Why I Didn't Become an Artist

 Cultural Classes: Calligraphy, Seals, and Knots

Hi all,

During the fourth week of my six-week class, we got to learn some basic calligraphy. Our professor was an older Chinese gentleman who had amazing calligraphy demonstrations in all different styles of characters; he said he’s been painting for over thirty years.  We each chose a word to practice and set to work diligently rehearsing every line and stroke on the rubber practice grids using water instead of ink. In Chinese calligraphy, each stroke has a specific order and the firmness of the brush creates different widths and patterns, so even though it may look like just another character to us, a calligrapher can tell if you’ve pressed too hard or wrote it out of order.

In direct contrast to my usual frame of mind, especially when struggling in a handicraft-class, I chose the words:       Serenity (left) and Contentment (right).          On the left side of the papers I had to write (from top to bottom) the date and my name. The boys took to it right away, but I’ve never had very good hand-writing even in English so I had a few more practice rounds before I used valuable paper and ink. According to my mom, I was inconsolable after receiving a ‘B’ for poor handwriting on a paper in seventh grade because I had spent hours trying to write well; she even had to go to the school and discuss it with my teacher. (I don’t remember this alleged illegibility incident, however.)  It’s been a long time since my Colorado College calligraphy class, but it was actually fairly enjoyable once I got into it.

The next week we completed the calligraphy theme when the same teacher taught us how to carve our own chops (signature seals). If you look at a Chinese painting, it will almost always have a signature followed by a little red square with squiggly characters in it. These squiggly characters are the signature of the painter, but cooler, because they’re carved into stone and used as a stamp.

You begin by taking a pencil and tracing the side of the stone which you’re going to carve onto a piece of paper. Then you draw out your design within that space. Before you copy it onto the stone, you have to prepare the stone:

Choose which side you want to carve. 

Smooth it out using sand paper, working from the lowest numbered paper up to the highest. Make sure it’s totally level and smooth before continuing.

Paint the side you’re carving red; this will increase the visibility of future cuts and it helps remind you which side you’re actually going to carve. 

Once the stone is ready, you can pencil on your design, then copy over it using a black marker so you can see what you’re doing. Then you take the blade and start cutting! Begin with the long, straight sections and try to put consistent pressure throughout. I had trouble with this part; I was just sort of scratching the surface of the design but you can’t just run the blade across it, you have to sort of chip sections of the rock out as you go along. Then if you have any dots or smaller sections, you make little circular motions with the point of the blade to carve those out. I did alright with the circles, but my teacher had to show me how to chip deeper several times.

We were each given a little kit which had two stones, some ink, and a blade in it. I started with the small one and decided since I already have my fake Chinese name on one back home, I’d try to carve out my initials and have an English seal instead. My teacher had to help me out with some of the swivel parts, but the majority of it I actually carved. (It was surprisingly cathartic to chip away at the stone; all you need is pressure and time, that and a big damn poster. Oh, wait, I’ve slipped into The Shawshank Redemption...).

Then, for no apparent reason, my teacher gave me a stone with a rabbit on top and the word ‘rabbit’ cut into the side of it (he didn’t give the two guys in the class bunny chops but it was really nice of him and I thought it was cute, so I didn’t complain!).  It represents the horoscope year of the rabbit, so it seemed fitting to carve the word ‘longevity’ into it (also, the word in the traditional form is perfectly symmetrical which I really enjoyed).  I haven’t carved my third stone just yet.

                                 




For our final culture class, we learned how to make Chinese knots with a new teacher from a different school. She started the class by saying that most of the time, men tended to be better at this than women. I don’t know why she mentioned this, but I do know that in our class it was definitely correct. According to my mom, I dropped out of Girl Scouts because I didn’t want to build a bird house, so arts and crafts have never really been my forte (again, I don’t actually remember this; I do remember going to a neon-sign maker's studio and enjoying his explanation of the chemical process which made them glow, but I must have blocked the bird house out of my memory. Basically, my mom could just make up anything and I would believe it because my childhood is apparently a bit of a blur…).

Actual knot-makers tie them all by hand, twisting
the strings on their fingers and magically not getting confused about which string goes where; we needed training wheels, however, so we were taught on little pieces of foam to which we affixed our strings using pins. You’re basically trying to weave a tiny red mat so you start with one level of ropes, then thread the string over and under the first pattern, flip it over and do it again with the second string (real knot-makers only use their fingers, we used tweezers).                


 Finally, tighten the mat by pulling strategically on the side strings, loop the end of the strings into the little plaque provided by the kit, you do another type of knot to tie it, the tassels, and the beads on. And that’s it!

 
                                                        

I didn’t take pictures of each of these steps like in other classes because I was too busy holding back the class by my inability to thread large pieces of string in between other large pieces of string. I pinned it too tight in the first step, so there was no give in the strings which meant I couldn’t see where the top and bottom strings were so I kept missing sections. After about fifteen minutes of struggling, I looked over and noticed that Tek and Paul had been done for like five minutes and were waiting for the next step. Finally I just told the teacher to carry on without me and then tell me the next step once I got to it (there were only three of us in the class so it’s not like it was a big deal to come back to me). I did eventually make the stupid thing, but each time I missed a loop I got more and more frustrated; working with my hands is definitely not the way forward. 

Still, it makes a nice wall decoration. The big characters on the plaque mean ‘Thankfulness’ and are the same characters used in the word for the Thanksgiving holiday. What I think the little phrase translates to (and correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not great with calligraphy characters yet) is: Let a sense of affection flow throughout the world; learn humanity to let love flow (like a long river).

Well, my summer classes are over, as are my cultural classes, so I’ll find something new to talk about next time. I hope you all are doing well!

Love,

Amanda

Return of the Red-Headed Barbarian!

Aloha compadres,

Cultural Class: Trip to Tainan.

 For our next cultural class we studied up on our religious vocabulary to take a field trip down south to Tainan. We were paired up with two of the other Chinese teachers, Chen Laoshi and Xie Laoshi. Chen Laoshi went with Paul, Tek, and me on the train down to meet Xie Laoshi.  Originally some of the Japanese students from the last few trips were scheduled to join us, but luckily they weren’t able to go so we didn’t have to rely on public transportation, instead, we all squeezed into the back of Xie Laoshi’s car. Paul is about 6’6”, an entire foot and a half taller than Chen Laoshi (and only a little over a foot taller than me…) so he crawled into the front. His height actually drew more attention than my hair (and we all had fun at his expense) but he’s been in Asia for years so he was used to it.

Our first stop, after braving the enormous four lane roundabout in the center of town, was the very first Confucius Temple built in Taiwan in 1665. It is comprised of a thick wall surrounding a park, a pagoda, a school for Confucian scholars, and the actual temple in the center. The roofs are all red which, according to our tour guide, Xie Laoshi, represented the Qing Dynasty in which it was built. The door frames are about six inches thick even on the ground so you have to intentionally step over the door stop to enter rooms and buildings. This is a Confucian trick to make you more aware of where you’re going; I guess you enter with your left foot and leave with your right foot (or maybe vice versa; I was focused more on not getting my shoe caught on the frame so I didn’t face plant in front of all the Chinese tourists than on listening to the running Chinese narration provided by my teacher). 

Scholar's Wall

There was a room full of traditional Chinese instruments, pictures of previous students, and shrines to filial sons inside the perimeter. When you leave the temple, you can also tack a prayer request to the main door. I’m not entirely certain what this has to do with Confucius, but China’s ‘Three Religions’ (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) all tend to get mixed together with local religious practices so the fact that it’s a school means that hoards of students come to ask for good test scores by writing it on the paper, stamping it, then pinning it to the door as they leave. I took one of the papers as a keepsake but didn’t actually write on it, Confucius seems to have enough to answer without mine.

After the Confucian Temple, we wandered over to the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, a Japanese-designed building built in 1916. It has a hall of authors and a library in the basement; the building itself is impressive but unless you are interested in Taiwanese literature there’s not much to see inside.  There was a nineteenth-century character press on one wall which was used for Chinese newspaper printing.

My favorite building was the next one on the itinerary: Chi Kan Lou. In 1653, a fort was built by the Dutch near a Taiwanese village and they called it Provintia. It didn’t last long under Dutch control, however, as the Ming general Zheng Chengkung, 

the son of a Qing-supporting pirate (that sounds like more of an insult in English than it did in Chinese…) took it from the Dutch because he wanted to keep Taiwan as a port to defend the Ming Dynasty from the Manchu usurpers. 

After the Chinese kicked the Dutch out, as represented by the acquiescing statues of Dutch men who seem to be saying, ‘Oh go on then, have the fort, we don’t mind,’ they built Chinese styled towers on top of the fort and painted the roofs red. This red did not represent the Qing Dynasty this time, however, nor was it because red is a lucky color in China, but because it’s all part of the Chi-Kan Lou pun. ‘Chi’ is a formal word for red in Chinese and the Dutch were considered red-haired (though a bit blonde in my opinion), red-skinned (because it’s so dang hot here, and they tan like I do: lobster) barbarians so another name for the tower is Hong-Mao Lou: Furry Red-haired Barbarian Tower. Naturally, I got my picture with the roofs just to feel connected to history! I got more stares than usual at this one, especially when we walked next to the picture of the main Dutch leader who conveniently had red hair and blue eyes….

 

We went to grab lunch afterwards over in Anping District at a restaurant called Anping Gu Ji where the tables were quite low and Paul’s knees were a good couple of inches above the table top. One of the Tainan specialty foods is called ‘coffin bread’ which is less wooden and has fewer worms than one would expect. They are little hollow rectangular pieces of bread with the top cut out so it can be filled with corn chowder, then the ‘lid’ of the coffin is placed back on top and there you have it. They do look like tiny coffins and they’re really tasty bread-bowls. For our drinks, we had little green plastic bottles of Sprite-like soda but the exciting part, and I know you were all wondering where I was going with this, is the clear marble at the bottom of the bottle which rolls around when you drink. I have absolutely no idea why it’s in the bottle and we all had fun trying to get it out of the top.

After lunch we walked over to a foreign trading house and the Anping Tree House which was once a warehouse for Tait & Co built out of bricks from the nearby Anping Fort; it was left to revert to nature and is currently covered in tree roots which weave in and out of the nineteenth-century building. There’s also a wax-museum which tells the history of Tainan starting from the native Taiwanese minority groups through Dutch/foreign imperialism, Chinese usurpation, and finally Japanese occupation in the twentieth-century. We weaved in and out of the rooms skirting confused Taiwanese school children who were intrigued at seeing real foreigners next to the fake wax Dutch statues; there were a few other foreigners lurking about, but the majority of tourists in Tainan are from mainland China or Japan, so Paul and I just looked a bit more obviously non-native.

Anping Fort, which ironically means Peace or Harmony Fort (I guess War really is Peace), was built in 1624 by the Dutch and called ‘Fort Zeelandia’. Funnily enough, until I was meandering around Fort Zeelandia, I never put it together that New Zeeland was based off of an Old Zeeland which is in Holland (you learn new, incredibly obvious, things everyday). Formosa, the former word for Taiwan, is also Dutch and it means ‘beautiful island’. Anping Fort has old canon surrounding the top layer of the fort which looks out over Tainan. Some of its original walls were made out of oyster-shell ash bricks and cemented together with sticky rice, sugarcane syrup, and clay mortar still holding up in one section.

 

We headed over to one of the oldest Matsu Temples in Taiwan. Matsu (Ancestral Mother) is a local goddess who, as with many Chinese/Taiwanese gods, was based off of a real person. Her name was Lin Moniang and, according to legend, she used to guide fishing boats into safe harbors during storms by wearing bright red robes. Her father and brothers were fishermen; one day, during a typhoon, she fell into a trance and saw them in the storm. She managed to save all but one of them whom she accidentally dropped when her mother attempted to revive her from her swoon. When she awoke, one of her brothers had drowned, but the rest returned to safety. After her death, her story changed into legend which eventually deified her throughout southern Taiwan and Southeast Asia.  This Temple is quite large, extremely ornate, and includes an enormous golden statue of her as well as some water king gods and the demon-pets she subdued and trained to be her loyal guards.  

 Our teachers also introduced us to some Matsu religious practices while watching some of the locals asking questions to the gods. You take two wooden half-moon blocks which are flat on one side (kind of like a cashew half) and you kneel before the mother statue, ask your question, and throw the two halves onto the floor. If they are both side down, the answer is no; if one is up and one is down, the answer is yes; if they are both face up, then the gods are laughing because it wasn’t a serious question (like, will my skin turn purple tomorrow?). I think you go for a two out of three to make sure it’s true.  If you have more complicated questions which can’t be answered by the magic-eight ball yes/no/just kidding tactic, then you can also use divining sticks. You ask your question, drop the sticks standing up in a bundle and the tallest one is your answer; you take that stick out and find its correspondingly numbered drawer and take out one of the papers. The paper has several topics listed, you find your category, and get your answer.

We had just enough time to run over to a local street-market which was more like an open walking mall than a market because all the little shops lining the streets were actually permanent buildings instead of booths. Towards the end of our wanderings, the typhoon weather kicked in. It was raining so fiercely we had to duck into a local leather shop to hide out and debate whether or not it was worth waiting for a break in the rain. The weather only seemed to get worse so the boys equipped themselves with umbrellas and held them over the teachers’ heads (I had my trusty ‘Sun is my nemesis, I’m a ginger’ umbrella on hand) and we made a run for the car. We managed to make it back to the train station just in time to catch our ride home. All in all, it was a good trip.

So, that’s a brief introduction to the wonders of Tainan and southern religious practices.  Talk to you soon!

Love,

Amanda

Kung Fu (Tea) Master of the Universe!

Hi all,

Cultural Classes: Ceremonial Tea and Chinese Chess.

 

On July 13^th, as a continuation of our cultural classes our teacher herded my classmates, a handful of the people from the last trip to the night markets, and me downtown to a quaint little cafe and bookshop where you can bring your own loose leaf tea and use their proper tea sets to take part in traditional tea ceremonies. There are several types of tea ceremony and it differs from country to country in Asia, but Hong Laoshi (our teacher) taught us what she called 'Kung Fu Tea'. 

Hong Laoshi walked us through the steps.

To begin, you boil water and pour it into the clay tea pot so that it overflows onto the tray below it in order to warm it.

Pour that water into each of the cups to warm them and dump the rest of the water out into a special bowl for just such a purpose.While the water boils again, use special wooden tweezer things to take each cup and pour its contents into the used-water bowl. 

Then put the tea leaves into the pot using a special wooden tea-leaf carrying implement. 

Once you pour the boiling water into the pot for a second time and let the tea steep for a few minutes, you pour all the tea into a large ceramic pot which you use to pour the tea into each cup.

This cup is not the cup you drink out of, however, this is the 'fragrance cup' which you hold to your nose and try to 'appreciate' the tea’s aroma. 

 

Finally, you place the drinking cup on top of the fragrance cup ‘til it forms a seal and flip it over on a little mat, and then carefully take the fragrance cup off your drinking cup trying not to scold yourself when the top cup pops off and splashes boiling water all over your bare hands.

After this simple and easy-to-follow demonstration,  Hong Laoshi, probably due to my Chinese-styled shirt, mistook me for someone skilled at holding pots of boiling water and asked me to take over for the next round.  Unfortunately, she began video taping me before she realized that not only am I not great with miniature cups of scolding-hot tea, but I also wasn’t really paying attention and already forgot the steps as outlined above. I thought we had to repeat the warming process from the beginning each time and started doing so, only to discover you just take it from ‘put the tea leaves into the pot using a special wooden tea-leaf carrying implement’ and so we had a few minutes of embarrassing footage as she told me what to do step by step and all the more-qualified students laughed as I attempted to get tea into the infuriatingly tiny cups. 

Kim Pouring the Tea

After setting the bar so low (I wouldn’t want the other students to look stupid on camera), each student got to pour the tea and thanks to my ‘What Not to Do When Brewing Tea’ lesson, they all did marvellously well.  It took about four hours for us to all cycle through the process, but it was a great time of tea and conversation.

Pu'Er Cha

 We also got to cycle through several types of green tea, oolong tea, and a fantastic black tea called pu'er cha which is really strong and my new favourite. The green tea is rolled up into little dried balls and then they expand in the water to show their 'heart' and two branches. There’s one green tea whose flavour changes depending on who’s pouring it (or so my teacher informed us though I’m a bit sceptical and I think it’s actually dependent on how long it steeps), so we each got to pour that tea to see if we had sweet or bitter temperaments (actually, this was after my turn, I just did some oolong). The smell and taste really did change remarkably, and I wouldn’t have guessed it was the same tea from pot to pot.

 
 

The next week on the 18^th we learned how to play Chinese Chess for our cultural experience. I already learned how to play it in China, but it was a fun refresher. Tek and I were paired up and we spent the entire hour and a half without either of us actually winning. I have great defence but 'I have no gift for strategy' as the indefatigable Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, and Tek had no defence but kept leaping over the river into my area where he hit my blockades and got shot by my canon. I had a whole stack of his pieces, he had about one pawn but I couldn’t corner his general. So...we called it a draw and went home. ‘Canon’ in Chinese is 'pao' that is pronounced 'pow' which I find very onomatopoeic; it's also my favourite piece because you get to jump like in checkers and pounce on other pieces (and while I do it, I also say ‘POW’ just to complete the illusion). Very cathartic.

Until next time, thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing about your lives and adventures!

Love,

Amanda