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HAN-PING CHIN
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German dye of sky blue fashionable in China in the forties). My
father said that I should have a fountain pen to write foreign
words and that, after all, my calligraphy with a brush was far
from satisfactory to him. Then they sighed, knowing that they
couldn't afford to buy either the trousers or the pen. My father
had been unemployed for two years; the pendulum clock, our
only mechanical possession, and even my parents' warm
clothes had been sold. Every evening we three brothers were like
locusts, devouring our meager meal in a few minutes. Mter we
finished, our parents shared a sweet potato as their only dinner.
Even though my father was regarded by his former employees
as exceptionally diligent and reliable, his lack of education of–
fered him little hope of finding a job.
A fountain pen was a luxury item in our town. Before I fin–
ished elementary school I had never dreamed of owning one,
because I knew my family could not afford it and I was not
knowledgeable enough to merit one. But I longed for the status
symbolized by a fountain pen. I used to watch the middle school
boys who sported fountain pens with shining clips outside their
left chest pockets, as they strolled proudly with their hands in the
side pockets of their pants. And, more stylishly, some high–
school girls hung two fountain pens on the left edge of their
cheongsam
(a high-necked, close-fitting dress with the skirt slit up
the sides to the knees). There were very few females in high
school. They were refined and solemn, mostly from rich fami–
lies. Because my three older sisters all died before I was born, I
thought girls were totally different creatures from boys, totally
inaccessible. So, naturally, I believed those girls deserved two
fountain pens. As for myself, I was content with reality and
learned from a big boy in our neighborhood how to cut a goose
quill into a nib. It was an adequate substitute, but its exalted mean–
ing became apparent only after many years when I saw a
Russian movie in which the Tsar's navy commander wrote with
a goose quill.
Eventually, because of his reputation for honesty, my father
was able to borrow travelling money from two creditors at high
interest. The day before my father left for the big city on the
Yangtze River, my mother decided to sacrifice some old clothes.
She tore out the seams, cut the relatively intact pieces out from the
rag, and sewed them together by hand to make a sack. She then
