Deputy Leader Jiao asked me to repeat how long I wanted to stay.
“I’d like to study here for a year, maybe two,” I said again.
Deputy Leader Jiao said, “The price for room, board, and private training is thirteen hundred American dollars per month.”
I exhaled. That was almost all the money I had on me.
It had never occurred to me to worry about cost. In the kungfu movies, disciples pay their teachers in sweat and tears, not American Express traveler’s checks. I tried to weigh the decision as they watched me like vultures. It was not like I could go home without having tried to study with the monks. But these men dripped with deceit. They were the first party apparatchiks I had met, and I was still new enough to the country to find it ideologically disconcerting to discover that Communists were greedy bastards. Bastards, I had expected, but greedy was a surprise.
It felt like a scam, so I said, “I will have to think about it a day or two. Is there somewhere in town where I can stay?”
Their disappointment was obvious. Comrade Fish said without looking at me, “Mr. Ling can take you to the hotel. We should be good friends. If you need any help with anything come find me.”
I turned to Deputy Leader Jiao, but he left without saying good-bye. Clearly, I had wasted his precious time.
I picked up my huge backpack that I had left in the hallway. Comrade Fish was whispering something to Mr. Ling. As I was waiting I heard the sound of someone practicing kungfu to the right of the office. I walked in its direction and found another practice room exactly the same as the one to its left. The difference was that the door was open and inside there were people training.
It was a sight I had been dreaming of: two Shaolin monks with shaved heads, maybe twenty years old, wearing orange robes with black sashes and teaching a class. Well, they weren’t exactly teaching; they were actually posing with their older, late fifties–early sixties, prosperous-looking Chinese students, who were taking pictures with state-of-the-art cameras. After a series of still shots, the monks demonstrated a traditional Shaolin form for the mini–video cameras.
I found myself standing inside the room, not conscious of walking in without asking. One of the older Chinese ladies came over to me. “Where are you from?”
“America. And you? You don’t dress like you’re from the mainland.”
She laughed as if I’d just said the funniest thing in the world.
“We’re from Singapore. We are all students in the same kungfu school. Our master brought us here for a week of training. Today is our last day. The monks are marvelous, don’t you think?”
As I talked to the woman I couldn’t keep my eyes off the monks. She told me their names: Cheng Hao (Shi Xing Hao was his Buddhist name) looked like a Chinese James Dean, cool and handsome; Deqing (Shi Xing Hong) was the one with the charismatic personality and explosive techniques.
The first part of their Buddhist name, shi, means “monk.” The second part denotes their generation—in this case, xing is the thirty-second generation. The generation is always one higher than the monk’s master. The third part of the name is unique and is often taken from the monk’s Chinese name. Buddhist monks are supposed to use only their Buddhist name. But at Shaolin, this rule, like many others, was at best loosely observed.
Deqing and Cheng Hao’s poses were precise, their techniques were blindingly fast and their kicks snapped like their legs were made of rubber bands. They were faster than Bruce Lee. They were better than the wire-enhanced kungfu actors in the movies. I had never seen such a display of martial art skill.
I was particularly riveted by Deqing. As he moved through the forms for the video cameras, he could barely contain his energy. After finishing, he could barely contain his joy. The old ladies were fussing over his tremendous talent and he was trying to “awshucks” them, but he couldn’t help from laughing with pleasure. Unlike the Communist Party officials in the office I had just escaped, his face was a kaleidoscope of emotions. There was none of the calculation or delay between feeling something and expressing it that I had noticed in almost everyone else I had met in China. Deqing’s emotions were spontaneous and vivid. Cheng Hao had a Hollywood cool about him, but Deqing was clearly the star.
The pleasure of performing in front of the cameras had pumped Deqing up. After running through the beginner Shaolin forms that the monks had taught the Singaporean students, he decided to put on a show. For the next two minutes, he punched, kicked, jumped, backflipped, front-flipped, back-handspringed, 360-barrel-rolled through the most complicated and exquisite form I’d ever seen. He finished with a series of spinning, jumping kicks. His leaps were so high, his hang time so long that for just a moment I had the feeling that he had defied the law of gravity and would never fall back to earth. My breath caught in my throat. For a moment, I believed that maybe man could fly.
I was sold.
I walked out of the training room and went over to the office. I told Mr. Ling and Comrade Fish that I was staying for at least a year. Their grins were salacious. I continued, “But I only have enough for the first month. I’ll pay you month by month.”
I handed over thirteen Benjamins. With that I became a student of the Shaolin Temple.
5
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Waking up after my first night at Shaolin, I finally took notice of my room, one of twenty in the two-story structure. It wasn’t quite the Bates Motel, but it was close. It was three years old, built in the eighties style of non–joint venture accommodations: peeling wallpaper, exposed wires, broken bulbs, a stained carpet, a bathroom with loose tiles, no shower curtain, and a toilet you didn’t want to touch. At least the water worked. The cold water, that is—hot water was piped in only once every three days for thirty minutes, unless a VIP was staying the night or I yelled and screamed loud enough to qualify as a VIP for the evening.
But none of this bothered me. I had found the Shaolin monks and as soon as I saw how they lived, I felt immensely fortunate and guilty. After all, I had carpet, two beds with a mattress, a desk and chair, a private sit-down toilet, a bathtub, a TV that worked, a door that locked, and no roommates. The monks lived on the second floor of the circular performance hall and looked down on where they worked every day—the equivalent of actors boarding in the rafters above a theater. Their floors were concrete, and their bath was a washbasin, which they filled with boiled water at night to wash their hands, feet, and faces. Their beds were straw padding over wooden boards, and, except for the most senior monks, they slept two to a bed, head to foot. Their toilet was a hole-in-the-ground outhouse.
It was nearly a month before I had the courage to ask one of my teachers to show me where he lived, and when he finally agreed, after much embarrassed hemming and hawing, I immediately asked Mr. Ling if I could live with the monks. I wanted to be part of the community, but it was illegal for foreigners to live or train anywhere else in Shaolin. Mr. Ling said that this was for my health and safety, but the increased revenue was also pretty convenient for the government-run Shaolin Wushu Center, a synergy that was a perfect example of Deng Xiaoping’s description of the Chinese economy: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
I had wanted to start my training immediately, but Mr. Ling informed me, without explaining why, that the monks would be busy for the next three days. It took me half a day to discover that I had wandered into Shaolin on its 1,500th birthday. A weeklong festival was in progress. If I were a superstitious guy (which I am), I would have taken this unlikely coincidence as a fortuitous portent, as destiny at work (which I did).
It turns out, however, that there is some debate about Shaolin’s exact year of birth. Because 495 A.D. is also often cited, Shaolin would throw itself another 1,500th birthday in 1995. So much for superstition. At any rate, the monks were busy performing for the increased number of tourists and various East Asian media outlets that had descended on the village to celebrate the event.
Shaolin was right to celebrate. Fif
teen hundred years, more or less, of continued existence is almost unprecedented in the history of religious orders and it is even more impressive given the extreme ups and downs of Shaolin’s past. The twentieth century was arguably its roughest patch. The problem, to simplify, was the introduction of firearms into China during the late nineteenth century. Immediately, the self-defense efficacy of being a twenty-year master in, say, the double sword, the rope dart, or the three-section staff dropped off the cliff. (God made man, but Sam Colt made him equal.) In 1900, the Boxers—members of a Chinese secret society who believed they could harden their bodies through iron kungfu practice to the point where they were impervious to bullets—attacked British soldiers stationed in Beijing. Rarely has the historical conflict between magic and science, mysticism and technology, been so dramatically put to the test with such lopsided results. When the smoke cleared, only the British soldiers remained standing.
One moment the kungfu masters, and the Shaolin martial monks in particular, were at the top of the warrior food chain, and the next they were helpless. Shaolin would be occupied and partially burnt down by a local warlord in the civil wars of the 1920s. In the early 1940s, it was occupied again and further destroyed, this time by the Japanese. Mao Zedong, who wanted a clean break with China’s feudal past and also feared Shaolin’s historical role as a sanctuary for revolutionaries, banned the practice of kungfu in the 1950s. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), his Red Guards sought to finish the job, dragging the few remaining Shaolin monks who had not already fled through the streets for public “criticism” and private floggings.
The Shaolin Temple was an abandoned wreck when Jet Li, an eighteen-year-old actor and martial arts expert, visited in 1981. He was making a movie called Shaolin Temple, the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic reformers. Having inherited a devastated, impoverished nation from Mao, they needed to generate revenue. The easiest method for a poor country with a rich cultural history is tourism. So the Chinese tourism board invited a Hong Kong production company to make a movie celebrating the famous Shaolin legend of the thirteen monks who rescued the Tang prince.
The effect of the movie, mainland China’s first Asian blockbuster, was dramatic. Life started to imitate art. Thousands of young boys ran away from home to become Shaolin monks like Jet Li’s character—so many, in fact, that the government had to build special trains to send most of them back. In addition, tens of thousands of East Asian tourists, for whom Shaolin is one of the most cherished cultural sites, began arriving annually.
Shaolin was reborn. Tuition from private kungfu students and tourism formed the basis of the village’s new economy. Peasants from the surrounding areas gave up their hardscrabble farms to cater to the tourists. Only three Shaolin monks had survived through the purges of the Cultural Revolution, but they had many students in the area, some of whom opened the private schools to cater to the young, tuition-paying Chinese students, the best of whom became new Shaolin monks, slowly rebuilding the community.
It didn’t take the East Asian media, starved for some fresh angles, long to ferret me out. An aggressive Taiwanese TV producer had heard there was a Chinese-speaking American who intended to study at the temple for a year or more. Comrade Fish in tow, he approached at lunch on my second day and began his flattery routine.
“It is so wonderful that an American has such a deep and profound interest in Chinese culture,” the producer said in Chinese. “Your presence in Shaolin demonstrates you are a fascinating person of great insight. Your participation in our insignificant little television show would help show the mutual friendship between our two cultures.”
I smiled as he continued to needlessly waste his breath. He had me at “hallo.” No red-blooded American can resist the siren song of TV exposure. It’s our God-given right.
The producer, the cameraman, and I went up to the hotel where I was staying after lunch. They wanted to film me walking down the hall, opening the unlocked door, and entering my room. I was confident I knew how to walk, open doors, and enter rooms. Apparently I did not. It took me five takes to get it right. Next they wanted a shot of me reading in my room. Despite many years of practice, I wasn’t very good at this, either. It took eight takes before I was able to turn the pages properly. I had seen countless of these background segments on TV shows without ever realizing that they were so elaborately staged.
There are few things more nerve-racking than trying to act normal with a camera in your face and someone shouting at you to “act normal.” By the time we arrived in the training hall I was already a wreck. It didn’t help that all thirty of the Shaolin monks—who I had not met yet—were lined up waiting for me. Nor did I feel much better when the producer explained that I was supposed to sit for an interview in Chinese while the monks practiced behind me. Here I was in the same room with my heroes and they were serving as extras in my first TV appearance.
The interviewer, a stunning Taiwanese woman with a perfect porcelain complexion whom I’d seen at the temple gates my first day in Shaolin, arrived with a flourish. We sat down facing each other on the green mat. The microphones were attached. The cameraman got into position. The interviewer smiled her lovely smile at me. She was no doubt reviewing the questions in her mind. In my mind we were in a far more romantic locale.
“I’m sorry,” I said in Chinese. “Could you repeat?”
“Why did you come to Shaolin?” she asked again.
I was aware that I was no longer on a beach. I was in the training hall of the Shaolin Wushu Center. I had found the monks. A beautiful woman was speaking Chinese. I had studied Chinese. There was a camera on and a light in my face. Everyone around me was expecting me to say something. I had no idea what.
“Why did you come to Shaolin?” she repeated again, her tone still mellifluous but the corner of her eyes narrowing in frustration.
“Right, right, right,” I stuttered back in Chinese. “Because Shaolin…good.” I had regressed back to first-year classes. I was even conducting the tones with my right index finger.
“Did you come to study Shaolin kungfu?”
“Right, right, right, kungfu good, very good, very, very good, incredibly good.”
I tried to smile.
Hers was frozen. “How did you learn about the Shaolin Temple?”
“I’m sorry, could you repeat slowly?”
“How…did…you…learn…about…Shaolin…Temple?”
“Right, yes, right, ah, movies, watching movies.”
“Which movies?”
“Movies.”
She hissed, “Do you want to become a Shaolin monk?”
“The monks are very good. Their kungfu is very, very good.”
She slammed the microphone down.
“I thought you said he spoke Chinese. He’s a bendan!” she shouted at her producer. “Stupid egg.”
For some reason, the Chinese are not very fond of eggs. “Stupid egg,” “bad egg,” and, worst of all, “turtle’s egg” are common insults.
There are a number of boxers of whom it is said need to be hit hard before they wake up and start fighting. I was like that. Suddenly I remembered all my Chinese, knew exactly what was happening, and understood everything she had said. I replied in fluent Chinese, “I’m sorry, I know compared to you I must seem very stupid. Maybe you want to ask the questions in English? How’s your English?”
She blanched.
The cameraman tried not to laugh. Clearly, he thought she was a bitch, too.
Furious, she stalked off, ending the interview. I was relieved until it occurred to me that I was unlikely to displace Dashan as China’s most fluent Mandarin-speaking foreigner with my “Shaolin…good” performance. Even worse, the filming wasn’t over. They wanted me to perform one of the Shaolin forms I had learned. The problem was that I hadn’t learned any Shaolin forms in the last thirty hours.
This did not dissuade the producer.
He had the monks stand in a semicircle as if they were examining their
American disciple’s skill. As they lined up I pleaded with the producer not to make me do this. I tried to explain that the only forms I knew were from a Southern style of kungfu. These were not Shaolin forms. It would be inappropriate for me to pretend they were, like making the sign of the cross in a synagogue.
Like any good television producer, he couldn’t have cared less.
As I stood there panic-stricken, waiting for the cameraman to set up, waiting to humiliate myself, I looked back at the monks. Deqing caught my eye. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and winked at me conspiratorially. From that moment, I knew he would be my best friend.
It took several takes before they let me and the monks go. I vowed that day to never do TV again. It was a vow I’d end up breaking repeatedly. The world media loves Shaolin. Before I left I would be filmed by Hong Kong, Japanese, Thai, Polish, British, and American TV crews. But most often, it was the state-run Chinese TV station that came to Shaolin to film a segment on Shaolin’s American disciple. I was the poster boy for Western appreciation of China’s profound cultural traditions. When I traveled through China, I would occasionally meet someone who had seen me on TV.
Invariably, they would say, “Your Chinese is quite good. It is almost as good as Dashan’s.”
6
A COKE AND A SMILE
I walked over to the Wushu Center restaurant, fifty feet away from my hotel, for breakfast. Inside the restaurant a dozen waitresses, who represented about a quarter of the entire female population of the village, lazed around. Only guests at the hotel ate breakfast at the restaurant, and most days I was the only guest. Lunch was their busy meal, when the day-tripping tourists and businessmen came to eat. The woman in charge of the restaurant, Fangfang, came over to try to assess what her primary customer for the next year-plus liked to eat.
American Shaolin Page 6