Iron and Silk

by Mark Salzman

  I stood up and said that she was very welcome, but that I had some work to do and should be getting back to the house. She shifted into the rituals of seeing off a guest, which involve pleading with the guest to stay, offering him tea and candies, then accompanying him at least part of his way home. This time she walked me all the way to my door. As she turned to go back, she said, “In your next letter to your mother, tell her you fixed a piano in China for an old lady.” Then she went home.

  I did not like riding the buses in Changsha; they were always terribly crowded, sometimes with passengers squeezed partway out of the doors and windows. I once rode a bus which stopped at a particularly crowded streetcorner. Women were holding their children above their heads so they would not be crushed in the shoving, and I saw a man desperately grab onto something inside the bus while most of his body was not yet on board. The bus attendant screamed at him to let go, but he would not, so she pressed the button operating the doors and they crashed shut on him, fixing him exactly half inside and half out. The bus proceeded to its destination, whereupon the doors opened and the man stepped down, cheerfully paid the attendant half the usual fare, and went on his way.

  To avoid having to ride the buses, I decided to follow the example of the three senior Yale-China teachers in Changsha, Bill, Bob and Marcy, and buy a bicycle. Because I was a foreigner, I was allowed to choose the model I wanted, pay for it on the spot with foreign currency certificates and take it home right away. I walked it out of the store with most of the store following me, got on, and rode away feeling acutely self-conscious, as if I had walked into a car dealer, paid for a Porsche in cash, and driven it out of the showroom right through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  When I got back to the house I felt grimy from all the dust on the roads, so I went upstairs to take a bath. Foreigners were not supposed to take showers in the public bathhouse, so our building was equipped with its own bathtub on the second floor, with an electric water heater attached to the wall above it. The hot water passed from the tank, which was at head level, through an iron pipe into the tub. The first time I used the tub, not realizing that the iron pipe conducted the heat of the heating element, I leaned my backside against it while drying off. As soon as the pain struck I reached out and grabbed the only object within reach—the wire supplying electricity to the heater, which stretched across the room over the tub. As soon as I had pulled myself free, I remembered my parents’ command never to touch wires or electrical devices when standing in a bathtub. I let go in a panic, lost my balance and fell back onto the pipe. After that I got in the habit of drying off in my room.

  This time, as I ran downstairs with a towel around my waist, I was met in my room by Teacher Wu and a silver-haired lady who looked about the same age as Teacher Wu, but was very thin and had fiercely bright eyes. Teacher Wu, who seemed not to notice that I was half-naked and dripping wet, introduced us.

  “Mark, this is Teacher Wei, my colleague. The college has assigned her to be your teacher, in case you would like to continue your study of Chinese. Since you have a background in classical Chinese, she offered to teach you; she taught classical Chinese in our middle school here for many years. She is a very good teacher.” Teacher Wei shook her head and said, “No, no I’m a bad teacher,” but she grinned. Teacher Wu wanted to arrange a schedule then and there, but Teacher Wei pulled her out of the room saying, “He’s wet now. I will come again some other time.” She looked at me. “I will come tomorrow and bring the books you will need.”

  After they left I remembered that I had met Teacher Wei before, at a welcoming party thrown the day after I arrived. One of the Middle-Aged English Teachers had taken me aside and said, “Teacher Wei is a widow and has the reputation of being the strictest teacher in our college. It is said that she never smiles and has never laughed out loud!”

  I did not have much time to worry about how I would get along with mirthless Teacher Wei, however—that night I was scheduled to give a lecture for which I had yet to prepare. My predecessors at the college had begun a Wednesday night “Western Culture Lecture Series” held in the largest hall in the college and open to anyone interested in learning English. Virtually everyone in our college was interested in learning English, so we usually drew a crowd of three to five hundred. Past topics had ranged from “Medical Schools in America” to “The American Legal System,” and each lecture, an hour and a half in length, was given twice—once to the doctors and teachers and once to the students. I was to give my first lecture that night to the doctors and teachers; my topic was “E.T.”

  For starters, I wrote out the events of the movie as I remembered them. Then I figured out what vocabulary I would have to introduce—like “spaceship,” “alien,” “ouch” and “phone home.” I adopted a distinct facial expression, walk, or tone of voice for each character, to make it easier for the audience to know right away who was who, and decided to alternate between narrating and acting out the scenes. I worried that the audience might not appreciate this sort of storytelling and think it childish or uninteresting, but I did not have to worry long. When I introduced E.T. by jumping on the lab table and hopping the length of it with my knees under my chin and my hands dragging on the table, the audience rose to its feet and cheered.

  The next day Teacher Wei arrived after xiuxi with a cloth bag and her glasses case. She walked into my room, sat down and accepted a cup of tea, put on her glasses, and took a book from her bag.

  “We’ll begin with this collection of classical essays prepared for Chinese high school students.” She handed it to me and took out another copy for herself. I noticed that her copy was filled with pencil notes, smudged from her habit of following the text with her fingertip as she read.

  “We’ll begin with an essay by Tao Qian. You are familiar with him, aren’t you? Then of course you know that he was a hermit and a famous drinker, almost fifteen hundred years ago. Most of the great Chinese authors were drinkers and dreamers.”

  She stopped, took off her glasses, and looked closely at me.

  “I saw your lecture last night, the one called ‘E.T.’ You are a very naughty boy!” She took from her bag a small medicine jar and handed it to me. I opened it and found that it contained a shot of baijiu—Chinese rice liquor.

  “Since we will be reading the works of drinkers and dreamers, and since you are clearly an eccentric yourself, I think it only fitting that you appreciate their essays like this. From now on I will bring a small bottle of baijiu when I come. You will finish it, then we will have our lesson.”

  I thought she was kidding, so I laughed, but she really meant for me to drink it. She reached into her bag and pulled out a container of fried peanuts, still warm from the wok.

  “You must have something to eat with it, of course. I brought some peanuts for you. If you don’t finish the wine, no lesson for you.”

  I finished the baijiu and peanuts, to her great satisfaction. Then she put on her glasses and began the lesson.

  …

  Not long after our first lesson Teacher Wei happened to walk by our house while I was practicing wushu out front. Wushu is the Chinese word for martial arts, and refers to any of hundreds of schools of armed and unarmed combat practiced in China for more than two thousand years. These schools range from the slow, graceful Taijiquan, or T’ai Chi Ch’uan, to the explosive Northern and Southern schools of Shaolin boxing. In the West, Chinese martial arts are called “kung fu” or “gong fu,” but the word gong fu actually means skill that transcends mere surface beauty. A martial artist whose technique is decorative but without power “has no gong fu,” whereas, say, a calligrapher whose work is not pretty to look at but reflects a strong, austere taste certainly “has gong fu.”

  Teacher Wei walked over and asked what I was doing. When I told her that wushu had been an interest of mine for many years, she nodded with approval.

  “In classical Chinese we have a saying that to be a true gentleman it is important to be ‘well-versed in the literary
and the martial.’ Wushu is an excellent sport. Have you found a teacher here yet?”

  At this I became very excited. I told her that I would love to find a teacher but had no idea where to look for one, and that even if I found one, I wouldn’t know how to approach him. I also expressed my doubts that a wushu teacher would accept a foreign student, as I had heard that they were usually secretive and old-fashioned in their thinking. She shook her head vigorously.

  “That may be true of the mediocre fighters, but you will find that the best fighters in China are not superstitious or close-minded. If you want to learn wushu, you will have a teacher—I can guarantee it, because you are a friendly boy. That is most important. Besides,”—she allowed herself a giggle—“you are exotic. Your big nose alone will open doors! You have blond hair, blue eyes, and you are very strong—you’re a ‘model foreigner!’ Teachers will find you.” I asked her if she knew anyone who might be able to help me, but she just smiled and said to be patient, then continued on her way.

  As I walked back into the house to take a bath and have breakfast, I noticed a man with close-cropped white hair squatting on the steps of our building. I said good morning to him and he answered politely, complimenting my Chinese. I asked him if he had come to see one of the American teachers, and he said no, then explained that he was staying in the one empty room in our building, which the college offered to guests when the regular guest house was full. He was a doctor of rehabilitative therapy and traditional Chinese medicine at a hospital on the outskirts of the city, and had come to represent his specialty at a conference our college was sponsoring. His name was Dr. Li. When he stood up to introduce himself, I noticed that he was taller than I, had broad shoulders, and held back his head slightly, which gave him an extraordinarily distinguished appearance.

  “I saw you exercising,” he said, “and overheard your conversation with the lady. There are several good teachers in Hunan.”

  “Do you know any of them?”

  “Yes, I know one or two.”

  “Do you think any of them would be willing to teach me?”

  “Hard to say,” he said, then wished me good morning and left for breakfast.

  Dr. Li stayed for one week. Every morning he squatted in front of the house, watched me exercise, talked for a little while, then left to get breakfast. The afternoon before he left he happened to return to the house while I was sitting out front working on a charcoal and ink sketch. He sat next to me until I finished, then took it in his hands to have a better look. He seemed to like it, so I asked him please to keep it.

  “Thank you very much—it is a beautiful drawing,” he said, then got up to leave. “Will you be exercising tomorrow morning?” he asked casually.

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll tell you something. The reason you haven’t seen anyone practicing wushu is that you get up too late. You are out here at 6:30 every morning. The wushu people have already finished practicing by then! Get up a little earlier tomorrow; you might see something then.” He thanked me again for the drawing and went into the house.

  At five o’clock the next morning my alarm went off. I scrambled outside and sat down on the steps. It was still dark out, and I didn’t see anyone else up yet, much less practicing wushu. Then it occurred to me how unlikely it would be for a wushu expert to choose to practice in the north campus of Hunan Medical College, and I cursed myself for not asking Dr. Li where I should go. I stood up to go back to bed when I noticed an unfamiliar shape next to a bamboo tree planted against the south end of the house. I walked over and saw that it was Dr. Li, balanced on one leg in an impossible posture, his body so still I could not even see him breathe.

  After an interminable length of time he suddenly straightened up, nodding to acknowledge my presence. He then practiced a Taijiquan form that lasted some twenty minutes. He moved so slowly I felt hypnotized watching him. When he finished, he gestured for me to stand next to him.

  “Of the wushu I practice,” he said, “my favorite is called the Xuan Men Sword. Xuan means dark, or mysterious; men means gate.” He had me stay put while he quickly found two sticks of equal length, perhaps two and a half feet long, then gave one to me.

  “Do what I do,” he said, and began teaching me the form.

  After half an hour or so, he said it was time for breakfast and told me that this was the last day he would be living in our house, so unfortunately he could not teach me every morning.

  “But I will come here every three days or so until you learn the form. Wait for me here, in front of your house, early in the morning.”

  He kept his promise and I was able to learn all the movements of the form in a month, but he insisted that something was still missing. Although I performed the techniques well, he could see I was not concentrating in a manner appropriate for the form: “You look good, but you have no gong fu.” At last he invited me to his home for dinner, saying that he could teach me better there. When I followed the directions he gave me to his house, I realized that he had been riding forty-five minutes each way to teach me for the past month. He lived well outside the center of the city on a small hill surrounded by lush, irrigated fields. As soon as I arrived his wife offered me a hot towel to wipe the dust off my hands and face. The three of us sat down to a simple but delicious meal of pork strips over noodles in broth, steamed fish, and plenty of rice.

  When we had finished, Dr. Li’s wife took what was left over and carried it into the adjacent bedroom where, I discovered, his son and two daughters, all in their teens or twenties, were sitting. When I asked why they hadn’t eaten with us, Dr. Li seemed puzzled. “That would be rude, wouldn’t it? You are our guest, after all.”

  He apparently sensed my discomfort, because he invited them to join us for dessert—a few oranges and apples, and more tea. Dr. Li’s children were far too shy to carry on a conversation with me, but one of them did manage to ask me if American food was the same as Chinese food. I tried to describe a typical American meal for them, but it proved difficult: how do you explain pizza to someone who has never seen cheese, tomato sauce, or a pie crust?

  After dessert Dr. Li took two swords from another room, tied them together with some string, and asked me to follow him. We got on our bicycles and rode to nearby Mawangdui, the site of the hole that had contained the two-thousand-year-old corpse. We walked past that hole to a second mound, which Dr. Li told me was supposed to contain the tomb of either the marquise’s husband or her son. The top of the mound was nearly flat and had patches of grass growing here and there on its packed dirt surface. As Dr. Li unfastened the two swords and handed me one, I realized that the flat part of the mound was just the right size for the form he had taught me.

  The sun had not yet gone down, and it cast a glittering reflection over the Xiang River a few miles away. The vegetable plots in all directions around us caught the light as well and glowed brightly, in sharp contrast to the deep red earth of the paths between the fields.

  “Just think,” he said, “under your feet is so much history! There are all sorts of treasures in this mound—probably even swords like these, only real ones that were used in ancient wars. With all this history under you, don’t you feel moved? Now, practice the form, and this time don’t fuss over the technique. Just enjoy it, as if this mound gave you power. That is the kind of feeling that makes wushu beautiful—it is tradition passing through you. Isn’t that a kind of power?”

  After the lesson at Mawangdui Dr. Li said there was no need for him to come in the mornings to teach me anymore, but that if I wanted any further instruction I could visit him anytime. Since very few people in China have telephones, about the only way to arrange to visit someone is to walk to his house and knock on the door. If it’s a friend, you can often dispense with the knocking and just walk in. My students told me again and again that if I ever wanted to see them I could walk into their homes any time of day or night.

  “But what if you are busy?”

  “It doesn’t matter! If y
ou come, I won’t be busy anymore!”

  “But what if you are asleep?”

  “Then wake me up!”

  No matter how often I was given these instructions, though, I could not bring myself to follow them. Whenever someone banged on my door unexpectedly, or simply appeared in my room, I always felt slightly nervous, and I only visited my friends when I felt I had a good reason.

  So I did not call upon Dr. Li for more lessons, but contented myself with practicing the Xuan Men Sword and trying to recreate the feeling invoked by dancing with the sword on the Han dynasty tomb.

  By that time Teacher Wei was helping me through a classical novel, The Water Margin, the story of a hundred and eight renegade heroes, all martial arts experts, who band together and perform deeds similar to those of Robin Hood and the men of Sherwood Forest. Teacher Wei and I agreed that our favorite character was Lu Zhishen, known as the Phony Monk, a man with a righteous soul but a powerful temper, who was on the run from the law after killing an evil merchant to redress an injustice. To escape execution he became a Buddhist monk, but was unsuited to the monk’s abstemious way of life. He would sneak out of the monastery at night to drink superhuman amounts of baijiu and eat roast dogs, bones and all, then return to the monastery where the other monks would scold him for drinking and eating meat. In a drunken rage, he would beat them all up, reduce a few buildings to rubble, then throw up in the meditation hall. Of course, the next day he would feel very bad and fix everything he had broken.