This is the first thing I have written for the journal. mo asked me four months ago whether I would like to begin contributing one entry per quarter, in my own voice. I said yes immediately, then spent the next several weeks not knowing how to begin. So I will begin where I always begin, which is with my hands.
I am writing this on a Tuesday morning in September. The window beside the bench is open. There is a small breeze. My hands, at rest, are in my lap. In a few minutes I will pick up a length of silk thread and begin tying knots between aquamarine beads for a wearer in Brisbane. Before that happens, I want to write down a few things about my hands.
What they were before
Before SENMOMO, my hands tied pearl knots for two years at a small atelier in Hangzhou. The owner of the atelier was a woman in her late sixties named Mrs. Yang who had been knotting pearls since she was thirteen. She trained me the way she had been trained: slowly, without much explanation, and by example. I made many mistakes. She made me untie and redo nearly every piece I produced for the first six months.
What my hands learned at her atelier was very specific. They learned the standard pearl knot — which is the simplest of the pearl-stringer's knots and the foundation of everything else. They learned the rhythm of working with double-strand silk on Tahitian pearls, which are larger and need wider knot spacing than freshwater. They learned how to grade pearls quickly by luster and surface — Mrs. Yang's atelier specialized in higher grades than I would now use, and my hands still flinch when I encounter a pearl that doesn't quite meet her standard.
What my hands did not learn at her atelier was anything about crystal. Pearls and crystals are entirely different materials. Pearls are soft, organic, forgiving of small errors in tension. Crystals are hard, mineral, unforgiving. The knots between pearls can sit slightly loose without consequence. The knots between crystal beads have to be exactly right or the bracelet will not feel right on the wrist.
I did not know any of this until I came here.
What they had to unlearn
The first six weeks at the SENMOMO bench were embarrassing. My hands kept doing the things they had been trained to do, which were the wrong things for the work I was now trying to do.
I tied my knots too loose. (Pearls forgive loose knots. Crystals do not.) I worked too quickly between beads. (Pearl stringing is a faster craft than crystal stringing, because the rhythm of pearl-stringing prioritizes the consistency of many knots; crystal stringing prioritizes the rightness of each one.) I selected stones too aggressively — I would scan a tray and pick the first three or four that met the technical standard, the way I had been trained to grade pearls. mo had to teach me, gently, that the selection step at SENMOMO is its own discipline, slower than I had practiced, more attentive to what fits together than to what individually qualifies.
I had to unlearn the habit of working without looking at the wearer's letter. At Mrs. Yang's atelier, the wearer was a category: someone who had ordered a particular grade of pearls in a particular length. At SENMOMO, the wearer is a specific person who has written something specific, and the work begins with reading what she wrote and continuing to think about it through the stringing. My hands had not been trained to think about a wearer. They had to learn.
The morning my hands stopped looking at themselves
This happened around month seven. I want to describe it because I think it is the most important thing that has happened to me as a maker.
For my first seven months at SENMOMO, my eyes were always on my hands. I watched myself string. I watched my fingers position the silk. I watched the knot form, looking for errors. This is how I had worked at Mrs. Yang's atelier, where the standard was high enough that visual confirmation was necessary at every step.
One morning — I remember the date, October 14, 2028 — I was tying knots between rose quartz beads, and at some point I noticed I was looking out the window at the orchard. I had been looking out the window for several minutes. My hands had continued working. They had tied four or five knots correctly while I was not watching them.
I put the bracelet down and sat still for a long moment. mo was at the other bench. I did not say anything. I just understood, for the first time, that my hands had become the hands of a SENMOMO maker. They no longer required my eyes.
That morning was the morning I knew I could do this work for the rest of my life if I wanted to. Not because the work had become easy — it had not — but because my hands had learned it deeply enough that I could trust them.
What they still haven't learned
I want to be honest about what my hands still do not know.
They do not yet know how to pick the difficult bead. There is a particular skill, which mo has and I do not yet, where you can sense — in the moment of looking at a tray of fifteen visually-similar beads — which one belongs to which specific composition. I can pick correctly when the choice is clear. I cannot yet pick correctly when the choice is subtle. mo can. The difference, I am told, is between five years and eight years of practice. I have not yet had five.
They do not yet know how to recover gracefully from a wrong move. When I notice mid-stringing that I have made a mistake — wrong bead, wrong spacing — I tend to start over. mo has taught me, several times, that some mistakes can be absorbed into the piece by adjusting the next three beads. My hands do not yet know how to do that. They know how to make pieces. They do not yet know how to make pieces that include their own course corrections.
They do not yet know how to talk to a wearer. The asking is mo's part. (She wrote about it last quarter; I read that entry several times and wrote a long note to myself afterward.) I have not yet sat with a wearer letter and run the interview from my side. I am not sure when I will be ready. mo says: when I feel something forming in me when I read a letter that is not "I want to make this piece" but "I want to ask her this question first." I have not yet felt that. I will know when I do.
What I want you to know about the work
If you are a wearer who has received or is about to receive a piece that was made by me, here is what I want you to know.
The piece was made by hands that did not exist in their current form three years ago. The hands of the apprentice are not the hands of the master, and they are not the hands of the beginner; they are something specific in between, which is the kind of hands that have been chosen to learn a particular tradition because the tradition is being protected by being shared. mo passed something to me. I am holding it as carefully as I can.
The piece was reviewed by mo before it was photographed, every time, without exception. If she found anything that did not pass, the piece was remade. If she did not find anything, the piece was photographed and sent to you. The work you received was, in every case, work that two pairs of hands agreed was correct.
The piece was tied with knots that come from a different tradition than crystal stringing. Mrs. Yang's pearl-stringing tradition is older than what we do here. I bring it with me. mo says my knots are slightly different from hers, in a way that is consistent and recognizable but does not affect quality. I think of this as my small signature in the work — invisible to you, visible to mo, and a quiet record of where I came from before I came here.
A small thank you
I want to thank mo, in writing, in the journal where I have not had a chance to before. She let me come here when she did not have to. She taught me when she had not yet figured out how. She trusted me with the first piece I made for a wearer without her review (it was last March, for a wearer in Stockholm; mo says she had been watching my work for weeks and decided that one was ready). I am still finding the words for what that trust meant.
I want to thank Daisy, who took me to my first dumpling lunch the day after I arrived in Wenchang and has been kind to me about my Hangzhou accent ever since.
And I want to thank Mrs. Yang, in Hangzhou, who is in her seventies now and has begun closing her atelier for half-days because her hands are tired. She knows where I have gone. She thinks SENMOMO is a small studio that is trying to do something honest, and she approves. That matters to me.
I will write again at the end of this year. There is a piece I am working on now that I want to write about — for a wearer in Mumbai, who sent a letter that has stayed with me. I will tell you about that piece when it ships.
Until then.
— Wei