Lost In Place (14 page)

The difficulty was more than compensated for by the excitement I felt knowing that I was doing something any adult would have to respect, and the work soon became a
kind of pleasure. One day Mr. Rowland said that he thought it was a shame that I wasn’t getting academic credit for my Chinese-language study. He introduced me to a counselor, Ms. Rauson, who informed me that I was perfectly welcome to apply for independent-study credit. She offered to act as the administrative go-between if Mr. Rowland and I would put together a formal proposal, and once we had done so, she set up and led the committee meeting where I made my presentation, and eventually I was granted the credit. It happened that one of the teachers present at that meeting was my art teacher. He had noticed the Chinese characters and imitation Chinese landscape paintings scrawled all over my notebooks and pants, and now that he knew how serious I was about the subject, he had an idea of his own. He asked me the next day if, instead of doing the regular coursework in our art class, I would like to organize a course for myself to learn Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, the real kind done with brushes and ground ink instead of just a ballpoint pen.

When I told my father about this he was delighted; he welcomed any evidence that my interests might be shifting away from unarmed combat. One time he actually asked me if I would consider dancing instead of kung fu—“Look at Nureyev,” he said hopefully, “now, there’s a powerful guy.”

Ballet. Man, you know the world is a confusing place when you’re a boy and your dad tries to get you to switch from self-defense to ballet.

So Dad was excited about the Chinese painting. He helped me by taking out dozens of oversized books on Asian art from the library. Over several weekends he and I charted out “a course,” starting with the basic brushstrokes
and characters, then moving to traditional methods of painting trees, rocks, mountains, waterfalls and little Chinese fishermen standing on the prows of their sampans. The final exam of the course, we decided, would be to paint a whole scroll depicting a waterfall partially concealed by mist, with a rocky mountain in the background and a fisherman right in front, admiring the whole scene from his sampan. In one corner I would brush a few lines of calligraphy of my own composition—assuming my
Speak Chinese
book moved beyond vocabulary like “worker,” “peasant,” “Twelfth Party Congress” or “high-level cadre.”

Before giving the art teacher my syllabus, I decided it would be a good idea to show him samples of the kind of work I would be doing. To do so I needed the proper materials, so one Saturday I got Michael to take the train down to New York City with me for an excursion to Chinatown. We ended up spending most of our time in a kung fu supply store admiring the swords, throwing knives and black-silk uniforms, but on realizing that we couldn’t afford anything except one of the Jackie Chan posters, we moved on to a bookstore offering painting and calligraphy supplies. I got myself a brush, a stick of dried ink and a small grinding stone, and Michael bought a magazine called
Secrets of Internal Kung Fu
, which had on its cover a photograph of a bony old man with a wispy beard allowing himself to be run over by a minivan.

On our way back to the subway station Michael noticed a building that looked like a Buddhist or Taoist temple with its doors wide open. Peering inside, we saw three dozen or so old Chinese men sitting around a bunch of tables chatting quietly and playing chess.

“Hey, you’re supposed to be learning Chinese,” Michael
said. “Why don’t you try it out on those guys? Maybe one of them is a master. They might be talking about kung fu right now.”

By then some of the men had noticed us and were giving us slightly annoyed looks. Deciding to give them a pleasant surprise, I marched forward into the room, stood at my full height and recited the sentence I knew best:
“Tongzhi! Nimen hao ma?”
which translates as “Comrades! How are you?”

To a man their faces turned beet-red with anger, and not one of them said a word in response. They simply pointed toward the door and waved their hands in disgust. Thinking I must have pronounced something wrong, I retreated in embarrassment and led Michael out of the building. “What did you say to those guys, you asshole?” he asked, obviously upset that I might have just offended a roomful of kung fu masters.

“I don’t know!” I answered, but when I took a last look at the building before we rounded the corner I got my answer. High over the wooden doors hung a sign that said in English,
OVERSEAS CHINESE KUOMINTANG ASSOCIATION MEETING
.

“What does that mean?” Michael asked.

“Oh, man—Kuomintang is the name of the old government that used to rule China! Those are the guys that got chased over to Taiwan by Mao!”

“So?”

“So? I called them Comrades! That would be like … God, it would be like if some kid walked into our kung fu school and said to Sensei, ‘Everybody knows karate can kick kung fu’s ass.’ Man, that was stupid.”

“Some expert you are. Loser!”

Several days later, after filling a few sheets with some
shaky brushstroke exercises, I began to worry that the art teacher might still be unimpressed with my presentation and decide not to let me go through with the independent-study course. Realizing there were things only a trained Chinese painter could teach me, I took what I assumed was the logical step: I took my painting materials, rolled them up under my arm and rode my bicycle to the Dragon Inn, the restaurant where Michael and I had consumed our ill-fated Peking duck dinner earlier that year. I entered the restaurant to see the cooks and waiters seated around three round tables having a late-afternoon meal. Not wanting to repeat my earlier experience with speaking Chinese, I remained silent until one of the waiters got up and asked if I wanted to sit at a table or order something to go. I said that I wanted to ask his colleagues a question about Chinese painting.

He shrugged and asked for everyone’s attention. With all of them staring at me I became nervous and forgot the carefully worded statement of purpose I’d composed on the ride over. Instead I said, “Um … is anybody here a Chinese-landscape painter?”

“Yes, I’m a Chinese-landscape painter.”

A chubby, shy-looking young man stood up. He was wearing black plastic nerd-glasses and a clip-on bow tie that had settled into a diagonal position under his collar. His name was Tommy Wing and, I later learned, he was an art-department graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After college he had begun his artistic career by painting landscapes for a traditional Chinese greeting-card company, but when his parents, who lived in the States, fell ill he came here to work as a waiter for several years to help support them. When I showed him my exercises and asked if he could give me any pointers, he covered
his mouth with his hand and started giggling uncontrollably. “I’m not laughing at you,” he reassured me when he gained control of himself. “It’s just that I think—you know—that this is kind of funny! I mean, I always thought that white kids were only interested in Chinese kung fu.”

There was something terribly familiar about the tone of his voice when he said “kung fu.” He sounded just like my dad. I decided to postpone telling Tommy about my other Asia-related interest until we got to know each other better. He fetched some brushes and ink from his car and gave me my first lesson right there in the restaurant.

Having gathered the proper materials and a university-accredited tutor, I made my presentation to the art teacher and was given permission to proceed with the project. These successes with the independent-study approach led me to wonder, Why not do this with every class? I tried to persuade my science teacher to let me practice acupuncture on myself instead of having to memorize the Krebs Cycle, but this proposal was met with less enthusiasm than my language and brush-painting projects. The metal-shop teacher would not let me build a broadsword, and when I asked my math teacher if I could skip class to work on the Zen puzzle “If everything returns to the One, to what does the One return to?” his only response was to ask, “What, are you on drugs or something?”

Word of my quest to transform high school into a kind of preparation for the Chinese imperial examinations gradually reached the main office. The vice principal called me in for a meeting and explained to me the strict federal and state regulations concerning the curriculum offered in each grade of every high school, regulations
that he had no choice but to enforce. When I protested weakly (I was not the type to argue with a vice principal) by reiterating how enthusiastic I was about these unregulated subjects, and how much I was enjoying learning them as opposed to the state-approved courses, he sighed and looked tired.

He leaned back in his chair and said, “Try to think of the school as a huge ocean liner. It’s out there in the ocean, it’s overcrowded, the engine is overworked, but it’s moving slowly in the right direction. Then imagine that one kid falls overboard. We simply can’t turn the whole ocean liner around just for him. I’m sorry; you’ll just have to stick with the regular courses.”

Man overboard! I was going to have to drown in algebra, French and chemistry after all.

Adults tell you that school is not about learning particular facts, but about learning how to learn. When the time comes that a subject intrigues you deeply, they insist, you will be grateful for having developed the skills needed to master that subject. “Someday this will all make sense,” they say. And they’re right. The problem for all of us as teenagers, unfortunately, is that until we find that special subject we have to take their word for it, and that’s a lot to ask when you’re talking about memorizing the Louisiana Purchase, the atomic weight of uranium or the pluperfect-tense conjugation for verbs in other languages. How about the chemistry involved in photosynthesis? Yep—could be useful someday. Anyone read
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
lately? Now,
there’s
an enjoyable book when you’re fifteen, especially all the descriptions of the flowers. If a sailboat left San Francisco thirteen hours ago against a 5-knot current and a 4-knot breeze and is just
now reaching Santa Barbara, 312 miles away, what was its average speed? Hey, couldn’t you just ask the Coast Guard? That’s their job, isn’t it? It’s a miracle any of us make it to the drinking age without having gone insane.

Even with my limited knowledge of physiology at that time, I knew that teenagers were designed for humping, fighting and little else, but the modern world asks that we put all that off until after high school. Instead we must fidget in uncomfortable wooden chairs and learn how to learn. As mentioned before, you’re told it will pay off one day, but between the ages of thirteen and eighteen you cannot help wondering, What if it
doesn’t
pay off? What if our parents, and their parents, were all wrong about what’s really important? How will it ever end if no one questions it? And these are supposed to be the best years of your life.

9
 

W
e’re moving,” Sensei O’Keefe said abruptly after class one night. He and Bill lit up a joint in the parking lot and sat quietly; Michael and I decided to take a few last whacks at the heavy bag for old times’ sake. The rent had finally driven us out. Sensei had found another building, this one in Danbury on Main Street, which at that time was a depressed area. It was not an ideal space; the room was long, but only about ten feet wide, so the Circle of Fighting became the Sliver of Fighting. Better than nothing, Sensei said, so that weekend he, Bill, Michael, three other students and I moved the equipment to our new house. During the move I noticed that Sensei had thrown away several dozen old trophies, framed karate and judo diplomas and plaques. One wooden plaque, with his name engraved on it, caught my eye, so I pulled it out of the garbage and put it in my equipment bag to take home and put on my wall.

Sensei, who was seriously depressed and drunk quite a bit of the time that season, apparently saw me take the plaque out of the garbage can, but instead of being flattered he called everyone together and denounced me as a thief. “Barabbas, the Christian thief. That’s your new name: Barabbas. Listen up, Barabbas. Don’t you
ever
think you can do something without my knowing it.” He poked his callused finger hard against my chest for emphasis. “I am the Master here, and you better get something straight. I can see right through you—I know what you think and what you do.
I know you better than you know yourself
.”

Instead of being mystified or impressed by something Sensei did, for the first time I felt annoyed. I didn’t question his status as a kung fu master, I didn’t object to his unusual training methods, like the time he had one man hang from the rafters with one hand and hold a paper target between his dangling legs with the other so that Sensei could practice archery, and I didn’t mind his calling me a candy-ass or a sissy, but even I knew that he was no mind reader. As I put the plaque back in the garbage an unwelcome thought came to me: This guy can punch well, he can kick well and he can cut watermelons blindfolded, but what if underneath all that he’s really just a jerk?