Because of my work, I often purchase Hunan embroidery as gifts for my foreign clients, so I became acquainted with the owner of the embroidery shop. One day, a foreign guest asked to see the embroidery process with his own eyes, and the owner took us to Rui Niang’s studio.
The embroiderer, Rui Niang, is 40 years old and is an “old man” in Changsha Jinxia Hunan Embroidery City. When we arrived, Rui Niang was instructing her disciples, just after teaching this one to split the thread, she turned around and told that one to pay attention to the tension of the taut frame. When she saw us coming, she put down her work and showed the foreign guests her work and the semi-finished products being embroidered by her disciples. In that small world, thousands of threads were flying in the embroidery needles held by the embroiderers, using the needles as the brush and the threads as the ink, the landscapes, flowers and birds, animals and human figures were all exquisite.
After a few such visits, Rui Niang took me in as one of her own and often chattered with me about her family life. When I was interested, I wanted to learn to embroider a flower or two with her, but she changed her usual gentle expression and suddenly became serious and told me, “You can’t joke about embroidery, you have to learn it from your teens to make it work.” I had to give up, but I was curious about her “embroidery history”, so I found an afternoon to meet her for tea and listen to her talk about the ups and downs in the hands of the embroiderers.
The following is Rui Niang’s oral account.
1
In fact, my real name is not Ruiniang.
I was born in a remote town in western Hunan province. Before me, my mother had given birth to three daughters, but still did not expect a son to carry on the family tradition.
But since I was born, my mother’s belly has never bulged again. When I was young, I didn’t know what it meant to be patriarchal, I only knew that my father never took care of family matters, and my mother was careful to handle everything that cost money. When we all reached school age, the family’s expenses became large, the eldest sister hastily married, the second sister dropped out of school to work. Looking at my mother’s helpless and desperate eyes from time to time, I guessed that my third sister and I were nearing the end of our studies.
In 1990, nine-year compulsory education was not yet universal in remote western Hunan. I was 12 years old and had been in elementary school for five years. Many girls would drop out of school at that age and start helping the family by farming or working. My mother, who was considered a long-sighted woman in those days, wanted several daughters to study as much as possible, but my father fought over this matter several times. So my mother’s persistence gradually wore off.
Finally, my father got drunk one day, smoked a cigarette and looked at us one by one, and said in a muffled voice, “At the end of this semester, I’ll stop studying.”
This year, the town came to a valuable guest, said guests, but in fact, also from the town out of the woman. She was a famous embroiderer in Changsha, and it was said that many of her embroideries were sold in Hong Kong, and everyone respected her as “Master Du”.
When Master Du was still a girl, she ran away from her marriage and left for many years. She didn’t return home until she had made a lot of money, and by then her family had lost the courage to force her to do anything.
This time she is also considered to “return home”, brought money back to repair the ancestral home, and according to custom to the deceased elders to establish a new tombstone, a full half month. Before she left, Master Du asked the old women in town to send word to all the families with daughters of the right age that she would choose a few apprentices to follow her back to Changsha to learn embroidery and be an embroiderer.
When the news reached my family, I was a bit moved – it was better to go to Changsha than to drop out of school and work. I grew up in the town and had never seen the outside world. I had learned how to sew and mend with my mother, but I had no idea if I would be chosen by Master Du. I whispered my thoughts to my mother at night, and she mulled it over for a night, but agreed to it early the next morning.
On the day of the apprentice selection, my mother and I deliberately changed into semi-new clothes that we usually wear for festivals or wedding receptions. My mother also carried a bag full of gifts to the master – in fact, some grains and eggs, their own insoles, these “countryside goods”. Although we two mothers waited in front of Master Du’s house before sunrise, but in the courtyard before we came, there were already more than twenty girls standing, all coincidentally dressed up.
The matter of Master Du’s choice of apprentice even attracted Yan Yan, the town’s crippled girl. Yan Yan was abandoned in infancy by the town’s stone bridge, and her adoptive mother, Aunt Liu, a deaf mute who had lived alone for many years, spent years at the bridge stall doing breakfast, selling scallion baba, doughnuts and oil tofu. Aunt Liu’s craftsmanship and character are excellent, although a woman living alone, life is particularly difficult, but whenever she encountered a customer who forgot to bring money, she never cared, breakfast as usual to give out. Aunt Liu found the abandoned Yan Yan when she was out of the stall, wrapped in her silk cloth embroidered with a swallow, so Aunt Liu gave her this name.
Aunt Liu gestured to the people around her, saying that God saw her dead husband and no queen, so he gave her Yan Yan as a companion. Aunt Liu relied on the breakfast stall, and single-mindedly raised Yan Yan. But Yan Yan had polio since childhood, and her legs were bad, so she was in a wheelchair all the time.
Sometimes when my father was in a good mood, he would give us some change and go to Aunt Liu’s to buy doughnuts for a “meal”. I have met Yan Yan several times, although her legs are not good, but she will accompany Aunt Liu out of the stall every day, rain or shine. Mother and daughter communicate by eye and sign language, extraordinarily tacit understanding.
I think this time, Yan Yan also felt that this embroidery job was suitable for her, so she came to participate in the election.
2
Master Du came out, she had braided a twist behind her head and wore a pure white coat, it was hard to tell what material it was, with small blue and yellow flowers embroidered on both sides of the button, and the coat was purposely waisted to make her look elegant.
Before the formal selection began, Master Du waved his hand and eliminated half of the people – the older ones, those who did not look “spirit pan” (Changsha, meaning smart), had to stand aside and watch the fun.
Master Du asked all the young girls to thread the needle first. I took the needle and thread, the needle is an ordinary needle, but the eye of the needle is very small, the thread should be specially treated, in the hands of soft and thin, I have never seen.
Some of the girls next to me had already given up, I fixed my mind, steady hands, smoothly threaded, tied the knot and wait for Master Du to check.
This round, the test is the hand is not stable and heart, the more anxious the more badly dressed, and in the blink of an eye, and brushed off half of the girls.
Then is the test of eyesight and thoughtfulness. Master Du put a pair of very delicate paper cutouts on the glass window, above an inverted fortune, decorated with floral patterns around. The rest of the girls stood a few meters away, Master Du smiled very mildly, but the question raised called us sweat: “Who can count how many snowflakes in this paper cut, who is considered to have passed.”
In addition to the six snowflakes in the circle around the word blessing, the “clothes side” of the word blessing, as well as the horizontal and vertical in the word “Tian”, is also composed of snowflakes, which is easy to ignore if you don’t look closely. The girls all squinted their eyes, raised their fingers in the air and compared the numbers clearly written on the pieces of paper in front of them and handed them to Master Du.
When all the answers were handed in, Master Du eliminated a few more girls.
Master Du called the final four girls, including me, to the front one by one, so that we held out our hands for her to carefully read and touch the knuckles, was “dismissed”, only a few of our parents stepped forward to talk in the hall.
When my mother came out, her face was beaming with joy, and I knew that I had been chosen.
Mother made an appointment with Master Du to send me to Du’s house five days later, the day before the trip, to stay overnight and return to Changsha with her the next morning.
When my father learned of this, he was not happy about it. He always felt that I could help the family more by staying around and was adamant that he did not want me to go to work as an embroiderer. After my mother put us to bed, she first talked to my father in a low, soft voice until he moved again, and then my mother returned to our house, crying herself to sleep.
I thought that the matter of going to Changsha to learn embroidery, like my studies, would eventually be just yellowed by my mother’s compromise. The night before Master Du’s departure, my mother found a reason to ask my father’s friends to come to the house for a drink, and deliberately made him drunk. The next morning, when my father was still sleeping, my mother took my hand and sent me to Master Du.
Before leaving for Changsha, I learned that Yan Yan and I were the two apprentices that Master Du finally selected.
I always remember that day, the bus station traffic, my mother’s silhouette in the roadside becomes smaller and smaller, I can even foresee her self-assertion will bring her own several beatings, but I gritted my teeth, or did not turn back to wave goodbye. I said to myself, “I have to “get out of school” early and sell my embroidery to Hong Kong people so that I can bring my mother to live in Changsha.
3
When we first arrived in Changsha, Master Du treated Yan Yan and me very well, and he took care of us because we were young. During the New Year’s holidays, he would send gifts to our family, saying that he wanted to be courteous.
When we first started, Master Du didn’t teach us any embroidery techniques himself, but had other adult embroiderers at the embroidery farm teach us, starting with the most basic stitches, learning to split threads, putting tents on embroidery cloth, ironing, framing, and some other introductory embroidery knowledge. But Master Du would accompany us for a few meals a week, asking us if we were still happy in our daily life, and checking whether we had a good grasp of the theoretical knowledge.
After she accepted me as her apprentice, she thought my original name was too rustic to be a part of the world, so she thought of giving me a new name. She thought long and hard: “Think about it, when you become a master, if you embroider large works, you will sign your name on the certificate or embroidery, and people will laugh at your name.”
After thinking about it for a few days, she decided to give me the word “Rui” – because the day she first met me, the paper cutout she used for the exam was the inverted word “Fu” which meant “Rui Xue Zhaoyuan”. So, according to the rules of the embroidery house, everyone started to call me “Rui Rui”, and when I was older, they called me “Rui Niang”.
Yan Yan and I followed the classes set by the embroidery house, and gradually learned the rules of the trade: embroidery subjects were divided into figures, animals, birds and flowers, and landscape paintings and calligraphy. Only after 5 to 10 years of experience are you able to embroider people and animals, and only then do you have the ability to embroider your work in detail. Most embroiderers start with “single-sided embroidery” and can produce works in about 3 years, mostly landscapes and birds and flowers first.
Because embroidery is extremely hard on the eyes, most of the senior embroiderers suffer from frozen shoulder and cervical spondylosis. There were countless embroiderers who quit halfway through the year, many of them couldn’t keep up and quit after learning to embroider flowers and birds, most of them would go to work in textile factories.
Master Du did not blame her students too much for quitting. In her eyes, a master’s career depended on five things – the teacher’s teaching, one’s talent, one’s perception, a good physical foundation and a tough heart – none of which was needed.
Yan Yan and I were both determined to stay in Changsha and learn Hunan embroidery well, so we worked hard and never slacked off.
When we were able to produce decent landscapes and birds and flowers, I took advantage of the New Year to go back home. By that time, my three sisters were all married, and I was the only one left who lost money, as my father called it. I took advantage of the few days off to embroider some orchids on the front of my mother’s old dress with the family’s needle and thread to cover up the rubbing of the silk.
My mother shook my hand and instructed, “Learn well outside, don’t be like your sisters who have to be stuck in town for the rest of their lives.”
The following year, when there was more work in the embroidery house, Yan Yan and I were able to help embroider some simple ornaments. From then on, Master Du began to teach us the more difficult stitches by hand, and began to pay us monthly. I saved up the money and remitted it to my mother every once in a while, and also helped Yan Yan remit it to Aunt Liu, who still had her breakfast stall every day. The money was not much, but it was enough to stop my father from saying “money losers” and to make Yan Yan feel “useful” and not a burden to Aunt Liu anymore.
4
As we learned techniques from Master Du, we gradually learned a lot of “gossip” about him from his own mouth and from other embroiderers at the embroidery farm.
For example, in the early years, Master Du’s favorite embroidery was “The Twelve Hairpin of the Golden Palace”.
When she was in her early 30s, she was in her golden age as an embroiderer. At that time, a wealthy Hong Kong businessman of Xiang origin brought his late father’s calligraphy and painting works to Changsha and paid a lot of money to find a good embroidery house to preserve the calligraphy works permanently in the form of Xiang embroidery.
Several major embroidery houses in Changsha received the invitation, and when everyone took a look at the painting the old man brought, it was none other than The Twelve Hairpin of the Golden Age. According to the rules, each embroidery house could send a representative to view the original painting and then select one of the beauties to be submitted to Mr. Lao, who would decide which embroidery house would do the painting – in today’s terms, a bid.
As a result, Master Du, who was not very famous, was chosen by Mr. Lao and embroidered the whole work by himself, making him famous.
But it wasn’t over yet – at that time, the son of another famous embroidery house in Changsha was so proud that he thought his own work was better, so he always came to Master Du’s embroidery house every now and then to buy some embroidery and try to pick it.
He was the sales manager of his family’s embroidery shop, and everyone called him “Zhou Shao”. Zhou Shao’s father was in the building materials business, and his family was very big, and his mother was also a famous embroiderer.
Zhou Shao was born with a good skin, and he was always polite and courteous every time he came, but everyone knew what was going on behind the scenes. Master Du cope with more, all the doubts of Zhou Shao can be justified to answer successfully. Zhou Shao convinced, prickly into a discussion, one way or another, on Master Du moved the heart. But he was 8 years younger than Master Du, Master Du began to just take his every gesture of affection as a teenage rash and impulsive.
Master Du had never fallen in love since she was a teenager and had never been immersed in the embroidery business, so when she was pursued by the young and handsome Zhou Shao, it was inevitable that she had a little girl’s heart. At that time, Zhou used to send food and drinks to the whole embroidery house, treating himself as half master, and gradually, rumors started to spread from the embroidery house to the whole circle.
Master Du also gradually noticed that there were more and more rumors behind the scenes, and even more and more out of the ordinary: some said that they were lovers before; some said that Master Du was flirtatious by nature and liked to eat young grass; others said that Zhou was rushing to Master Du’s embroidery shop to make the “beautiful man scheme”.
Master Du, who had been clean for many years, was so uncomfortable with the rumors that he started to hide from Zhou, and later even disappeared. He was very insistent on this matter, and at that time, Master Du had a few blind dates with his friends, all of which were spoiled by Zhou. Master Du went back to Xiangxi in a fit of anger, hiding for a full month.
When Master Du back to Changsha, Zhou less never appeared, Master Du only as a teenager is thin, this farce can not be taken seriously.
After half a year, someone sent a pair of good huanghuali embroidery frame to master Du, attached a letter – the original Zhou Shao had cancer, simmered a few months and died. Before he died, he made his mother promise him to give Master Du the embroidery frame that had been passed down from his ancestors.
After that, Master Du never went on a blind date again, and remained celibate, absorbed in learning and improving various needlework techniques – except that if anyone wanted to order the Twelve Hairpins of the Golden Palace from her, she never agreed to do so again, no matter how high or low the price was.
The huanghuali embroidery frame was always covered with silk cloth and placed in Master Du’s bedroom, so no one could touch it.
I remember one year at Mid-Autumn Festival, when we accompanied Master Du to have a few more drinks, she said to us with a smile, “Don’t think that good embroidery with good techniques and stitches will do, the heart must be full of sweet and sour, taste life and death, and tolerate loneliness before anything can be embroidered well.”
5
In the blink of an eye, Yan Yan and I had been at the embroidery farm for five years. Master Du changed the curriculum for us, and in addition to insisting on learning various stitches, splitting threads, and matching colors to embroideries, we began to learn Chinese painting. Master Du said, “Between an embroiderer and an embroiderer, there are senior embroiderers, provincial art masters, and national embroidery masters, but in reality, it depends on whether you have talent for art and painting besides embroidery. If you don’t know how to paint, your embroidery will not be able to convey the spirit of your work, and you will not be able to do ‘master class’.”
Usually, if a customer comes to the embroidery shop in a hurry, 8 to 10 embroiderers can work together to finish a piece of work, but an embroiderer of Du’s level usually finishes the whole piece by herself and does not take on urgent work.
It is very difficult to show the delicate texture of the animal’s hair and to make the transition between the light and dark hair on the tiger without showing the vividness and realism, so only an embroiderer of Du’s level would dare to take on a job like “tiger”.
Yan Yan and I love to watch Master Du embroider the tiger, there are hundreds of colors of threads alone. There are thousands of colors of embroidery threads, and it is up to the embroiderer’s eyes to choose the most suitable threads according to the sketch of the embroidery, taking into account the light sensitivity and even the personal preference of the customizer.
Whenever she wants to embroider such a “big job”, Master Du carefully soaks her hands in olive oil and milk to remove the barbs and dry skin, then wipes the remaining oil with a paper towel (for fear of scratching the embroidery threads and hair), and then embroiders with a disheveled needle (the most representative stitch of Hunan embroidery, mostly used for embroidering hair). Yan Yan and I asked our own questions from time to time, and the time passed slowly, beautifully and fully.
Yan Yan and I started to embroider animals independently, and we started to embroider “double-sided embroidery”, but we knew that this did not mean that we had become masters. We have learned that embroidery is endless, and we are always in awe of it.
Eight years later, Yan Yan and I have grown from teenagers to young girls in our early 20s. Master Du is very pleased that both of us have put our hearts into embroidery and have improved our skills step by step, mastering not only single-sided and double-sided embroidery stitches, but also painting and producing our own exclusive embroideries.
Embroidery has also left various marks on our bodies, with calluses on our fingertips and sore shoulders, all of which are commonplace. As long as we were diligent, we could earn a regular income of several thousand dollars a month, something that our parents and sisters who still lived in the town could not even imagine. Every time I go home and see my sisters, who have lost all their glory to the oil, salt, vinegar and children, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart that I had such an opportunity when I was young.
After completing the last embroidery in the millennium, Master Du stopped accepting work and only instructed the embroiderers in the embroidery farm.
The golden age of an embroiderer is from 35 to 45 years old, which is only 10 years. 35 years old is a period of accumulation, sharpening and improvement of skills, but after 45 years old, the eyesight is no longer good enough to meet the requirements of an embroiderer, so the best way out is to retire to the second line and concentrate on teaching students. Master Du has gone through all stages of the embroiderer’s life, from apprentice to master to teacher, and now that the embroiderers in the embroidery farm are able to take charge of their own work, she has truly put her heart at ease.
I thought the days would go on like this, but then something happened to Yan Yan.
6
During those days, Yan Yan and I were embroidering a pair of “Zhaogun Goes Out of the Frontier” together, and our customers were in a hurry, so sometimes we took a break at night and got up to embroider for a while. That night, I was on my period, so I lazily rested in my room while Yan Yan went to the studio alone. It didn’t take long for her to return from the wheelchair with one hand and her right hand was covered with blood.
We rushed to the hospital to dress and treat Yan Yan’s wound, which spread from her wrist to her hand, with dozens of stitches and a bruise. On the way back to the embroidery shop, we learned that the frame of the embroidery we were working on had suddenly broken, and Yan Yan’s hand had been cut and then hit by the frame again because she couldn’t get out of the way in time due to her legs.
As her hand had to recuperate for a while, Yan Yan simply went back home to western Hunan, wanting to stay with Aunt Liu.
Although Yan Yan and I had been able to earn enough to support our family over the years, Aunt Liu still insisted on working at the breakfast stall at the Stone Bridge bridge every morning, saying that she had gotten used to it over the years and felt too idle to stop. Yan Yan persuaded many times also useless, simply let her go.
After Yan Yan returned home, daily accompanied Aunt Liu out of the stall, until one day, a group of all-night drinking drunks passing by, between the fight, overturned the frying pan on Aunt Liu’s stall, hot oil splashed Yan Yan all over, also splashed on her hands.
When Master Du and I rushed back, Yan Yan was already in the hospital with her burns, and she didn’t get too depressed, just smiled weakly at me and said, “About God wants me to stay with my mother more, so I won’t go back to Changsha.”
Master Du transferred a sum of money from the embroidery house as Yan Yan’s severance pay, enough for her to buy a new house in town.
When Yan Yan, who had been my companion for many years, left, it really made me depressed for a while. Whenever Master Du tried to say something, I walked away in silence and didn’t want to listen. I just concentrated on embroidery, but I finished a few good pieces and sold them for more than 100,000 yuan.
During the Chinese New Year, I went home to visit my relatives as usual, and Yan Yan came to visit me. We were sitting together outside the house, and she said, “Actually, I tried to continue embroidering, but my hands are really not working anymore. It’s just a few flowers and birds, but my hands can’t keep up.”
I urged her, “Let’s go to a bigger hospital in Changsha, the doctor must have a solution.”
Yan Yan shook her head: “Forget it, these years to cure my leg has also spent a lot of money, basically do not have too much savings. Mom is usually always alone, I do not feel at ease. And I’m also a little tired.”
After all, we had been with each other for more than ten years, and when I heard her say that, I had to give up.
The next spring, I received the news that Yan Yan was in love. The man is a small tailor, because Yan Yan hands have scars, often go to the tailor store to change the sleeves longer, talk more, the two have a good feeling for each other, on the secretly live with friends.
Master Du and I were happy for Yan Yan when we found out about it, and we discussed to embroider a wedding dress for her with gold threads full of phoenixes and peonies to make a good omen.
One day, Master Du suddenly bought a bus ticket and dragged me home to Xiangxi without even packing her luggage. I asked her why she was in a hurry to go back. Master Du smiled, as if there are a few hints of youthful vigor: “Someone wants to break up the Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, we go back to stop them from hitting the lovebirds ah!”
A few hours on the road, Master Du told me the story – Yan Yan fell in love with a small tailor, a few years younger than her, the small tailor’s family to see Yan Yan leg disability, there are scalding scars, or a found girl, the adoptive mother is also a deaf mute, firmly disagree that they continue to love, let alone get married.
The young tailor naturally disagreed and was ready to live in Yan Yan’s house to do a “back door”, but was tied back by the family. This fight, the neighbors know. Yan Yan was too thin-skinned to tell us about it, but the word of the town was so fearful that it soon reached Master Du’s ears.
Although Yan Yan has left the embroidery farm, but Master Du always treat her as half daughter, not to mention that Master Du and Zhou Shao also because people said that the age gap, missed a good marriage for nothing, to Yan Yan, she naturally will not let the little lovebirds just scattered.
Master Du, if serious, is harsh and thorough. She took me, Yan Yan mother and daughter and the little tailor, and even called on the mayor, all the way to the little tailor’s home.
The little tailor’s mother was particularly loud, and came up cursing, saying that the vixens led by Master Du had seduced her honest son. Master Du is sitting in the main seat of the hall without any problem, his back is as strong as a small poplar. Waiting for the little tailor’s mother to finish scolding, Master Du pulled out two passbooks from his bag, and only then steadily opened his mouth: “Now is not the old society, the two children’s matter, one is not against the law, the second is your love, of course, they should be the decision. We know that Yan Yan’s legs are not good, Liu is also deaf and dumb, but they are not no mother’s family by your casual bullying!
Master Du turned his head to Yan Yan and said, “This fold, one is your dowry, one is my bride price for you, a total of 200,000, today we are here to take a stand, if you agree, then according to normal etiquette to marry. If someone is still opposed, then we do not have to worry about what marriage rituals, before I was your master, I will recognize the little tailor as a godson, to be your mother-in-law!”
The mayor saw the master Du all the way to the end of the frame, also came out to reconcile, the little tailor family jealous of the mayor’s prestige and master Du’s connections, the bride price on the table is how many ordinary girl’s family can not get, so a calculation, or agreed to the marriage.
Yan Yan’s wedding day, we hand embroidered with gold threads of the wedding dress for her to wear, 8 phoenix, noble and good omen. Master Du combed her hair, tears flowing – she may feel that she will not see herself married in this life, looking at Yan Yan, it is like going back to her own youth, also considered married.
After eating the wedding wine, I cried for a while, and after sobering up, I stepped on the bus back to Changsha, and sealed everything in the town for the time being, thinking only of breaking into the world in this business, and putting aside the love affairs of children.
7
When I told Master Du that I wanted to learn “double-sided embroidery”, she was very surprised.
Hunan embroidery is divided into single-sided embroidery, double-sided embroidery and double-sided embroidery, of which double-sided embroidery is the most difficult, and there are only a few embroiderers who know how to do it. The so-called double-sided different embroidery is to embroider the same pattern on the same piece of material, but with different colors: for example, a 30*30cm ornament with pink lotus on one side and yellow lotus on the other, but with the same composition and outline. A small piece of this kind of work can be sold for more than 3,000 yuan, which is 10 times more than ordinary double-sided embroidery, and for a large screen or wall painting, the price can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands – but of course, the time spent on a piece of work with this embroidery method is also many times more than ordinary work. With fewer and fewer embroiderers knowing this method, the collection of works is becoming more and more significant, and it is naturally expensive for a reason.
The reason why many embroiderers do not learn this method is that it takes several years to learn it, and the biggest concern is that an embroiderer usually has more than ten years of experience, and if she spends a few more years learning this technique, she will be able to embroider for at most 5 to 8 years after she is fully trained, and then it is time to retire. For those who are not physically fit, they can’t even last 5 years. Therefore, most of the embroiderers stop at the skill after mastering double-sided embroidery.
But Master Du still supported me and even opened a small kitchen for me to practice this kind of embroidery. She was influenced by Yan Yan, who also began to care about my life, and introduced some boys to me, but either they didn’t see my profession or I didn’t like their vulgarity, so nothing happened.
In the eyes of most outsiders, the embroidered girl who has not even studied in high school is not worthy of those white-collar and gold-collar workers in office buildings. So after several failed blind dates, we tacitly stopped talking about it and I concentrated on my embroideries.
After my first double-sided embroidery was produced, it was sold after only 3 days in the hall of the embroidery shop. I embroidered my own seal topstitch in the lower right corner as Master Du had instructed, and was so excited that I couldn’t sleep all night.
Ruiniang’s work (Photo by the author)
Those were my “golden years”. With these hands, I was able to buy a house and a car and build up a family fortune. My father passed away early because of alcoholism and smoking, but for several years before he passed away, the family was mainly subsidized by me, and he didn’t dare to say “no” to me.
New apprentices are still taken in, but fewer and fewer children are willing to devote themselves to embroidery from their teenage years. With the spread of compulsory education, it is difficult to find suitable apprentices at the age of teenagers, so Master Du has to mobilize people to bring their relatives’ daughters to learn embroidery during the summer and winter holidays.
Master Du had a deep fear of the decline of this traditional skill, but later, we started to relax the standard and recruited some slightly older girls from the village to join the industry, and the number of embroiderers finally stabilized.
8
As Master Du grew older, although she still looked elegant and dignified, I could feel that her health had deteriorated, she always caught a cold a few times a year, and her medical checkups were always abnormal in terms of blood lipids and heart indicators.
The hot summers and cold winters in Changsha, combined with the year-round humidity, were not suitable for the elderly to recuperate. Master Du himself started to let go of the embroidery business and gradually became a hands-off businessman, following his sister to Guangzhou and Hainan in winter and returning to the town of Xiangxi in summer to escape the heat. After her marriage, Yan Yan and the young tailor had a baby of their own and never suffered any more.
In the early spring of this year, Master Du, as a senior in Hunan embroidery, followed the industry experts to the United States for an exhibition exchange. When she came back, she started to ask her English-speaking apprentice to teach her English, and she even took a small notebook to write down a few common English phrases.
During the Spring Festival, everyone went back to their own homes and the embroidery farm was empty. In previous years, Master Du would go back to Hunan with us, but this year, he got a visa to the U.S. early, and only after I asked him again and again did he sheepishly admit that he had been to the U.S. for an exchange and was introduced by a friend to an old Chinese gentleman who owned a winery, and the two of them hit it off. The old gentleman had no children and was free, so he invited Master Du to the United States many times. We learned that all encourage Master Du to “fall in love” again.
Before Master Du left, invited me to her bedroom for a night talk. She lifted the silk cloth so I could look at the embroidery frame that had been handed down for generations from Zhou. Master Du took out a pamphlet for me, full of points and insights about her skills over the years.
She gave me the half-embroidered work, the six beauties on the silk backing, which she had stopped embroidering halfway through.
Master Du gave me a hug and said, “In your life, you have to do your best to experience all kinds of people and things, so that your life will be full and your feelings will be abundant, and your work will be good with your heart as the thread, and your stitches will be all your heart’s blood, and your work will be good with feelings. Let you finish this one for me later.”
After Master Du left, I repeatedly thought about the life of the three of us over the years and suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment. I also gradually let go of the idea of never marrying for life and devoting myself to embroidery.
I met Cheng, a male embroiderer, for the first time at a forum to promote Hunan embroidery.
Ah Cheng was born in Guangdong to a family of embroiderers and used to specialize in Cantonese embroidery before he slowly started learning Hunan embroidery. Male embroiderers are not common in our profession, and I admired him for his unconventional approach and for inheriting the skills of his fathers, and he thought my love and persistence in embroidery deserved his respect.
Later we went on several dates, and apart from discussing embroidery, we slowly got to know each other’s temperament, family situation and so on. With the help of Master Du, I finally got my first boyfriend at the age of 40. Yan Yan, who already had two children, got the news and was happy for me.
Mother and three sisters, has settled in the small town life, I married, Ah Cheng settled with me in Changsha. We discussed, every New Year’s Day, the two sides of the family to run in exchange. During the weekdays, excluding the daily chores of life, we each took on apprentices and got down to business, wanting to keep the Hunan embroidery business going, which became our exclusive romance.
I often think of that early morning many years ago when I was a young girl standing in the courtyard of Master Du’s ancestral home, tense to the point of numbness as I took the “exam” to enter the profession. Nearly 30 years have passed, and we no longer use the old method of accepting apprentices, and the criteria have changed, as long as the children are healthy and want to develop in the industry, the embroiderers are willing to teach them, regardless of gender.
The young faces in the embroidery shop always remind me of the saying “there are talents from generation to generation”. New people will always replace old ones, but as long as this art, which has been passed down for thousands of years and which I have loved all my life, is passed down from generation to generation, this art, which represents the culture of Hunan and Chu, will continue to flourish.
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