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Article Excerpt
I AM A WESTERN WOMAN born in the Year of the Tiger. In far-eastern astrology, each year is associated with a particular animal through a rotating twelve-year cycle. This dimly acknowledges that distant time before humanity chose to separate from the other creatures. A time when we all spoke the same tongue and could change form at will. A time that legends of many lands refer to as the Age of Goht. I keep an ear ready for stories about Year-Beasts from those who grew up in cultures with those beliefs. Often those tales have come from my two teachers, both of whom are Japanese and masters of the martial tradition of Budo.
One day I was lunching at a downtown Chinatown restaurant with a group of other students and both of my teachers after three days of intensive training.
I was seated next to my senior master. I asked him, "At other times you've been kind enough to explain to me the nature of the years of monkey, rabbit, dog and even rat. There's one animal we haven't discussed yet, which I'm curious about. What are the traits of those born in the Year of the Horse?"
My senior master, a dragon, thought for a moment. "Horse-year men are handsome and compelling, but not very bright," he said.
"What about horse-year women?"
My other master, who, like me, is a tiger, bent his head low over his soup and growled.
My dragon master turned his head to one side and waved his hand in front of him, as if he'd caught a whiff of spoiled fish. "Not good," he said.
"Really?" I was fascinated. "In Western cultures horses are admired for their fleetness, beauty, and wild, free nature."
My dragon master shook his head.
"Stubborn. Hard-headed. Bad-tempered," my tiger master muttered, his ears laid well back to his skull.
"But surely some of the other beast-years get along with them?" I asked.
They shared a brief glance in which my Western woman's curiosity wasn't welcome.
"Some say dogs, but I haven't observed that to be true. Of course, other horse-people. But other than that, none, at least not well," my dragon master said firmly, closing the topic. I didn't pursue the issue. The relationship between dragon and tiger is defined as the mutual admiration of respectful adversaries, and shouldn't be pushed beyond this boundary.
Of course he'd piqued my curiosity. Perseverance and patience are readily applied to hunting that premier prey, knowledge. I prowled through libraries and musty, dim bookstores, uncovering old texts on myths, legends, and customs of the ancient Far East.
No wonder my masters had been reluctant to speak! Throughout the world and throughout history infanticide has been common. Yet nothing matched the drop in Asian newborns every Horse Year.
The tradition, as described, was that during any Year of the Horse, pregnant women went off into the wilds to give birth by themselves without family or midwife--a dangerous proposition, and by itself cause enough to avoid a pregnancy. If a woman came back with a boy-child, her husband greeted her with relief. But often she'd return pale and drained and announce with downcast eyes--without mentioning its sex--that the child had been stillborn and she'd buried it in the bush.
As my studies led up to modern times, I learned that technology improved on this practice. Amniocentesis allows a child to be sexed in utero and discreetly deleted if it proves to be an unwanted girl.
This knowledge filled me with sadness. Lost in the tenuous realm of might-have-been were generations of rambunctious, contentious, rearing, kicking, crow-hopping women who by their very nature made men uneasy; caused tigers to slink off belly to the ground, and dragons to smolder with smoke in general disapproval and retreat to their lairs.
Several years passed before I discovered my studies weren't the end of this story.
In the dojo I belong to, our masters hone our ability to see by rarely explaining. They teach by presenting the warriors' art with quick, silent demonstrations. They instruct by the precept, "The student must steal technique from the teacher."
So I took up instruction in Sumiei brushwork in order to train my eye and improve my perceptual abilities, hoping to become a better thief and therefore a better student. I enrolled in an evening weekend course at the local community college.
Among the other students in the class, one young woman caught my attention.
Her features, though long and angular, hinted at Asian ancestry. Her hair was a thick, glossy, rebellious black that simultaneously bristled and flowed. The young men in the class didn't flirt with her as they did with the other girls. Apparently they didn't consider her pretty, but I thought her strongly beautiful. I found myself stroking her likeness onto my practice sheets as frequently as I practiced my kanji.
The class took several breaks each night, as much to stretch out and massage cramped fingers as to drink coffee.
One evening during a break I struck up a conversation with the young woman with the arresting features. I told her my name. She told me that hers was Thera. We talked about the class: found that we both enjoyed the hypnosis of laying down line after line of velvet ink, freed from any goal or expectation other than the experience of each stroke.
Thera was taking the class because she wanted to use it in her artwork, and to try her hand at lettering.
I told her that I'd begun to use the technique to train my eye and to experiment with sketching. That I liked the idea of rendering objects in calligraphic terms--trees, stones, birds, perhaps even people--not confessing that I'd already used her as a subject. "For example, with that incredible mane of yours, I could translate you into an icon for the idea of 'horse,'" I said, speaking tactfully of her hair rather than her long, equine face.
"That would have amused my mother," Thera said. "According to her people, the year I was born in was ruled by the horse."
My pulse jumped. Since ceasing my investigations, I'd never expected to hear of the subject again.
"She said I was lucky to have been born here. Horse-year women were considered undesirable back in the old country."
"Really?"...
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