What I learned writing Chinese

A number of years ago I was talking with a neighbor, Mimi Gates (an art historian, a specialist in Chinese art, now the head of the Seattle Art Museum), and she mentioned that she was studying Chinese calligraphy. I had always been oddly drawn to this form, seeking it out in museums and just gazing at it. I knew nothing about it, but it just looked right to me, musical and lively, profound.

So I asked Mimi if I could meet her teacher, maybe take some classes. I think she was trying to protect me from disappointment when she told me that this woman, Chung-ho Frankel, who lived in a modest house near New Haven, was considered one of the great living Chinese calligraphers. Nevertheless, she asked, and Chung-ho agreed to meet me.

We sat at her dining room table, which had long since been given over to calligraphy, and she showed me some work. We talked, and as we did she kept running upstairs to bring down some treasure—an inkstone, a cake of Ming Dynasty ink, a book of some famous calligrapher’s work.

And in the end she agreed to give me some lessons. I’m not sure why, but it might have had something to do with my naive enthusiasm and maybe my sheer unlikely-ness. In any case, it was the beginning of many years as her student, continuing to the present.

Once she told me how, when she was a girl, she would do the calligraphy homework of all the girls in her class, in their style and making their mistakes. “Those girls thought they were so clever,” she said, “but I got all the practice!” And indeed she still practices every day…at age 95.

 I once asked her if she’d ever seen a book of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching done by a calligrapher and reproduced. She said she didn’t know of any, and that was that. Then a few years after that her husband, Hans Frankel, became quite ill, and she found herself waking up at 5 in the morning too worried to sleep. So she would get up, come down to the table and do calligraphy. And what she did was the whole of the Tao Te Ching, over 5000 characters in two volumes. And then she sewed a cloth cover for it and gave it to me. Here is the first page.

 


My own practice comes and goes, but there is something so serene about doing a piece again and again until I know it is just right. Here’s a piece that took me months of work.

 

Finally, this story:
At some point I had done some piece, and she said to me, “You’re my second best student!”  And I was very tickled by this slightly odd honor. Then, a few years later she said, “You’re my best student!” Now, I hadn’t gotten any better during this time, so unless someone else got worse it was unlikely. I think she was just pleased that this foreigner worked so hard. Anyway, I told her that I liked being second best better, and that I wanted a certificate, some recognition.
Recently I did some copy work for a book of her work that is being published in China. And my payment was a beautiful seal that says, “Cloud and Dragon Hut (her studio name), Number Two Student”. It was carved by Qainshen Bai, an art historian who is a wonderful calligrapher and also, I suspect, the real Best Student.

So it has been a wonderful connection to a world I would have no other way into, and it has given me any number of lessons. One is that if you practice something for 80 or 90 years you’re likely to get really good at it. Another is that if a door to the unfamiliar opens before you, you’re a fool if you don’t walk through it.
Finally, here is my latest work. It is the name she gave the teahouse, which translates roughly as Two-sided Pavilion Surrounded By Jade Green (it rolls off the tongue more trippingly in Chinese).