Free Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman Page B

my bicycle was parked. The brother had a huge barrel chest, a scarred face and a moustache that made me think of Fu Manchu. He didn’t speak so much as growl, or so it seemed to me, and every once in a while he leaned forward to slap me on the shoulder, nearly propelling me out of the boat. He smiled at me, gnashed his teeth and growled. “What is he saying?” I asked Old Ding. “He says he likes you and wants to wrestle! My brother likes to wrestle!”
    Before letting me ashore, they insisted that we have one more adventure. A big river boat was anchored in the middle of the river, dredging up silt from the riverbed and dropping it onto flat tugboats that carried it to shore. Old Ding knew the crew and suggested that we stop by and say hello. We rowed alongside the boat and got on quietly. None of the crew saw us, for they were all in the cabin relaxing during xiuxi. The three of us walked into the cabin, me last of all. The captain was the first to look up. He opened his mouth but was unable to speak, and his cigarette fell from his lower lip into his bowl of rice, where it sizzled loudly. Once the initial shock and frenzy died down, the captain gave me a tour of his boat. He told me that he remembered the American soldiers from the Second World War very well. With great emotion in his voice, he repeated over and over how good it was of them to help China. At last, he managed to say “USA!” in English, and gave me the thumbs-up sign.
    Eventually we left the river boat and the brothers took me to where I had first gotten on. Only after I agreed to acceptthe two biggest fish in the hold did they let me ashore. They stood in the boat waving for as long as I could see them, yelling after me that I should come back soon to play, that all I had to do was walk by the river and I would find them. To avoid arriving late for class, I rode directly to the classroom, where I had a difficult time explaining to my doctor students how I came to possess two giant fish that still breathed when I set them on my desk. Every few minutes, just as the curious whispering had died down and we began to go over the lesson, one of the fish would leap into the air and land with a loud slap on the floor. On my way home, I gave the fish to Teacher Wei and told her of my day with the fisherman. She nodded slowly as I told it, and when I had finished, she smiled. “The fishing people are very honest, and very kind. You see how well they treat you? That is the Chinese way. They are common people, but they understand manners better than we intellectuals, who are now cautious and tired.”
    Two hours later she walked into my room with a covered pot and put it on my desk. It contained one of the fish, cooked to perfection in a spicy Hunan sauce. “Of course,” she said as she hurried out, “we intellectuals can still do a pretty good job.”
    I t started with an argument about Nastassia Kinski’s lips.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
was playing in Changsha, and I asked the small group of doctors and teachers from my class what they thought of it. We had just finished an outstanding meal cooked by two of the doctors, husband and wife, and were now relaxing in their small apartment, drinking tea and trying to digest seventeen dishes shared among eight people. The doctors beat around the bush for a while, calling the movie “interesting” and “full of characters,” but eventually confessed that they had not enjoyed it much. Among the disappointments of this movie, they said, was that Miss Kinski, the star, was not beautiful. “You can’t be serious,” I said, but they were, and their complaint was specific: her lips were too big. “They aren’t big,” I said, “they are full.” “Then they are too full,” they replied. According to Chinese taste, a woman’s lips should be small and delicate. I told them that Westerners consider full lips to be very good, and they asked, “Good for what?”
    Middle-aged Chinese intellectuals, I found, do