Iron and Silk

by Mark Salzman

  Determined now to fight for justice, I found my metal cup, excused myself from the room and strode firmly into the Coffee Shop. “I brought my own cup,” I said smartly. “I’d like a cup of coffee now, please.” To my surprise she snatched the cup and marched into the kitchen without a word. A full ten minutes passed, giving me more than enough time to realize that I was completely at her mercy. At last she stalked out of the kitchen, slammed the mug of coffee on the desk, opened her magazine and demanded five dollars.

  “Five dollars? But the menu here says that a cup of coffee costs one dollar!”

  “Your mug is oversized,” she hissed.

  “There are five cups of coffee in here?”

  “Come on, hurry up! I’m busy!”

  Just as I started to see double, a last strategem came to me. “I didn’t ask for five cups of coffee, miss. I asked for one.” I put a dollar on the desk. She picked up my mug, walked over to a window and poured nearly all the coffee out of it. She put the mug on the desk in front of me, opened her magazine and resumed reading.

  As I walked back to my room, my anger subsided, and I actually smiled, thinking of the fun I would have telling the story to Bill and the African. When I got there, though, the African had already gone out for dinner. Bill was lying on the bed with a book closed on his chest and his glasses in one hand. “You know,” he said, “talking to the man from Sudan made me remember something.” I sat down on the floor against the wall, drank my coffee and asked him what he remembered.

  “It was in Africa, when I was teaching with the Peace Corps. During a break I decided to travel. I had to ride on the back of a truck for ten hours to get to the border of some country—I don’t even remember now which country it was—and the truck followed a dirt road through a desert. In my whole life I had never felt so close to going mad. I thought I would die from the heat, the dust, the noise and the thirst. At last we reached the border. I fell off the truck, then stood in line for two hours at the visa office, a little shack in the middle of nowhere. Just as it was my turn, the official said, ‘Sorry, closed for the day.’ I walked out of the shack on the verge of tears. The truck I had ridden was already gone. I saw another truck parked not far away, so I walked over and sat against it, just to get out of the sun. Something I have to tell you—in some parts of Africa, people who own trucks often write something on the hood. It’s usually something religious, like ‘Jesus Have Mercy,’ because a breakdown in the desert could easily be fatal. Anyway, this truck looked as if it would fall apart at any moment. As I sat against it, I looked up to see a few vultures circling, like they were waiting to see what I was going to do. My eyes wandered from the vultures to the hood of the truck next to my head. There, in white lettering, it said, MY FRIEND, IT IS NOT BEAUTIFUL.”

  It was an important day for the 1983 English Medical Class—they were to perform their first co-ed skits. It had been distracting that these medical students had not yet gotten over their fear of speaking with members of the opposite sex. At last Jan and I had assigned groups composed of both girls and boys and told them they would present their skits on Monday morning. When that day arrived, of course no one volunteered to go first. I pointed to one of the students, Duncan, and told him to gather his partners for their skit. After making all sorts of protests he finally stood up and walked out of the classroom. Then Alison and Heidi got up and stood in front of the class.

  ALISON: “We are playing ping-pong.”

  They pretended to play ping-pong. Suddenly Duncan walked into the classroom, approached them, hesitated, opened his mouth, and turned and faced the blackboard.

  DUNCAN: “Excuse me, girls. May I enjoy you?”

  ME: “Duncan, you mean ‘join you.’ ”

  Duncan, embarrassed that he had made a mistake, turned purple.

  ME: “Keep going.”

  The two girls put their imaginary paddles down angrily.

  HEIDI: “No! Go play with yourself!”

  ME: “You should say ‘play by yourself.’ You play with others, and play by yourself.”

  HEIDI: “By yourself.”

  The skit completed, all three performers ran to their seats, where they were teased by their neighbors. Just as I was debating whether I had the courage to hear the next skit, the classroom door opened and an unfamiliar woman led by Teacher Wu walked in, handed me an envelope, then walked out without a word. I opened the envelope and pulled out what appeared to be an invitation, elegantly printed in Chinese and decorated with several red seals. It was written in classical Chinese, too difficult for me to sight-read, so I put it in my pocket, braced myself and called on the next group.

  When I got back to my room I took out the card and looked at it again. I realized that it was not printed but meticulously written out with a miniature brush. Whoever wrote it, I thought, must have spent hours on it.

  “To Mr. Sima Ming:” it opened.

  “Greetings to you. I am a retired professor who loves and practices calligraphy. I am a poor calligrapher, but I am nevertheless concerned about the future of calligraphy. I heard recently that a young American at Hunan Medical College was interested in calligraphy, and had even gone to the trouble to learn it himself to understand it further. When I heard this I was deeply moved, and hoped I could meet you before you returned to your country.”

  It closed with an invitation to visit and was signed “Jin Wenzhi.”

  I wrote back that day, thanking Professor Jin for his letter and asking when I might visit him. Three days later I received his answer, inviting me to come for tea that Saturday afternoon after xiuxi.

  I brought with me, as he requested, a few samples of my latest calligraphy exercises, along with the models I had used. The woman who had delivered the first letter opened the door. “I am Luo Binfu, Professor Jin’s wife,” she said. “Please come in. He’s just getting up from xiuxi, so he will be a few minutes. Why don’t you have some tea?” I had a cup of tea by myself in their small living room, noticing that huge, un-framed sheets of calligraphy hung loosely over the walls, some overlapping each other and all blowing slowly in the wind of an electric fan. A few minutes later his wife came back and asked me to come into the next room. There, propped up in a bed covered with calligraphy manuals, rice paper and brushes, sat Professor Jin. His face looked pale and swollen, with patches of red across his cheeks and throat. He extended a bloated, stiff hand for me to shake. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come out to greet you,” he said. His wife explained that he suffered from chronic bouts of fever, headache and swelling caused by heart and liver disease. “But you see,” Jin interrupted, pointing to the fresh examples of calligraphy on the bed, “it doesn’t stop me from writing.” He shuffled through some books in front of him, choosing an old volume worn from use and spattered with ink. “If you copy out the models of a particular master,” he said, “you will be influenced by his personality. This is the model I use—you see how strong, disciplined and clean his brushstrokes are? He was an austere figure in the Song dynasty. His writing method strengthens me.”

  When he picked up my calligraphy samples, he responded to them in an unusual way. Typically, when I showed my calligraphy or performed wushu, people in China complimented me on the novelty of my achievement—“Imagine! A foreigner who writes Chinese characters! That’s really something!” Compliments like that wearied me after a while and often reminded me of a remark I once overheard after a recital by the cellist Yo-yo Ma: “Isn’t it remarkable the way he plays Western music so naturally?” Professor Jin looked my work over, compared it with the models I was using, then took out a red pen and started making corrections. “Not bad at all,” he said. “The only major problems are here, where you don’t finish the brushstroke with a sense of authority. They start well—you see, right here—but then get sloppy at the end.” He pulled his inkstone and tray of brushes near him and showed me how to improve the strokes. Though he could barely move his fingers, all of them rigid with arthritis, he managed to wield the brush with extraordina
ry fluidity. He took frequent pauses to rest, wiping the sweat from his forehead and throat, and closing his eyes to recover from dizziness. After forty-five minutes his wife reminded him that he should take another short nap, so I collected my materials and thanked him. “It’s my pleasure,” he said, “and you are welcome to come here as often as you like.”

  “I wouldn’t want to trouble you like that.”

  “Please! Why don’t you come every week like this, on Saturday afternoons?”

  “Well—”

  “It’s settled! We’ll see you next week. Here—let me get up, I really should at least see you to the door. I’ve been a terrible host.”

  His wife told him to stay put and relax, she would see me off. When she and I got outside, she thanked me for coming. “He’s been excited about it all week—I think it has given him something to look forward to.”

  The next Saturday he not only gave me a lesson but also presented me with a gift of several calligraphy books and journals. He promised to introduce me to a scholar of oracle bone script, the earliest known form of Chinese writing; this scholar could acquaint me with the historical analysis of Chinese characters. On Thursday of the next week, though, I received a letter from his wife.

  “Dear Mr. Sima Ming:

  “I am sorry to say that Professor Jin has fallen ill and is no longer able to live at home. He is very sorry that he cannot teach you for the time being, and hopes that you will not be discouraged. He enjoyed your visits very much.

  Wishing you health,

  Luo Binfu”

  One of my students, Dr. Xiao, managed to find out for me which hospital Jin had entered. “Can I visit him there?” I asked. Dr. Xiao looked at me strangely. “But Teacher Mark, he is in a coma—what good would it do to visit?”

  A Rat

  A Night Ride

  The Long Swords

  “Let’s look it up and see,” I said to the group of students who had visited me to ask about the meaning of an obscure word. No sooner had I picked up my copy of The American College Dictionary than I heard one of the girls scream. I looked up and saw them all staring wide-eyed at my desk. A rat had jumped on it and was running around looking, presumably, for a way to jump off. With a great yell I slammed the dictionary down on the table. I had intended only to be funny, but by unfortunate coincidence the rat darted into the path of the dictionary and was annihilated. The students laughed and applauded, saying it was a magnificent demonstration of “real gong fu.” On the spot they gave me the nickname “da shu haohan,” Rat-Killing Hero, a play on “da hu haohan,” Tiger-Killing Hero, the epithet of a legendary warrior. They had a wonderful time reviewing aloud exactly how it had happened and what it had looked and sounded like, so that when they told all their friends the story would be consistent. Eventually, though, something had to be done with the little corpse. I opted for leaving it on my desk as a warning to other rodents, but the students had a better idea: “Teacher Mark, there is a reward for killing rats! Bring it to the Rat Collection Office and you will get a mao (about five cents) for it.” So the whole pack of us walked across the campus, with me at the front holding the rat by the tail, and my students behind me holding sheets of paper with the rat’s crimes written out on them.

  By the time we reached the Rat Collection Office, we had attracted quite a crowd. I explained to the comrade-in-charge where and how I had killed the rat, put it on the table and asked for my reward. He and the other men in the office laughed heartily when they heard the circumstances of the rat’s demise, but as the comrade-in-charge went to his desk to take out a mao, one of his colleagues pulled him aside for a brief conversation. Then the comrade-in-charge took a few of my students aside and talked to them for a few minutes. At last he picked up the rat, tied a string to its tail and walked over to me. “I’m sorry to say that we can’t pay you. The regulation is that the reward be given to students who kill rats in the dormitories. But here,” he said, handing me the string and smiling, “why don’t you take it outside and play with it? When you’re done, just throw it away.”

  I thanked him and left. Outside the building I asked if anyone had any ideas how to play with the rat, but no one did, so I threw it away. When we returned to the Foreign Languages Office, one of the students giggled and asked if I wanted to know why they didn’t give me the reward. “Sure—why?” “Because the other comrade pointed out that the official statement concerning rats is that they have been stamped out. Only internal documents, which foreigners can’t read, discuss the rat problem. Since you killed the rat, well, there’s nothing to be done about that. But if they give you the reward, then an official disburser of State funds will have publicly confirmed to a foreign resident that rats do exist here. They might have been criticized.”

  I couldn’t resist asking the student if he didn’t think that was a bit silly. “Oh, of course it is very silly. But the comrades in the office, like anyone else, would rather do something silly than something stupid.”

  “Teacher Mark—can I trouble you?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I have a relative. She is my wife’s cousin. She is a doctor visiting from Harbin, attending a conference in Changsha for a few days. She speaks very good English and is very interested in learning more. Could I take her here to practice with you? It would only be once or twice, that would be more than enough.”

  Because of the overwhelming number of relatives and friends of students, not to mention perfect strangers, who were very interested in learning English, I had to be protective of my time. I explained this to my student and apologized for not being able to help him.

  “Oh dear, this is terrible,” he said, hanging his head and smiling sheepishly. “Why?” I asked. “Because … I already told her you would.” I tried to let my annoyance show, but the harder I frowned, the more broadly he smiled, so at last I agreed to meet with her once. The student, much relieved, said he wanted to tell me a bit about the woman before I met her.

  “Her name is Little Mi. She is very smart and strong-willed. She was always the leader of her class and was even the head of the Communist Youth League in her school. During the Cultural Revolution she volunteered to go to the countryside. There she almost starved to death. At last she had a chance to go to medical school. She was the smartest in her class, and she excelled in English.”

  Little Mi sounded like a terrific bore; I cleared my throat, hoping that my student would simply arrange a time and let me be, but he continued: “Her specialty was pediatrics. She wanted to work with children. When the time came for job assignments after graduation, though, some people started a rumor that she and some of the other English-speaking students read Western literature in their spare time instead of studying medicine. They were accused of fang yang pi! [Imitating Westerners, literally ‘releasing foreign farts.’] So instead of being sent to a good hospital, she was sent to a small family planning clinic outside of the city. There she mostly assists doctors with abortions. That is how she works with children. But saddest of all, she has leukemia. Truly, she has eaten bitter all her life. I know that talking with you will cheer her up; you are really doing a very kind thing. When can I bring her?”

  I told him they could come to my office in the Foreign Languages Building that evening for an hour or so. He thanked me extravagantly and withdrew.

  At the appointed time someone knocked. I braced myself for an hour of grammar questions and opened the door. There stood Little Mi, who could not have been much older than me, with a purple scarf wrapped around her head like a Russian peasant woman. She was petite, unsmiling and beautiful. She looked at me without blinking.

  “Are you Teacher Mark?” she asked in an even, low voice.

  “Yes—please come in.” She walked in, sat down and said in fluent English, “My cousin’s husband apologizes for not being able to come. His advisor called him in for a meeting. Do you mind that I came alone?”

  “No—not at all. What can I do for you?”

  “W
ell,” she said, looking at the bookshelf next to her, “I love to read, but it is difficult to find good books in English. I wonder if you would be so kind as to lend me a book or two, which I can send back to you from Harbin as soon as I finish them.” I told her to pick whatever she liked from my shelf. As she went through the books, she talked about the foreign novels she had enjoyed most; among them were Of Mice and Men, From Here to Eternity and The Gulag Archipelago. “How did you get The Gulag Archipelago?” I asked her. “It wasn’t easy,” she answered. “I hear that Americans are shocked by what they read in it. Is that true?”

  “Yes, I guess so. Weren’t you?”

  “Not really,” she answered quietly.

  “You are a pretty tough girl, aren’t you?”

  She looked up from the magazine she had been leafing through with a surprised expression, then broke into a smile and blushed.

  “Do you think I am?”

  “You seem that way.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled nervously. “How terrible! I’m not like that at all!”

  We talked for over an hour, and she picked about five books to take with her. When she got up to leave, I asked her when she would be returning to Harbin. “The day after tomorrow.” Against all better judgment I asked her to come visit me again the next evening. She eyed me closely, said “Thank you—I will,” then disappeared into the unlit hallway. I listened to her footsteps as she made her way down the stairs and out of the deserted building; then, from the window I watched her shadowy figure cross the athletic field in the moonlight.