Iron and Silk (5 page)

After dessert Dr. Li took two swords from another room, tied them together with some string, and asked me to follow him. We got on our bicycles and rode to nearby Mawangdui, the site of the hole that had contained the two-thousand-year-old corpse. We walked past that hole to a second mound, which Dr. Li told me was supposed to contain the tomb of either the marquise’s husband or her son. The top of the mound was nearly flat and had patches of grass growing here and there on its packed dirt surface. As Dr. Li unfastened the two swords and handed me one, I realized that the flat part of the mound was just the right size for the form he had taught me.

The sun had not yet gone down, and it cast a glittering reflection over the Xiang River a few miles away. The vegetable plots in all directions around us caught the light as well and glowed brightly, in sharp contrast to the deep red earth of the paths between the fields.

“Just think,” he said, “under your feet is so much history! There are all sorts of treasures in this mound—probably even swords like these, only real ones that were used in ancient wars. With all this history under you, don’t you feel moved? Now, practice the form, and this time don’t fuss over the technique. Just enjoy it, as if this mound gave you power. That is the kind of feeling that makes wushu beautiful—it is tradition passing through you. Isn’t that a kind of power?”

After the lesson at Mawangdui Dr. Li said there was no need for him to come in the mornings to teach me anymore, but
that if I wanted any further instruction I could visit him anytime. Since very few people in China have telephones, about the only way to arrange to visit someone is to walk to his house and knock on the door. If it’s a friend, you can often dispense with the knocking and just walk in. My students told me again and again that if I ever wanted to see them I could walk into their homes any time of day or night.

“But what if you are busy?”

“It doesn’t matter! If you come, I won’t be busy anymore!”

“But what if you are asleep?”

“Then wake me up!”

No matter how often I was given these instructions, though, I could not bring myself to follow them. Whenever someone banged on my door unexpectedly, or simply appeared in my room, I always felt slightly nervous, and I only visited my friends when I felt I had a good reason.

So I did not call upon Dr. Li for more lessons, but contented myself with practicing the Xuan Men Sword and trying to recreate the feeling invoked by dancing with the sword on the Han dynasty tomb.

By that time Teacher Wei was helping me through a classical novel,
The Water Margin
, the story of a hundred and eight renegade heroes, all martial arts experts, who band together and perform deeds similar to those of Robin Hood and the men of Sherwood Forest. Teacher Wei and I agreed that our favorite character was Lu Zhishen, known as the Phony Monk, a man with a righteous soul but a powerful temper, who was on the run from the law after killing an evil merchant to redress an injustice. To escape execution he became a Buddhist monk, but was unsuited to the monk’s abstemious way of life. He would sneak out of the monastery at night to drink superhuman amounts of baijiu and eat roast dogs, bones and all, then return to the monastery where the other monks
would scold him for drinking and eating meat. In a drunken rage, he would beat them all up, reduce a few buildings to rubble, then throw up in the meditation hall. Of course, the next day he would feel very bad and fix everything he had broken.

My lessons with Teacher Wei had come to involve more than reading and writing assignments. She was a teacher in the Chinese tradition, taking responsibility not only for my academic progress but for my development as a person. She had advice for me concerning my family and friends, my diet, my clothing, my study and exercise habits, and my attitude toward life. At times I got impatient with her and explained that in America, children become adults around the time they leave for college and like to make decisions for themselves after that. She was appalled. “Don’t your parents and teachers care about you?”

“Of course they do, but—”

“Then how can they leave you stranded when you are only a child?”

“Well, we—”

“And how can you possibly think you understand everything? You are only twenty-two years old! You are so far away from home, and I am your teacher; if I don’t care about you, won’t you be lonely?”

She pointed out that the close relationship between teacher and student has existed in China since before the time of Confucius and should not be underestimated—besides, she was older than me and knew better. I couldn’t help respecting her conviction, and she seemed to get such pleasure out of trying to figure and then to straighten me out that I stopped resisting and let her educate me.

I learned how to dress to stay comfortable throughout the
year (a useful skill in a place without air conditioning or heat in most buildings), how to prevent and treat common illness, how to behave toward teachers, students, strangers and bureaucrats, how to save books from mildew and worms, and never to do anything to excess.

“Mark, you laugh a great deal during your lectures. Why?”

“Because, Teacher Wei, I am having fun.”

“I see. Laugh less. It seems odd that a man laughs so hard at his own jokes. People think you are a bit crazy, or perhaps choking.”

“Teacher Wei, do you think it is bad to laugh?”

“No, not at all. In fact, it is healthy to laugh. In Chinese we have a saying that if you laugh you will live long. But you shouldn’t laugh too much, or you will have digestive problems.”

Teacher Wei also encouraged me to travel. She knew I was homesick; she said that travel gives experience, helps cope with sadness, and in any case is fun. I disagreed with her. My last trip, from Hong Kong to Changsha, had given me unwelcome experience and was no fun at all. She let the issue drop until I told her one day that Bob, Marcy and Bill were planning a trip to Wuhan to spend a holiday weekend with the Yale-China teachers living there. Actually, I had already decided to join them, but I did not want to rob Teacher Wei of the opportunity to talk me into it. After I promised her that I would go to Wuhan if she really thought I should, she wanted to know who was going to arrange our travel.

“Teacher Wei, it is only a six-hour train ride.”

“Yes, but who will buy the tickets for you? Who will see you to the train station? Who will see to it that you get seats?”

“Teacher Wei, we will just take the bus to the station, get in line, buy the tickets, and find seats ourselves.”

She could not understand why I would not allow her to get all of her relatives in Changsha and Wuhan to arrange our passage.

“It is my duty to help you!”

“We will be all right, Teacher Wei. It is only for a weekend.”

“Well, when will you be back?”

“Monday night.”

“Which train will you take?”

“Probably this one—the one that arrives at dinner time.”

“I see.”

The weekend in Wuhan turned out to be fun, although I did not enjoy the train ride either way. Going up we sat on pieces of newspaper on the floor between two cars, knee to knee with three exhausted men traveling from South to North China. On the way down it was so crowded there was not even room on the floor between cars, so we stood, packed like cattle, with our faces pressed against a mountain of cabbages stacked up to the ceiling of the train. Bob had the clever idea of anchoring his arms in the pile of cabbages and leaning against it so he could sleep, so I followed his example and managed to doze for a few hours. When we got back to Changsha we stopped at a shop for some noodles in broth as the sun went down, before going home.

By the time we reached the gate of our college it was nearly dark. As I passed through it I heard someone calling my name and turned to see Teacher Wei waving at me from under a tree. I walked over and asked if she was on her way somewhere.

“No—I am waiting for you.”

“Why are you waiting for me?”

“This was your first trip in China. How shameful it would be if no one greeted you when you came home.”

C
hangsha stayed hot and humid through the early part of November. By then I had developed a painful case of athlete’s foot and started looking around for some medicine. None of the local stores carried anything for it, and none of my doctor students was familiar with the symptoms. At last someone acquainted with diseases of the skin had a look at me. He recognized the problem right away, but was unable to treat me. Athlete’s foot, he told me, had been declared successfully driven out of China, and therefore could be contracted only if one left the Socialist Motherland or had contact with foreigners. For this reason it was now called “Hong Kong Foot,” and no medicine was available for it. He advised me to have someone send medicine from the States.

I wrote someone in Hong Kong and he put a few tubes of medicine, along with some candy bars and brownies, in a small cardboard box and mailed it to me right away.

A few days later a pick-up notice addressed to me showed up in our mailbox. I walked over to the post office and handed it to a young woman behind the counter. She snatched it out of my hand, marched into the back room, came out with my package—torn open, its contents in disarray—dropped it on the counter, slapped a bill in front of me and barked, “Sign and pay!” She seemed to be in terrible humor and refused to look me in the eye, choosing to glare at the clock on the wall instead. I looked at the bill and saw that it imposed on me a tax that surpassed the value of the package’s contents.

I took a deep breath and risked all by asking the woman to
explain the tax. Her face turned white and her nostrils flared. “Import tax for Foreign Friends! Hurry up!” I began to get annoyed, because I had been told repeatedly by the Foreign Affairs Bureau that this tax was waived for foreigners living and working in China. It was supposed to be levied only on foreign travelers, who presumably are all rich and don’t mind being exploited. When I explained this to the young woman, she yelled, “Then let the Foreign Affairs Bureau pay the tax!” shoved my box to the far side of the counter, and refused to pay attention to me anymore.

I stalked over to the Foreign Affairs Bureau office, calming myself by anticipating the satisfaction of thrusting an official document bristling with angry red seals under that woman’s nose. She would have to surrender my box or be sent to a labor camp. But when I told Comrade Hu at the bureau about the problem, instead of giving me an official document he told me not to worry, that the Foreign Affairs Bureau would “research the matter” for me. In Chinese bureaucratic language, “researching a matter” means putting it aside until it solves itself or just goes away, so I pressed him for a better answer. He said he understood the need for expediency and smilingly agreed to “look into the matter,” which is usually better than “researching the matter.”

A few days later I visited the Foreign Affairs Bureau again to see if my medicine had been released.

“Oh yes,” Comrade Hu said, smiling, “it is a very simple problem. You see, this tax is imposed on foreigners who import things into China that China already has. China is a developing country, but nevertheless has medicine and food of its own. For someone to import medicine and food insults our country and the government assumes that foreigners wish to exploit Chinese people by selling foreign goods to them at high prices, saying that their foreign goods are better than
Chinese goods. Of course, we know that you wouldn’t do anything like that! You are a friend of China! But, unfortunately, we don’t control the regulations!”

“Yes, Comrade Hu, I understand that, but I was told that this import tax applied only to foreigners traveling in China, not to those living and working in China.”

After a pause and a few words with Group Leader Chen, Comrade Hu smiled again.

“Yes, exactly. But the Postal Customs officials in Canton get confused. Apparently they don’t have your name on their list of foreign residents. So why don’t you just pay the tax. We will examine the matter for you, and Canton will reimburse you in no time.”

Not wishing to let responsibility for the matter shift to Canton, I tried something else.

“Since this is an internal matter, Comrade Hu, why doesn’t your office pay the tax, and then have Canton reimburse you?”

After another pause, and a few more words with Group Leader Chen, Comrade Hu smiled and answered, “Our office, I am sorry to say, is not authorized to disburse funds. If you like, though, we can look into the possibility of having the Health Office of the medical college pay the tax for you. It might take some time for us to determine exactly which channels to go through, however.”

Knowing that I had been defeated, I said I would think about it and let them know later. They smiled, and Comrade Hu told me that anytime anything came up I should feel free to come see them. That way, even if we couldn’t solve a problem right away, we could come to understand it.

I felt I had had enough of the matter for the time being, and decided to pay the tax the next day. At dinner that night the wife of an American doctor doing research at our hospital mentioned to me that she had a package of mine. She brought
it out and indeed it was my medicine and chocolates—she had seen it on the counter at the post office in the afternoon, saw that it was for me, and innocently walked out with it. Our little American community cheered this small victory over the forces of evil, and I went to bed a happy man.

The next day we received no mail. The day after that, we again received no mail. The third day without mail I went to the post office.

I walked straight to the counter where the young woman worked and stood there until finally she hissed, “What do you want?” I answered as quietly as possible that we had not been getting any mail recently, was there a problem? Without looking up she pointed at a pile of mail in the far corner of the room, on her side of the counter—all international mail. I asked if I could pick it up, and once more she slapped the tax bill on the counter. I paid up without a word, and that afternoon we got a big pile of mail.