I tried to smile at her, “You are very hardworking. Your boss should give you a raise.”
She giggled and leaned closer to my chest, “Your skin is so white.”
“I spent too much time in the library.”
“So white, so beautiful,” she said, leaning even closer.
At six foot three, 156 pounds of pale skin and bone, women had used a number of phrases to describe my body—“Skeletor,” “bird legs,” “Ethiopian albino.” Beautiful was not one I’d ever heard before. Was she mocking me? I didn’t know yet that in China pale skin was considered more beautiful than tanned, because it showed you were rich enough not to have to labor outside under the sun like a peasant.
“You like white skin?”
“It is so beautiful,” she said, her face now within inches of mine. It was rapturous, a young woman about to have all her prayers answered.
What could I say to her? It’s not you, it’s me…and my vow of celibacy?
No longer able to stall, I ran for it. I flipped out of bed and hustled my tightie-whitie covered buns to the chair in the corner. I hopped into my jeans and slipped on my shirt before turning around again.
“I am so late,” I said, throwing on the rest of my clothes.
I made it out of that room in record time with Moon trailing behind me. I kept hitting the button for the elevator. Moon was crestfallen.
“Look, when I come back to visit Zheng Zhou, I’ll stay here and then we can see each other again,” I said.
She smiled.
I stepped into the elevator and turned back to wave good-bye.
Her face fell as she realized I was lying.
“You are not coming back,” she said.
The elevator doors shut.
I didn’t go back.
4
KUNGFU WORLD
The intended purpose of the highway that linked Zheng Zhou to Luoyang, and thus Shaolin, may have been to transport goods and people across Henan’s interior, but its actual function was to serve as an arena for elaborate games of chicken. It had four lanes, but none of the drivers used the exterior two. So when they wanted to pass—which they did frequently because the assorted vehicles, spanning the continuum of motorized conveyances from tractor to semi, varied so greatly in speed—they used the opposing traffic’s lane, especially if they were, say, rounding a corner or heading up a hill.
As our bus approached one particularly high hill, our driver decided to pass a three-wheeled tractor being steered by a wooden pole connected to the back wheels like a rudder. At the same moment, a Volkswagen behind us decided this was a propitious moment to pass our bus. Our bus took the opposite interior lane; the sedan sweeping left took the opposite exterior lane. It was the Cornhuskers’ option play. All three drivers honked their horns as a safety precaution, but then again everyone on the road in China honks his horn with metronomic regularity, so it only added to the cacophony. As we approached the top of the hill, an open coal truck appeared, heading straight for us. Its driver’s only option was our exterior lane, which he swerved at the last moment to take, escaping a painful death but losing that particular round of chicken.
“Ni bu yau ming!” the coal-truck driver shouted at us. “You don’t want life!”
It was the most common driving curse in China and pretty much summed up the driving conditions.
Halfway through the three-hour trip on Henan’s highway of death—multi-vehicle pileups were a weekly occurrence—my right thigh started aching. I had been furiously pressing on an imaginary brake pedal in the floor, the same as my father always did when I was driving and he was in the passenger seat.
The Chinese often used the term luohou (backward) both to describe certain ways of thinking as well as certain parts of their country’s economy. As we moved into the interior of Henan, I observed luohou’s literal meaning: Every step forward was an economic step backward from the more wealthy and advanced coastal regions. Concrete gave way to brick and white-tiled buildings. Business-casual clothing of the city became the rough cotton of farmers and peasants, who squatted along the side of the highway smoking cigarettes as they breathed in the exhaust of the trucks passing by. At regular intervals of about thirty minutes we drove through little towns, each one poorer than the last.
The final town before Shaolin was Deng Feng, where the bus stopped for lunch. It was hard to decide exactly what its most depressing aspect was. Was it the charcoal grime that blanketed the town? The dejected expressions on the faces of its citizens? The trash strewn across the streets? I came to think of Deng Feng as the irredeemable armpit of China, quiet desperation made manifest, a justification for mass suicide. It was so awful that I nicknamed the town Darn Fun.
Deng Feng sat at the base of the Song Mountains, the Chinese Appalachians—it featured short peaks covered with trees and extreme poverty. From here it was a thirty-minute winding journey on two lanes to reach Shaolin. As we rounded the final curve to my destination, there was a fifty-foot cast-iron statue of a Shaolin martial monk guarding the entrance to the Shaolin village, a one-road cul-desac running west into a valley surrounded by five mountain peaks.
I had expected a windswept, isolated monastery. This is not what I discovered. Cars and tourist buses were backed up before the entrance to a parking lot. Packed along the sides of the road were dozens of lean-to restaurants made of cracked plaster and chipped concrete to feed the tourists, and several dozen corrugated-tin-roof shacks sold kungfu tchotchkes. Donkey-drawn wagons waited at the entrance of the parking lot to carry the tourists the half-mile to the temple. And then there were the more inventive attractions dreamt up by local entrepreneurs: a World War II cargo plane with a sign claiming it was Mao’s first plane, the ski lift that took tourists up to the top of one of the mountain peaks where they could fire machine guns, or the 2,000-year-old mummy that was actually a dead monkey. The isolated monastery had been turned into Kungfu World, a low-rent version of an Epcot Center pavilion.
The one exception to all the tourist trappiness was the six or seven private kungfu schools with similar names—Shaolin Kungfu University, Shaolin Wushu Academy, Shaolin Wushu and Kungfu School. Together they trained more than 10,000 teenage Chinese boys—and a smattering of girls—who paid tuition of around $100 a year to study kungfu all day long, six days a week for ten months out of the year. School uniforms were jogging suits made in the school’s colors—just like Enter the Dragon—so, scattered among the thousands of tourists clogging the road were gaggles of students in red or yellow or blue suits, skinny and dusty and clutching various kungfu weapons: wooden staffs, tin swords, dull-pointed spears. On the southern side of the road, where the valley stretched out for half a mile, color-coordinated blocks of several hundred students practiced traditional Shaolin forms on the hard-packed dirt. A coach barked out the cadence through a bullhorn as the students moved as one performing the next move.
I bought a laowai ticket (ten times the Chinese price) to enter the village proper, demarcated by a gate manned by smug police officers wearing comically oversize sunglasses. I was in utter shock. The Shaolin monks live here?
Intermingling with the Chinese tourists, I walked the half-mile from the gates of the village to the entrance to the Shaolin Temple. The courtyard and the gates to the temple itself—with the Chinese characters for “Shaolin” above—looked as I expected. I had seen them before in kungfu movies. It turned out that countless Hong Kong film crews would come to the temple for a day or two to film a scene in front of those gates, below the Shaolin sign, for the requisite element of vérité. There was a TV crew filming the gate as I approached; production assistants were trying gallantly to keep the tourists at bay while an attractive Taiwanese reporter said something about Shaolin’s history into her microphone.
I followed a tour group through the temple, which was fairly modest by contemporary Chinese standards. It was the size of several football fields, consisting of a dozen or so courtyards, a few larger-than-life Buddha statues, prayer
rooms, and wooden statues of martial monks in various kungfu poses. Almost all of it was a reconstruction of recent vintage, part of the government’s effort to increase tourist revenue after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. The most impressive part of the temple was the the stone floor in the old training hall. Traditional Shaolin forms have various stomping techniques. Over the centuries, generations of Shaolin monks have pounded the stone block floor, creating two paired rows of giant footprints, indentations the size of large watermelons—the negative space a visible testament to the monks’ devoted pursuit of martial perfection for a millennium and a half.
But I was worried about another negative space. Where were the monks? I searched the monastery. There were plenty of tourists and tour guides. There were peasants selling refreshments. There were even money changers in the temple (“Laowai, shanjah mahnie?”). But there were no monks. I retraced my steps, growing more and more anxious. I had traveled halfway around the globe only to discover that the temple was empty of the very people I’d come to find. After two hours of fruitless searching, I started to hyperventilate. If I’d failed, I’d have to go back home with my tail between my legs.
I wandered out of the temple, despondent. Immediately to the west is Shaolin’s other famous attraction, the Pagoda Forest. Dating back a thousand years, it is the temple’s graveyard. The ash remains of various abbots and Shaolin heroes are buried in pagodas (or stupas), tall, narrow, vertical structures of elaborate brick and stonework. The height and size of the pagodas varies depending on when they were built and the importance of the monk. I wandered around trying to read the names on the plaques. Frequently in Shaolin movies, the monks are portrayed battling their enemies by jumping around the tops of these pagodas. It seemed that all that remained of the real Shaolin monks were these ashes.
Amituofo (May the Buddha bless you) is what the monks—while pressing both palms together and bowing—said in the movies when introduced and when departing. It was also a phrase of hope. As I wandered down the street, I repeated it over and over again. Amituofo. Amituofo. Maybe the monks had left the temple for one of the private schools? Maybe they were on vacation? The Pagoda Forest marks the western end of the village, where the concrete road turns to dirt and trickles off into a field surrounded by mountain peaks. I turned east to retrace the village’s single road.
I approached the Shaolin Wushu University (wu means “martial,” shu means “arts”), a cracked-concrete compound just east of the temple. As soon as I entered the gate—the Chinese love walled structures with gates, mini–Forbidden Cities—I was immediately surround by red-jogging-suited teenage Chinese boys. “Hallo! Hallo! Laowai, hallo!”
I went over to an older man, assuming he was one of the instructors, and asked if he knew where the Shaolin monks were. Chinese words exiting a laowai’s mouth created a sensation. A larger crowd soon gathered. I repeated my question. He kind of laughed in a mirthless way and pointed east, away from the temple. So I repeated my efforts farther down the road at the next school with the same results. I was working my way one by one down the street toward the highway. Finally, I hit Taguo, the last school before Shaolin’s one road meets the highway. It was a series of redbrick buildings without an outer wall or gate. It was also the first school where the students who surrounded me seemed less intrigued and more hostile to my presence. I finally found an instructor, a twentysomething man wearing only kickboxing shorts.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Tourists are supposed to stay back on the road,” he said dismissively.
“I am not a tourist. I want to study kungfu with the Shaolin monks.”
“Why?” he said with a slight sneer. “Laowai are no good at kungfu.”
As youngsters with kungfu weapons in their hands pressed closer, I began to feel like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. My courage collapsed. I nearly fell as I backed out of Taguo.
As I reached the cracked-concrete stone, I started to think that this had to be the single lowest moment of my life. I had left everything I knew behind, journeyed thousands of miles, and spent thousands of dollars in pursuit of a dream that had seemed absurd to my friends, my teachers, and my parents. And now it looked like they had been right.
Then, as I stood there wallowing in my own private pity party, a vision appeared before me: a young boy with a shaved head, wearing the orange robes of a Buddhist monk. Short of being a card-carrying member of NAMBLA, I couldn’t have been more excited to see him.
Amituofo.
He was dodging through the crowd of tourists, local salespeople, and teenage kungfu students from the various academies. I followed him. He turned into an alleyway between two restaurants. The dirt path had wooden shacks on each side, each emitting the sounds of kungfu fighting. Inside, students from the schools were watching pirated Hong Kong chop-socky movies playing on VCRs and small TV sets—Shaolin’s multiplex. Past the huts, an area opened to several outdoor pool tables where boys played on the uneven felt with chipped, hand-carved pool balls. At the end of the alley, the young boy in monk’s robes turned into a hut.
I ducked to avoid banging my head while entering the hut and discovered Shaolin’s video arcade, which consisted of two standup games: Asteroids and Street Fighter II. The young monk put a coin into Street Fighter II, the classic martial arts game. I watched him play a couple of games before I asked if I could challenge him. It would be too sad to try to calculate how many hours of my life I had spent playing Street Fighter II, so I’ll just say it was clearly more than my Shaolin opponent. His Blanka was good; my M. Bison was much better. After two quick games, he turned to me and said, “You are very good.”
“No, no, no, I’m not,” I said and paused. “My name is Bao Mosi.”
“I’m called Little Tiger,” the boy said. “Amituofo.”
“Amituofo.”
Uncertain what else to say, I let Little Tiger leave and wander ahead of me, before I started trailing him again. He went up the stairs and entered the Shaolin Temple Wushu Center, the one compound I had not entered previously because I had assumed it was a tourism center rather than a school. It was the best-built structure in the village. The steps leading to the entrance were stone; the rest of the schools had dirt paths. There were two large statues of Shaolin monks. The signage was machine-carved instead of hand-whittled. The concrete walls weren’t cracked. The creamy yellow paint looked new.
I hustled up the stairs, but by the time I had entered Little Tiger was nowhere to be found.
The central building of the Shaolin Temple Wushu Center was shaped like a horseshoe. An oval hallway encircled the large, circular performance hall. I peeked through one of the windows where the raggedy curtains were ripped. Inside, 500 wooden auditorium seats surrounded a large red mat of Olympic proportions. I followed the hallway to my left, but the doors to the performance hall were secured with flexible bicycle locks.
At the end of the left side of the horseshoe was a counter selling Chinese paintings. A bucktoothed man in a purple jacket smiled at me and pointed at his paintings. From the black paint staining his fingers I guessed they were his own work. I shook my head.
Behind him was another glass door secured by a bicycle lock. Through the glass I could see a green mat. It was a square, two-story practice room. A dirty mirror covered the far wall. As I stood next to the painter, he asked, “Shanja mahnie?”
“I want to study kungfu with the Shaolin monks,” I said in Chinese.
“Really?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes.”
“Wait here,” he said, walking off to his right.
There were a series of wooden doors along the back wall. He knocked on the door with the sign INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS OFFICE and entered. He returned a couple of minutes later with a slight man, wearing a rumpled, polyester-blend brown suit and tie.
The man asked me in faltering English, “American?”
I answered in English, “Yes.”
He pointed to himself, “Ling.”
&
nbsp; “Hello, my name is Matthew.”
He pointed at me, “Kungfu?”
“Yes.”
He ushered me into the room he had just exited. It was a concrete box with nothing in it but a desk and three chairs—the walls were unadorned, the paint peeling. It looked like some Soviet Bloc interrogation room—a place where no one could hear you scream. Mr. Ling pointed to a chair for me to sit in, mumbled something in English, and left.
He came back with a man dressed identically in the same brown suit, gray silk socks, plastic dress shoes—the only difference was where Mr. Ling had about six keys attached to an outer belt loop, the other man had a dozen. In a country where every building had a gate and every door a lock, the number of keys was a signifier of rank. The man’s nickname, I’d later learn, was Comrade Fish, not only because he had a lazy eye but also because his handshake—a Western custom the Chinese were adopting with various levels of success—was limp and clammy.
Comrade Fish’s smile didn’t rise to his eyes. He left his sweaty palm against mine. I tried not to shudder.
Dropping my hand, he turned in Mr. Ling’s general direction and said in Chinese, “Ask him if he wants to study kungfu here.”
Mr. Ling, who was apparently the school’s translator, said to me in English with an extremely embarrassed smile, “[Mumble, mumble] kungfu?”
I said in English, “Yes.”
“Yes,” Mr. Ling relayed to Comrade Fish in Chinese.
“How long does he want to study here for?”
Mr. Ling asked me in English, “How [mumble, mumble, unintelligible] time?”
I said in English, “A year, maybe two.”
He translated to Comrade Fish in Chinese, “He is not certain.”
I decided this charade was not helping my cause, so I said in Chinese, “I want to study kungfu with the Shaolin monks for one year, maybe two.”
Both Comrade Fish and Mr. Ling were surprised, but not because I had spoken Chinese. They were shocked by the length of time I proposed to stay. Their eyes lit up like cash registers. It hit me. I wasn’t in an interrogation room. I was in a far scarier place—the back sales office of a used car lot. Comrade Fish excused himself, returning after a couple of minutes with yet another stale brown suit, a tall, thin man with a weak mustache. I’d later learn his name was Deputy Leader Jiao, the second in command at the Wushu Center. Of all three men, he had the greatest number of keys hanging from his belt loop.
American Shaolin Page 5