书法: A written art

UIBE, 28ºC, hazy

Every Friday afternoon, a number of activities are on offer. Some learn Kung Fu, some tie Chinese knots, some learn calligraphy. As someone who greatly values good handwriting (I think it tells you a lot about a person), I naturally took up the latter of these activities. When you see Chinese calligraphy lining the wall of a restaurant, or being sold at a stall in the street, it looks impressive and effortless. When you sit down at a table with ink, writing brush and paper, you start to wonder how they do it.

Our teacher first showed us how to write a single horizontal stroke. You start just inside the left hand end of the stroke, brush slightly to the left, and then glide back to the right. You must maintain a steady pressure as your brush stroke moves to the right, and to finish the stroke you must round off the stroke to the inside, cutting ever so slightly back to the left. Painstaking.

Some thirty horizontal strokes later, we tried some vertical strokes, following the same principle. And then we were afforded the chance to write our first character: 中. By this point, my hand was already aching from my attempts to keep my brush stroke both steady and constant; my head was fuzzy from the intense concentration the activity demanded. As I struggled to craft those effortless brush strokes, the teacher came by. She muttered some advice, and with a graceful flick of the wrist showed me what I should do better: keep the brush vertical, don’t press too hard during the stroke, close of the stroke more tidily. I tried. But, as you can see below, my efforts did not emulate those of a 师傅 master, more those of a complete novice, searching for that je ne sais quoi.