Pedro was better. Mrs. Lau’s tending had strengthened him. He was sitting up when next Mr. Lau came into the room.
“What was it like to study calligraphy with Dr. Chang?” Pedro asked.
“The brush strokes... “ Mr. Lau began. “He used all parts of the brush with mesmerizing speed. After he emerged from his trance, expressive characters would challenge you to write them as well as he did.” Mr. Lau’s voice faded, as memories flooded his mind. “Dr. Chang idolized Mi Fu, who was the foremost scholar of the Northern Song Dynasty.”
He paused, “That’s 960-1127 AD.” ‘Did Pedro know this?’ Mr. Lau wondered. Pedro stared at him. ‘He didn’t,’ Mr. Lau concluded, but that was ok.
“Dr. Chang didn’t move the brush from his wrist. He suspended his arm, so he could work from the elbow, like Mi Fu. You see, the arm gained more power and used less tension. If the poem was about a boat gliding like a flying chariot, wind coming through the window could move hIs arm. Calligraphy is subtle movement that requires elite physical coordination.”
Photograph: “Poem WriYen on a Boat on the Wu River,” by Mi Fu, c. 1095, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pedro held his elbow up and allowed his arm and wrist to move freely. “How can you write like this?” he asked.
“Practice,” Mr. Lau chuckled. Then he observed Pedro’s arm, “Yes, just like that. Dr. Chang balanced freedom, expression, and a sense of surprise with the restraint of form and line. If you improvise with speed and pressure, your drawing gestures become idiosyncratic. The Chinese characters come out distorted or collapsed. It can be called ‘running script’ or ‘cursive script,’ but I called Dr. Chang’s method ‘transfigured writing.’ He transformed us from scribes into artists.”
Mr. Lau suspended his arm and showed how a gust of wind from the window would move the brush. “Do you see?”
“Yes!” A mystery Pedro didn’t know existed had been revealed. “I have never thought about writing in this way,” Pedro suspended his arm again. “How long did creating a poem take?”
“Well, the brush would flutter like a butterfly at the start of a character, a long line would follow, drawn at top speed, then a flourish would end the character, where the brush would guide the hand. How long it took really depended on your emotions at the time.
“Of course Dr. Chang choreographed calligraphy with effortless brilliance. We toiled on one or two specific movements for hours, and tried to reach higher and higher levels of skill.” Mr. Lau paused. “Do you know that calligraphy led Dr. Chang into translation?”
“No. Really? How did he make that connection?”
Pedro said, confused. Mr. Lau explained, “He had an epiphany. If you were going to translate poetry that was both visual and literary into Latin languages, you had to bring the other culture into the Chinese world.”
“How?” asked Pedro.
“By making the reader suspend his biases. Most importantly, the impulse to name everything. Once gone, the reader could embrace the Chinese sensibility of namelessness. Dr. Chang’s translations struck at the psychological heart of Colonialism: identity. It was revolution on a scroll.”
“He must have earned a lot of money,” Pedro responded wryly.
“No. No money at all. Dr. Chang would never accept payment on principle. He always self-published, and studied all day in the library. His wife got a job as a librarian so she could put food on the table.”
“Yes, I remember that the librarian in the Chinese Ancient Book Chamber was Mrs. Chang,” Pedro said.
“Yes. It was a tragedy,” continued Mr. Lau. “Dr. Chang became obsessed with writing voluminous letters to important people, but no one noticed anything was wrong, because his translation of the Tao Te Ching into English was so successful.
His wife loved the beautiful young man who had given her lotus flowers and taught her about Taoism. She saved a flower in a copy of a Chinese edition of the Tao Te Ching he had given her 50 years before. She thought she was marrying a great man, but instead was wedded to the torture of his financial mistakes and the sacrifice of her talent.
“One day, when he came home and proudly announced that he donated half the family’s food money to a charitable cause, her ferocious, violent imagination exploded into an argument which has seeped into Macau’s folklore. I am glad I wasn’t there to witness it, but Jiao-liang was. Hiding in a corner, a 9-year-old boy saw his mother destroy the only person he had ever loved - and said nothing.
“The next day, Dr. Chang got a day job selling stationery, after which he would work the night shift at the post office. The irony of the great calligrapher selling blank reams of paper and sorting letters was not lost on anyone.”
“What happened to all his scholarly work?” Pedro asked, astonished.
“I don’t know what she did with it, but I saved some of it. It has significant value now, but I will never sell it. I keep his calligraphy in this drawer.” Mr. Lau got up and walked to a chest of very narrow drawers made to hold paper. He opened one and took out a piece to lay on the table so Pedro could see.
Some characters were made of only thin lines, while others had a thick bottom and a thin top. To the uneducated eye it would have looked like the script of someone who didn’t care, but Pedro was now a bit more educated.
“The hardest thing to do is to be simple,” he said. Then he remembered, “Jiao-liang had skeletons of people from the Macau Museum’s Linguist Society in the Chinese Ancient Books Chamber. Does that relate to what you just told me?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Lau. “Dr. Chang swayed the opinions of the Linguist Society board members in his favor. He made his reputation when the Society accepted his English translation of the Tao Te Ching.
“However, when fellow board members heard that Dr. Chang had to take menial jobs, the self-interest and cowardice that he had silenced in them transmogrified, and they howled their revenge. He was unceremoniously thrown out. It is said that security guards escorted him out of the building.”
“After this ultimate dishonor,” Mr. Lau continued, “he became more eccentric, isolated, and would walk about his rooms muttering in a whisper at the other board members - who were not there. Once he got so angry he broke a blood vessel in his eye.
His letters to his colleagues became frantic. “May I not ask for your moral support? I am all alone!” he would write. His wife didn’t know how to cure the broken man who paced her living room, and it was too late to do so.
“One morning, she held her husband’s hand as he died, and sent her son off to school despite his passing, There was no time for grief. She had to go to work. Her disappointment and disillusionment, his wasted intelligence, and her sacrifice for her son had created a biYer, abusive, terrifyingly close-minded woman who took everything out on him in private, while showing a polite face to the world.”
“Polite is not exactly the word I’d use for Mrs. Chang,” Pedro said.
Mr. Lau laughed. “Given what she’s capable of, that was polite.”
“Really? Well, when your glasses are twice as wide as your face, something has to be amiss.”
They both smiled. “So what happened next?” asked Pedro.
“Jiao-liang worshiped his father, but got involved with opium and the 14K Triad gangs. Even so, he wanted to create his own religion and be the spiritual leader of a temple, based on his research into dating Neolithic jades. To him, Hongshan humanoid figurines, like the one you saw in my window, represented space-alien spirits who created everything on Earth.
“His mother never forgave him. By chance, when she met her neighbor in the market, she had to endure, ‘How is your son?’ Her neighbor would respond, ‘My son is an orthodontist. His practice is doing fine.’ Mrs. Chang would answer, ‘My son is God’s spiteful trick.’ It poisoned her blood.
“Children’s choices can make monsters out of mothers, and there began the family conflict that tore him apart.
“His mother had set off a chain of events that drove his father to heart failure and cancer, and Jiao-liang became his father’s dark avenger. He killed at least 16 board members, if he didn’t get them all. I’m not sure.
“I passed him on a side street once on an early morning walk. He was dragging a body. He knew I wouldn’t say anything to authorities, so he told me, ‘The first murder makes you want to throw up. The second one gets easier. Then you get an itch,’ and continued on his way. That half smile of his was just like his father’s.” Mr. Lau reminisced.
“You’re kidding,” said Pedro.
“No,” said Mr. Lau without missing a beat. “I don’t know who had the more burning brilliance, father or son, but to see both of them degenerate into what they became was heartbreaking.
“And it’s all because...” Mr. Lau paused for a moment. “What do you do when you meet genius that can change the way the world thinks? It’s not a question many people have to answer, but when you have to answer it, you give your life up in one way or another.
“I have always felt that Dr. Chang’s life personified the battle between the human will and a society that punished non-conformists. You always want the hero of a story to win, but that is mostly fiction.”
“Did you give your life? How have you given your life?” asked Pedro.
“I saw a connection between the energy patterns of calligraphy and jade, and married the most mighty soul and beautiful woman I’d ever met. She bought us a house with a garden, and we withdrew from society. I became a simple jade dealer — obscure, low-profile, quiet, unnoticed, so I could live my life by my own principles instead of surrendering my intellect to bustling, coarse Colonial officials. That was my response to Dr. Chang.”
...And you experienced Jiao-liang’s life choices – so different from your own.”
“Does this help you understand what happened to you now?”
Mr. Lau asked. Pedro looked at Mr. Lau. His innocence and ignorance had vanished, and in its place he’d found sorrow. He responded, “With all my passion for the Chinese aesthetic, I am a window shopper who walked into a drama, not only about jade and the history of China, Colonialism and the history of Macau, but about how society could break the heart of a dreamer. Dr. Chang dared to trust others. The wreckage that leaves behind... that was his son. Oh my Goodness.” Pedro closed his eyes, still absorbing the story of how Jiao-liang never found his way back to humanity.
“I feel devastated,” Pedro whispered. “Come, I will cheer you up. I have a collection of jades you might want to buy. Let me show you,” said Mr. Lau. Pedro shook his head ‘Yes,’ and started breathing normally again.
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