Taiwan / Week 5: Learning/Birthing and Chinese Characters

The Reckoning comes on Fridays as well as the unexpected gifts. I got a 69 out of 100 on last week’s quiz. Up from 32. It was a relief but I knew it wasn’t going to last. I’m too wobbly. I’m wobbling among too many undertakings: how to hear the tones, learn the words, remember how to write the beh, peh, meh, feh, write the characters, learn the characters, understand the grammar. Today’s quiz was all in Chinese characters, there were no more comforting beh peh meh fehs (phonetic spellings). My heart could have started pounding but I thought instead, no, let’s not react to the teacher’s speediness; let’s instead remember she wants us to move along and learn lots, and I’m slow and I’m not here in Taiwan to excel, just to learn.

So, fighting the impulse to leave the room and quit school, I looked at the quiz with the Chinese characters and they all looked Chinese. Meaningless squiggles. I couldn’t differentiate one from another. Breathe, look at another part. Look again and with time, I was able to recognize maybe half of the characters. Why such focus on a quiz? Why such disturbance? Why are quizzes needed? I suppose they spur on the learning. I don’t know. This was not the intention of learning at Summerhill or even at Bank Street College of Education whose graduate school I attended forty years ago. Learning was for the individual and for learning’s sake. Well, maybe it’s like giving recitals in music; finding out what it is that you know and what you don’t know; pushing yourself to another level. Thank goodness there are no quizzes in Kindergarten, First and Second Grades. Learning would be torture. As it is, we have fifty–minute classes at the Chinese Learning Center and I find myself watching the clock at 35 and 40 minutes. Part of it is Mrs. Ding’s inane textbook, part the drill, and part the lack of relevance to my life. And then, once a day, (and sometimes twice or three times — like today) there’s the joy of emerging out of the thicket of so many unknowns and suddenly something connects, and it begins to make sense… until the next thicket blocks the view.

After our official class ended at 12, Teacher Fong and I wrote on the whiteboard the characters for the titles of Journey to the West (Xī Yóu Jì, 西遊記). The first character is West (西) which is a small slanted square with two legs at the top extending into the square. It kind of resembles a bird sitting on its nest, (birds fly home to the west every evening). I find the character adorable. The left leg is straight, the right one curves. Even before I knew that it supposedly resembles a bird, I found it adorable. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Chinese Learning Center offered optional calligraphy classes. Again, the setting was without spirit or soul — it began with a five minute film on why Chinese people paint their houses red on the New Year’s (to protect them from monsters who are afraid of the color red???!), but once I had a brush in my hand and began to try the strokes, a kind of reverie set in, a timelessness. These squiggles are each simple ordinary lines. But they curve and relate to one another. They feel like a family talking and moving and expressing themselves each in their own way. And now today I was actually drawing the very characters of the title of the story that has brought me to Taiwan. And as I drew them, Teacher said, “Good, good. You have a skill for this.” I don’t know if I have a skill; I know that I have, and have always had, a love, a taste, an inclination, an affinity for the Chinese characters. I want to be close to them. I want to know them.

This morning I woke at five with the most vivid dream. I was in a room with my brother Martin. For the past 20 years we’ve barely spoken. When I would visit my mother, he would leave the apartment. Last March my mother was hospitalized for a month. Visiting her each day at the hospital, the two of us sat in the same room and so we began to talk. It gave me great hope that we were connecting again because despite the fight we had over money I’d never stopped caring about him. In the dream, a voice said, “So Martin is really very ordinary, probably the most ordinary of all the family.” Then Martin sat up and said to me, “There you are.” I saw him. He was glowing, golden, in his twenties. I could see all his sweetness and goodness. I saw his wonderful essence. I grabbed him by the front of his white shirt and said, “I love you so much. I love you so much.” At that moment in the dream I’d entered a place with no constructs. Just love. I knew I was in a dream and I thought, Go ahead, here’s your chance, you can learn something more, ask, but I didn’t. The seeing; the experiencing, was the knowing.

Sometimes being here in Taiwan feels like a dream because I can’t speak very much. And because I can’t speak I connect in a deeper way to people and to myself. I find so many of the people here kind, tender, caring. They not only walk you to the bus stop, they give you the token you need to take the bus or the subway. They want you to be well. After I asked for herbal tea for three days at the restaurant, the manager of the restaurant, brought me a canister of lavender tea and a tea pot with a filter. Last week when the manager was about to leave her job, I brought her back the tea pot and she said, “No, no, that’s a gift for you.” I was speechless. She has so much less than I have. But it’s not the more or the less of it; it’s the freedom of choosing to connect. It’s seeing the connection. Under his anger and resentment, my younger brother Martin still has the open loving tender heart that he had as a child. And I do too. I am my brother. Pushed under by all we need to learn and surmount, we become the thicket and lose the connection to our own hearts. Here in Taiwan, in a foreign place, a new aspect of myself emerges–the one that is so often hidden and defensive in the States — the innocent, open, loving heart, eager for connection.

Several years ago I read Fabienne Verdier’s extraordinary book, The Dragon’s Brush, about her journey to southern China in her twenties to learn calligraphy. She suffered greatly during the experience from the harsh physical conditions as well as the grueling schedule but after three years she learned to do exquisite calligraphy and her eighty year old teacher, who would soak his feet in hot water each morning because of the cold, took her as his companion on journeys to the mountains to understand the art more deeply. So, I shall plod ahead, and trust, at least for the time, that the process will lead to where I’m meant to go.

At four today, I was to meet Effie at Dante’s Restaurant. I was late and she was even later but I could actually say in Chinese: Woh yeh chida le. (I was also late.) I couldn’t have said that two weeks ago. We spoke about politics and she said that her learning until now was based on what she had read in Chinese textbooks, but now that she has been living in Taiwan for four months she has a different understanding about Taiwan, Tibet and other places. She loves the friendliness of the Taiwanese. She wants to return. She is writing her final paper on the history of Taiwan. She is an exchange student from Nanjing University. From politics, we turned to the task: and I read the chapter for next Monday from Mrs. Ding’s Family Textbook: Do you have a car? I read the Chinese excrutiatingly slowly. Effie responded by kindly saying at the end of each sentence, “Good.” What a relief when one is trying so hard (and not really succeeding) to have another person respond by saying the cheering word, “Good.” Effie is so genuinely happy for me (it may also be that I’ve reached the end of the sentence). And then came the gifts.

A new person appears in Mrs. Ding’s Family Textbook. Her name is Lin Xin–ru. As always, I asked Effie if the name has a meaning and she said, “Yes, xīn (心) is heart.” Ahh, I looked at the character more closely. The character for heart is a pulsing open heart. So beautiful. Lin Xin–ru and her classmates are in the classroom. I asked Effie to explain the different words for school, classroom and student. The three confuse me. When Effie explained the word student, that clarified the word and the whole process. Student in Chinese means Learning/Birthing/Borning. Xuésheng (学生). Learning is pushing out of the thicket into the world of possibilities.

Walking slowly home from Dante’s, enjoying the strong virile sprouts that are budding on the palm trees. They will probably be leafing in February.