PETALING JAYA: When poets speak of the pain of love, they seldom mean the kind of suffering that Amy Lin goes through to give expression to her passion for Chinese calligraphy.
Lin lives with chronic rheumatoid arthritis and has to contend with the pain that runs through her fingers as she makes the brush strokes that constitute her literal labour of love.
It’s a love that has been nurtured since she was three years old. She started by learning to write her name in Chinese characters. Her parents, who believed in preserving old traditions, made sure she practised every day for hours.
“I myself had a deep interest in it,” she told FMT. “I started with just a pencil, but later began doing traditional calligraphy with the brush.”
By the time she was in kindergarten, she had become so good at writing Chinese characters that her teachers couldn’t believe their eyes. “One teacher asked my mother if there was anyone helping me with my homework,” she said.
When she turned 18, however, she went to college to study marketing, believing that she could never make a living as an artist. After graduation, she tried for years to concentrate on her career as a marketing expert and practically abandoned calligraphy for some time.
But the flame of love would not die. She eventually gave in to her yearning and started practising the art again as a hobby.
It was in 2014 that she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. This came after a year of intermittent fevers.
Around the time of the diagnosis, she said, she noticed swellings on her joints and the pain was so excruciating that even putting on her clothes was a struggle.
She fell into depression and, for a time, didn’t even want to paint. But her family encouraged her to persevere and she soon realised that calligraphy was the one thing that could keep her happy.
“I couldn’t quit,” she said. “Life is short. I may as well keep on doing what I love while I still can.”
Some years later, the company she was working with decided to retrench her. The reason it gave was that it could no longer afford the insurance premiums to cover her treatment.
That was when she decided to set up business as a calligrapher. Her company’s name is Fun Yu Yu, which combines the English word “fun” and a Mandarin phrase that means being carefree and happy.
Her works are customised to the wishes of her clients, who buy them either to decorate their own homes or to give away as presents.
Although her true love is for traditional calligraphy, she finds herself these days painting more and more works that are in the modern style to cater to the tastes of her customers.
She said the traditional style of drawing large Chinese characters with no accompanying graphics was becoming a thing of the past. She gets orders for them only once or twice a year.
She said clients found the old-fashioned scrolls inconvenient because of the amount of wall space they would take up.
“They are also more expensive, and I would have to go to a particular supplier to get the paper. My more modern works can be mounted in frames that take up less space and are easier to hang and carry around.”
But she has by no means abandoned tradition. Most of her current works combine traditional calligraphy with modern imagery, such as flowers or animals. She said she would receive more than 50 orders for such works every Chinese New Year and would charge anywhere between RM160 and RM700 for a piece.
She said traditional-style calligraphy on special red paper remained popular for Chinese New Year because of the association of red with good luck and prosperity. Legend has it that an old man once warded off a hideous monster by pasting pieces of red paper on doors and wearing red clothes.
Lin said she was struggling to sustain her business because the demand for her works is not constant.
“It’s not like the food and beverage business, where you get return customers,” she said. - FMT
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