But our inability to find him an opponent meant he wasn’t able to play the game. So his life relapsed into one of dejected boredom. He had become trapped again – the danger of intellectual decrepitude lurked everywhere. Again we had to think of ways to keep him occupied, to give him something to do. We thought of travel, calligraphy, painting, qigong, t’ai chi – anything that might make him take an interest. But nothing worked. He was once more cold and detached – we were terribly discouraged. Once, a qigong teacher arrived in our residential area and many people decided to learn t’ai chi. I doggedly urged him to attend, for days, then a week; finally he agreed to study with a group of elderly people, about thirty men and women. Occasionally I went along with him and practised the moves, but even though Father had been going every day, and studying constantly, he still couldn’t perform the most basic moves – his movements were all over the place. He’d remember the first part of a move and then forget the final part; it was completely infuriating. Needless to say, his performance demonstrated his clumsiness. He seemed to be two different people: one a sublimely skilled go player possessed of immeasurable intelligence; the other, a clumsy old man unable to master the most basic moves of t’ai chi. It was quite bizarre. On the one hand he was a superman, a man of towering intelligence and skill; on the other, he was incorrigibly obstinate, slow-witted – nothing more than a drone. He was a man easily stuck in a rut, pigeon-holed into one particular thing that he couldn’t extricate himself from – so in a sense he was very limited. The only thing I had misgivings about was this: what was it, exactly, that allowed him to display such remarkable skill in the game of go? Was he truly a talented player who understood the game inside out, or was there some other reason for his success?