“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Carlos said, smiling.
“It’s positively arthritic,” I replied.
My hands were frozen claws. They refused to return to full use for ten minutes. Despite his encouragement, that was my last session. I decided to stick to banging my forearms against trees.
When Carlos arrived, Deqing volunteered to teach the foreigners, so he took over from Monk Chen, one of the older monks who had taken over from Cheng Hao. Two foreigners were better than one, and at least Carlos would leave relatively soon and give him a tip for his troubles.
Deqing’s success at Shaolin had been built on a relentless love of hard training, and as he’d watched me he felt that the Shaolin method for training foreigners—all smiles and encouragement—was too soft. He was going to train us like they train their own Chinese students: “To curse is to care, to hit is to love.”
Now, there was a good reason for the variation in methodology besides cultural differences. We were older and obviously self-motivated or we wouldn’t be here. A rough guess was that of the 10,000 or so teenage kungfu students in the Shaolin village, about half had been sent by their parents rather than volunteered. They were the type of hyperactive boys who refused to study and got into fights. Shaolin was China’s version of a reform school; kungfu was their Ritalin.
But I agreed with Deqing that at the very least it was an appearance problem, so I didn’t mind when he brought out the stick and whacked us. What did bother me was how he conducted stretching time. Deqing’s approach was hands-on and feet-on. When we were in the split position, he’d climb on top of our legs and bounce to the point of breaking us. Then he’d have us lie on our backs, pin one leg and push the other toward our faces until we screamed for mercy.
But it wasn’t the pain as much as the fact that we were objects of amusement for the other monks that infuriated Carlos and me. After the first day of screaming, we began to gather a crowd. The younger monks would suddenly appear in the training room at stretch time, take a seat, and wait for the entertainment to begin, holding their breaths until we started begging for mercy and then laugh and laugh. Actually, only one of us begged for mercy. (“Please, master, you’re going to break my leg. Please, God, I beg you!”) Carlos was tougher than me and therefore able to refrain from screaming anything coherent.
“They sure enjoy watching the foreigners suffer,” I said to Deqing once, after a session.
“They don’t have TV,” he replied, not catching my hint.
After a week of this, it occurred to me that none of them spoke English, so I switched from begging to cursing in my native language, running through the gamut of four letter words, spicing it up with Oedipal accusations and questions about Deqing’s parentage, and promises to commit an astounding variety of X-rated acts to various parts of his anatomy. I had to stop, however, when Little Tiger, following one of my tirades, yelled, “Fack youah, madafacka, fack, shat, madafacka, I kah you.”
As the banner in the performance hall said, “Cultural Exchange Mutual Benefit.”
After a couple weeks of this, when it became obvious the younger monks weren’t going to grow tired of watching our torture sessions, Carlos and I decided to speak to Deqing about it. I explained that we didn’t mind the tough training, but having the younger monks laugh at us “made us lose face.” Deqing visibly blanched. He explained that the monks weren’t laughing at us so much as laughing at the memory of when they had been beginners and their coaches had made them scream and beg for mercy. I explained that whatever their reason it still bothered us. He nodded, and the younger monks never showed up in our class again for stretch time.
After class, however, I did gain a constant companion. Once he had heard me curse in English, Little Tiger followed me around every day, begging me to teach him more.
He’d run up to me and say in English, “Fack, madafacka, fack.”
“Little Tiger, don’t use those words,” I said.
“Am I saying them correctly?”
“You shouldn’t use bad words.”
“But what do they mean?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“But why?”
“Because you’re too young and a Buddhist monk,” I said.
Who needs that kind of karmic debt?
After weeks of unsuccessfully attempting to cajole me into teaching him, Little Tiger finally hit upon a winning strategy: slighting my patriotic pride.
“Chinese culture is so much deeper than American culture,” he said one day. “I bet our curse words are worse than yours.”
“Oh, really, you think so?”
“Absolutely. Let’s compare.”
I sighed, torn between the choice of spending the next life as a dung beetle or letting one Chinese boy think his culture was better than mine.
“All right, all right, all right,” I relented.
Little Tiger gave me a crash course on Chinese curses. The lower-level Chinese curses revolve around dogs and eggs: running dog, stupid egg. Turtle’s egg was the worst and likely to cause a fight, although no one could explain to me why. The more extreme curses involve a sexual act performed on various members of your enemy’s family: mom, of course, dad, older brother, dad’s older brother, dad’s father, mom’s father, mom’s older sister.
Confucianism placed the patriarchal family at the center of society to serve as the model for all relationships. Much like the Eskimos and the word “snow,” the Chinese had multiple words for each familial relation. They distinguished between older and younger siblings and relations on the mother’s or father’s side of the family. For example, there are five different words for “uncle”: father’s older brother (bofu), father’s younger brother (shufu), father’s sister’s husband (gufu), mother’s brother ( jiufu), mother’s sister’s husband (yifu). Even strangers are often addressed, usually when a favor is being asked, by a kinship term. At Shaolin, I learned to address old men as “grandfather,” middle-aged men as “uncle,” and males of a similar age as either “older brother” (gege) or “younger brother” (didi).
“The standard form is wo cao ni made ge bi,” Little Tiger said with South Park glee. “I fucked your mother’s pussy.”
“That’s pretty bad,” I said.
“And then you just replace ‘mother’ with some other relative,” he continued. “Can you do better than that?”
“It’s not easy,” I said, preparing to pull out my trump card. “But those curses are not as bad as ‘motherfucker.’”
“Madafacka,” Little Tiger attempted.
“Motherfucker.”
“Madafucker.”
“Better.”
“What’s it mean?”
The best I could do for a translation was: “You are the kind of man who makes love to his own mother.”
Little Tiger scrunched up his face, “I don’t understand.”
Have you heard the story about a Greek king named Oedipus? A doctor named Freud? Do you understand how a husband and wife make babies? Now imagine the husband is the wife’s son and the wife is his mother—I tried several times before Little Tiger grasped the concept, a sure sign I was going to hell for this.
“That’s bad, really bad,” Little Tiger said. “But I don’t think it is as bad as this: ‘I fucked your eighteen generations.’”
Given Chinese respect for their ancestors, it was their harshest curse.
I had to give it up. “You’re right. That is worse.”
Little Tiger was triumphant. “I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. Chinese curses are the worst.”
It was a bitter defeat.
On Carlos’s last day of his six-week stay, his eyes welled up and tears trickled down his face at breakfast. I thought he was weeping because he was leaving Shaolin.
“It’s okay, Carlos, we’ll stay in touch.”
“No, Mateo, you don’t understand. It was just so incredible.”
“What?”
“Jesus spoke to me last night.”
I instantly knew I believed him, because my first reaction wasn’t skepticism but envy. My first thought wasn’t: Isn’t Shaolin a little outside of His jurisdiction? It was: Carlos gets a lecture from the Son of God and all I got was some crappy little moment of absolute peace. That’s not fair, I have seniority here!
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was in bed, praying for my family, when I heard this voice, and I knew it was Jesus. It was so incredible.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t remember most of it. It was so fast, the words rushed over me. I remember him saying, ‘I am energy. This is the answer. I am energy. You are energy. Everything is energy.’”
We were silent for the rest of the meal.
BOOK THREE
INITIATE
February–April 1993
“Drinking games are to be observed even more seriously than military orders.”
—DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER
1
KICKBOXING
Shaolin’s students take a winter break instead of summer vacation, because the winters are so brutal in the mountains. The monks spent my first Shaolin winter being treated like kings during their tour of Thailand, the only country on earth where kickboxing is the national pastime and Buddhism the state religion. I tried to stay and keep training, but because neither the hotel nor the training halls had any heating system, I had to keep adding layers of clothing. I trained until it was impossible either to sleep or warm up enough to be able to stretch my legs and practice. I finally broke down and went home for Christmas.
Back in Topeka, my friends took me out to local watering holes. Wanting to test the extent of my Shaolin training, they purposely picked the rowdiest bars in town, the kinds of places where brawls were not only frequent but also had a come-one-come-all quality that tended to metastasize, filling the bar with swinging fists and boots before spreading out into the parking lot. Watching from the sidelines, I became reacquainted with just how big they grow them on the farms in Kansas. Despite my three months of studying traditional kungfu forms, I was still not any more confident that I could protect myself than I was before I left.
After that first bar brawl, I decided to switch from traditional forms to kickboxing, because the best fighters at Shaolin were the kickboxers. And since the best kickboxer was Coach Cheng, I was determined to become his student.
When I returned to Shaolin in early February, after the Chinese New Year, I informed Deputy Leader Jiao that I wanted to study sanda with Coach Cheng. I knew this was a rather outrageous demand, because the Wushu Center did not have a kickboxing team and Coach Cheng was not an employee.
“Our focus is on foreign tours and performances for tourists,” Deputy Leader Jiao told me. “Sanda is difficult to stage for performances.”
Having anticipated this line of argument, I said, “There is no doubt that the Wushu Center has the best performance team in Shaolin, but Taguo has the best kickboxers. Administrators at Taguo have told me they think the Wushu Center performers aren’t the toughest martial artists in town.”
Deputy Leader Jiao graced me with a rare smile, a professional manipulator’s nod to a precocious amateur’s entrance into the big leagues.
“Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting.”
Privately owned Taguo was the main rival to the government-run Wushu Center. With its superior infrastructure and indoor training facilities, not to mention its access to Shaolin monks, the Wushu Center had a clear, structural advantage in performance kungfu. In response, Taguo had lowered its tuition and developed a reputation as the toughest place in town where the toughest sanda fighters were forged, attracting nearly 3,000 Chinese students as compared to the Wushu Center’s 300. With its sheer mass of young students banging on each other year after year until only the strongest were still standing, Taguo’s meat grinder had produced a disproportionate percentage of China’s national kickboxing champions.
Wanting to leverage its growing national reputation and tuition revenue, Taguo had plans to build a restaurant, hotel, and performance hall to compete with the Wushu Center’s core business. It was also working back channels to obtain the right to train laowai. Prior to the winter break, Taguo administrators had invited me over for a tour and a sales pitch. News of my visit made it back to the Wushu Center leaders the same day.
“Yes,” I said to Deputy Leader Jiao. “It is interesting.”
Within a week of my discussion with Deputy Leader Jiao, I was told that the Wushu Center had decided to form its own kickboxing team. Coach Cheng had been hired to train his own handpicked members, all of whom would receive a monthly stipend. The leaders had decided to take the New York Yankees’ approach and buy themselves a championship team…with my money. While my teammates were all going to be expert kickboxers, I was to be the rank beginner who had to buy his way on to the team. I knew they were going to start off hating me, because everyone hates a rich dilettante, especially if they are indebted to him. The only way to win them over and become a true member of the team was to prove I could eat as much bitter as they could.
The first day of kickboxing practice, the thirteen members of our team lined up by weight class, which in sanda are 48 kg. (105.8lb.), 52 kg. (114.6lb.), 56 kg. (123.5lb.), 60 kg. (132 lb.), 65 kg. (143 lb.), 70 kg. (154 lb.), 75 kg. (165 lb.), 80 kg. (176 lb.) and up. There were two fighters per category up to 70 kg. Fighters above 75 kg were rare in China, given the genetics, diet, and lack of weight training, equipment, and steroids. Also, because it was an amateur sport, there was no financial incentive to move up to a more popular weight class. So sanda fighters were like American collegiate wrestlers, always trying to drop kilograms so they could get down to a weight class where they were stronger than their opponents.
Sanda class started like forms class. We ran around the room, we did drills up and down the mat, and then we stretched. After the stretching, we paired up with the other guy in our weight class, who would be both a partner and a rival for the top spot. Having already dropped down to 150 lb., I was in the 70 kg. class along with Baotong, the team’s strongest fighter. He was a pugnacious-looking dude about my age. While we were nearly the same weight, I was four inches taller, so he was a good deal broader and thicker than I. His physique looked like it had been chiseled by Michelangelo, with special attention paid to the calves, which were bigger than my thighs. In fact, his calves were bigger than his own thighs, too.
The first drill was to practice sanda’s basic techniques against a kungfu shield, a thick pad that covered the forearm, held by our partner. Unlike traditional Shaolin forms, sanda had the simplicity of a Chuck Norris movie: four basic punches (straight, hook, uppercut, and overhand), five basic kicks (forward thrust, roundhouse, side kick, spinning hook, and spinning sweep), and three throws (leg catch and sweep, head lock and hip throw, and the waist grab and trip). Hundreds of techniques had been boiled down to a dozen, driven by the rules of Chinese-style kickboxing, the limitations of the human body, and the merciless logic of skilled opponents fighting each other over and over again. Only the most effective techniques survived.
After we finished with the punches, we moved on to the kicks. The front side kick is the standard opening attack in sanda and the cornerstone of the style, because sanda, unlike most other kickboxing styles, rewards contestants for throwing each other to the ground, and the side kick is a powerful, long-ranged attack that is difficult to grab. (Styles make the fights, but rules make the styles.) To execute the front side kick, you take a big step forward with your lead foot, then slide your back foot up to meet your front, and in one motion lift your front leg into the air, chamber it against the side of his body, and turn at a ninety-degree angle to your opponent. When done properly, the body looks like a compressed accordion for an instant before you fire the front leg directly at your opponent with as much speed as possible, snapping it like a whip at the last moment.
The second most popular kick is the roundhouse. For this
kick, you lift your knee and twist your upper body, while at the same time swinging your leg around in a circular motion like a baseball bat. It is the fastest of the three major sanda kicks and the best for head shots, but it is also the easiest to grab.
The least popular is the thrust kick. For a right thrust, you plant your left foot, raise your right knee up into your chest so that the sole of your right foot is pointing at your opponent, and then drive the foot forward like you’re a fireman kicking open a locked door. It is a powerful kick used to jackhammer an opponent backward and is difficult to grab because it comes in at a straight angle, but it is slow and easy to dodge.
Despite my three years of martial arts training in college and three months of Shaolin forms, I was terrible at every technique, particularly the side kick. Baotong, who had been kickboxing in Shaolin for the last seven years, was in a different league. But still, he seemed bored as he practiced his front thrust and side kicks. It wasn’t until he got to his roundhouse that he brightened considerably. He picked up his right leg with its massive calf on the end and swung it like a mace, hitting the shield so hard I thought he had dislocated my shoulder. He smirked at the look of pain on my face. If anything, on his next kick he tried even harder to hurt me. After two kicks, I had to use two arms to hold the pad.
The next drill was throws. Sanda differs from most other styles of kickboxing because a fighter can score two points by throwing, sweeping, or knocking his opponent to the canvas. This must be done quickly. The referee will step in to break the fighters apart two seconds after they have started to grapple. And once one fighter goes down, the referee steps in until he can get back up—there is no ground fighting. These rules are meant to keep a kickboxing fight from turning into a wrestling match. So throws have to be quick and efficient. While it is legal to just charge your opponent, grab him around the waist or head and throw him to the mat, such throws are easy to defend against and therefore hard to complete within the two-second limit. The most effective throws involve anticipating your opponent’s kicks, catching or trapping his kicking leg and then sweeping the standing leg.
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