Yesterday morning I was lost before I even got out of bed. Stepping onto the packed dirt of my street, Little Gold Thread Hutong, whose roads are barely wide enough for a bicycle cart, I see how the street got its name: thin golden beams of sunlight play across the street and its grey brick walls, illuminating the suspended dust stirred up by morning traffic.

Breathing in the crisp fall air, I walk to the bus stop slowly, each turn around identical grey corners a gamble in bringing me closer to or farther from the main road. To me, accustomed to finding my way around the city based on tall neon building lights and huge street signs , wandering around this neighborhood of traditional Chinese housing is like being stuck in Crete’s labyrinth, with stay cats the size of minotaur’s lurking around every rooftop.

Without my neon skyscraper compass, I have begun to chart my course using neighborhood landmarks. Left at the big tree growing out of my neighbor’s courtyard, right at the recycling stacks of green glass bottles. Hurry past the communal bathrooms, then left at the corner store selling breakfast baozi out of bamboo steam trays. Here I turn right. Then the wooden plank across the ever present mud bog , where the tall grass grows. From there it is a straight shot to the main road.

Today I make a wrong turn somewhere between the baozi and the bog, and stumble upon an open doorway with several weathered calligraphy scrolls hanging just inside the doorway. The scrolls invite closer inspection, and I cross the threshold into my neighbor’s yard to take a closer look. A small garden patch sits in the middle of the dirt courtyard, surrounded by red bricks. There is an old man cutting down brown stalks from the plot, preparing his garden for winter. He is dressed in what seems to be the unanimously agreed upon outfit for old Chinese men: black slippers, baggy black cotton pants, a blue cotton jacket called a mian’ao, and a revolution style black cap.

Seeing me, he walks over calmly, in the manner that belongs only to old men in their gardens, and smiles, revealing a few yellow teeth surrounded by a beautiful sea of wrinkles. He asks if I am interested in calligraphy, and beckons me inside his studio to take a look around, saying that he gives lessons. As he fills his stove with coal, he gestures to a scratchy brown pad on the desk telling me to write my name. Slowly, I scratch out my Chinese name in the scrawl a kindergartener would be ashamed of.

He studies it, scratching his white stubble and squinting his shiny brown eyes. Then, quizzically, he says “zuo shou?” Left handed?

“Yes,” I reply, preparing myself for the barrage of questions involved in the dialog between an older Chinese person and a left handed foreigner.

“Do you always write with you left hand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how to write with you right hand?”

“No.”

“You never learned to write with your right hand?”

“No.”

“You write every word, all the time, with your left hand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you eat with your left hand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you pick things up with your left hand?”

“Yes. Well, sometimes, I pick things up with my right hand.”

The man looks down at my hands with slight disbelief, still stroking his beard. In China, no one writes with their left hand, as it is considered to be incompatible with forming the strokes in Chinese characters correctly. Although left handed children are made to write with their right hand, there is no negative stigma attached to being left handed. In fact, left handed people are considered bright, which is a kindly flip side to being considered handicapped while holding a pen.

“Can I still learn calligraphy?” I ask the man.

But he is distracted by the paper. Picking up a pen, he writes my name again, beneath my chicken scratches, in beautiful flowing fanti, the old, more complicated character system used before the script was simplified in the cultural revolution. Even holding a ball point pen, the motion of his hand is graceful, yet strong and deliberate, like water running over smooth stones.

He puts the pen down and looks at me. “Yes…” he says slowly. “You can still learn.” Neither of us seem too sure though, and he’s still eying my left hand with suspicion. I take my leave, just happy to have met another one of my neighbors. At the very least, I can add the calligraphy scrolls by his door to my mental collection of neighborhood landmarks.

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