Chapter 7: First Strokes

For ten weeks the brush went everywhere except onto the paper.

It went onto the walls, the quilt and the cat, and once into the soup.

Chengzhi gripped it in his whole fist, and every stroke came out as a fat black blot.

I tried the model sheets from the academy.

I tried guiding his fingers with mine.

He cried twice, and I cried once, in the wash house, where nobody could hear.

On the eighty-eighth day I carried the kneading board out to the front of my mother's stall and sprinkled it with flour.

"Draw in it," I said.

"With what?"

"With your finger."

He frowned at the board.

It was a quiet morning, and the lane was full of the smell of bone broth.

Chengzhi put out one long finger, with the old ink stain still faint on the middle joint, and drew a line through the flour.

It came out straight.

He stared at it.

"Again," I said.

He drew it again, and then a second line across it, and a third.

"Lanxi, look," he said. "It's snow."

"It's flour," I said. "Draw it again."

He drew it a dozen times that morning, and each one was a little straighter.

When he was tired he wiped the board flat with his sleeve and began again, humming.

A customer watched him over a bowl of noodles.

"What's he doing?" the customer called to my mother.

"Learning," said my mother, without looking up from the pot. "Eat."

By noon I had pinned a clean order slip to the post for each of the first strokes: one line, two lines, a cross, a roof.

I told him the names.

"That one is one," I said. "That one is two. That one is ten."

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