It is difficult, at best, to take a leisurely walk in Hong Kong. The streets are congested with cars and trucks and buses, and the sidewalks are jam-packed with people. It is said that Hong Kong is a study in contrasts. Traversing the streets and neighbourhoods, one encounters opulence alongside poverty, luxury next to destitution. It can be a shock to the senses. Hong Kong comes at you in a blast of colours and smells, measure, and flow, splendour and simplicity. A beautiful woman, draped in high-fashion, strolls along as a hunchbacked beggar extends gnarled hands in supplication. All cities are like this. It is the case in America too, but the swarming streets of Hong Kong, the multitudes of people pressing in, accentuate the impressions.

My wife and I were on holiday, visiting her family. We had eaten and were wandering the streets after dinner. Window-shopping. People-watching. She was manoeuvring smoothly through the throngs, like a trout through a river. I was dodging and swerving, knocking and bumping into people, trying to keep pace with her. Up ahead, on the left, amid the hoi polloi, a mob of people had accumulated and was crowding in on something, causing others to jostle around. Our curiosity worked us through the crush to see for ourselves what was going on.   

There was a guy half-laid out on a bamboo mat on the sidewalk. He hunched forward, his head bowed, leaning on his one good arm. Good was not really the word to describe it. It was distorted and lumpy, like kneaded dough. A hand was there, but it was warped and clawed. It served as a crude balance for his misshapen body. His other arm, such as it was, dangled like a dead slug from his shoulder. There was no hand on this unnatural appendage. He had no legs. His trousers were pinned up at the bottom end of his torso. His chest was thick, his back double-humped. He had a thin, pointed, wooden brush between his teeth. He was moving his head, writing Chinese calligraphy with the brush in his mouth on a sheet of paper stretched in front of him on the pavement. He moved his head, slow and deliberate, the caricatures taking shape on the paper. He rose occasionally, leaning his head to his left to dip his brush into a small bowl of black ink. There was an array of brushes laid out on a mat beside the ink bowl in an ordered line, thick to thin. Each brush had teeth marks bitten into the handle. There was a large group of people standing in a semi-circle around him, watching. Occasionally someone would step forward to drop money into a bowl that was set on the ground. Beside him, to his right, sat a board with wheels, like an oversized skateboard. It had a piece of carpet stapled to it and I figured it for his means of locomotion.

We watched him for several minutes. We frequently stop, when out and about, to watch and listen to street artists, buskers, jugglers, and musicians. As a teenager, growing up in San Francisco, I used to sit on a stool in Ghirardelli Square, and play my guitar. I would open my guitar case and throw some of my own bills and change into it to inspire passers-by. It didn’t really matter what I played. No one ever stood around to listen long enough. I didn’t make much money, but it was fun and it’s fun to think back on. My wife understands. She indulges me when I stop to look or listen, and she doesn’t mind it when I pull a couple bills from my wallet and drop them into an upturned hat or open guitar case.

This guy’s bowl was to the point of overflowing and after a few minutes he lowered his head, tongued the brush from his lips and set it on the mat. He bit onto the edge of the bowl, lifting it, and pivoting his body awkwardly to the left, he tilted the bowl with his head, emptying the assorted bills and coins into an open canvas bag. He replaced the bowl, with his mouth, back down in front of him. He then bit onto the brush again and resumed his laborious calligraphy. My wife stood transfixed, watching the inky characters coming to life, flowing from the tip of his brush.

“He’s very good,” she suddenly said. “Look how perfect his writing is. How expressive.”

“You want to give him some money?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer. She was born and raised in Hong Kong. As a child she had studied and practiced calligraphy. She has told me stories of her father, a strict disciplinarian, forcing her and her sisters to sit for long sessions, holding the brush upright in their small hands, tracing out the characters in an ordered, rhythmic, fluid manner. The marks had to be just right, in the right succession, with the right amount of pressure and the right thickness of stroke and curvature of line.

I didn’t know if it was perfect or not, but I watched as he continued his painstaking, measured, stylistic script. His head moved as if in time with some unheard music, like pictographs dancing onto the paper. It was arduous, obviously, but it was smooth and precise. It was almost as though he wasn’t actually writing the characters. It was more like he was allowing the characters to materialise on the white paper.

“See how graceful?” My wife said.  “He makes no mistakes. No mistakes at all. Look.”  

I looked. People would step forward to drop money into his bowl and walk away. Other people would push into their spot to watch. He hovered over the paper on the sidewalk, moving his head, inscribing with, apparently, no mistakes. He never crossed one out to start again. He would re-ink his brush as needed, dipping with his mouth, and keep on writing. Who is this guy, I thought? My wife watched, obviously in awe.

“Look how elegant,” my wife continued. “How beautiful and smooth. I could never do that. It takes people many years to be able to write calligraphy so perfectly.”

I thought of the scene in the movie Amadeus, where Maestro Salieri is looking through some of Mozart’s original, handwritten scores of music. He was noticing that all of the musical notes had been written down without any editing, no crossing out, no rethinking, no mistakes, no corrections. The music, it seemed, had just flowed out of Mozart onto the paper. That, it seemed to me, was what this guy was doing. The calligraphy seemed to emanate out of the brush in his mouth onto the paper.

It is an art form, Chinese calligraphy, to be mastered like any other art form. Like kung fu or tai chi. Like painting or playing the violin. Virtuosity. Technique. A distillation of centuries of combined ideas. Simple strokes arranged in limitless combinations, conveying the language of thought. Philosophy. Perspective. It is difficult and demanding even when one has arms, hands, and fingers.

“What is he writing? Is that poetry?” I whispered.

“Shhh.”

He wrote on.

Who is this guy, I wondered? Where did he come from? How did he end up this way? These thoughts crowded my mind and I quickly realised that thoughts like this were better forced out and away. It is better to simply watch. I became mesmerised. Grotesque and misshapen as the guy was, he seemed to recede, to fade away within the delicate beauty, as if the symbols were writing themselves. They emerged and took on a life of their own. They crawled and shadow-danced onto the paper. Balletic. Exquisite. Gorgeous. The guy wrote on. He never looked up. There was a tempo to what he was doing. A pulse. A measured cadence. Bach-like. I didn’t understand what I was seeing but I was caught up in the moment. I never cared much about my own penmanship when I was in school. Who is this guy?

But it became, at one point, more than fascination for me. I had been engrossed, but that began to morph into discomfort. It became difficult and unnerving, almost painful to watch.

“Let’s go,” I finally said to my wife.

“No, wait,” she said. “Just a little longer.”

“No,” I urged. “I can’t watch any longer. Let’s go.” I took her arm and eased her away from the crowd. “C’mon.”

We backed up and moved away through the crowd. We walked about a half block when abruptly, she stopped. She looked at me and smiled then turned and made her way back through the swarm of people toward the calligraphist. I stood where she left me. She returned a moment later, finding me amid the throng.

“I gave him some money,” she told me, and she smiled again. “Come on,” she said.

We walked on through the teeming streets of Hong Kong. Behind us, he wrote on.

Header image by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho.

How to cite: Beyl, Jeff. “He Wrote On.”  Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/20/wrote-on.

Jeff Beyl writes about nature, fly-fishing, music, geology, surfing, and the ocean. He has been published in several magazines such as Big Sky Journal, Outside Bozeman, Montana Fly-fishing, Idaho Magazine, Northwest Sportsman, Ocean Magazine, Snowy Egret Literary Journal. His book, A Conversation With the Earth, was published in 2020. He has travelled widely through Asia, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. He is a jazz guitarist and photographer, scuba diver and fly-fisherman. He lives in Seattle with his wife. [All contributions by Jeff Beyl.]

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