Iron and Silk (14 page)

Fifteen minutes of vigorous discussion, all in dialect, produced a decision: they would give me one of the rowboats. I looked at Old Ding and said that that was absolutely ridiculous, that of course I would not take a boat from a poor fisherman’s family in return for a charcoal sketch. “Oh, but it’s no problem! They can get a new one!” I realized that the situation was serious, for if I refused and left, they would no doubt carry the rowboat to my house and lay it on the front porch. I looked at the old man. “That is a very fine gift, it is worth thousands of drawings like that one, but we Americans have a custom, and that is we speak directly. If we want something, we say so.” Many Chinese people appreciate “talking straight,” perhaps because convention almost never allows it, so they applauded this and told me by all means to speak up. “The boat is very fine, but there is something I want more.” They all smiled and nodded and said that of course I could have whatever I wanted, but I could see they were deeply nervous. I believe they expected me to ask for the junk. “In my country, we have a superstition. If someone gives you a piece of art, like a painting or a poem, you must give him a piece of art in return, or the feeling will be spoiled. If I take the boat, I will feel sad. I would prefer that a member of your family sing a folk song from your hometown.” The family,
almost hysterical with relief, cheered my decision, saying it had “true spirit,” and each of them sang something for me.

After we left the junk, Old Ding asked me if I would have dinner with his family that night. I wasn’t feeling up to it just then; the encounter with the family on the junk had tired me out, so we made a date for a week from that day, a Saturday. I was to wait by the river in the afternoon, and he would pick me up in his boat.

I brought my cello and an album of photographs of my family. I attracted a certain amount of attention as I stood next to the water with the hard case strapped to my back. By the time Old Ding came, a crowd had gathered. They watched me climb on, and the two of us pushed off and rowed downstream. The crowd followed us on the bank until I smiled and waved. They all smiled and waved back, nodded as if something had been explained, then turned and disappeared over the floodwall. As we rowed, the sun went down. Soon only the silhouettes of factory smokestacks and low hills could be seen through the copper-grey haze. We stopped near a cluster of other boats, all moored against the wall near a stairway leading up to the street. We left the river and walked for about fifteen minutes through a maze of narrow, dark alleys, arriving finally at a row of three-story concrete buildings. We entered a pitch-black doorway and felt our way up the stairs. Then he stopped me, and I heard him knock on a wooden door. The door opened into a small room illuminated by three candles. “No electricity tonight,” Old Ding said. It took a few seconds for me to orient myself to this eerie scene, but I soon began to recognize members of his family I’d met that morning in winter. I heard only gentle murmurs from the children who were seeing me for the first time. They asked me to stand next to a candle so they could see me clearly.
After that they passed a candle around, holding it in front of each of their faces so I could see them properly, too, and Old Ding introduced them to me in turn. There were his four cousins, three aunts, three uncles, two nieces, his wife and two children, his two brothers and one sister-in-law, his father and his grandmother. In the doorway stood a few friends of the family who had been waiting across the hall when I came in. Everyone sat on the floor except for his father and his grandmother, who sat on the two chairs in the room. The father got up and, taking me by the arm, insisted that I take his seat next to his mother. He went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of baijiu and a bowl of peanuts.

The most striking figures in the room were the grandmother and the brother, the one who had helped row me back that day. The grandmother had brilliant white hair, carefully combed and tied back, and sparkling eyes that looked at me without blinking. She wore thick cotton trousers and a padded cotton jacket, all black, and though worn threadbare, her clothes were spotless. She sat only a few inches away from me, absorbed in pure wonder. She had great dignity nonetheless, occasionally turning her head as if to show me her profile in the candlelight. Fu Manchu sat on the floor right in front of her, like some sort of gargoyle, grinning demonically and waiting for someone to try and attack her. I tried talking to these two, but they didn’t understand my Mandarin, and I didn’t understand their dialect, so we just looked at each other while I ate the peanuts and drank with the father.

I took the album out of my bag and showed them their first color photographs. The clarity and brilliance of the prints overwhelmed them; several minutes passed before anyone asked about the people in them. Two pictures impressed them above all. One showed four generations of my family seated in my grandmother’s living room in front of an elaborate
drapery—the drapery looked unimaginably beautiful, they said. The other picture showed my other grandmother standing with my mother. “This is your grandmother?” they asked. “How old is she?” They all clicked their tongues with disbelief when I told them, and when I pointed out my mother, they shook their heads. “She is too young to be your mother, she is a young girl. And this one you call your grandmother, she looks thirty years old.” I asked them what made these women look so young to them. “It’s easy—they are wearing such beautiful clothes. Only young women wear bright colors. And they are smiling! Old ladies never smile in pictures.”

At length the grandmother said something to me and pointed to the cello case. I noticed that all the children had moved as far away from it as possible, so that it sat in an empty circle in the middle of the floor. “She wants to know what it is,” Old Ding said. I told him it was a
datiqin
, a cello. He passed this on to everyone, they discussed something, then he turned back to me. “What’s a cello?” I went over to the case and opened it, whereupon the children shrieked with terror, and two of them started to cry. Old Ding, between fits of laughter, explained, “My brother told them you had a spirit inside it that eats children I” I looked at Fu Manchu, and he nodded enthusiastically. I took the cello out of the case and the whole room gasped, clicked their tongues and sighed with appreciation. I walked over to my seat and began to explain the mechanics of the instrument, and then I noticed that none of them were looking at me or the cello. “It’s beautiful,” they kept saying, and one by one they all went to touch the divine object—the red velvet lining inside the cello case.

After the touching of the velvet, they asked to hear the instrument. I tuned it up, waited until they were ready, and began to play Bach’s First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. The instant I drew the bow over the strings, the family started
talking with one another, in full voice, mostly about the velvet. I thought perhaps I had misunderstood and they didn’t want me to play, so I stopped. Gradually they became silent and looked at me. “Why did you stop?” I felt puzzled, but started again. Right away they resumed their conversations, the children laughed and played with the case, and Fu Manchu initiated an arm wrestle with the third brother. When I finished the first movement, they looked at me again. “Is that all?” I must admit that I felt disappointed that their first exposure to the cello, and to Bach, was generating so little interest. But then I remembered what a Chinese friend had told me one night at a performance of instrumental music where the audience talked, laughed, spat and walked around during the show. I mentioned to him that the audience seemed unbelievably rude, and he answered that, on the contrary, this showed they were enjoying it. He said that for the majority of Chinese who are peasants and laborers, music is enjoyed as a sort of background entertainment and is intended as an accompaniment to
renao
, which means literally “heat and noise.” Renao is the Chinese word for good fun, the kind you might have at an amusement park in America, and noise and movement are essential to it.

I accompanied their renao for as long as I could stand it, then put the cello away. The grandmother spoke again, and this time I understood her. “Sing a song.” My mind went blank; after several minutes of stalling, the only song I could think of was the first stanza of “Scarborough Fair.” Singing affected them differently, for they listened in complete silence. When I finished, the grandmother tapped me on the shoulder with her tiny finger. “Sing it again.” I sang it again, and she asked me to sing it one more time. “She likes the song,” Old Ding told me, and he encouraged me to keep singing it until dinner was ready. The children spared me from that task by
squealing with disapproval, saying that we had all heard enough music, now it was time for a ghost story. “Could you do that for them?” Old Ding asked. “They think you could tell a good one, because you look like a ghost yourself.” I said I would be happy to, but only if the children sat close enough for me to touch them, knowing that this would add to the dramatic effect. It took a while for them to get up the courage, but in time I had a circle of trembling children around my feet, waiting to be terrified. The children had heard enough Mandarin on the loudspeakers and in school, so that if I spoke slowly, they understood. I created a horrible tale about a hungry ghost that hid in dark corners of houses or under beds, waiting to nibble at the ankles of little boys and girls, that had golden hair, strange blue eyes and a long, narrow nose. Upon hearing this description, they began edging away from me. “Would you like me to show you how the ghost nibbles?” I asked, and the entire circle of them vaporized, and could only be seen peeking out at me from behind doors for the rest of the evening.

This amused everyone, but most of all Fu Manchu, who growled with delight and tried to capture the children and carry them back toward me. They scratched, kicked and bit him, which only added to his enjoyment. This could have gone on all night if my friend’s wife hadn’t stuck her head in to announce dinner. We all herded into a storage room on the first floor, which they had cleared out for dinner, and sat at three low tables, using overturned washbasins as chairs.

They served five or six varieties of dried fish, a stew of fresh fish and Chinese parsley, and some sausage, along with rice scooped out of a huge black iron pot. There was a large bowl of fresh hot peppers mixed with crushed dried peppers on each table. A pinch on my rice was enough for me, but only whole mouthfuls satisfied my hosts, who considered the peppers
a separate dish rather than a seasoning. Tea followed, and I noticed that most of them ate the leaves after drinking the tea. Suddenly Fu Manchu leapt to his feet and said something in an excited voice. Everyone got up and cleared the tables, moved them and all the washbasins out of the storage room, then returned to squat against the walls. The brother grinned at me, flashing his teeth and saying something I could not understand. Old Ding tapped me on the shoulder. “He wants to show you how strong he is. Watch!” The brother stripped to the waist, revealing a massive chest and arms muscled with steel bands. He jumped face-first to the ground and started doing push-ups on his fingertips while the rest of the family counted aloud. At seventy-five, with no signs of slowing down, he jumped back up, assumed a martial stance and punched the air in front of him one hundred times. He looked as though he were in some sort of frenzy, and after the punches he took a cloth soaked in cold water and squeezed it over his head, dancing with joy as the icy drops ran down his back. “Now it is your turn. Show him how strong you are, then you two can wrestle!” I chose to keep my shirt on, the temperature being forty degrees or so in their unheated building, and not to begin my demonstration with push-ups. I performed a routine of Chinese Southern Fist, which can be done in a very small area, embellishing it with one or two jumping kicks that I knew I did well. A silence fell over them, and Old Ding asked who my teacher was. When I mentioned Pan’s name, sighs of admiration filled the room. “Is it true?” he asked. I said it was, and his brother put his right fist into his left palm, an old-fashioned sign of respect, especially among fighters, and mumbled something to me. “He wants to become your apprentice,” Old Ding translated, “and he doesn’t want to wrestle anymore.”

Later that night Old Ding, his two brothers and I returned
to the river. They unfastened two boats, the brothers taking one and us the other, and we started rowing downstream. “Aren’t we going in the wrong direction?” I asked. “No! The big fish are downstream in the morning.” “In the morning?” “Yes—why, do you want to fish now, too?” “Am I going fishing with you in the morning?” “Of course!” “Where will I be sleeping tonight?” He pointed to the bamboo roof. “Under that.”

We anchored far enough downstream that the lights from the city no longer illuminated the sky. The stars and a nearly full moon shone brilliantly over our heads, and the movement of their reflections in the water told us when another boat passed in the distance. Each of our boats had a small charcoal brazier on deck and a kerosene lamp, burning faint yellow, hung from a pole off the bow. Watching the brothers prepare the boats for the night, their faces and hands glowing red, the wood of the boats a deep walnut color becoming ebony where the lamplight could not reach, all reflected in the pure black glass around us, I imagined that a magic spell had transported me into a Japanese woodblock print.

When it came time to go to sleep, Old Ding and I lay down, side by side, on a mattress of tattered army coats, using the same for blankets. The boat was narrow, so we pressed against each other, with our faces against the sides of the boat. He put out the kerosene lamp and pulled the bamboo cover back, so we could look up at the sky. Then we began talking.

“How far away is America?” When I told him, he giggled. “Bullshit—the world isn’t that big!” He asked if I had ever seen the ocean, and when I said I had, he wanted to know what color it was. For some reason he thought it was yellow. He also thought Taiwan was an island off the coast of America. “Do you have robots in America that look just like people? I heard that you have them over there, but that sometimes
they get angry and kill people.” I explained as best I could that we have some very impressive technology in our country, but as yet no robots that cannot be distinguished from humans. He fell silent for a while, and I thought he had gone to sleep, but he had one more question: “Is the moon higher than space?” I thought about it for a long time but finally had to admit that I really didn’t know. “But,” I said, “did you know that we have sent men to the moon, and they have walked there?” He was quiet for a moment, then he laughed and laughed, and pulled the bamboo cover shut.