Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen

meat, fried peanuts, oysters, crispy seaweed, and lightly sautéed crunchy snow peas. Long noodles promised longevity. Oysters, in my local dialect, meant “alive.” Eggs were round and perfect. Peanuts indicated countless offspring, and if you twisted the pronunciation of
seaweed
a little, it sounded a lot like the word that meant
fortune.
    I fought down the long noodles, donned a new jacket that Mom had tailored herself, and ran off to offer New Year’s greetings to our neighbors. I clasped my hands, bowed my head, and wished wealth to the garlic-nosed Liang Qu, an old man with seven sons, who made a living selling cigarettes to children behind closed doors at a huge markup. He wiped his big, dripping nose and threw me a cigarette with dark tobacco in it. “Thanks and happy New Year, young fella. Have a smoke,” he said.
    “It’s not one of those moldy ones, is it?” I teased as I pocketed it. He was known to pass the kids rotten products. Since the children were smoking secretly, they never complained. Only on New Year’s Day could I get away with a joke like that.
    I crossed the bridge to greet the white-haired country doctor, who peered at me through his thick glasses, trying to figure out who I was. “I’m the younger son of the Chens,” I said.
    He nodded, pointed with his cane at the seat next to him, and offered some tea. I politely told him I had just had breakfast. He asked how my grandpa was. “He’s gone,” I said. I couldn’t believe how forgetful the doctor was. Only half a year ago, he had been telling us that Grandpa didn’t have long to live.
    “Oh, I’m sorry. But the living has to go on, ain’t that right?”
    “Right, doctor. Happy New Year.”
    He nodded in silence and watched me run off down the dirt road.
    It was a tradition that for good luck you should greet as many as you could on New Year’s Day. To me, it was the easiest way to scorebrownie points with people, for they were in the best of spirits then and you could get a lot of goodwill for nothing.
    By noon, I had greeted no less than fifty people. There was the brigade leader, the neighborly teacher, Mr. Lan, the kind tailor who sometimes let Mom use his sewing machine, the blacksmith who made good farming tools for us, and the locksmith who stuttered when he became excited. His son had gone to Chinghua University in Beijing, the equivalent of MIT. He had the hardest time saying the name, and always ended up stuttering “Chin…Chin…Chin…Chinghua University.” By the time he did the third
hap, hap, hap
of his unfinished “happy New Year” greeting, I was long gone.
    When I got home for lunch, our living room was already filled with well-wishers. Dad was holding court, busily pouring hot tea and lighting the water pipe for his visitors.
    I often thought that if Dad hadn’t been the unfortunate son of a landlord, he probably would have ended up being one of the Communist leaders. He was a big man, who commanded attention the moment he entered a room. Dad loved laughing, and could charm your boots off, but when he was angry, his temper thundered and his tongue lashed out mercilessly. He was a natural, a dramatic leader in a sleepy, little town like Yellow Stone.
    The commune leaders put him down like trash; bad neighbors and ignorant militiamen spat in his direction when they passed him in the street. But villagers from the surrounding towns and remote farms still came to him for all sorts of advice. They came in groups of five and ten and treated Dad as if he were still the son of an old family that had once headed the local gentility.
    He wrote persuasive letters for those whose relatives resided in rich places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, helping them to squeeze money from their rich relatives. Defenseless widows sought his aid in drawing up complaints about neighbors who had encroached on their properties and families who had abandoned them. They paid Dad with money or a sack of rice or yams. But a lot