For several months, I tried to find out whose job it was to turn on the song’s recording every morning, because it was played at such irregular intervals. Some weeks I woke up to it every day. Other weeks it was not played at all. (I imagined some baijiu-soaked apparatchik, sleeping fitfully as his liver converted the low-grade alcohol into sugar, deciding whether it was worth fighting back the hangover that morning to play the song.) No one seemed to know or care. It was background noise, something they’d rather ignore. And about six months into my stay, I noticed it hadn’t been played in weeks, and without any fanfare I was never awakened by it again. The sputtering, inconsistent wake-up anthem falling silent forever was about as good a metaphor for the final death rattle of Communist ideological fervor as I encountered during my stay. But at the time this was far from clear, so as I dressed myself in the sweatpants, T-shirt, and tennis shoes that would be my uniform for the next two years, I felt a bit like the Manchurian Candidate.
When I walked outside the hotel, the dawn sun was rising over the mountains in a brilliant display of reddish hues, the Shaolin valley lighting up all at once. The last time I had been up at this hour, I had been pulling an all-nighter to finish a term paper.
I looked for the monks. It was now around six A.M., and I was signed up for four hours of private tutorial in two sessions, nine to eleven A.M. and three to five P.M. Pre-breakfast practice was optional, and everyone at the Wushu Center worked on what they wanted, usually something calisthenic.
The Wushu Center was built along the base of the Song Mountain. The motel and restaurant were on a plateau about fifty feet above the main building and the courtyard surrounding it. A half-dozen monks were frog-jumping—arms behind their backs, hopping up from the squat position—up the fifty stone stairs that connected the upper area with the courtyard below. Some of the older monks (mid-twenties) were running to the top of Song Mountain, where they went to meditate and practice qigong, breathing exercises that are believed to increase internal power.
The courtyard below was a kungfu playground. Kicking bags filled with sand hung from wooden overhangs. Two monks were practicing a form on top of twelve leveled tree trunks planted in rows (a test of balance and control). Rainwater had collected in a giant, uneven concrete bowl. A monk walked along the edge of the bowl, trying to keep his balance as it tipped back and forth, sloshing the water around. There were a couple of loose tree trunks lying around. Deqing was doing squats with one of the trunks on his shoulders. His roommate Cheng Hao was bench-pressing another. The scene looked like the backlot of a kungfu movie studio. In a way it was. Asian film crews would regularly show up to shoot the monks exercising on the traditional equipment for an insert into one of their period chop-socky flicks.
But the main action that morning, as it would be most mornings, was on the concrete parking lot behind the restaurant, where the tourist buses parked each day at lunch. Someone had put up two rusty basketball hoops, and the teenage monks were working on their Michael Jordan moves. Christian missionaries had first brought over the YMCA version of the game shortly after its invention at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was still played across the Chinese countryside with great passion, if not much skill or knowledge of the rules. Dribbling was optional, passing a foreign concept, their shooting touch pure brick. I’d played on my high school’s varsity basketball team (okay, warmed the bench, but there’s no need to get technical). The monks were about as good at basketball as I was at kungfu—a perfect opportunity for me to employ Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in the sporting sphere. I offered to demonstrate how the game was played.
I started with the dribbling drills, moved to passes, and finished with the jump shot with special attention paid to the proper wrist flick to get just the right amount of backspin. I was not unmindful of the fact that they seemed, if I was reading them correctly, more interested in scrimmaging with each other than attending my mini-seminar. “Hey, laowai, why don’t you give us the ball back so we can play?” was my first clue. But what is basketball without a proper grasp of the fundamentals? Sure, some of my three-pointers may have rimmed out—the goal was slanted—but it was the principle that mattered. I had no intention of ending the lessons prematurely, because frog-jumping looked like my only other option.
Finally, they stopped passing my missed shots back to me and offered as a consolation that I be allowed to join one of the teams. Little Tiger wanted to be on my side. All eight of the other monks wanted to be against me. The Chinese are not the world’s tallest people—the Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming does not count, because (not many people know this) he is a cyborg—and the Shaolin monks were even shorter than the average mainlander, because the ideal height for their very acrobatic performance style of kungfu was about five foot five or five foot six. So the game consisted of me driving to the basket with the ball above my head while the monks tried to slap it away from me. Did I mention the monks had no real understanding of the concept of fouls, personal or otherwise? It was my first game of street ball against professional kungfu masters, and I’ve suffered from post-traumatic stress flashbacks ever since.
It was while I was trying to convince one of the sixteen-year-olds that the Leopard Claw Kidney Strike was not a legal technique, even in the NBA, that Deqing and Cheng Hao came over. Deqing, the monk who could fly, must have noticed a certain deficiency in my leaping ability, my white man’s disease, because he called me over and asked me if I could dunk. I could, of course, under perfect conditions…like having a trampoline under the basket. But this was a challenge match.
“Sure,” I lied. “Can you?”
“Pretty much.”
It was a kungfu version of the final “bet” scene from White Men Can’t Jump. I charged the basket, barely cleared it with my fingertips, and rattled the ball around the rim before it popped out. So I tried again and again, and finally concluded that the basket was clearly taller than the regulation ten feet.
Then it was Deqing’s turn. He sent a two-handed tomahawk crashing through the rim. And if this weren’t humiliating enough, all the other shorter-than–Spud Webb monks proceeded to put on an NBA-worthy slam-dunk contest. I’d stumbled upon the Shaolin Globetrotters. I asked Deqing with incredulity how they did it. He pointed over to the monks frog-jumping up the staircase.
I spent the rest of the morning—and many more to come—hopping up and down those damn stairs.
After breakfast I met Cheng Hao in the training hall where I’d first seen him with the Singaporeans. He was to be my private tutor.
In the movies and the picture books sold to tourists, the myth is that the monks spent every moment of every day in exotic training practices. They would hang themselves from trees. They would eat their meals while balancing bowls on their heads. They would take naps hanging upside down. They would pour tea from hundred-pound teakettles. They would study ancient Buddhist texts while their masters broke bricks over their heads.
The pictures were real, not faked or staged. The monks could do all these things, because they were fantastic athletes. But this was not how they spent most of their training days. Instead, their regimen would be familiar to any professional athlete, which was why the visiting TV producers, always paragons of “truthiness,” never filmed their normal practice schedule. The fantasy made for much more compelling TV.
A normal session went like this:
9:00–9:10—Run around the practice hall to warm up.
9:10–9:20—Perform a series of basic calisthenics across the mat: slide-steps, knee-raised runs, leaps of all types, more of those damned frog-leaps, tumbles, rolls.
9:20–9:25—Switch to basic kungfu moves—punches, kicks, and throws—and more gymnastic moves: leaping kicks, flips, back handsprings, barrel rolls, aerials.
9:25–9:40—Break for individual stretching with a particular focus on splits, full and side.
9:40–9:50—Kicking stretches.
9:50–10:00—Rest.
10:00–10:20—Practi
ce individual movements in the particular form they are working on, or a specialized type of iron kungfu.
10:20–10:50—Take turns doing the entire form they are trying to perfect.
10:50–11:00—Warm down.
After lunch, the monks repeated the same schedule in the afternoon session. And this remained unchanged—day after day, for six days a week—from preadolescence to the end of their fighting careers in their mid-twenties. Repetition was the key. For those four hours they almost never altered the schedule. The prebreakfast and post-dinner slots were the only times they could train individually. The only time they’d adjust their routine was if they had a performance for a group of tourists during one of their normal training sessions, usually in the afternoon.
I made it all the way to the 9:40 kicking stretches before my inadequacies became obvious. I couldn’t get my legs higher than my chest and even that height required me to bow my head, arms, and back forward like I’d just been punched in the gut. Cheng Hao tried to keep an even temper. But I was so bad, he finally couldn’t help himself.
“Have you practiced kungfu before?” he asked.
“For three years.”
“Seems more like three weeks.”
The monks didn’t have joints and ligaments. They had rubber bands in their legs. Without the proper flexibility, it is impossible to make Shaolin forms look right. It was one of the reasons the Chinese believe you have to start kungfu at a young age when the body is limber and can be kept that way throughout the aging process. I was starting at the stiff end of adolescence and trying to work my way backward.
After stetching we moved on to the eighteen basic movements, which were believed to be the same eighteen calisthenic exercises the Bodhidharma disciples practiced, but probably weren’t. These movements cropped up with the greatest frequency in various Shaolin forms, like Small Red Boxing and Luohan Boxing, which consisted of fifty to sixty sets of techniques. One basic movement involved stepping forward while your right hand blocked and trapped an imaginary opponent’s punch as your left hand struck his face. Another basic movement required you to spin 360 degrees and use your foot to hook your imaginary opponent’s leg while your left hand blocked his imaginary punch and your right struck him in the chest, knocking him over.
I spent a lot of time falling down during that first class.
The first thing I noticed about Chinese kungfu was its complexity. Both karate and tae kwon do were simplified and modernized at the turn of the century, in order to be taught more easily. Almost every movement in those styles has a very clear and obvious self-defense purpose. Traditional Shaolin kungfu is the opposite. It is complicated and obscure. I couldn’t make heads or tails of at least half of the basic movements. They were so odd that they looked like interpretive dance moves. They were so complex it is impossible to describe them in words. I would later try to help an administrator at another Shaolin school clean up his English translation of a Shaolin forms book. It went something like: “Right hand is placed at forty-five-degree angle with fingers straight, palm pointed at the sky. Left hand is palm up at right elbow. Rotate 180 degrees with back leg moving perpendicular, while bending at the knee. At the same time, both hands sweep counterclockwise and…”
That first morning, Cheng Hao explained that there was a method to this apparent madness. Before the gun, kungfu masters had the most valuable and dangerous skills around. How was an older master to prevent some young hothead from picking up his best techniques in a year or so and then using it for evil ends—or worse, against the older master? How was he to keep the younger students long enough for them to feel proper loyalty to him and learn enough self-control not to bring the master into disrepute? Simple—he hid his best techniques in these complex movements, which contained a number of superfluous moves. After enough years of loyal training, the master would reveal the uses of certain techniques, which the student—having practiced them over and over again—had mastered without knowing it. I immediately recognized this technique from the “wax on, wax off” pedagogic philosophy of The Karate Kid.
But that was before the gun. Cheng Hao was more than happy to explain each self-defense application of the basic movements as he taught them to me. Even with the explanations the moves still seemed impractical. The angles of attack were odd. The combinations seemed needlessly complex. One technique involved hooking the back of an opponent’s left ankle with the right foot and then trapping his leg with the right knee. At that same moment, I was supposed to lean forward to straighten the opponent’s leg and punch at his chest to knock him over. The technique seemed useless to my untrained eyes.
“Master,” I said after a few tries. “This spinning dog-hook technique seems too difficult to be effective.”
Cheng Hao was quiet for a moment before he responded.
“Interesting you would say that. Last year there was a German karate instructor here who was very rude. Every day he insulted Shaolin kungfu and said it was not as good as karate. Finally, I said to him, ‘Okay, you use any karate attack you want and I’ll defend against it with a traditional Shaolin technique.’ He faked a punch and then kicked a roundhouse. I used the same technique you just asked me about. I caught him under the knee and leaned until he collapsed. He had to use crutches to walk for the rest of the time he was here, but he never insulted Shaolin kungfu again.”
Cheng Hao smiled and shrugged in embarrassment as he finished the story. “It was probably excessive, a violation of wude,” he said. “Martial arts ethics.”
“I hope you don’t think I was being rude,” I said.
“No, no, no, you were just asking a question.”
“Because if you ever think I’m being rude, just tell me and I’ll stop.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will.”
Amituofo.
After thirty minutes of working on basic movements, Cheng Hao started to teach me Shaolin’s beginner form, Xiao Hong Quan—Small Red Boxing. Most of Shaolin’s beginning Chinese students study the basic movements for six months to a year before moving to forms. But, Cheng Hao explained, the monks sped the process up for us laowai who have less time, less patience for basics, and a greater need for external markers of our accomplishments. The monks knew that even before we were good at one form, we wanted to start learning the next. They had studied us closely.
Small Red Boxing had about fifty-five movements, more or less, depending on who was teaching it. Each master tended to teach Shaolin forms with small variations. It was, Cheng Hao said, why there were so many different kungfu styles in China. Over time, the variations on individual Shaolin forms became larger and larger until something new was created.
There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of distinct styles of kungfu. There are styles devoted to every conceivable animal. There are “drunken” styles, regional styles, styles exclusively dedicated to one weapon. There are family styles, which are never taught to anyone outside a bloodline. There are external and internal styles, styles for ground fighting, joint manipulation (qin na), and even one focused on head-butting. Chinese kungfu is one of the most glorious examples of obsessive-compulsive behavior in the history of human culture.
Each style of kungfu is marked by distinct qualities. While most martial arts forms take advantage of the entire plane of a performance mat, Shaolin forms always stay on a single straight line. You attack to your right, stepping forward, and then at some point, you turn 180 degrees and attack to the left. This is because the fundamental principle of Shaolin kungfu is that it could be, if necessary, practiced “under the shadow of an ox.” Cheng Hao demonstrated. Instead of stepping to the left or the right along a straight line as he did each technique, he would jump straight up into the air, complete the technique while aloft, and then land in the same spot as before. Then he would jump straight up in the air again, complete the next technique while aloft, and land in the same spot, etc. The line was reduced to a single point. I asked him why.
“I don’t know. Ma
ybe because the early monks lived in really small rooms,” he said. Then he laughed. “I guess we still do.”
Watching Cheng Hao teach Small Red Boxing was like watching a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician teach high school algebra. It had been so long since he had thought about Small Red Boxing that it took him a few moments to walk through the moves for himself. And then, once he pulled the first part of the form from his long-term muscle memory, he soared through the first ten movements, his technique flawless, as perfect as I had ever seen a form performed. And then he stopped, scratching his head. He wasn’t sure how to transition from move ten to move eleven. Was it duck, turn, and snap kick? Or did he turn, then duck, and snap kick?
He grinned sheepishly, “It’s been a while since I taught this form. Usually one of the older monks teaches it.” I asked him what he usually taught. “More advanced forms. My specialty is eagle. So if some foreigner wants to learn that, they call me in. But the monks who usually teach laowai are on vacation, so here I am.”
Cheng Hao was a gracious, kind, and enthusiastic coach. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I learned he hadn’t wanted to teach me. In fact, none of the monks did when they heard I would be staying for a year. Teaching took time away from their own training, and they didn’t get paid anything extra for doing it. They didn’t mind teaching for a short stay. It was a nice break from their monotonous training schedule and a good way to make foreign friends and contacts, which was useful for any monk who might be thinking about emigrating (or defecting). Teaching for a year, on the other hand, was a surefire way to limit a monk’s personal kungfu progress. This was particularly painful for the monks in their performing prime, usually from sixteen to twenty-six years of age. Cheng Hao had drawn the short straw with me. To his credit, I never would have guessed it.
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