Character Lessons and Conversion Experiences

To start off, I’d like to say that I thought of the title “Character Lessons” before I realized it was a great pun since I’m talking about calligraphy. What does this mean? My English has now been suppressed to the unconscious and is punning of its own free will.

I do at times feel like there is a part of me that is suppressed by the language change. I’ve started to hear my name being called while walking through crowds. This is strange because Chinese really has few sounds that come close to “Sarah”, and everyone here uses my Chinese name, Xinru. Xinru has been my predominant form of address since the beginning of the summer; I’ve formed entire friendships as Xinru. Xinru’s personality is about the same as Sarah’s, short perhaps the occasional bad joke or obscure movie reference, but though I feel I’ve changed little, perhaps Xinru has just taken been carrying on business as usual while Sarah is suppressed and evolving, ready to reclaim control when I start using English again.

Sorry for that surreal interlude, but it was an actual thought that occurred to me, especially as I had an interesting break to use English when a group of visitors (Midd parents and Alumns) led by Middlebury’s Bai Laoshi came through today to have lunch with us and marvel at our study habits. We had a pleasant hour or so, ordering lunch for them and chatting about life in China. The alumn sitting next to me grew up in Maplewood, and his wife in Ridgewood, thus confirming in my mind the theory one in every ten people is from New Jersey, usually Essex, Union, Morris and Bergen Counties. In any case it was strange to be casually chatting in English with complete strangers and my classmates, and made me think a bit about whether or not I actually have a Chinese persona. Also my turns of phrase are suffering; I have recently used the phrases “far and few between” and “point in case”.

I’ve been studying Calligraphy for a few weeks now, and I’ve gotten down all of the basic brush strokes (to give you an idea, there are four components to writing a horizontal line, and two for writing a dot). Calligraphy relies on precision, uniformity and focus, attributes I categorically lack (I remember trying to build a rectangular box out of clay about five years ago: there was not a single even edge or right angle in the entire thing). At the start, the teacher would write outlines for us to trace, showing us the progression and having us repeat a single brush stroke or character several times. This guy is pretty young, but he’s been studying for about two decades, and he’s so incredible he can take a pen and quickly outline, in perfect proportion, the strokes for an entire character for us to trace. He also showed us a poem he copied onto a scroll; the scroll is about four feet tall and a foot across, the characters each maybe an inch square: he wrote it for seven hours straight without food, water, or breaks to regain feeling in his hand (you have to hold your elbow really high). This week we’ve graduated from tracing his characters and then attempting our own to writing characters from a book that has guidelines to show the proportions of each character.

I am often tempted to revert to my painting days and quickly trace out the characters, but the problem is that the character requires balance; it must fit evenly inside a box, with symmetrical proportions and regular stroke length and width. Anyone who’s seen my handwriting knows that consistency and balance are not my strong points. I’m confident that forcing myself to really study calligraphy may help not only my handwriting and character writing ability, but also help me find more patience for detail and precision in other areas of my life. I also think this is a ridiculously Chinese notion of self-discipline and training, but at least my teacher liked it.

This afternoon, having finished one of my exams, I took off in my bike (which I love and have named Tingting, which means Dragonfly and is also the sound its bell makes) and went to the silk market, which is much quieter than the other markets I’ve been to, a beautiful pedestrian street full of silk shops selling bolted fabric, scarves, embroidered crafts, shirts, ties and mandarin dresses. I bought a few souvenirs, restricting my purchases of big silk scarves for myself to one, and perused the various wares, musing about buying a length of silk fabric which I’d inevitably not turn into anything. I did a bit of haggling, but the prices were already pretty reasonable so I didn’t fight too hard. When I bought my scarf, the woman said it was 20 yuan. This sounded good but I wanted to play along, so I asked her if she could do 15 yuan. She replied the lowest she could go was 18. Suddenly, it somehow seemed like she was saying 180, and I stood around frantically trying to remember what she had quoted, simultaneously remembering that an equal or somewhat lower quality product in Beijing three years before had cost me 100 yuan. I decided it must be the higher figure, and handed her 200 yuan. Luckily, I picked up almost instantly that she was confused about the sum, so I hastily said a few confused sentences, took the money back, examined it, muttered something about not having change, and handed her back one bill. Whoops, that was embarrassing. More culturally embarrassing than anything else, because I’d clearly demonstrated that an American would pay 10 times the going price for a silk scarf.