Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  Nǚshū script is becoming more widely accessible online. There’s now a free online dictionary based on the original Dictionary of Nǚshū Standard Characters compiled by Gong Zhebing and Tang Gongwei. On the screen, I input the two characters of my name.

  Wellington, 2011

  ‘Nĭ wèishéme xuéxi zhōngwén?’ ‘Why are you studying Mandarin?’ The question comes up at the beginning of each new semester. Your mostly male classmates all have very practical, career-driven motives for picking the subject: ‘To do business in China.’ ‘To become a Chinese translator.’ ‘To study international relations.’ When a mature student makes a crass joke about wanting a Chinese girlfriend, the teacher laughs it off. When it’s your turn, you mumble something about wanting to learn more about Chinese culture, as if that culture wasn’t also your own.

  The university buildings are perched on a steep hill above the city. From the fifth floor of the library, you can see out over the whole blue harbour. Ferries passing each other on their way in and out, planes coming in unsteadily to land in the wind, small white lighthouses on the edge of the south coast. On a clear day, you can see white-capped mountains watching over the city from a distance.

  In August it snowed at sea level. It was the first time you or anyone you know had ever seen snow in Wellington, where winters bring freezing rain and wind, but never snow. It started during an art history lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites – Ophelia’s drenched hair floating on a PowerPoint slide in the lecture hall – when someone glimpsed what looked like snow out of the upper windows and whispers went round the rows. There were at least two hundred students enrolled in first-year art history, so you often used the time to practise Chinese characters in the back row, unseen. As soon as class ended you rushed out to the quad, where everyone was standing around laughing and looking up at the sky, holding out their tongues.

  Fat flakes fell on the beaches, melting instantly as soon as they touched the waves. In the morning, the hills emerged out of the mist still dusted in sugar. By the afternoon it was gone.

  I met the poet and artist Jen Bervin in Shanghai in 2016. She was in the city for the Shanghai International Literary Festival, where she presented her ongoing collaborative project on the fourth-century poet Su Hui, one of the earliest known Chinese women poets, who is said to have invented the ‘multidirectional poem’ form. Su composed and embroidered in silk a square poem consisting of 841 characters in a 29 x 29 character grid that can be read in any direction: horizontally, vertically, diagonally. The title of her poem, ‘Xuanji Tu’ refers to an ancient Chinese astronomical instrument, and is variously translated as ‘The Star-Gauge Poem’ or ‘The Map of the Armillary Sphere’. According to legend, Su addressed the poem to her husband, who had left her for a concubine. She sent it to him and he came back to her.

  At the poetry reading in a bar overlooking the Huangpu River, the screen behind Bervin showed a digitised version of Su Hui’s poem. I could briefly make out a handful of words scattered across the grid: earth, fly, long, road, and in the very centre of the square, a heart

  Bervin’s art often engages with poetry and textiles. In The Dickinson Composite Series, the artist embroidered Emily Dickinson’s handwritten punctuation marks (as they appear in her original manuscripts, letters and notes) in red thread onto large-scale quilts. For her Su Hui project, Bervin asked three embroiderers from the Suzhou Museum of Embroidery – three women – to embroider Su Hui’s poem over the course of a year, using the complex Chinese technique of double-faced stitching on fine silk. A six-minute video shows embroiderer Yu Juan slowly pulling purple thread back and forth through taut fabric, looping fragments of the ancient poem through her fingers.

  Years later I came across images online of a vast scroll suspended from the ceiling of a small gallery. On the scroll were painted repeating characters: In the middle of the room stood a worktable, a calligraphy brush, a bottle of black ink. The installation is by Rainbow Chan, an Australian interdisciplinary artist whose work brings together translation, calligraphy, traditional craft and installation. The artwork’s title, – To Enclose One’s Mouth, literally describes the character (huí), meaning to return: a mouth enclosed within a larger mouth. Chan wrote a poem in English, then used Google Translate to translate the poem into Chinese. She then painted each character of the transcribed poem ten times on a wide silk scroll, re-enacting her childhood memory of writing and rewriting characters ten times over. The poem reads:

  I try to speak

  but my tongue refuses.

  My mouth is a perfect logogram,

  a frame with no content.

  Beijing, 2013

  A catalogue of firsts. First time travelling alone, first time walking on a frozen lake, first time ordering food in Mandarin every day and not having to translate from English first inside your head. You begin to sense a brand-new intimacy with this language you’ve been trying to get closer to for so long. Words and sentence structures are now closer to where you need them, just under the surface of your skin; you reach for them with little effort, without having to pull them up from the depths.

  The city is new to you but feels oddly familiar, like those places that appear and reappear in dreams. This is where your parents first met – there are pictures of this dusty skyline dotted around the house. It’s strange piecing together the backdrops of old photos with the real thing: blazing red flags by the gates of the Forbidden City, parched hills unravelling in the distance behind the Great Wall.

  Beijing snow feels dry and soft on your cheeks. It gets swept off the road by street cleaners before it has a chance to freeze into black ice. It glows in white drifts beside the footpaths. The air is so dry that the skin around your nails cracks, begins to bleed. When you come in from the cold, everything you touch sparks with static. You have never experienced cold like this before: two thermal layers, two jumpers, two pairs of wool socks, leather gloves borrowed from your mother, a knitted bobble hat, a padded shearling coat.

  You go out exploring alone, warding off homesickness by trying lots of local Beijing snacks. You stand in the doorway of Family Mart licking a hard-frozen vanilla ice cream speckled with milk chocolate flakes. You take the subway three stops away to a mall where, according to the guidebook, there’s a noodle place known for its roast duck ramen. You sit in a booth sipping the rich broth, balancing half a soy-marinated egg on your spoon. The steam thaws your fingers and cheeks, still red from the cold.

  When I was a teenager my mum took me to the Dowse Art Gallery in Wellington. I was bored, wandering aimlessly around the dark galleries. I found myself in a room surrounded by blue shimmering objects dangling from the ceiling. The shapes shook slightly as I moved closer to them. They were traditional Chinese-style paper-cuts made out of squares of blue translucent plastic: zodiac animals, stars, flowers, familiar Chinese characters.

  This was The Unavailable Memory of Gold Coin Café, an installation by the artist Kerry Ann Lee, whose parents owned the Gold Coin Café takeaway shop at the top of Willis Street in Wellington when Lee was growing up. The building was deemed an earthquake risk and demolished in 2013. Lee revisited the abandoned site for her research, rediscovering it as a place of distant but living memory. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue created by the artist, various paper ephemera are presented like precious excavated materials: a takeaway menu with prices crossed out in pen, bright red and yellow joss paper, a blurry family photograph.

  But these details about Lee’s life were unknown to me that day in the gallery. I remember wanting to touch the glittering objects hovering like apparitions. Mum came to find me to tell me we were leaving. For a moment we stood mesmerised by the paper-cuts, the way light shone through them, casting blue shadows onto the floor, the walls, our arms.

  Shanghai, 2016

  You spend humid afternoons in your dorm room copying words onto flash cards. Twice a week the teacher sets dictation tests and the only way to learn is to write each character at least twenty times until your w
rist is sore, until each stroke becomes embedded in muscle memory.

  You stick the cards all over the walls above your bed. At night you can see them, illuminated by the soft glow of lights in the windows of dorm buildings opposite.

  You duck out between downpours to bike to your closest dumpling restaurant, exercise books stuffed in your backpack. Wonton soup, iced green tea, choi sum leaves steamed with ginger. Pages of gridded paper are spread out on the café table. The heel of your palm is rubbed silver with pencil graphite.

  The path to fluency is slippery, unstable. Some words never stick. Every week, hundreds of hànzi float in and out of your memory, leaving parts of themselves behind while others slip into the current.

  One afternoon, you’re studying in the library along with a hundred others sitting silently at long tables, heads bowed over textbooks, when symphonic music begins to play over the library’s speaker system. It starts softly, then swells in volume. You look up, bewildered, and it stops. So brief that some students wearing headphones haven’t noticed. Others seem to be pretending nothing happened. A couple of people are giggling, muffling their voices in the folds of their books – the only confirmation you didn’t imagine it. You’ve never heard announcements in the library before, but maybe it was meant to be a campus-wide notice, a technical test, or a failed prank? You didn’t recognise the music but maybe it was a well-known piece – someone’s favourite song? Out of the tall open windows you notice it’s started raining, lightly at first, then building to a downpour. The downpour soon drowns out all other noise.

  If someone asked me to draw my languages in the shape of a tree, I’d think of Mandarin and English as twin trunks, with Hakka and Cantonese branching off in either direction. I always thought I had to master Mandarin before I could dream of starting on the others, which are less commonly taught as second language subjects, but now I don’t know if this is true.

  Dialect: regional language. I used to think of dialects as languages without standardised writing systems, rendering them incomplete, less developed. But a dialect is not just a regional language. Dialect is family, is blood, is history. In my family we have Hakka, English, Mandarin and Cantonese. English is the common tongue between us, and the edges of the other languages all melt into the edges of our English.

  The standardisation and simplification of the Chinese written script is steeped in a history of revolution, violence and colonisation. There are hundreds of regional Chinese languages connected in some way to Mandarin, known as ‘Sinitic’ languages, and there are thought to be a further three hundred additional languages currently spoken within mainland China – Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uyghur are the most widely spoken non-Sinitic languages in China.

  What if dialects are not branches, but roots? Hakka, which I can’t speak, is the language that gets shouted the loudest down the phone by our elders. The Hakka people are a migratory subgroup of Han Chinese with a distinctive language and culture of their own. Hakka are believed to have come from the area of central China bordering the Yellow River; they then gradually migrated southwards, spreading the Hakka language and its many regional variants all over the world. Yet it’s the least well-known of my four connected languages. It has no formal written script of its own, but instead can be transcribed using traditional Chinese characters.

  There are very few words I know in Hakka, all from childhood: milk, sleep, bread. It’s through old texts written by European missionaries that I begin to find my way in the dark towards a broader Hakka vocabulary. Swiss missionaries compiled the first Hakka lexicon in 1909, and Presbyterian missionary Donald MacIver published the first Hakka–English dictionary in 1926. A later dictionary, from 1959, compiled by the Italian Jesuit priest Guerrino Marsecano, has been digitised by the National Taichung University of Science and Technology. Each definition includes the word written in simplified Chinese characters and the romanised punctuation, with tone marks.

  Marsecano’s guide to the six tones is useful to me. My foreign throat and lips aren’t used to the shapes – but I feel I can come close to wrapping my tongue around them, since I am at home within Mandarin’s four tones. At any rate, six tones seem easier than Cantonese’s nine. But Marsecano lived in Hsinchu County, Taiwan, and his Hakka dictionary’s pronunciations and tones are particular to that region, and may not necessarily apply to the many variants of Hakka spoken by my relatives in Singapore, Malaysia and Canada.

  In Mandarin, the word fluent, liúlì, has the word within it: an adjective, fluid, and also a verb, to flow. Fluency is not stable; it moves. The written character has water running through it: three curved lines flowing outwards.

  Japanese artist Tomoko Kawao uses a calligraphy brush almost the size of her own body to create canvasses that take up the floor area of entire rooms. Her practice combines traditional calligraphy, known as shodō in Japanese, with performance art and installation. Watching a video of one of her performances, I can hear the sound of the end of a rainstorm in the slow drip of ink. The only other sounds are her breathing, and the soft sweeping of her body touching the paper. The characters are borne from her body; her body takes on the shape of her script. In an image posted to Kawao’s Instagram page on the 5th of April, 2020, the character – home – is painted in black ink against a white background, with the artist herself lying on the canvas, curved across the top in the shape of the roof radical, She wears a black top and leggings, her arms crossed over her chest, knees bent. Her long hair sweeps downwards like a brushstroke, or a wave.

  London, 2019

  You recognise the smell of the calligraphy ink from some room of your childhood: oily and plasticky, reminiscent of acrylic paints. From inside the fluorescent-lit room in the Chinese community centre, you can hear the cold spring rain coming down. The room is sparse, apart from a porcelain vase holding a spray of branches with the orange husks of physalis fruits hanging from them like little paper lanterns. Ferns, vines, aloes and monstera have been placed in every room of the centre, with labels stuck to the pots displaying their Chinese names written in black permanent marker. Physalis, winter cherry,

  It’s your first time holding a calligraphy brush. It feels clumsy in your fist. Your wrist is too tight, your fingers too tense. You are the youngest in the class; four older women sit at desks with their brushes, inks, scrolls and thermoses of tea. They smile brightly, pour tea, offer biscuits, but they aren’t interested in where you’re from or where you got your scraps of Mandarin. They sit down and get to work, copying out their ancient poems in silence.

  Hu Laoshi is a patient, soft-spoken man from Beijing. He explains everything in Mandarin, which means most of the details are lost on you, but your body slowly eases back into the sound and feel of this language you haven’t spoken in months. When he touches his ink-dipped brush to the paper, his lines are so fluid and light. He curves the tip to make a swoosh at the edge of each stroke in the shape of a magpie’s tail feathers.

  Begin by dipping your brush in the water dish, then tipping two or three drops of water into the pooling black ink. Begin with the oldest and simplest of the five calligraphy scripts, zhuàn shū, known as seal script, not too different from the very first symbols that were carved into bone.

  ‘Xiàn shàng, hòu xià,’ Hu Laoshi says. First up, then down. You repeat this to yourself as you begin to paint. He asks for your Chinese name, and shows you what the characters look like in ancient seal script. He slowly draws a new set of shapes, ones you’ve never seen before.

  ‘Fàngsōng fàngsōng bà. Don’t rush.’ Calligraphy is like doing tai chi, he explains – you need to relax your whole body, from the top of your head to your wrist, down to the tip of your calligraphy brush, which should be an extension of your body.

  You try to breathe, letting the brush take you where you need to go. You lean too close over the table, accidentally dipping the ends of your hair in ink, splattering the paper. You hope no one’s seen. You quickly tie up your hair, then shake three drops of water into the black in
k and begin again.

  Museum of White Clouds

  One night in a dream, Kerry Ann Lee’s father journeyed from Wellington to Xi’an to see the terracotta warriors . . .

  Kerry Ann Lee, Return to Skyland

  IN A DREAM, Po Po takes me to visit the terracotta warriors at Te Papa. They’ve been flown here from China and put on display in an earthquake-proof case on an earthquake-proof stand, to be gazed at inside an earthquake-proof museum by the sea.

  In the dream, I don’t just speak her language; I dream in it, too. We both call the same city home. We wait at the bus stop on Kōwhai Street for the number 83 into town. Po Po flashes her Gold Card at the bus driver and her eyes sparkle.

  We sit by the window and zoom along the Hutt Road looking at the shimmering sea. It’s warm for January; Po Po is wearing a cotton T-shirt Mum bought her from Uniqlo in Singapore last Christmas, white with a daisy pattern.

  We walk to the wharves, bracing ourselves against the wind. Po Po pauses to watch with delight the teenagers cannonballing off the wharf into the harbour. She takes out her phone, which we are still teaching her how to use, and snaps a picture of the splashes.

  In the dream, we are not the only Chinese people in the queue. We are not even the only half-Chinese-granddaughter-plus-Chinese-grandma pair in the queue, and we both register this without needing to say anything about it.