Iron & Silk (1990)
Mark Salzman: Teacher Mark
Quotes
-
Mark : Am I ugly to you? With my big nose?
Teacher Hei : No. Your face is just... very 3-dimensional.
-
Teacher Hei : When you have a visitor in China, at first you offer him tea and something to eat.
Mark : Oh, sorry. Here you are.
Teacher Hei : No, thanks.
Mark : But you just said you wanted something to eat.
Teacher Hei : No, I said you should offer me some.
[Mark takes it away]
Teacher Hei : What are you doing now?
Mark : But you said you didn't want it!
Teacher Hei : But you have to leave it here, that's habit.
-
Teacher Hei : You must master each stroke before you go on. Otherwise everything you do will be so-so.
Teacher Mark : Tell me about it. Everything I touch turns to so-so.
-
[first lines]
Mark : [voiceover] I hate to admit it, but when I graduated from college, I thought I was ready for anything. That is, until I stepped off the train in Hangzhou. Here I was in a country of a billion people, and I didn't know a single one. This place was different than what I'd expected. It wasn't at all like what I'd seen in the Kung Fu movies. No one else I knew stayed up all night to watch that stuff, but I was hooked.
[screaming, Kung Fu movie clips with English subtitles]
Mark : The hero was always small like me, but he moved like the wind, triumphed over evil, and brought the bad guys to their knees. And - he always got the girl.
-
[last lines]
Mark : [voiceover] I tried to memorize exactly how Teacher Hei looked at that moment. I thought of Sinbad, Teacher Pan, and Ming. I couldn't concentrate on the book I was reading. It was America that suddenly felt like some exotic dream and China that was real to me. There is a saying that it's the height of stupidity to look for the donkey that you're already riding on. I had come halfway around the world looking for places that existed mostly in my mind, and while I didn't find what I'd expected, I did find that I was riding on that donkey all along, and that eating bitter lets you taste sweet.
