by Mark Salzman
At ten o’clock at night everyone got up from the campfire and went to their tents except for Michael and me. We hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and we were freezing. The only bright side to this that we could see was that Sensei would probably have to let us sleep in his large tent with him, giving us a chance to redeem ourselves somehow for our poor behavior on the ride up. Suddenly a pair of headlights appeared on the dirt road leading to our campsite. Michael and I practically leaped for joy, thinking it was Bill, but as the headlights got closer we saw that it was a compact car driven by a young woman.
It was one of Sensei’s girlfriends. As soon as she got out of the car she and Sensei disappeared into his tent, and Michael and I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping indoors. Then it started to rain. We thought about sleeping on the ground under Sensei’s Cougar, but then saw that it was parked on a hill and that a small torrent had already formed between the wheels. We didn’t even consider asking the Bridgeport group if we could squeeze into their tent; they were inner-city black men—utterly mysterious and therefore frightening people to us—whom not even Michael dared look straight in the eye. When we sparred with them we always stared at their hands so that we wouldn’t become paralyzed with fear. Out in front of their tent they had set up a little plastic bucket with a sign taped to it that said DONATIONS TO HELP “TINY” RAISE BAIL. Just as we began to despair, Sensei stuck his head out of the tent and threw us his car keys. We spent the night trying to sleep sitting up in the bucket seats, but the sound of the rain on the windshield was a constant reminder that we were soaking wet and cold. At one point Michael said that if he could live his life over again, one thing he would definitely change was his decision three years earlier during our BB-gun war to keep that boy who had fallen through the ice a prisoner in the abandoned Chevy. “No wonder that poor bastard was so mad,” he kept saying, his teeth chattering the whole time.
We agreed that the glow on the eastern horizon the next morning was the most welcome sight of our lives. The rain turned to drizzle, and at eight o’clock Sensei began our training. The exercise made our bodies feel warm except for our feet, which were kept frozen by our soggy cloth shoes. At noon, when everyone broke for lunch, Michael and I built a fire and made a rack over the flames with a few long sticks. We hung our shoes and socks from the rack, hoping that the heat would dry them out, and left them there momentarily when Sensei, taking pity on us at last, offered us some of his own lunch. Suddenly we heard gales of laughter from the Bridgeport group and ran back to our fire to see that our shoes, which had cheap plastic soles, had melted. They hung like long strands of chewing gum, with the cloth parts slowly burning. We had to spend the rest of that day and that night barefoot.
On the third and last day of the camp Bill finally showed up. When he saw Michael and me pale, hungry and shivering in our wet uniforms and wearing no shoes, he apologized profusely, but his disappearance hadn’t been his fault. His transmission had given out on a lonely part of the highway and he didn’t have enough cash with him to have it fixed by the local mechanic; nor did he have enough cash to pay for a tow truck to take him back to Danbury. He tried to hitchhike back, but got picked up by the police in some small town, and when they saw his tattoo they busted him and held him overnight.
Michael and I changed into dry clothes and spent the next hour eating everything in Bill’s van. Then Sensei announced that the camp was over, and this time he did not offer to let us ride with him.
“Well, at least now we can listen to Black Sabbath,” Michael said, trying to look at the bright side.
“No, we can’t,” Bill said as we climbed into his rental car. “This car doesn’t have a tape deck.”
8
I disliked the ninth grade nearly as much as I’d disliked the seventh and eighth grades, although being Michael’s friend meant that at least I didn’t get beaten up in the hallways anymore. Why did the subjects have to be so boring? Did adults do this on purpose? They made the world the way it was, and then made us learn the rules so we would make sure not to change anything! If I’d had to sit through a class five days a week called “Plucking All of Your Hairs Out and Arranging Them in Stacks of Prime Numbers,” it wouldn’t have seemed any better or worse than my actual classes. I still thought Lao-tse had the right idea when he said that if you stopped learning, your problems would be solved.
When I entered the tenth grade, however, I began to feel differently about academics. For this I must thank an enthusiastic but professionally doomed world history teacher who saw my interest in China and ran with it. His name was Richard Rowland, but the students knew him as Rick der Stick, a tribute both to his angular physique and the vaguely Germanic atmosphere of discipline that he insisted upon in his classroom.
At the end of our first day of class he called me aside for a moment. “I understand from Coach Anderson that you’re extremely interested in China,” he said. He had a severe crew cut, a prominent Adam’s apple, a slightly frenzied look in his eyes and a habit of emphasizing key words with bold, choppy strokes of his right hand, which always held a piece of chalk between the index and middle fingers.
When I said that I was indeed interested in China, he asked, “Well, what are you doing about it, Mr. Salzman?”—chop.
I told him about the Boxing Institute, but he seemed unimpressed. “You can’t grasp another culture just by learning an art form out of context like that. First of all, you’ve got to learn the language. You’ve got to learn Chinese if you’re serious. I’ve heard that you are serious, but I want to hear it from you. How willing are you to work, Mr. Salzman?”
Now it was my turn to look frenzied. “You know Chinese?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that, but that’s not important. I want to know if you’re willing to work this year, because if you’re willing to work, and I do mean work”—chop—“then I might be willing to help you. But what I’m talking about would be in addition to the regular classwork in my class. I’m not”—chop—“talking about letting you substitute the curriculum.”
“I understand.”
“All right. Give me a few days to think about this. There are a few people I want to talk to, and then we’ll see what we can come up with. But let me emphasize that if I’m going to do this on my own time, I’ll expect you not to let me down”—chop chop chop.
What Mr. Rowland came up with was this: first, he gave me the title of a book, Speak Chinese, published by the University of Beijing Press, and told me to buy it right away. He knew someone who had used this book and persuaded the man to lend him the set of flash cards and audiotapes that went with it. Mr. Rowland let me borrow the tapes, while he kept the flash cards. He suggested that we meet once a week after school in the teachers’ lounge, where he tested my progress by flashing the cards with the Chinese characters on them at me and helped me wade through the chapters, supposedly written in English, explaining the rules of Chinese grammar.
Second, Mr. Rowland told me that he had just completed a summer graduate course in Chinese history at Trinity College to help get his master’s degree. He had all the books and the syllabus for the course, and would be willing to lend me all of that, along with his classroom lecture notes, as long as I was willing to report to him weekly on my progress and write the two required papers for the course, one short and one long.
Third, and most exciting of all, Mr. Rowland told me about a clever and highly sophisticated game that had been invented by Dr. Robert Oxnam, the professor at Trinity he’d been studying with. Called the Ch’ing Game, it was a complex re-creation of the Ch’ing-dynasty government that required more than twenty players and took a week to play. Mr. Rowland had been using the game as the climax to his world history classes for several years, but always lamented that the student playing the emperor had never been sufficiently prepared to make the game truly dramatic. He promised me that if I completed the work for the graduate course he would let me be the emperor, guaranteeing that it would be the most memorable experience
of my high school career.
Once I started learning how to speak Chinese I wanted to learn how to read it, and as soon as I began studying those characters I wanted to write them. I wrote them all over my notebooks during my other classes, all over my desk, and all over my pants. There was something deliciously addictive about trying to make them look just right—balanced and yet free, correct and yet unselfconscious, as if the strokes had fallen onto the paper instead of having been carefully drawn.
For the first time in my life I was reading real books, not textbooks prepared for adolescents. At first I was shocked by how much reading the course involved, and I was discouraged when I found out how difficult the books were to understand. Happily for me, Mr. Rowland did not allow me to stay depressed for long. Apparently he had decided that it was already a foregone conclusion that I would finish the course. “What, you think other people just pick up these books and read them without any trouble?” he asked me, waving his arms and rolling his eyes. “Everybody has to face this kind of complex thinking sooner or later—everybody!”—chop—“that is, if they plan to ever really understand anything. Of course it’s hard work! That’s what we’re here for, hard work! Didn’t I tell you that already? Sure I did, that’s old news. What passages did you have trouble with?”
The difficulty was more than compensated for by the excitement I felt knowing that I was doing something any adult would have to respect, and the work soon became a kind of pleasure. One day Mr. Rowland said that he thought it was a shame that I wasn’t getting academic credit for my Chinese-language study. He introduced me to a counselor, Ms. Rauson, who informed me that I was perfectly welcome to apply for independent-study credit. She offered to act as the administrative go-between if Mr. Rowland and I would put together a formal proposal, and once we had done so, she set up and led the committee meeting where I made my presentation, and eventually I was granted the credit. It happened that one of the teachers present at that meeting was my art teacher. He had noticed the Chinese characters and imitation Chinese landscape paintings scrawled all over my notebooks and pants, and now that he knew how serious I was about the subject, he had an idea of his own. He asked me the next day if, instead of doing the regular coursework in our art class, I would like to organize a course for myself to learn Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, the real kind done with brushes and ground ink instead of just a ballpoint pen.
When I told my father about this he was delighted; he welcomed any evidence that my interests might be shifting away from unarmed combat. One time he actually asked me if I would consider dancing instead of kung fu—“Look at Nureyev,” he said hopefully, “now, there’s a powerful guy.”
Ballet. Man, you know the world is a confusing place when you’re a boy and your dad tries to get you to switch from self-defense to ballet.
So Dad was excited about the Chinese painting. He helped me by taking out dozens of oversized books on Asian art from the library. Over several weekends he and I charted out “a course,” starting with the basic brushstrokes and characters, then moving to traditional methods of painting trees, rocks, mountains, waterfalls and little Chinese fishermen standing on the prows of their sampans. The final exam of the course, we decided, would be to paint a whole scroll depicting a waterfall partially concealed by mist, with a rocky mountain in the background and a fisherman right in front, admiring the whole scene from his sampan. In one corner I would brush a few lines of calligraphy of my own composition—assuming my Speak Chinese book moved beyond vocabulary like “worker,” “peasant,” “Twelfth Party Congress” or “high-level cadre.”
Before giving the art teacher my syllabus, I decided it would be a good idea to show him samples of the kind of work I would be doing. To do so I needed the proper materials, so one Saturday I got Michael to take the train down to New York City with me for an excursion to Chinatown. We ended up spending most of our time in a kung fu supply store admiring the swords, throwing knives and black-silk uniforms, but on realizing that we couldn’t afford anything except one of the Jackie Chan posters, we moved on to a bookstore offering painting and calligraphy supplies. I got myself a brush, a stick of dried ink and a small grinding stone, and Michael bought a magazine called Secrets of Internal Kung Fu, which had on its cover a photograph of a bony old man with a wispy beard allowing himself to be run over by a minivan.
On our way back to the subway station Michael noticed a building that looked like a Buddhist or Taoist temple with its doors wide open. Peering inside, we saw three dozen or so old Chinese men sitting around a bunch of tables chatting quietly and playing chess.
“Hey, you’re supposed to be learning Chinese,” Michael said. “Why don’t you try it out on those guys? Maybe one of them is a master. They might be talking about kung fu right now.”
By then some of the men had noticed us and were giving us slightly annoyed looks. Deciding to give them a pleasant surprise, I marched forward into the room, stood at my full height and recited the sentence I knew best: “Tongzhi! Nimen hao ma?” which translates as “Comrades! How are you?”
To a man their faces turned beet-red with anger, and not one of them said a word in response. They simply pointed toward the door and waved their hands in disgust. Thinking I must have pronounced something wrong, I retreated in embarrassment and led Michael out of the building. “What did you say to those guys, you asshole?” he asked, obviously upset that I might have just offended a roomful of kung fu masters.
“I don’t know!” I answered, but when I took a last look at the building before we rounded the corner I got my answer. High over the wooden doors hung a sign that said in English, OVERSEAS CHINESE KUOMINTANG ASSOCIATION MEETING.
“What does that mean?” Michael asked.
“Oh, man—Kuomintang is the name of the old government that used to rule China! Those are the guys that got chased over to Taiwan by Mao!”
“So?”
“So? I called them Comrades! That would be like … God, it would be like if some kid walked into our kung fu school and said to Sensei, ‘Everybody knows karate can kick kung fu’s ass.’ Man, that was stupid.”
“Some expert you are. Loser!”
Several days later, after filling a few sheets with some shaky brushstroke exercises, I began to worry that the art teacher might still be unimpressed with my presentation and decide not to let me go through with the independent-study course. Realizing there were things only a trained Chinese painter could teach me, I took what I assumed was the logical step: I took my painting materials, rolled them up under my arm and rode my bicycle to the Dragon Inn, the restaurant where Michael and I had consumed our ill-fated Peking duck dinner earlier that year. I entered the restaurant to see the cooks and waiters seated around three round tables having a late-afternoon meal. Not wanting to repeat my earlier experience with speaking Chinese, I remained silent until one of the waiters got up and asked if I wanted to sit at a table or order something to go. I said that I wanted to ask his colleagues a question about Chinese painting.
He shrugged and asked for everyone’s attention. With all of them staring at me I became nervous and forgot the carefully worded statement of purpose I’d composed on the ride over. Instead I said, “Um … is anybody here a Chinese-landscape painter?”
“Yes, I’m a Chinese-landscape painter.”
A chubby, shy-looking young man stood up. He was wearing black plastic nerd-glasses and a clip-on bow tie that had settled into a diagonal position under his collar. His name was Tommy Wing and, I later learned, he was an art-department graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After college he had begun his artistic career by painting landscapes for a traditional Chinese greeting-card company, but when his parents, who lived in the States, fell ill he came here to work as a waiter for several years to help support them. When I showed him my exercises and asked if he could give me any pointers, he covered his mouth with his hand and started giggling uncontrollably. “I’m not laughing at you,” he reassured me when he ga
ined control of himself. “It’s just that I think—you know—that this is kind of funny! I mean, I always thought that white kids were only interested in Chinese kung fu.”
There was something terribly familiar about the tone of his voice when he said “kung fu.” He sounded just like my dad. I decided to postpone telling Tommy about my other Asia-related interest until we got to know each other better. He fetched some brushes and ink from his car and gave me my first lesson right there in the restaurant.
Having gathered the proper materials and a university-accredited tutor, I made my presentation to the art teacher and was given permission to proceed with the project. These successes with the independent-study approach led me to wonder, Why not do this with every class? I tried to persuade my science teacher to let me practice acupuncture on myself instead of having to memorize the Krebs Cycle, but this proposal was met with less enthusiasm than my language and brush-painting projects. The metal-shop teacher would not let me build a broadsword, and when I asked my math teacher if I could skip class to work on the Zen puzzle “If everything returns to the One, to what does the One return to?” his only response was to ask, “What, are you on drugs or something?”
Word of my quest to transform high school into a kind of preparation for the Chinese imperial examinations gradually reached the main office. The vice principal called me in for a meeting and explained to me the strict federal and state regulations concerning the curriculum offered in each grade of every high school, regulations that he had no choice but to enforce. When I protested weakly (I was not the type to argue with a vice principal) by reiterating how enthusiastic I was about these unregulated subjects, and how much I was enjoying learning them as opposed to the state-approved courses, he sighed and looked tired.
