It isn’t possible to take in what’s going on, everything happens with such lightning speed, so that Stein can bring to mind later only the quick movements as he painted, the violent emotions clearly inundating him, and that passion, difficult to put into words, which manifestly possessed him as he worked, because now only that can be seen, after the earlier mixings of the ink and the walking around, the hesitations and the somewhat humorous concentration, suddenly there is on the piece of paper a startling, an enchanting, a genial painting, a monumental calligraphic work, composed of two hieroglyphics, daubed onto the snow-white paper with black ink, the interpreter reads it out softly from behind Stein: xie huai, ‘out of breath’, yes, a poet among them, Xi Chuan, who speaks excellent English, confirms it, but it emerges quickly that he is mistaken, out of breath, and the master motions to one of his apprentices, and the two quickly place it onto the wall with the magnets, and he stands back from it, assuming the same pose, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, now before the completed work, standing as he did before, looking at it in the same way, eyeing it, examining it, studying it, just as he did a short while ago with the blank paper, that is, everything is almost the same, because there is already something sober within him, the fact of this slow distancing can be felt in his being, the beginning of calm, he is beyond it now, even while he is still somewhat within it, he stands, moving his head from side to side, then he steps back again, as if he were cautiously emerging from out of this, he lowers the brush blindly into the pail, then puts it next to the table, and he has returned, he is among the others: he is smiling, laughing gaily, with grateful laughter he receives the exclamations of rapture from the company, as one after the other, every one of the guests, with the greatest enthusiasm, praises the creation that has suddenly taken place here; and Stein as well, who, among those present, knows the least about calligraphy, although he is capable of understanding it, after a while, with the help of another guest who is introduced to him by a Chinese living in Europe, and whom he has met here for the first time, is able to say: that what he has seen here, the speed of the contours, the plangent rhythm of the two signs, the black ink burning on the white paper, the pure natural impulse of the brush’s movement, the exact harmony of the proportions, that all this together is truly amazing!
The master nods, bowing his head a little in thanks for the praise, then turns away and begins to explain something to his assistant. In a fervently broken rendition of the English language, Stein, with his helper of a moment ago, begins a conversation with Tang Xiaodu, of whom he knows only the name, but a particular mannerism of his immediately strikes his attention.
After half an hour in his presence, Stein establishes that no one else smokes in the same way, not a single being anywhere puffs away at his cigarettes in such an engaging way — no one on this entire earth — as Tang Xiaodu.
At the beginning of the birthday evening, when they met at the entrance of the building at the agreed-upon time, while they and the interpreter were pressing the buzzer, and waiting for Zeng to arrive at the entrance from some far corner of his palace of concrete columns and glass, which took a few minutes to happen, Tang Xiaodu, who had just arrived, stamped out his previous cigarette and, in the fashion of a true smoker, pulled out the box of cigarettes from his pocket and took out three, so that, in accordance with Chinese custom, he could offer one to Stein, another to the interpreter as a token of friendship and smoke the third himself, but since they weren’t smokers he remained alone with his cigarette and, with the hungry movement characteristic of a passionate nicotine addict, he lit up, then turned the cigarette towards his palm, between his thumb and his index finger, holding it inward, keeping it concealed, and he smoked like that, slowly and deeply, and blew out just as slowly and deeply, cordially turning his head away so that the smoke would not be blown onto the guests, and then — as he turned his head — there came that accompanying movement: he struck the pose without being aware of it, sweeping the two Europeans off their feet at the same time and betraying everything about himself in one single instant, namely: he held out his right hand in which the cigarette was concealed completely distant from his body, so that the rising smoke would not disturb Stein or the interpreter, in short, so it would not disturb the people he was speaking to and who, in contrast, were not smoking. . but to be more precise, this was just one element of his pose; the other was the angle at which he held out his arm with the smoking stub turned inward towards his palm, and held it out again so that when the breeze, despite every precaution, still swept the smoke towards someone, in this case Stein, with his left hand he would try to wave it away quickly, well, all this put together was so touching, and so revealing, that it disclosed so profoundly the nature of the owner of these gestures, this carriage of the head, the movements of the hand, of this kind of secret smoking, that Stein, standing in the entrance of the Zeng house, felt a very deep sympathy for Tang Xiaodu, although he could not suspect that the reason he felt so close to him — as this only became clear later on, and gradually, one could say as the result of a double step — that is, not too long afterward he realized that Tang Xiaodu always keeps his hand holding the cigarette well away, and Tang Xiaodu always turns his head away when he exhales, even if he is conversing with people who are smoking just like him, so that after all this, but still before dinner, when they were just standing around the dinner table and talking, during the second encounter, Stein at once perceives that in these movements, so characteristic of a dear, tactful, cordial, elegant and modest person, that what is really most moving in this deportment is that Tang Xiaodu smokes in exactly the same fashion even when there is no one next to him.
At the back of the atelier, sectioned off by shelves, Tang Xiaodu has his new friend sit down in a comfortable armchair, he sits down next to him, pours him a cup of tea, and it can be seen that he feels at home at Zeng’s place, and Stein is happy that at last he has a chance to talk to him, and after he listens, as Tang Xiaodu slightly rectifies the explanation of a moment ago concerning the two Chinese characters, that is, the two signs conceal a release of the soul’s tension as well as an inundation of the spirit, nearly bursting-out — the visitor from far away starts to say something, how he feels himself to be in such a difficult situation, for that which he admires so much, which at the beginning of this journey to China he thought still lived in the depths, unbroken, which he thought still nourished the China of today from these depths — well, he is happy that he can complain about this now to Tang Xiaodu: because he, Stein, sees this last ancient civilization, this exquisite manifestation of the creative spirit of mankind, as dead, and he is afraid that apart from Tang Xiaodu there is no one to really talk to about this, and he is afraid that there won’t be anyone to talk to about this, because his experience is that people consider the opposite to be true, and celebrate the renewal of Chinese traditions in cultural monuments restored in the most dreadful and coarse ignorance, or their attention is engaged exclusively by modern life, and are altogether unconcerned with that which was, even if it has passed, their own spiritual tradition.
Tang Xiaodu begins to speak, brokenly, very softly and with long pauses:
tang. I grew up in a world, after Mao, in which nothing was important. We had no clear goals. My generation’s way of thinking really oversimplified things. We were indifferent to everything. And we did not confront the real problems.