Still, Comrade Fish was growing more desperate, and his threats that I wouldn’t be allowed to practice anymore unless I paid were starting to concern me. Even missing a few days of training could make me rusty, and this was dragging on.
The morning of the seventh day of negotiations, Coach Yan came to visit me. Despite my concerns, I was feeling rather elated. I was finally standing up to injustice. I wasn’t rolling over and allowing myself to be walked over. Coach Yan, however, was pessimistic about the situation.
“You can’t simply refuse to pay any longer,” he said.
“But it is unfair,” I insisted, repeating my arguments.
“Yes, but you are making Leader Liu lose face in front of the entire school,” he explained. “If you can defy him, then what stops someone else from doing it?”
“But Leader Liu hasn’t even come to see me.”
“Of course not. He can’t allow you to defy him in person. Then he would have to do something about it. He sends Comrade Fish, so it is Comrade Fish’s fault, not his. But still you are making Leader Liu lose face.”
“But it isn’t fair.”
“This is China,” Coach Yan said. “What does fairness have to do with anything?”
“You have a point,” I said. “What should I do, master?”
The most important relationships at Shaolin were between master and disciple: Both sides had an obligation to help the other in times of need. It was one of the reasons I had tried to have as many coaches as possible, especially the coaches with deep guanxi like Coach Yan.
“Where do you get this money?” Coach Yan asked. “From your father, right?”
“More or less.”
“The Chinese people have great respect for the family.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We also know that sometimes families can have money problems. You understand?” he said, staring at me until I understood what he meant.
A piece of face-saving fiction was called for, and it was up to me to craft it if I wanted to stay and pay only $550 a month.
I started to spin: “I was too ashamed to admit this before, but my father is not happy with me being here.” All good lies start with the truth…“He has stopped sending me money.” Shift to a plausible untruth…“So I had to ask my grandfather for the money.” Followed by the big lie…“But he is just a farmer.” Embroidered with honest details…“So he can’t send me more than $550 per month.” And sympathetic bullshit.
Coach Yan stood up, bowed slightly, and left.
Amituofo.
Comrade Fish’s mood and approach were transformed when he arrived the next day. He came as a supplicant with all the bowing and scraping and pleading that entails in China.
“Oh, this is so embarrassing. I hate to trouble you, Bao Mosi. You were probably resting. But we have a problem, and we need your help. The Wushu Center needs to borrow $600,” he said, hands fluttering upward to the ceiling as if begging for divine intervention.
“Why?”
“To pay the dancing teachers.”
Every night for the past two weeks, the leaders of the school and their wives, plus some of the waitresses and other village officials, had turned the Wushu Center’s performance hall into a dance studio. Besides karaoke and drinking, the favorite recreational activity of the older generation of Chinese was Lawrence Welk–era dancing. They loved nothing more than to waltz around nightclubs or outdoors in parks during the summer months. The younger generation preferred dancing to Western and Hong Kong pop. At the Zheng Zhou International Hotel’s nightclub, the DJ would play four or five waltzes in a row for the older crowd, then switch to Western style music for the kiddies.
But I had the feeling I was being conned.
“Why are you bothering me with this? Surely Leader Liu has that much money,” I said, my voice hardening into the imperious, guttural tone the Chinese use when they really want to see the supplicant get down on his knees and kowtow.
“What can I say? It is a difficult problem. The teachers insist on being paid in American dollars. Leader Liu only has Chinese money at the moment. You have always been such a good friend of the Shaolin Temple and this school, won’t you help?”
“But I told you. I was only going to pay $550 a month. Is this a trick to raise the price to $600?”
“I will give you the $50 in Chinese money, okay?”
I paid him the money, he left, and that was that. Comrade Fish did not come back again until a month later. And he did not argue when I paid him $550.
After it was all over, I took Coach Yan out to dinner. After many rounds of Playing Hands, he admitted that he had taken my story back to Leader Liu.
“He was going to kick you out. But Chinese people love family relationships,” he explained
“Chinese people also love saving face.”
“Yes. Empty your glass.” Coach Yan slapped me on the back. We continued my Playing Hands training well into the evening.
One day during training, Doc asked me to visit him after class. When I arrived, he poured me tea. I readied myself to be hit up for a favor.
“I want to start a business selling Chinese medicine,” he said. “But I need a grinder, so I can turn the leaves, roots, and skin into powder. It’s easier to package that way.”
“Where can you buy a grinder?”
“Zheng Zhou.”
I sighed internally. He sat quietly, waiting for me to finish calculating the guanxi debt I owed him for teaching me iron forearm kungfu and fixing my knees and realizing it was far more than a day trip to Zheng Zhou and the cost of a grinder.
“Okay, I’ll go with you to Zheng Zhou and buy you one.”
The trip was uneventful. We found a store, bought a $95 electric grinder, and brought it back. The grinder lasted two days before the motor broke.
Doc invited me over that night to show me the offending object and its sputtering engine. I shrugged. What did he expect? Everything with more than two moving parts broke in China. But Doc had decided he wanted to return it and get a refund. I was less enthusiastic. Chinese stores’ return policies are so notoriously caveat emptor that the country even has a traditional proverb on the subject: “Once the goods are carried out of the store, the owner will refuse to acknowledge them.” But Doc was insistent, and I wasn’t inclined to argue with a man whose hobby was breaking river stones with his palm.
Still, I tried to weasel out of my obligations. If he had only fixed my knees, I could have just said no, but I hadn’t paid off my debt to him yet for teaching me iron forearm kungfu.
“What good will me coming along do you? Stores don’t return money for broken goods.”
He chewed on the end of his cigarette for several moments before saying, “Maybe he won’t want to lose face in front of a foreigner.”
“Doc, the grinder cost 750RMB. That’s very expensive face.”
Doc considered this. “You can always scare him.”
“How am I going to do that?”
Doc smiled, a rare event for him. “Bao Mosi, you have lived in China for many months. Tell me, what is the general Chinese prejudice about laowai?”
I immediately quoted Beijingers in New York: “Do you know why foreigners are so hairy? Because when we were human, they were still monkeys.”
Doc laughed out loud. “Exactly. Laowai make us nervous. You are so emotional, so unpredictable, like very tall children. We never know what you are going to say or do next.”
When we returned to the store, I stood behind Doc, while he initiated a discussion with the owner. He had the receipt and anyone could see the grinder was broken. The storeowner agreed that it certainly was broken, but it hadn’t been broken when he sold it. It had broken while Doc was its owner. Doc explained that he had followed the instructions, and it was clear that the machine was faulty. The proprietor was certain that Doc was an honest man, although most were not these days. But how was he to know if Doc might not be mistaken? Maybe he had, without realizing it, of course, done
something wrong, and therefore the mistake was his, not the machine’s. How was he to know the real cause? And if he couldn’t know for certain, why should he return the money? Doc said he didn’t want the grinder any longer. He wanted the money back instead. The proprietor wondered why he should want a broken grinder. He preferred the money, thank you very much.
This continued for several minutes before the histrionic level was ratcheted up to more personalized attacks. This was to be expected. Negotiations in China frequently took a turn toward the melodramatic—it’s one of the few times the Chinese feel free to display emotion, even if it is feigned. This was one legacy of China’s favor-based (guanxi) economy. The problem with favors is that they are very hard to quantify, to secure an agreement at the market exchange rate. If a friend helped you secure a meeting with a town official so you could obtain a zoning permit for your new store last year, how many days are you obligated to loan him your truck so he can haul lumber? One, three, or seven? How many days before you have repaid your obligation, and he starts owing you another favor? As anyone with a difficult mother-in-law knows, one way to up the perceived value of a favor is to complain bitterly about how much sacrifice it will entail before granting it.
Doc’s difficulty was that he was asking the merchant to do something he wasn’t obliged to do without offering anything in return. It was my job to change the merchant’s calculation from benefits to potential costs. When he called Doc a peasant and poked him in the chest, Doc stepped back and gave me a nod.
Having received my cue, I went ballistic. I bugged out my eyes, stomped the floor, threw my hands wide into the air, and yelled in Chinese, “You dare touch my master? You stupid egg! Do you know who he is? This is one of Shaolin’s greatest kungfu masters! And you just touched him. So disrespectful! Do you not want life? You sell him this piece of shit and now you don’t want to take responsibility. Look at it”—at which point I kicked the grinder, knocking it dangerously close to a display case—“it is worthless and so are you.”
“What are you doing?” the stunned merchant cried out, “You dare kick it?”
“I dare! I dare kick everything in this backwards store!”
I went over to the display case and smacked it with my palm hard enough to make it shake but not break the glass.
I could almost see the merchant’s mind whirling like a cash register as he calculated the price of replacing the glass against reimbursing us for the grinder. I learned the glass was cheaper when he said, “What is the matter with you? Are you sick in your mind?”
“You are sick in your mind if you think you can cheat and insult my master without consequences!” I said, towering over him. “I’ll destroy this entire store.”
I picked up the grinder and charged the storefront window as if I meant to throw it through the glass.
“Is he crazy?” the merchant asked Doc. “You must stop him.”
Doc shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do? Foreigners are strange.”
The storefront window must have been expensive, because the storeowner relented.
“I’ll give you 50 percent,” he said.
I snapped out of it and put the grinder down—it was heavy and I didn’t think the merchant would offer a better deal.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s 375RMB.”
On the way back to Shaolin, Doc and I howled as we replayed the incident.
“You should teach that as a special kungfu,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll call it Crazy Foreigner Kungfu.”
7
TAKING A BEATING
Coach Cheng believed that before a fighter could learn how to win, he first had to master losing. He had to experience defeat after defeat until there was nothing new to it and thus nothing left to fear. The ideal Chinese kickboxer stepped onto the leitai with indifference, nonchalance—just another day on the job. It was an approach Coach Cheng felt crucial for me to develop, because the fear of physical confrontation left me paralyzed.
For my lessons on Zen and the Art of an Ass Whipping, Baotong was Coach Cheng’s jolly teaching assistant. While Baotong was not by inclination a particularly creative fighter—he preferred to fix his opponents with a quick side kick or a jab so he could chop at their torsos with massive roundhouse kicks, a limited approach that had kept him out of the top ranking in China—my helplessness inspired him to employ the full range of kickboxing techniques. After a few sessions banging me around with roundhouses, he grew restive and actually tried some throws, which worked so beautifully that he spiced it up with some spinning sweeps to great applause. Buoyed, he actually went back to the basics and started to throw kick and punch combinations, something he normally would have sneered at as being for those weak fighters who lacked his thunderous roundhouse kick.
And as he explored the wide variety of ways to pummel me, I became his best critic, a human punching bag with an analytic mind. He’d catch my leg and toss me across the room. And I’d get up and say, “Nice execution.” He’d level me with a thrusting kick to my chest and I’d shout out from the ground, “Real power. But maybe you want to try a straighter angle.”
As I learned to watch my devastations with an aesthetic detachment, my fear of losing started to fade. I’d wake in the morning wondering how I was going to lose that day. And I’d spend the evening massaging the various bruises that I wore like blue badges of courage, while replaying the bouts in my head, looking for opportunities missed. In the ring, I no longer bounced nervously on my toes, and I ran only when that roundhouse was aimed above my shoulders. When it came to being bullied I was already something of an expert, and under the tutelage of Baotong’s fists and feet I quickly became a master.
Switching from traditional forms to kickboxing was like finding love again after a bad relationship. All my vices were now virtues, all my flaws strengths. Instead of being too tall and awkward, I suddenly had a reach advantage. The simplicity of sanda’s techniques allowed me to focus all my attention on just a few moves.
And unlike those who view combat sports as brutal, I found sanda beautiful. The opposite of barbarism, I saw it as the height of civilization. A defined space with rules, judges, a referee, and two men, who have of their own free will volunteered to ask and answer one of the most basic questions men ask: Who is the better fighter with the better techniques? In this, I saw the leitai as no different from a courtroom (who has the better lawyer and legal arguments?) or a parliament (which side has the more persuasive politicians and policies?). Single combat has always been, according to the military historian John Keegan, the primitive but certainly less bloody way to resolve tribal conflicts short of total war (see also David v. Goliath, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, or, if you prefer beefcake, Troy). As far as I was concerned, barbarism was what happened outside the ring where inevitably it was the strong, relatively certain of victory, who attacked the weak. Stepping alone onto the platform, no matter how good you are, is always an act of courage because you can never be certain of the outcome. One foolish mistake, one lucky punch, and even the mightiest can fall.
Before anyone expected, I was ready for the next stage. Six weeks into my sanda training I shocked everyone.
We always had “sparring-only” days on Saturday mornings, because Sunday was our day off and we could use the time to nurse any injuries, usually strained shoulders, cuts along the forearms, and bruising on the shins and tops of the feet. On the sixth Saturday of my sanda training, I was in the middle of the ring with Baotong when he kicked me with one of his thunderous roundhouses to the chest. Instead of retreating, I stood my ground and kicked him with my roundhouse to the chest. He kicked me again. I kicked him back. We stood there and exchanged six or seven kicks before Baotong stepped back, a look of surprise in his eyes and a grin on his face, and bowed.
Amituofo.
I bowed back. We continued fighting, and he outscored me on points, but it was close, close enough that our teammates razzed him afterward about losing to the laowai.
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br /> After class, Coach Cheng asked me to come up to his room. He was silent for a long time, which I was used to, but this time he kept shaking his head like he was trying to work out a problem.
Finally, he said, “I don’t understand it. I just don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand, Coach?”
“I don’t understand how you could improve so quickly. Usually it takes years. I don’t know, maybe it’s because you’re a college student that you learn so fast.” He fell silent for several minutes before continuing, “China has a proverb, ‘The martial arts and cultural learning are two halves of the whole.’ So that must be it. You are a college student, so you grasp basic principles quickly.”
He shook his head again and fell silent. It was so quiet he could almost hear me purring.
Coach Cheng went to his desk, pulled out a rolled-up poster, and unfurled it. It was a poster for the Zheng Zhou International Wushu Festival, which would be held in September.
“Henan Province is the birthplace of kungfu and tai chi,” Coach Cheng said. “So the government throws a festival every two years to encourage tourism. Martial artists from dozens of countries come to compete. I want you to fight for me.”
“But Coach,” I said, “that is in less than eight months.”
The best sanda fighters in Shaolin had been training for at least eight years. Baotong was very good, but he wasn’t the best in China. I’d be lucky to survive one round with a nationally ranked Chinese fighter.
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