American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

  “Meat,” I said, like any good Midwesterner.

  She wanted to know what else I wanted to eat besides meat, suggesting several vegetarian dishes. I told her I didn’t care what the vegetable was as long as there was a meat dish at every meal.

  I didn’t understand why she was having so much trouble with this request. We went back and forth for several minutes. What I didn’t know was that Fangfang had been given the restaurant as a kind of franchise, part of the recent experiments in controlled capitalism. She paid the leaders a certain fee every year for the right to run the restaurant. Any profits she made above that fee and her operational costs she could keep for herself. But I was paying my fee to the leaders, who were giving her a small percentage of my $1,300 each month. Meat dishes are the most expensive part of any meal. As Fangfang was suggesting the delightful varieties of nonmeat dishes, and I was insisting on beef, chicken, or pork, her mental cash register was calculating the cost differentials.

  We settled on meat for every meal but breakfast. I agreed to enough vegetable dishes to make my mother proud. And then I spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the concept of french fries. Fangfang eventually called out the cook. I knew the Chinese word for “potato,” but my vocabulary lessons had not included the adjective for “deep fried.” We ended up in the kitchen, which I immediately wished I had never seen given the rusted utensils and festering puddles of water. Trying to pantomime the process of making french fries, I explained how the oil had to be poured in high enough to completely cover the sliced potatoes.

  The chef stared at me for a moment before saying, “Why would you want to use so much oil?”

  “Because they are delicious.”

  “It is a waste.”

  Fangfang and I went back to my table to continue our discussion. She turned her attention to beverages.

  “What would you like to drink? Tea?” she asked.

  “No, it’s too hot to drink tea when training.”

  “Beer?”

  “For breakfast?”

  “Water?”

  When I had been trying to find the monks the day before, I had seen Shaolin’s creek, a tiny bed of fetid water on the south side of the road. It was where all of the town’s trash and human waste seemed to end up. It was also where little peasant boys took empty water bottles down to refill, recap, and then sell to the vendors, who resold them to a new batch of tourists. I was not going to drink any water at Shaolin that wasn’t boiled first.

  “Do you have Coca-Cola?” I asked.

  “You want to drink Coca-Cola at breakfast?”

  I momentarily thought about explaining but realized I didn’t know the Chinese term for “hick.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We don’t have it. How about Jianlibao instead?”

  I agreed and soon found out that Jianlibao, China’s national soft drink, tastes a lot like Sunkist minus the sugar and carbonation. After breakfast, I decided to search for a supplier of Coke.

  Just outside the temple’s courtyard was a row of fifteen or so stalls, tin-roofed wooden shacks selling identical convenience store goods like boiled eggs, packaged Spam, bottled water, soda, beer, peanuts, cigarettes, etc. I went down the line trying to find someone who sold Coke. They all had Jianlibao but no Coke until I arrived at the very last stall, which was run by an ancient man and his young granddaughter.

  Grandfather had the weathered face and hands of someone who had spent a lifetime working the land. He also moved with the deliberate pace of the peasants of China: Subsistence farming is hard but slow work. It took him a minute to stand from his stool and offer me a seat on another stool, then another minute for him to sit back down. He pointed at his granddaughter. She went into the back of the stall to look for the Coke. While she searched, he spent a good deal of time getting comfortable on his stool. Finally settled, he pulled out a pack of Chinese cigarettes and offered me a smoke.

  “Thank you, but no, Grandfather. I don’t smoke.”

  “I have foreign cigarettes.” He searched his pockets until he found a pack of 555, a popular British brand.

  “No, really, I don’t smoke.”

  “You prefer Marlboro?” he asked, reaching over to the wooden case where the cigarettes were kept. “They are American.”

  “No, really, I don’t smoke,” I said.

  He looked slightly hurt, and I was once again confused. I’d soon learn that the offering of a cigarette was the equivalent of saying, “Let’s be friends and do business together.” The Exchange of Cigarettes was the opening act of all banquets. Accepting someone’s cigarette meant you were willing to enter into a relationship. Rejecting a cigarette meant you didn’t want to be friends and didn’t want to do business. Or, if it were a cheaper Chinese brand, it might also mean you were a snob who felt the proffered cigarette wasn’t good enough for you. A cigarette was the first thing offered when a cop stopped you for some infraction. If the cop took the cigarette, it meant you were getting off with a warning; if he turned it down, you were getting a ticket. Because 99 percent of Chinese males smoked, saying you didn’t smoke was understood as a snub. (Women weren’t supposed to smoke and so were exempt from the ritual. They did smoke, of course, just in much smaller numbers, although it was increasing rapidly in the coastal cities, where the younger generation saw it as cool, Western, and empowering.)

  Who offered and who accepted a cigarette was a sign of social status, the petitioner of a favor versus the granter. At banquets, the low-ranking males jumped over each other to offer the most powerful man at the table a cigarette. Whose he accepted and whose he rejected set the pattern for the entire evening. But if you were of equal status you had to give a cigarette to the person who offered it to you. Chinese cigarette etiquette was complex enough to be worthy of a book by Emily Post and bizarre enough for a P. J. O’Rourke parody.

  Grandfather was chewing over what had just happened in the methodical way old people do until he finally reached a common Chinese conclusion that saved me from a lot of awkward situations: Laowai were ignorant and rude, but it was not our fault. We were like the giant panda, a slow but charming endangered species that must be forgiven and protected lest it go extinct. Stupidity was our shield. The most perilous thing for a laowai was to demonstrate a deep understanding of the Chinese way, to achieve the status of Zhongguo tong (China expert). Once they knew that you actually knew better, they treated you like they treat each other, which was not so forgiving. But there was no danger of that happening to me yet.

  “Would you like some peanuts?” he asked. “Maybe an egg?”

  “No thanks. Just the Coke.” He stared at me and smiled like I was a long-lost friend. I smiled back. About the time I didn’t think I could smile anymore I hit upon a question: “Which cigarettes do you prefer, Chinese or foreign?”

  “Foreign cigarettes are too expensive. And they don’t last as long. But they taste better.”

  “How much are foreign cigarettes?”

  “10RMB. Chinese are around 2RMB.”

  His granddaughter brought back a can of Coke. It had been back there for so long that it had acquired a thick film of dust. Grandfather wiped it clean slowly and methodically.

  “How much is it?”

  “4RMB” (fifty cents). I was surprised that it was as expensive as in America. But I had given up every other vice. I needed my carbonated-caffeine fix.

  “I’ll take ten cans.”

  This caused a flurry at the nearby stalls, where the other peasant-entrepreneurs had been leaning in to eavesdrop on our conversation. Word of my request raced down the line.

  “What did the foreigner say?”

  “He asked for ten cans.”

  “Aiya!” Several of the female merchants shouted.

  Grandfather ignored the chatter and sent his granddaughter back to look for more cans of Coke. She could find only five more. He told me he could get the rest in a couple of days and to come back then.

  I was the big spender that day
. And Grandfather was the pleased salesman. The sellers jokingly heckled me as I walked past them.

  “Hey, want to buy ten things from me?” one asked.

  “What things?” I shot back.

  “Anything you want!” was the reply.

  Just as I passed the last stall the woman there called out, “Foreigner, where are you from?”

  “America.”

  “Coke is American.”

  “Right, right, right.”

  She turned to the woman in the stall next to her. “See, Americans like American things.”

  The merchants were researching the international market.

  As I walked back to the Wushu Center the waves of Chinese tourists for the day were coming the other way. They pointed and stared and giggled and said to each other, “Ni kan, laowai” (Look, a foreigner) and shouted “Hallo laowai!” to me and waved. Some even stopped to take pictures. But all of them pointed and shouted “Hallo!” Some of the young women would continue to stare until they realized this annoyed their boyfriends and then would say in Chinese to appease them, “He’s tall, too tall,” or “His nose is so big.”

  This was sort of charming the first four or five hundred times, but within weeks the excessive attention began to make me seethe like Sean Penn in his Madonna period. When tourists would point at me and shout, “Look, a foreigner,” I’d find myself, more frequently than I care to admit, pointing back and shouting, “Look, a Chinese person.” By the end of the first month, I was going to great lengths to hide out from the tourists during the day, just like the monks in the temple had been doing the day I’d arrived.

  7

  DEFECTION

  On my second night at Shaolin, I went down to the performance hall to explore. Hanging from the wall was a banner that read in Chinese and English: CULTURAL EXCHANGE MUTUAL BENEFIT. The Chinese loved banners with slogans—they decorated many offices and were a common departing gift.

  Cheng Hao, Deqing, and some of the other monks were doing what they did most evenings: hanging out in the performance hall, talking, laughing, and practicing kungfu. I’ve never lived in a community more obsessed with a single activity. Life here was a year-round kungfu camp.

  Even after a long day of performances, the young monks were working on their techniques. Deqing was helping Little Tiger, the boy from the first day, with his spear form. Several of the monks were practicing their back handsprings in the “bouncy” corner of the performance hall. In the modern equivalent of the indented stone floor inside the Shaolin Temple training hall, the monks had jumped and landed so often and so hard on the wooden floorboards in the southwest corner of the Wushu Center hall that they were as loose and springy as a trampoline.

  My presence quickly stopped the training. Within minutes I had a dozen monks and about thirty of the young Chinese boys who trained at the Wushu Center (there were about 300 tuition-paying students) sitting around and peppering me with questions. Because I was an American, the topic they all wanted to ask about was the big scandal that had recently rocked Shaolin. Two Shaolin monks, Monk Yanming and Monk Guolin, had defected during the temple’s first tour of the United States. Four months earlier, while I was calling the Chinese Embassy to ask if it had any information about the Shaolin Temple and despairing that I would never find Shaolin, the monks were, unbeknownst to me, on a ten-city tour of the country. They closed in San Francisco. Afterward, when the plane was sitting on the tarmac waiting to leave, party officials discovered to their great surprise and anger that they were short two monks.

  “All of you were touring America this summer?” I asked, feeling like an idiot.

  “Not us.” Deqing said. “Another group of monks living in the temple.”

  “There are two groups of monks?”

  Deqing was visibly uncomfortable at the question. “Well, we are all Shaolin monks, but some of us moved to the Wushu Center when the Henan government opened it as a tourism center and kungfu school in 1989. Those who were older or less interested in kungfu remained at the temple.”

  “Why did you move?”

  “The training facilities are better,” Deqing explained.

  “And the government pays us a salary to teach kungfu and perform for tourists,” Little Tiger added. “The temple monks have to beg for money from their disciples.”

  “Life is better here,” Cheng Hao said. “But the government didn’t give us much of a choice.”

  Deqing changed the topic. “Do you know what the situation is for Guolin and Yanming?”

  “I didn’t hear anything about any monks defecting.”

  This set off rumbles through the group. How could I not have heard of it? Two Shaolin monks defected! It was an international scandal! Had I heard the rumor that the Chinese government had sent out secret agents to try to capture the two monks and bring them home? Had I heard the rumor that Yanming and Guolin were hiding in a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York? I thought, but did not say, that if this were the case the Chinese government wouldn’t have much trouble narrowing down their location. Maybe they had fled to California, one of the younger monks speculated. Wherever they were, life was very tough for them, the monks decided. They had no money and no face—having embarrassed all of China and hurt Shaolin’s reputation. Now it would be next to impossible for the Wushu Center to get visas to America. Hadn’t they just proven what the American visa officers suspected?

  Clearly feeling the other monks had aired too much dirt, Deqing changed the topic again. “Have you met Michael Jordan?”

  “No.”

  There were some grumbles. How could I have not met Michael Jordan? He was the most famous American in China. The NBA had been cleverly marketing its property in the mainland for the last several years. Every week Chinese TV aired an NBA package that consisted of a carefully edited game of the week with all the boring parts like free throws, passing, and teamwork removed. It was the NBA distilled to its essence: one big slam-dunk contest. Come to think of it, that pretty much describes NBA play even without the editing.

  “Have you met Mike Tyson?” Little Tiger asked.

  In 1992, the Shaolin monks considered Mike Tyson the fiercest fighter on earth, a high compliment. Several of the monks popped to their feet to imitate Tyson’s style, the way he ducked his head down to get into his opponent’s chest and then pawed with a left hook to set up his doomed rival for a devastating right uppercut. Their impressions were uncanny.

  “No, I haven’t met Mike Tyson,” I admitted.

  The grumblings were more pointed. I hadn’t heard about the defection, hadn’t met Jordan or Tyson. Maybe I wasn’t really an American. Could I be a Canadian parading as an American? An Australian?

  They knew how to hurt a guy.

  What followed was a test of my Americanness. They wanted to know what life was like in America, and they wanted the answers in terms of dollars and cents. How much could a kungfu instructor make in America? They wanted to know what other jobs they could do besides teach kungfu and how much money they could make. They wanted to know about the earning potential of delivery boys, waiters, cabdrivers, cooks, and policemen. They were particularly interested in the salaries for kungfu movie stars, although we did spend some time discussing the salaries of stuntmen and fight choreographers. I spent the rest of the evening pretending I knew exactly what each occupation made. It didn’t really matter—the sums were so extreme to these boys that the difference in income for the various professions was irrelevant. All were far beyond anything they could imagine.

  For the entire evening I was a first-person witness to what life was like on the opposite side of the globe, a walking economic report of American wages. I was the center of attention.

  It was the last night that they would openly ask me about America in a large group with witnesses. For the next two months, they would largely ignore me. At the time, I assumed it was because I had answered all their questions.

  I was wrong.

  BOOK TWO

  NOVICE />
  October–December 1992

  “Only those who have tasted the bitterest of the bitter can become people who stand out among others.”

  —GUANCHANG XIANXING JI

  1

  EATING BITTER

  On my first morning of training, my wake-up call was a Communist Party propaganda song blaring out of speakers placed on top of wooden poles throughout the village.

  Socialism is Good

  Socialism is Good

  In a Socialist Country

  The People’s status is High

  The Communist Party

  The Communist Party…

  The second verse of this cheery marching tune with its bouncy beat took up the importance of overthrowing the capitalist reactionaries and running off the imperialist dogs, which if I’m not mistaken meant me. I dressed in a certain state of disquiet. It’s not every day you wake up in a village where 10,000 armed Chinese kungfu masters are being urged by a Communist anthem to rise up and throw down your colonialist-capitalist ass. As national welcomes go, it’s not exactly, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”

  The song itself was one of those odd reminders of China’s recent ideological past that was becoming increasingly anachronistic, like the appellation tongzhi (comrade), which was no longer used by the general populace. Other than the leaders of the Wushu Center and the police officers who collected the ticket revenue for the government, the town’s population now consisted almost entirely of private tuition-paying students, kungfu entrepreneurs, and peasant merchants—in short, a bunch of capitalist running dogs. Whenever I wanted to get an embarrassed rise out of younger, hipper Chinese, I’d start singing the “Socialism is good” song or call them tongzhi.