Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 10

Love at First Sight

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Hong Kong 1959, February 5th, Thursday, Lesson One

Chinese Lessons, 5th floor, followed by a phone number, read a plumply calligraphed sign alongside the doorway of a ten-story building on Lockhart Road, five or six blocks from the waterfront seaman’s bars in Wan Chai, about a mile and a half walk away from Golden Court. It caught his eye when he was taking the long way back to Frank’s apartment from Suzie Two’s place in the early dawn on the last Saturday in January. Later that morning he called the five-digit phone number and arranged to meet the teacher at three. The doorman seemed to have been informed about his visit and let him into the building without a word. He walked up the stairs to the fifth floor and was greeted at the landing by an attractive Chinese woman, apparently unmarried, a propitious sign to the sexually addicted youth.

She offered him low tea at a small round table covered in a spotless white linen tablecloth, with a folded napkin aside each plate, a small white teapot, a small crystal bowl of sugar cubes, and a triple layer stand of cakes and cookies on white, bone china. As comforting and lovely as the tea setting was, the thin white curtains wafting in the breeze across the table from him, gently revealing glimpses of Causeway Bay in the distance, evoked the view that he must stay here, in this gossamer embrace of subdued femininity, for weeks, if not forever. She had uttered no more than a few words of polite formality before he knew without a doubt that he would do whatever it took to study Chinese under this woman.

So it was that Miss June Wong would become his first formal Chinese language teacher and a harbinger of things to come, i.e., intellectual stimulation combined with erotic curiosity and lust. Initially, they scheduled one lesson a week at her apartment. It turned out she was thirty-two, exactly twice his age and he got the feeling that someone else may have been living there, but he or she was never present when he took his two-hour lesson.

On their first lesson, three days later on Thursday the fifth, releasing his inner cad, emboldened by a mental disturbance due to frequent contact with bargirls and whores, unbalanced by any social contact with virgins and wives, he tried to unfasten her mian’ao¹. She moved his hand aside but didn’t get angry. Instead, she got up and fixed low tea again— it was the 1959 British colony of Hong Kong after all, and 4 PM was tea time— simpler than at their first meeting, but even more pleasant because of the concomitant visions of intimacies to come that danced in his testosterone addled adolescent head.

She then opened their text and, glancing at the short vocabulary list, began to tell him about the second syllable in the word hongse for “red.” “Se,”² she said, “can mean color, form, or sex.” With this sleight of hand, Teacher Wong expediently converted, at least temporarily, the object of his prurient interest from her breasts to the point of her soft and silky smooth writing brush with which she gracefully guided the black ink onto the coarse but pliant paper, replicating a new instance of the graphic form of the word se and thereby guaranteeing that he would never miss a lesson with Teacher Wong.

Hong Kong 1959, February 6th, Friday, Lesson Two

In a change in the schedule that they had agreed on at the end of the first lesson, the second lesson occurred the next day instead of Thursday the following week—something to do with the impact of Chinese New Year on her schedule. Because of the weather or not, at the next lesson, he noticed that Teacher Wong had allowed the top two buttons of her mian’ao to remain unfastened, and that the blouse beneath it, too, was open at the neck. The glimpse of a tiny patch of soft, vulnerable skin at the top of her breastbone confirmed for him, from his head to his toes, on the emotional level at least, that this was the beginning of a wonderful trip, much longer than this one.

“In your last lesson, Master White, we discussed the word se. I wonder if you would prefer to continue in that direction or not? Or, would you rather return to the lesson in the book?”

He felt the saliva build in his mouth until he had to turn his head and gulp. “Continue,” he said, nodding his head. “Please continue in that direction.”

“Have you practiced writing the word?” “Yes, I have.” “Please show me.” She dribbled a little water onto the inkstone, then picked up a stick of ink and ground it slowly in a circular motion against the wet surface. The liquid ink flowed gently down into the shallow well at the end of the stone. Setting the ink-stick aside, she picked up the writing brush and stroked and rolled the lower third of the hair of the brush in and out of the well, until she was satisfied that the brush had absorbed the proper amount of ink. Then she handed him the brush and called his attention to the coarse blank newsprint that she had laid out on the table.

“I didn’t practice with a brush,” he said. “Just a pencil.” She seemed to halt for second, straighten her back, and in a stricter voice than before said, “That is no good, Master White. You must use a brush.” But seeing the momentary look of concern on his face, her slight frown fell into a soft smile and in the same sweet tone as before she said, “I’ll guide you.” She came around behind him and, leaning over his right shoulder, the touch of her breasts barely perceptible under the lightly padded mian’ao, aligned his fingers correctly around the bamboo stem of the brush. She adjusted the angle and commanded him to write. “Write one se in each of the large squares I have folded into the paper.” He could feel her breath lightly on his neck as he attempted unsuccessfully to write the character.

“I will guide you,” she said. She laid her hand over his and directed it in a smooth, waltz-like motion, producing the correct form of the character in one square after another. When she lifted her hand from his, he was able to continue this motion, and managed to make a few recognizable copies of the character se, for color, form, and sex.

“Now put more ink on the brush and continue,” she said. “Not too much or too little, not too wet or too dry. You will be able to feel it.” She returned to her seat across the table from him. “You must be deliberate, very deliberate. Especially at the end of each stroke. There are different ways to end your stroke. You may pause, producing slight bulge, or make short hook, or medium hook, or long hook, or maybe tail, straight down. I will show you, one by one. Now, here is your first full line of Chinese. I have picked it carefully because it has multiple meanings and yet it is easy to write. Start with the first and second character, the character ri, for ‘sun’ or ‘day.’ The first two characters and the last one in the line are the same. When you are able to write ri, you are able to write three of the five words in this sentence. Because of my excellent choice,” she smiled. “Please observe.”

At the end of the second lesson, they changed the schedule again. She agreed to give him lessons four times a week, Monday through Thursday, starting right after the Chinese New Year holiday which ran for sixteen days. The next day would be New Year’s Eve and sixteen days later would be Tuesday. “But,” she said, “we will have your third lesson on the day before, on Monday, February 23. I will sacrifice the last day of the New Year Holiday for you, Master White. Are you not pleased?”

“I am,” he said, then quickly swallowed his saliva again. “But ... studying throughout the holiday would be better, Teacher Wong.” With you, he added in his mind.

She smiled and said, “You are right. I expect that, Master White. Use a brush, not a pencil or pen. You will learn how to write with a pen later. Practice every day as long as you can. When we meet again on the twenty-third, I expect you to know how to hold a brush and apply ink. We cannot continue if you do not learn how to use a brush. And to be able to write that five-character line from a Chan master,³ and the word se nicely. Do you understand?”

“I do,” he said.

He did not waste the chance to practice using the brush. Nor to wonder how it was that Teacher Wong spoke English so well and to imagine various underlying scenarios. Nor to remove the mian’ao and the blouse and bra beneath, from her upper body, in his mind. Nor to recall the barely perceptible, muffled, touch of her left breast on his back.

He enlisted Ely’s help in getting two brushes, an inkstone, a medium size stick of ink and permission to appropriate the daily newspaper to write on. He practiced several times every day throughout the long holiday season. His conversation classes were already on hold until after New Year. New Method English College, too, had recessed for the holidays. His uneasiness when first writing the character se under Ely’s eyes quickly dispersed when she prefixed the character hong to it, to make the ordinary disyllabic word for the color ‘red’. The idea that his teacher would introduce a word for ‘sex’ was so incongruent that it didn’t occur to Ely. She added the words for white and for black, thinking they were starting by learning the colors.

He went to Suzie Two’s place once. But she was not there and a brief visit to the Arizona confirmed that she was taking a break and would not be back until after the New Year.

He was obsessed by thoughts of Teacher Wong and impatiently awaited his lesson on Monday, the 23rd. The mian’ao was carefully removed, and what lay within gradually exposed, in both fantasies and dreams. He wrote to his parents and asked if they could increase the amount they were paying to Frank to $16 a week to pay for Chinese lessons, a doubling of his allowance. Also, he would see if he could launch a second English conversation class, continuing to keep secret from them that it, like the current class, would be strictly for bargirls and whores. In the meantime, he would dip into the money he was supposed to use on his trip home, three months away, to pay the additional tuition that four days a week entailed, to Teacher Wong.

1. 棉襖 mián’ǎo, a lightweight cotton padded jacket.

2. 色 sè, color, form, sex, beauty. 色中餓鬼, whoremonger.

3. 日日是好日。rì rì shì hǎo rì