Traditional kungfu masters from Taiwan and Hong Kong absolutely hate modern wushu because they (rightly) see it as a political assault on their art form with the intent of stripping away its martial and religious aspects. But the public loves wushu, because it is fast, beautiful, and the style most often seen in Hong Kong movies. Handsprings and back flips have zero usefulness in a fight, but they sure look cool. So that’s what the monks gave the crowds. In fact, they had modified the competition wushu forms, which are highly regulated, to jazz them up even further. The goal was to excite, to maximize the “ooh”s and “ah”s. And they did, especially Deqing and Lipeng.
Lipeng was an expert in Ditang Quan (Floor Boxing), which involved leaping into the air with various flying kicks and falling flat onto the mat. After entering with twenty back handsprings, he proceeded to do a series of front flips without using his hands, followed by several high-flying kicks, the last of which he finished by landing flat on his back. And so forth. As a pure example of acrobatic ability and physical toughness, it was breathtaking.
His only competition was Deqing, whose entire body was basically one fast twitch muscle. His endurance was lacking, but for the minute or so he was in front of the crowd he was an explosion of kinetic motion. He was so fast and so strong that he couldn’t be bothered with the niceties of wushu forms, which require the feet, the hands, the head, and the body to be exactly a certain way at exactly a certain moment. He was too busy blowing through the form, leaping higher, spinning faster, charging harder. Deqing was the only monk that the other monks would make a point to watch. Part of it was his skill and part of it was the joy he exuded, but the major reason was that he was the only monk who consistently improvised new moves for his forms, sometimes on the spot. As great as the other monks were, once you had seen them do the same form exactly the same way a couple dozen times, you started to get a little jaded. Not with Deqing.
Deqing was once doing his version of Shaolin Drunken Style (created by a monk with a weakness for the bottle). In the middle of the form, he was supposed to jump into the air, complete a flying kick while rotating in a large parabola before landing flat on the left side of his body. But he had leaped too high and his body wasn’t rotating over fast enough. He was going to crash flat on his back. So what he did was straighten his legs to stop his body’s rotation, and then, in the middle of the air—six feet above the ground, laid out flat as a board—he rotated his hips, which flipped his body like a pancake. When he finally landed (it seemed like it took a minute), he was in a push-up position, his hands bracing his fall. A monk sitting next to me shook his head with awe and envy and exhaled under his breath, “Fucking Deqing.”
I watched every performance I could. But even more entertaining were the monks’ interactions before the show started. The monks were like a theater troupe. They bitched about aches and injuries. They complained about having to perform for small crowds. They were pumped when the house was packed or there were VIPs present. The less expert monks studied the performances of their betters, looking for techniques to appropriate. The stars were difficult to track down moments before their performances, usually arriving with a flourish at the last moment after one of the younger monks had been sent to fetch them. There was also endless backbiting about who was over-the-hill, who wasn’t improving fast enough, who was shirking the performances by faking an injury, who was not as good as he thought he was, who never gave a good performance unless the crowd was large enough, who needed to learn something new instead of doing the same old form over and over again, who needed to spend less time instructing others and more time looking after his own deteriorating kungfu skills.
As the monks switched from the jogging pants and T-shirts they wore for practice to their orange monk robes, the banter would go something like this:
“Where’s Lipeng?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go get him.”
“Why should I go?”
“Because I told you to.”
“Hey, who has a sash?”
“Where’s your sash?”
“It’s in the wash.”
“That’s why you have two.”
“They are both in the wash.”
“You’re a stupid egg.”
“You need to shave your head again.”
“But it’s so cold.”
“When you bring the staff down on my arm, snap it. Be fast. Last time, you nearly broke my shoulder.”
“If you don’t like how I do it, get someone else.”
“Where’s Lipeng?”
“He’s never here.”
“Who’s in the crowd?”
“A group of laowai.”
“How many?”
“Maybe twenty.”
“Where are they from?”
“America.”
“How can you tell?”
“Everyone give full effort today. I don’t want to see any laziness out there.”
“Their clothes. And they’re fat.”
“I want you to do praying mantis form.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“My back. You know my back is hurt.”
“It’s been more than a month.”
“But I already did praying mantis this morning.”
“So you can’t do it again?”
“My back. It really hurts.”
“Okay, then do iron stomach.”
“I can’t.”
“Aiya! Why not?”
“I have diarrhea.”
“Then practice your iron asshole kungfu at the same time. Okay, the music has started. Everyone get ready. Will someone get Lipeng? Damn! Everyone ready? Let’s go.”
3
CHINESE MEDICINE
The Shaolin monks were my hosts, and I was their guest. The problem was I didn’t want to be a guest. I wanted to be part of the family. But I was the ultimate outsider, a pampered foreigner who ate at the fancy restaurant and lived in the fancy hotel. I had a passport that allowed me to leave anytime I wanted. I had credit cards that could fund my departure. And I was an American: a citizen of the country the Chinese most envied, admired, and feared. After being an object of curiosity the first few nights, I was separated by a wall of polite distance. I had made it inside the Shaolin gates, but I wasn’t a member of the community.
My only hope for acceptance was to earn their respect. Status among the monks was based on kungfu skill and/or willingness to suffer, “to eat bitter.” There was not much chance I was going to impress any of them with my kungfu skills any time soon, so eating bitter was my only option.
Including the early morning workout, the average Wushu Center student trained five hours a day. I decided to try for eight. After the initial physical shock, I started adding hours. In week three, I added an extra session after dinner. In week four, I cut down on my siesta and added an extra hour before my afternoon session. I was up to seven hours a day before I got stuck. Each time I tried to add another hour, I slipped back a couple of hours the next day. My body just couldn’t take it. But seven was more than anyone else and I soon became aware that others were taking notice.
My only companion during my 2:00–3:00 P.M. session was a button-cute ten-year-old girl. She was a student of Monk Lipeng’s father, a wiry little man with a hard gaze and a scruffy Fu Manchu mustache. A descendant of a long line of martial arts masters, Lipeng’s father brought his wife, daughter, and son, whom he had personally trained, to Shaolin because it provided the best opportunities for his family’s particular skills. As a young boy Lipeng earned money for his family as a street performer, dazzling the tourists who came to Shaolin with his kungfu skills. When the Wushu Center opened, his talents secured a place, albeit a tenuous one, for his family. His father was given a job as janitor. And the family was given housing in the broom closet under the staircase next to my training room. Slats of plywood had been attached together and leaned against the staircase to provide what little privacy could be had in thirty
square feet of the busiest corner in the Wushu Center. The first time I was invited inside I tried hard to seem unfazed by the space restrictions, which made an airline bathroom seem roomy. Lipeng’s father finally asked me what I thought. I told him his home was very nice.
He smiled at my white lie. “No, it is inadequate, but it is better than where we lived before.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
“A cave.”
“Ah, a cave, right…” I said, as my brain frantically searched for an appropriate response. “Well, this is definitely better than a cave in so many ways.”
“We have a floor now,” Lipeng’s father said.
“True, true, true, no dirt, that’s one.”
“And less bugs,” his wife added, smiling.
“Right, right, right, that’s another,” I said. “I hate bugs.”
“And there’s electricity,” Lipeng’s father concluded.
“So much better,” I said. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Like many of the young children at Shaolin, the little girl I trained with in the afternoon was an economic orphan. Her parents were so poor they couldn’t afford to raise her. Lipeng’s father was a distant relative, so he agreed to take her on as a disciple, proving that there were still lower rungs on China’s economic ladder than living under a staircase. In return for her training, room, and board, the little girl did all the chores asked of her. After seeing her sweeping the floor outside their home, I nicknamed her Cinderella.
We were both beginning students, training alone with private teachers. We were both Shaolin outsiders: she an orphan girl, me a laowai. We were both a long way from home, and we were both miserable. So we became fast friends. She had it tougher than me, because Lipeng’s father was from the cruelty-is-kindness school of kungfu instruction. If she didn’t do everything perfectly, Lipeng’s father would shake her and shout, “If you don’t work hard, I’ll send you away and then you will have no one left who can afford to feed you!”
One day Lipeng’s father ran her through a series of exercises so brutal and extreme that I came dangerously close to intervening. He was training her to do back handsprings. After making her do a handstand for ten minutes, he had her bending backward like a pretzel for a hundred repetitions until she could barely stand up anymore. After that class, Lipeng’s father said to me, “I know you think my teaching method is severe, but you will see it will be the best for her. In this world, she only has one chance and that is to be excellent at kungfu.”
Because Cinderella was so often on the verge of tears, I decided to make it my mission to cheer her up. So during that hour when we were training alone each day, I did what you do with kids to make them laugh: pratfalls, airplane lifts, pretend to be a monster chasing her around the room. And then as soon as Lipeng’s father entered the training hall we’d act like we didn’t know each other. He was smart enough to know that as a teacher he was in need of a good cop.
Those early afternoon sessions and my acquaintance with Lipeng’s father probably saved my martial arts career at Shaolin. After about a month, I developed this aching tenderness in the area right below my kneecaps. When I tried to snap a kick, a jolt of excruciating pain shot up and down my body. None of the monks knew what to do. Even Cheng Hao said it was bad enough that I should rest until it healed, which meant it must have been really serious. The only thing more bitter than training at Shaolin was living in Shaolin without being able to train. After several days of watching me forlornly wander the halls, Lipeng’s father told Cheng Hao to have me visit him at home the next night.
It turned out the Wushu Center’s janitor was the only person in Shaolin skilled in traditional Chinese medicine. As I walked into their home under the staircase, I found Lipeng’s mother cooking a meal over an electric burner and Lipeng’s father cooking a strange brackish yellow stew over another burner.
“Have you eaten?” Lipeng’s mother, an unfailingly pleasant woman, asked me.
It was a common greeting in Shaolin. In a nation where millions of people went hungry every day, “Have you eaten?” was the equivalent of “How are you doing?” If you had eaten, you were doing well. If you hadn’t, you weren’t. The expected response was “Yes, I’ve eaten,” even if you hadn’t, or “I am about to,” even if you weren’t, but the possibility was left open to say, “No, I haven’t” if you were really starving and had no prospects for food anytime soon. In such cases, the questioner was obliged to invite you to dinner.
“Yes, I have eaten,” I said.
By leaning over and sliding carefully, I was able to make it to their bed, where Lipeng’s father directed me to sit down for my examination. To all outward appearances, he looked like any other commoner in Henan. He was short and scrawny, maybe five foot five and 125 pounds, and wore a baggy white T-shirt, sweatpants, and a local brand of tennis shoes. The only exceptions were the preternatural fierceness of his eyes and his right hand, which was at least 50 percent larger than his left. It looked like a transplant from a giant, and it had a callus the size of a silver dollar along the fleshy part of the palm. He was obviously an advanced practitioner of iron palm kungfu.
As he looked me over, he was intermittently soaking his right hand in a yellow stew, which on closer examination contained what looked like a collection of samples from a nature trail walk: bark, weeds, leaves.
“Chinese medicine,” he said.
“You practice iron palm kungfu, yes?”
“Yes,” he said. He went on to explain that hardening the body was only half of iron kungfu practice; Chinese medicine was the other half. It was needed to heal that part of the body so one could continue practicing just as hard the next day, otherwise you’d have to wait for it to heal on its own. “Without medicine, your iron kungfu can only improve so much.”
He went over to grab two smooth, palm-size river rocks and presented them to me. I knew this was the point where I was supposed to strike them with my palm. Nothing makes an iron kungfu practitioner happier than seeing the look on an inexperienced student’s face when he attempts what the master has perfected. I struck the stones as hard as I could. The reverberation ran up my arm and rattled my teeth. His grin was wide. Then he set one stone on top of the other and brought his hand down once and then twice, before the top rock split in two. I’d seen wood, brick, and concrete blocks broken, but never something as hard as river rocks. This was the equivalent of having a Harvard Medical School diploma above the door.
“Will you fix my knees?” I asked.
“I don’t normally treat people. It is too much trouble. But I like how hard you are training. You are not afraid to eat bitter. And you are kind to my student. So I will treat you,” he said. “But I will have to travel to many different places to buy the ingredients for your medicine.”
“How much will that cost?”
We worked out a price, which I felt had a slight but not egregious foreigner surcharge added to it, and I left. If it worked, it’d be worth every penny because if my knees didn’t heal, I’d have to return to America for treatment. From that point forward, I nicknamed him Doc.
Five days later Doc returned from his trip, and my Chinese medical treatment began. Twice a day, I went to him for a thirty-minute session. Like his iron palm kungfu medicine, my mixture was boiled in stew but with a browner result. It looked like wet mulch. A washcloth was placed over each knee and a bowl underneath each leg. Then Doc poured the no-longer-quite-boiling medicinal stew slowly over the washcloths, watching to see just how much I squirmed.
“Oh! Ah! Ow!”
“Hot?” he’d ask, smiling.
“Yes.”
“Too hot?” he’d ask, smiling more.
There was only one appropriate answer to that question: “No.”
“Good.”
On the fifth afternoon of treating my knees, which still hurt as much as before, Doc posed the question he’d been waiting to ask, “What do you think of the Wushu Center leaders?”
His eyes were brig
ht, expectant. How I answered the question would either secure or destroy our guanxi (relationship). My assumption was that no janitor living under a staircase could have any great affection for the bosses, so I went with the honest answer: “I hate them to death.”
He grinned at the fervor in my voice. “Yes, they are awful. Bad people.”
I grinned back. Nothing cements a friendship like agreement on whom to hate.
Doc and I discussed the leaders and their individual flaws. The head of the Wushu Center was Leader Liu. He was your typical political appointment: tall, broad shouldered, executive hair. He wore a suit well, but it was as empty as his head. It was clear that his striking wife was the brains behind Leader Liu’s ascent up the Henan Communist Party ladder. The Wushu Center was a plum position. Besides the extra money he could pocket, foreign tours offered one of the best opportunities for junkets. On every tour, the Wushu Center leaders secured a number of extra places for important local politicians, who could not otherwise afford a foreign trip, trading these spots for political favors.
The brains of the Wushu Center, as so often is the case, rested with the number two, Jiao Hongpo, or Deputy Leader Jiao. He was the final leader I had met the first time I arrived at the Wushu Center, the one with the most keys. Extremely tall and thin, Deputy Leader Jiao was the only former Shaolin monk who was also a member of the party, no small feat and a testament to his operational skills. (Less than 5 percent of China’s population belongs to the Communist Party, and you need references from at least two current members to join.) In Deputy Leader Jiao’s universe there were no straight lines, only angles, and everyone was working one. He took a kind of Machiavellian delight in this worldview, and he often wore a slightly cynical smirk when he was in a negotiation. Asking a favor of Deputy Leader Jiao was a fool’s errand; no one came out ahead of him in an encounter. It was obvious to all that he was biding his time until Leader Liu moved on to something more prestigious. Deputy Leader Jiao had grown up in the area. Shaolin was his life. And in his own supremely self-interested way, he was quite devoted to it.
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