West Meets East IRON AND SILK

By Donald Morrison

Mark Salzman was riding an overcrowded bus in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, when he saw a passenger clambering aboard. The driver asked him to step off. The request was ignored, the door closed, and the bus pulled away with the stubborn rider sticking halfway out. Arriving at his destination, the man cheerfully paid half the usual fare and went on his way.

Salzman knows exactly how he felt. For two years the author stood part way in, part way out of a rapidly moving conveyance called the People's Republic of China. Fresh out of Yale, he took a job in 1982 teaching English at a college in Changsha. He lived, worked and learned among his pupils, mostly young medical students, plus a group of former Russian-language instructors sent down for retraining after shifting political winds had rendered their specialty obsolete. Nearly every day Salzman tried to reignite imaginations extinguished by the Cultural Revolution. Nearly every hour circumstances taught him about the land he had long studied but never visited. "I had heard that China was spotlessly clean," he writes of his first day in Changsha, a city of more than 1 million. "Instead, dishwater and refuse were thrown casually out of windows, rats the size of squirrels could be seen flattened out all over the roads . . . No one that I could see was smiling, or had red cheeks, as all the Chinese do in China Reconstructs magazine."

What Salzman's Chinese acquaintances lacked in cheek coloring they made up in generosity and frankness. A family of poor fishermen he befriended insisted that he accept a gift of their boat (he dissuaded them with difficulty). When he brought out his cello to play for the family, they rushed across the room "to touch the divine object -- the red velvet lining inside the cello case." An aging athlete, posing for a snapshot, inquired gravely if it is true that in America, where "everything is modernized," there are ways of adding hair to photographs? "If you could do that for me, I'd be very grateful."

Iron and Silk is not so much a treatise on modern Chinese mores as a series of telling vignettes. When a clerical worker at the college committed suicide, her funeral could not be held or her family consoled until, four days later, local Communist Party officials announced that "her problems were personal and not political." Salzman killed a rat in his classroom, and his students merrily escorted him and his quarry to the local Rat Collection Office, where he was entitled to a 5 cents bounty. A young man teaching Salzman calligraphy was surprised when the American confided that his highest ambitions were to be well liked and to master a skill. "But these goals can be achieved so easily!" the calligrapher replied. "All you have to do is be kind and work hard. But to eat and sleep well, that is a difficult wish, because you cannot control these things yourself."

Not all of Salzman's Chinese were so mundane. He describes his encounter with Pan Qingfu, the country's foremost master of wushu, the traditional Chinese martial art. Salzman managed to become a private student of the fiercely demanding Pan, whose nickname, "Iron Fist," came from his reputed practice of punching a heavy iron plate up to 10,000 times every day. For more than a year, Pan pushed his acolyte through pain, sweat, blood and fatigue, inching him toward the goal of gong fu, or "skill that transcends mere surface beauty." The day before Salzman left for the U.S., he was finally allowed to display his new skills in a dramatic, draining, nightlong workout. At the end of the session, the master acknowledged that the American had indeed acquired gong fu. No other term is as apt for a book that describes the land and its people with such deftness and delight.