Colors of the Mountain

Colors of the Mountain

Random House, 314 pp., $25

You would never expect a memoir of growing up under the political oppression of the Cultural Revolution to be as much fun as this book is. But thanks to the author's easygoing style, crystalline memory, and charming personality, I would go with the book jacket's formulation: "Part Horatio Alger, part Holden Caulfield." What could be a gloomy tale of injustice and woe becomes a rollicking story of growing up smart and funny and a little wild in a situation designed to stifle those very traits. Tough and tender, prideful and humbled, blessed in some ways, horribly cheated in others, Da Chen does an amazing job of showing both what was uniquely awful about his childhood and what was familiar and universal, too -- the coming of age of a rowdy, gifted little boy in a close-knit and loving family.

"I was born in Southern China in 1962, in the tiny town of Yellow Stone. They called it the Year of Great Starvation." So begins this story, set in a time many readers will have lived through, but a place that is utterly foreign. The conditions of life in Yellow Stone resemble nothing recognizable as modern. There is no electricity, no cars or buses, no television -- Da takes his first ride in a vehicle other than a bicycle or a tractor at the very end of the book, when he is about 20. The boy's father and grandfather, persecuted outcasts because they once were "landlords," are allowed to work

only in forced-labor camps and can earn and own nothing. The family lives on moldy yams for months at a time. Da has to beg his way into public school since the entrance fee -- the price of 100 pounds of yams -- is a few bucks to most people, but a fortune to the Chen family. But beg he does, and so begins his life at school, which is a central part of this book.

Academic studies were considered basically worthless under the Maoist regime, and the schools were more of a holding tank than a serious educational enterprise. For this reason, in the course of his elementary career, Da's social skills are even more valuable than his intellectual gifts. For a while, he overcomes his family stigma and is the most popular boy in the class. But then a cadre of enemies humiliates and tortures him to the point where he becomes an untouchable. At this point, he makes friends with a bunch of lovable dropouts, a bunch of no-account gamblers and smokers who are the dearest, most loyal pals a boy could have. Scenes of the boys chowing down on their own home-cooked feasts in the back room of one compadre's carpentry shop seem to come right out of a Chinese Goodfellas.

This gallery of rogues and heroes -- in the latter group belong Da's parents and siblings, portrayed with a warmth that radiates off the page -- just becomes livelier as the tale continues. From his ungainly but prescient schoolteacher "Peking Man," to the characters his father meets in his extremely successful career as a self-taught acupuncturist, to the elegant Chinese Christian lady who gives the boy English lessons, there is nothing bland or gray about the people who lived under this supposedly "red" but actually colorless regime. Here is a typical introduction to a new friend:

This thin little guy carried a large schoolbag with him during the course of the day. Most of the space in it was taken up by the two cold meals he had to carry around, and the rest was divided up equally between books, a bag of foul-smelling homegrown tobacco, and an ugly pipe made from a twig. His nicotine addiction was legendary. He was the only person I know who smoked before and after each meal and stopped halfway to squeeze in another tobacco roll." Soon his new friend tells him the secret of the Dia family's homegrown tobacco -- it is fertilized every day with the thick smelly piss of the Dia men.

After the death of Mao, the country reinvests in education, and countrywide college admissions exams are announced. The first and only route out of a life of backbreaking physical labor that most Chinese have seen in many years, the exams draw young men and women, including Da and one of his brothers, into frenzied months of preparation and sacrifice. At last, they arrive, given over a period of several days. At a remote location, surrounded by ambulances and armed militia. And even though we know what the outcome must be (Mr. Chen's author bio lists him as a graduate of Columbia Law School, married and living in New York), you will find yourself turning eagerly through the final pages, and wistful when they are done.