1.
Where do we begin? I asked the instructor, dipping my pen into the inkstand and dripping blue-black ink across the thick paper. The paper absorbed the ink and spread it into flowers. Not here. I thought, not here. The room began to spin and then I started to write characters, I had never seen before. One looked like a horse, one a doorway. The instructor stopped at my desk and frowned. She wrapped her small, thick hand, almost like a child’s, around my pen. You’re in the wrong class, she said, sweeping away my pen and ink into a bin. There’s a class for drawing next door in the green room. She then held up my paper and examined it carefully, up and down. No, wait, she said, this is calligraphy, but it’s pictographs, I haven’t seen this ancient style since I was a student. It’s beautiful. Where did you learn this? How, she said, searching my eyes, and then my trembling hands, for answers.
2.
The American students came to my class to learn traditional calligraphy, and they were uniformly awful at it. Even those who had been coming year after year still failed to follow the stroke order, slapped thick dollops of ink on the paper, and rolled up their work too eagerly before it had fully dried. None of them breathed properly, despite my careful modeling. One day a new student appeared in the middle of the semester, which normally would not be permitted. She looked like she had been crying, with her black mascara dripping onto her cheeks and eyes all red. I let her sit down and take up a pen. And then she surprised me by quickly placing two ancient characters on the paper, in the right order. I can’t imagine where she learned to write these characters, or that she could have possibly known what putting these two characters next to each other would mean to me. The word that they made together was a word that changed my life a long time ago.
3.
I was a scribe, like my father and his father before and so many generations back, that the occupation, the person, and the implement, this pen, were synonymous. Scribe. The craft, craftsman, and tool, this reed moved together as one.
Every morning, I used the only other tool I was permitted, a pair of chopsticks, to quickly scoop out a rice bowl and walk to the studio. I worked in a small room outside of the capital city with fourteen other young men, all from families of scribes. Some scribes rode in small carriages pulled by a single horse and had servants that brought them hot lunches in ceramic jars. Others, like me, walked, and carried cooked rice in pouches for a midday meal.
I filled my inkwell from the common pot at the rear of the room near the hearth, and attempted to peer over the other workers’ shoulders as I walked to my desk. We were not supposed to interrupt the other craftsmen or judge their work, I always thought I was the best, the one who used the least ink and the fewest sheets of paper, as I made almost no errors. But then I saw one scribe, whose work was so beautiful, that I stopped to look, as this scribe swept a delicate hand over the paper, barely touching it. A horse whinnied in the street, the door flew open, and the chief scribe stood in the doorway. He narrowed his eyes and pointed me towards my desk. But before I could take my place, the scribe with the delicate hands glanced up at me and from then on, we knew each other’s secrets.
