by Mark Salzman
MARK SALZMAN’S
IRON & SILK
“Evocative … Salzman is a gifted storyteller, able in short order to capture the look, the feel, even the smell of everyday … life in the People’s Republic.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Lucid, accurate, and compelling … Salzman has begun to capture the peculiar and poignant pulse of life as it is actually lived today in the Middle Kingdom.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Salzman is a master storyteller.… A tender, heartwarming, laugh-filled, rewarding volume that is universal in its appeal.”
—The Oregonian
“An engrossing, beautifully written tale … a rich portrait of life in contemporary China that even the most seasoned sinologist will find engaging.”
—Foreign Affairs
“It’s hard to imagine how anyone could fail to enjoy this book.”
—San Diego Tribune
“There have lately been dozens of books about the new China … but none … has the charm of this one. Mark Salzman is a delightful writer with a keen eye. He’s full of compassion and humor.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Salzman writes wonderfully observed anecdotes and sketches of his Chinese acquaintances and of the moments of humor, pathos, and cultural confusion arising from their meetings and conversations.”
—Pittsburgh Press
VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, JANUARY 1990
Copyright © 1986 by Mark Salzman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc, in 1986
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salzman, Mark
Iron & silk
(Vintage departures)
Reprint Originally published:
New York: Random House, c1986
1 China—Description and travel—1976—
2 Martial arts—China
3 Salzman, Mark—Journeys—China
I Title II Title: Iron and silk
DS712 S245 1987 951 05′8 87-40085
eISBN: 978-0-307-81423-4
Author photo copyright © 1987 by Jill LeVine
Calligraphy by Mark Salzman
v3.1
Her swordplay moved the world.
Those who beheld her, numerous as the hills, lost themselves in wonder.
Heaven and Earth swayed in resonance …
Swift as the Archer shooting the nine suns,
She was exquisite, like a sky-god behind a team of dragons, soaring.
From “On Seeing a Pupil of Lady Kung-sun
Dance with the Sword,” by Tu Fu, (712–70); translation by the author.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Leaving • Arriving
A Piano • Teacher Wei • Hong Kong Foot • Myopia
Peking Duck • Pan • A Fisherman Kissing • A Suicide
Lessons • A Garden • A Short Story “Mei Banfa” • A Ghost Story
Pan Learns Script • A Runaway Teacher Black • In a Gallery
Unsuitable Reading • No Sad, No Cry Thinning Hair • Bad Elements
“Don’t You Know It’s Snowing Out?” • A Coffee Shop • Professor Jin
A Rat • A Night Ride • The Long Swords
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Leaving
Arriving
For some reason I always had bad luck in Canton. In August 1984, on my way out of China after two years in Hunan Province, I was delayed at the Canton train station for half a day because of the seven-foot leather bag I carried. It contained five swords, four sabres, a staff, a halberd, two hooked swords, some knives and a nine-section steel whip. I had receipts and photos and a manila folder full of Foreign Affairs Bureau correspondence to prove that the weapons were all either gifts from my teachers or had been purchased in local stores, that none of them was an antique, and that I was the legitimate student of a well-known martial artist residing in Hunan, but the officials right away saw an opportunity to play their favorite game, Let’s Make a Regulation.
“This bag is too long. You can’t take it on the train. There’s a regulation.” We discussed this point for a while, and eventually the regulation was waived. “But these weapons are Chinese cultural artifacts. They cannot leave China, that’s a regulation. You can take the bag, though.” In time it was determined that the weapons might conceivably leave China, but I would need special permission from a certain office which would require a certain period of time to secure, so wouldn’t I stay in Canton for a few days and come back with the proper documentation? My flight from Hong Kong to New York left in two days; I was desperate not to miss it. As I walked around the train station trying to think up a new strategy, I happened to bump into a Cantonese policeman I had met a year before. When I told him my problem he took me by the arm and led me back to the train station, where he began arguing on my behalf. He talked with the officials for over an hour about this and that, occasionally touching on the subject of my bag and its contents, then gently retreating to other matters. He eventually suggested that I give a short martial arts demonstration there in the train station—“Wouldn’t that be fun?” He asked the people sitting on the long wooden benches in the station to make room for a performance, then helped them move the benches out of the way. I warmed up for a few minutes, took off my shoes and began a routine. Somewhere in mid-air my pants split wide open, from the base of the zipper to the belt line in back. A crowd of giggling old ladies rushed forward with needles and thread ready, followed by an equal number of old men with incurable illnesses who believed that I must have learned traditional medicine as part of my martial arts training, convincing the officials to let me through without further delay. The policeman helped me get on the train, then sat with me until it began to move. He hopped off, wished me well, then saluted as the train left the station.
I don’t know exactly when the loudspeaker woke me up, but it was early, and the song was “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” I tried wrapping a pillow around my head, but one of the conductors tapped me on the knee and told me if I wanted any breakfast I’d better get to the dining car fast. It was 96 degrees already and rising. I stumbled over to a sink, splashed some water on my face, drank a few mouthfuls, then noticed the sign over the faucet—DON’T DRINK THIS. I found my way to the dining car and sat down with my three friends, Bob, Jean and Julian, also on their way into South Central China to teach English. An attendant urged us to try the Western style breakfast. It cost three times as much as the Chinese style breakfast, but I figured it might be the last Western food I would eat for some time, so I ordered it. It turned out to be a ham sandwich—a single slice of ham on two squares of dry bread, with no butter or mayonnaise, served with a warm glass of sweetened powdered milk. I heard a People’s Liberation Army man behind me muttering to his friend, “Look at the foreigner—how can he eat that at seven in the morning?” After a few minutes the attendant returned and asked if I wanted the Western-style dessert, too. I said no, but that I would like to try the Chinese-style breakfast, a steaming bowl of noodles with a fried egg on top. “Ah yes! An international breakfast!” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen. “How can he eat so much?” the PLA man mumbled.
The four of us had had a difficult time in Canton the day before. A China Travel Service representative had approached us as we got off the train from Hong Kong and insisted that we would require his services if we expected to reach our destinat
ions in China. China Travel Service, China’s only travel service, specializes in imposing services on foreigners and then failing to carry them out properly, thus creating a need for more services. We would “need” a dolly to move our bags from the customs office to the waiting room; once hired, it turned out that the dolly could not leave the customs building parking lot, so we “had to” hire a taxi to carry them the rest of the way. We would “have to” buy the most expensive bunks on the train, since they were “the only seats left.” The CTS man led us to an empty waiting room and told us to sit there and watch the luggage while he arranged everything. My three companions, who had all lived or traveled in China before, sensed disaster and insisted on going with him to the ticket office. I did not feel like sitting alone with the bags in that miserable room, so I asked Jean to stay with me.
Not long after Bob and Julian left with the CTS man, an angry little woman in a blue uniform stalked in. “Where are your tickets? What do you think you are doing here?” We tried to explain that we didn’t have any tickets, that a CTS man had told us to wait there while he bought them for us, but she would not let us even finish a sentence. “Where are your tickets? You can’t sit here if you don’t have any tickets! Let me see them.” After several rounds of this, Jean and I stopped answering her and stared at the floor in frustration. The woman turned maroon, glared at us and marched out, only to return after half an hour to repeat the interrogation. This scene recurred four times over the next three and a half hours, until at last Bob and Julian returned. At the ticket office, the CTS man had tried to convince them that what he meant was there were no tickets at all for that night, that we had to buy the most expensive tickets on the next day’s train and spend the night in a foreigners’ hotel in Canton. In the end, Bob and Julian managed to get the tickets for that night, but the CTS man had his revenge: just as we prepared to find a restaurant and buy some dinner, a Public Security Bureau official appeared with the CTS man and demanded to see our tickets and visas. He snapped them open and shut, then pointed at me. “You can go. Those three cannot.” I asked why not.
“Your visa says you will be living in Changsha. Their visas say they will be living in Wuhan. But all of your tickets are for Changsha. They can’t get on the train with faulty papers.” We tried to explain that we all worked for the same organization, that my friends only wanted to help me settle for a day since I was new, and would then get back on the train for Wuhan, the next major stop on the line.
“You can’t do that. There’s a regulation.”
He took them to the Public Security Bureau office, leaving me alone with the bags in the room. The angry woman in the blue uniform showed up again and demanded to see my ticket. I showed it to her, and she demanded to see my friends’ tickets as well. “They have them,” I answered. “Then you’ll have to move their bags out of here,” she snapped.
Five minutes before the train left, Bob, Jean and Julian came running back into the waiting room with little permission slips. We grabbed our bags and ran across the monstrous platform, with the Chinese national anthem blaring over the loudspeakers. I got into the train first, opened a window and had them throw the bags in to me. They jumped on, and the train began to move.
After breakfast I heard over the loudspeaker a flourish of trumpets and a woman’s voice, quivering with emotion: “Comrades—we have arrived! Changsha—a city with a long and glorious history …” I looked out the window and saw in the distance a sprawling cluster of cement buildings, and a group of peasants walking alongside the railroad tracks with a huge pig tied to a wheelbarrow that had a wooden wheel. In direct sunlight, at 97 degrees, they wore heavy black cotton jackets and pants that looked like quilts for all the patches sewn on them. The transition from countryside to city was abrupt: one moment we saw rice paddies, vegetable patches and fishponds, and several hundred yards later the train came to a halt in Changsha, a city of more than one million people and the capital of Hunan Province.
We unloaded our bags out the window, since the aisle was jammed with people shoving to get off or on, then stood with our mountain of luggage in the sweltering heat as a growing crowd of peasants, mouths agape, formed a tight circle around us. They were brusquely scattered by three somber men in Mao suits who strode up to us, determined that we were the right foreigners, then assumed postures and expressions that indicated warm, heartfelt greetings. Long handshakes occurred, and they identified themselves as members of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of Hunan Medical College: Comrade Hu, Comrade Lin and Group Leader Chen. Comrade Hu spoke English, and although all four of us spoke Chinese, he insisted on speaking English while the other two Foreign Affairs men smiled broadly, nodded and occasionally said, “Ah, ha ha!” Comrade Hu frowned with concentration and delivered a speech. “We are responsible for the safety and convenience of foreigners. On behalf of our college, we warmly welcome you. And now, let’s go.”
The Foreign Affairs team led us into the station and helped us carry our bags down a broken escalator into the main concourse, the largest empty room I have ever seen. The Changsha train station was built toward the end of the Cultural Revolution to accommodate the hordes of pilgrims who came every day to visit Chairman Mao’s birthplace near Changsha. By the time construction ended, however, interest in the Chairman had waned, and since Changsha is neither a scenic nor an important city, hardly anyone stops there anymore.
A white van waited for us in front of the station. Its driver, an overweight fellow from North China, ran to greet us and shook all our hands for a long time, then helped load our things into the van. He started the engine, held his palm against the horn and gave it a long blast to warm it up, then shot full speed into the crowded streets. He swerved and braked violently to avoid pedestrians who darted into the road without looking, swarms of bicyclists who rode in the middle of the street, trucks, jeeps and huge buses that careened as if driven by madmen, and long carts piled sometimes ten feet high with construction materials, furniture, or tubs of human excrement, which were pulled by men dressed in rags, the veins of their necks and calves bulging from the strain. At no time during this ordeal was our horn silent, nor was that of any other vehicle on the road, rendering them all essentially useless. I asked Comrade Hu why the driver held the horn down like that, and he answered, without a trace of irony in his voice, “Traffic Safety.”
Small shops lined the streets, all with their doors propped open, so I was able to catch glimpses of carpenters, wool-spinners, key makers, bicycle repairmen, cooks and tailors, all working in rooms lit by a single bare bulb, using tools I had seen before only in antique shops or museums. In front of the shops, families of several generations sat on bamboo chairs and beds pulled out onto the sidewalk, fanning themselves, holding infants who urinated into the street, and playing cards.
It was all a bit shocking, but most shocking was how filthy everything looked. I had heard that China was spotlessly clean. Instead, dishwater and refuse were thrown casually out of windows, rats the size of squirrels could be seen flattened out all over the roads, spittle and mucus lay everywhere, and the dust and ash from coal-burning stoves, heaters and factories mixed with dirt and rain to stain the entire city an unpleasant greyish-brown. The smell of nightsoil, left in shallow outhouse troughs for easy collection, wafted through the streets and competed with the unbelievable din of automobile horns to offend the senses. No one that I could see was smiling, or had red cheeks, as all the Chinese do in China Reconstructs magazine.
We reached the college, passing through an iron gate into a walled compound that contained more walls and gates, and some buildings. All the buildings were of grey concrete except for a few red brick ones, most of which were in the process of being either torn down or plastered with concrete so as to look “modern.” The entire campus seemed mired in a swamp of loose bricks, cinderblocks and grey mud. I asked Comrade Hu why there wasn’t any grass on the ground. “Grass makes mosquitoes,” he answered. The van moved toward a two-story brick house, where a group of
older men in tailored Mao jackets stood in a loose circle, looking none too happy in the stupefying heat. When our van approached they all stiffened and broke into smiles, extending their hands to shake even before the van had come to a stop. A complicated flurry of introductions ensued, none of which I could absorb except that these were important people in the administration of the college, and they were all convinced that the deep friendship and understanding that already existed between us would become even deeper with time. As I shook hands with one of the leaders, Comrade Lin suddenly hawked as if clearing his entire chest cavity and sent a lump of mucus behind me onto a brick a few feet away. I desperately wanted to laugh out loud, but no one even blinked, so neither did I. “The Chinese and American peoples have a long history of mutual friendship and cooperative teamwork,” the leader said. “I am sure your stay here will prove educational to us both.”
The leaders said that I must surely be tired from my journey, so they left me to settle into my new home. Comrade Hu led me into the house and pointed to my room. A four foot seven, sturdy-looking peasant woman in her late fifties sat inside. As soon as I came into view, she jumped straight up and ran at me, greeting me in Changsha dialect so loudly I thought her voice would knock me down. “This is Comrade Yang,” Comrade Hu told me. “Everyone calls her Old Yang. Her name means ‘sheep.’ She cleans the house and boils the water. If you need anything, let her know.” Old Sheep laughed in shrieks and ran to pick up my bags. The largest of them, my cello case, stood as tall as she, but she insisted on leaning it against her back and carrying it into the room.
I lay down on my bed, a wooden frame with a bamboo mat spread over it, and balanced an electric fan on my stomach so it would blow on my face. Even in my underwear I was sweating heavily, but the fan made me comfortable. Suddenly it stopped working. I got up and fiddled with the plug, to no avail, then put on some clothes and went outside. Old Sheep was hanging her laundry to dry on lines she stretched from the bars on my window to the cement wall surrounding our house. (The college built this wall, I was told, for the convenience of the American teachers, as it would protect us from “bad elements” who might come to bother us. By unfortunate coincidence, it also protected us from good elements such as our Chinese students and friends, who felt uneasy passing through the conspicuous iron gate that led into our compound.) I told Old Sheep about the fan and she laughed, “Of course! The electricity is off!” I asked her how often that happened. “Sometimes every day, sometimes every other day, but sometimes we go for days without a blackout! Don’t worry, it will only be for a little while.” Then she asked me if I was thirsty, and when I told her I was, she trotted into the house and came back with a glass of boiling water. “Do you want tea leaves in this?” “No, thank you.”