When someone wants to be something but never succeeds, then that something can become a lifetime obsession. This is why I am drawn to any blacksmith I meet and why the clanging of hammer on anvil stirs me so deeply. It is also why, when I started out as a writer, I wanted to write about iron forging and blacksmiths.

1

Every summer, when the scholar trees were in bloom, Old Han the blacksmith from Zhangqiu County would put in an appearance with his two apprentices. They unloaded their cart under the big scholar tree at the entrance of the village, set up their stall and built the forge. Then the clanging would start up. The first thing they worked on was not an implement, but a piece of pig iron. They heated the metal till it was red-hot, beat it out, reheated it, beat it again, folded it, beat it into a long, flat strip, then repeated the process of folding it and beating it long and flat. Under their hammers, the red-hot iron was like dough in a woman’s hand, they could knead it into any shape they wanted. They beat that piece of pig iron until it became steel. When I was a kid, I saw a sentence that read ‘Well-tempered steel is flexible’ in my brother’s middle-school textbook. I immediately saw the blacksmiths in my mind’s eye, and their clanging echoed in my ears. This strip of steel would be filed into strips by the blacksmith and clamped to the blades of the villagers’ kitchen knives, sickles and other farm tools, to repair them. As long as the tempering was done properly, these steel-reinforced implements sat nicely in the hand and stayed sharp, which meant that the job could be done better and faster. That was why people in our village never went to the marketing cooperative to buy the shoddy tools produced by the farm-tools factory. And that was why Old Han had to come to our village every year. There must be children like me in the many villages to the north-east of Gaomi City, who think back nostalgically to the blacksmiths’ visits every year at scholar-tree blossom time, and remember how we were their faithful audience.

Old Han had two apprentices. One was his nephew, known by everyone as Young Han. The other was called Old Third. Old Han was tall and thin, bald, with a long neck and weepy eyes. Young Han was big and burly. Old Third was dwarfish and squat, with short legs and long arms, built like an orangutan. He was cheerful and talkative, in sharp contrast to the more taciturn Young Han. When they were working, Old Han held the tongs, Young Han swung the sledgehammer, and Old Third worked the bellows to raise the heat. When it was a big job, he also weighed in with a twelve-pound hammer. The three of them made an impressive tableau as they rained down the blows in quick succession. Young Han’s hammer weighed eighteen pounds.

2

My grandad was a skilled carpenter and craftsman, and he was a demanding customer. It was obvious to me that the blacksmiths didn’t like him, and that upset me. Once, Grandad went to them with an axe and asked them to reinforce the blade with a steel strip. He’d had the axe for many years, and the metal had largely rusted away and been absorbed into the wooden handle. Old Han took the axe and looked at it.

‘You call this an axe?’ he said.

‘What else is it?’ Grandad riposted.

‘I’ll make you another one.’

‘I don’t want another one. If you can’t do the job, I’ll find someone else to do it.’

‘Relax, old man,’ Old Third spoke up. ‘There’s nothing we can’t fix, fodder choppers, scissors, you name it.’

‘Can you do embroidery needles?’ Grandad asked.

‘Nope,’ said Old Third. Then he said with a smile: ‘Listen, old man, we’re in the same industry, right? I mean, you’re a carpenter.’

‘It’s one yuan for a new axe, and it’ll cost you one and a half to fix this old thing,’ Old Han said.

‘That’s barefaced robbery!’ said Grandad.

‘Take it or leave it,’ said Old Han firmly.

‘Okay,’ Grandad said. ‘But you better make a decent job of it, this isn’t any old axe.’

‘It’s Lu Ban’s axe, is it?’ Old Third joked.

‘Lu Ban is a folk legend, Guan Er is a real person,’ Grandad said.

Guan Er was my grandad’s name.

Old Third went to the rusty iron plate leaning against the tree trunk, cocked his head on one side, and chalked: guan er, one axe head, add steel, 1.5 yuan.

I piped up: ‘It’s written wrong! The “guan” should be 管 not 官, and the axe should be 斧 not 福!’

No one paid any attention to me.

Uncle Zhao the cowman dropped an old chopper on the ground and said, ‘Old Han, you’re late this year, aren’t you?’

‘No, we’re not, it’s the same day as last year,’ Old Han muttered.

‘I need this fixed, put a steel strip on it. How soon can you do it? I’m in a hurry,’ Uncle Zhao said.

‘Ten yuan!’

‘Are you off your head?!’

‘Ten yuan!’

‘I can’t pay that,’ Uncle Zhao said. ‘I’ll get the team head to come and see you in a bit.’

‘It’ll still be ten yuan,’ said Old Third.

‘Let me find you a wife, Old Third,’ Uncle Zhao said.

‘Pull the other one, Old Zhao! You said the same thing last year.’

‘Did I say that last year?’ said Uncle Zhao. ‘Well, this year I mean it. There’s a young woman from my wife’s family who’s fair-skinned and tall and has a nice figure. She just has a few eye problems.’

‘That doesn’t matter as long as she can see enough to cook a meal.’

‘She has no problem cooking a meal,’ said Uncle Zhao. ‘She can even see well enough to sew shoes.’

‘Then go and talk to them,’ said Old Third. ‘All I want is a wife.’

Old Han glanced at Old Third and heaved a sigh.

Hundred-Acres Tian turned up next, looking gloomy. ‘I need a sickle,’ he said.

‘And the old one?’ asked Old Third.

‘Don’t have one.’

‘You want a Jiaoxian sickle or a Yexian sickle?’ asked Old Han.

Jiaoxian sickles are narrow, Yexian sickles are wide. Jiaoxian sickles are light, Yexian sickles are heavy. People have their preferences.

‘I want a leftie sickle.’

‘A leftie sickle?’ asked Old Third. ‘What’s that?’

‘A sickle for someone who’s left-handed.’

‘But left-handed people use a sickle with their right hand!’ Old Third objected.

‘Gotcha,’ said Old Han. ‘We’ll make you a leftie sickle.’

Just then, Happy, the village idiot and Liu Laosan’s son, ran along the road stark naked, with his younger sister following behind holding his clothes.

‘Didn’t they get a cure-all woman in to see him last year?’ said Old Third.

‘Cure-all, my foot!’ scoffed Uncle Zhao. ‘She was nothing but a quack!’

Hundred-Acres Tian looked down and said nothing.

‘I told you all last year that real cure-all docs don’t walk around the streets ringing a bell. The family got screwed over, didn’t they?!’ said Old Third.

‘Get to work!’ Old Han said angrily, pulling a piece of red-hot iron out of the forge.

3

The boy squatting under the trees cutting grass left-handed was called Tian Kui. Five years older than me, he was the only son of Hundred-Acres Tian, and had been a