Colors of the Mountain

by Da Chen

  The whole town started searching for him. He was now their hero. As darkness fell, they finally found him. He was running down the dirt street barefoot, shouting, “Fang Jin won! Fang Jin won!” The people happily joined him in shouting the slogan, but he went on and on, much to the frustration of the messenger, who couldn’t return until the honoree had received the order in person. They tried to calm him down, but Fang kept right on shouting. A local doctor was brought in. Fang Jin had gone crazy upon hearing the good news, the doctor said.

  Jin accepted the nickname good-humoredly. It actually made him calmer.

  A month later, rumors began to circulate that the papers had all been graded and the scores were in. The scores were low across the board. All the test-takers gossiped among themselves. Jin at this point didn’t care anymore. It only made me pray harder each night, hitting my head against the soft pillows in obeisance to all the gods I assembled in my head to whom I read off my list of wishes. The list got longer each day and the list of promises to the gods grew more generous. I went from one little piglet for each god to five piglets and two cows as sacrifices if all the items in my list came true. And I knew that if that happened I would probably have to bankrupt our family, returning all our worldly possessions back to where they came from. But that didn’t stop me. I figured we could always deliver the sacrifices slowly, or even make out an IOU with the gods on them. When all was repaid, we would add on a handsome interest. They would have no problem with that.

  Dad wasn’t one to sit around waiting for our scores to arrive. He wanted to know now, so he put up his antenna and whispered into the ears of all his patients, whose numbers had expanded into the hundreds. Word spread from the patients to their families, then rippled into their circle of friends, who might know someone on the Board of Education at Putien, the agency in charge of grading all the tests. Within two days, a young man showed up at our door with the name of a clerk working at the board in Putien. He was a close friend of a close friend of a family member of a patient’s sister-in-law’s aunt. Dad immediately dispatched a young teacher from Yellow Stone High, whose job was to scout the scores for all the high school graduates. His name was Chung. Carrying a letter from Dad, he rode his bike to Putien to get the scores from this distant friend.

  We waited and waited. Chung didn’t return home that day. At midnight he sent a note from Putien to say that he was still waiting, staying at a hotel at the school’s expense until the next day. Our hearts were in our mouths. My family, usually noisy, was quiet. We were worried.

  Next day at breakfast, my sisters asked me again what I thought my scores might be. I hiked it up another twenty points. They laughed till tears filled their eyes. I knew they wanted to believe it. Their love for me was genuine, and their hope for me was as high as the clouds hanging in the blue sky.

  During the course of the morning, word leaked out about the score line. This was a line the government drew to cut off the successful applicants from the unsuccessful ones. It was based on how many slots were open for college enrollment that year: if there were only one hundred openings, the cutoff line would be set after the top one hundred scores. Everyone above that line was guaranteed a place in college, while the rest of the applicants wouldn’t be considered at all. This year’s cutoff point was 300 out of the total 500 points possible.

  The news sent chills down our spines. We all must have done terribly.

  At lunch, the whole family sat around the table without any real appetite. Jin picked at his food, and our sisters yammered on about irrelevant things. Dad asked me how I felt about the cutoff line. He didn’t say outright that I probably needed to adjust my own estimate in order not to get hurt when the scores were disclosed, but I knew that was what he was thinking. I stood firm, but this time I didn’t increase my estimate the regular 3 percent. Jin smiled absentmindedly, but I knew he was troubled. Mom was not at the table. I had a good idea where she was. She was talking to her god friends. She had been talking to them, and would be talking to them, for as long as she lived. She had been orphaned at a young age, and Buddha and all the other local gods were her parents. It was love in the purest sense.

  Just after midnight, the messenger, Chung, ran into our house, sweat covering his red face. He was breathless from the three-hour ride that he had just cut to two. We surrounded him, watching his heaving chest with great anxiety.

  “Water,” he croaked.

  “The scores first,” Dad said.

  “I’m really thirsty.”

  “The scores.” Dad’s voice had never been that loud with a friend before.

  Chung smiled.

  We stood by, our hearts in our throats.

  “Jin first.”

  Chung swallowed. “Three hundred and fifty.”

  There was an odd lull. He was in. His face first turned ashen, then red. He was speechless.

  “How about Da?”

  “You want to know?”

  “Yes, yes. What is it?”

  “Three hundred and eighty!”

  I felt the blood shoot up to the very top of my head. All the muscles in my arms twitched uncontrollably.

  “I’m not finished yet. According to the record, Da has one of the highest liberal arts scores in the province of Fujian, including the big cities of Fuzhou, Amoy, Chuangzhou, and Nan Ping—out of hundreds of thousands of test-takers.”

  There were no joyful shouts nor happy dances, only tears. It was a moment of triumph and happiness for the whole Chen family. Mom was in Dad’s arms; my sisters were sniffling and holding each other. Jin and I shook hands wildly.

  A dirt-poor country boy, beating all the city brats. I couldn’t believe it. It was about forty points higher than my highest estimate. I could kowtow forever.

  I wanted to run down the street of Yellow Stone and shout like the ancient Fang Jin, only it would be “Good-bye Yellow Stone, hello Beijing! And I’m not crazy!”

  MOM ASKED ME to walk to her brother’s house to tell Cousin Tan the news. I took the narrow road through the green fields. The fresh sea wind made the young rice dance, and woke up my dizzy mind, still dazed with the intoxicating news. I took a deep breath and started running. I was in shock and needed time alone to think. My eyes stared into the distance as my mind wandered off into dreamland. Which university would pick me? Should I go with one that had a good name, or one with a good English department? Which city? Shanghai or Beijing? As I ran, I felt as if I were sitting in the Fujiang–Beijing express train, with the scenery flying by and the wind blasting my face. I wondered what Tiananmen Square looked like.

  Cousin Tan was holding court at his house with a few of his classmates from AU. I heard carefree laughter as I entered. They were having tea. I wanted to drop the bomb and have the AU boys running for cover. Tan stood up as I came through the door. Smart guy, he sensed something.

  “Did you hear anything?” he asked.

  I stood there, trying to catch my breath.

  “Is it bad news?” he asked anxiously.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to seem too eager to impress a bunch of AU guys, all of whom were proudly wearing their white-and-red school badges.

  “Jin got three hundred and fifty,” I said.

  “Well, that’s very high.” Tan knitted his intellectual brows together with disbelief. “How about you?”

  I took another deep breath.

  “You didn’t make it?” He started to smile and reach out his noncallused hands to press his subtle condolence. I knew that look.

  “My score was three hundred and eighty.”

  All his cronies stood up.

  “What did you say?” Tan didn’t believe his ears.

  “Three hundred and eighty,” I repeated.

  Silence.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Tan said absentmindedly, making a readjustment in his mind. “I’m sure AU would consider you for their famous English department.”

  “Give me a break, Tan,” one of his classmates said. “This fellow d
oesn’t want to go to a college isolated on a little island in the corner of China. It’s okay for a bunch of older guys to study finance there, but for English, he should and could go to big cities like Beijing or Shanghai.”

  “I’ll think about all the options,” I said diplomatically. “I’m sure AU would be an excellent choice also.” I didn’t want to hurt Tan’s pride. After all, I still loved and respected my cousin. He had paved the road for Jin and me and had given us hope when we were just another landlord’s family, waiting to be wasted by communism.

  I said good-bye to them and told them I wanted to go take a long nap.

  They laughed and saw me to the door, slapping my shoulder in congratulation. Cousin Tan affectionately pinched the back of my neck. Coming from a bunch of college men, I considered it the red-carpet treatment. I was one of the boys now. Within a single moment, I had arrived.

  I took the same route back home to avoid being stared at in the street. By now, Yellow Stone would be like dry hay aflame with the breaking news about the Chen brothers. Having one child in a family going to college was an eye-opener, but two at the same time? The town wouldn’t be able to sleep for a long while. The shock would be reverberating through the people by now. It couldn’t be happening. Some people in Yellow Stone wouldn’t be able to take such an insulting assault on their turf. Two landlord’s children, hitting the jackpot at the same time? No way. There would be hostile letters of protest, ghostwritten and sent anonymously to the Board of Education, filled with big fat lies, aiming to try and stop us. There would be people gritting their teeth at this very moment, swearing to poke a hole in our balloon and let our dream be just another dream. I knew it was coming and that we should appear modest and undeserving in public.

  “Sorry I scored that high, I didn’t mean to. I swear I won’t do it next time.” What a twisted world we lived in. I couldn’t be happy when I was supposed to be, and I couldn’t be sad when I was supposed to, like when my grandpa had died. I couldn’t wait to pack up my bamboo mat and mosquito net and shake the dust off my feet.

  Mom shut the front door early and prepared a simple dinner. We moved our dining table to the backyard. Everyone was whispering as we set the table and prepared the food. My sisters had left work early. The young rice plants could wait, but the celebration could not.

  We sat close together around the round table, all seven of us. It was a little crowded, and we kicked each other under the table and fought with our chopsticks for the last bite as we had when we were children. We whispered and laughed quietly, lest there were ears listening outside the walls. It was okay to let people know when you were suffering, but not when you were celebrating. They turned jealous, and evil things are bred from the seeds of jealousy.

  Dad smiled like a carefree lion, smoking his pipe, while my mom still sniffled over the shock of the news. It shook her up in a very pleasant way. They both confessed that it was the best day of their lives. They were so happy and proud. It made their decades of suffering worthwhile. Our sisters poked us with challenging questions, like which pretty girls we would consider as brides. We went through a list with mock interest: none of them seemed perfect. The appealing ones didn’t have the cows necessary for a dowry, while the ugly ones had plenty. They giggled and giggled over our silly discussion.

  We dreamed and sat there, just staring at a perfect Yellow Stone sunset.

  Dia showed up the next day at my house.

  “Praise Buddha, you blew the top off. I heard the news from the guy down the street. How the hell did you do it?”

  He hugged me. I picked him up to throw him on the floor.

  “Come on, Da, don’t be so childish. You’re a college guy now. We don’t have to wrestle each time we see each other.”

  I dropped him to the floor. He rubbed his neck in fake pain and shook his head. “You’re never gonna change, are you?”

  “Nope.” I sunk my left foot into his soft stomach. He laughed like a kid.

  “Better not.”

  “How did you do?”

  “How did I do?” Dia got on his feet and he dusted his shirt. “I shamed my family, many generations of them. All the dead Dia men must be kicking each other’s ass, blaming one another for having born this Dia.”

  “How did you do, serious?”

  “Two hundred and three, along with a nice little note from the commune Education Board saying something like, don’t be hurt and to try again. For crying out loud, it sounded like a jail number instead of a score.”

  “That wasn’t too bad. It was only a hundred points off; take it again next year.”

  “Not a chance. College doors might be open, but the Dia men are all brain-dead. We smoke too much, have always smoked too much. The nicotine poisoned our brains and now I’m the last in line to hold the empty bag for life. Next thing you know, the Dia men are gonna be walking around with only one ball. You know the nicotine shrinks the other. Fuck the smoke, I’m sick of it.” He pulled out his usual bag of tobacco and pinched some leaves to roll a big one when he suddenly realized something. “I forgot my smoking paper. Could you go find some from your dad.”

  “You just said you were sick of smoking.”

  “That was then, now is now. I need a smoke to calm down.”

  I ran off and returned with some Flying Horse. He threw them back at me. “These are as tasteless as wax. Give me the newspaper.” He tore the corner off a daily, rolled his thick one, and was an instant chimney.

  “So what do you intend to do?” I asked him.

  “The army.”

  “The army?”

  “Mom signed me up as soon as she heard my score.”

  “You like the idea?”

  “Yeah, I’m ready to leave home and be a man.”

  “We all are. I’m proud of you, maybe you’ll be a general someday. I like the way you hold your tobacco roll, there’s something very official about it.”

  “Oh, shut up. You know I’m very proud of you. I don’t even have to say it. By tomorrow, I’ll be known in my backward village as the man who slept under the same roof with Da the Great, and that should go on my tombstone if I were to die today.”

  WE WERE GIVEN an application form to fill out, along with a list of slots open to Fujian students for all the colleges. The slots for English majors were pathetically few. From the top down, there was only one for Beijing First Foreign Language Institute, and two for Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute. There was one opening for Shanghai Foreign Language Institute and a few more at other cities like Nanking, Fuzhou, and twenty at Amoy University. There were other tempting slots in foreign trade and international journalism, both of which required a strong English performance.

  The school counselor advised me that my score put me in the top 2 percent of all applicants. Any college I picked could be mine. My brother’s score also qualified him for a leading university. He had his mind set on finance, and his university choices were all near home. He wanted to be close to the family. But they fully supported my choice, Beijing Language Institute, the top spot on that year’s roster. I was the bird that had to fly far and high and they wanted me to reach for the sky because I thought I could. And now they were beginning to think that I could, too.

  I turned in my application at the commune headquarters, an office near the commune jail in which the principal of my elementary school had once wanted to put me.

  The lady clerk smiled at me when she saw my name and choice.

  “You’re the star they have been talking about. I have heard your story. I want my son to do just as well as you did. Would you mind meeting him?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She stood up, went to the back room, and brought out a two-year-old toddler.

  “Shake hands with him, son.” She grabbed her son’s chubby, sticky hand, and I shook it. The kid was a little shy. I pinched his rosy cheek.

  “Thank you. I hope he remembers meeting you.”

  I felt flattered. Overnight, I had become the
model son to all moms.

  As I headed out, she stopped me. “Here, I got something for you. Take these and burn them.”

  There were a dozen badly written, lying letters of protest against Jin and me.

  I ran behind the headquarters building and found a seat beneath a tree. I went through all the letters quickly. The most ridiculous accusation was a claim that Jin and I had cheated by swapping answers in the public toilets during the exam. Yeah, right. Jin and I had taken the tests forty miles apart from each other. Others claimed we were from a landlord’s family and didn’t deserve to be in college, old clichés, and other garbage. One letter said that my brother had poor eyesight and that I hung out with bad company. That was true, but did it matter?

  Obviously it didn’t, because the clerk had handed everything over to me. I was grateful for her gracious gesture. I tore the letters into little pieces and dumped them down a manhole, then went back and thanked the clerk. She smiled. I bent over, picked her son up from the floor where he was crawling, and played with him for a while. I tickled his tummy and got a big smile. Then I gave him back to the lovely woman.

  Two days later, we got a notice from the county that said we had to have a complete physical examination. I didn’t eat or sleep too well that night. Maybe my eyes would be too weak or my legs too short. I had no muscles and was all bones. My belly button was too deep, my nipples too far apart, and my ribs heaved like an accordion. Why would our country want to invest four years of college in such a shaky person?

  We went on the commune’s muddy tractor. There were no showy flowers pinned on our chests, or anything like that. We arrived at Putien County Hospital a little late because we had had to fill the gas tank, and the driver had stopped to push a fallen tree to the side of the narrow road, then had brawled for a good ten minutes with the farmer who owned the tree.