China by Edward Rutherfurd (historical books to read TXT) 📕

he might throw me out, but he decided to ignore me and disappeared back into the closed shed. I stayed there another hour and then left.

Now by this time I’d committed to memory every hand movement the craftsman made, and when I got home I took out my ink stone and brushes and some of the scraps of paper I had saved, and I made strokes just like his, again and again, until I thought I really had the feel of it.

The next day I took my writing equipment with me. This time I stationed myself opposite another of the craftsmen. This was a placid fat man, a bit younger than the first. And he was doing something different. The lacquer box he was working on had a design of two figures in a bamboo garden on it, and the lacquer had been built up so thickly that I realized it must have dozens of coatings, perhaps more than a hundred layers. With infinite care, he was carving into it, using several implements—razor-sharp little knives, a gimlet almost as thin as a needle, and other curious instruments I’d never seen before. It was such intricate work that I imagine he might have taken weeks to complete it. I was quite fascinated, and I almost forgot about the master and why I’d come there.

At the end of the morning, I sat down on the ground in the yard, and taking out my brushes and my ink stone and a tiny bottle of water, I started to make a rough approximation of the design I’d seen on one of my scraps of paper. Then using the ink, I tried to do the same process, but in reverse, forming the design by building up a layer of ink, waiting for the ink to dry, which it does quite quickly, and then adding another layer. It was very clumsy, of course, but it helped me get the feel of the process. I continued like that, getting up to watch the fat craftsman, then sitting down to play with my brush and ink, all afternoon. There was no sign of the master that day. But at the end of the afternoon, the fat craftsman indicated that I should come over to him. And he put a brush in my hand and showed me how to hold it for lacquer work, which, despite my observation, I still hadn’t got quite right. So then I bowed very deep and thanked him and went home.

Well, the next day I was back again. I was afraid they’d probably send me away as soon as they saw me, because craftsmen don’t like young people hanging around. But they didn’t say anything. So I watched another of the craftsmen, who was carving. It was exciting to watch him, but I couldn’t copy that, so in the afternoon I went back to copy some more of the fat man’s work. After a while the master came out again, and this time he came straight to me angrily and said, “Why are you still hanging around here? What do you think you’re doing?”

“If you please, sir,” I said respectfully, “I had the idea that I might like to work in lacquer. But I thought that I should learn all I could about it first, to discover whether I might have any talent for it.”

“A master tells a pupil whether he has aptitude,” he replied sharply.

“I did not dare waste the time of any master until I had taken the trouble to find out all I could for myself,” I replied. “And I had to consider whether it was a craft to which I could dedicate the rest of my life.”

“Why do you have an ink stone and brushes? Are you a young scholar?”

“Oh no, sir,” I said. “I did have some lessons. But I am poor, and so I’ve had to teach myself to read and write as best I could.”

“Can your father not teach you?”

“My esteemed father, unfortunately, cannot read and write.”

“Write something,” he commanded. So I wrote a few characters in my best hand, and he looked at them and said, “Not bad.”

“I thought, master,” I ventured, “that since I could learn to use a brush to write, perhaps I could also learn to use a brush applying lacquer.”

He glanced at the fat craftsman, then turned back to me. “Well, I’ve nothing for you,” he said firmly. “The way these Taiping devils are ruining all the trade, we’ll be lucky to keep the people we have, let alone take on an apprentice.” He frowned. “Who are you, anyway, and how did you get here?”

I try never to lie, but I didn’t want him to know about my father yet, so I just invented a name, said I came from Beijing, and that we were staying with relations in the area for a month. He looked a bit cynical. “Well, don’t bother anyone,” he said. Then he left.

But the next day, when I turned up, the thin man beckoned me over, told me to sit beside him, gave me a brush, and showed me how to use it properly. Then he gave me some splinters of wood and a tiny pot of lacquer and told me to try. It was quite difficult, because the lacquer is sticky and not like ink at all, but I began to get the feel of it. I spent the rest of the day doing that.

The following day, the same thing happened, and the day after. I’d really have liked to work with the fat man, because what he was doing was much more interesting. But that would have been rude to the thin man and would have made me look ill-mannered. Besides, I’d already realized that this was a kind of test, to see if I was hardworking and obedient.

Another three days went by. Now and then the thin man would show me something I was doing wrong, so I was all the more glad that