Chinese and more Chinese

---

Today I spent most of the day doing some sort of Chinese. Not that I suppose that's uncommon as I'm in China but it was a long day.

There was one woman sitting in a red costume with a mask on. She was absolutely beautiful. She looked real sitting there but I knew she couldn't be nor was she. I was simply looking at a picture in a museum in Dalian. There are very few of them here in Dalian and this particular one was filled most of the way with Russian art - not actually Chinese art. It was on the corner of Russian street - a huge tourist spot for ... well ... Russians. So I suppose it made sense to have a lot of Russian art.

It's just a line. I thought to myself. But then I looked at it again. No, it wasn't a line. It took on the appearance of a line but not the personality of a line. No matter how many times I drew it I couldn't capture that personality. The art tangled up in this one line was much more complicated than the characters I had drawn previously. I felt I could wrap my head around the characters. But the one line? It was just one horizontal line. It took me at least 10 minutes to get an okay one. Not really any good. Why was it so hard? "The more simple they get the harder they are to do" my Chinese teacher later told me recalling the days when she too studied calligraphy. Yet it looks like a line.

After my calligraphy class I raced to school running a little late for my Chinese class with Julia where we learned the radical "mu" (tree) and many other characters that go along with it.

---