Iron and Silk

by Mark Salzman

  While Pan struggled to recite English routines from memory, he began teaching me how to use traditional weapons. He would teach me a single move, then have me practice it in front of him until I could do it ten times in a row without a mistake. He always stood about five feet away from me, with his arms folded, grinding his teeth, and the only time he took his eyes off me was to blink. One night in the late spring I was having a particularly hard time learning a move with the staff. I was sweating heavily and my right hand was bleeding, so the staff had become slippery and hard to control. Several of the athletes stayed on after their workout to watch and to enjoy the breeze that sometimes passed through the training hall. Pan stopped me and indicated that I wasn’t working hard enough. “Imagine,” he said, “that you are participating in the national competition, and those athletes are your competitors. Look as if you know what you are doing! Frighten them with your strength and confidence.” I mustered all the confidence I could, under the circumstances, and flung myself into the move. I lost control of the staff, and it whirled straight into my forehead. As if in a dream, the floor raised up several feet to support my behind, and I sat staring up at Pan while blood ran down across my nose and a fleshy knob grew between my eyebrows. The athletes sprang forward to help me up. They seemed nervous, never having had a foreigner knock himself out in their training hall before, but Pan, after asking if I felt all right, seemed positively inspired. “Sweating and bleeding. Good.”

  …

  Every once in a while, Pan felt it necessary to give his students something to think about, to spur them on to greater efforts. During one morning workout two women practiced a combat routine, one armed with a spear, the other with a dadao, or halberd. The dadao stands about six feet high and consists of a broadsword attached to a thick wooden pole, with an angry-looking spike at the far end. It is heavy and difficult to wield even for a strong man, so it surprised me to see this young woman, who could not weigh more than one hundred pounds, using it so effectively. At one point in their battle the woman with the dadao swept it toward the other woman’s feet, as if to cut them off, but the other woman jumped up in time to avoid the blow. The first woman, without letting the blade of the dadao stop, brought it around in another sweep, as if to cut the other woman in half at the waist. The other woman, without an instant to spare, bent straight from the hips so that the dadao slashed over her back and head, barely an inch away. This combination was to be repeated three times in rapid succession before moving on to the next exchange. The women practiced this move several times, none of which satisfied Pan. “Too slow, and the weapon is too far away from her. It should graze her back as it goes by.” They tried again, but still Pan growled angrily. Suddenly he got up and took the dadao from the first woman. The entire training hall went silent and still. Without warming up at all, Pan ordered the woman with the spear to get ready, and to move fast when the time came. His body looked as though electricity had suddenly passed through it, and the huge blade flashed toward her. Once, twice the dadao flew beneath her feet, then swung around in a terrible arc and rode her back with flawless precision. The third time he added a little twist at the end, so that the blade grazed up her neck and sent a little decoration stuck in her pigtails flying across the room.

  I had to sit down for a moment to ponder the difficulty of sending an object roughly the shape of an oversized shovel, only heavier, across a girl’s back and through her pigtails, without guide ropes or even a safety helmet. Not long before, I had spoken with a former troupe member who, when practicing with this instrument, had suddenly found himself on his knees. The blade, unsharpened, had twirled a bit too close to him and passed through his Achilles’ tendon without a sound. Pan handed the dadao back to the woman and walked over to me. “What if you had made a mistake?” I asked. “I never make mistakes,” he said, without looking at me.

  “Learn calligraphy,” Teacher Wei said, “it will improve your mind.” So I bought a few brushes, a bottle of ink and some paper, and waited for further instructions.

  She gave me a children’s book of models to copy from, but beyond a few basic instructions she declined to teach me, saying that her calligraphy was not good enough. “There are plenty of good calligraphers around. Find one and take lessons.” I passed word around that I was looking for a calligraphy teacher and not long afterwards heard from Teacher Wu that a suitable teacher had been found. His name was Hai Bin, and he had been born and raised in Suzhou, the city of enclosed gardens, for many centuries famed as an artists’ community. Hai Bin had been a prodigy and had studied with many of the city’s great painters and calligraphers. I asked Teacher Wu how I should approach him; she told me not to worry, he would visit me in my room that evening.

  That afternoon I cleaned my room, set out all my brushes and paper on the desk, and bought some expensive tea to offer him when he arrived. At seven o’clock someone knocked on the door. I opened it, feeling strangely nervous, and sighed with relief when I saw it was only a graduate student about my age, with an English textbook under his arm. I asked if I could help him with anything.

  “Are you Mr. Salzman?” he asked, lowering his gaze.

  “Yes.”

  “I am Hai Bin.”

  At first I didn’t believe him, thinking that all good calligraphers had to be old men with thin, white beards. But then I saw a few calligraphy books peeking out from under the English text, so, hiding my disappointment, I invited him in.

  While many young men in China were wearing stylish nylon shirts, flared pants and slight heels, and were beginning to let their hair creep down over their ears, Hai Bin wore simple cotton Army pants, a plain white shirt and sandals, and had short hair that looked as if he had cut it himself. He spoke beautiful Mandarin and English, and I noticed that when he sat down at my desk and examined my calligraphy materials, cheap as they were, he handled them with great care. He explained that, no matter what the quality of the brush or paper, one should always treat them as if they were priceless. “This prepares your mind for the serious task ahead.” After softening the hairs of a brush in warm water, he dipped it in the ink several times until he felt it was properly loaded. He adjusted himself in the chair, stared quietly at the paper, then brought the brush down on it with the concentration of a surgeon. He spent about five minutes filling the paper with the characters of a poem. When he finished, sweat glistened on his forehead. “Calligraphy is very, very difficult,” he said, “because it requires everything.” He gave me the brush, took my hand in his, and began showing me how to form the strokes.

  In Chinese calligraphy a single dot requires as many as five distinct motions of the wrist and shoulder to be formed properly, and that same dot will be formed differently depending on which of the several tens of established styles you are studying. Once you are able to brush the dots, lines, hooks and circles, you must learn how to put them together into aesthetically balanced characters. After that, you learn to write the separate characters as if an invisible, unbroken line existed between them, to give them continuity and life. There seems to be no end to the complexity of this art; Hai Bin had brought three books, each containing examples of a different calligrapher’s work, and we spent an hour comparing their versions of a single character.

  He started me copying the work of Liu Gongquan, saying that practicing Liu’s vigorous, bold strokes would help my martial arts. Hai Bin believed that calligraphy, painting and wushu were closely related, and that skill in one would inevitably carry over into the others. He told me I should practice every day, but if I could not, I should at least look at the models and run my finger over them as if I were writing them myself. Most important was that I choose a time for practice when I would not be disturbed by friends or sudden noises.

  As the weeks passed and I began to make progress, I tired of Liu’s models and wanted to try something new. When I told Hai Bin he frowned and said that some people spend their entire lives researching a single model—I should at least be willing to spend a year on t
his one. At last I convinced him to let me copy one other model, a form of ancient seal script in the style of Wu Changshuo. Hai Bin introduced me to the fundamental brushstrokes of this style, and I found that not one of them resembled those of Liu Gongquan.

  Perhaps Hai Bin was right about calligraphy and wushu being related, for although he had had no formal martial arts training he did have a keen eye for what was wrong in my execution of certain moves. On his way to the laboratory in the morning and after dinner in the evening, he would often wander to our little compound where I practiced to point out flaws and to encourage me to work harder. Whenever I stopped to take a break, he would say, “Would Master Pan want you to rest? Your time is precious—use it wisely!” I gave him the nickname Slave Driver, and he seemed very pleased with it. One morning he came earlier than usual, and instead of finding me outside exercising, he looked in my window and saw me practicing calligraphy with a Walkman on. He tapped on the window; I turned around to see him shaking his head and finger at me vigorously, indicating that I should put the Walkman away. After that incident he gave me the nickname Bad Boy.

  If there was a painting or calligraphy exhibit in town, Hai Bin would invite me to go with him. We usually began with a bowl of noodles downtown and then made our way to the exhibit, where he would explain the work to me in detail. The only time I saw him truly disgusted was when we saw an exhibit of Chinese calligraphy by a celebrated Frenchman studying in Shanghai, who brushed the characters in a free-form, abstract manner. Hai Bin’s face twisted into a grimace. “This is so-called freedom,” he said, and wanted to see no more.

  During winter break Bill and I traveled to Nanjing and Shanghai, he to visit historical sites and I in search of Western food. In Nanjing I found a restaurant that served chocolate pie and wanted to stay there for the rest of the trip, but Bill convinced me that Shanghai would have better food and besides, we could stop in Suzhou on the way. Hai Bin was home on vacation there and had promised us an insider’s tour of the city if we came to visit.

  Our train arrived in Suzhou at night. We got on a bus that was empty except for a young couple who were so absorbed in talking to their newborn baby that they did not even notice us. They spoke in Suzhou hua, reputedly the most beautiful of Chinese dialects, which sounded distinctly smoother and more nasal than the Changsha hua we were used to. The woman held the baby’s face to her throat to keep him warm, while the husband held the baby’s two hands in his one. When the bus stopped near our hotel and we stood up, the woman saw us and gasped, holding the baby tighter against her throat and whispering to her husband. He turned to look at us and nearly jumped. Perhaps we looked even stranger than usual, since Bill, at six and a half feet, had to practically bend over at the waist to stand up in the bus, like some sort of crippled giant. We waved to the young family and they smiled nervously, waving goodbye with their baby’s hand and telling him to “say goodbye to the foreign uncles.”

  We walked along a canal with dim lights reflected in its calm surface, following a quiet road lined with trees and two-story wooden houses painted solid black or white and decorated with handsomely carved doors and terraces. By the time we reached our hotel, I had decided that Suzhou was one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen.

  The hotel was not far from where Hai Bin’s family lived. At seven o’clock the next morning he met us out front, early morning being the best time to sightsee, since by noon the parks and gardens are jammed with people of all ages, especially children who run, scream and throw fruit peels all over the most serene architecture in the world. Each garden has its own unique theme and characteristics; Hai Bin had spent many hours in the gardens with his teachers, who believed that by simply looking at the careful arrangements of rocks, trees, walls and space, one could improve one’s painting and calligraphy. He showed us the best angles from which to view certain famous trees and rocks, some of which have names to describe their particular beauty, and occasionally had us look in a certain direction for several minutes, advising us on how our eyes and minds should move through the scene.

  On our third and last day in Suzhou, Hai Bin took us to a small garden that was completely deserted, then asked us to wait for him while he stepped out for a few minutes. He told us that one of his teachers, a distinguished artist now in his eighties, lived nearby and might consent to join us in the garden for the morning. Half an hour later Hai Bin returned with his teacher, who looked more like a sea captain than an artist. He was short, sturdy and unshaven, and had gnarled hands that delivered an extraordinarily powerful handshake. We soon found out why—he carved stone seals, using only a metal knife shaped like a chisel to carve out the designs. His genius, along with the strength and steadiness of his hands, had made him one of the greatest seal artists in China; he had brought along several bound collections of prints made from his seals, which he spread out on a stone table, inviting us to look. In spite of his fame he was thoroughly unpretentious, answering all of our questions with care and enthusiasm, and even offering to carve seals for Bill and me to show his appreciation for our coming to China and teaching English. During our conversation Hai Bin sat quietly next to him, helping him turn the pages and translating for us when we could not understand the artist’s dialect.

  We asked him about an especially beautiful print depicting two horses leaping together, one in solid color, the other in outline, and he told us that the horses represented him and his late wife. The inscription said something about his thoughts of “journeying to the West,” where they would be reunited. Hai Bin explained that in Buddhist terminology the journey West meant the passage of the soul from life into death. Just as he finished his explanation, two liumang—punks—wandered noisily into the garden with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths. After looking at Bill and me for a while, talking loudly in dialect so that we could not understand them, they looked down at the collection of seals on the table, dropping ashes on the precious books. They began to jeer at the old man; they read the inscription about the journey to the West and, in their ignorance, accused the old man of sucking up to Westerners. The artist said nothing and sat bent over his books, his eyes lowered, while the hoodlums continued to insult him.

  Suddenly Hai Bin stood up. Though slighter than either of the liumang, he turned on them as if they were children and gave them a tongue-lashing that apparently ended with the advice that they leave the garden, for that is what they did, grinning nervously. Hai Bin gently brushed the ashes off his teacher’s book and apologized to Bill and me for their behavior. The artist apologized also, telling us how ashamed he felt to see young people acting so rudely, then asked us to excuse him, for it was getting late and he had to return home. We took a few photographs together, said farewell and watched as they left the garden, Hai Bin carrying the master’s books and supporting his arm as they walked.

  Later that day in another garden, Hai Bin and I stood on a little bridge arching over an artificial pond. We were looking at a pair of Mandarin ducks swimming under a plaque that extolled the virtues of their species, which chooses only one mate and remains devoted to it for life. I asked Hai Bin if this was true and he answered, “Yes, of course. But I’ve heard that if you take them to America, they ask for a divorce within a few months.” This was the first joke I had heard in China, so I felt it was some kind of breakthrough. I responded by telling him a few American jokes, and he laughed, but pointed out that most of them were biologically unfeasable.

  Back in Changsha I was determined to pursue our friendship. Although we liked each other very much and had become familiar, our conversations still sounded like interviews for a Cultural Exchange magazine. We shared many interests, and I had seen his home and met his family, who were much like my own. Surely, I thought, at heart we could not be so different. One warm night I bought two bottles of beer and asked Hai Bin to come down to the river to watch the sunset with me. We talked about calligraphy and medicine until it got dark; then I pulled out the beers and we polished them off, sitting on th
e floodwall and watching the cigarettes of the fishermen glowing like red fireflies. We were laughing about something when suddenly it flashed through my mind what was missing from our discussions.

  “Hai Bin, tell me—what are the two things you think about most, that pass through your mind most, whether you like it or not?”

  He paused for a few seconds, scratching his head, then answered “Eating and sleeping.”

  I was so full of hope that our culture gap would magically be bridged that I could not accept this.

  “Come on, Hai Bin, that can’t be true!”

  “But of course it is true! The food in our dining hall is so terrible it makes me think of home, when my mother cooked for me. I think of it all the time. Don’t you always tell me how much you dream of milk trembles?”

  “Milk shakes.”

  “Milk shakes. And our dormitory is very noisy at night, because the students laugh loudly and listen to the Voice of America with the radios on loudly, and I cannot go to sleep when I want, so I never get enough sleep.”

  I realized, to my disappointment, that he was being sincere, and when he put the question to me I became flustered.

  “Well, Hai Bin, I guess I want people to like me, for one thing. Especially women—do you know what I mean?”

  “And the other?”

  “I want to be very, very good at something.”

  “At what?”

  “It doesn’t matter, I guess. I want to do something well enough that I feel satisfied with it, or get some kind of recognition for it.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Why do you think about these things?”

  “Because they are important—aren’t they?”