Scheherazade

I was speaking with someone recently who had a challenging exam coming up and did not feel ready. The teacher insisted she be there and take the exam. Despite all the reasons she could summon to postpone, he compelled her to be there. She passed with flying colours. How? she thought about someone important to her that had recently passed away, and decided to dedicate her endeavour to the memory of that person.

This reminded me of a similar experience I’d had many years ago. My Tai Chi Chu’an instructor had been called and told by his teacher, the venerable Grand Master who’d brought traditional martial arts of the 1930’s China to North America, that he was to bring his students to a banquet in his honour, and demonstrate what he’d been teaching us. It was a daunting proposition; we three senior students rehearsed the 108 steps, a Wu-Yang combined form, for weeks. We got our outfits organized, and hoped for the best.

The banquet was in an enormous Chinese restaurant in Vancouver, with over 400 guests. The demonstrations were to be held on a small dance floor, a tiny lit up showplace for for all the guests to revel in and be dazzled by the proficiency and nerve of the students and teachers that the Grand Master had produced in his 20 years in Vancouver.

By the time I arrived at the restaurant, with my special jacket slung over my arm, my teacher was already there. I was ushered over to his table. The ‘Three Musketeers’ as the three of us had started to call ourselves, were not unaware of the spectacle we were about to become part of. One was just plain talking nonsense to ease his nerves, and the other was resigned to ‘it is what it is’. I had rehearsed the form so many times that my brain couldn’t hold any more pictures of how to do it. We put on our jackets behind a screen and waited for our turn, at our seats.

Suddenly, we were signalled to go to the spotlighted floor. We stood on the precipice between the carpet and parquet, then for a moment looked at each other more like the Three Stooges. I didn’t want to us to be stooges, though. Our teachers had honoured us with imparting their wisdom, truth, and patience, and I wanted to honour them by showing this austere martial arts community that we were fully trained and awake. We stood in our places, and took a breath together and then began. ‘Raise hands…’

I felt the fluid rise, fall, carry, circle, beauty, grace, touch, light, heavy, breath in and out with each step for 108 movements. Time and place slipped away until I came to a close just where I began, and bowed, hands held towards the Grand Master, our Teacher, and the audience, in proper kungfu gesture of respect. My comrades were looking sheepish as we walked back to our table. Something unexpected then unfolded,

Along the way back, people smiled and reached towards me. When we sat, my teacher had me sit next to him. Beneath his thick moustache, his mouth grinned, dimples deep in his cheeks and face blushing. He tapped my hand, then closed and opened his eyes with a nod of silent praise. We were almost the last on the floor demonstrations, and straight away, the Grand Master began circulating to the tables to have photos with his guests. He first came to our table. I assumed it was to honour my teacher for bringing his industrious, intrepid students. Which was true: but instead of standing next to my teacher for the photos, he stood behind me for all of them! My teacher beamed with pride, to have succeeded so well with his students that his own teacher honoured one so.

I forgot about this for almost ten years, and went my own path; my teacher got me a job and told me my students would now be my teachers. I decided after so many years to have lessons with the Grand Master. I entered his little ground floor studio. There were students practicing tui shou push hands and other exercises, and the Grand Master was at the back giving a lesson to someone, with push hands. He looked sideways to glance at whoever had just come into the studio door, and abruptly dropped the hands of the student he was teaching and walked over to me. He gently took my hand and asked, “What your name?” I told him “Susan”. “Ah, Soo-san, Soo-san”. Smiling he took me over to the wall, which had photos plastered over it. In one section, he had photos of that banquet from 10 years ago, and there I was, in several of them! He pointed, “Soo-san” and smiled. He remembered.

He started me at what they called the ‘Dragon’ level. He did not have me learn his form from the beginning. I was told the no one, in the decades since he had been there, had ever been allowed to skip learning his form. I tried to be like everyone else and make small talk with him, about which restaurants had the freshest fish or where to buy the best sword. If I tried to speak to him in my lessons, he would take my hand abruptly and sit me down on a bench and say, “Sit, drink tea”. Oops. He taught me in silence, and I listened as he guided, prompted, pushed, pulled and showed me how to master movement and energy.

Today, I played my favourite oboe exerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’. It is the first time I have done so since sustaining injuries many months ago. It was scary; my attempts to play music thus far had been choppy and jumbled as my brain and body endeavoured to reassemble in harmony. Going back recently to Tai Chi, as a student at a new dojo with a new teacher, has been a boon. But, today was about the oboe and about music. I thought of my beloved oboe teachers and their important words, to play everything, including technical exercises, with expression; that is how music is played, otherwise, it is merely notes.

I played Scheherazade companioned by their lessons and words, coyly coaxing out lyrical music, a ballet ship afloat over crestfalls and sea.