How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Write the Blog

I’m back! It’s been a very, very long time. Rather than offering a weak excuse (I’m taking a Chinese calligraphy class! We’re doing a musical! Our snacks were stolen by monkeys! All true.), I’ll just get to it. I’m hoping to cover current things and go back to old stories. Things will have a less frantic tone (as does, thankfully, my life) but I hope that reading it will still be enjoyable. Rest easy: I have certainly not stopped making a fool of myself.

To commemorate this new beginning, I will teach you how to draw a heng stroke (read: a horizontal line) in shufa, Chinese Calligraphy:

1. Imagine you are holding a thin, footlong brush with a pointed tip.
2. Starting at the left side of your paper, make a tiny upward diagonal line (no one will ever see it but the gods will know/smite you if you skip this step). This step is called Ni.
3. Cover the line entirely with a dab of your brush. (Dun)
4. Leaving the point in the same place, turn your brush counterclockwise about 60 degrees. (Zhuan)
5. Pull your brush across the paper. Push hard at the beginning, lighter in the middle, harder at the end. This is where you’re actually writing the line part. The line should slant diagonally upward. (Xing)
6. When you’ve almost reached the right side, turn your brush up slightly. (Ang)
7. Turn your brush down sharply and lift it gently. (An)
8. Flick the tip of the brush back up. (Hui)

WHAT.

If you have done all steps correctly, your heng will be breathtakingly beautiful. In the great paradox of shufa, the top will be perfectly straight, but the bottom will curve gracefully. It will look something like this:

A heng stroke written by my teacher during my first class 

If you have done any of the steps incorrectly, your heng will be bad in one of many, many, many ways. It could look like this:

A bad heng

Or this:

A bad heng 

Or this:

It seems like you're not really trying

Here are some other shufa rules:

1. Keep your brush perfectly perpendicular to the paper at all times.
2. No sitting
3. Elbow up
4. Something about breathing I don’t fully understand because it, like the rest of this, was explained to me in Chinese.

Speaking of Chinese, I am getting quite a vocabulary lesson. Here are some words I have learned: “Horizontal line,” “vertical line,” “diagonal line,” “a different diagonal line,” “brush tip,” “lift,” “gentle,” and a special word for “bad” (cha) used to describe subpar work. Eek.

My teacher, 周老师 (Zhou Laoshi), is a Changsha native. He’s a small middle-aged man with a military hat, a strong Changsha accent, and, as of late, a small ponytail. He is very good at shufa. Starting, about a year and a half ago, one of my sitemates and I started going to his Monday evening classes from 7 to 9. Last year, when I was still learning all of the basic strokes, I brought in weekly homework for Zhou Laoshi to review. You can tell he likes your homework when he draws little circles next to a character. You can tell he doesn’t like your homework when he says it’s cha. Or when he writes the characters again over your characters. Or when he crumples up your paper and puts it under your ink bowl to catch the drips.

At first, this all, plus my pretty utter lack of understanding, stressed me out a lot. Plus, I was very bad at shufa, because an important part of learning shufa (and probably most things worth learning) seems to be being very bad at it for a long time. But I really, really love the way the characters look when they’re written well. A good character is not symmetrical (that’s another one of the rules) but it has a definite balance to it. At the same time, it’s a little dangerous, with cliffs and steep drops and sharp angles. So I spent a lot of time last winter in the living room, tray table stacked on top of the coffee table to make a surface of the right height. I cranked out stroke after graceless stroke, on paper so thin it crinkled under the wet ink, until I had more or less gotten the hang of it. Now I have good days and bad days—in a recent class, my characters all looked like sad little men about to topple over—but Zhou Laoshi seems relatively satisfied.

When we first arrived, our foreignness made quite a stir. We weren’t the first foreigners our teacher had met, he told us, but we quickly became the ones he knew best. People were surprised that we were interested in learning something so archaic, wondering, I guess, what use we’d possibly have for Chinese Calligraphy. We were even interviewed by a local newspaper—“foreign girls take interest in Chinese culture!” 

Class is made up of about 15 students, some regulars and a rotating group of drop-ins. One woman is called the banzhang, the head student. She has a round face that reminds me vaguely of Princess Leia’s and produces a constant stream of jokes that I don’t understand but leave the rest of the class howling. There’s the older woman who must have started only a few months before me, who writes quietly and beautifully at the corner table, and the younger woman who one time pressed a Tupperware of homecooked fish into our hands at the end of class. The dad who’s always at the small side table, who sometimes drives us home and can somehow pronounce my English name perfectly. The quiet older man who writes huge sheets of small characters almost as beautiful as Zhou Laoshi’s (the studio’s trash can is full of discarded practice sheets I’d be thrilled to give or receive as wedding presents). Halfway through class, we all stop writing and crowd (or in winter, huddle) around a small table and drink tea out of cups with our names painted on them and chat. Sometimes people bring snacks, and then everyone spends a lot of time getting everyone to eat the snacks.

 This is the teacup with my name, 裴莉

And over the many months, I think I’ve become one of the crowd.  When new people arrive and exclaim over me, assuming I won’t know that they’re talking about me, my classmates answer their questions for me. “She’s from America.” “She’s half-Asian.” “She teaches at Yali Middle School.” “She’s been in China for almost two years.” “Just ask her—she understands what you’re saying, even if you speak in Changsha dialect.”

That last one is blatantly untrue. I understand about 20-40% of what anyone is saying in Changsha dialect and maybe about 75% of what people say to me in Mandarin. But it’s nice, really nice, to have them on my side: rattling off my personal details, defending my Chinese. Because they saw me the November after I moved to Changsha, a silent, basically-incompetent-at-everything version of myself, trailing along behind my bubbly sitemate, who had to turn every 40 seconds to translate everything for me. And now most Mondays I show up to class on my own, having braved a 40 minute busride through Changsha’s rush hour traffic, pulling out my brush and paper, making conversation, writing characters that are not glaringly embarrassing. I think I can sort of handle myself! I like to think maybe they’re a little proud.

Zhou Laoshi is in red and white stripes. Front center and to the left are my former sitemates, Steph and Marie.