by Mark Salzman
Middle-aged Chinese intellectuals, I found, do not talk about kissing much. If an American raises the subject, though, it becomes a matter of cultural exchange, and can be discussed in the name of international cooperation. “For kissing,” I said. They all exploded into laughter and decided aloud that I was a “very, very naughty boy.” They seemed in a fine mood for cultural exchange, so I mentioned that, since coming to China, I had never seen two people kiss each other, even in the movies, except for mothers kissing their infant children. Their eyes opened wide and they nodded vigorously. “Of course not! Here in China, it is very different from your country. People don’t kiss here.” This I found hard to believe, and asked them if they meant not at all, or just in public. Here lay the boundary of cultural exchange, for suddenly there was an embarrassed spell of throat-clearing and teacup refilling. I didn’t want the conversation to turn back to “Can you tell us the secret of learning English?” so I groped for safer material. “What about parents? Do they kiss their children after they grow up?” One or two of the doctors said no, only when they are infants. You shouldn’t kiss children after they are two or three years old. And there ended our discussion, for the Small Group Leader of the class, a Party member, pulled out a grammar textbook and began pointing out contradictions.
By ten o’clock most of the guests had gone home, leaving only the hosts, myself and Teacher Liu. I thought it odd that Teacher Liu remained, for of all the students in that class, he was the most shy and the most self-conscious about speaking English. He wrote fairly well, but I had probably heard his voice only three or four times all semester, and he hadn’t said anything that night but had sat quietly and looked downward the whole time. He seemed such a gentle man, with greying hair and a reddish glow to his nose after drinking a thimbleful of baijiu; I wanted to speak with him now that the more aggressive talkers had left. He declined to answer my questions, though, looking even further downward, smiling and waving his hand—he was ashamed of his English. Then the husband and wife excused themselves to start cleaning up in the kitchen, but invited us to stay as long as we liked to finish our tea. I waited for Teacher Liu’s cue to leave, but he didn’t move. The doctors left the room, and I could see that Teacher Liu was thinking about something and trying to form the words silently. I said in Chinese that he could speak Chinese now, the English party was over, but he gestured for me to be patient. Then, very slowly, and with great precision, he said, “Teacher Mark. Do you remember? We said that we do not kiss our children after they are big. You are an honest, and you are my teacher. So I must be an honest, your student. As to kissing, this is not always true. I have two daughters. One is twelve and one is ten. I cannot kiss them, because they would feel embarrassment and they would call me a foolish. But every night, after they are asleep, I go into their room to turn off the light. In fact, very quiet, very soft, I kiss them and they don’t know.”
Old Sheep’s responsibilities gave her, in addition to the keys to our rooms, daily opportunities to get to know us better. In the mornings, when she came in to dust and fill my thermos with hot water, she created such a flurry of movement and noise that I inevitably found myself drawn out of my work and into conversation with her. She always wore a white surgical cap pulled halfway down over her eyes, her strong teeth bared in a huge smile, and carried several tin buckets that crashed together as she walked. She would explode through my door and into the room, greet me in Mandarin—“Ni hao!”—prolonging each syllable for several seconds with her voicebox turned up all the way, wait for my response, then laugh in whoops. With that out of her system, she usually asked me what I had eaten for breakfast, told me it was not nearly enough and that I worked too hard, then related the latest gossip.
Naturally I was curious when one day she entered my room quietly, said “Ni hao” in a subdued voice and did not laugh when I answered. I asked her if something was wrong, and she walked over to where I was sitting so that she could whisper.
“Suicide,” she said.
“Who?”
“A woman in our college—a few buildings away. They found her just now.”
She began to dust very quickly. Without looking at me, she said, “I want to finish all of my work early today so that I don’t have to be out when it gets dark.”
“Why not?”
She looked a bit embarrassed and covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m afraid of ghosts. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them anyway. The ghost of a suicide wanders around at night.”
News travels fast in China, for when I got to the classroom at half past eight, all the doctors were in a huddle, whispering tensely. I asked for the details, but all I could learn was that the woman, a middle-aged clerical worker, had hanged herself in the office of her superior. After class one of the doctors stayed behind to erase the blackboard. I asked if he had any idea why the woman had taken her own life. He looked around and said quietly that he could not be sure, of course, but the rumor was that her superior had been mistreating her for many years. She had complained, but no one wanted to take responsibility for the investigation, so at last she killed herself in despair.
“Do you think it is true?” I asked.
“No one knows what really happened.”
“But do you think it is true?”
He paused, then answered, “Maybe.”
“What will happen to the superior if the rumor is true?”
A slight frown passed over his face. “He is a Party Member. Anyway, that is not the important thing.”
“What is the important thing?”
He looked at me strangely, as if the answer should have been obvious. “The important thing is, what will happen to her family now?”
I did not understand. Patiently he explained to me that, according to Chinese law, most suicides are considered criminal offenses against Socialism and the Communist Party. When someone takes his own life, members of his family are often punished, on the principle that they must have either condoned or been influenced by the “incorrect thought” that led to the suicide. My student predicted that the woman’s children would lose their chances of receiving work assignments in our unit when they came of age—a grave sentence, as it would be very difficult for them to get jobs in other units, which have their own surplus of young people to provide jobs for.
Four days passed, during which the woman’s family was not allowed to hold any kind of memorial service, and, I was told, few dared visit the family to offer condolences. No one talked about her in my classes, though it was clear she was on everyone’s mind.
On the fifth day a poster went up at the gate of our college. The Leaders had announced their decision: “Although Comrade M’s suicide was the wrong course of action to take, it was not a crime against Socialism or the Chinese Communist Party because she left no note blaming the Party or any of its representatives for her despair, indicating that her problems were personal and not political. A thorough investigation of the case has proven that her superior, Manager L, is competent and totally without blame. Comrade M’s gesture of hanging herself in the office of Manager L was the result of misunderstanding on her part.”
A memorial service was held right away, and the woman’s house was crowded with friends and neighbors who came to help with the cooking and cleaning. For several days afterward my students talked fondly about her in class, for she had been very popular during her lifetime, and everyone agreed how tragic it was that she had had this misunderstanding.
Lessons
A Garden
A Short Story
“Mei Banfa”
A Ghost Story
I was to meet Pan at the training hall four nights a week, to receive private instruction after the athletes finished their evening work out. Waving and wishing me good night, they politely filed out and closed the wooden doors, leaving Pan and me alone in the room. First he explained that I must start from scratch. He meant it, too, for beginning that night, and for many nights thereafter, I
learned how to stand at attention. He stood inches away from me and screamed, “Stand straight!” then bored into me with his terrifying gaze. He insisted that I maintain eye contact for as long as he stood in front of me, and that I meet his gaze with one of equal intensity. After as long as a minute of this silent torture, he would shout “At ease!” and I could relax a bit, but not smile or take my eyes away from his. We repeated this exercise countless times, and I was expected to practice it four to six hours a day. At the time, I wondered what those staring contests had to do with wushu, but I came to realize that everything he was to teach me later was really contained in those first few weeks when we stared at each other. His art drew strength from his eyes; this was his way of passing it on.
After several weeks I came to enjoy staring at him. I would break into a sweat and feel a kind of heat rushing up through the floor into my legs and up into my brain. He told me that when standing like that, I must at all times be prepared to duel, that at any moment he might attack, and I should be ready to defend myself. It exhilarated me to face off with him, to feel his power and taste the fear and anticipation of the blow. Days and weeks passed, but the blow did not come.
One night he broke the lesson off early, telling me that tonight was special. I followed him out of the training hall, and we bicycled a short distance to his apartment. He lived with his wife and two sons on the fifth floor of a large, anonymous cement building. Like all the urban housing going up in China today, the building was indistinguishable from its neighbors, mercilessly practical and depressing in appearance. Pan’s apartment had three rooms and a small kitchen. A private bathroom and painted, as opposed to raw, cement walls in all the rooms identified it as the home of an important family. The only decoration in the apartment consisted of some silk banners, awards and photographs from Pan’s years as the national wushu champion and from the set of Shaolin Temple. Pan’s wife, a doctor, greeted me with all sorts of homemade snacks and sat me down at a table set for two. Pan sat across from me and poured two glasses of baijiu. He called to his sons, both in their teens, and they appeared from the bedroom instantly. They stood in complete silence until Pan asked them to greet me, which they did, very politely, but so softly I could barely hear them. They were handsome boys, and the elder, at about fourteen, was taller than me and had a moustache. I tried asking them questions to put them at ease, but they answered only by nodding. They apparently had no idea how to behave toward something like me and did not want to make any mistakes in front of their father. Pan told them to say good night, and they, along with his wife, disappeared into the bedroom. Pan raised his glass and proposed that the evening begin.
He told me stories that made my hair stand on end, with such gusto that I though the building would shake apart. When he came to the parts where he vanquished his enemies, he brought his terrible hand down on the table or against the wall with a crash, sending our snacks jumping out of their serving bowls. His imitations of cowards and bullies were so funny I could hardly breathe for laughing. He had me spellbound for three solid hours; then his wife came in to see if we needed any more food or baijiu. I took the opportunity to ask her if she had ever been afraid for her husband’s safety when, for example, he went off alone to bust up a gang of hoodlums in Shenyang. She laughed and touched his right hand. “Sometimes I figured he’d be late for dinner.” A look of tremendous satisfaction came over Pan’s face, and he got up to use the bathroom. She sat down in his chair and looked at me. “Every day he receives tens of letters from all over China, all from people asking to become his student. Since he made the movie, its been almost impossible for him to go out during the day.” She refilled our cups, then looked at me again. “He has trained professionals for more than twenty-five years now, but in all that time he has accepted only one private student.” After a long pause, she gestured at me with her chin. “You.” Just then Pan came back into the room, returned to his seat and started a new story. This one was about a spear:
While still a young man training for the national wushu competition, Pan overheard a debate among some of his fellow athletes about the credibility of an old story. The story described a famous warrior as being able to execute a thousand spear-thrusts without stopping to rest. Some of the athletes felt this to be impossible: after fifty, one’s shoulders ache, and by one hundred the skin on the left hand, which guides the spear as the right hand thrusts, twists and returns it, begins to blister. Pan had argued that surely this particular warrior would not have been intimidated by aching shoulders and blisters, and soon a challenge was raised. The next day Pan went out into a field with a spear, and as the other athletes watched, executed one thousand and seven thrusts without stopping to rest. Certain details of the story as Pan told it—that the bones of his left hand were exposed, and so forth—might be called into question, but the number of thrusts I am sure is accurate, and the scar tissue on his left palm indicates that it was not easy for him.
One evening later in the year, when I felt discouraged with my progress in a form of Northern Shaolin boxing called “Changquan,” or “Long Fist,” I asked Pan if he thought I should discontinue the training. He frowned, the only time he ever seemed genuinely angry with me, and said quietly, “When I say I will do something, I do it, exactly as I said I would. In my whole life, I have never started something without finishing it. I said that in the time we have, I would make your wushu better than you could imagine, and I will. Your only responsibility to me is to practice and to learn. My responsibility to you is much greater! Every time you think your task is great, think how much greater mine is. Just keep this in mind: if you fail”—here he paused to make sure I understood—“I will lose face.”
Though my responsibility to him was merely to practice and to learn, he had one request that he vigorously encouraged me to fulfill—to teach him English. I felt relieved to have something to offer him, so I quickly prepared some beginning materials and rode over to his house for the first lesson. When I got there, he had a tape recorder set up on a small table, along with a pile of oversized paper and a few felt-tip pens from a coloring set. He showed no interest at all in my books, but sat me down next to the recorder and pointed at the pile of paper. On each sheet he had written out in Chinese dozens of phrases, such as “Well need a spotlight over there,” “These mats aren’t springy enough,” and “Don’t worry—it’s just a shoulder dislocation.” He asked me to write down the English translation next to each phrase, which took a little over two and a half hours. When I was finished, I asked him if he could read my handwriting, and he smiled, saying that he was sure my handwriting was fine. After a series of delicate questions, I determined that he was as yet unfamiliar with the alphabet, so I encouraged him to have a look at my beginning materials. “That’s too slow for me,” he said. He asked me to repeat each of the phrases I’d written down five times into the recorder, leaving enough time after each repetition for him to say it aloud after me. “The first time should be very slow—one word at a time, with a pause after each word so I can repeat it. The second time should be the same. The third time you should pause after every other word. The fourth time read it through slowly. The fifth time you can read it fast.” I looked at the pile of phrase sheets, calculated how much time this would take, and asked if we could do half today and half tomorrow, as dinner was only three hours away. “Don’t worry!” he said, beaming. “I’ve prepared some food for you here. Just tell me when you get hungry.” He sat next to me, turned on the machine, then turned it off again. “How do you say, ‘And now, Mark will teach me English’?” I told him how and he repeated it, at first slowly, then more quickly, twenty or twenty-one times. He turned the machine on. “And now, Mark will teach me English.” I read the first phrase, five times as he had requested, and he pushed a little note across the table. “Better read it six times,” it read, “and a little slower.”
After several weeks during which we nearly exhausted the phrasal possibilities of our two languages, Pan announced that the
time had come to do something new. “Now I want to learn routines.” I didn’t understand. “Routines?” “Yes. Everything, including language, is like wushu. First you learn the basic moves, or words, then you string them together into routines.” He produced from his bedroom a huge sheet of paper made up of smaller pieces taped together. He wanted me to write a story on it. The story he had in mind was a famous Chinese folk tale, “How Yu Gong Moved the Mountain.” The story tells of an old man who realized that, if he only had fields where a mountain stood instead, he would have enough arable land to support his family comfortably. So he went out to the mountain with a shovel and a bucket and started to take the mountain down. All his neighbors made fun of him, calling it an impossible task, but Yu Gong disagreed: it would just take a long time, and after several tens of generations had passed, the mountain would at last become a field and his family would live comfortably. Pan had me write this story in big letters, so that he could paste it up on his bedroom wall, listen to the tape I was to make and read along as he lay in bed.
Not only did I repeat this story into the tape recorder several dozen times—at first one word at a time, and so on—but Pan invited Bill, Bob and Marcy over for dinner one night and had them read it a few times for variety. After they had finished, Pan said that he would like to recite a few phrases for them to evaluate and correct. He chose some of his favorite sentences and repeated each seven or eight times without a pause. He belted them out with such fierce concentration we were all afraid to move lest it disturb him. At last he finished and looked at me, asking quietly if it was all right. I nodded and he seemed overcome with relief. He smiled, pointed at me and said to my friends, “I was very nervous just then. I didn’t want him to lose face.”