Fabienne Verdier, "The initiatory journey of a calligrapher"

I just finished reading "Passagère du silence" written by Fabienne Verdier...a great book, a great adventure...After studying arts in France she wasn't really satisfied, needed some deeper experience so she decided to study traditional painting and calligraphy...In 1984 she arrived in Chongqing, a very polluted and populated Chinese city...with a small scholarship...she was poor but so much richer than the other students...she was completely isolated from Europe, and Chinese people at first...Life was very difficult, Chinese politics was so strict and suspicious about traditional art...Most statues, documents, monasteries, museums had been "revised" or sometimes merely destroyed...Life in universities was extremely difficult, (" and I discovered the Chinese toilets--40 or 50 women squatting side by side"...)but she worked and worked and persevered, in spite of all sorts of problems, fought isolation (...Absolutely forbidden to disturb the foreign student") managed to make friends and speak Sichuanese...
The teaching at university was completely westernized, but she succeeded in finding private masters...
Thanks to Huang Yuan she completed her "education"...years of hard work, learning modesty, humility, zen way of life...from 5 am in the morning until late at night...walking in the mountains for days and days...to try and approach truth...and to be able to paint with only a "single stroke of the brush"...
She wrote her story and you may see pictures of his art book "The single stroke of the brush" on this site...More pictures from herself are there...
She could have lost herself in that quest for perfection, but she met a man one day..."He put a brush in my hand and told me: show me what you have learned..." She was saved...