On the train, everyone is scrolling through his or her phone.
My hands too can’t escape the destiny of this era.
Changes in human history are closely tied to the hand.
For the animal kingdom, the hand holds no significance.
Cows, horses and pigs put their weight on their four limbs and walk or climb on all fours. Although their forelimbs and hindlimbs have slightly different functions, the difference is negligible.
Half of the species in the animal kingdom mostly use their “claws” and “teeth”. Primates such as apes stand on their hindlimbs; when their forelimbs began to evolve, they gradually developed various functions of “fingers”, such as gripping, grabbing, plucking, peeling and throwing.
In an anthropology class in my university days, I read German philosopher Friedrich Engels’ essay explaining the connection between human civilisation and the hand.
His key argument was that hands are not innate but the product of mankind’s continuous evolution through labour.
So if we do not use our hands, will they degenerate?
At one’s fingertips
I am reminded of the ape’s hands — the hands of an ape mother embracing her baby and the fingers of an ape mother removing lice from her baby. Lice are tiny — removing them requires the use of fingertips.
Nanie (拿捏) is not a type of knowledge. It’s a reminder that knowing something comes with experience.
My mother often stressed the importance of having a good grasp of things (拿捏 nanie, consisting of the Chinese characters 拿 “take, seize” and 捏 “pinch, mould together”), be it in terms of how we season a dish, taking measurements when altering clothes, pickling vegetables, and even how we behave and treat others. Mother told me to have a good grasp of all these things (拿捏分寸 nanie fencun).
Both na and nie are related to the hand.
When Mother cooked, she simply grabbed salt, added wine and sprinkled sugar with her hands. She never used a scale to measure the exact weight of ingredients but used her hands to na (take) and nie (pinch) the exact amount of seasoning needed. It always turned out to be the perfect amount, leaving me in awe of Mother’s precision.
Nanie is not a type of knowledge. It’s a reminder that knowing something comes with experience.
What’s difficult to convey in the human sensory world is “touch” — you can feel the weight of an item in your hand or gauge the thickness of textiles fibres in clothing with your palm. Different textures and temperatures; the coolness of silk and the warmth of fur, cotton and linen — all these can be touched and felt with your fingers without seeing them with your eyes.
I have a friend who used to work in the textile industry and is now retired. At times when I show her some fabrics that I’m unable to tell apart, she would simply have a feel of them before casually calling out “warp”, “weft”, “40x40”, “68x128 density”… Basking in the magical memories of fingers and textiles, I would be reminded of Mother’s fingers when she knitted, crocheted and embroidered.
Can we love a piece of fabric not because of its brand or exorbitant price but purely because it was knitted and sewn by one’s mother?
Turning “threads” into “clothes” is a thousand-year textile memory of humankind.
In my memories of childhood, Mother was always sewing — knitting sweaters, crocheting tablecloths, embroidering on pillowcases. Those dexterous and slender (纤细 xianxi) fingers of hers made many things. It turns out that xian (纤, “fine, delicate”) and xi (细, “thin, slender”) are the most basic lines and threads in fabrics and textiles.
When I read literature later on and came across the term xinsi xianxi (心思纤细, describing a thoughtful and sensitive person who pays great attention to detail), I was often reminded of Mother’s hands as she did her embroidery.
Without memories of the hand working with silk thread, would xian and xi still hold the same meaning in literature?
“A thread in a mother’s hand” is a line from Tang dynasty poet Meng Jiao’s 游子吟 (Youzi yin, Song of the Wanderer). I recited it when I was young and it didn’t seem unfamiliar to me because in that era, the clothes, socks, scarves and hats that every child wore were usually sewn by their mother.
Turning “threads” into “clothes” is a thousand-year textile memory of humankind.
Decline of handicrafts
Can the human hand return to Mother’s era?
Until the 1970s, whenever I took the mountain trail near Lushan (庐山) in Wushe (雾社) and walked past a tribal village, I would see tribal women chopping down Ramie trees, flattening the bark out with stone slabs, and extracting fibres from them. The material would then be dried under the sun, dyed and weaved together to create vibrant and beautiful linens with a simple loom. These linens would be used to make clothes, bags or headscarves.
I bought a few of them without thinking much about how precious they were and gifted them to my friends when I went overseas. When they knew that the items were all handmade, they couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful they looked.
By the time I returned to Taiwan in the late 1970s, the island had undergone rapid industrial and commercial development. When I walked along Lushan in Wushe again, the production of Ramie fabric had become mechanised and the material itself started being blended with nylon fibres. The dyeing process was not as meticulously done as before either.
I experienced the decline of handicrafts on the island of Taiwan and truly felt sorry for the loss of tribal textiles or Ramie fabric. However, what I truly miss is the value of the human hand in that era.
In the 21st century, on the train, it seems that our hands, including mine, have been kidnapped by the mobile phone.
Will we ever be able to break free?
Will we have the chance to know the significance of our hand?
... does the degeneration of the hand correlate to the regression of the brain?
Our parents’ generation worked tirelessly with their hands their whole lives. Even when they turned 80, they still did a lot of things with their hands. They preferred using their hands even when machines could do the work. There is a different kind of joy and satisfaction in using one’s own hands, instead of machines, to mop the floor, do the laundry and wash the dishes occasionally. Parents of that era, even at the age of 80, were still healthy and had good memory.
The books always teach us to use our hands and brains at the same time — does the degeneration of the hand correlate to the regression of the brain?
Since the agricultural era, human hands have been gender-differentiated, with men growing crops and women weaving clothes. About 10,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, the earliest agricultural civilisations were formed along the banks of the Euphrates, Tigris, Nile, Indus, Ganges, Yellow River and Yangtze River. Men developed heavy labour skills to work in the fields, digging with hoes, harvesting with sickles, and ploughing the field and sowing seeds with wooden ploughs.
Gender roles defined arm and hand strength
Men developed arm and shoulder strength.
At the same time, women and fibres formed a unique civilisational memory involving the finger. Knitting involves dexterous finger movements.
A long time ago, the mythical Leizu domesticated silkworms. She watched as the little critters ate mulberry leaves and spun a cocoon with a single strand of silk numerous times the length of its body, encircling itself like a piece of clothing and waiting to transform into a moth.
The history of spinning textiles is like a myth — Leizu learnt how to boil the cocoons, unravel the fine silk and weave it into a beautiful piece of silk garment.
Undyed silk is called “plain” (素, su) silk, while dyeing on plain silk is called “painting” (绘, hui). When Confucius said hui shi hou su (绘事后素, which meant that paintings should be done on a white background, and implied that one only appreciates simplicity after experiencing splendour), he was referencing the silk-dyeing process.
The history of this textile civilisation in which women played a key role is recorded in the Kao gong ji (考工记, Record of Trades) chapter of the Rites of Zhou (《周礼》).
Silk is an important record of women’s role in ancient civilisation. Because of silk, a silk road of thousands of years was paved from the East to the West.
I once visited a traditional silk carpet-weaving workshop in Istanbul. It takes several weavers countless months to make a single silk carpet.
The unbelievably exquisite silk carpet in their hands seemed like a magic carpet straight out of a fairytale. The weavers began their trade when they were young and continued until they became silver-haired. They sat in a circle in front of the carpets, talking about the story of the magic carpet, as if comforting the blood, sweat, tears and time that they have dedicated to their handicraft.
I remembered that our guide suddenly talked about a 6th century Chinese princess who married into the Byzantine empire. Worried that she would be unable to wear silk in the future, she hid a silk cocoon in her hair before she left for a faraway land.
“Thanks to this princess, we learnt about sericulture,” the guide said.
A princess from the 6th century… Was she from Xianbei (鲜卑, likely a Proto-Mongolic ancient nomadic people), Northern Wei, Western Wei or Northern Zhou?
I couldn’t know for sure. But I found myself imagining her hiding a cocoon in her hair, like a modern spy running off with the 12-inch silicon wafer technology. But the princess was not a “commercial spy”. She was simply afraid that there would be no silk garments in the foreign land. But that foreign land would in fact be her future hometown!
When I was little, I sat in front of Mother for a long time and listened to the stories she would tell me. Stories about the White Snake, the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl… She would knit sweaters with three long needles as she told stories.
Tales and fairy tales while busy hands worked
Mother knitted most of the sweaters worn by our family with six children.
There were always balls of different-coloured yarn lying around her. I would sometimes accompany her to pick out yarn at a small yarn shop along Yuanling Street (沅陵街).
She would carefully compare the colour and texture differences of the different yarn, and often hold up two strands of yarn for me to observe and compare them. I couldn’t tell the difference but Mother would point at one of the strands and say, “This is a brighter green.”
She also studied European, American and Japanese fashion magazines, noting the patterns and colour combinations.
She would begin knitting as soon as she got home.
Those balls of yarn danced among three magical long needles in a series of warps and wefts. She sometimes stopped to count the stitches but most of the time, her eyes weren’t on the yarn. Instead, she focused on telling me the story of the Weaver Girl on the other side of the Milky Way and how she could weave a piece of embroidery as beautiful as the starry sky.
I guess the mythical Weaver Girl must have been the idol of women in agricultural societies for thousands of years. The women would offer incense and pray to Weaver Girl on 7 July every year for a pair of dexterous hands like hers. That festival is also known as the Qiqiao Festival (乞巧节), which holds special significance to all women.
Nowadays, the 7th day of the 7th Chinese lunar month is Chinese Valentine’s Day, focusing on Cowherd and Weaver Girl’s annual meeting on a bridge formed by flocks of magpies. Businessmen seize the opportunity to make sales on that day.
But the Cowherd and Weaver Girl in Mother’s stories were about a pair of lovers who were so head over heels in love that they forgot about their roles — men growing crops and women weaving clothes — and abandoned the labour of their hands, which is why they were punished and separated on opposite ends of the Milky Way and were only allowed to meet once a year.
I’ve always felt that there was a thin thread connecting Mother’s hand and my body, like an umbilical cord that was not cut.
By the time Mother finished telling the story, the front of the sweater — orderly and neat — would be complete.
I remember that it was a bright green turtleneck sweater, like the colour of new willow leaves in spring. When I was in my second or third year of high school, whenever I didn't need to wear the school uniform, I would wear the sweater to school and was the envy of my classmates.
When I studied in Paris, I often looked around luxury boutiques but I still missed the sweater that Mother knitted. During the icy cold seasons, I especially missed the turtleneck that fit snugly and protected my neck. No other brand can ever replace the warmth of Mother’s sweater.
After a sweater has been worn for a year or two, Mother would unpick everything and start over. She would say that the yarn has grown old and was no longer as pliable as before. Strands of the unpicked sweater would be washed and dried on a bamboo pole. Against the sunlight, the yarn looked like newly-sprouted willow leaves with young stems.
When the yarn was dry, she would take them in with her own hands and ask me to sit on a small stool across from her. I would raise both of my arms and Mother would wrap the yarn around my arms, and then wind it into a ball.
As a little boy, I would be trapped in one of Mother’s balls of yarn for hours. I would watch her knit sweaters and listen to her stories.
While we wound the yarn into a ball, she would tell me about The Legend of the White Snake, the story of a snake that practised hard to turn into a beautiful woman.
I’ve always felt that there was a thin thread connecting Mother’s hand and my body, like an umbilical cord that was not cut.
I could feel Mother’s strength as she pulled the yarn. It was not too fast and not too slow, similar to the rhythm of her storytelling.
Labour of love
We have six children in the family — three boys and three girls. A lot of Mother’s time was spent on mending and knitting, and her knitting skills seemed to improve by the day.
On a regular basis, she would buy yarn from the shop along Yuanling Street and come home to design sweaters based on the patterns she saw in foreign magazines. They could be long-sleeved or sleeveless tops, or cardigans or V-neck pullovers.
She also picked out the buttons for our cardigans at Yuanling Street — buttons made of shell, wood, leather — carefully seeing if they would match. I guess no designer brand tailor-makes clothes the way Mother did, taking the time to ensure that each piece of clothing would be suitable for each of her child’s body and personality.
From the yarn wrapped around my arms, Mother would pull out a strand and start winding it into a ball. I could feel Mother’s strength as she pulled the yarn. It was not too fast and not too slow, similar to the rhythm of her storytelling.
She sorted the balls of yarn according to colour, and used her three long needles to knit new patterns.
There was an imperial yellow chequered pattern across my chest on my bright green turtleneck sweater. When I wore it to school, my classmates thought that it was a new sweater and all came around to admire it. But it was difficult for me to explain that the “yarn was old”, and that the yellow yarn was actually taken from my older sister’s old sweater or that some of the green yarn from my sweater was now part of my younger brother’s sleeveless top.
I slowly fell asleep, feeling as if Mother’s hands had embroidered the splendid galaxy in the dark night.
The joy of handicraft is in creating something new. In the handicraft era, Mother probably didn’t feel like it was a chore to make clothes and cook because she was doing so for her children. When she knitted, she would also think about the Weaver Girl, who neglected her work and was punished and separated from her loved ones. Wouldn’t that be the greatest punishment?
Mother enjoyed embroidery too. She was very focused when she was embroidering — she spent a lot of time choosing between different greens and reds before she started embroidering a leaf or a flower petal.
She gifted us exquisitely embroidered satin pillowcases but only left embroidery sketches on rough pieces of cloth for herself.
In their labour of every needle and thread, women over thousands of years wove together a history of civilisation.
On the night of the Qiqiao Festival, Mother prayed before the Milky Way and read me the following Tang poem: “Candlelight shines against a printed silk screen on an autumn night. She gently blows the firefly away with a little fan. The night is cool as water on the stone steps. Reclining, one can see the Altair (Cowherd) and Vega (Weaver Girl) stars in the sky.”
I slowly fell asleep, feeling as if Mother’s hands had embroidered the splendid galaxy in the dark night.
This article was first published in Chinese on United Daily News as “五行 九宮 蔬食13——母親的手”.
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