Brush Up on Your Chinese: Crafty Calligraphy
For the December issue of the Beijinger, we sent our editors out to try their hand at traditional Chinese crafts. An excerpt of their experiences was featured in the magazine. The following is the full version of their story.
I had always wanted to try calligraphy, but sensed trouble. I could keep my affliction secret for a while, but it would have to come out.
I was able to keep up the act as Paul, China Culture Center’s calligraphy teacher, led us through a “warmup.”
“Deep breaths … Feel the sensation of the whole body.” Breathing deeply, I felt deeply stressed. Traditional instruments piped away in the background. Their easy, airy sound teased me as I drew in another breath. But I was enjoying calligraphy’s meditative possibilities.
Confession time. I announced my crippling left-handedness. Doesn’t everyone know left-handers can’t write Chinese? Why else would my first Chinese teacher have tried to make me right-handed? Paul surprised me. “Never mind,” he said, reassuringly.
Two characters – chu (初 beginner) and xin (心 heart) – were written on the whiteboard. Dots indicated “solid” (heavier) as opposed to “empty” brush strokes. We would be practicing on these characters, which together mean “the beginner’s mind.”
My early efforts left labored, undistinguished scrapes of ink across the paper. Paul observed that my characters looked like “steady” style – better suited for carving in stone than on delicate sheets of parchment. I paid more attention to my grasp of the brush, holding it just below the halfway point, pinched between my thumb on one side and index and middle fingers on the other, with the fourth finger supporting. “Let your fingers relax,” urged Paul, encouraging us to be guided by the pressure of brush against paper, rather than leading with the hands.
I concentrated on applying Paul’s brush-on-paper theory. My touch was soon more deft and assured. Even if most of my characters had all the charm of a Tang dynasty poem put through Google Translate, they were slowly becoming legible.
The final challenge beckoned. I felt more confident in my chu than in my xin. The results proved me right. A tiny sense of pride poking through as the red chop was applied to my masterpiece. “The thing about the beginner’s mind,” Paul explained, “is that you are always on zero. But every zero is different.” I was a zero again, but a different, slightly better zero than 90 minutes earlier.
Next morning, I was paying a bill at the bank. “Sign here,” the clerk said dourly. As pen touched paper, I snapped out of auto-pilot, strangely aware. Was I relaxed? Was the pen on paper guiding me? I smirked and signed away, wondering how a real calligrapher experiences even the most mundane acts of writing.
Price and venue: RMB 160/single session, RMB 480/four-session course, China Culture Center
The rewards of persevering: A single phrase can take up to ten hours of practice. Full mastery, on the other hand, is not even guaranteed over the course of a lifetime.
Click here to see the December issue of the Beijinger in full.
Photos: Judy Zhou
