A Million Shades of Gray Read Online Free Page A

The houses were built north to south. He had heard that in America nearly every house looked different from the house next to it and houses could face different directions, depending on how the street ran. Y’Tin thought that seemed disorganized, but who was he to judge?
    As he approached his family’s longhouse, he clucked at the chicken coop and opened the door.The chickens scurried out to forage. They were a motley collection: red, black, white, brown. Once, a Special Forces soldier had watched with interest as Y’Tin clucked for the chickens in the evening. He’d asked Y’Tin how he knew which chickens were his and not another villager’s. Y’Tin tried to be polite but laughed a bit when he explained, “We know which chickens are ours, and they know us.” Sometimes the Americans were funny. He really missed them. And they had a lot of weapons to fight the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. In the Central Highlands, life had seemed safer when the Americans had been here, even though Y’Tin had heard gunfire almost every night. He still heard gunfire.
    Y’Tin climbed the ladder up to his longhouse. At 130 meters long, it was the biggest in the village. His entire clan numbered sixty, not counting the two babies who were still in their mothers’ stomachs. Y’Tin had never set foot in parts of his house. He mostly just went from the entrance to his family’s room. One of his aunties lived at the far end, in the biggest room. She was a widow and had her room all to herself. Though she was just thirty-two, she had been widowed three times,and, frankly, after that nobody was too keen on marrying her.
    Y’Tin nodded to one of his seven uncles, who sat on a mat eating rice in the entrance room. His uncle chewed and swallowed.
    â€œDo a good job in school today,” his uncle said. “You know how important it is to your mother.”
    â€œI’ll study hard,” Y’Tin said, but he knew his uncle didn’t believe him. Nobody ever believed him when he said that. Maybe he should start saying something new when people told him to do a good job in school. Maybe he should say
Absolutely
, the way the Americans would have.
    Y’Tin went to the family bedroom to grab his schoolbook. He looked at it with distaste. Most days he couldn’t even bear to open it up. One thing about school was that even though all the children were different, they all used the same book. Did that make sense?
    He didn’t feel he should have to attend school. As an elephant expert, he would always have work. The village would always need elephants. He begged his parents again and again to let him stay home. He would work on them for a few weeks and then not say anything for anotherfew weeks, so that each time he complained, it would seem fresh to them. He thought he might be wearing them down, because sometimes after he begged them, he saw his parents meet eyes in a certain way, the way they did when they disagreed but didn’t want to say so in front of Y’Tin and his sisters.
    School was really his mother’s idea, and his father always supported her when it came to raising Y’Tin, H’Juaih, and his younger sister, nicknamed Jujubee. Rhade women could be bossy. Y’Tin had heard that the women were more subservient in some of the other thirty-odd Dega tribes here in the Central Highlands. But in the Rhade tribe the women held a lot of power. His mother wanted him to go to school so that he could move to the city one day. “That way, you can have a better life,” she liked to say. He tried to explain to her that he didn’t want a better life. Except for school, his life was fine the way it was. Maybe after Lady died he would check out the city. But Lady was just twenty-one, and elephants lived to sixty or even longer. In forty years Y’Tin would be fifty-three. Then, and only then, he might want this better life his mother spoke of. But