Iron and Silk (17 page)

“I am very fortunate to be Master Pan’s student, but, you know, he leaves Changsha all the time. I get discouraged when I don’t have someone to go to, who will push me to keep trying.”

“I understand,” he said. “I will help you in any way I can. But I must ask that you do not mention to Master Pan that you are studying with me.”

“Not tell him?”

“Try to understand. He is famous in China, a well-known fighter. He has chosen to teach you, so of course many Chinese are envious of you. Some say he teaches you because you have a great desire and you work hard. But some say it is because you are a foreigner—you are his exotic pet. Master Pan takes a great risk, teaching you. If he knows that you are studying with me, he will think that you feel dissatisfied, and he will be insulted because I am so common. Please, let it be our secret.”

“If you say so.”

“The other thing is that I don’t want you to pay me or give me any gifts—it would only cause trouble. I teach for my own pleasure. Just let me know when to expect you so I can be prepared.”

“You are terribly kind, Teacher Hei, but how can I show my appreciation? I’ll feel embarrassed if I can’t do something for you.”

He stared at me for a moment, then laughed. “Practice, of course! It sounds so easy, but so few students do. Shall we start now?” The singer, her obligation fulfilled, said goodbye, and right there on the sidewalk Hei began teaching me the footwork of the two styles he loved most, Xingyiquan and
Baguazhang. These styles are closely related, so a master of one usually becomes competent at the other as well. According to popular history, a
xingyi
master and a
bagua
master competed against each other in the last century, but when several matches held over three days produced no clear winner, they became friends and agreed that their two styles should from that time on be taught and learned together. After Hei demonstrated the fundamentals of the two styles, he performed an advanced routine of each, to give me an idea of the distinct character of the two systems. It was not difficult for me to see that his skill was by no means “common.”

After an hour’s lesson and a break for tea he suggested that I follow him home so I would know how to get there next time. He lived across the river on the far side of Yuelu Mountain, a fifty-minute ride that took us along a narrow, battered road jammed with overloaded trucks, homemade tractors, wheelbarrows carrying screaming pigs and buses going back and forth from the countryside. About a mile from his home, as I strained to pedal up a hill, my bicycle chain snapped. We walked it to a roadside “fix bicycle” stand; just as the repairman got over the shock of seeing me, a loud bell rang and the local elementary school across the street let out for the afternoon. A huge iron gate swung open, releasing a horde of children who perceived and then surrounded me like a single, vast organism. After an eternity the chain was fixed and we managed to ride through the sea of children. Teacher Hei, looking dazed, asked me if I always drew crowds like that when I rode my bicycle. “I’m afraid so.” “Oh … well, you know, you are quite a spectacle. Not many people look like you around here.” I asked Teacher Hei if people in Changsha thought I looked ugly. “Oh, no!”
he answered quickly. “Not ugly—you look … interesting! You have a very three-dimensional face.”

When we reached his house, I felt as if we had left Changsha completely. He lived in a small, red-brick building surrounded by trees and terraced vegetable plots, all tucked away on the slope of Yuelu Mountain not far below an orange grove. An old man sat in the shade of a tree growing near the building, playing the
erhu
, a Chinese stringed instrument. Hei explained that this group of two-story buildings housed teachers in the Arts and Culture Department of the Teachers’ College. His neighbors were painters, dancers, musicians, scholars and athletes. When we walked into his apartment, a flock of chickens that slept under his stove at night ran forward to be fed. Hei motioned for me to sit in a large chair while he sat on a low stool near a window. He stretched his arm out of the window where a young tree stood and plucked a few tiny, oval-shaped fruits off it. “Do you like kumquats?” he asked. “This tree is doing well.” I had never seen a fresh kumquat; I told him I liked preserved kumquats, but had never tried them off the tree. He dropped the fruits into a tin cup filled with boiling water, poked them around for a minute, then handed me one. He watched me carefully, and when he saw how much I enjoyed it, he went outside, picked twenty more and put them into my bag. He introduced me to his wife, who quietly insisted that I try a few tea-cooked eggs that she had just prepared. Then I left, having agreed to come three afternoons a week thereafter for lessons.

When I next came I found Hei out in the terraced vegetable patch harvesting some kind of spinach. He heard the bell on my bicycle and came trotting down the hill, his shoulder pole bent with the weight of two buckets full of
nightsoil, which he used as fertilizer. A cup of tea that he had steeped earlier and let cool waited for me inside; he knew I liked “cold drinks.” After I finished it he cleaned a few kumquats for me, watched me eat them, then took me outside to practice. During the lesson I heard a piano through the window above Teacher Hei’s apartment. The playing was beautiful, and it complemented the calm grace of Hei’s movements. He stepped, turned, parried and struck in rapid, gentle circles. Unlike Pan’s eyes, which flashed with exquisite violence, Hei’s eyes looked alert but expressionless, almost like a bird’s. His first criticism of my attempt to learn the straight punch of xingyi was that my shoulders and arms were too tense. “Even your hands should relax,” he said, “tensing and snapping only at the moment of impact.” He took my hand in his to show me the correct posture and noticed the scars on my knuckles. “You are hitting iron, I see.” I looked at his hands and saw that they were unmarked. “Teacher Hei, do you condition your hands in any way?” He spread his hands in front of him and looked at them as if trying to decide something. “No, I don’t. I suppose I could, but in truth, I can’t think of a good reason for it. What would I do with such powerful hands? I’m a college teacher and a gardener, not a warrior. Besides, the wushu I practice does not require it. When you practice, your hands should look fluid and graceful, as if they were made of silk. They become hard only for an instant, like the end of a whip as it cracks, then they are soft again.”

Hei went into the house for a few minutes to check on the stew he was cooking, leaving me outside to practice the straight punch. An old woman wearing a plain white blouse and a grey skirt appeared in one of the doorways and sat down on a stool to watch me. I smiled at her and she smiled back, waving at me and gesturing for me to continue. I kept
it up for a while, then paused to stand in the shade of a tree. “I think it’s wonderful that you are making such good use of your time here in China,” the old woman said all of a sudden. “Your teacher says you are an exceptionally diligent student.”

“Well, it’s very nice of him to—” I stopped in mid-sentence and blinked. She had complimented me in fluent English. “You-you speak English!”

“Why yes, I do. I grew up in the States. I imagine that was some time before you were born.”

“And—now you live here, in Changsha?”

“That’s right. I live right upstairs. That was my piano you must have heard. I’m a piano teacher here. You see, I was a piano student in the forties. I was visiting China at the time of the Revolution. Of course, it became difficult to enter or leave China at that time, so … now I live here.”

I didn’t know what to say. She stood up, brushing her skirt daintily, then walked over to where I was standing. “You’re lucky to have a teacher like Mr. Hei. He is a kind and generous man. Do you see all the gardens and trees around here? He planted them all. He dug all those terraces, too. And he shares what he grows with the whole neighborhood. Everyone likes him, because he is a real gentleman. He is out of the house every morning at four o’clock to exercise, then at five he rides across the river to teach wushu in the park. He does it for free, you know! Really, there are so few people like him.” Just then Teacher Hei came out of the house. The old woman said to me, “Back to work, now! Come visit me whenever you like—I have some instant coffee that a relative sent, so I could make you a cup if you like.” She waved goodbye and disappeared into the building. “So that’s what English sounds like,” Teacher Hei said, then he asked me how my straight punch was coming along.

By wintertime I was getting fairly comfortable with
Teacher Hei’s xingyi and bagua. My biggest problem, he said, was still the same: I did not relax enough. He had thought it over and decided that if I was serious about learning soft-style boxing, I should study Taijiquan, the quintessential “soft” martial art. “My Taijiquan is not good enough, but I know someone who is very good. If you like, I will approach him and ask if he will teach you.”

One week later Teacher Hei took me to a small old house in the center of the city, with a ceiling of exposed wood, stained black from the accumulated smoke of incense and coal. There he introduced me to Teacher Yi, who was in his forties, and to Yi’s father-in-law, Old Zai, who was in his eighties. Both of them were well-known
taiji
experts in Changsha; Yi was chairman of the city-wide wushu association. They practiced the Wu style of taiji, native to Changsha, distinctive for its method of leaning with the whole upper body in the direction of attack rather than maintaining a strictly upright posture. They taught their students right there in the house, in an area no larger than fifteen by eight feet. As we talked, two advanced students practiced “push hands,” a kind of sparring that moves slowly and gently until one partner senses the other losing his balance and takes advantage of it instantly, sending his opponent flying with a well-timed push. They had cigarettes in their mouths as they fought: the cigarette and incense smoke was so thick they looked like figures in a hazy dreamscape, writhing and bobbing like serpents, then suddenly bursting apart with one left standing and the other crashing into a wall and sliding down to the floor. “Teacher Hei has asked me to teach you taiji,” Yi said at last. “Usually I wouldn’t consider it, because you will only be here a short time. My father and I only accept students who are willing to study for at least five years.
Even that is only a beginning! Teacher Hei is my friend, though, and he thinks it would be worthwhile, so why don’t you come three nights a week, starting next week. I would like you to come here early Sunday morning for the first lesson.”

When I arrived that Sunday, instead of taking me into the house he told me to get back on my bicycle and follow him. We rode to the home of a young man, another beginning student, who joined us on our way across the river to Yuelu Mountain. We hiked to an old Taoist temple halfway up, where a young man sitting by the entrance greeted us. He led us into a sitting room and served us tea and cookies. I noticed something strange about the way he moved; when he stepped out of the room, Yi told me the boy was blind. “His taiji is coming along nicely, though.” After our snack the three of us said goodbye to the young man and climbed to a clearing near the top, from which we had a view of the river. There, Yi told us to sit down and watch him practice the form, which took almost thirty minutes. He practiced it so slowly I sometimes thought he had stopped moving, but even so it seemed that his clothes would burst from the strength underneath. After that he taught us the first move of the form. “It’s important to get off to a good start,” Yi said. “This is the right kind of atmosphere. In the future, when you practice at my house or anywhere else, if you find your mind getting cluttered, close your eyes and remember this scene.”

On a pretty day between the cold rains of winter and the steaming rains of spring, Hei and I took a pair of spears up the mountain to a clearing by an orange grove. We weren’t the only ones to think of this—a few minutes after we got there, a teacher of traditional Chinese dance brought five of
her apprentices to the same clearing. At first the girls, all in their mid-teens, hid their faces in their hands with embarrassment, unable to concentrate with me only a few yards away. Gradually they settled down, though, and began their dance. The older woman sang while the girls, all petite and moonfaced, danced with silk handkerchiefs in their hands. The handkerchiefs seemed to come to life in the air, floating and darting around the girls like birds. “Do you remember when I told you that your hands should move as if they were made of silk?” Hei asked me. “Yes.” “Well, that’s what I mean. Isn’t it beautiful?” Somehow this seemed a good time to ask a question that had been nagging me for some time. “Teacher Hei, I have a question.” “Mm?” “Sometimes I get confused—I don’t understand why I spend so much time learning wushu. I’m not a fighter—I’ve never been in a fight in my life—so what am I doing this for?”

Hei thought for a while, never taking his eyes off the dancers. Then he said, “You don’t have to be a fighter to enjoy wushu. If you were really training for combat, you wouldn’t practice wushu. You would become a soldier.” He pointed to the spear I was holding. “Look at this thing. Do you really think it has any practical use in this century? Can you carry it with you in case of attack and still feel like a respectable man? It is a cultural artifact now, not a weapon. But should we throw away all our spears and all the skill developed for them? I don’t think so. It would seem like a waste to me.”

“I guess I see what you mean, but still, what reason can I give myself for all this effort?” Teacher Hei shrugged his shoulders, then answered, “I don’t know—why dance with handkerchiefs?”

…

“I think the taiji is helping,” Teacher Hei said one afternoon. “You look more relaxed. That solves one problem. You have another problem, though, and it doesn’t have anything to do with martial arts. You don’t dress warmly enough! You wear a heavy army coat when you ride here, but the ride gets you all sweaty, so you take it off as soon as you arrive. That way you get a chill! You don’t wear the proper clothing for the Hunan climate. Again I have called upon an expert to help you—my wife. She believes she can solve the problem.” He called her from outside, where she was washing clothes. She walked over to a closet and pulled out a beautiful jet-black turtleneck sweater. It was made of thick, heavy wool. I tried it on and it fit perfectly. “She knitted it herself,” Teacher Hei said proudly, “guessing your size just by looking at you.” I groped for the appropriate words to thank her but she interrupted me. “It’s black. That way, when you leave us, you can remember your Teacher Black.” She blushed, then hurried back outside to finish her laundry.