I wasn’t just idly staring. The first thing I noticed was that the tray was made of two pieces of wood glued together with opposing grains. This, I guessed, must be to make the tray more rigid, so it wouldn’t warp. He was quietly coating the tray with red lacquer, using a small brush. I took note of the tiniest details: the way he held the brush, how he moved it. And I’d been watching like this for half an hour when a big middle-aged man emerged from one of the closed sheds and came towards me. He had a broad bony head with deep eye sockets and a jutting brow that reminded me of a rock face. I felt sure he must be the owner.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I was watching the craftsman, sir,” I said with a low bow. “Just to see how it’s done.”
He looked at me suspiciously. He probably wondered if I was planning to steal something. He turned to the craftsman. “Is this boy annoying you?” he asked. The thin man shook his head. “Well, throw him out if he gives any trouble,” he said, and went into the street.
When the craftsman had finished the thin coating of lacquer, he took the tray over to another shed, but this one was closed. As he went through the door, however, I could see that there was a pot hanging over a lamp in there, and a little steam was coming from the pot. As it was a warm day, but rather dry outside, I supposed that this arrangement must make the room more humid. I took note of that, but I didn’t say anything.
Then the thin man took up another piece of work. This one had already been coated with lacquer. But as he started brushing a new coat on it in exactly the same way, I realized that each piece of lacquer work had probably been coated several times.
* * *
—
I was still there two hours later when the owner came back. He looked very surprised, which was just what I wanted. For a moment I thought he might throw me out, but he decided to ignore me and disappeared back into the closed shed. I stayed there another hour and then left.
Now by this time I’d committed to memory every hand movement the craftsman made, and when I got home I took out my ink stone and brushes and some of the scraps of paper I had saved, and I made strokes just like his, again and again, until I thought I really had the feel of it.
The next day I took my writing equipment with me. This time I stationed myself opposite another of the craftsmen. This was a placid fat man, a bit younger than the first. And he was doing something different. The lacquer box he was working on had a design of two figures in a bamboo garden on it, and the lacquer had been built up so thickly that I realized it must have dozens of coatings, perhaps more than a hundred layers. With infinite care, he was carving into it, using several implements—razor-sharp little knives, a gimlet almost as thin as a needle, and other curious instruments I’d never seen before. It was such intricate work that I imagine he might have taken weeks to complete it. I was quite fascinated, and I almost forgot about the master and why I’d come there.
At the end of the morning, I sat down on the ground in the yard, and taking out my brushes and my ink stone and a tiny bottle of water, I started to make a rough approximation of the design I’d seen on one of my scraps of paper. Then using the ink, I tried to do the same process, but in reverse, forming the design by building up a layer of ink, waiting for the ink to dry, which it does quite quickly, and then adding another layer. It was very clumsy, of course, but it helped me get the feel of the process. I continued like that, getting up to watch the fat craftsman, then sitting down to play with my brush and ink, all afternoon. There was no sign of the master that day. But at the end of the afternoon, the fat craftsman indicated that I should come over to him. And he put a brush in my hand and showed me how to hold it for lacquer work, which, despite my observation, I still hadn’t got quite right. So then I bowed very deep and thanked him and went home.
Well, the next day I was back again. I was afraid they’d probably send me away as soon as they saw me, because craftsmen don’t like young people hanging around. But they didn’t say anything. So I watched another of the craftsmen, who was carving. It was exciting to watch him, but I couldn’t copy that, so in the afternoon I went back to copy some more of the fat man’s work. After a while the master came out again, and this time he came straight to me angrily and said, “Why are you still hanging around here? What do you think you’re doing?”
“If you please, sir,” I said respectfully, “I had the idea that I might like to work in lacquer. But I thought that I should learn all I could about it first, to discover whether I might have any talent for it.”
“A master tells a pupil whether he has aptitude,” he replied sharply.
“I did not dare waste the time of any master until I had taken the trouble to find out all I could for myself,” I replied. “And I had to consider whether it was a craft to which I could dedicate the rest of my life.”
“Why do you have an ink stone and brushes? Are you a young scholar?”
“Oh no, sir,” I said. “I did have some lessons. But I am poor, and so I’ve had to teach myself to read and write as best I could.”
“Can your father not teach you?”
“My esteemed father, unfortunately, cannot read and write.”
“Write something,” he commanded. So I wrote a few characters in my best hand, and he looked at them and said, “Not bad.”
“I thought, master,” I ventured, “that since I could learn to use a brush to write, perhaps I could also learn to use a brush applying lacquer.”
He glanced at the fat craftsman, then turned back to me. “Well, I’ve nothing for you,” he said firmly. “The way these Taiping devils are ruining all the trade, we’ll be lucky to keep the people we have, let alone take on an apprentice.” He frowned. “Who are you, anyway, and how did you get here?”
I try never to lie, but I didn’t want him to know about my father yet, so I just invented a name, said I came from Beijing, and that we were staying with relations in the area for a month. He looked a bit cynical. “Well, don’t bother anyone,” he said. Then he left.
But the next day, when I turned up, the thin man beckoned me over, told me to sit beside him, gave me a brush, and showed me how to use it properly. Then he gave me some splinters of wood and a tiny pot of lacquer and told me to try. It was quite difficult, because the lacquer is sticky and not like ink at all, but I began to get the feel of it. I spent the rest of the day doing that.
The following day, the same thing happened, and the day after. I’d really have liked to work with the fat man, because what he was doing was much more interesting. But that would have been rude to the thin man and would have made me look ill-mannered. Besides, I’d already realized that this was a kind of test, to see if I was hardworking and obedient.
Another three days went by. Now and then the thin man would show me something I was doing wrong, so I was all the more glad that I had been patient. I’d been there ten days when the master appeared around noon and said to me severely: “I’ve let you learn here. But I’m quite sure you lied to me about who you are. So you’d better tell me the truth now, or you can get out and never come back.”
I was really glad that he gave me a chance like that. I confessed everything. I told him who my family was, how I’d wanted to learn to read, how my father had made the boots for my teacher and got me thrown out, and how I’d gone on learning for myself and bothering the teacher as much as I dared.
“But wait,” he said, “you’re the boy whose mother knows my wife. You were supposed to come and see me.”
“Yes, master,” I said, “but how could I expect you to take an interest when I had nothing to recommend me?”
“It’s quite true that your father’s reputation goes against you,” he said. “He’s not a good worker. Never takes enough trouble.”
“I honor my father,” I said quietly, with a low bow.
“Very proper. But you’re determined not to be like him, al
l the same. You want to be a real craftsman. Isn’t that true?”
I nodded.
“Well then, you can start here tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “An apprentice gets paid only a pittance, you know.”
I didn’t care about that. Not then. I was so excited.
* * *
—
I worked hard and learned fast. In less than two years I was as good as the thin man, and I worked with the fat man, too. But I was still the apprentice and I was always deferential to everyone. People should know their place.
I also came to understand how lucky I was. They say that the art of lacquer-making goes back to the days of the Han dynasty. For a long time lacquer goods came mostly from the southern provinces, where the ingredients for the lacquer are to be found and the climate is suitably humid. But gradually the craftsmen came north, and in the reign of the great Manchu emperor Qianlong, there was a huge royal works in Beijing. But with the troubles from the barbarians and the Taiping, and the court’s being so short of money, the art and industry were in decline. My master was one of the few small works still going, supplying a little to the court and any other rich persons he could find—for the lacquer takes so long to make that it cannot possibly be sold at a price any modest person can afford. My master could have found any number of out-of-work craftsmen in the capital. But hardly any young persons wanted to enter the craft. That was why he had been intrigued by me. That, and my persistence.
I loved that lacquer works. The finished stock was stored on racks in one of the closed sheds. I’d go in there and look at the rows of boxes, bowls, and vases. Sometimes we even produced furniture, too. Some of the work was in black lacquer, but mostly it was red. There were beautiful fans of lacquered bamboo, and a big black screen, with a flying stork and a distant mountain painted on it, that was going to the port to be sold to a rich barbarian. The master would hire in artists to do the painting.
I could have gazed at them for hours. Sometimes I’d let my fingers gently touch the intricate carving on the boxes. The patterns were so deep and tight, it was like feeling a little world under your hand.
One day—it was the start of my second winter there—the master found me in the storeroom. I was still a bit afraid of him. He hardly ever smiled, and that great cliff face of a head he had was quite intimidating. “You love the goods we sell, don’t you?” he said to me.
“Yes, master,” I answered. “I’ve always liked the finer things in life.”
“Well, you’ll never be rich enough to own most of the things in here,” he told me, “but the joy of the craftsman is greater than the pleasure of the owner.”
That impressed me very much, I have to say.
Then he smiled and gave me my pay packet and told me to check it.
“I think there’s a mistake, master,” I said. “There seems to be too much.”
“Those last two little boxes you lacquered, they were plain but perfect,” he said. “So I’m paying you for those at the full rate—for a junior craftsman, of course.”
I bowed very low. The truth was, I couldn’t speak for a moment.
* * *
—
It was a month later that we thought we were going to die.
We’d become used to the Taiping ruling down in Nanjing. But one morning I arrived at work and found everyone with long faces, and the master told me, “Those devils are on the move again. They’re sending a great horde up here to take Beijing.” And we were right in their path, of course. “If this Taiping Brother of Jesus were a real king, it mightn’t be so bad,” the master said. “Real kings don’t kill craftsmen. We’re too valuable. But with this rabble, who knows?”
That night in our village, everyone was discussing: Should we stay put and hope for the best? Or should we put our possessions in a cart and get behind the great walls of Beijing? Surely the Taiping couldn’t get into Beijing, people said. But I wasn’t so sure. No one had thought they could take Nanjing, either.
Then word came that the horde was camped by the mouth of the Peiho River, about sixty miles down the canal to the south. I daresay they could have reached us in three days.
If I saw clouds on the southern horizon, I’d think: They could be on the move under those clouds right now. Once, on a clear winter night, I remember gazing down the canal to see if I could make out any faint glow from the horde’s campfires in the distance. But all I could see was the reflection of the stars in the cold water.
We watched the emperor’s troops heading south, of course—Manchu bannermen, Chinese troops, cavalry—a lot of them. But to tell the truth, we weren’t very confident.
* * *
—
So you can imagine that I was a bit surprised when, in the middle of all this worry and uncertainty, my father announced one evening, “I’ve found you a wife.”
“What are you talking about?” I turned to my mother. “Do you know about this?”
“She’s a girl from the village where you work,” she told me.
“Don’t tell me,” I said, “you know her mother.” But apparently she didn’t.
“I found her. She’s perfect,” my father cried with a big smile.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “Is she rich?”
“No.” My father looked at me as if I were stupid. “Her family are respectable people like us.”
“I see. Is she pretty?” I wanted to know.
“Pretty women are trouble. She’s not too bad.”
“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “And why now? I’m too young to marry.”
“That’s the thing,” said my father. “Her father’s got three other daughters. The marriage broker discovered that he’d be prepared to part with her if she comes to live in our house now, like a daughter, until you’re both older. Then we wouldn’t need to pay a bride price.” Which of course he didn’t have.
“Perhaps,” I said, “in a few years I can earn enough to afford a bride price myself. We might do better. Are there any other reasons for all this hurry?”
“The girl could help your mother,” my father said. He looked thoughtful. “And with all these troubles in the world, she might come in useful.” I’m still not sure what he meant by that.
“I want to see her,” I said.
This wasn’t difficult. Once I knew who she was and where her family lived, I found a good place where I could catch sight of her without her seeing me and hung about there after work.
She was a year or two younger than me. I’d have preferred more years between us, but you can’t have everything.
“I will obey you, Father,” I said, “but let’s just wait and see what the Taiping do.”
* * *
—
It turned out the emperor’s armies were better than we thought. Although they couldn’t break the Taiping, they managed to push them back across the plain to Nanjing. That certainly gave us heart.
But in my opinion, it was the old Yellow River that really saved us.
For in 1855, when the river broke its banks just above that plain, the water came down like a great tidal wave, right across the landscape. You wouldn’t think water from even a great river could do so much damage, but the impact destroyed entire sections of the Grand Canal between Nanjing and the Peiho River. That southern extension became unusable. It took a generation to repair the damage.
But if it was a disaster for the people living there, that flood was also a warning to the Taiping. That’s how I saw it—a warning from the ancient gods. If they ever returned to that plain, the old yellow serpent would strike them with another flood and drown them all.
And whether they were mainly afraid of the river or of the emperor’s armies, I don’t know, but the Taiping never came near us again.
The next year, the wretches were quarreling amongst themselves. One of their generals had become too pop
ular, it seemed, with the Taiping troops, and their Heavenly King didn’t like that. So he killed the general, all his family, and twenty thousand of the general’s men as well. Just like that. It’s strange how people can preach brotherly love one day and tear you to bits the next.
* * *
—
And so I got married. Her parents had named her Rose—because the rose is the flower of Beijing—though she was rather pale to be called that, I thought. I must say, she didn’t give any trouble. She helped my mother and was very respectful to my father, which I thought was a good sign for the future. And although mothers-in-law are supposed to be like dragons, my mother was always kindness itself to Rose.
Rose and I would talk a bit in the evenings. I’d ask her how she’d spent the day, and she’d ask if I liked the food. If I said I liked the noodles, for instance, my mother would tell me, “Rose cooked them,” and give the girl a smile. That seemed to please Rose very much. She’d been living in our house only a year or so when we got married. And I have to say we were very happy together. Soon after that my master gave me full craftsman’s wages.
Our life just then was quite uneventful. The Taiping were safely down in Nanjing. We heard there’d been a Muslim revolt out in the far western provinces, but to tell the truth, ordinary peasants like us hardly knew anything about those faraway provinces—except that the empire had taken in all sorts of tribes at one time or another, and some of these people were Muslim. My father got very angry about it: “These barbarian religions are nothing but trouble,” he cried. “First the Taiping Christians, now the Muslims, they’re all the same. The emperor should forbid them all.”
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