Pen friends are my favorite kinds of people

One of my many regrets is that I was born too late to be a turn-of-the-century satin-wearing, grape-eating aesthete. I could wear satin and eat grapes all I want in the industrial gloom of suburban Beijing, but it's just not the same.

My romantic preoccupation with beauty reaches a climax with fountain pens. Every so often, I take a break from my humdrum secular thoughts and thank God for them.

I don't understand why the rest of the world doesn't love them as much as me. The unique sensation of drawing a pen slowly across a piece of paper, leaving behind a trail of ink recording the exact motion of my hand is, to my mind, a miracle.

Although the electronic revolution has made pen lovers a rare species, we hold onto the objects of our affection as if they were swords. To find out more, I recently got to meet two fountain pen aficionados.

In his Beijing apartment decked out in vintage finery, 30-year-old IT manager Lin Mian held up a Parker Duofold "vacuum" fountain pen, a symbol of the United States' golden age.

In the afternoon sun, the pen shone like a lit-up skyscraper. Dipping the nib into a bottle of ink, Lin penned a classic poem and for a brief moment, relived the glories and opulence of the 1950s. As we admired his Parker Duofold medium antique color series, our bulging eyes were reflected upside down in the magnifying glass.

Another pen pal, 23-year-old computer-engineering graduate student Yu Hang, let me try his Parker Duofold. Gratefully, I took the pen and tried to pull the cap off. Yu jumped up from his 300-year-old Ming-Dynasty chair and shrieked. It had a twist-off top and I might as well have stuck a pin through Yu's heart.

Computer-savvy purists like Yu and Lin are rife at the China Fountain Pen Forum - my mothership. It's the largest online community for fountain pen lovers in China. These people give color and shape to something that I always thought was nonverbal and nonrational.

One posting described writing with the Pelikan M400 as "a sensation akin to peeling an apple with a sharp pocket knife"; another said the Lamy 2000 is like "skating, gliding on ice"; while the Parker 75 is "a true independent, a fearless warrior clad in golden armor".

It's a relief to know there are others with ambitions of designing the perfect fountain pen, people who cannot help but take the fall of local brands personally, and those who have a seemingly strange compulsion to take extensive notes at boring office meetings.

As devotees of the fountain pen, we don't consider ourselves calligraphers. While many have practiced it, most of us, I suspect, would be happy to draw circles all day. After all, the fountain pen was not designed for Chinese characters.

I am a fountain pen addict but I don't need help, just understanding.

(China Daily 12/14/2007 page20)