Discipline

There is beauty, discipline, balance built into my first language. As I practice making the three drops of water that start my surname, I know this. I've known this every time I sign my Chinese name and the angles of the square-shaped character is too sharp, or the right half is too big, or the line that shorter accidentally looks the same length as the one below. I feel it as right hand vaguely remembers where the tip of the brush needs to point away, where you lift up quickly to end the stroke, where you push down for appropriate thickness.

Just trying to make the right strokes makes it obvious why discipline is so built into the culture. As you write top to bottom, right to left, your hands have to hover perfectly over the paper, else you end up smearing the writing. Your proportions must be perfect. And each character hovers in its place on the invisible grid, so when you look at a completed sheet of writing, white lines stand clearly between the rows and characters.

I sense the difference between my dabbling in Chinese calligraphy and Jonathan's. (The differences between a daughter of immigrants whose first language was Chinese and one who learned the culture later on in life is infinite and shouldn't really compare, but still.) Jonathan happily writes whole characters at a time, and if he gets it wrong, he finishes and tries again. On the other hand, I by nature remember how you learn Chinese: repetition, strokes, over and over again. You can spend 10 minutes perfecting the three drops of water, then move on to another 20 sweeping strokes for the pieh. When you try rushing it, try writing the whole character before you've perfected each stroke, the the balance of characters completely off, the fat edges where it should be thin weighs the image to the wrong side, the line that should be shorter than the one above is accidentally too long, the dot accidentally turns into a dash. So you repeat: trying to make the left side smaller, the top right bigger, the bottom right not too big. Over and over again.

With the brush in hand and my eyes concentrated on the page, I think of how discipline has always been explicitly and implicitly valued. Restraint and self-control are built in from early ages: holding back any desires and wants even when offered, practice and work over play whenever mom and dad call, accepting your parent's discipline as right. Even straight, strong punches in martial arts, repeating the same kick multiple times.

With a page full of dots, lines, symbols and partial characters, I choose to remember that this is something my people offer:  beauty that is a product of discipline, a value so intrinsic that it's built into our language.