Iron and Silk

by Mark Salzman

  When we reached his house, I felt as if we had left Changsha completely. He lived in a small, red-brick building surrounded by trees and terraced vegetable plots, all tucked away on the slope of Yuelu Mountain not far below an orange grove. An old man sat in the shade of a tree growing near the building, playing the erhu, a Chinese stringed instrument. Hei explained that this group of two-story buildings housed teachers in the Arts and Culture Department of the Teachers’ College. His neighbors were painters, dancers, musicians, scholars and athletes. When we walked into his apartment, a flock of chickens that slept under his stove at night ran forward to be fed. Hei motioned for me to sit in a large chair while he sat on a low stool near a window. He stretched his arm out of the window where a young tree stood and plucked a few tiny, oval-shaped fruits off it. “Do you like kumquats?” he asked. “This tree is doing well.” I had never seen a fresh kumquat; I told him I liked preserved kumquats, but had never tried them off the tree. He dropped the fruits into a tin cup filled with boiling water, poked them around for a minute, then handed me one. He watched me carefully, and when he saw how much I enjoyed it, he went outside, picked twenty more and put them into my bag. He introduced me to his wife, who quietly insisted that I try a few tea-cooked eggs that she had just prepared. Then I left, having agreed to come three afternoons a week thereafter for lessons.

  When I next came I found Hei out in the terraced vegetable patch harvesting some kind of spinach. He heard the bell on my bicycle and came trotting down the hill, his shoulder pole bent with the weight of two buckets full of nightsoil, which he used as fertilizer. A cup of tea that he had steeped earlier and let cool waited for me inside; he knew I liked “cold drinks.” After I finished it he cleaned a few kumquats for me, watched me eat them, then took me outside to practice. During the lesson I heard a piano through the window above Teacher Hei’s apartment. The playing was beautiful, and it complemented the calm grace of Hei’s movements. He stepped, turned, parried and struck in rapid, gentle circles. Unlike Pan’s eyes, which flashed with exquisite violence, Hei’s eyes looked alert but expressionless, almost like a bird’s. His first criticism of my attempt to learn the straight punch of xingyi was that my shoulders and arms were too tense. “Even your hands should relax,” he said, “tensing and snapping only at the moment of impact.” He took my hand in his to show me the correct posture and noticed the scars on my knuckles. “You are hitting iron, I see.” I looked at his hands and saw that they were unmarked. “Teacher Hei, do you condition your hands in any way?” He spread his hands in front of him and looked at them as if trying to decide something. “No, I don’t. I suppose I could, but in truth, I can’t think of a good reason for it. What would I do with such powerful hands? I’m a college teacher and a gardener, not a warrior. Besides, the wushu I practice does not require it. When you practice, your hands should look fluid and graceful, as if they were made of silk. They become hard only for an instant, like the end of a whip as it cracks, then they are soft again.”

  Hei went into the house for a few minutes to check on the stew he was cooking, leaving me outside to practice the straight punch. An old woman wearing a plain white blouse and a grey skirt appeared in one of the doorways and sat down on a stool to watch me. I smiled at her and she smiled back, waving at me and gesturing for me to continue. I kept it up for a while, then paused to stand in the shade of a tree. “I think it’s wonderful that you are making such good use of your time here in China,” the old woman said all of a sudden. “Your teacher says you are an exceptionally diligent student.”

  “Well, it’s very nice of him to—” I stopped in mid-sentence and blinked. She had complimented me in fluent English. “You-you speak English!”

  “Why yes, I do. I grew up in the States. I imagine that was some time before you were born.”

  “And—now you live here, in Changsha?”

  “That’s right. I live right upstairs. That was my piano you must have heard. I’m a piano teacher here. You see, I was a piano student in the forties. I was visiting China at the time of the Revolution. Of course, it became difficult to enter or leave China at that time, so … now I live here.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She stood up, brushing her skirt daintily, then walked over to where I was standing. “You’re lucky to have a teacher like Mr. Hei. He is a kind and generous man. Do you see all the gardens and trees around here? He planted them all. He dug all those terraces, too. And he shares what he grows with the whole neighborhood. Everyone likes him, because he is a real gentleman. He is out of the house every morning at four o’clock to exercise, then at five he rides across the river to teach wushu in the park. He does it for free, you know! Really, there are so few people like him.” Just then Teacher Hei came out of the house. The old woman said to me, “Back to work, now! Come visit me whenever you like—I have some instant coffee that a relative sent, so I could make you a cup if you like.” She waved goodbye and disappeared into the building. “So that’s what English sounds like,” Teacher Hei said, then he asked me how my straight punch was coming along.

  By wintertime I was getting fairly comfortable with Teacher Hei’s xingyi and bagua. My biggest problem, he said, was still the same: I did not relax enough. He had thought it over and decided that if I was serious about learning soft-style boxing, I should study Taijiquan, the quintessential “soft” martial art. “My Taijiquan is not good enough, but I know someone who is very good. If you like, I will approach him and ask if he will teach you.”

  One week later Teacher Hei took me to a small old house in the center of the city, with a ceiling of exposed wood, stained black from the accumulated smoke of incense and coal. There he introduced me to Teacher Yi, who was in his forties, and to Yi’s father-in-law, Old Zai, who was in his eighties. Both of them were well-known taiji experts in Changsha; Yi was chairman of the city-wide wushu association. They practiced the Wu style of taiji, native to Changsha, distinctive for its method of leaning with the whole upper body in the direction of attack rather than maintaining a strictly upright posture. They taught their students right there in the house, in an area no larger than fifteen by eight feet. As we talked, two advanced students practiced “push hands,” a kind of sparring that moves slowly and gently until one partner senses the other losing his balance and takes advantage of it instantly, sending his opponent flying with a well-timed push. They had cigarettes in their mouths as they fought: the cigarette and incense smoke was so thick they looked like figures in a hazy dreamscape, writhing and bobbing like serpents, then suddenly bursting apart with one left standing and the other crashing into a wall and sliding down to the floor. “Teacher Hei has asked me to teach you taiji,” Yi said at last. “Usually I wouldn’t consider it, because you will only be here a short time. My father and I only accept students who are willing to study for at least five years. Even that is only a beginning! Teacher Hei is my friend, though, and he thinks it would be worthwhile, so why don’t you come three nights a week, starting next week. I would like you to come here early Sunday morning for the first lesson.”

  When I arrived that Sunday, instead of taking me into the house he told me to get back on my bicycle and follow him. We rode to the home of a young man, another beginning student, who joined us on our way across the river to Yuelu Mountain. We hiked to an old Taoist temple halfway up, where a young man sitting by the entrance greeted us. He led us into a sitting room and served us tea and cookies. I noticed something strange about the way he moved; when he stepped out of the room, Yi told me the boy was blind. “His taiji is coming along nicely, though.” After our snack the three of us said goodbye to the young man and climbed to a clearing near the top, from which we had a view of the river. There, Yi told us to sit down and watch him practice the form, which took almost thirty minutes. He practiced it so slowly I sometimes thought he had stopped moving, but even so it seemed that his clothes would burst from the strength underneath. After that he taught us the first move of the form. “It’s important to get off to a g
ood start,” Yi said. “This is the right kind of atmosphere. In the future, when you practice at my house or anywhere else, if you find your mind getting cluttered, close your eyes and remember this scene.”

  On a pretty day between the cold rains of winter and the steaming rains of spring, Hei and I took a pair of spears up the mountain to a clearing by an orange grove. We weren’t the only ones to think of this—a few minutes after we got there, a teacher of traditional Chinese dance brought five of her apprentices to the same clearing. At first the girls, all in their mid-teens, hid their faces in their hands with embarrassment, unable to concentrate with me only a few yards away. Gradually they settled down, though, and began their dance. The older woman sang while the girls, all petite and moonfaced, danced with silk handkerchiefs in their hands. The handkerchiefs seemed to come to life in the air, floating and darting around the girls like birds. “Do you remember when I told you that your hands should move as if they were made of silk?” Hei asked me. “Yes.” “Well, that’s what I mean. Isn’t it beautiful?” Somehow this seemed a good time to ask a question that had been nagging me for some time. “Teacher Hei, I have a question.” “Mm?” “Sometimes I get confused—I don’t understand why I spend so much time learning wushu. I’m not a fighter—I’ve never been in a fight in my life—so what am I doing this for?”

  Hei thought for a while, never taking his eyes off the dancers. Then he said, “You don’t have to be a fighter to enjoy wushu. If you were really training for combat, you wouldn’t practice wushu. You would become a soldier.” He pointed to the spear I was holding. “Look at this thing. Do you really think it has any practical use in this century? Can you carry it with you in case of attack and still feel like a respectable man? It is a cultural artifact now, not a weapon. But should we throw away all our spears and all the skill developed for them? I don’t think so. It would seem like a waste to me.”

  “I guess I see what you mean, but still, what reason can I give myself for all this effort?” Teacher Hei shrugged his shoulders, then answered, “I don’t know—why dance with handkerchiefs?”

  …

  “I think the taiji is helping,” Teacher Hei said one afternoon. “You look more relaxed. That solves one problem. You have another problem, though, and it doesn’t have anything to do with martial arts. You don’t dress warmly enough! You wear a heavy army coat when you ride here, but the ride gets you all sweaty, so you take it off as soon as you arrive. That way you get a chill! You don’t wear the proper clothing for the Hunan climate. Again I have called upon an expert to help you—my wife. She believes she can solve the problem.” He called her from outside, where she was washing clothes. She walked over to a closet and pulled out a beautiful jet-black turtleneck sweater. It was made of thick, heavy wool. I tried it on and it fit perfectly. “She knitted it herself,” Teacher Hei said proudly, “guessing your size just by looking at you.” I groped for the appropriate words to thank her but she interrupted me. “It’s black. That way, when you leave us, you can remember your Teacher Black.” She blushed, then hurried back outside to finish her laundry.

  It had been one thing after another the day I stabbed myself with the sword. Several of my students had been completely unprepared for class, I had ridden across the river for a wushu lesson but Teacher Hei was not at home, and when I got back and started practicing I strained a hamstring within half an hour. I limped through most of my routines, saving the one I was studying at the time, the Drunken Sword, for last. This technique was created some time ago by the student of a famous swordsman, who one day gave up in despair, thinking he could never progress beyond the stage he had reached. He left his master’s house, supposedly for good, and went directly to a wineshop in the nearby village. There he got drunk. As he staggered out he was confronted by his teacher, who threw a wooden sword at him in disgust and told him to prepare for a good beating. The student, relaxed and made bold by the wine, gave the master a good beating instead—in front of all the other students, no less. The next day apologies were made and all was forgiven, but all was not forgotten; the students who witnessed the fight went away to the wineshop and began their study of this new method.

  My routine called for me to leap, spin in the air and land in a twisted posture. I remember thinking in mid-air that I had not jumped high enough to land properly. When I hit the ground I felt a blinding pain and looked down to see that I had sent the tip of the thirty-six inch blade into my thigh. Thankful that my aim had not been worse, I pulled it out, dressed the wound and decided to go shopping to cheer myself up.

  In all my time in China I had never treated myself to anything but sweatsuits and wushu equipment, so that day I decided to buy a painting. I went to a painting and calligraphy gallery that Hai Bin had recommended, a huge room on the second floor of the Hunan Museum annex, and started to browse. There were only two other people in the room, a sales clerk and an older Chinese man who appeared to be dozing in a large padded chair. The sales clerk walked over, took my arm and led me away from the “boring” monochrome paintings I was looking at, to a section of the room that had a sign, “Welcome Foreign Friends,” taped on one wall. There hung several dozen colorful portraits of Chinese minority women with tiny waists and enormous breasts, dressed in alluring “native costumes,” gathering berries or drawing water from rustic wells. Even if I had wanted one of these monstrosities I could not have afforded it, so I told the clerk I preferred the “boring” monochromes and returned to that part of the gallery. The old man in the chair had apparently listened to our conversation, for he got up, walked over to a few feet from where I stood and silently watched me as I looked at the paintings. “You speak Chinese,” he said at last. “Yes, a little bit.” He lit a cigarette, leaned his head to one side and squinted. “That’s incredible.” “Not really,” I replied. “I live here, I have to speak Chinese.” “You live here?” he asked, his eyes opening up. “Yes—I teach at the medical college.” He flicked the ashes of his cigarette, shaking his head. “That’s incredible.”

  He was quiet for a few minutes, then asked, “So you don’t like the girlie paintings, huh?” “No, do you?” He broke into a smile. “I’m Chinese! How can I like that kind of thing? That’s for foreigners. But you’re a foreigner and you don’t like them. What do you like?” I pointed to my favorite piece, a small ink painting of three shrimp. “And why do you like it?” he asked. “Because it’s simple,” I answered. We compared a few paintings and a few pieces of calligraphy, then he asked me to follow him downstairs for a moment. At the bottom of the stairs he pointed to a large mural depicting a mist-shrouded valley filled with soldiers, jeeps, trucks, smokestacks, utility poles and television antennas. “What do you think?” I told him I didn’t like it. “Why not?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “Too many jeeps,” I answered, and he laughed, grasped my hand and shook it for some time. “I’ll have you know I painted that mural,” he said, “and you’re exactly right! There are too many jeeps in it! You don’t know how wonderful it is to hear someone say that! Just for saying that, I’m going to paint you a landscape, I promise you!” He wrote down his address and told me to visit him a week later, after xiuxi.

  When I got there, his whole family greeted me and fed me all sorts of nuts, sunflower seeds, dried beans and tea. The artist, Master Lu, took out a photo album showing pictures of favorite works he had sold. He turned out to be one of the best-known painters in Hunan, who was frequently commissioned by the State to paint murals for important halls and smaller paintings for visiting dignitaries. Finally, after clearing a space on the wall, he took a freshly mounted scroll from his desk. He carefully unrolled it, hung it from a nail high up on the wall, then stood back to let me see it. It was an imaginary scene in the mountains with no sign of industrialization in sight, inscribed with a poem in a style of calligraphy he had seen me admiring in the art gallery. Master Lu sat back in his chair, drew on his cigarette and squinted at the painting. “No jeeps. Just mountains.”

  Vnsuitable
Reading

  No Sad, No Cry

  Thinning Hair

  Bad Elements

  On October 1, China’s National Day, the Provincial Foreign Affairs Bureau arranged a banquet for all the foreigners living and working in Hunan. Prior to the banquet our host, a high official within the Provincial Government, held a meeting at which he gave us a “brief review of current political, economic and social issues affecting the province.” This brief review, translated a sentence at a time into English, turned out to be a very lengthy recitation of statistics, all showing remarkable growth, interspersed with firm declarations of purpose, goals for the year 2000 and conclusive evidence that these goals would be met. The official sat completely still as he delivered this speech, moving his lips only as much as he had to except at the end of paragraphs, when he pulled them open to smile, shaking his head from side to side so that the smile fell upon all members of the audience equally.

  After two hours the translator showed signs of fatigue. Something about striving from victory to victory was translated as “And the broad collective masses, by means of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and under the protection of the new Constitution approved during the Twelfth Party Congress, shall—shall strike from factory to factory in order to realize the goals of the Four Modernizations by the year 2000.” By the third hour, the poor translator had become delirious, stumbling over nearly every sentence.

  No one experienced fatigue more than the audience, however, for of the fifty foreigners there, about ten spoke both English and Chinese, whereas the rest, from Japan and Romania, understood neither English nor Chinese.