Colors of the Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

regretted my actions and wished I could take everything back, but it was too late, the damage had been done. I thought of Mom and Dad and the trouble I might have just brought to my family if the teacher blew this thing up. My head began to pound.
    “I am sorry, honorable teacher. I will redo my homework and hand it in as soon as possible.”
    He stared at me silently with his icy eyes, looking like a wolf that had just caught a rabbit in a trap.
    “You think it’s going to be that easy?” He shook his head slowly. “Everybody!” His voice cracked out. “Let’s have a vote. Those who wish to have Da thrown out of our classroom, raise your hands.”
    There was a moment of silence. Then slowly, the son of the party secretary raised his hand. A few more hands from the La Shan club went up. Next the whole class raised their collective hands, even my friends Jie and Ciang.
    I felt trapped. I felt half-dead. I couldn’t understand how even my best friends could vote against me.
    “Please, I don’t want to leave this class. I would like to stay.”
    “We’ll see about that. Class is over for the day,” La Shan said, slamming his book closed and walking out of the room, his disciples trailing behind him.
    I walked home in a daze. Nobody talked to me. I redid my homework and turned it in right away. I waited for La Shan to throw me out of school, but nothing happened. I sat in the back corner of the class by myself. No one talked to me, not even my friends. Occasionally, La Shan would throw disgusted glances my way. The worst thing was when he disparagingly called me “that person in the corner” without looking at me. Why did he take the whole thing so personally, as if I had desecrated his ancestor’s tombstone?
    Then one day during the morning exercise break La Shan called my name and asked me to stay behind while the others noisily poured out of class.
    “I have received reports about you,” he said, pacing in front of the classroom. “Really bad reports.”
    My heart began to race. “What kind of reports?”
    “You have been saying antirevolutionary and anti-Communist things to your classmates, haven’t you?”
    “No, I haven’t.” He was trying to paint me as a counterrevolutionary, just as they had done to Yu Xuang, a fifth-grader whom they had locked in the commune jail for further investigation. It was a dangerous situation.
    “I have never done anything like that! You know that!” I said, using the best defense a nine-year-old could muster.
    “I have the reports here”—he waved a thick sheaf of paper—“and I can ask these people to testify against you if necessary.”
    “The people who wrote those reports were lying. I have never said anything against our country or the Communist party.”
    “Shut up! You have no right to defend yourself, only the chance to confess and repent,” he spat out angrily. His voice deepened. “Do you understand what kind of trouble you are in now?”
    “I have nothing to confess!” I was losing control again. My throat dried up and my arms began to tremble.
    “I said, shut up! You have today and tonight to write a confession of all the treasonous things you have said, to explain the motivation, and to state who told you to say these horrible things. Like perhaps your father, mother, or your landlord grandparents.”
    He was trying to involve my family. They would put my dad in prison. They would take Grandpa out into the street and beat him to death.
    “They did
not
tell me to do or say bad things against the party! They didn’t!” I cried. I couldn’t afford to have my family dragged into this. I was scared and began to sob helplessly. The sky had just caved in and I felt that nobody could help me. I would be a young counterrevolutionary, a condemned boy, despised by the whole country. I would be left to rot in a dark prison cell for life. That was what had happened to Shi He, another high school kid, who was caught listening to an anti-Communist radio