假手于人
When Qingyun Tang walked into the house, Old Tang was bent over, cutting bamboo into strands. Heat was rising in indistinct waves from the stove where a clay pot stood, filled with simmering sausage, green beans, and white rice.
“Back home so late again? Come and eat,” said Old Tang, lifting his eyes and peering at Qingyun’s reflection in the mirror just above its frame. The girl had short floppy hair, thin suspenders holding up her jeans, and large headphones hanging around her neck, spewing what sounded to him like gibberish.
“I’ve already eaten outside.” Qingyun walked over to the bamboo sofa to lie down and pulled out her phone. The chain around her wrist jingled loudly.
“Food from outside is not as good as food from home. Come on, at least eat a little if you don’t eat it all. It’s green beans and sausage clay pot rice.” Old Tang stopped cutting with the knife in his hand and, by the light of the yellow lamp, examined the delicate strands of bamboo. The green part of the bamboo stems, which he had split so the yellow core was removed, was tough and strong, yet only half an inch thick. He had then further split it eight times into thin strips, carefully cut, which were all thin enough to be so translucent that you could read the small print of the evening newspaper through it if you held it up to the lamp.
Old Tang was trained in the art of bamboo craftsmanship and had finished his apprenticeship in the craft when he was just sixteen. Now, he had been weaving bamboo for forty-one years, and he was a master.
Qingyun dawdled, taking her time to get up and scoop a small bowl of green beans and a handful of rice dripping with pepper grains into her bowl.
“Why aren’t you eating any sausage?” Old Tang lifted the intricate bamboo crock cover on the table to reveal a dish of preserved cabbage.
The cabbage had been soaked and preserved by Old Tang himself over a month ago, and the sausage had also been made by him last winter. Thirty-five pounds of lean meat, fifteen pounds of fat, everything diced and sliced with his skillful knife: lantern pepper, regular pepper, bright green sun-dried peppers, then passed through a grinder to form little tubes, then, with just the tips of the chopsticks, pushed carefully into little sausage cases, before being hung out on the balcony to dry. Because there were not many people in his family, the sausages lasted a long time. Since the sausage had been hanging to dry for quite some time, their surface was now covered with an ashy substance. When they were steamed, they were also brown, no longer the striking bright, oily red they had been while hanging from the window outside. Regardless, Old Tang felt that anything made by hand at home was bound to be better than anything bought from a store outside. As for what exactly made it better, he could not say.
“Next year, don’t do it yourself anymore. You’ll just tire yourself out. If you don’t want to eat store-bought ones, then take the meat, bring it to the market, and use the machine there,” said Qingyun, picking at the pepper grains while looking at her phone. “It’s electric, and specially made for grinding meat and making sausages.”
“What machine!” Old Tang’s hands gathered the strands of bamboo, but because his hands were shaking, they clattered to the ground. He wanted to stand up in protest but found himself paralyzed, glued to the chair.
“Dad!” Qingyun threw down her chopsticks. “Another headache?”
Old Tang strained wordlessly for the teapot. Qingyun hurriedly handed it to him, and Old Tang gurgled and drank until beads of sweat rolled down the furrows all over his wrinkled face. He seemed to calm down a little.
“You’d better go check on it earlier. It’s fine to leave these alone for now.” Qingyun whispered.
“Don’t bother, I have my own tally.” Old Tang bent down and, not raising his head even once, began picking up the bamboo strands one by one. Qingyun picked up the rice grains silently. Between them, neither issued a sound.
The Tang family did not watch much television. For decades, after nightfall, the house was filled, in the early evening, with the sounds of Qingyun doing her homework—the rustle of pen and paper, while the later part of the evening would see the house filled with the sounds of Qingyun practicing guzheng, the plucked strings of the instrument resounding. These days, the sounds of keyboard and mouse were more likely, crackling on into the night as it got late. Interspersed with this was the rustling sounds of Old Tang cutting bamboo, making it into cylinders, weaving it into different patterns, and polishing. The sound of cars honking on the street and the music played by the little provisions shop in the alley made him feel frustrated and anxious, and it was only the subtle sounds made by his own hands and the objects he was working with that allowed him to concentrate and escape, to pretend that he had returned to his old home near the forest, where the wind rustled through the bamboo leaves.
“Leave it.” The sound of water from the washbasin. Old Tang scolded, “Young lady, leave it. Hands made for playing the guzheng would get coarse by doing chores like washing up.”
“Your hands are more valuable than mine,” argued Qingyun, using the cylinders to brush the bowl. “You’re able to weave bamboo using one hundred and eighty different methods, all by hand. Isn’t that more impressive than playing the guzheng?”
Old Tang didn’t say anything. He had started his apprenticeship at the age of fifteen and became a master at the age of twenty, and even his own master had said that he, Tang Hong, was the most accomplished bamboo craftsman he had ever seen. At that time in the old countryside, bamboo craftsmen had a good life. People who farmed the fields needed bamboo rakes, bamboo dustpans for drying grain, bamboo curtains for hanging in the summer, bamboo mats to sleep on, and bamboo cases for hand warmers. He still remembered the couplet that decorated the front door of his store: Branches and vines are shaped into tools, whether square or round; we, too, are shaped into worthy things of use. At that time, he took great pride in his role as a bamboo craftsman and had great regard for his craft. Craftsmen made an honest living, neither stealing nor robbing. He thought he was set for life and wouldn’t have to worry about making a living. Little had he anticipated the world of today.
Old Tang reached his hand out to examine it. The many years of learning the art of a hundred and eighty methods of weaving bamboo had left his hands with cracks, scars, and bruises. The cold Chengdu winters also gave him frostbite, aggravating the cracks and making them itchy and painful, and no matter what medicinal balms he used, they never relieved his hands. But it was not frostbite that made his heart feel like it had been scratched by a cat’s claw.
“Dad, next weekend, I want to bring Xu Xiao over for a meal,” Qingyun said as she finished wiping the table and washing the rag. “We’ll just eat at the restaurant downstairs and come back up here for tea afterward.”
Old Tang frowned.
“Oh alright, alright, we’ll eat at home, okay? Anyway, he keeps saying he wants to come and see you working at your craft. Maybe you could even take on a disciple!”
“Disciple?” Old Tang snorted. Since 1977, when he first started working at the bamboo factory, and in the two decades or more that he’d practiced his art, how many disciples had he taken on? But how many still practiced the craft today? Not to mention, the way young people were these days, they couldn’t even sit still long enough to concentrate, not to mention learn the nuances of the art of bamboo weaving. Even his own daughter, who grew up watching him work, had never even tried her hand at it once, and was completely ignorant of the art. Take on a disciple?
It had gotten late, and Qingyun went back to her room. Old Tang was still under his lamp, his blade still open in his hand, but, instead of working, he simply sat and stared. Outside the window, the noise of commerce filled the street, and the glaring neon lights and shadows distracted passersby with their brilliance. Times had indeed changed, but at the bottom of the heart, there was always a shard of something hard, something solid and immovable.
Those with skills that the world requires prosper, while those without those skills are trapped with nowhere to go. Bamboo implements are cheap and lowly, unlike objects and precious things made of jade or silver. His master had said that if you wanted to be able to make a good living, to make a name for yourself, you need to rely on your own two hands. To this saying, Old Tang had tacked on, perhaps unconsciously, that no machine could equal the skill and finesse of a master craftsman of the art of bamboo. He just refused to believe it possible.
When I first came to New York City six years ago, I wandered around with no regard as to where I would end up. At the Rubin Museum of Art, my fingers stroked a tapestry from the Himalayas, and at a small Ethiopian restaurant, I rolled sour injera bread with tiny holes in it that evoked the texture of honeycomb. Truly, you can find something from every corner of the world in this city. In the subway, faces that emerged were varied and diverse, and in the plaza, every hand raised was a different color. After the initial shock subsided, I tried to find a common essence behind the differences, to find something abstract in common. This is the way I understand the world. It is the essence of my profession.
I studied applied mathematics at the Courant Institute. Applied mathematics is about abstraction and induction. If the beauty of pure mathematics lies in the creation of pure patterns in a concise system, unencumbered in any way by reality, as the mathematician G. H. Hardy said, or even the physical world itself, then applied mathematics is, I’m afraid, ugly, and concerned with trivialities. What I am after is not a perfect crystal in the void, nor a creativity comparable to that of a painter or a poet, but an explanation, a model, a new perspective that arises after careful observation and profound reflection. With this perspective, even ordinary things take on unimaginably rich layers and wonderful patterns may be observed.
In my second year, I started to decide on my research direction. Wall Street is the best testing ground for applied mathematics. The ever-changing market fluctuations and the richness and diversity of investment portfolios require precise descriptions in the language of mathematics. The pricing theory of securities was modeled by stochastic differential equations, and the value-at-risk of stocks was predicted by Monte Carlo methods. The models we play with in the lab, just a few miles away from the world’s largest financial market in terms of volume, become real, huge risks, and commensurate huge returns. Hundreds of the brightest brains are fighting it out on this battlefield, and hundreds of megabytes of data are being captured, analyzed, and modeled as they speed through fiber optic cables. But for me, that’s not interesting enough.
The research question I chose to answer was regarding the brain itself. In essence, it was not very different from the research my classmates were doing. If we look at the financial markets as a giant brain, then each trading decision that is made can be seen as a single disbursement of individual neurons, and each flow of information is analogous to the transmission of impulses between synapses. Deciphering the transmission process of a certain external stimulus along the “neural pathways” is also equivalent to deciphering the market shock that a certain piece of news may trigger. Understanding that the actual human brain is much more difficult and more interesting than understanding the financial markets. Not only because the average volume of transactions in the New York Stock Exchange is just forty thousand per second, whereas the human brain has millions of signals passing through it per second. But more importantly, the brain is not the only organ we use for this.
During my first year at the Courant Institute, I took an introductory neurology course in the medical school. In the class, I saw a diagram of a longitudinal section of the human brain, and above each brain region, other organs were drawn, in proportion to the size of the area of the brain responsible for the motor and sensory functions of each organ. This schematic diagram is called a cortical homunculus. On the diagram, I saw a hand that took up a larger proportion of the brain than the entire lower half of the body.
I have never forgotten that lesson. The old professor said in an incomprehensible Eastern European accent that the hand is the most delicate and complex organ that human beings have. There are a million nerve fibers in the human hand, a number unmatched in any limb of any other animal. The human being thus has the most complex and special functional relationship between organs, namely the connection between the hand and the brain. In addition, the human hand has an extremely special and delicate group of nineteen small muscles, each with a unique degree of freedom of movement. I reach out, flex my hands, and tighten them into fists again, imagining a torrent of data rushing into my brain at one hundred meters per second, lighting up one neuron after another, shining like a star.
The bamboo weaving factory was reorganized in 2003. The factory, which had employed five hundred people, was streamlined to less than one hundred workers. The old hands who had been doing it all their lives, and the young apprentices who only had a few years’ experience, were all asked to leave. At the time, Old Tang was such a skilled hand at bamboo that he thought he would easily avoid this round of layoffs, but sadly, at the last minute, a relative of the director was given a spot in the quota instead of him, and Old Tang was forced out of his job.
His old colleagues lamented that if only he had presented two high quality Jiaozi brand cigarettes, or a bottle of Luzhou baijiu liquor to the right person, he would almost definitely have been able to stay on. But at the time, Old Tang was still young and stubborn, with an artistic temperament and a temper that refused to let him seek help from anyone. He thought he should be allowed to stay simply on account of his high degree of skill and craftsmanship. After all, which colleague at the factory could dispute that he was a highly skilled Master? With his skill, even if he lost his job at the factory, it was impossible to imagine that he would starve.
Reality hit him as he watched the decades-old company sign get replaced by a sign for a private limited company, thus changing its standing as a government brand. The cool wind that blew the street full of Chinese parasol leaves, flittering and clattering, blew just as cold a wind in his empty heart. That day he did not ride his bike, instead pushing it slowly along the south bank of the river, and, after he had passed the second ring road viaduct, he spotted the smoke spouting from the towering cranes, busy in the act of changing his city. When did his city change so much?
It was painfully obvious to Old Tang why he had been laid off. Although ostensibly the management had said the benefits of bamboo were not obvious enough, and that the staff were redundant, in the end, it was simply because bamboo weaving was far too labor intensive to be cost-effective. To make the same product, say, a rice sieve, required a skilled factory weaver a full day of work, whereas at the plastics factory, the same sieve would take just minutes to produce. Although the plastic was coarser, the holes rougher, and the feel less warm and inviting than bamboo, how many people would be willing to fork out a few times the price just to have the same item made out of bamboo?
Not to mention that, if you let the machines run for a few extra hours, you could double your output, whereas human workers needed to stay up until the light ran out, and when the sun set, blurry human eyes could not make out the fine, supple bamboo strands. Although he was reluctant to admit it, Old Tang had to say that even though machines could not attain the complexity and finesse of his bamboo weaving, in terms of speed, the machine was a million times better than any bamboo craftsman, no matter how skilled.
His old colleagues told him that these days, it was even possible to get out of Sichuan Province on a train or plane. A journey that used to take a whole month now took a mere few hours. How could a bamboo craftsman, used to laboring for a whole month to make a single item, keep up with the increasing speed and relentless change of times like these? He had to face it: their time had passed, and this age had replaced them so swiftly, they hadn’t even had time to react.
A few of them left the factory with tens of thousands of yuan from the compensation they received. Some had enough savings and contacts to start motorcycle taxis or open grocery stores. The vast majority seemed to knock into insurmountable walls in every direction, losing all their money, and were reduced to doing odd jobs anywhere they could find them, working as security guards, masseuses, dishwashers, or vegetable sellers. The former bamboo artisans were now doing whatever they found their hand at, doing anything they could to survive. The only one who still refused to relinquish his bamboo carving knife was Old Tang.
Old Tang decided to invest tens of thousands of yuan, plus all the tens of thousands he had saved up over the course of twenty years, in opening his own store. He leased a small store on a tourist street where people came to buy gifts and antique wares and put up a sign saying “Chengdu Bamboo Weavers” above the door. From the moment he hung up that sign, it bought him another seventeen years in this line of business. Old Tang no longer worked for a factory, weaving coarse woven textiles, mats, and other household goods. Now, he specialized in intricate weaves and luxury products. Machines may be good at being quick and fast, and Old Tang recognized that. But it was different with fine work. This required finesse.
Bamboo weaving using the plants’ fibers that were split as fine as silk is a craft unique to the city of Chengdu. All the skills that Old Tang had picked up over the years from the old masters in the village had really gone to waste in the factory since they were seldom required, but fortunately, with practice, these skills came back to him easily. The thicker weaves, using coarser bamboo, were the foundation of the art of bamboo, but these fine skills of manipulating thin threads of bamboo were like the pinnacle of a beautiful, jeweled pagoda. Bamboo is inherently tough and strong, but when the fibers are separated into fine threads, they are soft and pliable, and unable to hold their shape on their own. So porcelain or silver teapots and tea bowls are used as a base on which to do the delicate weaves. This is called bamboo weaving on a base. Each item contains intricate designs so that every inch of its surface is woven with a different pattern, all depending on the individual artisan’s judgment and experience. This was not something that could be made by machine. Although he had left his master a few decades ago, in terms of fine bamboo weaving, few people could equal his skill since few people had received such training. In Old Tang’s own eyes, there was none who met his standard. This was Old Tang’s conviction.
Sadly, although his work was excellent, business was not so good.
The antiques and gift shopping street’s location was less than ideal, and his small store was in an obscure corner. In the dim darkness of the evening, a single lamp illuminated Old Tang. He was in the middle of making an intricately woven bamboo tea set. The weave was so tight that he could accommodate twelve strands of bamboo within a centimeter. That was what was required to certify it a fine grade bamboo weave.
Old Tang had not yet found a buyer for the set. It had been an entire month since the last tea ware was sold. He was idle for two days but felt so terrible lying idle that he went to the wholesale market to put together a range of white porcelain that he could sell as a set to wrap in bamboo. For Old Tang, to weave bamboo was like playing basketball for a basketball player or practicing guzheng for a musician. A single day of missing his practice caused his hands to feel raw, and his heart to feel troubled.
The year he was laid off, it wasn’t like it never crossed Old Tang’s mind to do something else. But the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that if he could do anything, he would still choose to weave bamboo. In the first few years of his business, he was losing money every year. Even Qingyun’s school fees were paid with borrowed money. Even when his wife divorced him, he was still unable to let go of his craft. With one hand he grabbed his daughter, while the other hand still grasped his bamboo. When he got busy, he even brought his child to the store. By the time he had finally gotten a little famous for his work, Qingyun had grown up. They had a better life, but by then he had grown old. Under the clear light of his lamp, the bamboo his hands were weaving spread like a net. These days, when he looked back at the decades of life, he increasingly felt that while he wove, he was also part of a net.
A car honked.
Old Tang frowned and looked up. When he chose the store in the obscure corner of the tourist town, one consideration was the cheaper rent. But another was also that it gave him peace and quiet. Drunks were unlikely to be found this deep in the alley, and the quiet gave him the peace to concentrate on work.
“Shifu, it’s me, Renjie Liu!” The car window rolled down, and the driver took off his sunglasses and waved, “Still recognize me?”
Old Tang opened his mouth, wanting to respond, but failed to make a sound. This disciple of his he remembered as being intelligent. However, when they worked together in the factory setting, his lively mind kept getting distracted with all kinds of schemes, so that he was completely unable to sit still and concentrate. One hot day, when Old Tang was sweating buckets in the factory while working on his weaving, Renjie was running to-and-fro, presenting Old Tang with a glass of chilled water. It turned out that this enterprising young man had secretly installed a refrigerator in the factory and was selling cans of soft drinks at one yuan a can to his colleagues, making more than any of them would on their salaries alone. Of course, the moment there was a series of layoffs, he was one of the first to be let go, and he went off to do some other kind of business. Old Tang had lost this particular apprentice a long time ago, and yet, the moment he heard him call him “Shifu,” he found himself tongue-tied.
“This place can be really hard to find!” said Renjie as he entered the door, looked around, and pulled up a nearby bamboo chair to sit on. “How’s business?”
“It’s good enough.” Old Tang continued to weave his bamboo. In the soft glow of the lamp, he saw that the skinny young boy he had known had since grown a beer belly, and that his business suit was straining to contain it. He himself was still wearing the old gray uniform from the bamboo factory that had laid him off.
“Don’t you wish to do something else? Come over to my company and do something with me.”
“I’m a craftsman. Not as good as you businessmen,” Old Tang replied, not looking up at him.
“A craftsman lives by the work of his hands. Don’t think too much! Isn’t that what you used to tell me? I still remember, you know!” Renjie lit a cigarette, leaned nearer to Old Tang to watch his weaving, and said, admiringly, “Woah, it’s like silk! That’s unbelievably fine!”
“I didn’t teach you these skills.” Old Tang put down his work, coughed twice in response to the smoke, and asked, “Why are you here?”
“Can’t I come just to see you?” Renjie put out the cigarette, “But if you must get straight to the point, then yes, there is a reason I’m here.”
“I won’t join your company,” said Old Tang, bowing his head. Renjie had called him on the phone before, wanting to hire him as a consultant. But Old Tang simply could not imagine putting down his bamboo weaving and wanted nothing to do with machines. He had already hung up twice on him and had never expected him to track him down and turn up at his door. But even if he begged him a third time, he still wouldn’t go. Old Tang had already made up his mind.
“I know.” Renjie smiled. “Our company intends to sponsor the Cultural Heritage Invitationals Exhibition. It’s a joint project with the Sichuan Department of Culture, and I immediately thought of you. Since you refuse to take my calls, I have no choice but to come here in person.”
“Bamboo weaving counts?” asked Old Tang, his eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Of course! I’ve really not seen an equal to your exceptional fine silk weaves. The judging is primarily based on dexterity and complexity of skill, and your hundred and eighty methods of bamboo weaving definitely count as complex. The more methods you can show off, the better!”
Old Tang said nothing. In the past two years, his headaches were becoming more and more frequent, and the pain made his vision blurry and his hands shaky. Pain he could tolerate, and he was also used to hard work and setbacks. But the thought of the craft he took decades to master being lost, little by little, was truly the most bitter fate for him to face. Old Tang had long thought that, while he still was able, he really needed to make a masterpiece to leave as a legacy, so that it would still endure for those who came after him, even if he was no longer around. Renjie’s offer spoke straight to his heart’s desire.
“How about it, Shifu? Will you think about it? In three and a half months, give me a call if you agree.” He put on his sunglasses, strode out of the little alley, and turned around for one last time. “I’ll be waiting!”
Old Tang nodded his head, already planning what he would need to do. The sound of Renjie’s car had long faded away when he remembered that tomorrow Qingyun would be bringing Xu Xiao home for dinner, and he had not even started to prepare the dishes he’d be serving. He rushed to his bicycle to ride to the market. Fortunately, he managed to pick up two celtuces and a handful of vegetables, including Chinese cabbage, and half a braised duck before closing time. He hung the duck from the handlebars of his bicycle and rode home slowly, humming songs from a Chinese opera as he went.
During my fifth year in New York, I felt overwhelmed for the first time.
For the past twenty years, whether it was studying for exams or fitting in during social activities, I was always able to quickly grasp the key to the puzzle and crack it with the absolute minimum of effort. Some say it’s a gift, but to me, it’s about thinking abstractly about a myriad of things, searching for the patterns that lie beneath, and applying your deductions. Just like mathematics. But that one time, I really felt as though I had hit a wall.
My thesis was about the neurology behind fine hand movements. Unlike in physiology and cognitive science, the language of computational neuroscience is mathematics and computer programming. The behavior of neurons, synapses, and neuronal networks become data that are analyzed to build mathematical models to imitate the workings of the cerebral cortex.
I don’t have to feed mice or monkeys, or insert electrodes into their motor cortices, or send questionnaires to subjects. I deal with the data itself to build the models and write the code. It is just like what quantitative analysts in the financial markets do, except that we still know next to nothing about this “market.” If you take the field of physics as an analogy, our field is still in its infancy, and has not yet seen our Galileo, much less our Newton or Einstein, when it comes to the quantifying of the human brain, much less the quantifying of the external world. It is both exciting and anxiety-provoking.
My data came from a collaboration with a group of researchers in the psychology department. Subjects followed instructions to perform certain hand movements, and MRI scans were taken, and data recorded. I mapped the hand movements to neural response signals, abstracted the key calculations, inferred the process of decision-making, built a model of the entire process, and coded algorithms to reproduce simple human fingertip movements into complex modeled signals. This was harder than I thought it would be. With millions of signals per second, identifying the signals that control hand movements is like finding a needle in a haystack. I tried various filtering algorithms and sequencing the subjects’ pulses, but the results were not good. I approached my doctoral advisor for advice, and he listened to my presentation without saying much, just inviting me to coffee after.
“You are very intelligent and very hardworking,” said my advisor. He was of Italian descent, a renowned scholar, with an outstanding mind, and discerning taste in both coffee and scientific research. I waited for him to continue with trepidation.
“However, being smart is only one aspect of doing research. Especially in this field.” He put down his cup, “Intelligence, insight, analytical ability, these can all be called talents. Talent is valuable and essential, but experience, or rather, domain knowledge, is often needed if we are to solve practical problems. It gives us a deeper understanding of the underlying structure.” He patted me on the shoulder, “Relax, I’ll let you take a break. Also, regarding the problem of detecting signals, muscle nerve signals are probably simpler to detect than central nervous system signals.”
I quickly figured out the mechanics of signal processing. But the domain knowledge my advisor spoke of still eluded me. Although I could extract stable muscle nerve impulses, the data were not significant enough to build a complete model.
I decided to take a break from work, hoping I could process things in the background like a program, as it were, while still doing my best to think. Then, one day, I casually flipped through the New York Times and came across a quote that jumped out at me.
The Devon-based [contemporary basket weaver] Hilary Burns recalls that observing Manthorpe [a master basket weaver] weave a herring cran was like “watching a dance; there was no wasted movement.” Despite the loss of this know-how, what had already vanished long before was something more profound . . .
—New York Times Style Magazine Feature: “The Enduring Appeal of Baskets” by Deborah Needleman
I stood up and paced back and forth in my dorm until darkness fell. I went downstairs and asked for a bowl of Lanzhou ramen at my regular noodle bar. The short, lanky Mexican-born boy skillfully stretched, threw, and pulled the noodles, a craft that had survived for a century and across an ocean, and, more importantly, now reinvented in a way the original inventor could never have imagined.
I graduated a year later, after handing in a computational model and prototype to my advisor. He smiled and shook my hands goodbye.
I flew back to Chengdu.
Xu arrived at their place at noon. Carrying a basket of fruit, standing in the doorway, his face was still stained with sweat despite it being the end of October. Qingyun led him into the house and fussed over him, bringing him a pair of slippers to wear and pouring him tea. But all the young man did was sit there gulping water, not saying a word.
Old Tang also said nothing, only going to the kitchen to bring out plate after plate of food. The delicate green celtuce, the deep purple Chinese cabbage, plump pink meat slices, the glistening red duck, and of course, the thinly sliced homemade sausage. Because Xu hailed from the Southern provinces where food was less spicy, Old Tang did not put too much chili in any of his dishes.
“Xu came back from abroad, and now teaches at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He is the youngest professor there.” Qingyun clipped bits of food with her chopsticks while talking.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Xu exclaimed while clipping rice toward his mouth. “I haven’t been back in China long. I’m still working toward achieving something, unlike you, Uncle, Qingyun told me, your bamboo weaving craft, now that is . . . ”
Old Tang looked at Xu’s face, reddened with embarrassment, and it reminded him of himself when he was young. He gradually felt something indescribable grow inside him. “Ah, I know I’m old. Don’t say that. Now you, on the other hand—you teach at UESTC. What do you teach there?”
“I’m in the field of neuroscience.” Xu perked up. “Let’s put it this way: If you think about it, even for an ordinary child to learn something, for example, how to type on a keyboard, takes them a certain amount of time. Not to mention specialized tasks. I study a new generation of human-computer interfaces, which aim to solve this problem. Even better, maybe machines could even . . . ”
Old Tang’s brow furrowed again. Qingyun winked urgently at Xu, and he hurriedly broke off mid-sentence. “Of course, sometimes manual skill is still irreplaceable. Mr. Lao She once said that we must use mechanical methods in large industries, and in small industries, we must preserve the skill of our hands. Things like the bamboo weaving you do, that’s irreplaceable. Handicrafts are the embodiment of the human heart, and the heart is not something that can just be mechanized.”
“That’s well put.” Old Tang chucked a chopstick’s worth of Chinese cabbage into his mouth. “Qingyun said that you were interested in bamboo weaving?”
“Yes, I have an interest.” He took his glasses off and wiped it of his sweat.
When they had finished eating, Old Tang took out his bamboo carving knife and demonstrated how he could separate a millimeter-thick strand of bamboo into four or five strands that were only the width of a human hair.
“This is called splitting to silk grade. The width of the knife varies from top to bottom, and since there’s no scale, the evenness of the width of each strand is entirely controlled by hand. See, it’s of even thickness. The cross-section of each strand is the same.”
Then, he picked up the scaffold formed from bamboo strands, fitted it over the fine white porcelain tea ware, and picked up an even finer strand of bamboo to continue weaving along the porcelain. His hands moved up and down in waves, guiding the bamboo strands, lifting and pushing, applying pressure nimbly until the bamboo strands formed a fine mesh of a layer, securely clinging to the outside of the porcelain tea ware.
“Lift, press, twist: that’s the basic technique. Whether it is plying or weaving bamboo, it is very difficult to vary the force your hands exert correctly. If you use too much strength, the weave around the porcelain would get distorted into the wrong shape or even break. With too little force, the bamboo will split apart and not hold its shape. When it comes to weaving on a base like this, there is no fixed formula. Every inch is different, and everything depends on an individual’s discernment and experience. If you look at this weave carefully, you would be certain that no machine could make anything equal to it.”
Xu didn’t seem to have heard anything. He was staring at Old Tang’s hands.
“I’ll show you the ones that I’ve finished.” Old Tang pointed to the porcelain cup and repeated himself, seeming a little out of sorts. He suspected this young man had only said he was interested in bamboo weaving to curry favor with him. And yet even Qingyun had believed him. He didn’t really want to rattle on anymore, what he did for a living was his own business. As for what Renjie had asked him to do that afternoon, Old Tang was already hatching a plan in his heart.
When Qingyun pulled Xu into her own room and the sounds of the guzheng strings being plucked gently, Old Tang decided to put the whole thing behind him.
“Dad, come, dinner is ready.” When he looked up, it was already dark. Qingyun had brought him some noodles. “He’s already gone, you didn’t even notice when he said goodbye.”
“He just left?” Old Tang was a little embarrassed.
“He even gave you a gift.” Qingyun handed over a string of beads. It was a bracelet of white chinaberries strung with a black tassel braided rope. Obviously of good quality, they were of equal size and when brought near, gave off the faint aroma of something bitter. “They were specially selected. It’s said if you wear them in winter, they can prevent frostbite. I know you treasure your hands more than anything.”
Old Tang took the bracelet and tried it on. The size was just right. He felt his heart soften a little. He also thought to himself, how likely was it that he’d accept a son-in-law as a disciple anyway? After all, he himself could barely earn a hundred yuan in a day. What he should really be worried about was disciples wanting to become sons-in-law. He would not want to let Qingyun suffer such poverty. Although the young man was a bit nerdy, at least he seemed decent, and he and Qingyun had also been together for quite a while. If they really could settle down, at least that would count as one less thing he had to worry about. As for the other matter, he would need to step up. Old Tang slowly turned his new bracelet, not noticing the faint green cast of the beads.
It has always been difficult to explain to people what I do. Ironically, this is because, unlike launching rockets or genetically engineering rice, what I do seems so simple.
“That’s it?” Qingyun asked, pursing her lips, after she saw my first demonstration. The visual demonstration was of a 3D reconstruction of a human hand picking up a credit card out of a pile of other items.
“That project took me five years to do as a doctoral student! It was only after I put in a ton of work that it even managed to pick up that credit card. If you just replace the credit card with a rubber ball, it’ll go back to not working,” I said. “You may not know this, but it’s much easier to predict the motion of a distant asteroid than it is to predict the motion of an object being pushed across a table by a model hand.”
“But robot hands in factories have been able to follow instructions for movements in an assembly line for a very long time,” Qingyun said, skeptical.
“It’s true that robot hands perform well under strictly controlled factory conditions. But the world is not an assembly line. It’s easy for people to interact with countless objects and an unpredictable environment. They can do so without thinking. But for machines, it’s extremely difficult. Why do you think that’s so?”
She tapped the desk, unconsciously playing invisible guzheng strings.
“That’s because hands are soft.” I tugged at hers.
“Hey.” She shook my hand off.
“Flexibility. Tactility. The ability of the fingers to adjust in time to changes in the surface of an object is the most efficient way for a human to interact with the world. Man has invented countless tools, but the world, robotics experts say, is still designed for human hands. The reverse is also true.”
She looked at me, then at her hands in wonder, tightening them into fists and then stretching them out again. Once, I had done the same. What appears inevitable and simple on the surface is both a trap and a shackle to our thinking. The more something appears simple and familiar, the later we as the human race come to truly understand it, because familiarity breeds contempt and stereotypes prevent us from examining simple things more closely. Such is the case when it comes to exploring our very bodies themselves. Our own bodies are like a far-off mountain, unknown and unexplored for thousands of years, despite being closer than our own skin.
“You’ve heard of the man from Qi who was afraid the sky would fall on him . . . ” I teased.
“No, I’m not worried at all.”
“The people who laughed at the man from Qi would never come to realize that classical mechanics, earth science, atmospheric science, many fields all have their origin in his very simple question. Now, like him, we have to do something similar.”
She was still bewildered. I didn’t say anything further. The first time I met her, I remembered her skillful guzheng-playing hands. But like the vast majority of people, she couldn’t grasp this new paradigm, and her father, even less so. His gaze, though different from that of my advisor, made me incredibly nervous. Although he probably saw me as a traitor who wanted to take his job, that was not my ultimate goal. I was not out to simply complete a specific, tangible job. I wanted someone to understand my purpose, at least to the extent that that was possible.
In the blink of an eye, it was now winter solstice. If Old Tang had been walking down the streets, he would not find it cold, but because he sat for long hours at home, the cold soaked straight into his bones, leaving his joints with rheumatic aches and pains. Even so, Old Tang stubbornly refused to install central heating. In fact, he did not even turn on the electric stove he did have. He was concerned that the heating would dry out the house, leading his bamboo strands to grow too brittle to weave. He had already completed about half of his project. Judging from the rate he was progressing, he would just about make the deadline, but he could not procrastinate even a little.
Old Tang blew hard on his hands, and then rubbed them together to generate heat. This year, he genuinely seemed to suffer from less frostbite. The chinaberry wood beads had already developed a shiny patina from friction and being rubbed by his hands, and his hands had swollen with water retention so that he could no longer take the bracelet off. He thought of performing one of the time-honored rituals of a Chengdu winter—eating good quality home-cooked lamb soup—and put on his jacket before heading out the door. The university term wasn’t over yet, so perhaps Xu could come.
At the market, he got a couple of pounds of lamb shank, slung it over his bicycle bars, and started thinking about the time Xu had come over for dinner. He had not even touched the Chinese cabbage, but at least Qingyun had eaten a bit of it. So he decided to select a few green celtuce. If he chopped them up and added them to the soup and boiled them until they grew tender and supple, they would make excellent comfort food. He thought about Qingyun, and how she had mentioned that Xu was a Southerner whose taste ran sweet, so he headed toward Wen Shu Fang on his bike.
The cakes and sweets at the Wen Shu Fang emporium had a decades-long reputation, especially their Peach Rose Cakes. When Qingyun was small, she used to cry because she missed her mother, and Old Tang had used those cakes to placate her. Now, Qingyun was fully grown, and her vanity meant she was watching her figure, so she didn’t eat them anymore. But Old Tang still remembered the way to the little alley where the shop could be found.
He brought the paper box back to his bike and balanced it carefully on the back of his bike, then proceeded to ride slowly and carefully. He had not come to the Wen Shu Fang area for quite a long time. The formerly run-down alley outside the courtyard wall had now been renovated to resemble an ancient street for the sake of attracting tourists, with pink and white walls, ochre roofs, and red and yellow store signs installed all over the place. It looked surprisingly lively in the gloomy winter, with many tourists and locals milling about.
Old Tang got off his bike when he got to the entrance of the renovated street. When he was laid off, the renovation of Wen Shu Fang had just been completed, and the development was just starting to advertise for tenants. At the time, others had encouraged him to set up a storefront here instead of at his current store in Song Xiao Qiao. The asking price for rent then was about three thousand RMB a month, three times the asking price for the Song Xian Xiao store, and he considered and mulled over it quite a bit before ultimately rejecting the idea.
For one thing, if business was really bad, he would have to worry about not being able to make ends meet. For another, he really did not like the noisy sounds of a bustling street—it prevented him from concentrating on work. However, in hindsight, the poor foot traffic in Song Xian Qiao meant that the street became more and more deserted, and still, despite this, rent had risen to ten thousand RMB. The first few tenants had told him that traffic at Wen Shu Fang was now very busy. Just selling silk handkerchiefs with pandas embroidered on them or kitschy Sichuan opera masks would net enough to pay the rent, as well as a tidy profit. When Old Tang heard this, he had nothing to say. He thought back on the many decades of hard work he had put in to learning his fine bamboo craft, thought through every choice he had made from the beginning to this moment. At the time he made those choices, he always thought he factored in everything carefully before making a rational decision. But in hindsight, if he had the chance to choose again, he really had no idea what he would have chosen.
Old Tang stared for a while, and then continued to ride down the street. The street featured not just handicraft stores, but also a variety of high-end teahouses and restaurants, all sporting a “vintage,” “rustic” bamboo hut look for people to eat cold noodles in. Young men and women dressed in fashionable clothing walked in and out of these establishments, and standing in the midst of them, Old Tang felt that he was the tourist.
Along the street, a black lacquered wooden door with gold trim opened, and a middle-aged man in a suit stepped out. Old Tang felt a flash of recognition. It was Renjie Liu. He did not see Old Tang but was chatting while walking toward his car. The door he had emerged out of was hiding what seemed to be a high-class club. Old Tang tried to glimpse inside, but only caught a flash of green, bamboo-like shadows.
“Manager Liu, thank you very much!” the person next to Renjie Liu said. Old Tang thought he sounded familiar.
“Professor Xu, please don’t stand for ceremony! You’re very welcome. With a young talent like you, the honor is all mine!” Renjie Liu was smiling ear to ear. Old Tang froze. He saw, through the crowd, clearly though he was at a distance, that the other person was Xu. He was wearing a dark gray tweed coat, half-frame glasses, and looked every inch the cultured gentleman. But laughing and talking with Renjie Liu, he seemed a completely different person from the red-faced young man who had sat down to dinner at his own table.
Seeing Xu get into Renjie Liu’s car and drive over, Old Tang hurriedly turned away. How did they know each other? Why were they looking at bamboo weaves together? Did Qingyun know about this? Old Tang did not dare to think too much, got on to his bike, and peddled furiously until he got home. He hadn’t ridden so fast for a long time, and when he got home and undressed, his undershirt was soaked in sweat. He sat down and looked at his half-finished bamboo weave. He didn’t stop panting.
Qingyun opened the door, “Ah, so many dishes! Wow, you also got sweets and cakes from Wen Shu Yuan!” She circled Old Tang, “You sure are sincere in welcoming your future son-in-law.”
“What son-in-law!”
“What?”
“You know what! No!” Old Tang was angry. “I don’t know what kind of people he mixes with!”
“What’s wrong with him all of a sudden? He’s a university professor—how the hell is he not good enough for the bamboo weaver’s daughter?” Qingyun exploded and took a step back, her face red with anger, “I always do what you want, but just what decade do you still think this is? Even the electric heater is not even on! It’s like I’m walking on eggshells all the time!” Her eyes were bloodshot. “Even Mum couldn’t stand you.”
Old Tang stood up to his full height, beads of sweat beading on his face. “So you look down on bamboo weavers now—” He felt a stab of pain in his head, and in a flash, he was sprawled all over the chair.
This time, the pain was stronger than it had ever been, and it would not go away. It was as though there were countless tiny bamboo strands stuck into the furrows of his brain. Old Tang wished to grit his teeth and bear it like he had every other time, but this time he was past the point of endurance.
That wonderful solstice family dinner went uneaten. Old Tang was sent to the ICU at the hospital, and then transferred to the general ward, where he stayed for four days and where his whole body was examined. In the large general ward, there was a constant stream of people coming and going. Along with the sound of doctors talking, the beeping of various instruments, the moaning of patients, the anxious inquiries of family members, and the sounds of weeping disturbed Old Tang, so that he slept fitfully, if at all. Finally, at long last, it was time for light’s out, and the hospital grew a little quieter, and still, he was disturbed by the sound of snoring coming from the next bed.
Every morning, Qingyun brought him a thermos filled with a generous amount of chicken soup, and at noon it was seafood noodles. But she refused to tell him the illness he had been diagnosed with. While peeling an apple, Old Tang got about half a question out of his mouth, but when he saw how red her eyes were, he did not continue. He knew very well that although he was still able to work, he was, after all, getting up there in years. When people grow old, like machines that have been working for a long time, they need to be oiled regularly, and human organs and body parts, used for decades, that look perfectly functional from the outside and seem to be working well, could still be atrophying or rotting away on the inside. It was only a matter of time. For the past two years, deep down he had known that he was unwell, but had been in denial, refusing to come to the hospital to confirm his suspicions.
Father and daughter faced each other, each unable to say a word, until the doctor arrived.
“So have you considered the options? We still recommend surgery first, then chemotherapy.” The doctor was quite young, and the name tag on his chest indicated that he was a neurosurgeon.
“What disease do I have?”
“The patient still doesn’t know?” The doctor wanted to tell him but held back. “You need to talk it over properly and consider all your options. Of course, if you want to keep to really conservative treatments, you can also go that route . . . after all, you are on the older side and the condition is complex.”
The doctor walked away. Old Tang looked at Qingyun and said nothing, just waiting for her to speak. The girl had been biting her lips the whole time. Finally, she could hold back no longer, and tears fell from her eyes. Through her sobs, Old Tang made out that his intermittent headaches and fainting spells had been due to a brain tumor. Although technology had advanced greatly, his disease was still incurable. At his present age, the prognosis for survival in the next five years was bad, at only ten percent; the average length he was expected to live was less than two years.
It was just a few numbers, but the effect they had on Old Tang was to make his heart feel as though a rope were tightening around it, squeezing tighter and tighter. Qingyun had dissolved into a crying mess, leaving tissues all over the floor. “I’ll take you to Beijing, to Shanghai for the best treatment.”
“Forget it.” Old Tang surprised himself with how calm he was. “Old age, sickness, and death, these things can’t be helped.”
“No . . . ” Qingyun’s tears kept falling.
Old Tang said nothing, only reaching out to smooth her hair. Qingyun’s hair was good, black, bright, and thick. When she was young, he braided her hair every day. With all the fancy hairstyles: princess hair, ponytail braid, fishbone braid, twisted braid, many people could not believe that the little girl was brought up by her father. Now that Qingyun was taller than him and had been for more than a decade, she no longer asked him to braid her hair.
“Let’s go home first.”
“Dad . . . ”
“Let’s go home first. It’s just a small request . . . please, can’t you do even this small thing for me?” Old Tang deliberately raised his voice to appear as though he were losing his temper, “What’s the point of living at the hospital?” At this, his voice seemed to crack a little.
The moment Old Tang arrived home, he picked up more than half of the bamboo weaves he had completed. Although it had only been a few days in the hospital, his hands were already itching to work again. The second layer of weaving was almost done, and he had reached the part that would bind off the weave. In silken bamboo weaves, the binding off is also known as “locking off.” In high quality weaves the final strand is hidden. The excess bamboo is clipped off, and then a thin layer of craft glue is applied onto the strand with a brush at the spot where it would be bound, or “locked off.” The way the cut is made must also be done with care and precision. Cut too short, and the head would be exposed, but cutting more could endanger the structure of the weave and cause it to unravel. Old Tang took out a small file and meticulously filed off the exposed head little by little and felt a little of his former spirit return to his body.
As the moon waxed to fullness, the artwork gradually started to take shape. His anxious heart, which had felt as though it were hanging by a thread, also seemed to settle down, coming to rest a little more steadily in his breast. Invitations to exhibit at the show were supposed to pass public review as well as the province’s panel of experts in the field, but Old Tang, not knowing what other contenders were doing, decided not to worry too much about the process. He also didn’t return Renjie Liu that phone call. He simply thought that as long as he did his best with the work, and presented it at the time of the exhibition, things would naturally fall into place.
Qingyun stammered something about Xu wanting to come and see him, but Old Tang ignored it. What he had seen in Wen Shu Fang that day, he had never related to Qingyun. Even though he was not entirely certain what he had seen, his heart felt like it had been tied into a knot. In any case, he had better not think too much—it was all too overwhelming.
Three days before the launch of the exhibition, Old Tang finished the artwork. He checked it over carefully, and it was all to his satisfaction, so he put on his coat and went out the door. For the first time in months, he felt lighthearted enough to enjoy some time in a teahouse, so he took a different turn on his bike and headed to Huanhua Brook.
These days, the famous teahouses that had long lined the brook had been transformed into high-class establishments, with expensive menus. In the past, he always favored the quieter ones, but now even these were newly renovated and serving high-grade, expensive teas. At night, they were even transformed into bars playing loud music and serving alcohol. No one drank the traditional Lao San Hua tea anymore. In the several crowded parks he passed on his way, he could hear the sounds of noisy mahjong games, making him feel uneasy.
Old Tang sat down in a small courtyard, soaking up the rare sunshine. The sun shone through the gaps of the leaves of the Chinese parasol trees, green and gold, spilling into deep and shallow shadows. He gathered his cotton jacket around him, closed his eyes, and curled up in the bamboo chair. The guzheng on the stage began to play, and he was almost lulled to sleep.
“Old Tang! It’s been a long time since you’ve last come here!”
He opened his eyes to see the teahouse owner pouring him a bowl of tea from a large, long-spouted copper teapot before bringing it to his table. “Still weaving bamboo?”
“Yes.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Qingyun too, and I was wondering what happened to the two of you.” Qingyun sometimes played the guzheng here. When she performed on stage, she wouldn’t be wearing her usual jeans, instead putting on her earrings and bracelets, putting on her elegant full-length spring green dress, and lowering her brow while she plucked the strings, her fingertips fluttering. According to Qingyun, she had met Xu Xiao for the first time in this teahouse. Old Tang could understand that for sure. When Qingyun played the guzheng, every teahouse guests’ eyes were riveted on her. Even modest Old Tang himself could not hold back his praise when he saw her at that guzheng.
“Young people are busy with their own things.” The thought of Xu had upset Old Tang a little. It was like poking a sore spot, and yet his suspicion was something he couldn’t really explain.
“Has she found herself a boyfriend? I’ve told you before, a girl like Qingyun, with her looks and her talent at the guzheng, and not to mention, she’s filial to boot . . . like I said, don’t be too worried about her or try to control her too much.” The teahouse owner peeled a tangerine while he talked. “Your little girl has grown up. Your thinking is too old-fashioned . . . ”
Old Tang coughed a couple of times, so the teahouse owner did not continue. The guzheng on the stage was now playing “Lament of the Peach Garden,” the song from the part of the story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms where Zhang Fei had just received news of his dear sworn brother Guan Yu’s death. Zhang Fei rushed for a day and a night to Chengdu, begging his other sworn brother Liu Bei to appoint the troops to attack the Eastern State of Wu. The two sworn brothers meet outside the city and weep for their fallen third brother. Zhang Fei sang this song of sorrow for his older sworn brother, lamenting the vicissitudes of age. Old Tang was moved, his heart troubled by the song, and found he could not sit there any longer. So he rode his bike home and opened the door to hear Qingyun clattering around inside her room.
Old Tang sat down and stood up, then sat down and stood up again, before finally making up his mind and knocking on Qingyun’s door. Although he could hear the guzheng being played inside, the door did not open.
“Qingyun, I want to tell you something.” Old Tang finally opened his mouth. But only the plucking strings of the guzheng replied.
Old Tang was both a little angry and a little anxious, so he twisted the handle.
The door was not locked.
“Why wouldn’t you open the door?” Old Tang asked.
But there was no one was in the room. On the ebony instrument, the delicate strings pulsated, and music flowed from it. When Old Tang looked closer, he saw tortoiseshell nails were plucking the strings, as though an invisible person were playing the guzheng with invisible hands.
Old Tang felt that the sky was spinning. He felt his legs buckle under him, and he hit the speakers with a thud.
It had been quite some time since Qingyun came to see me. Her father had been hospitalized. Data package updates received were less frequent, but the line of communication was still stable. I offered to visit him, but she didn’t give permission, and so I didn’t try to force it.
When I was still working in the Courant Institute, the psychology department’s experimental animal laboratory was just upstairs from where I worked. Of all the animals in there, three Tibetan macaques were the most precious. They had been raised since infancy as lab animals and each was worth tens of thousands of dollars. They were experimented on four times a week, for four hours each time. The experiments did not last for very long, but each time they had to be immobilized, their hands and feet tied down while electrodes were inserted below their cerebral cortices. Every few months, animal rights activists who opposed animal experimentation would hold signs outside the building in protest. They were not being unreasonable. These monkeys’ only purpose in life was to be experimented on, and they also sacrificed their lives for the sake of these experiments, when their cerebral cortex was exposed to the electrodes for long periods of time. Most lab monkeys die from the complications of infection within a few years.
Although my prototype was lightweight and noninvasive, since it only took in signals through contact with human skin, collecting EMG signals without causing actual damage to the subject, I was no different from my colleagues in the psychology department when it came to ignoring the will of the subjects of my experiments.
Renjie Liu was the flip side of it all. I was not one to refuse novel sources of funding for my research, but his ways and methods of getting things done were particularly unorthodox. Perhaps these were simply the rules of the game. The many stories told by my classmates who worked on Wall Street seemed to suggest this. My aim had always been to understand, to integrate, in order to reach a new paradigm in my mind. Because what I envisioned was more than just a doctoral thesis, a product, or even just a theory. A vast new paradigm, a completely new world filled with infinite possibility, must necessarily accommodate all the dimmer corners of reality. I just hoped I hadn’t sacrificed too much.
On the day Qingyun came to me, I was in the middle of correcting the fit of the prototype. She didn’t sit down. Instead, tears fell continuously as she spoke. “Neuroscience is your field, and even you can’t do anything about it?”
“I merely do the calculations,” I laughed bitterly, “Extraction, abstraction, mathematical modeling: It is called applied technology, but it is still just a means of understanding the theory. It’s like Newton coming up with the three laws of motion and giving us a way to understand physics and our external reality.”
“But, other programmers’ AIs can play Go and even win the world championship! You’re working in this field, but you still can’t do anything to help?”
Little had I known that even after doing applied math, the old problems would still be present. I was reminded once again of the G. H. Hardy quote that the most beautiful mathematics would have no application in the real world. When I had first heard that quote, I had laughed at his stubbornness, but now my heart was in knots because of it. The application of mathematics to build a new framework for understanding the human self, which he would probably have deemed already too “useful,” was still miles away from solving Qingyun’s very real problem.
I didn’t care. When Descartes invented the Cartesian coordinate system and Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, I didn’t care either, because the new perspectives and methodologies they brought to humanity itself was enough to put us all in awe. But at this very moment, I could find no way to face Qingyun.
“Human perception, including the connection between the hand and the brain, can be seen as an interface between human beings and the external world. It is a layer, the same way that text and images are a layer between people, or how the keyboard and mouse are a layer between people and machines. What I do is to mathematize and generalize this layer so that eventually one can get rid of the interface . . . ” I struggled to find the words, “to move matter with the mind, like . . . qigong?”
But this was useless to her.
On the screen, the prototype flickered on and on. After she left, I thought long and hard and picked up my phone to dial a number.
Old Tang didn’t have the energy to try to understand what had gone wrong. His head still hurt from time to time, but he insisted that he wouldn’t go to hospital no matter what his condition; instead, he downed vat after vat of thickly brewed tea and soldiered on. When it came to bamboo weaving, the most important and difficult part was to lock the final strand securely; and so, in the same way, he would give it his all to the end, not stop at ninety percent. Tomorrow was the Exhibition for the Invitationals—no matter what, he had to finish the work he had started.
The crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, and the days were short while the nights were long. Even before dawn lightened the sky, Old Tang gathered up his artwork and left the house. He didn’t ride his old faithful bike, instead getting Qingyun to hail him a taxi. The item that he hugged in his arms was not big, but it was wrapped in several protective layers. He carried it into the car.
“Why are you going to Chongzhou so early in the morning?” The driver looked at Old Tang, wrapped in his tattered cotton jacket, “What are you up to?”
“Exhibition.” Old Tang stroked the precious artwork in his arms. “Handicraft exhibition.”
“Handicrafts.” The driver nodded, “What a time-consuming thing to do . . . and a waste of expensive taxi fare . . . ”
“Whether it’s a big or small thing, someone has to do it.” Old Tang didn’t feel like making small talk.
“I suppose so.” The driver nodded, “Our fates are determined by our talents—each according to our ability, right? Sought-after, highly skilled talents get sought-after rewards and earn big bucks. Look at me, for example. I can’t do anything else, but I know the roads well, and I know how to drive . . . I know the maps like the back of my hand, and so I drive a taxi. You, you have your handicraft skills. Maybe it’s a little difficult to make a living . . . ”
Old Tang did not answer again. After a while, the taxi had quietly left the old town behind. It had been several decades. He had gone from being the famous young bamboo artisan whose name was known in every village for miles around, to the respected old master craftsman at the bamboo factory where everyone called him “shifu,” and now, here he was. He thought his work was refined, and that he had reached the pinnacle of his craft, but the people and things that surrounded him now confused him more than ever.
The car drove for an hour, to a town just beyond Chongzhou. This place resembled his old home a lot. Just on the edges of the town was a lush bamboo grove. It had been an age since he walked in such a bamboo grove. Walking through the fine mist, watching the sky gradually turn white, Old Tang touched the cold, green bamboo on its nodes, listening to the wind playing in the leaves of the bamboo, the sound of the gurgling stream as it ran over a gap, and was struck with a feeling of timelessness.
The exhibition hall was located deep in the bamboo forest and took the form of a circular house with many long corridors. It was said that it had been built by a professor from Shanghai, and although the material was prefabricated in a factory with machines, and the structure had been assembled in just a few weeks, it had won an international award. Old Tang walked one round around the exhibition hall and noted the delicate traditional cascading green tiles, which reminded him of old Chinese mansions, but the ultramodern steel and wood structure and the shiny floor-to-ceiling windows made him feel a little uncomfortable. Through the window, the green trees in the central courtyard and the green fields and hills on the outside of the building unfolded in layers to his eyes, like a painting. It felt far more exposed and transparent than traditional old, dark mansions, and this made him feel a little ill at ease.
The exhibition officially began at ten o’clock. The Shu (traditional Sichuanese) brocade and embroidery was spread out for all to see, so bright and intricate they dazzled the eye. The lacquer art was carved and inlaid with a multitude of beautiful and intense colors. There were also exhibits for silver thread embroidery, sugar painting, traditional New Year paintings, paper cutting, and various forms of printing and dyeing. The bamboo weaving exhibits, moldering in a dim corner, looked rather dull. The expert judges arrived, and Old Tang clutched his thermos and stood waiting in front of his artwork.
There were quite a lot of bamboo weaving entries, and there would only be one award in that category. Old Tang’s eyes followed the judges. The first piece they looked at was a bamboo pagoda that stood a whole foot high. It was a four-story pagoda, with two layers of four-sided flying eaves. The upper roof was octagonal and reached a graceful tip. On every layer of the ridge, tiny birds and animals were woven according to what you would find on a real pagoda. In terms of coarse silk bamboo weaves, this would be considered a top-grade quality weave.
The second item they examined was a one-foot high, three-foot wide bamboo calligraphy scroll. It featured a fine silk bamboo weave, so it was light as silk and yet as flat as paper. Instead of ink forming the words, different colored bamboo strands wove out the script of the incident from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms known as “Before the Table of Division.” The calligraphy was done in the style of Yue Fei. Old Tang did not know much about calligraphy, but even he could see that the variation in the strokes and their stately look had been successfully achieved using just bamboo.
The judges moved on to the third, fourth, and then the fifth exhibits. Finally they turned to where Old Tang stood. He moved to take out his work—a paltry less than half a foot of bamboo weave that he had tucked over a porcelain tea ware, short in the middle and fine at the ends. It was so intricate that only if you picked up the tea ware would you realize that what appeared at first glance to be just a varied selection of patterns woven into the weave were actually an accurate miniature replica of Su Dongpo’s famous painting “Folded Bamboo.” Seen from a distance, it was an unremarkable piece of work, but up close, with the shifting light casting delicate shadows, the outline of Su Dongpo’s masterful strokes that had created the bamboo leaves appeared, even more vivid than the original painting.
“Not bad at all.” The expert judge put down the basket, “We get to see some top-grade examples of fine bamboo weaving on a base.”
“Wait a minute.” Old Tang reached into the belly of the porcelain tea ware and pressed gently, removing the bamboo weave so that the porcelain and the bamboo basket were separated.
“It’s woven on a base, and yet if the base is removed the weave still holds its shape! That’s really skilled work!” The judges looked even more interested.
“One more thing.” Old Tang held the bamboo basket in one hand, and with his other hand, he unscrewed the thermos and let a few little red goldfish pour into the bamboo basket along with some water. The basket held the water and fish, which were waving their tails happily, without leaking even a drop, and you could see the intricate pattern of the weave clearly through the water.
“A good bamboo basket for fetching water!” the crowd that had formed around him applauded, and Old Tang smiled. He was filled with pride. The basket itself might be small, but its construction was ingenious, composing of three very thin layers of silken bamboo weaves nesting inside each other, every layer using a different pattern so that the weave would be so tight water would not leak out of it. With this particular artwork, even if he never managed to train another disciple, he could feel like his lifetime spent mastering his art had not been lived in vain.
“Shifu, how about this piece, was it made by you, or made by your disciple?” Just at the moment he had reached the pinnacle of fulfillment, Old Tang heard this question pelted at him, and his hand shook when he saw which piece they meant, causing him to spill the water all over the ground.
In an identical bamboo basket, there also swam a few tiny fish waving their little tails. Old Tang picked it up and examined it carefully. Every feature: the coiled silk strands, the triple layer structure, the stacked patterns, and the hidden bamboo head in the “lock,” was exactly the same, just like there had been an assembly line creating baskets using his methods. But when did machines learn how to braid so finely in his style and using his painstaking method? What were they trying to do? Old Tang put down the basket, his eyes searching through the crowd. He spotted them—and they dare not look his way.
“Abomination!” Old Tang was furious and wanted to chase them down but lost his footing on the puddle and slipped.
“Shifu, Shifu!” The buzzing sound of the crowd made his head ache as though there were an earthquake in his brain. Slowly, his eyes shut.
I had never been so nervous in my life. Not during my doctoral defense, not during my oral presentation for my selected thesis topic, never. Nothing compared to how nervous I was in this moment.
Renjie Liu was talking to the doctor. Qingyun was asleep in the corner, the tip of her nose still red from crying. I sat down, put my coat over her, and took the string of beads out of her hand. The bracelet had been disassembled and the beads split in half, revealing a set of fluorescent green chips hidden within.
The prototype worked by intercepting the motor signals sent from the central nervous system to the nerve ending inside each finger before transmitting them wirelessly to the computer terminal. It was like bugging the central nervous system with a wire that tapped into, tracked, and recorded the movement of the hand that had worn the bracelet without the need for a camera. For the past three months, every push, lift, press, and twist the hand had made upon the bamboo strands had been recorded, and every nerve impulse captured, abstracted, and modeled.
A working, movable model that could articulate up to twenty degrees of signal flexibility, which was more flexible and powerful than any existing technology, was then built out of this data, which all had its origin in a place time had nearly forgotten.
The human brain is extremely plastic. Types of sensory input that are repeatedly reinforced over long periods of time occupy a much larger area of the cerebral cortex, and there, neural signals are able to express far more nuanced and sophisticated degrees of control. Moreover, only with signals that had been captured from twenty different planes combined together rather than a single-dimensional model—as well as the daily practice of the hand that had repeated the motions every single day—could such a model truly become an interface that could interact with the outside world with the kind of precision it required. This was unprecedented.
Old Tang, the old shifu, now lay unconscious. He did not know that when it came to interacting with the external world, his hands had reached a level so sophisticated that they could move in more dimensions than any of ours.
What he had wished to preserve may have been a tradition, his own self-respect, and a way of life. But for me, what was precious was the vast ocean of knowledge and skill that had been accumulated over thousands of years in the traditional craft he had mastered, and the related patterns of brain function that had arisen. This is our human potential, which was passed down by both the culture collectively and through individuals, developed through the millennia-long process of natural evolution and cultural transmission. Now, this knowledge would be converted into the pulsing signals that jump through the crystalline grooves of computer chips, a very precious legacy that Man can be proud of. And what I have done is to liberate this knowledge from the limiting, ancient shackles of oral transmission. Extraction, modeling, digitization, generalization. To transmit a signal from the central nervous system to the nerve ending in a finger takes time, yet my prototype was able to capture the signal before the hand even made the actual movement.
The key is not in the hand, but in the brain. I had confidence in my ability to reconstruct the brain but taking the reconstructed brain and attaching it to another hand was where the applicability of my model would be put to the true test. Just as it was not hugely difficult to build an identical bamboo basket with identical bamboo strands, it was using my new creation in an operation on an actual, living brain that was the ultimate challenge I faced now. I had done everything I could.
“Professor Xu? Let’s get ready and get started.”
“Renjie Liu, tell me the truth, how confident are you that this is going to work?”
“Professor Xu, I was his apprentice for five years and knew him personally for twenty-one years. To be honest, I don’t believe in you. I believe in him.”
There was not a single soul in the operating theater and the lights, which were out, cast no shadows. In the darkness, a hologram came to life and grew to fill the room with light, as Old Tang’s brain and body appeared before our eyes. A cluster of malignant red gliomas was entangled between a jungle of blue nerves. The hideous tumor wrapped its many strands around the slender blue branches like a mesh, defying radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and making it extremely difficult to completely remove via surgery, as it was all too easy to injure the healthy brain tissue.
Even if healthy tissue was not injured, if the removal was not complete, the possibility of recurrence would be extremely high. I stared at the giant brain, and it was as though the blue parts were fading before my eyes. I blinked. The lead surgeon pulled up an interface in the control room and two tiny silver fibers appeared in the middle of the brain area. He waved his hand to zoom in on that part, and at the tip of the fibers appeared a mechanical hand with five long, thin, rounded fingers. The doctor adjusted the angle and began to send instructions.
I saw the hand, covered with its distinctive wrinkles and scars, come to life again in the hologram of the brain. Dissecting the adhesions, twisting the nodes, weaving in and out of the weak nerve fibers, moving with great flexibility between the dense weave of the cerebral cortex. Every incision was tailored to that particular case, and every measure of force was applied to just the right degree. The tumor was like a bamboo strand in a hidden head “lock,” finely excised without missing a single hair, without hurting the integrity of the structure it had wrapped itself around. In these hands, the sinister, malignant red was reduced little by little, disappearing strand by strand.
Qingyun woke up at some point. She watched the rapidly weaving hands, staring at that fluorescent, flickering brain, and heaved a sigh of relief.
“It’s okay. You must believe in your dad.” I held her close.
When he next opened his eyes, all Old Tang saw before him was a white blur. It was only when he tried to concentrate a little more that he realized what he was staring at was a snow-white ceiling. Pale green walls, deep green curtains on the windows. He realized that the air-conditioning unit was turned on and he was covered by a blanket to keep him nice and warm. He also heard instruments and machines whirring and beeping. So he was at a hospital.
How much time had passed? Old Tang tried to think back to the last thing he could remember, which was falling on the floor. At the time, he had felt a hundred times more pain in his brain than in his bones, but now, he found that his ankle was bandaged so much that it was immobilized, whereas the pain in his head, while still there, seemed to have subsided somewhat. Old Tang tried to move his fingers, and they seemed to be working fine, but it felt like something was missing. When he raised his head to check, he saw that the chinaberry wood bracelet he had gotten so used to wearing was resting on the bedside table. The ivory-white beads were emitting a strange green light.
Old Tang felt a little dizzy. He touched his scalp and found it completely bald, which gave him a shock. After years of having a Mediterranean Sea bald patch, now his scalp was completely naked from the top of the head to the bottom of his ears, and he could also feel a thin thread that sewed up a wound. He asked Qingyun, “Didn’t they say that neither man nor machine could get rid of my tumor?” Qingyun turned her head to look outside the door.
It was Xu who walked in. He explained what had happened. Old Tang didn’t quite understand. It was like watching a magic trick in a magic show, where the puppeteer wears a bracelet in order to manipulate the little puppets tumbling about and jumping, while the hand that controls them only twitches slightly. Xu said, what was more important than the human brain, was the human heart. Old Tang completely failed to understand any of his explanations, but at least he sensed that what he said seemed good.
In the end, it was still with the help of a machine that they had snatched his life back from the brink. That stony thing that had laid in his breast for so long melted, just like ice in a heated room, and Old Tang heaved a sigh. He had indeed gotten old.
“You were the one who saved yourself,” said Xu.
“Just think of it as having taken on a disciple, except that your disciple can not only weave bamboo, but also a lot of other things . . . ” Qingyun said while carrying a bowl of porridge over to Old Tang and placing it into his hands.
Old Tang looked at his daughter, then looked at Xu, and said nothing. He scooped up the porridge. The porridge was still hot, and the fragrance of peanuts, sweet red dates, glutinous taro, and soft kidney beans comforted him as he took it in. It was when he tasted those autumnal flavors that he realized that the Laba Festival had already passed.
Chengdu winters bring with them a special warmth in the air. It’s like Sichuanese pancakes, stewed dishes, and sausages all mixed together, but without the smell of oil and smoke, as though the fragrance has been cleansed by the Sichuan rain. Against the dark sky, raindrops slip from the tips of verdant banana leaves, and red and brown sausages hang from balconies.
I put down my chopsticks and refilled the two shot glasses.
“A toast! To you, and to your art!”
“Handcraft. These past few days, I’ve been pondering what ‘craft’ actually means.” Old Tang, the master, did not raise his glass.
I raised my eyes. “And what do you think?”
“When I first learned my art, my shifu said a bamboo craftsman must have a deep soul. It takes many years of practice before your two hands can truly work together, and even more before the soul and the hands work as one.” He sipped his wine. “Although I do not understand all your explanations, this is something I do understand. The reason why people these days cannot do what we could before is because they all lack a stillness of the soul. When it comes to my art, there is nothing that complex about it. But to do it, you do need to be still in your soul. Your heart must be quieted before inspiration can strike, before your hands can move with skill.”
“Well said. The most valuable thing is that heart of yours.” I tilted my head back and drained my glass of wine.
“You’re leaving on the sixth day of the new year?”
“Yes.” I nod my head. “I’ll be traveling the country, traveling all over the world, in search of hands, in search of hearts.”
A year ago, I set out from New York. A year later, we will set off once again, this time from Chengdu. From the ancient masters who repair the exquisite clocks and watches housed in Beijing’s Forbidden City, to the oil-paper umbrella makers who work in Yunnan’s rainforests, from the guqin players keeping a thousand-year heritage alive in Yangzhou, to the nearly extinct sculptors of sea willow in Fujian, we will visit them all and record the skills that reside in their talented fingers.
Then we will go even further, and model, analyze, and record traditional crafts from all over the world, such as the spiral weaving of southern France and the winding techniques of South Carolina in the United States. It is our aspiration to build an enormous, comprehensive database that connects human hands, brains, and countless man-made artifacts in a vast treasury, which will be permanently preserved on the Internet. Even in a thousand years, when the artifacts themselves have turned to dust, these models of human movements will live on, carrying with them the rich history of thousands of years of civilization and evolution, expressed either in flesh and blood, or perhaps in a body composed of metal and electric circuitry.
And then, when even that has been completed, we will search for the most excellent eyes, ears, noses, and tongues. We will redefine all the senses, the senses that compose the interface between Man and the world he inhabits. We will build a new layer of interfaces that are parallel and complementary to the physical world. We will create the only world that Man can know, a world that will allow Man to escape the boundaries of the physical body nature had bestowed on him, so he can become the True Man. After millions of years, Man will finally see the day he receives true freedom.
That day is not far away.
Old Tang, sounding conflicted, spoke again. “You said . . . you said that the hand doesn’t need me anymore. Then, in the future, why would people still want hands?”
I laughed but said nothing. Instead, I poured more liquor, and waited silently for him to finish. He had woven bamboo for over forty years now and understood the nature of the craft—its meditative quality and the need to go slow to master it. But at the same time, it also required speed and skill. He sat in silence for a while, then picked up his glass. We clinked glasses again and drained the shot glasses bottoms’ up.
On the afternoon of the Lantern Festival,1 Old Tang went to the teahouse again. He didn’t ride his bike because his feet were not yet back to their old selves. There was no one else in the small courtyard. He spotted a few gnarled old plum trees and the hanging vines were budding with half-opened buds, while the black and brown branches sported the bright yellow furry buds of spring. Old Tang found himself a chair, and, as usual, ordered a pot of traditional Lao San Hua tea.
The results of the Invitationals Exhibition had been announced. Old Tang had won second prize. Before, he would have sulked about it, but not now.
Renjie Liu had paid him a visit on the fifth day of Lunar New Year, bearing all kinds of gifts as both apologies and tokens of gratitude. He said that now that the surgery machine had been upgraded with Old Tang’s skill, and had also demonstrated its first successful operation on him, orders had gone through the roof and would keep him busy all the way until the next Spring Festival. Old Tang waved away the consultant’s fee Renjie Liu had stuffed into a red packet, only accepting the magnified model of the machine hand. Ten metallic fingers and claws were encased in a three-inch high cube of transparent, extra-strong glass. No matter how long he looked at it, Old Tang could simply not see the resemblance to his own hands.
Qingyun and Xu spent the first few days of the new year at home and went out on the sixth day. That night they talked a lot, and drank a lot, and he could no longer remember exactly what had been said. When he woke up the next day, he felt as if there was something different about himself, although he could not quite put his finger on it.
As the teahouse owner poured Old Tang tea, he remarked, “How strange . . . Why did you come over today? Surely, as head of the household you should be rolling tangyuan2 tonight, right? Filling them with sesame and rose fillings . . . wetting flour with water . . . ”
“I won’t be doing it by hand this year. Tonight, I’ll just go out and buy some,” said Old Tang. “Not many people in our household anyway, so it’ll save some time.”
“You’re not doing it by hand?”
“Machine-made is still more convenient!”
“Wow, I’d never thought I’d see the day. Here’s your tea, take your time and enjoy!”
On the stage, the old huqin was playing “Eight Trigrams Formations” from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In this part of the story, the military leader and enemy of the three sworn brothers, Lu Xun, had just burned the joint forces’ camp, which had reached around for seven hundred miles, and he chased the escaping hero Liu Bei through the smoke and fire to the Yufu Waterfront. But there, Lu Xun fell into the ambush of master strategist Zhuge Liang’s Eight Trigrams Formation. A gentle breeze blew, dispersing the delicate fragrance of the wax plum blossoms, and a little petal fell in the half-open tea bowl. Old Tang drifted to sleep.
In his dream, he seemed to enter a dense, primeval bamboo forest, where he moved through the deep twilight, and where there was hidden a secret structure of white walls and black tiles. Lights flickered here and there, but no matter which direction he walked in, bamboo branches grew, blocking his way out. But regardless of what he did, he found his hands fixed firmly to his sides, unable to move. Then, it dawned on Old Tang like a flash of lightning that he was a master of the art of bamboo, and out slid his bamboo carving knife from its sheath. His conviction slid like a knife through mud, and within seconds a new path had been cleared out of the darkness. All throughout, his hands had not moved an inch, still fixed by the sides of his body. And yet bamboo leaves tumbled to the ground and great stems were felled before him. He raised his head to the skies and yelled out loud, before striding forward, his face to the wind.
Author’s Note: The noninvasive neural interface technology in the story that enables control through intention alone is inspired by the real-life work of CTRL-labs. The techniques of bamboo weaving in the story are based on the art of Chengdu porcelain bamboo weaving, Yunnan Yiliang bamboo weaving, and Hunan Huitong bamboo weaving, among others.
First Prize: 7th Future Science Fiction Master Award (2018).
Originally published in Chinese in 2018 China’s Best Science Fiction Works, anthology, 2019.
FOOTNOTES:
1 - The Lantern Festival takes place on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year and is part of the Lunar New Year festivities.
2 - Tangyuan are traditional sweet flour balls eaten on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year. Sometimes they have fillings like peanut, sesame, etc., and it is a traditional family activity to make them together.