  Fatty smiled his silly smile, making his eyes disappear into the folds of his face. The two girls blushed and looked at each other with a secret understanding before turning away to whisper to each other.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you think it was scary?” I asked Fatty.

  He shook his head and said, “Outside, not here.” He looked at the girls and his face, too, reddened.

  I followed him out of the office.

  He sat down on the cement steps that led to the water tower and gestured for me to sit beside him.

  “You want a smoke for this one?” He pulled out a Flying Horse for himself and one for me. We lit the cigarettes with a single match.

  “What is it, something funny?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It’s embarrassing in front of the girls.”

  “Come on, tell me. What’s so embarrassing about it?”

  He drew a few long, deep puffs and said, “Do you know what a man and a woman do when they are alone at night?”

  I wasn’t getting it. I smoked and shook my head.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen a male ox humping a female, with that long dick slipping in and out.”

  I could feel my mouth drop open at the realization. “But she was crying!” I said.

  “They do”—he nodded—“with pleasure.”

  I felt a stir somewhere inside me. “So they were doing the cow thing?” I was overwhelmed by the discovery. I had actually overheard the whole episode of the cow thing performed by humans. It wasn’t very neighborly. The little boy in the room next door had almost come running with a knife to defend her. I felt ashamed and stirred in an odd way.

  Fatty nodded, smiling with relief at my understanding.

  “Does it always involve a bottle?”

  “Oh, that part I don’t know.”

  “The girl called him a drunk.”

  “They must have had a good time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Liquor and women, they go hand in hand like a banana soaked with honey.” He smacked his mouth deliciously. Fatty sounded like an expert. I wondered why we hadn’t had this conversation earlier.

  “Have you done it before?”

  His fat face broke into a smile. “You may think so.”

  “Well! With whom and how?”

  He shook his head, looking at the tip of his cigarette.

  “You’re not sharing it with me?”

  “It was a long time ago and I don’t want to corrupt your little mind.”

  I begged and begged.

  “It’s bad for you to know, and besides, you heard enough from your neighbor. Next time get a telescope or poke a hole into her room and watch.”

  “You shut up. I would never do that.”

  “Hey, did you see the man’s face?”

  “No, but I remember the limp.”

  “The limp?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Show me how he limped.”

  I stood up and limped around, dragging my right foot just a little, like a broom sweeping the floor.

  “Was he big or small?”

  “Big in the middle, small at both ends, like an olive.”

&
nbsp; “Tall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And a little drunk?”

  “He talked with coins in his mouth, slurring.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “What can’t be?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I answered all your questions. You’re not answering mine? Thanks for nothing.”

  He just shook his head.

  For the rest of the day, I couldn’t face the two women in my office. I pretended to read the newspaper, covering my face. A couple of times, they looked at me and smiled their knowing smiles. I looked away as soon as our eyes met.

  In the factory cafeteria, I stayed away from the table where the two girls sat with the other factory girls at lunch, buried my face in my bowl, and gulped my food. As I left, I heard laughter coming from behind me. They must have been laughing at me, for I heard Ning’s voice. She was telling everyone about my naive encounter. I fled the scene like a convicted felon.

  That night I returned to my boiler room with a strange feeling. I stared at the girl’s door for a long time. Her cries, the sinful, now pleasurable cries echoed in my mind. I tried to imagine what she looked like and wished I knew more about her. The idea of poking a hole through her wall crossed my mind. The mystery was only a thin wall away. What kind of a gypsy life did she live? Was she beautiful or not? Was she married or single? Was that man her lover or her husband?

  I’d never get any answers. There was no one to ask. I poked some more holes in my wall and patiently waited for the next sighting. Her door became the shrine of my imagination and I would have my eye glued to the peephole at the first sign of any movement in the house.

  One afternoon as we were playing poker in our office, we heard people yelling and shouting like at a ball game. We all put our cards down and went outside to see what was happening.

  “Shit, it’s that bastard again.”

  I saw our one-armed division manager being chased around the water tower by a big man with a red face. He was screaming and foaming like a drunk, and brandishing a bottle. And he limped.

  “Who is that?” I asked urgently.

  “The bodyguard of the factory’s party chief.”

  “Why is he chasing our manager?”

  “He’s drunk. Our manager was probably drinking with him.”

  “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

  “He’ll attack anyone in his way. He’s an animal. Within the factory, he fears no one.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “The party chief came from the army and brought the bodyguard with him. He drinks every waking hour and you don’t want to get in his way,” Fatty said.

  The poor manager was still being chased up and down the road, and the bodyguard was getting tired. As he slowed down and limped across our office, his potbelly, fat ass, and small head paraded right before my eyes. When he walked by me, he turned his broad back on us and the images of the man in my boiler room holding the girl’s breast suddenly jumped to life. I almost let out a cry before I covered my mouth with my hands. It was the same man. I had no doubts. I had seen him limp in and out of our boiler room. He couldn’t fake a limp like that. It left me thoroughly disgusted. How could any girl sleep with a dog like that? His eyes, red and dirty like muddy water, had no light in them. His mouth flapped with white spittle. What a slob. I couldn’t imagine seeing him naked on top of the small frame of my invisible neighbor. The enormous belly must weigh seventy pounds and his nipples were so fat they looked like the breasts of a pregnant swine. His fat ass alone could have fed a party of four.

  Finally the chase was over. The bodyguard collapsed in the middle of the road, the same way many previous chases must have ended. His face hit the dirt and his mountain of a body lay like a dead buffalo. Flies hovered over him, licking the sticky sweat from his neck folds. No one wanted to touch him. Our manager left the scene breathlessly, after sticking out his tongue at the limp carcass and waving to us.

  Ten minutes later a decrepit electrician pulled out a water hose and sprayed the bodyguard. He awoke instantly, and shook his head wildly like a dog shaking off water. He hauled himself up and crawled to his feet, limping along the wall, leaving his wet footprints behind.

  “Get out of here before you get hit by a truck, you lousy bastard,” yelled the old electrician. Because he was the founder of the factory and a revolutionary himself, he was the only one in the factory who dared to do that.

  The bodyguard limped away, minus one shoe, into the shadows of the factory’s chimneys. Everyone watching him went back to work; the electrician rolled the hose up again till the next time. Everything went back to normal.

  That night I came back to my room mourning the sad discovery. I stared at the door, feeling sorry for my neighbor. She had been raped, pleasurably. I was the witness. Not quite an eyewitness, but I had had an earful. Her door became the shrine of a heroine. I wanted to lay wild-flowers at its foot in sympathy.

  The boiler room was never the same after that night. When darkness fell, there was always the possibility of drama and mystery, but such a scene never happened again, nor did the girl ever return.

  HAN JIAN CANNED Food Factory produced 80 percent of the canned mushrooms lining the shelves of supermarkets in the U.S. and the rest of the corrupt western world. It was a cash cow. The value of the U.S. dollars it brought in had made Mr. Tui, the goldfish-eyed general manager, the most important member of the Communist party in Fujian Province every year since the mushroom account had landed on this lowly food manufacturer a few years ago.

  Mr. Tui, who also doubled as party secretary of the canned-food factory, rode around in a ’50s model Russian car with tinted windows. His bodyguard could be seen every morning running after the car, trying to put on his shirt as he was left behind by his angry boss, who invariably found him still recovering from another night’s heavy drinking. Mr. Tui lived with his family in a large new house built by the factory, but he was listed as the owner. He sent for a northern chef who cooked everything with pepper from his native province of Shangdong. Liquor flowed freely in that household, and every meal was a banquet. The party leaders discussed urgent political issues with the help of Peking ducks, barbecued piglets, French brandy, and filtered cigarettes from Hong Kong. In the background the music of love songs, also from Hong Kong, played continuously to help solve the tricky political problems.

  The boss’s official salary was about a hundred and fifty yuan, the equivalent of twenty U.S. dollars. But he made his real money the old-fashioned way, skimming a healthy percentage from individual mushroom producers. For every ton of fresh mushrooms sold to the factory, he took 10 percent from the growers, that percentage coming from the inflated prices paid them by the factory. Happy growers worshiped him like a god, a horny little god who demanded sexual favors. The farmers would have the girls ready on demand, otherwise the mushrooms would just sit and rot and hundred of thousands would be wasted. Some angry farmers had reported his behavior to local authorities, but he himself was, in essence, the local authority, and most of the reports landed on Mr. Tui’s banquet table. Those disagreeable farmers found themselves in bankruptcy shortly thereafter. A couple of farms had even been burned down.

  In a busy season, mountains of fresh mushrooms were piled up along the cement pits. The whole factory smelled like a large mushroom-soup kitchen. Everything I wore to the factory, including my underwear, told the tale of my whereabouts. Most of the employees followed their boss’s fine Communist example and had their own ways of stealing from the factory to supplement their income. A common one involved family participation. They invited family members to visit, and under cloak of night they ventured into the pits where the fresh mushrooms were stored. They bagged them, accompanied them through the side gate, and had the family member resell the mushrooms back to the factory early the next day, before the mushrooms yellowed. A brother of our one-armed division manager just lived in the factory while running an empty yet highly profitable mushroom-grow
ing business. The factory drivers routinely unloaded mushrooms at their own houses and resold them back to the factory.

  It was one happy family down there at the factory. The employees, about four hundred of them, lived in factory apartments and didn’t have to work at all. They made the factory hire temps like my sister and me, thousands of us, while they all stayed at home playing poker and raiding the local food and fish markets. Some division heads and team leaders used their temps as cooks and nannies, while others forced sex on the young girls who were eager to make a buck in this freewheeling mushroom paradise. The regular employees could be seen flying out the factory door on their bikes every morning, going to the local market to buy the freshest seafood off the boats, while the miserable temps crawled in to take up the morning shift. Soon, temps were running the factory and the regular employees only dropped by to pick up their paychecks.

  To my surprise, I was told one day that there were five regular employees at the water-treatment division who never showed up, and that the reason why the division manager was here once in a while was due to his brother’s mushroom business. The division had another temp who had never been seen. They said she was working at the division manager’s home, coaching his son in math.

  One day I jokingly asked my manager whether he would consider letting me teach his son the flute. He said no thanks, the son was taking violin lessons. Oh well, it was a reasonable attempt to improve my lifestyle.

  One of my biggest concerns, day in and day out, was food. The dried yams and rice I’d brought from home kept dwindling. I measured the portions of rice carefully each meal before putting it up to steam in the factory cafeteria. The portions got smaller and smaller. I found myself hungry all day long. I stayed away from the rest of the gang in the cafeteria because I didn’t want them to know that I was eating cheap yams while they were eating white rice that looked plump and delicious.

  I had another reason to hide. I had been cooking mushrooms in my room, eating them for three meals a day. At one point I became so sick of them that I threw up at the faintest whiff of steaming mushrooms. Yet all I saw in the factory were mushrooms. I smelled mushrooms and talked about mushrooms. Each day I carried a small bag of them tucked under my shirt when I slipped through the heavily guarded gate. I sautéed them, fried them, baked them, and steamed the suckers until I ran out of options. I tried cooking them with salt, sugar, vinegar, and wine. Eventually, after having eaten them three times a day for thirty days, they all tasted the same. With the money I saved by eating mushrooms I used to buy rice from the local market. The rice tasted so good that sometimes I splurged and would have two pounds of rice steamed, then find a deserted corner where no one could see me and guzzle down the whole lot, plain. The others would have thought I was some starving Ethiopian, with my big head, skinny neck, countable ribs, and melon belly. I was sure I must have looked pathetic enough that my colleagues would raise a collection for me.