China Through A Spoiled Child's Eyes
TUNG, TIMOTHY
China Through a Spoiled Child's Eyes Colors of the Mountain By Da Chen Random. 312 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research professor and China specialist, City College,...
...But being a member of the Black class (as opposed to the revolutionary peasant-worker Red class), he found himself ridiculed by teachers and bullied by schoolmates...
...Da Chen's recollections of his childhood in China convey a different picture...
...Elsewhere he mentions that his cousin, who earned 32 yuan a month, was considered a very rich man...
...THE BOOK exudes the narrator's confidence that he, a boy genius, is superior at everything he touches...
...He passes the national college entrance examination, eventually is admitted to the elite Foreign Language Institute in Beijing, and thus finally leaves his tiny hometown of Yellow Stone for good...
...a corner of the playground where the rowdy kids gather becomes "the Wild West...
...Or is the portrayal of these enviably privileged youths the author's distorted childhood memory, embellished to meet his editors' expectations...
...A few pages later he asks Mom where she got money to buy meat as a special treat for the boys while they were studying for exams— noting that "we didn't have any money...
...Forbidden to join the Little Red Guard, he was befriended by other older outcasts, from whom he learned to smoke and drink at the tender age of 10...
...Colors of the Mountain is a comingof-age memoir set in Communist China's most tumultuous times...
...the fashionably dressed young people wearing their long, greasy, ducktail hairstyle and skintight, bell-bottom trousers...
...I, for one, was relieved to find the book is not a predictably political exposition...
...Official corruption and idleness at state-run factories are barely touched upon...
...The story's Americanization does not stop there...
...In one touching scene Chen Da bids goodbye to his cronies, now whiskered fugitives from the law...
...No revolutionary fervor is indicated anywhere...
...Nineteen seventy-two was also the year American journalists who accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on his groundbreaking visit to Beijing returned to describe a nation of ants all clad in blue...
...Whenever Chen Da has an obstacle to hurdle Dad is always there to help...
...Colors of the Mountain further asks the reader to believe he was so sturdy physically that for a time he carried his acupuncturist father on the back seat of his borrowed bicycle to go see a paralyzed patient in a village 40 miles away...
...Enterprising and highly educated, he became a selftaught acupuncturist when he returned home...
...Why didja send him here...
...Had they missed the opportunity to drop by that one small country town where the young folks openly flaunted their taste for bell-bottomed fashions and fancy scooters...
...Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research professor and China specialist, City College, City University of New York In the fall of 1978, I visited China after 31 years in the United States...
...What the f— are you doing here, you little punk...
...Here and there the book is sprinkled with fiction and a grown-up's exaggerations, but at times it is unintentionally funny and heartwarming...
...The bullies in Chen Da's elementary school are "the Mafia...
...He was born into a landholding family, the youngest of five children of "Mom" and "Dad"—as his parents are called throughout the book—and lived in a spacious house...
...Because of my longish hair and casual clothes, I too became an object of intense interest...
...By the time he applies for junior high school, he has a reputation as a flutist, actor and Ping Pong player...
...Her little son was so spoiled by her that she never asked why he sometimes came home late at night, drunk and reeking of cigarettes...
...He describes how, in his enthusiasm to leam English, he became enamored with "the people who actually used the language": "In my mind, all the men were gentle and mustached, wore tall hats, carried a timepiece and a cane...
...For crying out loud, quiet, you guys...
...In the crook of their arms leaned ladies, snake-waist thin, with long dresses, yellow hair, and blue eyes...
...That was in Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities...
...It was Dad's decision that little brother would be the only one in the family whose future would be free of physical toil...
...Scenes of rampaging Red Guards hardly appear...
...The girls wore colorful nylon skirts that flew above their creamy white knees...
...Dad happens to know an excellent teacher, a Professor Wei, whose paralyzed twin sister is under his care...
...Reading it, we gather Da Chen (or, in Chinese custom, Chen Da) was an exceptionally intelligent child, excelling in everything he tried...
...For lessons, Dad knew amusical dentist, who, on first meeting his young pupil, proffered a filtered cigarette: "Smoke...
...Mom is depicted as a kind, loving, dutiful housewife who was proud of her "spotless floors" and constantly stayed up late preparing the family's meals...
...While Dad was away, though, the family seemed to get by without too much hardship...
...At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, Dad was sent off to reform camps for reeducation through labor...
...Chen Da was also an accomplished violinist...
...This kind of vagueness and inconsistency are what render this childhood memoir troublesome...
...Keep it down...
...They pointed at my strange looking blue jeans, and they leaned close to hear if I spoke Chinese...
...Here is how he remembers waiting in line with his older cronies to purchase movie tickets in 1972: "...We stared at...
...Despite his frequent absence from school, the 10year-old Chen Da wows his buddies by composing a love letter of several hundred words echoing novels he has read...
...We ain't no garbage can here...
...At the age of 14, with the Gang of Four fallen, the determined youngster begins to think seriously about college...
...This gift from a grateful patient had no strings, but Dad used his connections again to obtain them from Fuzhou, the provincial capital...
...His biggest desire is to learn English...
...Going about on his own curing patients and doing favors for local party cadres, he gained respect in the villages and neighboring towns and thus was able to provide the daily necessities...
...He even throws in names like Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh with ease, as though at 14, in the year 1976, he had already been impressed by Gone with the Wind...
...He grew up in Yellow Stone, 20 miles from Putien, itself a mere county seat in the southern Fujian Province, during the height of the Cultural Revolution...
...And except for a few mentions of "Mao," "Party secretaries," "commune leaders," or "reform camps,' China as seen through a spoiled child's eyes appears to be devoid of most of the Communist cruelties we have heard or read so much about...
...Yet Colors of the Mountain does give a flavor of what life seemed like to a precocious 10-year-old evolving into a teenager in a small community in China during the hardest of times...
...The boys] rode around on fancy scooters, their girlfriends holding on to their waists...
...In her gratitude, Professor Wei refuses tuition and, in a couple of dozen lessons, whips Chen Da's English into good shape...
...Chen Da attributes this to his Mom's ingenuity and to what little money his three sisters and a brother were able to earn while working on farms and in factories...
...After he expressed fascination with the sound of violin playing on the commune loudspeaker, his resourceful Dad came up with the "strange instrument...
...To help them flee, he gives them 30 yuan, then a huge sum...
...Joining Chen Da on his escapades, readers will be jarred hearing him speak with his friends—who are older by four or five years—in American street lingo: "Not a bad looking dude at all...
...The young and old followed me in the streets, tittering among themselves...
...Chairman Mao had passed away barely two years before and foreign visitors were still regarded curiously...
...And he gave me a shitload of crap right in front of everyone...
...The author never explains, either, how he was able to buy cartons of Flying Horses cigarettes...
...the local policemen are, naturally, "cops...
Vol. 83 • March 2000 • No. 1
