I knew it was perfectly innocent, because in my daily walks to get my supply of Coke, I’d see boys walking arm in arm. Eventually, I started to notice that young women would do the same with each other. Finally, I realized that the male and female couples who came to Shaolin as tourists never touched each other in public. They walked side by side and talked to each other like intimates, but their bodies never touched. And so I drew the conclusion that physical affection was channeled into same-sex relations, because public displays of affection between the sexes was taboo.
The most exuberant public displayer of affection, because he was the most exuberant at everything, was Deqing. The first time I was walking down the street with him to visit the temple, he put his arm around my shoulder, squeezed, and said, “I like you.”
“I like you, too,” I replied. And because I couldn’t help myself I added, “as a friend.”
Deqing pulled his hand away from my shoulder, dropped it down, and clasped mine. As we walked down the road, I kept repeating in my head, Breathe through your nose. And my eyes darted at the people who passed us in the other direction to make certain no one was looking at us with suspicion.
But then Deqing interlaced his fingers with mine, and I literally jumped into the air. When I landed, my knees were locked, and my sphincter had tightened like I’d stepped on a nail.
Deqing looked at me funny, “Is there something wrong?”
“No, no, no, nothing is the matter,” I said as I walked down the street like Frankenstein, all the while reminding myself that Deqing was interested in someone far fairer than me.
Of the 300 or so Chinese students at the Wushu Center, five were female. But there was only one who drew the attention of all the boys. Lotus was sixteen and in her first bloom of beauty. She had this impossible figure, like a Chinese version of Lara Croft. When she went out onto the street, she stopped traffic. Men rooted themselves to the ground and craned their necks to watch her pass. She was a triple take. Bite-your-knuckles beautiful. And Lotus knew and enjoyed it.
One day when I was practicing the nine-section whip—a chain made of nine two-inch-long metal spikes linked by metal hoops—she walked past. As I turned my head to stare, the whip caught on the wrong part of my arm, twisted around and smacked me hard on the head.
I couldn’t stop myself from crying out in pain.
Seeing what had happened out of the corner of her eye, she giggled. Afterward, whenever she’d spy me in the courtyard practicing the nine-section whip, she’d find a reason to saunter past.
I’d have broken my vow of celibacy right then and there if Lotus had been interested in anything more than teasing me. But she was Deqing’s girl.
Every night after practice, Deqing and Lotus would meet in the training hall, ostensibly so he could help her perfect her straight-sword form. But it was really an excuse to be together without anyone being able to openly accuse them of dating.
He’d shout in the harsh voice of Shaolin instruction, “What’s the matter with you? Straighten your elbow, and drop your shoulder!”
She’d just giggle. And after a while, he’d start showing off his prowess at kungfu. An expert in lightness kungfu, he’d run up and across the wall like Spider-Man—four, five, six steps before gravity finally reclaimed him. It was like watching the captain of the football team and the head cheerleader flirt after practice.
No one said anything to him about it. All of us boys were too busy staring at Lotus with our tongues hanging out. But behind Deqing’s back, tongues wagged with speculation about whether they’d end up married.
Because the Chinese tend to hit puberty later (at fourteen to sixteen) and because it is a sexually conservative country, especially in the rural regions, the Chinese don’t usually start dating before they are eighteen. Deqing was nineteen and, more importantly, at the height of his mastery.
It was common for Wushu Center monks who had reached the peak of their power to find a special female friend to focus the extra energy they no longer needed to improve their kungfu skills. It would start innocently enough and over a two-to three-year period, if things worked out, gradually become less innocent, so that by his mid-twenties, when a monk was ready to retire from performing and leave the monastery for the wider world, he could give up the robes and marry.
But it didn’t work out.
Suddenly, about two months after my arrival, Deqing had free time during the nightly practice sessions, and Lotus was nowhere to be found. If she walked past him during the day, she turned her face away from him. In response, Deqing started to pay attention to one of Shaolin’s skankier groupies.
Yes, groupies. The Shaolin monks were fantastic athletes and the most famous young men in all of Henan Province. As is always the way with such situations, they had an ardent female fan base. Young women from Deng Feng, and occasionally as far as Zheng Zhou, found excuses to travel to Shaolin and linger. The monks were supposed to be celibate, which gave them the added attraction of being both safe and a challenge. The groupies would stay long enough to make a concerted effort to crack one of the eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old monks’ vow of celibacy. And when they more often than not failed, they would stop returning to Shaolin. The monks preferred the girls from the village who studied kungfu, but there was always a steady supply of new young women willing to test their luck and feminine charms.
A couple weeks after the split, Deqing, Cheng Hao, and I were at dinner in a local restaurant, a five-table, concrete-floor affair, when Lotus showed up, drunk. Deqing led her outside. Cheng Hao and I couldn’t make out her words through her tears. When Deqing returned, his face was red. Cheng Hao and I pretended like nothing was wrong.
Three days later, Lotus left Shaolin.
Deqing came to my room that night for counsel. Early on, one of the monks had asked me how many girlfriends I’d had, because it was assumed Americans were as sexually libertine as the characters in our movies and TV shows. I’d told him three, which made me forever after—word spread fast at Shaolin—the resident expert on the subject of male-female relations. I suppose they could have done worse, but it’s hard to imagine how. O. J. Simpson, perhaps.
“Bao Mosi, I feel terrible,” Deqing said. “I ran Lotus off.”
“Did you tell her to leave?”
“No, but I paid attention to that Zheng Zhou girl.”
“Why did you?”
“Because after I ended things with Lotus, she kept begging me to take her back. But I couldn’t.”
“Why? You two seemed happy together. And she is so beautiful it would kill a man to leave her.”
“Yes, she’s beautiful to the point of death. But I’m a monk.”
“So nothing happened between you two?”
“No, no, no,” Deqing said, dropping his eyes, hunching his shoulders, covering his reddened cheeks with his pincushion hands. Incapable of hiding his feelings, he was the worst liar I ever met in China.
“Deqing, why would Lotus want you to take her back, if nothing was going on?”
“Okay, okay, okay, maybe I kissed her once.”
He looked up, but his eyes wouldn’t meet mine and his face was still red.
“Deqing…”
“Okay, it was twice. What does it matter? Once was wrong,” he said, finally looking up at me.
“It doesn’t,” I laughed. “I just wanted details. I’m jealous. Besides, it was your first time, right? So you needed once to practice. And twice to get it right.”
His faced turned red again, but he laughed and grabbed my knee. “You’re naughty,” he said. And then he thought for a moment. “Do you think I’m a bad monk?”
“No, I think you’re nineteen. I doubt Siddhartha Gautama himself could have turned Lotus away when he was your age. The Buddha had already had his fill of women before he became a celibate.”
“This is true. This is true. This is true.” Deqing said, the tension in his shoulders releasing slightly. “But still I wish she hadn’t left. What will become of her
kungfu training?”
“Heaven gave Lotus all the talent she’ll ever need to succeed in this world.”
“Aiya. She’ll probably end up as some Hong Kong businessman’s mishu,” Deqing said, aghast. “Secretary.”
It was slang for “mistress.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“She’s not tall enough,” I said.
There was nothing a five-foot-five or five-foot-six Hong Kong, Taiwanese, or Singaporean businessman seemed to love more than a mainland mistress who was significantly taller than he was. She didn’t even have to be particularly beautiful. In the luxurious Japanese-and Western-built shopping malls in Beijing and Shanghai, you’d see these young women, usually on platform shoes to add an extra couple of inches, towering over their middle-aged sugar daddies—always with bags filled with Prada and Gucci dangling from their lanky arms. Any village girl who made it to five-eight or better had hit the genetic lottery and moved rather quickly to the big cities to cash in her ticket. I often wondered if China would have received as much direct foreign investment from the Chinese diaspora if it hadn’t possessed these long-limbed natural resources.
Deqing laughed his big laugh, leaned over, and pinched my cheek. “You’re a good friend.”
“But one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you break it off with her? Most of Shaolin’s young monks eventually leave the temple to marry.”
“If I hadn’t ended it now, more things would have happened, and then I would have had to marry her. And then I’d be stuck here for the rest of my life. And I want to spread Shaolin kungfu and Shaolin’s fame to the rest of the world.”
I suddenly understood what motivated Deqing.
“You mean you want to be a movie star,” I said.
“What better way to spread it?”
When Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China film crews visited the temple, they usually wanted background or training sequences of the monks to splice into their films. The producers would pay the leaders, and the monks would be rounded up to perform. They’d film wide shots of dozens of monks running through forms, kicking bags, and balancing on tree stumps for a day or two, then leave.
But one day as I entered the performance hall, I found a man I didn’t recognize sitting in front of the monks. They were lined up in military parade formation.
“Who is that guy?” I asked Little Tiger.
“He is a movie director from Taiwan,” Little Tiger said, excitedly. “He is filming a martial arts picture. One of the major roles is a Shaolin monk, and he wants to cast a real Shaolin monk for the part. Imagine, a lead role! I wish I was older.”
One by one, the monks performed their specialty: drunken staff, eagle, double sword. Deqing gave, as always, the signature performance. But Lipeng and Cheng Hao were also very good.
After the demonstrations were finished, the monks were each required to read a line of dialogue. Because most of them had received little if any formal education, the director resorted to feeding them the line and asking them to repeat it.
That night Deqing was high-spirited. He had a bounce in his step, although he studiously avoided mentioning the audition.
The next day the director announced his choice. It was Cheng Hao. Deqing was crushed, and Cheng Hao pleased, but both pretended otherwise.
Little Tiger summed up the collective sentiment of the monks. “In movies, good looks are more important than skill.”
I stayed neutral. Deqing had his mother and his family’s lost honor to worry him. But Cheng Hao also had family concerns. His father and mother had moved from the northern city where they used to live to Shaolin after his father had lost his factory job, leaving Cheng Hao as the sole family provider on a salary of less than $40 a month.
After Cheng Hao’s departure to Taiwan, Deqing disappeared for a couple of days. When he came back he was wearing a retainer. I’d known he was self-conscious about his buckteeth, because every time he’d let out a wide-mouth laugh, he’d lower his lip to cover his front teeth a fraction of a second later.
“Where did you find a tooth doctor in Henan?” I asked.
“A friend told me about one in Zheng Zhou who could fix my two front teeth. I’ve hated them ever since the injury.”
“I didn’t know you injured them.”
“Yes, we were doing a four-man form. Two of us had to jump onto the other two monks’ shoulders and fight with swords. My foot caught in the folds of my partner’s robes. As I fell my two front teeth dug straight into his head.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, he was an expert in iron head kungfu, so he wasn’t injured.”
Six weeks later, word spread that Cheng Hao was back. I ran up to his and Deqing’s room. A rapt crowd was listening to Cheng Hao recount his experience, most especially Little Tiger, who kept interrupting.
“The director was very helpful. He’d sit with me at lunch every day and give me acting tips.”
“What was the lead actress like?” Little Tiger asked. “Was she pretty?”
“Pretty is as pretty does,” Cheng Hao said. “She was very arrogant. She would talk to no one but the director.”
“What about the actor? How was his kungfu?”
“He was terrible with a sword. He kept dropping it.”
“Was he worse than Bao Mosi?” Little Tiger asked.
“Hey!” I said. But Little Tiger had ducked behind several other monks and was out of reach.
“During the movie, the director told me he wanted to work with me again. And at the end of the shoot, he said, ‘You will be hong.’” Cheng Hao said. “Red.”
“Why would he say you’d be the color red?” I asked.
“Hong is slang for famous,” Little Tiger laughed. “Stupid egg.”
Deqing had had enough. “All right, that’s it. Everyone out of my room.”
Cheng Hao was too blissed out to notice Deqing’s mood. Wanting to share the moment, I remained.
“Can you believe it? ‘You will be hong.’” Cheng Hao said, imitating the director’s deeper voice. “‘I want to work with you again. You will be hong.’”
Deqing valiantly tried to ignore Cheng Hao, but around the tenth time Cheng Hao said the word hong, Deqing lost it.
“Of course he said those things to you. He’s a director. That’s the kind of flattery they use on actors.”
“I don’t know,” Cheng Hao said, surprised by Deqing’s vehemence. “He told me several times.”
Deqing threw his arms into the air. “He was lying to you. Directors are all liars. That’s how they get country bumpkins like you to kill yourself for them for a fraction of what they pay the Taiwanese actors.”
Because he was a peacemaker by nature, Cheng Hao said, “Maybe you’re right.” But he didn’t believe it in his heart.
“How much did they pay you? 1,000RMB? For six weeks! You couldn’t get a Hong Kong actor for six minutes for 1,000RMB. Directors are all liars.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Deqing turned away. He clearly felt guilty for raining on his friend’s parade but wasn’t able to admit it to himself yet.
For months afterward, I’d greet Cheng Hao with, “You’re going to be hong.” He’d laugh and shake his head, but his eyes would light up.
Then one day, I repeated the line and his laugh was weak and his eyes were dead. That’s how I learned that he finally knew Deqing had been correct.
The director never contacted Cheng Hao again.
5
SHAOLIN’S CHAMPION
I didn’t think much of Coach Cheng when I first saw him, because I failed to look at his hands. All I saw when he shuffled into the practice hall that afternoon while a bunch of us were horsing around was a man in his late twenties, head down, shoulders slumped, paunch protruding. It was not until I saw the reaction of the monks, who slapped him on the back and welcomed him home like a returning hero, that I looked at his hands. They were two ham hocks, twice as large
as they should be for a man his size, the telltale sign of a Chinese kickboxer.
Deqing introduced us. “This is Coach Cheng. He is a national champion in sanda. You should see his kicks. They are amazing.”
With the faintest of smiles, Coach Cheng modestly demurred, “They’re nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“It’s an honor to meet a national champion,” I said.
“No, no, no, it is nothing special.”
Little Tiger had run off to find a kicking shield. He came back and gave it to Cheng Hao. “Here, hold this. Let Coach Cheng show Bao Mosi his kicks.”
“I’m not holding it.” Cheng Hao said, throwing the kicking shield to another monk, who didn’t want it either. The shield was passed around like a hot potato before Deqing finally said, “All right, I’ll hold it.”
Deqing walked to the center of the room and braced himself behind the shield. Coach Cheng shuffled over. He stood lazily in the center of the room with his left leg in front of his right and his arms raised slightly. He looked so sleepy, it was like he was dozing. And then without warning, he woke up, lunging toward the bag, kicking it with a bone-shattering left side kick that knocked Deqing back ten feet. The man had jackhammers for legs.
Encouraged by the monks, Coach Cheng proceeded to put on the most amazing kicking display I have ever seen. His kicks were as supple as a professional boxer’s punches: They snapped like whips but struck with the force of a baseball bat.
Filled with the joy of his genius, Coach Cheng finished his display with a couple of flying kicks and backflips. When he stopped in the center of the floor to applause, he dropped his head again, slightly abashed, and slowly withdrew back into himself. It was obvious that he was the type of man who is truly alive only when practicing his art. By the time he left, he was shuffling along like a sleepwalker.
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