Colors of the Mountain Read Online Free Page B

He took me on a tour, but my mind was still on those arms. I had no appetite when I went home. My jealousy was gone. From then on, I quietly watched out for Buckle.
    Before long, Mr. Sun was bidding us a sad good-bye. He was heading for a reeducation camp for teachers. I gave him a small notebook as a gift. The school would be taught by the militiamen and women from the commune. There was a directive from the central government that from now on all schools would be governed by poor farmers; all teachers—a class made up of dangerous and stinking intellectuals—would be reformed and instilled with revolutionary thoughts before they could return to teach China’s younger generation.
    School wasn’t the same. Our teacher was a sleepy young man, a distant nephew of Yellow Stone commune’s party secretary. He had never graduated from elementary school; he misspelled simple words and twisted pronunciations so badly that they hardly sounded like Chinese anymore. The first day he came to class he was shaking, and there were long lulls while he searched through his notes and tried to think of something to say. In the evening, these farmers played poker and drank at the same tables where real teachers used to grade homework. The zoo was being run by the animals themselves.
    To say the least, I was disappointed. I searched outside school for books to entertain myself, and yearned for the farmers to leave, to have the real teachers come back from the camp. Although the earliest that could ever happen would be the following year, I nonetheless believed that, like the spring, it
would
happen.

IN SEPTEMBER 1971 , I entered third grade. Dad had come back from the camp on the mountain and was at another reform camp ten miles away from our town. They made him dig ditches from morning to night to expand an irrigation system that eventually failed to work, while continuing to press for more confessions about my uncle in Taiwan, which had always been China’s sworn enemy.
    Sometimes I was allowed to visit Dad and bring him food. I would stand on the edge of the work site, searching for signs of my father among the hundred or so other people being “reformed.” Tired, curious faces would look at me, word would pass on down the line, then eventually out would come my dad from the ditches, his back straight, head held high, and a dazzling smile on his face for his son as he busily dusted off his ragged clothes. I would have nothing to say and could only look at his blistered hands, while he asked how everybody was and how my schoolwork was going. Then it was time to leave; if I delayed, the foreman would chase me off the site with his wooden stick.
    Grandpa was suffering all the time now. An expensive medication was bought to cure him, but he was outraged when he heard its price, since he knew that what it cost could have bought the whole family some decent food for a month. Despite his frail condition, he was still ordered to go to the rice fields every day to chase the birds. After he had had an especially bad night, I brought in another petition. The cadre ripped it to pieces in front of me.
    “The stinking dogshit!” he screamed, and spat on the floor. “Tell your no-good grandpa to wake up. I’ve already given him the lightest job and he doesn’t appreciate it. What does he want, to sleep in his warm bed all day and plot his revenge against our Communist system? Well, that’s not going to happen with me in charge.” He thumped his chest. “Do you hear me? And as for you, you little shit, I don’t want to see you this often. You’ll be in trouble yourself one of these days, running all these errands for your no-good family.”
    I ran home angrily and told Grandpa the answer was no.
    My eldest sister, Si, had graduated from junior high school. Brother Jin had had to stop one year short of completing it, and Ke and Huang were asked to leave before finishing elementary school. The Red Guards took over the classroom and put some