Iron & Silk Book

From the back cover: The much-acclaimed adventures of a young martial arts master in China "take the form of a series of lightly sketched-in episodes; almost without exception, they produce the gulp of feeling you might get from an unusually fine short story, and they reverberate long after you have put them down." (The New York Times)

My thoughts:
Salzman had been interested in China since the age of thirteen, when he'd first seen the television movie Kung Fu. He had studied kung fu, Chinese art and calligraphy. At Yale he majored in Chinese Literature. He wasn't particularly interested in going to China, but he did need a job once he graduated and he was "fluent in Mandarin and nearly so in Cantonese," so he applied for and was accepted by the Yale-China Association to teach English at Hunan Medical College in Changsha from August 1982 to July 1984. This is a memoir of his experiences while in China.

The book is told in a series of vignettes, and divided into sections. It begins with two episodes that bookend his tenure - arriving and leaving China. The rest of the memoir is roughly in chronological order (I think). Salzman is an astute observer and writes in a clear yet atmospheric way about his experiences. The various people he meets - professors, bureaucrats, fishermen, students - come to life as he describes their clothing, customs, habits, living conditions and demeanor. Much of the book focuses on his own efforts to expand his knowledge of martial arts, calligraphy and Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese and the local dialect). I was a little disappointed to not have more information about the classes he taught and the students he encountered, though there are a few scenes about those experiences.

The area of China Salzman lived in is still not often visited by Westerners. In the early 1980s few Chinese had themselves traveled beyond their own villages, let alone to other countries. Most of the people he encountered had never seen a Westerner before, and many were stunned to silence on first seeing him. I've visited China a few times; my husband was in international business and traveled more extensively in the country than I have. Reading this memoir gave me a glimpse of China that I do not know. It's an interesting book, though I cannot help but wonder how accurate the portrayal is today, given the Chinese government's efforts to modernize.