The other pairs were drilling at half speed. One partner would gently toss out his leg, the other would catch it, gently sweep the standing leg, and cradle his partner to the ground. They were going slowly to perfect the motion. Not Baotong. When I gently tossed out my leg, he grabbed it hard, chopped at my standing leg with his massive roundhouse sweep, and smashed me to the ground. When I got back up, he had a bigger smirk on his face that said, Bitter, ain’t it, rich boy? I kicked slowly again with the same results. The wind knocked out of me from the fall, I stood up more slowly, a rage building inside.
The rest of the team was now half-practicing and half-watching us to see what would happen next. It was Baotong’s turn to kick. Instead of putting out his leg for me to easily grab, he kicked me full force, jamming my thumb. On the next kick, I grabbed his leg and moved slowly to sweep his leg, but he grabbed me roughly around my neck, refusing to go down. The rest of the team had stopped to watch. I was back on the playground. My face felt hot with anger and shame. On his next kick, I grabbed his leg hard, turned, pulled his leg in a circle, and swept his back leg with as forceful a kick as I was capable of. He went sprawling to the mat. He blinked a couple of times, looking up at me.
Snarling, I stood over him, “Get up. Let’s go again.”
He kicked me hard again. I caught his kick. He tried to grab my neck. I ducked him and threw him to ground as hard as I could.
“Don’t waste time,” I shouted. “Get up. Let’s go again.”
Baotong looked over at Coach Cheng and started laughing. Coach Cheng smiled. Clearly, I had just passed some unspoken test. The laowai wasn’t such a wimp after all. For the rest of practice, Baotong and I went at each other full force. He banged me up pretty good, but he wasn’t smirking anymore.
After the morning practice, I was so wrecked I didn’t think I could make it back to the hotel, so I went up to Deqing and Cheng Hao’s room above the performance hall instead. As I sat on Deqing’s bed looking at the kungfu movie posters on the wall, I tried to keep from quivering with exhaustion.
“How was sanda class?” Deqing asked.
“Baotong was trying to kill me,” I said.
“He wanted to see if you were afraid,” Cheng Hao laughed.
“He’s powerful but slow.” Deqing said. “You have to stay out of his range.” I tried to smile, but my body was shaking too violently from exhaustion and adrenaline letdown. “Are you okay?”
“No problem,” I said, sitting on my hands to try to make them stop quivering.
“He’s tired to death,” Cheng Hao said. He cracked their door open and shouted, “Little Tiger, come here!”
Little Tiger ran over to their room. “What is it?”
“Bao Mosi is tired to death. Go get some sugar and hot water.”
“Where do I get the sugar?”
“From the restaurant.”
“They’ll want money.”
“Tell them it’s for the laowai.”
“What if they still want money?”
“Don’t argue, get going!”
Little Tiger ran off. As the youngest monk, he was used to the wushu team’s seniority system: crappy errands rolled down the hierarchy of age. He came back ten minutes later with a packet of sugar and a thermos bottle. Deqing poured the boiling water and sugar into a bowl.
“Here, drink this,” he said. “It will help stop the shaking.”
I tried to bring the bowl to my lips, but my hands were quivering too badly. I spilled the boiling water into my lap.
“Here I’ll hold it for you,” Deqing said, grabbing the bowl and putting it to my lips. “Just like a little baby. You okay?”
“No problem.”
I drank down as much as I could. Everything was fine for a moment, but suddenly I was bent over their wastebasket, vomiting.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” Deqing said.
“He’s an American,” Cheng Hao said to Deqing. “They don’t like hot drinks. We should have gotten him a Coke.”
“Maybe.”
One of the younger monks, Genming, was walking past the room.
“Genming, come here!” Cheng Hao shouted.
“What is it?”
“Get Bao Mosi a Coke. Here’s 4RMB. Also take this trash out and clean it.”
“Get Little Tiger to do it.”
“Don’t argue. Do what you’re told.”
Genming walked into the hallway. I heard him shout, “Little Tiger, come here. Cheng Hao wants you to clean out this basket.”
Little Tiger must have dreamed of the day when someone younger than him joined the monastery.
I managed a couple of swigs of Coke before Deqing forced me to lie down in his bed and take a nap. I woke up just before three P.M. It took everything I had to drag my bruised body out of bed and back down to the practice room. Deqing saw me just before I entered.
“Bao Mosi, you should go back to bed,” he said.
“I don’t want Baotong to think he’s beaten me.”
He nodded. “That is the right attitude.”
I limped into class. Coach Cheng looked at me. He raised his eyebrows and smiled slightly. He must have heard about my being sick.
“You are here,” he said with a mixture of surprise and amusement.
“Correct. I am here.”
“Good. Let’s start class.”
I dragged through the early drills, barely keeping up. Baotong, seeing how bad off I was, took pity on me. He ran through the throwing drills with me at half-speed, letting me sweep him to the ground without much of a struggle.
Watching us sleepwalking through the drills, Coach Cheng decided to raise the stakes.
“Enough!” he shouted. “All right, it looks like it’s time for some sparring.”
He sent one of my teammates to get the pads.
Sanda matches take place on a leitai, a raised canvas platform, a boxing ring without the ropes. In ancient times, traveling performance troups would erect a wooden platform in the middle of town and the kungfu expert of the group would offer an open challenge to the town, just as John L. Sullivan did in 1890s America. The winner was the last man standing on the platform, a kungfu version of king of the hill.
The Wushu Center didn’t have a leitai, so Coach Cheng marked off the dimensions of a regulation leitai with the kicking shields. He threw the two sets of protective gear into the center of the ring and then went to sit down outside the marked-off area.
“Baotong.”
“Yes, Coach.”
“You first,” Coach Cheng pointed at the center of the ring.
He looked around the team. Every other member of the team dropped their eyes: none of them wanted to spar with Baotong. This realization hit me a second too late. I was still looking at Coach Cheng when we made eye contact.
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
The rest of the team was smiling, happy they had avoided facing the toughest fighter on the team. I turned my back on Baotong as I started to put on the protective gear.
The Chinese government designed the modern rules of sandawith an eye toward international amateur competitions like the Olympics. Because these are tournaments where each contestant will have to fight multiple opponents within a period of a few days, the two big concerns are exhaustion and injury disqualifications, so the matches are kept short (two-minute rounds, best two out of three rounds wins the match), and there is a great deal of protective padding: headgear, mouthpiece, chest pad, boxing gloves, cup, shin guards, and mini-footpads to protect the fragile bones on the top of the foot.
When I was done putting on my armor, I felt like the Michelin Man. Baotong was waiting for me, wearing only a cup protector and his boxing gloves, clearly unconcerned about the possibility that I might hurt him. My pride, still tender from the morning practice, flared again. I threw my headgear off and started pulling off the chest protector. Coach Cheng intervened, “No, n
o, no, Matt. It is your first time.”
I compromised. Baotong did after all have massive calves. I left the headgear off, but wore everything else, including, thankfully, the cup.
Scoring in sanda is relatively simple:
Punch = 1 point
Basic kick below the head = 2 points
Basic kick to the head = 3 points
Advanced spinning kick = 3 points
Knocking opponent down while remaining standing = 2 points
Knocking opponent off the platform = 4 points
Coach Cheng slapped his hands together and stepped back. I bounced nervously on my toes, wanting very much to be somewhere else. Baotong jumped forward and raised his left leg as if he intended to kick me with a front side kick. Still a jangle of nerves, I jumped back two steps. He put his foot on the ground. Then, like in a nightmare, he made the exact same motion, jump-stepping and feinting a kick. And I had the exact same response, jumping back two steps. But this time, I had reached the end of the marked-off space, my foot tangled in the handle of one of the kicking shields. I found myself tipping backward in slow motion, my arms windmilling cartoonishly as I tried to remain standing. I failed, flopping back onto the ground. Without touching me, Baotong had knocked me out of the ring.
4-0.
My teammates were laughing.
Coach Cheng shouted at them, “You dare laugh? Do you want to fight Baotong?”
Shamed, they shut up. I stood up and walked back into the center of the ring.
Still testing me, Baotong faked another left side kick, but this time I didn’t move. He smiled slightly. The fog of fighting had lifted. I faked a jab, jumped, and kicked him in the chest. Baotong’s smile broadened: I’d scored, and now the games could begin.
4-2.
Next he charged forward and let loose a right roundhouse kick with that massive right calf hurtling toward me. Turning, I caught the blow on my left tricep. 6-2. It knocked me two feet to the side. Baotong stepped in closer and kicked me in the other arm with a left roundhouse. 8-2. He was pinballing me left and right around the ring. 10-2, 12-2, 14-2. He clearly intended to keep chopping away at my torso until I toppled. I had to strike back.
With a minute left in the first round, I lifted my right leg to roundhouse him in the chest. At the same moment, he was lifting his left leg. The timing was unfortunate for me. My right leg swung around on a slightly higher plane; his left chambered exactly below it, sliding along the underside of my leg. Time froze for just an instant and I knew not only what was going to happen but that I was helpless to stop it. My foot was inches from his chest when his slammed into my protective cup.
It cracked.
Coach Cheng must have dismissed the class while I was writhing on the ground, because when I was finally able to open my eyes, he and I were alone. He pulled me to my feet. I found it hard to meet his gaze.
“Look at me,” Coach Cheng said.
I looked up. He raised his right fist, as if to strike. Like some abused Pavlovian dog, I flinched and ducked behind my hands. I looked up to see that his fist hadn’t moved.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Being hit.”
“Why?”
“The pain.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“When you were little, did they beat you?”
His question caught me off guard. My eyes got hot.
“Classmates?”
I nodded.
“Okay.”
He picked up a boxing glove and put it on his right hand. He punched at me in slow motion. I held firm. The glove lightly tapped my head. He pulled his fist back and punched at about half speed. I braced but didn’t flinch. The modest blow knocked my head back a couple of inches. Coach Cheng reared back again. This time the punch was pretty close to full speed. I blinked right before my head snapped back. I stumbled to a knee before catching my balance.
I stood up slowly, my head ringing.
Coach Cheng looked at me with a slight smile on his face. “You still alive?”
“Unless this is hell,” I said.
“Was it too painful?”
“I don’t know. I can’t feel my face. I think I’m okay.”
“You’re okay, and you didn’t die. So what do you have to fear?”
“Brain damage,” I offered.
Coach Cheng laughed. “Don’t worry, even with a damaged brain you would still be too smart to be a kickboxer.”
He took off his glove and turned his back on me. Suddenly, he twirled swinging his naked fist at my face. I froze. He pulled his fist up short just millimeters from my nose.
“I didn’t move,” I said.
He grabbed my nose between his fingers and tweaked it.
“In this case, you should move,” he said.
2
MEDIA MATTERS
China had four state-run TV channels, but Shaolin received only two of them. The programming mostly served propaganda purposes. The dramas were overwhelmingly World War II serials, in which noble Communist peasant-soldiers battled against vicious Japanese imperialists and corrupt Chinese nationalists, pushing both out of the country: the Japanese to Nippon, the nationalists to Taiwan.
The news programming was tedious, government boosterism:
This year Henan Province produced 512,000 metric tons of wheat, 304,000 metric tons of rice, and 211,000 metric tons of [something]. Henan’s governor said this represented a strong improvement on last year’s numbers of 454,000 metric tons of wheat, 281,000 metric tons of rice, and 145,000 metric tons of [something], but the people of Henan must pull together to further increase our contribution to China’s growing economy. The Henan government has invested 50 million yuan in agriculture projects. It has also invested 100 million yuan in transportation and other developments. In other news, this year Henan has produced 600,000 metric tons of coal…
The only other staple was show trials: no jury, a court dominated by judges in police uniforms, and a stricken-looking defendant who said next to nothing, because the outcome was preordained. Depending on the point the government was trying to make, they’d reshow the same trial for weeks at a time.
When I first arrived, the big trial was of a man who had made and sold knockoff Maotai, the most expensive brand of baijiu in China. He bought empty bottles of Maotai, filled them with a cheaper version of baijiu, dipped the cork in real Maotai so customers would be fooled by the distinctive Maotai scent, and sold hundreds of thousands of RMB worth to stores and restaurants around the country. He had also apparently exported some of it, which was the core problem. The head judge went on at great length about the potential impact on the Chinese economy if foreigners lost confidence in Chinese quality. China was applying for membership in the World Trade Organization at the time, and black market and pirated goods were a sticking point in negotiations.
At the end of the thirty-minute program, the defendant was convicted and sentenced to “death.” The first time I watched the trial, I grabbed my Chinese-English dictionary, not quite believing I’d translated what they’d said correctly. The death penalty for selling knockoff booze? They won’t even execute you for that in Texas! But Deng was a big believer in capital punishment. Besides murder, a Chinese citizen could get a bullet in the back of the skull for rape, arson, embezzlement, armed robbery, pimping, and organizing a secret society, like the Falun Gong.
There was only one decent program on TV while I was at Shaolin. In China the TV event of the year was a twenty-plus-part miniseries called Beijingers in New York. It was so popular that the government showed it twice. While it was on, almost every monk on the performance team crowded into my room on a nightly basis.
The story line featured a Beijing couple who move to New York City in search of a better life but end up miserable. The woman can only find a job in an illegal sweatshop in Queens. Her husband has to work as a delivery boy in a Chinese restaurant. The stress of trying to survive strains their marriage. Then the woman’s boss—a devious,
Chinese-speaking laowai, who unfortunately bore a striking resemblance to me—seduces her. The couple divorces. The husband takes up with a Chinese woman who owns a restaurant/bar.
It was pure propaganda, of course, and more than a little bit xenophobic. But the writing and acting were so good that even I enjoyed it. The husband delivered the best line of the series. One night, he’s drinking beers and ranting about how hateful laowai are. He concludes, “Do you know why laowai are so hairy? Because when we were human, they were still monkeys.”
The monks doubled over with laughter. For weeks afterward, they’d reenact the scene.
After the series was over, I asked Cheng Hao, “Do you still want to go to America?”
“Yes. It was just a show,” he said. “Besides, even the worst life in America is better than what we have to endure here.”
With most TV programming so dull, the boys at Shaolin were kungfu movie freaks, constantly visiting Shaolin’s multiplex to watch the latest blood-spattered Hong Kong releases on VHS. Once a year, the Wushu Center leaders threw a white tarp over a two-story stone wall and played an old print of Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple. The night had the feeling of a religious service.
In Hong Kong chop-socky flicks, the bad guys, or at least the bad guys’ henchmen, are more frequently than not laowai. A white guy is never the hero, and only rarely does a foreigner get to be the hero’s buddy. Within the industry there is a subset of laowai actors, usually Australian, who appear near the end of these films, shout something like, “Ha! You Chinese dog, your kungfu is no match for mine,” and then display their good but distinctly inferior martial arts skills against the Chinese hero for a minute or two of screen time before being dispatched in a humiliating manner.
When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you’ve sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, “You Chinese dog,” before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.
American Shaolin Page 16