Wanting to undermine the assumption that laowai suck at martial arts, I brought VHS copies of Steven Seagal’s Above the Law, David Carradine’s Kung Fu, and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart back from winter vacation.
We watched Seagal’s movie first. It is very roughly based on his life (according to his somewhat suspect publicity bio) as an aikido instructor in Japan who became involved with the CIA. A Japanese aikido school had performed at the Shaolin Temple prior to my arrival, so all the monks retold stories of the visit during the first half of the movie.
“But what do you think of the actor?” I asked, finally. “His kungfu is pretty good, isn’t it?”
Little Tiger said, with the honesty of youth, “He’s not bad…for a laowai.”
“Oh,” I said, wounded.
“But he is very fierce,” Deqing politely interjected. He cuffed Little Tiger across the back of the head when he thought I wasn’t looking.
“What did I do wrong?” Little Tiger asked.
Deqing said, “Pay attention to his eyes. He looks like he enjoys hurting people.”
The monks were used to highly fictionalized portrayals of the Shaolin Temple, so they weren’t bothered by the fantasy version of Shaolin in David Carradine’s Kung Fu. They were, however, shocked by the casting of David Carradine.
“How can he be a Shaolin monk?” Little Tiger asked. “He’s a laowai.”
“Actually in the story he’s half-Chinese, half-laowai,” I said.
“He doesn’t look like a hun xui,” Little Tiger said. “Mixed blood.”
Deqing cuffed Little Tiger across the back of the head again. “Don’t use bad words.”
“The actor is a laowai,” I said. “He’s pretending to be half-Chinese.”
“That explains why his kungfu is so terrible,” Little Tiger said, as he ducked to the back row to avoid another cuff.
For the rest of the movie I ignored the slights about Carradine’s kungfu skills, which were admittedly poor. (To be fair, however, he did capture that California New Age, faux-Zen blankness perfectly.) I was waiting for the climactic moment that nearly every American male who was alive in the early 1970s remembers: the scene where Carradine lifts a burning chalice to pass the final Shaolin test, permanently branding a dragon on one forearm and a tiger on the other. I hadn’t seen or heard anything like this legend since my arrival, but I had to know.
“Is this story true?” I asked. “Did that used to be the final test for Shaolin monks?”
“No,” Deqing said. “Why would we want to burn our arms like that? You might end up a cripple, never be able to make a fist again in your life. What kind of kungfu test would that be?”
“Americans have excellent imaginations, however,” Little Tiger offered as consolation. “Don’t you agree, Deqing?”
“They make good movies,” Deqing conceded.
Jean-Claude Van Damme impressed the monks the most, especially his bodybuilder physique.
“Look, he has muscles on his muscles,” Little Tiger shouted. “I wouldn’t want to wrestle him.”
“But muscles that are too big reduce the quickness of your technique,” Deqing said. “Power is generated by speed, not size. You saw what a tiny bullet can do.”
Little Tiger shouted, “I know! I shot a gun at the range! Bam! Bam! Bam!”
The monks were also intrigued by Van Damme’s signature move: a jumping, spinning hook kick. Van Damme does a full split while in the air. The monks did theirs with one leg tucked under their body.
“His flexibility is very good,” Cheng Hao said.
“But why would he split his legs?” Deqing asked. “You generate more speed with your right kick if you keep your left foot tucked.”
“He studied, um, what is the Chinese word for the French traditional form of dance?” I said.
Lipeng, who was one of only four monks assigned to Shaolin’s first trip to Paris two years before, said, “Ballet.”
“Right, right, ballet.” I said.
“It looks pretty,” Little Tiger said.
“But it is not as fast,” Deqing repeated.
We watched in silence for another thirty minutes before Little Tiger tugged on my sleeve.
“When does he die?” he asked.
Confused, I asked, “Who dies?”
“The laowai.”
“Which laowai?”
“The one with all the muscles.”
I was even more confused, “But he’s the hero.”
“Right, so when does he die?”
“He doesn’t. Heroes don’t die in American movies.”
“They do in Chinese movies.”
“I know, but not in American movies.”
“Then they aren’t heroes.”
“Why do you say that?”
Little Tiger paused to think. “I don’t know. They’re just not.”
Feeling like I was on to something important, I pressed. “But why do you think that?”
Little Tiger dropped his head and shrugged his shoulders.
Deqing, who had been following the exchange, said, “Because it doesn’t take much courage to fight when you still believe you can win. What takes real courage is to keep fighting when all hope is gone.”
3
IRON FOREARM BOY
Along the sidewalk of Shaolin’s road, there were half a dozen ancient women who sold tiny clay cats that meowed when the attached string was pulled. But since the sound was more like a bleating “mao” and the price point was, coincidentally, 5 Mao, which is half a RMB (about six cents), they were nicknamed the “Mao Mao Grandmothers.” Every day as the tourists passed their wooden stands with the clay cats displayed, they’d plaintively pull on the string of one of the cats in a desperate effort to entice someone to make a purchase. Mao! Mao! Mao! It was highly irritating, like alley cats in heat.
But it was hard not to feel sorry for them. They were too poor to retire as they should have at their venerable age, and they spent all day trying to sell something that nobody wanted. What tourist visiting a famous kungfu monastery wants to buy an annoying-sounding clay cat? I often wondered if it wasn’t a subtle form of begging. Money! Money! Money!
One day I was walking down the street with my new supply of Cokes when I saw one of the tourists, a thirtysomething Chinese male, slap a cat out of the hand of a Mao Mao Grandmother and stomp on it. I was about fifty yards away and didn’t know how to react. I can’t say I hadn’t thought of doing the same on more than one occasion. But then Grandmother said something I couldn’t hear, and the tourist slapped her. I pushed through the crowd that had stopped to watch.
Grandmother pointed at him and blurted something else, which I assumed was a curse, because the tourist’s face turned red, and he took a swing at her with a closed fist. The punch was amateurish, and Grandmother was able to dodge it as she darted around the table, putting it between them for protection. Embarrassed and angry, the tourist knocked over her table and stomped each one of her cats flat. When finished, he twirled around and started to walk away from her, but she cursed him again.
The tourist whirled, caught her by the arm as she tried to flee, and kicked her twice in the butt. His kicking wasn’t much better than his punching—the equivalent of a couple of gentle spanks—but I couldn’t stand by and watch a man in his prime kick an elderly lady in her backside, whatever the cause of the dispute.
As I moved purposefully toward the Mao Mao Grandmother, the tourist’s friend grabbed him around the waist, pulled him away, and turned him around, pleading, “Enough. Enough. Enough.”
I stepped into the vacated space between the two antagonists. Grandmother was behind me and I was facing the tourist’s back. Grandmother cursed him again, claiming to have fucked one of his relatives, but her accent was so thick, I couldn’t translate which one. The tourist whirled and was about to charge until he saw me standing in the way. He stopped in his tracks. His face was still red with rage, his eyes still wild, but this look of bafflement danced acr
oss his visage. One moment he was knocking around a peasant who had offended him, the next he was face-to-face with a very tall laowai. He couldn’t get his mind around it.
Sensing the shift in the balance of power, Grandmother rained curses down upon him. She must have been from a nearby mountain village with its own slang, because I didn’t understand anything she said—and thanks to Little Tiger, I had become a dedicated student of local curses.
The friend grabbed the tourist around the waist again, which freed the tourist to give the appearance of trying to charge Grandmother without actually moving forward. It was a Mexican standoff.
I wasn’t particularly worried. I’d seen he couldn’t fight and knew there were only two of them. Besides, what chance did they have against Iron Forearm Boy? I played out the scenario in my mind. If he broke free, I’d snap a left kick to stop his forward momentum and then clobber him over the side of the head with the bag of eight Cokes I had gripped in my right hand. That would take him down and make his friend less likely to enter the fray. My biggest worry at that moment was whether I had enough money on me to buy eight new cans of Coke.
“Grandmother, would you please, please, please shut up!” I shouted over my shoulder.
Finally, after a minute more of this, the friend was able to convince the tourist to walk away. “It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it.” He dragged his friend all the way down the road.
When he was far enough away, I turned to Grandmother who was still cursing in her local dialect.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She walked over to her smashed cats and picked them up, one by one. When she’d finished, the old crone handed me one. As magical trinkets go, it was not particularly inspiring.
Looking at the crowd that was dispersing unsatisfied, I noticed Little Tiger for the first time. I waved him over, but he turned and scurried back to the Wushu Center.
When I got back, I went straight to Deqing’s room. I was feeling pretty pleased with my minor heroics and good deed for the day.
I sat on his bed and said as casually as I was capable, “I had an interesting afternoon today…”
“I heard what you did,” Deqing said.
“Little Tiger didn’t waste any time.”
I was expecting praise. Instead, he said, “Bao Mosi, you shouldn’t have involved yourself.”
“But Deqing, the man was beating on an old lady who couldn’t defend herself,” I protested.
“But you don’t know why he was doing it.”
“What possible reason would justify kicking a grandmother in the butt?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she cheated him.”
I paused to consider this. “Well, even if she did, he kicked her before I had a chance to stop him, so he got his revenge.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.”
“But what good is learning kungfu if you don’t use the skill to help people?”
“You believe you were correct to help, but you are a foreigner here. It isn’t proper for you to involve yourself in the people’s business.”
We soon changed the subject and talked about other things, but I was sore at him for rebuking me and left his room as soon as propriety allowed.
It took me half a year to discover that I was not the only foreigner studying in Shaolin. I was walking past the Shaolin Wushu University watching the Chinese adolescents practice their basic movement one day when I stopped in my tracks. Something was wrong with this picture. Even though he dressed in the same jogging suit and shoes as the rest of the boys, one of the young men stuck out. His cheekbones were too high, his skin was too reddish brown, and his torso was too long in proportion to his body. He clearly wasn’t Han Chinese.
He had seen me staring and must have guessed the reason because he waved. I waved back. When his class was over, he came over to greet me.
He said in broken English, “Hello, my name, um, Ahmed. Happy you meet. I hear, um, American, um, Wushu Center.”
“It is an honor to meet you,” I said in English. But then, I continued in Chinese, “Do you speak Chinese?
“Better my English…a little bit,” he replied in Chinese. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t know there were any other laowai in Shaolin. What country are you from?”
“Afghanistan.”
“Your kungfu is very good. How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
“That’s a long time,” I said, somewhat miffed to discover I wasn’t the toughest laowai in town.
“Yes.”
“And you like it here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And you live with the other Chinese students?” I asked, incredulously.
I had long since realized that if I had to live like the Chinese students—eight to a room, straw-mat bed, no toilet, no shower—I never would have had the strength to survive three weeks let alone three years, especially if my Chinese were as rough as his.
“My dorm over there.”
“So how long are you planning on staying?”
“As long as I can. My brother works embassy Beijing. He help me get here. It’s much better than home.”
I was dumbfounded. In my spectrum of experience, Shaolin was as bad as it got. I knew very little about Afghanistan. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I preferred not to learn too much about dysfunctional countries until after my government invaded them. It’s emotionally easier that way.
“But isn’t the war with Russia over?”
“It worse now.”
Even though his poor Chinese made conversation difficult, I tried to visit Ahmed as frequently as possible after that. He was a great guy—the kind you want to have a drink with and to have your back in a fight. Deqing often joined me in these trips, because he had a number of friends at the Wushu University.
Deqing, Ahmed, and I were sitting with our backs against the Wushu University outer wall one day when we saw a posse of adolescents leading a teenager like a prisoner. They had a rope around his neck and wushu spears pointed at his back. The boy holding the rope had a samurai dagger pressed against the prisoner’s throat. As they marched him toward Wushu University, the boys took turns punching him in the gut and across the side of the head.
As they got closer, the prisoner noticed Deqing and shouted something to him in a dialect I couldn’t understand.
Deqing exploded off the ground and jetted himself toward the posse.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? What has he done that you treat him this way?”
“What business is it of yours?” the boy with the dagger and the lasso asked.
“What business? Listen to your tone! I am Wang Deqing,” he said, using his full family name. “You all know me.”
“So? Who is this turtle’s egg to you?”
“He is from Zhejiang. I am from Zhejiang. That puts him under my protection.”
Identity politics in China were primarily geographical. Shaolin had boys from all over the country, so provincial loyalty was particularly strong. The only connection more powerful was devotion to one’s schoolmates. As the highest-ranking person in Shaolin from Zhejiang, Deqing was in effect every Zhejianger’s big brother. He took the role seriously. Young Zhejiang boys who arrived with little money, as Deqing had, sought him out for loans, favors, and advice. Twice a week he taught a class for Zhejiangers who were too poor to afford tuition at one of the schools.
The posse didn’t want to relinquish their prey. “He borrowed money from one of our classmates. When he asked for the money back, this prick beat him.”
There were six well-armed boys, but Deqing was older and on the edge of exploding. He knocked the dagger out of the leader’s hands. He pushed the spears down. He yanked the prisoner away and pulled the rope off his neck.
“I don’t care what he did,” Deqing said. “This is excessive. You dare to rope and beat him like he’s a dog? I ought to do the same to you.”
The boys r
efused to back down. It looked like a fight was imminent. Ahmed and I flanked Deqing. I was scared shitless. The spears were light and blunt; at best, they’d take out an eye. But a samurai dagger in skilled hands would leave a man lying in a puddle of his own blood.
Our presence tipped the balance. Ahmed was a classmate of theirs. And seeing me pulled Deqing back from the brink.
“We will settle this tonight when the cops are asleep,” Deqing said, pushing the prisoner into my arms. “Bao Mosi, you take him back to my room.”
The leader pointed at the boy and said to Deqing, “He’s your responsibility now. If you don’t bring him back tonight, we are coming after you.”
“Why, you disrespectful prick. I was your coach’s coach. You dare talk to me like that?”
They continued to argue as I walked the shaken boy back to the Wushu Center. Deqing arrived twenty minutes later. He grabbed the boy roughly and slapped him hard across the face, “What are you, a thief? You take money and then beat the boy you borrowed it from? You’ve made all Zhejiangers lose face! I should strangle you to death to restore our honor. Do you have the money?”
“No.”
“You stupid egg!” Deqing slapped the boy again. “Okay, I’ll take care of it. Now get out of here. And tell the others to meet me outside the Wushu Center at midnight. And you better be there, too, or you will wish I had let those boys beat you.”
After the boy left the room, Deqing’s quicksilver mood shifted 180 degrees. He laughed and shook his head. “This is really difficult,” he said. “What the boy did was wrong, and they have every right to punish him for it. But I couldn’t allow them to be so excessive to a Zhejianger in front of me.”
At 11:30 P.M. I knocked on Deqing’s door. He opened it. He and Cheng Hao were laying out weapons.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to fight with you.”
Deqing’s started laughing in disbelief. “Oh no, you can’t fight with us.”
“Why? You don’t think my kungfu is good enough?”
American Shaolin Page 17