Iron and Silk (3 page)

I
’d been interested in China since I was thirteen. I had seen the television movie
Kung Fu
and decided right away that peace of mind and a shaved head were what I had always wanted. My parents supported my interest, buying all sorts of books about kung fu and Chinese art for me; they even enrolled me in a kung fu school, although they did not let me shave my head. I practiced several hours a day, tried to overcome pain by walking to school barefoot in the snow, and let my kung fu teacher pound me senseless in cemeteries at night so that I might learn to “die well.” I enjoyed all of this so much that my interest continued through high school, and spread to wanting to learn Chinese painting and calligraphy and then the language itself.

I went to Yale and majored in Chinese literature. By the time I finished college, I was fluent in Mandarin and nearly so in Cantonese, had struggled through a fair amount of classical Chinese and had translated the works of a modern poet. Oddly, though, I had no desire to go to China; it sounded like a giant penal colony to me, and besides, I have never liked traveling much. I did need a job, though, so I applied to and was accepted by the Yale-China Association to teach English at Hunan Medical College in Changsha from August 1982 to July 1984.

The college assigned three classes to me: twenty-six doctors and teachers of medicine, four men and one woman identified as “the Middle-Aged English Teachers,” and twenty-five medical students ranging in age from twenty-two to twenty-eight. First I met the doctors, who stood up to applaud my entrance into the classroom and remained standing while the Class Monitor read a prepared statement that welcomed and praised me.

Their English ability ranged from nearly fluent to practically hopeless. At the end of the first week of classes the Class Monitor read aloud the results of their “Suggestions for Better Study” meeting: “Dear Teacher Mark. You are an active boy! Your lessons are very humorous and very wonderful. To improve our class, may we suggest that in the future we (1) spend more time reading, (2) spend more time listening, (3) spend more time writing and (4) spend more time speaking. Also, some students feel you are moving too quickly through the book. However, some students request that you speed up a little, because the material is too elementary. We hope we can struggle together to overcome these contradictions! Thank you, our dear teacher.”

I was next introduced to the medical students, whom I taught only once a week, on Tuesday nights. They were nearly faint with excitement over meeting a foreign teacher; when I first walked into the room they didn’t move or breathe, and no one dared look directly at me. The Monitor yelled, “Stand up!” and they rose with such formality that I did not know how to respond. At last I saluted them gravely and yelled in Chinese, “Sit down!” They looked stunned, then exploded into cheers, giving me the thumbs-up sign and speaking to me all at once in Chinese. It seemed that the tension had been released, so when they calmed down I asked them to introduce
themselves in English. At first they giggled and whispered to one another, then slowly they lowered their heads, turned pale and went mute.

That night when I got back to the house I found a note on my door from Teacher Wu, a senior member of the English Department, asking me to see her in her office the next morning. I went to bed feeling uneasy, wondering if I had done or said something wrong during the past week and was about to be purged or criticized.

The offices and classrooms of the Foreign Languages Department were on the second floor of a three-story building. The first floor housed cadavers for the Anatomy Department and the third floor was occupied by the Political and Moral Education Department. Students used to joke that it was hard to determine who slept more soundly in that building—the bodies, or the students on the third floor. I groped up the unlit staircase and found Teacher Wu in her office, surrounded by piles of paper that turned out to be the draft of an application for a World Bank loan that the college had given her to translate into English. She pointed to a seat next to her and asked if I would go over the translation with her to check for mistakes. She handed me two piles: the Chinese version, and a copy of her translation—all handwritten, since the college had only one copying machine and the only authorized operator was on vacation.

Nearly seventy years old, Teacher Wu was short and plump, with heavy eyelids above and below her eyes that made her look tired. I had heard that both she and her husband had received advanced degrees from an American university in the 1940’s. When they finished they returned to China, determined to serve their country whatever the outcome of the civil war. Like most Chinese with intellectual backgrounds,
they were to suffer despite their patriotism. Teacher Wu’s husband came under attack during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950’s; to protect his family, he apologized to the State for his “crimes against Socialism,” then took his own life. During the Cultural Revolution Teacher Wu became a target and had to endure not only her own public denouncement and humiliation but those of her son, who was “sent down” to the countryside for nearly a decade.

I sat down next to her and began to look over the English version of the text:

And so on.

I looked at her and didn’t know what to say. Could she really think that this was appropriate wording for an application to an international lending group? I finally asked her as much. She did not look up from her work. “Mm. Is there something wrong with the grammar?” I said no, the grammar seemed fine, but the content seemed a bit weak, perhaps. Her expression did not change at all. “But this is a translation of the text written by the officials of our college. This is the Chinese way of writing this sort of thing. I am only an English teacher, I cannot presume to change it.” I told her that perhaps from a Chinese point of view this kind of language was acceptable, but that from a Western point of view it seemed repetitive, and since they were applying to an institution run according to Western principles, they might want to draft a more Western-sounding text. She sighed, still without looking at me, and said nothing. I got the impression that she was quietly hoping I wouldn’t press the issue, so I didn’t, and pointed out a misspelling.

We corrected misspellings for about an hour, then took a break for tea. “Have you met the Middle-Aged English Teachers yet?” she asked. I said I hadn’t. “Mm. They are a special group. Originally they were Russian teachers, but then, because of certain political conditions, Russian teachers became English teachers.” She paused to refill my teacup, closed her eyes for a moment, then continued. “Then, during the Cultural Revolution, as you surely know, all teaching was interrupted. There is no need to go into that. Anyway, now we are all teaching again. The Middle-Aged English Teachers are victims of the Gang of Four; now they think they are too old to improve. You may find it difficult to inspire them to work”—she laughed—“but they are a humorous group. I think you will like them.”

We worked on the application until lunch time, when she suggested that we walk home together, since her apartment was not far from where I lived. When we reached her building she said, “By the way, I hear you brought a cello with you. Why don’t you bring it here, to my house, tonight? I used to be a musician myself—I would love to hear it.”

After dinner I carried my cello to her building. It was the first time I had entered a Chinese person’s home. She lived in a tiny apartment that she shared with “Auntie Tan,” an old woman from the countryside who helped with the shopping, cooking and clearning. The apartment had cement walls, bare except for a calendar and a few photographs, a bare cement floor, a bare light bulb in each room, and sparse furnishings, with one exception: against one wall stood an upright piano.

I asked her how she had managed to get a piano, and she said that she grew up playing and had continued to study when she was in America. She bought the piano there, and brought it back to China when she returned with her husband. “I haven’t had much time to practice it since then, but nowadays I try to play whenever I have free time.” She went over, opened it up, and began to play.

The piano was badly damaged—many of the notes did not sound, and those that did were so out of tune I almost wished they hadn’t. She invited me to play a duet with her, but we had to give up. After a pause she sighed and said quietly, “One night the Red Guards came. They took everything in the house out and burned it. They wanted to take the piano, too, but”—and here she smiled at the floor—“it was too heavy for them to throw out the window! So they just hit it for a while and left. I haven’t been able to find anyone to fix it since then.” I said I wished that I could help her, but though my mother played the piano I had never learned to tune or repair one.

“Your mother is a pianist?”

“Well, she was a pianist. Now she plays the harpsichord.”

“Mm. So you know what a piano should sound like, then? You grew up hearing it every day, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Mm.”

The next day I went to meet the Middle-Aged English Teachers. They had drawn an elaborate mural on the blackboard in several colors of chalk, composed of the words “Welcome Teacher Mark!” surrounded by an assortment of animals, musical notes and Chinese characters, and had set out candies on my desk along with a cup of tea and a thermos of hot water. When I walked in they stood up and stepped forward to shake my hand—all except for Teacher Du, the one woman in the group, who covered her mouth with her hand and smiled shyly. Since they had had American teachers already, they were more relaxed than the other groups. I introduced myself and told them a few stories about my family and friends, and they laughed uproariously at the funny parts. They even interrupted me a few times to ask questions or to accuse me of exaggerating, which came as a great relief after a week of stiff formality.

I asked them to introduce themselves to me, but they chose instead to introduce the person sitting next to them. Teacher Xu began: “Teacher Cai was a wonderful dancer when he was a young man. He is famous in our college, because he has a beautiful wife.” Teacher Cai hit Teacher Xu and said, “Teacher Xu is always late to class, and he is afraid of his wife!” “I am not!” “Oh, but you are!” Teacher Zhang pointed to Teacher Zhu. “Teacher Zhu was a Navy man. But he can’t swim! And Teacher Du is very fat. So we call her Fatty Du—she has the most powerful voice in our college!” Fatty Du
beamed with pride and said, “And Teacher Zhang’s special characteristic is that he is afraid of me!” “I am not!” “Oh, but you are!”

As Teacher Wu had predicted, I liked this group very much, though when I assigned them reading and a short composition for the next class they became quiet and looked less cheerful than before.

A week later Teacher Wu appeared at my door early in the morning, breathless with excitement. “I have something here …” and she pulled out of her bag something that looked like a bent screwdriver. “I heard that an orchestra was passing through Changsha, so I found them and talked to them. Their pianist had one of these—it is a tuning wrench. He said I can have it until tonight—can you try?”

“Try what?”

“To tune it—tune the piano!”

“But I don’t know how.”

“Try!”

I asked her not to stay in the apartment while I worked, because it would only make me more nervous, so she prepared a thermos of tea and promised me a good dinner that evening. “And if you need anything, just tell Auntie Tan—she’ll be right in the kitchen.” Auntie Tan gave me a toothless smile and nodded, and I smiled back.

After Teacher Wu left I began to disassemble the piano. As I was taking off one of the boards concealing the pedal mechanism, I heard a loud squeak and a frantic scratching. I stepped back and watched three large rodents scurry out of the piano, around the room and down a drainpipe.

Using sandpaper and a pair of pliers I managed to get all the hammers loose, and I repaired the pedal system by replacing the broken levers with several wooden rulers that I connected
with nuts and bolts. To tune the instrument I damped two of the strings of each note with my thumb and forefinger while I adjusted the third, then tuned each of the others to it. Since I have only semi-perfect pitch, I set middle C according to a Michael Jackson tape played through my Walkman.

I finished just before dinner. I was terribly excited and went into the kitchen to announce my success to Auntie Tan, but saw that she had stuffed her ears with balls of cotton, over which she had tied a thick towel, and seemed to be taking a nap. Teacher Wu arrived shortly thereafter, but did not yet go near the piano. “Let’s eat first,” she said.

We had a delicious meal of smoked eggs, noodles with pork strips in broth, and a whole chicken—a real luxury in China, only for special occasions—stewed in a thick yellow sauce. Then we had tea and popsicles that Auntie Tan had bought for us in the street. At last Teacher Wu sat down at the piano, took out several books of music, and began to play. She played through a few pieces and played them beautifully, but said nothing for a long time. Finally she stopped playing, looked directly at me, and said in Chinese, “Thank you very much.”