Iron and Silk Read Free Page A

their Mao caps rolling across the stage. A roar of laughter and applause rose up from the audience, and the entertainment had come to an end.

A Piano
 
 Teacher Wei
 
 Hong Kong Foot
 
 Myopia

 

 
    I ’d been interested in China since I was thirteen. I had seen the television movie
Kung Fu
and decided right away that peace of mind and a shaved head were what I had always wanted. My parents supported my interest, buying all sorts of books about kung fu and Chinese art for me; they even enrolled me in a kung fu school, although they did not let me shave my head. I practiced several hours a day, tried to overcome pain by walking to school barefoot in the snow, and let my kung fu teacher pound me senseless in cemeteries at night so that I might learn to “die well.” I enjoyed all of this so much that my interest continued through high school, and spread to wanting to learn Chinese painting and calligraphy and then the language itself.
    I went to Yale and majored in Chinese literature. By the time I finished college, I was fluent in Mandarin and nearly so in Cantonese, had struggled through a fair amount of classical Chinese and had translated the works of a modern poet. Oddly, though, I had no desire to go to China; it sounded like a giant penal colony to me, and besides, I have never liked traveling much. I did need a job, though, so I applied to and was accepted by the Yale-China Association to teach English at Hunan Medical College in Changsha from August 1982 to July 1984.
    The college assigned three classes to me: twenty-six doctors and teachers of medicine, four men and one woman identified as “the Middle-Aged English Teachers,” and twenty-five medical students ranging in age from twenty-two to twenty-eight. First I met the doctors, who stood up to applaud my entrance into the classroom and remained standing while the Class Monitor read a prepared statement that welcomed and praised me.
    Their English ability ranged from nearly fluent to practically hopeless. At the end of the first week of classes the Class Monitor read aloud the results of their “Suggestions for Better Study” meeting: “Dear Teacher Mark. You are an active boy! Your lessons are very humorous and very wonderful. To improve our class, may we suggest that in the future we (1) spend more time reading, (2) spend more time listening, (3) spend more time writing and (4) spend more time speaking. Also, some students feel you are moving too quickly through the book. However, some students request that you speed up a little, because the material is too elementary. We hope we can struggle together to overcome these contradictions! Thank you, our dear teacher.”
    I was next introduced to the medical students, whom I taught only once a week, on Tuesday nights. They were nearly faint with excitement over meeting a foreign teacher; when I first walked into the room they didn’t move or breathe, and no one dared look directly at me. The Monitor yelled, “Stand up!” and they rose with such formality that I did not know how to respond. At last I saluted them gravely and yelled in Chinese, “Sit down!” They looked stunned, then exploded into cheers, giving me the thumbs-up sign and speaking to me all at once in Chinese. It seemed that the tension had been released, so when they calmed down I asked them to introducethemselves in English. At first they giggled and whispered to one another, then slowly they lowered their heads, turned pale and went mute.
    That night when I got back to the house I found a note on my door from Teacher Wu, a senior member of the English Department, asking me to see her in her office the next morning. I went to bed feeling uneasy, wondering if I had done or said something wrong during the past week and was about to be purged or criticized.
    The offices and classrooms of the Foreign Languages Department were on the second floor of a three-story building. The first floor housed cadavers for the Anatomy Department and