My thoughts over Chinese Calligraphy

Each student in Taiwan must have the experience of practicing calligraphy in class. To me as an elementary school kid, it was such a torture that I wanted to escape. To write a good calligraphy, posture was extremely important. We were asked to hang our wrists up in the air and move our arms steadily, which for me was a task. My right arm got sore in several minutes. What’s worse, if I wrote bad calligraphy, the teacher would punish me by hitting me on the hand with a strict. That was the reason why I was afraid of practicing calligraphy. Writing a good calligraphy requires plentiful patience and practice. I still remembered that I envied classmates who could write beautifully. It was an honor if someone could be picked by the teacher to represent the whole class to attend the competition.

However, my attitude changed. Somehow, as I grew up, I found calligraphy artistically beautiful and worth practicing because it could train my concentration on things. I adored the structure of each character and develop my interest in imitating the strokes and the structure of characters with ball pan. Even though I still wrote bad calligraphy, I could write beautifully with ball pans. I even tried to buy models for calligraphy for myself to imitate with ball pan. In the course of imitating, I found much peace within myself and could concentrate more on what I was working on. Each character has to be balanced and you have to be steady enough to write characters properly.

Now, I do think that writing calligraphy is a good way to train oneself to be concentrated and stable. It takes efforts to memorize the whole structure of a character. I feel very peaceful and sharp when practicing writing. When I finish duplicating one model, I often feel a sense of achievement. Whenever I feel upset or anxious, I will sit down in front of my desk and start to write something until my handwriting becomes steady and straight. It is said that you can judge one’s disposition and mood by looking at the handwriting. I often look at my own handwriting. If it is very careless, I would take one model out and start writing. To me, practicing writing calligraphy becomes one way to cultivate my patience and disposition.
Sharon Zheng