An Asthmatic Character

Our yellow kitchen contains a drawer that stops before it can be pulled out fully, caught on something invisible. Before the drawer stutters on that invisible thing, though, you can see yellow rice paper sheets with printed grids. My mother has kept these sheets and a haphazard collection of calligraphy brushes in this drawer for nearly 15 years, and they have remained untouched for around 10.

Before I hit middle school and the general angst that comes with preadolescence, my brother and I would lay out those yellow sheets and practice our Chinese calligraphy. Typically, we would do this on weekend mornings, when the light was stale, lazy, and caught up on dust.

“It’s all about pressure,” my mother said of painting. First, you draw an inward breath at the beginning of a bihua (笔划), bringing only the tip of the horsehair brush against your paper and slowly bearing it down in the direction of gravity.

In calligraphy, there is visual evidence of your hand’s posture and your bobbing brush. Here, the physical meets the visual.

The physical: We kept the horse hairs off the table with ceramic brush holders. We used a circular ink cake, and on special occasions, an ink stick engraved with a dragon, to make marks. Then we took rice bowls encrusted with semi-permanent grains onto the table. We filled these vessels with water to clean our brushes. In ink, we breathed qi (气).

The visual: We were drawing art from art.

***

My mother came here in metal casing, in the air, as a teenager on a plane. She was born again: a 15-year-old infant swaddled in qi and lifted by a pointed beak. Holding tightly to the horsehair brushes and yellow sheets of her upbringing, my mother converted to a new language.

I, too, brought my calligraphy on a flight once, albeit a domestic one. My mother remembers that I was a particularly avid calligrapher in Naples, Florida. I only remember the cover of the booklet, the red outline of a girl with pigtails diligently working on her own calligraphy — a mise en abyme I privately resented.

Beneath this girl-en-abyme, red character outlines dictated where my ink was meant to land. The goal was to let the ink bleed just over the red boundary, discreetly concealing the evidence of my amateurism. This practice required discipline and was meant to build character. “A person should stand up straight, not crooked,” my mother would whisper, referring to both the calligrapher and her creation.

So I straightened my spine in this new Naples, using the objects of my mother’s childhood to make characters. I shared her brushes, her ink, her qi. I realize now that I am her character, an indelible collection of strokes expelled through the mouth and into my shoulders, my smile, my freckles, my eyes especially. We are collections of the same objects and images, but our arrangements vary in their pitches and tones, in their essential sound.

***

“You are a person who hold certain values and standards for herself if your lines are straight,” my mother clarified years later on a phone call. In the 35 years since her first landing, she has lost most of her accent. The harshest edges of her Beijing vowels have sanded into a timidity that often solicits a “What did you say?” or “Speak UP!” Her grammar, however, is more stubborn. Her subjects and verbs often fail to agree. As a near-constant reminder of her otherness, my brother makes a game of catching these grammatical slips. She’s never too bothered. Sometimes, I think her grammar mistakes are a subconscious attempt at maintaining her mother tongue.

“Your handwriting tells something about your character. So if your handwriting is sloppy, you are probably sloppy in your condact,” she said on the phone. She was right, conduct is better said as condact; it is the way you act. ”

“So, each character has character — they are living things,” I said. My mother had birthed me in assured, heavy breaths, but I was born asthmatic and my calligraphy was coated in mucus.

She didn’t respond so I revised what I had said, using more words to mean less: “I mean, a writer’s handwriting, whether it’s steady or shaky, shows her personality.”

The physical: I imagined her nod, her pause. Picturing me, she must have softened.

The visual: “You know, you should practice calligraphy when you come back for Thanksgiving.

The essential sound: “Of course, dang ran (当然).”

***

My mother has instituted a new push for calligraphy while I have been away. I learn this when I last visit, just before I head back to Cambridge. My brother, nearly 15 and a half-head taller than me, is the primary target.

“Stay, do calligraphy with me,” my mother commands him from an armchair picked up while at an artists’ residency in Maine. She likes the polyester moose patchwork.

“No, come on,” he responds from the doorway, discount Yeezys already on socked feet and hand turning doorknob.

“You promised. Keep your promise,” she reminds him. She knows I am leaving and that he is beginning to follow.

He rolls our eyes and eventually does as she says, trudging back into the house. He moves that invisible blockage and, without a sound, opens that obstructed drawer.

— Magazine writer Rose C. Giroux can be reached at rose.giroux@thecrimson.com.