In thirty minutes I barely managed to approximate five of the movements. My technique was poor, my movements were awkward, my stances were unbalanced, and my strikes lacked any power. If I had been a Chinese student, Cheng Hao would have shouted all these failings at me, while occasionally whacking me with a wooden staff to emphasize his criticisms. Shaolin’s pedagogical style was profoundly corporal. China has a saying parents often use with their children when they punish them, da shi teng, ma shi ai (smacking is fondness; scolding is love). But I was a foreigner. More important, because he was only nineteen, I was two years older than he was. So he only said, “Good…very good…better…you’re getting better” as I stumbled through the morning.
After class I asked him about Shaolin’s training methods and why they were so different than in the movies.
“Those are just movies,” he said.
“Did the monks in the past train like in the movies?”
“Who knows? It is hard to separate life from fiction,” he replied. “But they may have. The monks of the past were much tougher than us. Their lives were much more bitter.”
“Your lives now don’t seem easy to me.”
“Oh, it is much better than in the past, much better than even when I came here nine years ago. At the Wushu Center we train indoors on mats, not outside on the dirt, as we did when I was a boy.”
Like all truly civilized societies, Shaolin had a siesta culture. After lunch all the monks took their xiuxi (rest) until the three P.M. afternoon workout. The only exception was when a big tour arrived later than expected and the monks were roused to give a performance. That first day I was too excited about my first lesson with an honest-to-God Shaolin monk to fall asleep. That would be the last day I skipped a chance to recover before another class.
The two-hour afternoon session was identical to the morning workout, as every workout would be for the next three months. I ran. I jumped. I reluctantly frog-jumped. I rolled. I tumbled. I sweated. I stretched. I kick-stretched. I learned more basic movements. I fumbled through more of Small Red Boxing. And as I did everything, Cheng Hao said, “Okay…good…better…not bad…faster…with power…very good.”
I went to bed that night as happy as I’m capable of being. I had found the monks, and I had trained with them. All was right with my world. I had trouble falling asleep. It had been a thrilling, incredible day.
It would be the last one without pain.
The second day is always the worst one for new students at Shaolin. My body hurt so badly it felt like a barracks of marines had given me a code-red blanket party, with particular attention paid to my legs. It took me ten minutes to get out of bed. I had to lift my legs with my hands to swing them over the edge. To stand, I had to rock back and forth. As soon as I was up on my feet, I fell forward into the chair next to the wall. I looked at the clock: 8:30 A.M. I had missed the early morning workout and breakfast. Even “Socialism is Good” had failed to wake me.
I limped down the staircase like a cripple. Right foot down one step, left foot dragged to meet the right, right foot down one more step, while I grasped the hand railing for dear life. I was a wreck. While I had been nobody’s all-American before coming to Shaolin, I had been an active high school athlete, playing on the basketball, soccer, and tennis teams. I had studied tae kwon do, aikido, and kungfu in college. I had never felt this shattered before.
As I shuffled like a highly medicated mental patient into the main building, I bumped into the painter I had met my first day at the Wushu Center.
“Started your training yesterday, right?” he asked, smiling.
I didn’t say anything as I limped past.
The monks were gathered outside the performance hall, waiting for someone to bring the key to open the bike lock holding the doors closed. Deqing took one look at me and laughed, “Having fun?”
“Too much fun,” I whispered back.
All the monks cracked up.
Cheng Hao did his best not to smile when I finally made it to the practice hall. “You hurt?”
“No problem.”
“Studying kungfu is very bitter.”
“So it would seem.”
It took everything I had that morning to run around the room and then try to jump, tumble, and spin across the mat. I nearly cried when it came time for the frog-jumping. I couldn’t bend more than a couple of inches at the knees as I hopped across the mat.
“Your frog is very tall,” Cheng Hao called out to me.
By stretch time, I was a quivering mess. The practice room was two stories high. Where the second floor would normally be, there was an internal balcony surrounding the room on two sides. Two staircases led up to it on either side, so people could go up and watch the practice below. The initial stretching was done with the aid of one of the staircases. The first stretch required me to place one leg up as high as possible, keep it straight, and then bend my nose to my knee. The problem was that the tendons behind my knee felt like frayed string about to snap. The pain was extraordinary, and my foot was two steps lower than it had been the day before.
I tried to bend toward my knee, but I couldn’t get more than a couple of inches forward. Cheng Hao got behind me and started pushing on my back. I tried breathing through the pain. I tried placing my mind somewhere else, somewhere pleasant, on a beach in Acapulco, in the Playboy Mansion, at a Pizza Hut in Topeka. But there was no escaping this room or this unbearable pain. I grew frantic, certain that one of the tendons would actually tear.
“Master, I’m very sorry,” I said. “But maybe I should skip today’s practice until my leg heals.”
“It won’t help,” Cheng Hao said. “If you rest until you feel better, then you practice, your leg will hurt just as much the day after. Better to get it over with now.”
“How long will that take?”
“Six to seven days.”
I was unable to imagine surviving a week of this.
“Put your nose to your knee,” he said, pushing harder.
I started to beg, “Master, please, let me rest for one day.”
“No, it won’t help.”
“My leg is going to break,” I mewled.
“No, it won’t.”
When I was younger I loved reading war memoirs. I often wondered if I could withstand being tortured. Now I had my answer. At that point I’d have given Cheng Hao anything—money, state secrets, sexual favors—for a reprieve from kungfu training.
Somehow, he got me through that practice and the rest of the week with a combination of cajolery, shame, and song. He wanted me to teach and translate for him Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants”—the most popular Western song in China at the time. We spent a great deal of time running around the room and debating whether the singer wanted another baby as in child or baby as in boyfriend. Cheng Hao insisted it was another child.
“If she already has a boyfriend, why would she want another one?” he asked.
I decided not to explain.
Cheng Hao turned out to be right. It took six days before my legs recovered, and afterward I was far more flexible. But it wasn’t the last time at Shaolin I’d be pushed to the point where I would beg for mercy.
2
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
I had defied my father to come to Shaolin, because I wanted to go to the most isolated, cutoff, far-flung, off-the-map place in the Mandarin-speaking world. And like most people who are not careful of what they wish for, my dream was granted. And, after the initial thrill of success passed, I was completely miserable.
No friends, no family, not even any English-speaking strangers—Shaolin was total immersion. At some point within the first month I started talking to myself, which wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that I was also answering myself. I’d never imagined how crucial English was to my sense of a unified self—part good and part bad, but all of a whole. I started to experience two versions of me: one English-speaking and one Chinese-speaking. Matt was a clever, thoug
htful boy. Bao Mosi was a verbally impaired dunce, always nodding his head and smiling and saying “right, right, right” when he had no idea what had just been said to him and was desperately hoping his brain would be able to translate that last comment before the speaker veered off onto another track. Bao Mosi was constantly working under a ten-second delay.
“Are you [something]?” one of the monks would ask. “All of us are going to [something] [something]. Interested?”
“Right, right, right…okay,” I would respond.
The Wushu Center had the only phone in the entire village capable of making international calls. It worked in about one out of every ten tries. The price was $8 per minute. The Wushu Center also had the village’s only international fax machine. The price was 20 per page. After failing several times to reach home by phone, I sent a short fax message per my mother’s demand that I reassure her of my continued survival.
Mother, your son lives still. But the natives grow restless. Please send more wampum. And some Peter Pan peanut butter. Food here is terrible. Will call when possible. Love, Little Lord Fauntleroy
Any letter or package from home took about thirty days to arrive: five days from America to Beijing, seven days from Beijing to Zheng Zhou, fourteen days from Zheng Zhou to Shaolin, then about a week for the Faulknerian drunks in the Shaolin post office to get around to telling me, the only American in the village, that a package had arrived from the United States. That is, if they hadn’t developed a hankering for Peter Pan peanut butter. All my packages and letters were opened, some never made it, and if they did, the stamps were gone, because foreign stamps were collectibles.
I was so lonely that for the first and last time in my life, when not under threat of being grounded, I wrote letters. And not little notes, I wrote twenty-, twenty-five-, thirty-page, single-spaced treatises. I sent them to everyone—my parents, my friends, my exgirlfriend—mostly, it pains me to say, my ex. Inspired by the example of all those married convicted felons, I had hopes of rekindling her affections with the power of my words. Fortunately, I have managed to repress all of those words, because they were most likely of the desperate, heartbroken variety, which are never particularly attractive. Nor, in general, is a college dropout who joins a Buddhist monastery. She sent a single Dear John letter back. Unfortunately, I remember every single one of its I-love-you-but-I’m-not-in-love-with-you words.
I was so completely cut off from any news that it wasn’t until late December that I first heard the results of the 1992 U.S. presidential election. The painter, who had helped me when I first came to the Wushu Center, said to me one day, “America has a new president.”
“Who won?”
“I am not sure, but I do know one thing,” he continued, “Bushi Bushi.”
The Chinese phrase for “is not” is bu (2nd tone) shi (4th tone). The Chinese transliteration of George Bush’s surname is bu (4th tone) shi (2nd tone). But I couldn’t hear the tonal differences, because the painter’s rural Henan accent was thick and my Chinese was still poor, so I misinterpreted him as saying that the president of the United States bushi bushi (is not, is not.)
I was momentarily confused. Why would he repeat “is not”? Was it for emphasis? Did something dramatic happen? The president “is not, is not”? Did he mean, “there is no president”? There was an assassination?
My heart started racing.
It is an indication of how deep my sense of isolation was that my first reaction was America had slipped into anarchy and the federal government had collapsed.
Sensing my distress, the painter repeated nervously, “Bushi Bushi.”
“What did you say?” I demanded.
“Bushi Bushi.”
Finally, I heard the tonal shifts and understood he was saying, “It is not Bush.”
It was not until several weeks later that I discovered it was Clinton, not Perot, who was our forty-second president.
Shaolin kungfu has eighteen different official weapons, but there are forms for more. Shaolin has five main animal styles—tiger, leopard, eagle, snake, and praying mantis—but there are more. It is estimated that Shaolin has more than 200 open-hand forms, but no one has been able to record them all. Historians of martial arts explain the creation of all of these styles either for self-defense (Shaolin was an isolated monastery often attacked by bandits) or religious reasons (kungfu forms are a type of moving meditation), but that doesn’t explain the complexity. It took me all of a week to come up with my own theory: boredom. Put a bunch of sexually repressed young men on a mountaintop with nothing to do but meditate and practice kungfu and the myriad of Shaolin styles is the result.
Unlike previous generations of Shaolin students, I had access to a TV, kungfu movies, pool tables, and Street Fighter II to occupy my free time. But even with all that, except when I was studying kungfu, I was like a jonesing addict in detox. I missed Western food, the English language, my friends and family. But I felt the aching loss of visual stimuli at least as much. Nights at Shaolin felt as tedious as extended car rides across the Kansas plains. Many evenings during that first month, the loneliness and isolation would grip me so hard around the chest I’d have trouble breathing. The worst of these panic attacks came on Saturday nights, because I had to face the prospect of Sunday without any kungfu training while all the time imagining all the fun my friends were having that I was not.
Shaolin’s only truly interesting entertainment option was the monks’ spectacular kungfu performances. There was no set schedule for them. They might not perform for several days, and then suddenly have three afternoon performances with an evening blowout. Tour operators would call at the last minute, hoping to get a better deal on the ticket prices. Or some government officials would appear with some foreign dignitaries they wanted to impress with a Chinese cultural event. Or a group would just show up at the door with a person in tow owed a favor by someone at the Wushu Center, and the monks had to drop what they were doing and put on a show.
The performances were designed like a superior version of the regular workout. The monks began with some jumping, leaping, and other gymnastic flips and falls across the mat. The youngest and least talented would start with basic leaping kicks. The difficulty of the techniques would ratchet up with each succeeding monk until the most talented concluded the warm-up: most often either Deqing with a series of whirling high kicks or Lipeng, a taciturn loner who could do twenty back handsprings on a space the size of a dinner table.
After limbering up the monks would execute the stretching kicks with military precision. Each back ramrod straight, every knee and elbow locked, every foot touching the top of every forehead, every leg snapping up and down almost faster than the eye could follow. Once this group warm-up was complete, the monks left the room to return one by one to perform their individual specialties.
These broke down into two groups: forms and qigong skills. Most of the qigong skills were iron kungfu feats. The Chinese believe in a concept called qi, which roughly translates as “vitality” or “breath” or “energy.” They believe that qi courses through the human body like the Force in Star Wars, and this qi can be strengthened through breathing exercises and then focused to various parts of the body. Iron kungfu involves directing the qi to a part of the body to protect it from a blow. One monk was an expert in iron arm and leg kungfu. During the performance, various wooden staffs were broken over his limbs. A monk who specialized in iron stomach kungfu invited members of the audience to punch him as hard as they could. The blows had no observable effect. His facial expression never changed. Another monk broke bricks over his head.
Did qi protect them? In my experience, focusing the mind on a certain part of the body and imagining you were focusing energy there was helpful and necessary but not sufficient. Advanced practitioners of a particular iron kungfu had hardened that particular part of the body for so long and with such force that the physical alteration of their bodies bordered on deformity. Deqing, who practiced iron fist, had fists that
were so thick they looked like pincushions—the fingers serving as the pins. Another monk, who practiced iron spear, had driven his fingers into hard dirt for so long that the four fingers of his right hand when held together were exactly the same length, his middle as short as his pinkie. And all the iron head practitioners had knots on their heads and spoke with stutters. So there are obvious limits to the power of qi: It can’t stop bullets.
The iron kungfu performances were interspersed with expert form demonstrations. Except for one routine, none of the forms performed were traditional Shaolin-style forms. They were all variations of modern wushu competition forms.
When Mao Zedong banned kungfu in the 1950s, it was part of his overall ideological program to create a “New China” free from its feudal past and religious traditions. But banning kungfu was the equivalent of trying to outlaw high school football in west Texas. The Chinese are obsessed with kungfu; you can find septuagenarians practicing martial arts forms every morning in parks across the country. So Mao knew he needed to rechannel that passion. Because international sporting competitions were one of the fronts where the Cold War could be fought relatively safely, Mao and his cadre created two sports out of traditional kungfu: modern wushu and sanda (Chinese-style kickboxing).
Modern wushu was the kungfu equivalent of figure skating. Competitions, both with weapons and without, are held before judges who assign points based on the beauty and the technical difficulty of each participant’s performance. The self-defense efficacy of the movements—the whole point of traditional kungfu—is irrelevant. Modern wushu is martial arts without the “martial.” The emphasis is on speed, grace, beauty, and acrobatic ability. The highly stylized forms are peppered with the kind of flips and leaps you find in Olympic gymnastic competitions.
To support these new sports, the government made modern wushu and sanda part of the curriculum at the various tiyu xiuyuan (sports universities) across the country. It pushed for the acceptance of the two sports in international competitions. And it scoured the land for talented boys to be placed in intensive wushu training programs. The most famous product of the Chinese wushu machine is Jet Li, who was discovered during citywide sports testing in Beijing, enrolled in Beijing Sports University’s wushu program—still considered the best in the country—and became a five-time national champion before making the movie Shaolin Temple, which launched his acting career.
American Shaolin Page 9