At the Heart of the Universe (25 page)

After many months of just drawing “Chun,” she began to fill in the other four characters in vertical order down the long run of paper.

At first she drew the aphorism that she had practiced as a girl—a girl of Chun's age—the calligraphy that had won her a prize:

Spring

Returns

Flower

No

Fade

Her teacher said there were many ways to interpret this: “Spring comes and in the dark the plant comes to life,” or “Whatever is alive will always bloom,” or simply “Stillness and Aliveness, in profound harmony.”

It was astonishing to her, the complexity and profundity behind these simple ink marks on a piece of rice paper. A skeleton for such imaginings! Best of all for her despair, it was totally absorbing, both in itself and as a vessel to her lost child, an artery to another heart that had once been her own and would never be other. Calligraphy became her world.

As the months passed, as memory turned to imagination, her strokes grew into a complex and willful attempt at simplicity, but not simplicity itself. It was infuriating to her, to see the mess she was always making. She tried new brushes, she tried better paper—mulberry paper in fact, a single sheet, brought all the way up the mountain by one of the porters, costing two weeks' pay. The harder she tried, the worse it got. She asked a monk who did calligraphy about that, and was told that
will
cannot work in calligraphy, rather that calligraphy
is
, and makes the essence of the person move, and in the movement in relationship, the character, like an unbidden ghost,
appears
. This was difficult for her. She thought back to the few childhood lessons taken from the strange old master in his hut on the river. He always smelled of jasmine water and seemed attached at the lips to his clay pipe and never seemed to eat. He grew more and more thin and his characters grew more and more full until one day his wife found him dead at his art, the long sheet of rice paper filled with a single stroke of the fattest brush in his collection, a single long, fat black character that was no character, no character at all, but any and all characters that anyone who wished could find in it. A stroke to begin from, contain in, break out of, to something else. She has thought about this stroke for the rest of her life, this message before dying.

“The character reflects the soul, the soul the character,” her teacher said.

It has taken her three decades to start to understand that, and over a year of practice alone on this mountain with each journey of five characters down a rice paper sheet beginning with the character for “Chun.” Each “Chun,” she understands now, when viewed from a distance is a stark black measure of her soul, and when viewed so close up that each bristle of the brush appears is a measure of the struggle still raging within it. The views from the closest place in paper and brush are beyond herself, and the views from the farthest place across the little hut and even out the door into the air of the mountain are beyond herself—and all are views of herself, too. As in an ancient painting, where the artist is so dwarfed by the mountains and rivers that his figure is hard to find—until suddenly you see it, floating in thin air between the peaks.
The mineral ink of a pliant soul.

Now she chants out loud:

“All of it is my soul, all of it is my not-soul.

“All of it is me, all of it is not-me.

“All of me is made of non-me elements, all of soul of non-soul elements.

“All of it is in Chun.”

She smiles, thinking,
All of it is in Spring
.

It was only when she first understood this about her soul and her art that she made the first journey to find her lost daughter. Two years ago now, and she only found out that she had been taken away to the ends of the earth. Five days ago now it was her birthday. Last Monday, and it is now Saturday. She was ten.

She sighs, feels herself sinking once again, and gathers all that she has endured over these ten years to right herself.

This morning she has finished the day's “Chun,” and has already looked deeply into it from near and far. But on this particular day her mind is still funneling around and around in a whirlpool like that below the waterfall upstream.
She is gone.

Her heart strikes sorrow. Tears come rolling down.

But whatever has been learned comes blossoming up to meet the tears. Whatever has kept her going keeps her going now. She hangs the day's “Chun” up to dry—as if for the first time now seeing what has been written:

It is a simple “Chun.” Simple strokes that are like the ancient carving on an oracle bone or a tortoise shell she once saw in a photograph. A seedling struggling for the light, strokes that have reversed the complexity of centuries, which evolved the nine-stroke character for “Spring” out of this elegant three. A simple “Chun” she has gotten back to, back to that single shoot struggling in darkness to find the light and grow toward the sun and blossom and give back seeds. Whatever she has learned and seen now in this day's simple character, she realizes that she has come to understand not only sorrow but love, not only depth but lightness, and so she is surprised to find herself saying out loud—to the lush pines and magnolias, to the stream and the fallen log spanning it, to the deer she has tamed who are curling into their beds nearby and to her playmates the erratic monkeys in the forests up the mountain—yes, breaking her silence, saying out loud:

“So? So, fancy lady, put on your plastic orange jacket and take your broom and go to work.”

A blue jay appears, the sharp face reminding her of her old calligraphy teacher. He chatters at her. She chatters back at him in blue jay, and walks out of the clearing.

The low, tilted morning sunlight casts the black shadows of the pine tree trunks across the bed of ferns. In one moment the shadows seem to her like a ladder laid down toward the most heavenly heart of nature, and in the next moment they seem like lines on her dead mother's sallow, waxy brow, and in another moment like a mere calligraphy of the number three, counted over and over again in her path.

23

The beaten-up bus sways around the hairpin turns of the steep, narrow road and stumbles up onto a small field, a shallow bowl partway up Emei Shan, the towering Hundred Mile Mountain. Hardly hesitating, the bus then swerves around sharply so that it is pointing back to where it came from. The driver gestures for them to get out. Pep peers out the window and can't believe that after traveling for two days this is the right destination. He sees no cable car, no signs in English, nothing. Definitely not a tourist-friendly zone. It's the wrong place. He tries to argue, but the driver is adamant.

They get out. With a cough of oily exhaust and a spray of dust the bus is gone.

Emei Shan rises all around, up into the clouds. At one end of the field is a two-story concrete building with a single opening as large as a garage door, and several windows with iron bars. Dimly seen inside are white tiles, an open fire, and two men in white caps. Outside, a third man stands under a large, stained pink umbrella that shades an iron table. His hands are on his hips and he is staring at them hungrily. A red fire hydrant rises up nearby, tilted, as if suffering. They look around more carefully up into the surrounding mountains for the entrance to the cable cars. Seeing none, in sign language they try to get information from the men in the building. No, there is no cable car, definitely not. There is a trail, the entrance of which is at the far end of the field.

“This does not feel good,” Pep says. “Rhett and Ming Tao were lying to us.”

“Maybe,” Clio says. “But they never said they were sure there was a cable car.”

“But they
were
sure that it was a popular tourist zone, like Disney. This ain't Disney.” They look at each other—the unspoken goes back and forth between them:
If they lied about this, maybe they've lied about everything and then what the hell are we doing here?