Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

The sound comes , a dry rasp like a thumb drawn slowly across a plastered wall. It is cotton on paper. A tuft no bigger than a lentil is wound round the end of a bamboo toothpick, rolled in black powder, and set down on a sheet that is not smooth. The powder does not flow the way ink does. It sits on the grain and has to be worked into it, a little at a time. Where the tip lifts, a fine black dust stays behind on the paper, and a little of it stays on the fingers too. The handle is whatever was close by: a chopstick cut short, the stem of an incense stick. Copper wire holds the cotton on, and for finer work a scrap of eraser takes its place. Almost none of it was made for the purpose. The black comes from a kerosene lamp left to burn smoky, with a funnel held over the flame to catch what rises, and it smells faintly scorched. Beside the sheet lies a photograph no larger than a palm. Its edges have gone soft where it has been held, and the faces in it have gone soft with them. A magnif...

The woman of the house set the steamer on the fire, and I asked her the names of the things on the porch. It was the question of a guest with nothing else to ask. She answered one by one, without thinking. The pestle leaned against a post, its head worn smooth by hands. The steamer had begun to give off vapor. A paddle hung crosswise on the wall, its paint flaking in patches, half a day’s walk from the nearest river. Every word she said was a word I had known since childhood: chày (pestle), mái chèo (paddle), chõ xôi (sticky-rice steamer). Only they came from a different place in the mouth, heavier and slower, as though each sound were weighed before it was set down. I wrote all three in my notebook, crossed them out, and wrote them again. The letters would not hold what I had just heard. Out in the yard, the wind on the slope carried the smell of cooking smoke and damp wood. A child ran past, calling to someone in a voice whose meaning I could guess but whose tones I could not. ...