Coach Cheng was living in Deng Feng at the time, and I didn’t see him again until a month later. A Japanese man who claimed to be a karate master had come to Shaolin and caused quite a stir. Through a translator, he told the leaders of the Wushu Center that he wanted to challenge Shaolin’s champion to a fight. It was the first challenge match I had heard about, and the fact that the challenger was Japanese only increased the stakes. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese had not forgotten or forgiven the Japanese invasion and occupation of the country during World War II. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which had lost the unifying force of Maoist ideology after it started to tentatively embrace capitalist reforms, had fallen back on the old fail-safe: nationalism. Chinese popular culture was filled with reminders of the Communists’ role in ejecting the Japanese and other colonialists after the Great War. It was their strongest claim to legitimacy. The Wushu Center was filled with dark mutterings about revenging Japanese aggression.
(Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party played only a minor role in battling the Japanese. It was the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] that bore the brunt of the heavy fighting and was significantly weakened in the process. Without the Japanese invasion, it seems improbable that the CCP could have won the “Nationalist-Communist” Civil War in 1950. But historical memory is rarely gracious, self-deprecating, or forgiving, especially in a police state.)
The next day a crowd gathered in the practice hall to see the match. The Japanese man, wearing a karate gi, stood in the center of the room, waiting. After a few minutes Shaolin’s champion shuffled into the room, head hung low, shoulders slumped, paunch protruding. Coach Cheng took his position in front of the Japanese fighter, looking for all intents and purposes like he was about to fall asleep standing up.
Deputy Leader Jiao, who as a former Shaolin monk and a current Communist Party member had two official reasons to want to see the Japanese man crushed, stepped between the fighters in the role of referee.
“Ready?” he asked, looking at both fighters. Then he clapped his hands and stepped back.
Almost before the sound could reverberate through the practice hall, the Japanese fighter backpedaled about thirty feet. The crowd was flabbergasted. He was too far away for dueling pistols, let alone a fistfight. Coach Cheng looked over quizzically at Deputy Leader Jiao, who shrugged his shoulders in response.
The Japanese fighter was wired. He ran forward several steps and then backpedaled to where he stood before, ten yards away from his opponent. He repeated this several times. It was like he suffered from physical autism.
“What does this stupid egg think he’s doing?” Deqing asked of no one in particular. “Feinting?” It was a surreal sight watching this karateka repeatedly charge forward and then dash back, as if his opponent lacked any depth perception and would therefore be fooled into thinking that the object in front of him was closer than it appeared.
Finally, after thirty seconds of this nonsense, the Japanese fighter finally found his courage and charged like a bull. Coach Cheng waited until his opponent was close, then lunged forward with a left side kick. The Japanese fighter was knocked back a dozen feet. Instead of continuing his attack, he backpedaled thirty feet again, where he restarted the process all over again, charging several feet and then retreating. It was like he needed to rev his courage into the red zone before he was able to attack. After another fifteen seconds or so of back and forth, he charged again. This time Coach Cheng waited an instant longer to strike, jabbing his huge left hand into the Japanese fighter’s face to stop his forward motion and pin him in place. He followed the punch almost instantaneously with a lightning-quick right roundhouse kick to the face.
The kick flattened the Japanese fighter’s face. He fell to his knees clutching his nose. Blood gushed through his fingers. His translator ran over with a towel.
Coach Cheng stood still for several moments to make certain the fight was actually over. When the translator waved his arms in the air, Coach Cheng shrugged his shoulders and shuffled off with a sheepish grin on his face. As he was walking away, the Japanese fighter shouted something at him in Japanese, which the translator refused to translate.
The translator must have spoken up later. Because at the banquet held at the dining hall in Coach Cheng’s honor, everyone was buzzing about what the Japanese fighter had said.
Coach Cheng kept shaking his head. “So this Japanese guy said, ‘You have beaten me today, but I will be back in exactly five years to fight you again. I will train every day and defeat you.’”
“He challenged you to a fight five years in the future?” I asked, incredulous.
“That is so typical of the Japanese,” Coach Cheng said. “They love to plan ahead. They are always thinking far into the future. They spent thirty years planning their previous invasion of China. I bet you they’ve spent the last fifty planning their next one.”
All the Chinese drank to that.
“If I beat this guy in five years, he will want to fight me again in ten,” Coach Cheng said. “He will want to keep fighting me until I am dead. And then he will challenge me in the next life.”
One of the monks muttered to himself, “Fuck their mothers.”
Upon hearing the curse, the Chinese drank to that, too. All racism is local.
Unlike Americans, the Chinese don’t pretend to believe in equality. However, while most of the social hierarchy was fairly clear—older above younger, men above women, rich above poor, city folk above rural folk, Communist Party members and their families above everyone else—it was not absolute. There was a certain circumstantial fluidity. For example, a husband was supposed to have the upper hand in a marriage, but if he refused or was incapable of wearing the pants, his wife would take charge with a vengeance. On more than one occasion I witnessed a scrawny man who had spent all night drinking with his buddies being chased down the street by his wife. She’d run after him wearing one flip-flop and striking him over the head with the other, all the while screaming so the neighbors could hear what a jiu guizi (drunken devil) he was and how he’d spent his entire paycheck on booze.
Coach Cheng had a girlfriend like this. She was as emotionally excessive as Coach Cheng was muted. You could hear her high-pitched, hysterical voice from the other end of the compound. Every time I was with Deqing and we heard her screech, he’d just shake his head and say, “What can you do with this type of woman?” I nicknamed her “Shou Ting,” because I have a weakness for bad puns, and deep down inside I’m not a very nice person.
Coach Cheng was twenty-eight. I’d estimate that Shou Ting was slightly older, although I was never foolish enough to ask. She lived in Zheng Zhou but visited Coach Cheng regularly.
Curious about the amount of free time she had, I once asked her what she did for a living.
“I have a business.”
“What kind of business?”
“The type of business that buys and sells things.”
“What type of things?”
“Why is it so important to you?” Shou Ting shouted, her voice cracking, tears forming in her eyes.
“So sorry, I was just trying to be a good friend.”
She pointed at Coach Cheng who had his back to her and was pretending like he couldn’t hear her. He was teaching one of the younger monks a new move.
“Well, why don’t you be a good friend and tell Coach Cheng to be nicer to me,” she said.
“He is a coach here. I’m just a student. I can’t tell him what to do.”
The tears were now streaming down her face.
“Oh, he will listen to you. He respects you. You’re educated, not some illiterate peasant kungfu coach who refuses to visit me in Zheng Zhou, so I have to risk my life driving along that awful road.”
Since being insulted by your woman in front of subordinates was considered a serious loss of face, I tried to change the subject, “How was your trip? Safe, I hope.”
“Safe? Ha! I was nearly killed ten times. But what do I care of life? With
a man like him, I might as well be dead! He wouldn’t shed a single tear!”
As the resident relationship expert, I found myself falling into the role of couples counselor. The problem was simple: Shou Ting wanted to marry Coach Cheng, and he didn’t want to marry her. All he would say on the subject was, “What would I do with a wife like that?” Still he wouldn’t break up with her, either.
One day after practice she finally broke down in despair. “Why is he so cold to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. Per usual, Coach Cheng had his back to us and was pretending like he wasn’t listening.
“After all I’ve done for him,” she paused for dramatic effect. “Did you know he was in jail?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He was in jail. And I paid the fine to get him released. I had to sell my car, my business. I lost everything. I did it for him. That is what you get for loving someone, Bao Mosi. Promise me you’ll never fall in love. Promise me.”
She was crying so I promised.
“But you didn’t tell me why he was in jail,” I said.
Without missing a sniffle, Shou Ting said, “Oh, I had some trouble with a client. He owed me money and refused to pay it back. We argued and the man slapped me. I told Mr. Kickboxing and what does the stupid egg do? He hits the man over the head with nunchakus. Puts the guy in the hospital. The police arrest him and I have to sell everything to pay the fine.”
Not able to take it anymore, Coach Cheng finally stopped pretending he wasn’t listening and turned around.
“He called you a chioniu,” he said. “Whore.”
“So what? You hit him over the head with nunchakus? Why didn’t you just punch him?”
“Because I’d have hurt him worse if I’d punched him,” he said.
“Oh, you see, Bao Mosi, that is male logic for you. The fine is less for punching someone than striking with a weapon.”
“It sounds like he was defending your reputation.”
“I don’t need my reputation. I need my car back. It took me three years to purchase a new one and it isn’t as good.”
One morning as I was walking through the halls of the Shaolin Wushu Center, I could feel the fear in the air before I reached the performance hall. I saw Little Wang, one of the junior kungfu coaches, scurry out a back door carrying a suitcase.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“My older brother got into a fight. The cops are looking for him.”
“Why are you leaving?”
Little Wang smiled awkwardly as he ducked out a back door. “I don’t want them to use me to get to him.”
Big Wang was an important player in the Wushu Center leadership, but it wasn’t clear what his actual job was. As far as I could tell, he was responsible for overseeing Coach Yan, who in turn oversaw the monks. Big Wang owed his position at the Wushu Center to his father, who had been one of the most famous and popular instructors at Shaolin. Because Coach Wang’s father was master to so many current instructors, Coach Wang, as first son, was everyone’s “big brother.”
Like many sons of famous men who can’t live up to their fathers, Big Wang covered up his insecurity with a belligerent jocularity. Or to put it another way, he was an annoying prick who thought he was hilarious. He liked to make his power known by publicly berating other instructors. But because the offenses were usually innocuous, these chew-out sessions had a certain ritual feel to them. Often Big Wang was unable to call up the energy to make his anger seem real.
Instead he’d say in a mock-outraged voice laced with amusement, “What the hell is the matter with you? Your students are terrible. I went by your class yesterday, and you weren’t even there. What were you doing? Visiting your girlfriend? How are students supposed to improve without a coach, eh? I ought to strangle you.”
The instructors’ role in this dance was to keep their heads down and keep quiet until he had finished. Coach Cheng was a frequent target. Big Wang envied his greater kungfu skill.
Big Wang didn’t know what to do with me. He knew I didn’t like him because of the way he treated Coach Cheng. But as long as I paid up each month, I was outside his sphere of influence. So he’d often call out to me, “Bao Mosi, look at you. You’re too skinny. I know what would fatten you up. You need a woman. I know this prostitute who could use some American dollars. Why don’t I get her for you? You’d like her.”
He never ceased to find this joke hysterical.
Curious about the situation, I went to Deqing and Cheng Hao’s room to ask them why Big Wang was in trouble with the law.
“You know Big Wang’s wife works as a waitress in one of the nearby restaurants, right?” Deqing said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, a customer complained about the food. She said something rude to him. I think she called him a dog-eater.”
“He was from the south?”
“Right, so he refused to pay. She said something ruder. He slapped her across the face.”
I could picture the scene in my mind. In the Chinese hierarchy, there were few positions lower than waitress. They were always women, usually young and single, and their job was to serve you food. It was almost a requirement to harass them. I often thought that for many Chinese men this opportunity was the major attraction of eating out. The waitresses usually took the verbal abuse, but Shaolin women were made out of rougher cloth than city girls. All of them had either a boyfriend or husband who was a kungfu master. Only a stupid egg would make the mistake of striking one of them.
“How did Big Wang find out?” I asked.
“Little Tiger was at the restaurant,” Deqing said. “He ran back to Big Wang’s office. Coach Cheng and I were there with him. Little Tiger told Big Wang a man was beating his wife. Big Wang was out the room so fast that Coach Cheng and I had to run full speed just to keep him in sight.
“Bao Mosi, I’ve never seen anything like it. Big Wang blasted the man into a wall with a flying side kick. Then he elbowed him in the face five times. When the man went down, Big Wang started jumping up and down on his chest. When the man’s wife tried to intervene, Big Wang punched her in the face. The man tried to get up to protect his wife, but Coach Cheng laid him out with a blow to the back of his neck.”
“Did you do anything?”
“No, there wasn’t time,” Deqing laughed with embarrassment. “It was over in seconds.”
I looked at him with disbelief. There wasn’t anyone in Shaolin faster than Deqing.
“So you just stood there?” I asked.
“Well, I pulled Big Wang off the woman. He was strangling her,” Deqing said. “I thought he was going to hit me. He was crazed.”
“But why did Big Wang have to run from the cops?” I asked.
“The man is in the hospital,” Deqing said. “He has two broken ribs, a broken nose, a broken jaw, a broken arm, and a punctured lung. His wife’s nose is shattered.”
“Right, but why did Big Wang have to run? He’s Big Wang.”
Cheng Hao understood my question. Big Wang had good guanxi with the cops. Many had been disciples of his father. And while the cops didn’t like it when tourists got hurt—it was bad for business, and the cops took a cut of the gate—their basic attitude was Darwinian: Any tourist dumb enough to provoke a fight in Shaolin was too stupid to live. I’d been in a restaurant where two drunken tourists were giving everyone the evil eye. I had turned my chair so I couldn’t see them stare at me. The next thing I knew they were being bounced off the walls like pinballs. After ten minutes of being used like kicking dummies, they had to crawl on their hands and knees to the police station. There weren’t any repercussions.
“Because the man is the nephew of Canton Province’s minister of tourism,” Cheng Hao said.
“So? This isn’t Canton. This is Shaolin.”
With a tone of bitterness I’d never heard out of him before, Cheng Hao said, “Bao Mosi, this is China. The leaders’ children are like the descendants of Heaven. This is t
heir world, not ours.”
After a moment of silence, Deqing said, “The Canton minister of tourism called the Henan minister of tourism and threatened to ban all Cantonese from traveling to Shaolin. You know what that means?”
I did. Because China’s economic reform had started in Canton, the Cantonese were richer than the rest of the country and consequently the biggest group of tourists. The problem was that they took great pleasure in rubbing their wealth in the face of resentful and envious Northerners, forever talking about how much their designer clothes cost in the annoyingly sing-song way they spoke Mandarin, ending each sentence with “la.” One local wag had even nicknamed them “the la la people” to widespread approval. (Okay, that wag was me.) Although rare, most fights at Shaolin were with Cantonese tourists.
“So the Henan minister called the Shaolin cops,” Deqing continued. “The chief of police called Big Wang to give him a head start.”
“What’s he going to do?”
Deqing said, “Well, he could pay them 60,000RMB to make the matter go away.”
“Big Wang has 60,000RMB?”
“This is Shaolin, not Shanghai,” Deqing said. “If he had 60,000RMB, he’d be running the place. So he has to negotiate.”
“How?”
“He sends a representative to talk to the cops. The minister wants 60,000. His representative counters with 1,000. What can the cops do? They don’t have him in custody. The longer he stays free, the lower the price. As long as the cops don’t catch him, he’s fine.”
“What happens if they catch him?”
“They send him to prison,” Cheng Hao said. “And you don’t want to go to a Chinese prison.”
“What do they do to you in a Chinese prison?”
“The guards beat you.”
“That’s it?”
“They are very good at it around here. Most of them are Shaolin trained.”
It suddenly occurred to me who else was implicated in this fiasco.
“Is Coach Cheng around?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know where?”
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