A Young Beijinger's Uprooted Dream of Woodworking | 2018 Stories ⑧

He just wanted to learn a craft. It turned out to take much more than that.

"Recording the actions and everyday life of ordinary people," said Walt Harrington, "is something our trade does far too little of. These stories record the behavior, motives, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, discontents, hopes, fears, achievements and longings of people searching for meaning and purpose in their lives. They help people understand their place in the world."

He once wrote a story about a family whose teenage son had killed himself two years earlier. "I worked hard to explain to them the kind of story I wanted to write, how deep I wanted to go. The father listened for a long time, and finally said, 'So you want to know what I'm thinking when I pray alone in a quiet room.'"

The simplest form of the question, Harrington said, is this: how do people live, and what do they value?

Each of our lives makes up this world.

"2018 Stories" is a new column from QDaily.

One of the people Xu Ke admires most is probably his master, Chen Zhiyuan.

Chen Zhiyuan is a carpenter with seven years in the trade, and his work is well known on a woodworking forum with 1.2 million registered members. He holds a view of his own: "Woodworkers should raise their social standing. You can't hand me 900 yuan for a chair and then order me around. I should be making a piece — a piece I'm satisfied with — and handing that over. A woodworker should carry the identity of a craftsman."

That view sat well with Xu Ke. Anyone who does woodworking, he believes, ought to have exactly that kind of pride.

Before he turned 27, Xu Ke had never done any woodworking. He came to Beijing with his parents at 16, and after graduating from Tianjin University of Science and Technology in 2011, he took a job at a Taiwanese-owned design firm drawing heating and ventilation pipework for factory buildings — four years of staring at AutoCAD's black drafting screen.

His grumbling about the dull work mixed with his longing for a dream. On top of that, the boost from the 4-trillion-yuan infrastructure investment program launched in 2008 was running out, and construction-related industries were starting to show the overcapacity that comes from growing too fast. Xu Ke left his first job with almost no hesitation and became an apprentice at Limu Workshop, the shop Chen Zhiyuan ran.

Xu Ke later called this an act of courage. In August 2016 he came across a WeChat official-account article titled "Enrollment Notice for the First Traditional Woodworking Training Class," posted by "Limu Workshop." He made a phone call to confirm the class was real. Then, again with little hesitation, he closed AutoCAD and typed out a resignation letter. He didn't tell his girlfriend or his parents — he packed his things and left.

Before that, his idea of courage went like this: in college he liked to go out walking alone at night, picking a destination at random and wandering there and back in the small hours. Once, on a trip to Qingdao, he went out at night to roam a stretch of wasteland, climbed a wall into an abandoned amusement park, and was frightened by a mirror hanging on a broken-down carousel horse. "I turned my head and saw a figure standing there. That was the first time I was ever scared stiff."

Woodworking was one dream. The other was driving the big dump trucks you see at mining sites. But the second didn't look like a college graduate's career, while the first was close at hand — Xu Ke often browsed woodworking forums, and had already seen Chen Zhiyuan and his work there.

His girlfriend, whom he was about to marry, raised no objection to the sudden resignation, and neither did his parents. Xu Ke paid 5,000 yuan in tuition and started learning the trade alongside five other students.

Unlike training classes that offer only a taste of the woodworking life, Chen Zhiyuan's traditional woodworking class set out to teach real carpentry. "The difference is that some classes hand you pre-milled material and show you how to do light work to make a wooden horse or a small stool. My master's idea was to give you a whole square timber and have you learn to make something from nothing."

Limu Workshop's main business was custom furniture, a set typically priced in the hundreds of thousands of yuan. Training classes made up about a quarter of its revenue. A carpenter's apprentice traditionally needs three years before going out on his own. After formally taking a master, an apprentice sweeps floors for a year, helping the master and learning as he goes, unpaid. In the second year he earns 3,000 yuan a month, in the third 8,000 yuan. Three years, and the apprenticeship is done; if the master wants the apprentice to keep working, it has to be on a signed contract, like any other hire.

The month-long course met on weekends, with Monday to Friday open for practice. Xu Ke turned up almost every day at 9 a.m. to wait for the doors to open, and stayed until evening. He knew nothing about woodworking; his one advantage was that Limu Workshop was close to home. "They'd just spent a year on renovations and had moved into Hualikan, in the Anhua No. 1 compound on Jingmi Road. I looked at it and thought, hey, isn't that right by my place? A turn down the road on foot." As Xu Ke recalled this, he opened a map app on his phone to point it out.

Xu Ke's graduation project from the beginner class was a Chinese-style lamp. When it was finished he signed up for the intermediate class, and it was during that class that he formally became Chen Zhiyuan's disciple and entered the carpentry trade.

There was no elaborate ceremony. On a night of heavy drinking, Xu Ke raised a glass to his master and became his disciple. To him, becoming a disciple was simply taking on a new identity in order to learn. Xu Ke was number 19; there were already 18 senior fellow disciples ahead of him.

Xu Ke says he had thought about it for a long time. It was settled at the drinking table, but it was no drunken impulse. "I just felt I was learning really well there, and I wasn't going anywhere soon, so I might as well become a disciple and stay a few more years. And I'd been sizing up my master Chen Zhiyuan for a while by then and felt we got along, so I didn't think about it much."

"That was the most excited I've ever been, because every day there was something new to learn. In the first half of 2017 Limu Workshop got busy with training and paused the custom furniture business, so everyone had time on their hands — seven or eight senior fellow disciples teaching the three of us."

From 2016, Limu Workshop served as a practical training base for the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the China Academy of Art, and every year students from those schools came to intern and learn woodworking. Xu Ke also taught them woodworking theory.

"There's just too much to learn. The adze, chisel, ax, saw, plane — and that's only the tools. You also have to learn basic design theory. The beginner class doesn't cover the adze or the ax; the adze was what people used to hew a round log into a square timber, and the ax gets used rarely now. These days there are machines for that, but the big ones, like the table saw, you learn in the intermediate class." It was more than Xu Ke could handle. The beginner class only laid a foundation, and he hadn't yet had time to properly learn the skills he would actually use.

"If the workshop hadn't been forced out of Beijing, I'd probably still be there learning carpentry. Things were going so well then," Xu Ke said.

On November 20, 2017, Limu Workshop was ordered to move out of the compound overnight, and the days of working and drinking with his master and fellow disciples ended.

In fact, Xu Ke had begun sensing changes in Beijing's woodworking market from the first half of 2017.

What hit him directly was the demolition of Beijing's Dongba Fine Wood Market, torn down over about ten days around April 20 last year. Located in Jinzhan Township, Chaoyang District, Dongba was the largest wholesale timber market in north China. Limu Workshop, and virtually every woodworking factory and workshop in Beijing at the time, bought most of its raw material there.

Meanwhile, more and more woodworking factories were leaving Beijing. "Will Limu Workshop have to move? What do we do after it moves?" These questions became the main subject when Xu Ke and the others drank together.

To avoid being ordered out, Limu Workshop hosted the "First National Woodworking Workshop Exchange Conference," and even lined up a number of official bodies as supporting organizations. The conference was held last winter, in November. Three days after it ended, Xu Ke and the others got the eviction notice anyway.

The notice gave them very little time. Xu Ke, his fellow disciples and the students then taking the eighth training class packed through the night, loading the workshop's finished furniture and equipment onto trucks. The workshop moved into a studio belonging to Chen Zhiyuan's own mentor in the Yihaodi International Art Zone — an art district in Hegezhuang Village, Cuigezhuang Township, 8.6 kilometers from Anhua No. 1, approved and built in 2008 by the Chaoyang District government, and untouched at the time.

Limu Workshop spent the rest of that winter of 2017 in the studio, and the mood there changed.

"We stopped drinking hard around then. Almost everyone was thinking about what to do next. My master's meaning was simple too — he didn't want to keep us; he wanted us all to go out and make our own way."

Going northeast was something a few of the fellow disciples who used to drink together had settled on early in the year. Ninth Senior Brother Wenwen, Guo Man who only drank beer, Xingdong who always went home once it hit nine, and two other fellow disciples — five in all — moved to Shenyang in March this year and opened a new workshop.

They chose the northeast because the local timber came in more varieties and cost less, and living was cheaper than in Beijing. Counting the few workers who went along to help, Shenyang took away nearly half the people in the workshop.

Seventh Senior Brother Zhuang Zhe, who always used to fall asleep at the drinking table, went home to Zhejiang in June and opened his own workshop in Anji, on his own. He still asks Xu Ke now and then to help promote it.

Some left woodworking altogether. Second Senior Brother, who comes from a comfortable family, signed up for a bigu class — the Taoist practice of abstaining from grain — which Xu Ke joked was going off to "cultivate the Tao." A senior sister who had handled operations and administration at the workshop went to work at an internet company.

But Xu Ke never considered going to Shenyang with them, or setting up his own workshop somewhere else, and he never thought about leaving carpentry. His family was in Beijing, and his wife was pregnant at the time. He felt he simply had to accept it: "There's really nothing you can do about this city's transformation. You just go along with it."

At first Xu Ke didn't want to leave his master. His plan was concrete: as long as the workshop stayed in Beijing, he would keep making furniture there. But he was also watching for opportunities of his own.

In the spring of 2018, two friends came to talk him into joining them in a custom billiard-cue business. One of the two partners had graduated from Tsinghua University in computer science and, instead of becoming a programmer, had spent ten years learning woodworking; he handled modifying and adjusting the lathes and machinery at the cue workshop. The other partner, the one who approached Xu Ke, had some name recognition in billiard-cue circles, and it was he who solved the problem of where to sell the workshop's cues.

In April, Xu Ke told his master he was leaving. "One thing I really envy about my master is how good his hands are. Problems we could never solve, he'd always find a way to make work. But I also think he's had terrible luck — moved twice, torn down twice. There was no way to follow him long-term."

After a few months in the temporary studio, Chen Zhiyuan found a new compound in Beijing's Roma Lake area and moved the workshop there. Xu Ke helped him move, and still went out once a week to do some work and have a drink. But less than three months after the move, the new compound was served notice of demolition for failing to meet safety standards. This time Chen Zhiyuan did not go back to his mentor's place. He let the workshop's veteran craftsmen go, chose to leave Beijing, and moved Limu Workshop to Cangzhou, in Hebei province.

"What sticks with me most is one of the old craftsmen at the workshop — more than 40 years in woodworking, more than 20 of them repairing furniture. You could say his skill was only a step below the people who restore the relics at the Forbidden City. He'd come to Beijing to get treatment for his wife's illness. After the workshop broke up, none of those old craftsmen could stay on; they had to find their own way. With hands like that he was never going to starve — he could go do interior renovation work, say, and still make 10,000 yuan a month."

"But think about it: a craftsman who's made furniture for 40 years doing renovation work — that's not what he wants to do. And what a waste. With skill like that, you go renovate people's apartments?"

Xu Ke became a cue maker, responsible for every step of the process. He believes he will stay in woodworking for the rest of his life. "I don't see any difference between making billiard cues and making furniture. Both give me far more of a sense of accomplishment than drawing on a computer did. I get to do what I want to do every day. It's a lot more fun."

In the first half of 2018, besides the cue workshop, Xu Ke was busy renovating his new apartment. The place, near Huixin Xijie Beikou in Beijing, is a three-bedroom flat with one living room, and every door and every piece of furniture in it he made himself, at his master's workshop.

The dispersal of the markets gave him another headache: he couldn't buy building materials. "Renovating in Beijing now is so much more trouble than before. Say you want a box of nails — you can drive around for ages and still not find any. Materials we assumed would be easy to get turned out to mean a long drive just to find something like waterproof silicone sealant."

Eventually he found a young couple who used to run a hardware store; their shopfront had been demolished too. But they had moved everything from the shop into a storage room in a residential basement. Whenever he needed materials during that stretch, Xu Ke went to the basement to buy them, and the problem gradually went away.

Now there is no big courtyard to drink in outside Xu Ke's billiard-cue workshop.

The workshop is a rented room in a village on the outskirts of Beijing, an hour and a half by car from his home. In April this year, Xu Ke and his partners went to look at it, reasoning that being far from the city center made it less likely to be shut down. Once the lathes and workbenches were in and the corners stacked with round rods and square stock, the single-story room, a little over ten square meters, felt cramped.

"I mainly make custom small-ball cues. A cue has two main parts, the shaft and the butt. On a small-ball cue the shaft is Canadian maple, and the first and most crucial step is turning the taper of the shaft on a lathe. Adding the collar and screws after that is fairly simple. The butt is more complicated, made from good material like ebony. On top of all those steps, the butt also has to be grooved, carved and inlaid."

Xu Ke doesn't actually play billiards, but he thinks custom cues can still make money. "If you've paid 1,000 yuan for a year at a billiard hall, you can't keep playing with the cheap house cues forever. Go to a decent hall and the walls are lined with glass cabinets where members keep their own cues."

The workshop's custom cues run from 3,000 to 10,000 yuan, seven or eight a month, all ordered well in advance by billiard enthusiasts. Xu Ke also supplies semi-finished cues to similar workshops elsewhere in the country, at higher volume.

Under the plan Xu Ke and his partners have for the future, the automated steps that turn raw material into semi-finished cues will move to Shenyang, where costs are lower and the work can scale up. The semi-finished cues would come back to Beijing for the custom work, which Xu Ke would handle. They have also built a website for promotion and training, planning to train a group of cue makers around the country to widen the market, and a Taobao store for the brand is being designed.

Whether the money will be as good as Xu Ke hopes is hard to say. Low-volume custom cues are not a big business to begin with, and there are three partners to split it.

He no longer lives out in Hualikan. Two years after getting married, Xu Ke moved to Huixin Xijie Nankou. He pays 5,000 yuan a month on his mortgage, and not long ago had a daughter. "If money didn't matter, I'd go make wooden furniture with my master. Billiard cues won't make you rich, but run it well, grow it, and there's some money in it eventually." He doesn't consider himself an idealist.

He still remembers how, looking out from the courtyard of the Anhua No. 1 compound, you could see the lights of Line 15 trains flash past on the elevated tracks in the distance. In the summer of 2017, every Friday night, seven or eight of them would carry a table out into the courtyard outside the workshop and drink from the first dimming of the light until the subway stopped running.

"Back then we drank white-bottle Niu Er — Niulanshan Erguotou — and the big green bottles of Yanjing beer. In summer we'd grill meat in the courtyard while we drank, right through until there were no more trains. When it got cold we moved inside, pushed four woodworking benches together in the teaching area, took off the vises and bench stops, laid out a tablecloth and ate stir-fried dishes."

"My master told jokes before half a catty of liquor and dispensed wisdom after. Seventh Senior Brother Zhuang Zhe would fall asleep after three taels and wake up just as things were winding down. Ninth Senior Brother Wenwen drank quietly and never got drunk. Xingdong, number ten, finished his half catty before nine and went straight home. Eighteenth Senior Brother Guo Man, who became a disciple just before me, once drank a catty and a half of baijiu and hurt himself — after that he only ever drank beer. Second Senior Brother kept shouting that he was on a diet and wouldn't drink, but he never stopped mouthing off about everyone else."

Those noisy days are the most interesting memories of Xu Ke's carpentry career. More than a year later, he can no longer remember when the last big drinking night in Hualikan was.

Cover image source: Limu Workshop