The Natural Laws of Good Luck (17 page)

Sweet Sweet asked me to help her find a job. We filled out a dozen applications, but only Dunkin' Donuts offered an interview. Zhong-hua and I went with her and slipped discreetly into a booth while she met with the manager. She was on her own. We strained to hear the conversation. The manager was saying that her poor English was a big concern. Perhaps she should come back next year. Then he said, “If you could only have one word to describe yourself, what would that be?”

“Nice, and loving,” she said decisively. She got the job.

Master Lu

M
Y HUSBAND WAS GIFTED
with natural grace, usually unnoticeable because it belonged to the sparkling he kept concealed. More often he appeared absent, even depressed—visible, but not to be looked into. I first noticed his superb memory for complex footwork while stepping on his feet at the outdoor dances in China. Every evening loudspeakers in public squares blared out music, both Chinese and Western. Punctually at seven o'clock, fountains of water spurted high into the air. Hundreds of people did the cha-cha, fox trot, waltz, and other ballroom dances, despite temperatures above ninety degrees. Husbands danced with wives, ladies danced with ladies, and long lines of ladies danced a Chinese version of the country line dance. The first time Zhong-hua saw my freestyle dancing, arms flinging over my head and feet skipping in every direction, he set his jaw and determined to steer me around despite the impossibility. He was the most skilled dancer in the park and drew wistful glances from ladies of all ages. He pretended not to notice the eyes of curious people all around us but before long herded me off the dance floor to a bench.

Da Jie was visiting our house, sideways as usual in her favorite chair while the little dog greased the kitchen floor and Zhong-hua's wok sizzled with hot oil and crushed pepper hulls.

“Gemer, lai! Zuo gei wo kan ni de Tai Chi quan ba
!” (Pal, come here! Show me your Tai Chi form!)

“Ni mei kan wo xianzai zhengzai zuofan
?” (Can't you see I'm cooking?)

“Ni kuai yidiar ba. Lai
!” (Hurry up and come here!)

Zhong-hua sighed and wiped his forehead with the dishrag. He shoved the chair laden with Da Jie to the wall and tucked the piano bench under the old upright to clear a six-foot-square space. He centered himself, inhaled as he drew up the energy of the earth with his hands, and exhaled, pulling down the energy of heaven as his body sank into bent-knee “Horse Stance.” No pans clattered. Da Jie shut up. Even the small dog sat on her haunches and watched with bulbous round eyes. Each time Zhong-hua shifted weight, the floorboards creaked. My mind wandered to the crawl space underneath the house, where I had recently ventured to check the condition of the joists with a screwdriver. It plunged in two inches to the heartwood of the two-hundred-year-old timbers. Zhong-hua was moving in a slow-motion dance, perfectly paced and perfectly balanced, his knees deeply bent and his weight first on one leg, then shifting through the center to the other. The voices of chanting monks rose from the small boom box. Da Jie was watching intently.

I watched, too, but the creaking floor kept pulling my thoughts under the boards, where spiderwebs had tickled my face as I examined the calligraphy of the adze marks on the hand-hewn beams. Those rugged sheep farmers must not have expected boulders when they started swinging pickaxes to dig a foundation hole. In the end, they capitulated to the gray-green bones that turned out to be only the shoulders, hips, and knees of sleeping giants. Entranced, I dreamed myself one of the ancestor builders:
The weight of the tool swung in my hands and bit off a good, satisfying chip. I heard the other men shouting and laughing, passing a bucket of water and ladle in the bright fall air. The water dripped off our chins, salt splash drying on the tangy oak
.

Da Jie's left eye twitched. A seagull spread its wings in the center of the house built by sweaty, gruff men, all dead now. A flower
opened and closed. A middle-aged man became an old man and then a young woman. My husband, whose legs were as heavy as concrete pillars, now flowed like air between cattails or water over small pebbles. Da Jie clapped her hands. “You better than my husband! Brother better than husband. Yes! I think so!” She laughed with glee. Da Jie's high-pitched laughter came in explosive bursts, settling a wealth of silvery particles over the room. I could relax and enjoy these fireworks now that the Gas Station Idea had been placed on hold.

“I cannot believe! Ellen-ah, you listen me. Zhong-hua do Tai Chi very perfect. I think now he can teach Tai Chi make money. You talk English. My brother do Tai Chi form. Teach all old people. This easy way. Old people cannot do. Oh my God, old lady all cannot remember. One week learn—next week he mind empty, Tai Chi form all forget. I tell you, Ellen-ah, need teach same thing long time. Long time you can make money.”

Da Jie showed up to observe her brother teaching his first Tai Chi for seniors class at the Community Center. She sat on the side bench with her thermos of green tea, firing criticism in Chinese as if the students could not decipher a scolding tone: “No, no, no. You wrong. You teach wrong. Don't need break down one-two-three. Just one and two is OK. You teach terrible. . . . Brother, you no good.” Zhong-hua was mortified but said nothing to her. This was his big sister. Later, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

“How to talk to Da Jie? I don't know how to say. She need stop talking, stop telling me how to do. I am grown man. But how to talk? I need think how to talk very nice way.” I don't believe he ever had this conversation with Da Jie. He just grunted in noncommittal acknowledgment of her dictates and continued to teach in his own way when she wasn't around.

Da Jie tried to bolster her authority over her brother by convincing me of her superior knowledge, not realizing that I had no influence over whether he listened to her or not. “Ellen-ah, I tell you: I know how to teach best way. At Qufu University, I was not
just Ping-Pong professor. I was top Tai Chi teacher. I teach Tai Chi, Qigong, Kung Fu, and also Chinese energy stuff. Energy come from where into body, how go through body, how make more energy—all special things. In America I cannot teach thee-o-ree, right? Because my English no good.” She shook her head, chuckling, and then the contagious silver laugh erupted. “My God, my English terrible!” Da Jie eventually stopped supervising Zhong-hua's class, which freed up another night for her to play mah-jongg.

We asked Da Jie to substitute-teach our largest Tai Chi class at the YMCA while we were out of town at a Tai Chi convention. When we returned the following week, only one lady out of twenty had not fled. She told us that Da Jie had commanded them to hold their hands behind their backs and watch her feet. They practiced the first step over and over for one hour. She told them next time they could learn the second step. Zhong-hua had told me that in China young students just starting out with Tai Chi masters had to do nothing but stand in Horse Stance for the first two years until they could hold this wide bent-knee standing pose for several hours without pain. When not standing in Horse Stance, they could carry water, fetch wood, and cook rice for the master. American students expected to make swift progress from the beginning to the end of a form; otherwise, they thought they were no good and became dejected, or decided the teacher was no good and became disgruntled.

Zhong-hua had been an exceptionally strong and athletic youngster. His elementary school teacher wanted him to stay after school so that he could coach him for the Shandong Province tumbling competitions. He did go one time, but after that he always made the excuse that he had to study. The real reason he could not continue was hunger. There was nothing at home to eat for breakfast. After a morning of classes, he curled up in a ball in the sandy schoolyard and slept with his head on his books. There was no point in going home for lunch. After five more hours of class, Zhong-hua was too weak to spend three hours doing flips and cartwheels. Dinner was
a thin broth made from boiled sweet-potato vines his mother was able to get for a penny a bundle. He said black beans floated in that water “like a few stars in the sky.”

On the street, bullies abounded. Once a fellow five years older and a foot taller than Zhong-hua kicked him in passing as he played in a sand pile. Zhong-hua sprang up to tackle the boy, but the big fellow sat on his chest and, with two forefingers, spread his mouth wide open. One cheek ripped in a straight tear from the corner of his mouth to his ear. The big boy then swung a metal pipe at Zhong-hua's head. The wound stayed open for many weeks. This boy was the son and grandson of beggars who had been made factory supervisors according to Mao's new social reorganization.

Mao categorized businessmen, along with landlords and intellectuals, as the worst enemies of the revolution. A poor peddler could be classified as a businessman, and the owner of a half-acre vegetable garden could be classified as a landlord. During this time, the only “good” families were those who had nothing of their own and no education. Zhong-hua came from a family disgraced by having very little of both. Zhong-hua's grandfather had been a peddler with his own business carried out from a large pack on his back as he walked from village to village selling needles, thread, elastic bands, and fabric dye. Zhong-hua's father, the eldest of this peddler's eight sons, was sent by a benefacting uncle to a
shushi
school, where he studied traditional cultural arts for one year. This single year of education proved a liability under Mao's rigid categorization because it led to the accounting job that classified him an “intellectual” with potentially dangerous opinions. The bully received no reprimand because all insult and harm inflicted on the “bad” people and their relatives were condoned by the authorities. Thousands more innocent people were accused and punished as officials carried out Mao's orders to fill regional quotas of “Rightist Deviationists.” Since the time of One Hundred Flowers Blooming, Zhong-hua's father lived as a cast-aside man whose formidable skills were no longer made use of by society. He was given the job
of street cleaner and ditch digger and wore a wooden plaque about his neck that said “Enemy of the People.”

Zhong-hua remembers only that his father cuffed him on the head whenever he came near him and that whenever there was a piece of meat in the house, his father ate it.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao sent many urban youths to the countryside to be reeducated. They lived in the villages and toiled together with the village people. Capable young minds like Zhong-hua's were made use of. In 1974, Lu Zhong-hua, just sixteen years old, was appointed the only teacher of a village middle school. His parents had no money to pay his bus fare, so he walked forty miles to this appointed village. On the way, his feet burned and his stomach growled. He rested against a tree, where an old toothless farmer with a cartload of watermelons took pity on him. He cracked open the largest fruit and set the two halves to sparkle before the hungry boy. Ever since that day, watermelons held a numinous power for Zhong-hua.

The students sat on the ground outdoors, where Zhong-hua hung a small chalkboard from a tree. Many of the boys outsized him by two heads and were five or six years older. Their families needed their help in the fields, and they fell more and more behind, never completing the year's studies in order to graduate to the next grade. They mockingly called Zhong-hua “Small Teacher” and set out to thwart his efforts by guffawing loudly in class, belching, falling asleep, or shooting flying objects at his head. Small Teacher cleared his throat and trembled behind the lesson book he held in front of his still-beardless chin. He knew he didn't have much time to solve this problem before mayhem would rule. Thrusting the book to the ground, he folded his arms across his chest and challenged the worst offender to knock him down. Iron roots grew downward through Zhong-hua's short, powerful legs, anchoring him to the center of the earth. The big farm boy could not budge him. Each ruffian charged him in turn, red-faced and panting, only to be lifted off his feet with the force of his own bluster, inverted,
and dumped unceremoniously to the ground. After that, few boys risked an uneven match with Small Teacher.

Tai Chi derives from the fighting forms of Kung Fu. In the West, many people think of Tai Chi as a very soft and peaceful pastime. It is relaxed but not soft. The body is supple and ready at any second to mobilize internal power that emanates from the center of the body out through the trunk and limbs. The knees are bent in Horse Stance so that one moves on a low plane and cannot be knocked off balance. My husband maintained a Horse Stance so low that his head was a foot lower than his students'. They often complained that their legs burned after a few seconds. Zhong-hua reassured them: “Legs burning is no problem.”

After Da Jie frightened our students away from the YMCA, a nursing home hired us to give an introductory Tai Chi and Qigong class. The residents seemed heavily drugged, judging from their half-closed eyes and dreamlike movements. Most had to be wheeled into the room, while those on foot stood facing a wall or staring down at their stomachs. Zhong-hua took in the scene in a split-second glance and clapped his hands. “Follow me!” he commanded in military posture. “You follow me. In one week you can get out of your wheelchair and run everywhere outside. OK? Let's go!” I couldn't believe he was saying that. I realized he had never seen such a scene as this and was thrown off by it. In China, the elderly rise at five o'clock and migrate to the parks and underpasses to practice Tai Chi.

Zhong-hua forged on in an effort to counteract the powerful drugs. The folks squinted at him in the fluorescent light. When he moved his left arm, they moved their right arms. When he bent, they stiffened. When he exhaled, they inhaled. Some nodded off, drooling, and then snored loudly. Zhong-hua panicked and began to stride briskly from one inmate to the next, taking their hands in his and pulling each finger with a loud
pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop
. “This very good for you,” he said. The snapping sound came from the expulsion of air between Zhong-hua's thumb and forefinger,
but they thought it was their own knuckles breaking, and he left looks of horror in his wake as they examined their bones for breakage. Some cried out, “No, no, don't touch me, you devil!” Others laughed, “Do it again! Do it again!” The remainder of class was tense, as those who hadn't mutinied feigned follow-the-leader: they clapped their hands with no clap, slapped their knees with no slap, and exhaled with no air. Once outside the door, Zhong-hua leaned to my ear. “I don't think we are can go back there. I did something wrong.”