This made Deqing really laugh. “No, no, no, but you’re a laowai.”
Deqing’s mood shifted and he looked at me with fondness. He pinched my cheek.
“You’re the best. You really are the best,” he said. Then he rocked back and laughed in disbelief again. “No, no, no, I can’t let you fight.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a laowai.”
“So?”
“One of us gets hurt, no one cares. But if you get hurt…” Deqing trailed off. “Do you think Beijing wants to read in The New York Times that an American got killed at the Shaolin Temple? It would turn a simple little fight into an international incident. It would make the government lose face, and then all of us would be arrested.”
Deqing finally spied the two samurai daggers he and Cheng Hao had given me tucked into my waistband. This really made him howl.
“You brought weapons! Oh, you really are the best. I can’t believe it. You really are the best. Isn’t he the best, Cheng Hao?”
Cheng Hao, who had remained quiet during this entire exchange, leveled a look at me.
“I think he’s crazy to want to fight when he doesn’t have to.”
“He might be crazy, but he’s still the best.”
Deqing sent me back to my room. Still smarting, I jumped the wall instead and waited in a dark corner. How was I supposed to prove my courage if no one would let me fight?
Deqing led a group of about fifty monks and Zhejiangers toward the university. He had a firm grip on the neck of the prisoner. I waited for them to get a hundred yards ahead and then followed quietly. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be seen. There were street lamps in Shaolin, but they were few and far between.
Waiting for them in front of Wushu University must have been 300 boys, about half the school. They were armed with spears, swords, staffs, nine-section whips, the whole array of weapons taught at Shaolin. It struck me as a fairly equal matchup.
Deqing’s side stopped and formed a line fifty yards from the other group. Deqing separated from the group with the prisoner in tow. From the other side came the posse leader and another boy, whom I assumed was the aggrieved party.
When they met in the middle, words were exchanged, but I was too far away to hear them. Then Deqing forced the prisoner to his knees. He handed the disputed amount of money to the aggrieved party, who slapped the prisoner in the face.
Deqing raised his hands in the air to indicate the matter was settled. The Wushu University students were the first to leave. Then the monks and the Zhejiangers turned back. Deqing said something to the prisoner. It must have been to stay where he was, because the boy remained after everyone else had left.
I thought seriously about sneaking back, but I was bursting with too much pride. Deqing began laughing when he saw me come out of the shadows.
“You naughty boy. I should slap you.”
“I was only going to fight if our side started losing,” I said.
Deqing pinched my cheek. “You’re the best. You really are the best.”
4
TAIWAN TUNES
I had just finished practice in the training hall when one of the older monks came up to me and asked me embarrassedly, “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Is it true that in America there are homosexuals?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
He shivered. “It is not human.”
“No, no, no, it’s very human.”
He shook his head, “You Americans are too strange.”
“China also has homosexuals.”
“No, we do not,” he said with conviction. “It is a foreign problem.”
“You’re wrong. It is not a problem,” I said. “And China has homosexuals.”
He refused to believe me. And when I made polite inquiries into the matter I found no one else at Shaolin believed there were any gay Chinese. I realized there was no homophobia at Shaolin, because it is difficult to be phobic of something you don’t believe exists. Men could walk around holding hands because no one would think anything of it.
Of course, the monks were wrong. Mainland China certainly wasn’t like Hong Kong, which under a century and a half of British rule had developed a fairly open gay culture. But it was an open secret that there were certain parks in the big cities like Beijing and Shanghai where gay men met at night. What surprised me the most about the denial of the monks, though, was that they seemed not to notice that Monk Xingming, a senior monk at the temple, was obviously gay.
I first met Monk Xingming in the performance hall. He was sitting with Deqing and the others. Deqing introduced him as the younger monks’ Buddhism instructor. He was a university graduate and clearly held in high regard by the monks, most of whom hadn’t graduated from anything more than grade school. Monk Xingming was a sprightly senior citizen with a cherubic face, sad eyes, and a warm smile.
I bowed. “Amituofo.”
He looked at me and said in almost a falsetto, “You are so cute.”
It was the most effeminate voice I’d ever heard out of a Chinese man, like a Mandarin Truman Capote. He offered his hand to shake, which I did. He held on to it while motioning me to sit next to him. He asked me where I was from, how long I had been here, what I was studying. As we talked he gently stroked the top of my hand with the tips of his fingers. Even for China, this was a little too friendly.
Little Tiger jumped into the conversation. “Master Xingming loves American songs. He sings them very beautifully.”
“That is very nice to hear,” I said, gently pulling my hand away. “Master Xingming, what American songs do you like?”
“Broadway songs,” he replied. “And Barbra Streisand.”
“Wo mingbai le,” I said. “Oh, I see.”
Little Tiger urged Monk Xingming to sing something. After much encouragement, which he halfheartedly tried to deflect, he launched into one of Babs’s songs. Or at least I assume it was. It was hard to make out the mangle of Chinglish he was humming. I stared at the other monks, trying to see why it was they couldn’t see what was so obvious.
They were looking at me expectantly—the arbiter of Monk Xingming’s English singing talent. It had been a truly gong-worthy performance.
It was all I could do to smile and praise his singing.
“That’s one of my favorite songs,” I said.
I bumped into Monk Xingming around the Wushu Center frequently. He was usually accompanied by a young man who was the not-so-platonic ideal of a boy toy: sweet of nature, broad of shoulder, dumb as a post. None of the monks seemed to think it was odd, so I didn’t say anything. I once asked Deqing what their relationship was, but he didn’t catch my meaning.
“Master Xingming is his Buddhism instructor,” he said.
Every time I met him, Monk Xingming was always the kindest, gentlest of men, so it was a surprise to walk into the performance hall one day and discover him railing about politics. The monks were gathered around him. He was holding up a Chinese newspaper and holding court. Everyone went silent when I walked up. My heart dropped when I saw the photos above the fold: three F-16 fighter jets. I braced for the worst.
“What has happened?” I asked.
“Your president sold military planes to Taiwan,” Deqing said.
I was relieved. I had been afraid there had been some military skirmish between our countries. It is always the danger for ex-pats from the world’s hegemon. You never know when your host country’s embassy in Belgrade is going to “accidentally” get hit by a missile, or some spy plane is going to crash land, or your president is going to sell military equipment to a rival country. It was the first time I ever wished I were Canadian. It wouldn’t be the last.
The mood of the room was hostile. I retreated into a platitude that usually worked to deflect such situations.
“This is a difficulty between our governments, not our people,” I said.
It was a useful formulation for dealing with situations where a Chinese
person had a bee in his bonnet over one or another of America’s foreign-policy positions related to China. The Chinese were usually very good about distinguishing between the American government and the American people.
“Taiwan is a part of China,” Monk Xingming shouted at me. “I will go to war with America over Taiwan.”
I was thunderstruck. It’s not every day that a Broadway tune–singing, sixty-five-year-old Buddhist monk, who has dedicated himself to a life of peace, says he’s ready to march into battle against the marines.
Monk Xingming’s fervor caught up the younger men. Several of the other monks said that they too would fight the Americans for Taiwan if it came down to that. This wasn’t quite so weird, since teenage boys are socially engineered to serve as cannon fodder. But still, it was a level of nationalistic fervor I had not seen before at Shaolin.
For a brief moment I wondered if it had anything to do with the rumor I had heard a couple of months earlier that a secret Communist cell had recently been sent to spy on activities in town. When a friendly restaurant owner in town told me this as a warning, I had tried to make a joke of it. “What do they want to do? Find out the black-market price for American dollars?”
The government had recently discontinued FEC and allowed Chinese to trade RMB directly for U.S. currency. But they had pegged the exchange rate at a ridiculous level of 8 to 1, which had set off a speculative frenzy because the Chinese are at heart hard-core gamblers. “Shanja mahnie?” The black-market rate would rise to 12 to 1 before the bubble finally burst.
“No, they are worried about the spiritual pollution of Western ideas,” he said, nodding at me, the only Westerner in Shaolin, and, one would have to suspect, the Typhoid Mary of Shaolin’s nascent democracy movement.
I studied the monks, but it was obvious they were sincere in their patriotic fever. Each one proclaimed his devotion to China, his denunciation of Taiwan as a rebel state, and his willingness to fight America if necessary.
“What do you think of that?” one of them asked me.
What I thought about that was what the U.S. government thinks about that: While Taiwan is a part of China, the dispute should be resolved peacefully, which the F-16s were meant to ensure. What I thought was: Taiwan isn’t Hong Kong, and America isn’t England. What I thought was: China has a long way to go before it can absorb Taiwan without destabilizing itself, and the wiser Beijing leaders probably know this but can’t admit it because the threat of Taiwanese independence is such a useful patriotic rallying cry. What I said instead was, “It is complicated.”
Deqing, bless his heart, came to my rescue. When Monk Xingming repeated his vow to fight the Americans, Deqing asked him, “And how will you fight them, master? Sing them to death?”
This broke the fever. The younger monks laughed. And after a moment, so did Monk Xingming.
“Naughty boy,” he said to Deqing. “You love my singing.”
“No, I just pretend I do,” Deqing said, smiling to take the sting out of it.
5
PLAYING HANDS
Other than kungfu, Shaolin’s only other serious pastime was hua quan, which roughly translates as the “Hand Game,” or more directly as “Playing Hands.” It was the most popular drinking game in rural China, played almost exclusively by men in restaurants across the countryside on a nightly basis.
The Hand Game is similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors. But instead of three options, there are six. Each opponent throws out a number of fingers (zero to five) on one hand, while shouting out a number he believes will be the sum (zero to ten) of both players’ hands. If one player guesses correctly while the other does not, the loser drinks. If both are mistaken or both are correct, they try again. For example, if you put out three fingers and shouted “six” while your opponent put out two fingers and shouted “five,” you’d drink. On the next round, if you put out a fist (zero) and shouted “four” while he put out four fingers and shouted “eight,” he’d drink. As the drinks flowed, the shouting invariably grew louder, which was why city sophisticates frowned upon the game.
Playing Hands is an inspired game because of the limitations of the human brain. If two random-number-generating computers played each other, they’d each win exactly 50 percent of the time. But human minds and motor skills operate in patterns that tend to repeat, especially when alcohol is involved. This is what makes it a skill game. If you are able to discover your opponent’s pattern (say, after putting out five fingers, he always puts out a fist or his thumb) while disguising your own, you dramatically increase your odds of winning. And as your wins pile up and your opponent sinks into a stupor, his ability to see your patterns decreases while his repetitions increase. Once this tipping point happens you go in for the victory by blackout.
The perfect Hand Game champion would possess the mental acuity of Stephen Hawking, the manual dexterity of Rachmaninoff, and the alcohol tolerance of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The closest to this ideal at Shaolin was Coach Yan, the calculating coach of the Wushu Center monks. He looked like a movie villain and possessed a dangerous temper to match. And he was to the Hand Game what Coach Cheng was to challenge matches. Whenever an outsider came into town and proved himself good at the game, Coach Yan was called in to drown him in thimble-sized shots of baijiu. When he sat down at a table—and the rule was you had to play everyone round-robin style, with the number of shots usually ten per person, although that was negotiable—the nonalcoholics found excuses to leave early.
I decided to seek him out as my Hand Game coach, because, despite possessing the recuperative powers of a twenty-one-year-old, the Chinese were killing me. At every banquet the Wushu Center threw, the leaders brought me over so the visiting VIPs could enjoy the novelty of beating a laowai at the Hand Game (not to mention the sadistic pleasure every Chinese party hack feels when he watches a laowai trying to choke down a shot of baijiu). I had to get better at the game—if not for my pride, then for my liver. The problem was that Coach Yan was the coach of the other coaches at the Wushu Center. Basically, he was the dean of the faculty, and like most deans he was a bit aloof from the students, even one with special status like me.
My strategy was to appeal to Coach Yan’s competitive instincts. I invited him, Deqing, Cheng Hao, and several other monks to a mini-banquet, because that was where all decisions in China were made. As the drinks were being poured, I cleared a space and pulled out a quarter.
“The Hand Game is very interesting. But it can’t compare to America’s favorite drinking game.”
“I don’t believe you,” Coach Yan said. “What kind of game is it?”
“It’s called twenty-five cents,” I said, translating as best I could. “The goal is to bounce this coin off the table and into the glass. If I succeed and you fail, you drink.”
I demonstrated the basic thumb–index finger bounce, and then asked Coach Yan if he wanted to play me first. It was a beautiful sight watching him miss and miss and have to drink and drink. When he finally got one in, I switched to rolling it off my elbow. Then to rub it in I said I would drink the shot for him unless I made the next one off my nose. I made it.
As we walked home—them stumbling, me laughing—Coach Yan clapped me on the shoulder. “Let me borrow your American coin,” he slurred.
Shaolin monks spend a lifetime mastering an art that requires a complete devotion to mental and physical conditioning. I have met a lot of athletes who are stronger or more powerful but few as coordinated or balanced. And none as competitive. So I probably should not have been surprised when two days later, Coach Yan joined me at my dinner table and pulled out the quarter. Nor should I have been shocked when he proceeded to whip me in ten straight games. In two days he had supplanted the skills I had misspent countless weekends of my youth perfecting.
“Did you sleep?” I asked. “Or have you been practicing straight for forty-eight hours?”
“I didn’t have the angle right last time we played,” he said. “And I still cannot do the nose.”
“Yours is not big enough.”
Coach Yan laughed, “So your big nose is useful!”
After establishing his dominance in this new game, he soon agreed to become my Hand Game coach. I knew the basic rules of Playing Hands. Coach Yan taught me the subtleties. The first set of lessons involved social customs. In every nation there is at least one finger combination that will get you into trouble: in England it is the “two fingers,” in America “the bird.” China, suiting its long history, had acquired many combinations that were considered somewhere between rude and downright offensive. Pointing your index and middle finger at someone meant you wanted to poke out his eyes. Pointing the index finger and the thumb meant you wanted to shoot him. But pointing and shaking your pinkie finger at someone—“you’re a small man”—would start a fight. And if it didn’t you could increase the insult by pointing your thumb at yourself at the same time—“you’re a small man, and I’m a big man.” So trying to put out the number “two” was a complicated affair. I was left with either the bird or the heavy-metal devil horns.
Next, Coach Yan taught me the tricks.
PERIPHERAL VISION: Instead of throwing your fingers in front of your opponent, you move your hand in random directions around his peripheral vision, so it takes his tipsy mind longer to register the number of fingers, and thus any patterns.
PACING: There is no rule about how fast you have to play the game. The expert and sober tend to play faster than the beginner and the blasted. It usually takes a couple of rounds before an unspoken understanding about the pace is established. But if you wanted, you could suddenly start shouting numbers and throwing fingers rapidly, causing your opponent to catch up, disturbing his ability to rethink his strategy between rounds.
DECOYS: Straight out of the Sun Tzu playbook, you pretend to have fallen into a fairly obvious repetitive cycle, and then switch out of it just as your opponent tries to capitalize. The key with this one is timing.
American Shaolin Page 18