Iron and Silk (15 page)

I woke up to feel tiny morning waves lapping at the side of the boat through my cheek. Old Ding woke at the same time and pulled back the bamboo cover. A heavy mist surrounded us, so thick we could barely see the other boat fifteen feet away. Without a word the three brothers prepared their long nets, dropped them into the water, then rowed apart. We waited half an hour or so, then rowed together again. We pulled the nets up, finding in them nothing but some mud and weeds. “Do you get angry if you don’t catch anything?” I asked them. They laughed as if I had told a joke, then answered no, they didn’t really care, but if they didn’t catch much, they would be scolded by their wives.

Two hours passed, then a third boat appeared out of the thinning mist. It was the father, with an even longer net that spread out among three boats. We pulled it in, and still found nothing inside. “Even father will get scolded today!” Old Ding yelled, and they all doubled over with laughter. They folded up the net, and we started back to shore for breakfast. We rowed to a spot where seven other boats were moored, and where the fishermen’s wives stood on the floodwall waiting to give them breakfast. I hid under the bamboo cover again, and when Old Ding’s wife came down to the river with a container full of steamed bread and hot peppers, I jumped
out, exchanged greetings, then jumped with the container back onto the boat. The other fishermen and their wives up on the wall watched in numb silence as we divided up the bread and started eating. In time I was properly introduced, and we pulled our boat into their little cluster and shared breakfast. When everyone had eaten, they took turns dropping their trousers, leaning off the sides of the boats and using the river as a toilet. At the same time, Old Ding insisted that it was time to wash up. He dipped an iron cup into the filthy water and began splashing it on his face and neck, inviting me to do the same. I declined, to everyone’s surprise. “Don’t you wash yourself?” “Yes, but not every day. I will tomorrow.” Then it came time to brush our teeth. He dipped the cup into the water again, swished a lump of steel wool in it, then put the steel wool in his mouth to chew on. He gargled with a mouthful of the water, then spat it out. “Here—your turn.” I declined again, and everyone agreed that it was an odd thing that Americans, who supposedly live in a fantastical future-world, understand so little about personal hygiene.

Eventually I had to get back home, but they pleaded with me to stay. “Why don’t you live with us, here, on the boats? Your hospital isn’t far, you could ride your bicycle to class in the mornings, then ride back in the afternoons. You can have a boat to yourself, if you like.” I told them it was very kind of them to offer, but I had lots of books and things like that, too much to fit on a boat. They answered that we could put some money together and buy another boat just for my books. I thanked them again but had to say no, assuring them that I would visit them as often as I could. They looked disappointed but did not press the matter, and took me back to the place where I had first met them. I hopped on shore, climbed up the floodwall with my cello, and before disappearing over it, turned to wave once more. They hadn’t moved from the
spot, waiting for me to turn around, and waved back with both arms, reminding me to come look for them again.

The rest of the day I spent thinking about the night on the boat. Teacher Wei warned me that if I slipped away to live with the fishermen on their boats, she would be very angry, because she would probably have to teach my classes. That night I slept uneasily, dreaming that I had pulled my ears out to clean them and was driven by some horrible compulsion to chew them to pieces. I woke up feeling anxious, but pleased that my ears had not been spoiled, got ready for class and opened the door to leave the house. A crowd of old ladies, on their way to get breakfast from the dining hall, stood around the porch looking curiously at something on the steps. It was a large washbasin holding a fish, so big that its head and tail hung over the edges of the basin and touched the ground.

Pan Learns Script
 
 A Runaway
 
 Teacher Black
 
 In a Gallery
 

I
enjoyed the time I spent with Pan very much, though I must admit I preferred the time he was teaching me wushu to the time he was teaching me how to teach him English. I remember with special clarity how close to madness I came the day he decided to learn to tell time. He managed to find a broken clock, set its hands at exactly twelve o’clock, then asked how to say what time it was. After he had repeated “It’s twelve o’clock” to his satisfaction, he moved the minute hand exactly one minute forward to 12:01. “How do you say this?” he asked.

Eventually, though, it always came time to put away the recorders and clocks and ride over to the training hall, and no matter how short the lesson, it always seemed worth a lifetime of English tutoring. I felt that I could practice for him until my heart burst, and the times when it nearly did, and he smiled at me, I thought I would surely float up through the ceiling with joy and power. After each lesson he would tell me a story about his own training and eventual mastery. He was the youngest of several sons, and had lost his father when still very young. His older brothers apprenticed him to a metal worker and disapproved of his interest in martial arts, calling it a waste of time. He practiced secretly, at night, and sought out fifteen of the greatest masters in China, quickly
becoming their favorite student. Year after year he forged metal during the day and practiced slavishly at night, returning home after the rest of his family had gone to bed. Not even his neighbors knew about his hobby, for Pan wanted no one to see him until he was ready. When that day came, he signed himself up for the national competition in Beijing, took a week off from his job, and without even a proper uniform or a pair of sneakers, became China’s grand champion.

Several things hindered our lessons, though. One problem, of course, was that officialdom felt uneasy about our relationship. I was able, in time, to convince my college that denying me permission to see my teacher would not be “convenient” for me, but the cadres of the Sports Unit, whom I never saw, thought differently. One day during my second year, when I went there to drop off an English tape, a guard stopped me at the gate. “You can’t come in here anymore,” she said. “Don’t ever come back.” I asked the Foreign Affairs Bureau to make inquiries and find out what had gone wrong. The first message from the Sports Unit went something like this: “Chinese wushu is a National Defense Secret and as such, cannot be leaked to aliens.” This was nonsense, so we asked for a better reason. The next message, that Master Pan was away on a very long trip, would have been more believable had Pan not been in my room when I heard it. By the third message, we were getting warmer. It was feared that I was a spy and might gain access to “internal documents” kept in the offices below the training hall, which contained such State Secrets as the number of athletes in the unit, their names, ages and so on. After several weeks, though, the most reasonable explanation reached our college. China was at that time undergoing a nation-wide purge of incompetent, radical leftist elements, known as the Party Rectification Campaign. This meant that
cadres at all levels were subject to evaluation and were likely to be shifted around according to the results Rumor had it that quite a bit of shifting around had occurred within the leadership of the Sports Unit, though no one really knew for sure. Anyway, a team of new, forward-thinking moderate progressives had presumably just come to power. It might seem odd that their first step toward modernization and “Opening Up to the West” was to forbid me to pass through their gate. But China was at that time in the middle of another nation-wide movement, the Campaign for the Elimination of Cultural Pollution, “cultural pollution” meaning Western ideas and habits. The new leaders encouraged the adoption of Western management and training methods in their unit, but at the same time had to demonstrate a firm resolution to protect their unit from contamination by a Western person.

No further explanations were given, and I never saw the training hall or the athletes again. After that, Pan taught me on the roof of a public bathhouse early in the mornings, where we had to dodge wires, piles of roofing materials and gusts of steam that shot up through ventilation holes under our feet.

Time was another problem. Pan accompanied the troupe on all of their trips to perform or to compete. One of these trips took them to Shanghai for a month, another to Wuhan for three weeks, and a trip to Singapore and Hong Kong kept him away for more than two months. They often performed in neighboring counties in Hunan, which involved four to five days of preparation, and Pan occasionally had to travel by himself within the province to choose new troupe members. He never knew beforehand how long these trips would last, or whether during the trip he might suddenly be called to
Beijing or Hong Kong to make another movie. Since I could not go to his unit, I never knew when he was in town, or for how long, until he appeared at my door. I lived in constant fear of his showing up when I didn’t happen to be home, and disappearing again for another few weeks, which frequently happened. Before the long trips, though, he always managed to find me and deluge me with new material, sometimes showing up on the rooftop every morning at five o’clock for weeks at a stretch. “When I come back, this should be perfect,” he would say, then disappear.

As for his English, something had temporarily distracted him from memorizing the oral English “routines,” and according to his wife, occupied him during nearly all his free moments. Apparently he had seen in my room a letter from a friend written in script. He was so taken by its appearance that he decided right away to learn it, even though he could not write in print yet. My protests were futile. I drew up a series of models for him to copy from, and barely escaped having to rewrite all of our phrase sheets in script as well. His wife sensed my frustration, and one night, as he sat at a little table copying out letters onto a pad that he always carried around with him, she pleaded with him to be reasonable and let me teach him the way I knew how. “After all,” she groaned, “teaching English is his job.” Pan’s eyebrows shot up and he glared at her. “Neither of you understands me,” he whispered. “No one understands me the way I do.” Then he picked up a single chopstick. “In the hands of an ordinary man, this is just a chopstick.” He looked at it for a moment, then burst into motion too fast to see clearly, bringing the chopstick to a trembling halt less than a centimeter from my throat. “In my hands it becomes something else. You think it is foolish that I want to write script, but I do what I like, and
who knows what I will do with it? Who knows what these letters will become when they are mine to use?” His eyes burned into mine, then a boyish smile came over his face and he moved on to the next letter.