Iron & Silk

Iron & Silk is a memoir by Mark Salzman recounting two years he spent teaching English at Hunan Medical College in Changsha, China, from 1982 to 1984. Salzman traveled there through the Yale-China Association, an organization that sponsors American teaching placements in Chinese universities. The book opens with a flash-forward to his departure in August 1984, when officials at the Canton train station invented regulations to prevent him from boarding with a seven-foot leather bag of martial arts weapons. A Cantonese policeman Salzman had met a year earlier intervened, suggesting a martial arts demonstration. Salzman's pants split mid-routine, but the spectacle convinced the officials to let him through.

The narrative then returns to Salzman's arrival in 1982. A lifelong student of Chinese martial arts, calligraphy, and language, inspired at age 13 by the television movie Kung Fu, Salzman had studied Chinese literature at Yale and become fluent in Mandarin. He and three fellow teachers endured a grueling journey from Hong Kong, contending with crowded conditions and a Public Security Bureau official, part of the state police authority overseeing travel, who nearly prevented three of them from boarding because their visas listed the wrong destination. Changsha proved a sprawling, grimy city of over one million people, its streets thick with bicycles and the smell of night soil, a latrine waste used as fertilizer. Members of the college's Foreign Affairs Bureau greeted the teachers with declarations of Sino-American friendship and drove them to a walled campus of grey concrete buildings.

Salzman was assigned three classes: 26 doctors, 5 "Middle-Aged English Teachers" retrained from Russian to English after political shifts, and 25 medical students too nervous to speak. The Middle-Aged Teachers proved the most engaging group, later reading aloud compositions about their happiest moments that revealed lives shaped by political upheaval. One teacher wept recalling a reunion with his family after years of mandatory separation; another confessed his happiest moment was his wife's repeated retelling of a Peking duck banquet he had never attended.

Two older women became central figures in Salzman's life. Teacher Wu, a nearly 70-year-old colleague whose husband had taken his own life during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, invited Salzman to her apartment, where he found an upright piano she had brought back from America. Red Guards had smashed its mechanisms during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) but could not throw it out the window because of its weight. Salzman repaired the instrument, chasing rodents from inside it and using a Michael Jackson tape to tune middle C. That evening, Teacher Wu played beautifully and thanked him in Chinese.

Teacher Wei, a silver-haired colleague reputed to be the strictest teacher in the college, was assigned as Salzman's Chinese tutor. She began each lesson by handing him a small jar of baijiu, a Chinese rice liquor, insisting he drink before they read classical essays by ancient hermits. Teacher Wei assumed responsibility for Salzman's personal well-being as well as his studies, advising him on clothing, diet, and behavior in the Chinese tradition of the teacher-student bond. When Salzman returned from a trip, she waited under a tree at the college gate, explaining it would be shameful if no one welcomed him home.

Salzman's deepest ambition in China was to train in martial arts, or wushu. A visiting doctor named Dr. Li taught him a sword form on an ancient tomb mound, urging him to feel history passing through him. But the memoir's defining relationship begins when a doctor student led Salzman to the Provincial Sports Unit, where the Hunan Provincial Wushu Troupe trained. There Salzman first saw Pan Qingfu, a legendary fighter recognizable from the martial arts film Shaolin Temple, which he had choreographed. After the athletes performed, Pan forced Salzman to demonstrate. Cornered, Salzman improvised a frantic routine. Pan said flatly, "That's not gong fu," then offered to train him, asking first if Salzman could endure suffering and if he feared pain. Salzman lied twice. Pan's wife later revealed that Salzman was the only private student Pan had accepted in over 25 years.

Training was grueling: weeks of standing at attention and maintaining unblinking eye contact, then weapons drills demanding total commitment. Their bond deepened through Pan's English lessons, which mirrored his wushu discipline. Pan refused to learn the alphabet, dismissing it as too slow. When officials barred Salzman from the Sports Unit to demonstrate resistance to Western "cultural pollution" during a political rectification campaign, Pan relocated their sessions to a public bathhouse rooftop.

Salzman also studied with other teachers. Hai Bin, a young calligraphy prodigy, taught him brushwork and insisted that calligraphy, painting, and wushu were closely related. Teacher Hei, whose surname means "black," secretly instructed him in the internal martial arts styles Xingyiquan and Baguazhang, emphasizing relaxation and fluidity in contrast to Pan's relentless intensity. When Salzman questioned why he spent so much time on wushu if he had never been in a fight, Hei watched nearby dancers twirling silk handkerchiefs and asked: "Why dance with handkerchiefs?"

Vivid episodes throughout the memoir illuminate daily life under Chinese socialism. A fisherman named Old Ding pulled Salzman into his boat and introduced him to a family living on the Xiang River; Salzman spent a night on the water, playing cello for people more entranced by the red velvet lining of its case than by Bach. When Salzman read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" to his class, a student dismissed the story as unbelievable, but another described how, during the Cultural Revolution, thousands had jumped into the river to emulate Chairman Mao's famous swim and many drowned. When Salzman killed a rat with a dictionary, the Rat Collection Office refused to pay the bounty because the official position was that rats had been eradicated. A woman at the college hanged herself after years of mistreatment by a superior; a student explained that suicide was considered a criminal offense against Socialism, and the woman's family initially faced punishment, including the likely loss of job assignments for her children. Five days later, officials declared the suicide personal rather than political, and a memorial service was held.

One of the memoir's most poignant encounters involves Little Mi, a pediatrician with leukemia who spoke fluent English and had been reassigned to a family planning clinic. When she missed the last bus home one evening, Salzman disguised himself and bicycled her across the river. On the bridge, she told him he was a fool not to be happy given his freedom, then asked him to coast downhill at full speed. At the bottom she hopped off, and they parted knowing they would not meet again.

As Salzman's two years drew to a close, Pan fell ill with an ulcer, heart disease, and other conditions but refused hospitalization, insisting his athletes needed him for the National Competition. He challenged Salzman to choose one final technique. Salzman requested the long sword, a weapon Pan had never taught anyone. Pan pushed a finger into Salzman's chest and warned that if Salzman wielded it poorly, it would make Pan very sad. Pan then disappeared for weeks. On the night before Salzman's departure, Pan appeared behind him with a rolled carpet containing two long swords, revealing that his own transfer back to North China had been accepted. On the bathhouse rooftop, they trained through the night. Pan had Salzman perform the routine alone, telling him the last move would be his own and that afterward he would proceed alone in wushu. Pan rolled the carpet around only one sword, stood at attention as he had during their very first lesson, and after a long silence said: "I brought two swords tonight. I am taking only one back with me."