American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  “If you keep working as hard as you are and improving as rapidly, you will be ready.”

  It was completely crazy, so as a crazy laowai I agreed to do it. It was a great opportunity for Coach Cheng. Not only was I a beginner, I was a foreigner. If he could make me competitive at the national level in eight months, he’d establish himself as a miracle worker.

  BOOK FOUR

  APPRENTICE

  April–June 1993

  “A club hurts the flesh, but evil words hurt the bone.”

  —TRADITIONAL CHINESE PROVERB

  1

  HAPPY ENDINGS

  It only took five months of self-imposed celibacy before my libido went nuclear. One night it conspired with my subconscious to produce an erotic dream that was rather more, shall we say, “Grecian” than I had ever experienced previously. I’d like to say that I was such a mature, secure, liberal-minded guy that I wasn’t concerned when I awoke. But I was raised in a part of the country where it is strongly believed that if a man has to put something inside another man it had better be a bullet. As soon as I opened my eyes, a new list flashed in my head:

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Gay?

  Gay?!

  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but…) GAY?!?!

  That was it for my vow of celibacy. But there was just one tiny problem. There weren’t any women who wanted to have sex with me. Not any nearby, at any rate. Shaolin had at most a hundred women, and all of them were either underage, married, or otherwise spoken for. A couple of the waitresses at the Wushu Center restaurant might not have had beaus, but they would never sleep with me. As I had explained to Carlos, it would have been social death.

  But it wasn’t just the social stigma. It was also part of the legal code. Any Chinese woman found alone in a room with a laowaiafter midnight was automatically considered a prostitute and the foreigner her john. The laowai and the woman were fined $1,000 apiece, which in practice meant $2,000 to the foreigner because no Chinese woman had $1,000 on her. A Shaolin policeman had once told me with great relish the story of an Italian businessman who had made the mistake of bringing his Beijing girlfriend with him on a trip to Zheng Zhou. (The police in Beijing were lax about the law, because there were so many important diplomats and businessmen in the city.) The key girl on his hotel floor called the cops, and the businessman was $2,000 poorer.

  If late-night sex with a local was automatically considered prostitution, then the only answer was to skip the amateurs and go straight to a professional—during the day. Here I was in some luck to be a member of the sanda team. My teammates were not monks. They were jocks, and like jocks everywhere, they talked constantly about women and sex. When we ran up the mountain, we talked about women and sex. When we did drills, we talked about women and sex. The only times we weren’t talking about women and sex was when we were talking about sanda.

  Most of them were still virgins (they likewise suffered from the local shortage of women, if not the social and legal dilemmas I faced). But if anything, that made the subject of sex all the more fascinating to them. Especially because they had in their midst an honest-to-God American, a citizen of the country that gave the world Baywatch. They wanted to know everything I knew about women and sex, which admittedly wasn’t much, but was a great deal more than they did. In exchange, they would tell me what little they did know. One thing they knew was that the barbershop next to the Zheng Zhou International Hotel doubled as a massage parlor. Whether the female hairdressers’ services were limited to happy endings or if they included lie down dancing, they could not say, because none had ever gone. But they wanted more than anything else in the world for me to go and give them the vicarious details.

  After days of internal debate, I settled on the excuse that I would simply go to see what it was like. As a student and visitor, it was my job to learn about the culture. At the very least, it would make for a good story.

  Deeply conflicted, I opened the door to the barbershop next to the Zheng Zhou International Hotel. There was nothing to indicate it was anything other than a hair salon. Four barber chairs faced a wall-length mirror, a special basin for washing hair was at the far end of the salon, a cash register over a glass cabinet with hair products for sale was next to the door. A matronly Chinese woman stood behind the cash register. A young hairstylist, maybe twenty years old, stood next to her chair.

  After I sat down, the hairstylist asked, “Do you want your hair washed first?”

  “Okay.”

  She led me over to the basin in the corner of the room. With a certain amount of relief mixed with a dash of disappointment, I decided the massage-parlor rumors were either unfounded or I had stepped into the wrong salon.

  But then she started washing my hair. There was nothing overt about her technique. But my fevered brain, having spent way too long in an isolated monastery, inferred erotic intent in her proximity (too close), her touch (too sensuous), and her thoroughness (too long). By the time the wash was over, I already was light-headed. She led me by the hand back to her chair, as I shuffled with a jake leg waddle trying to hide the effect her hair washing technique had had on me. The list flashed in my head.

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Gay?

  Cowardly

  Still a boy/not a man

  Unattractive to the opposite sex

  As I settled back into the chair with some subtle readjusting, my stylist stood behind me and gently kneaded my shoulders. This was quite nice and necessary, but not really sufficient. If this was Henan’s idea of a massage parlor, I would need to arrange a trip to a coastal city.

  She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Would you like a massage?”

  Thinking she was asking me if I wanted her to continue rubbing my shoulders, I nodded.

  Just then a thirtyish harpie wearing too much makeup and too tight a sequined dress burst through the front door and upon seeing me started squawking like a molted macaw, “Laowai! Laowai! Laowai!” as she dashed across the room. She opened a door to a room in back and exited stage right. Now I knew that my teammates had been right.

  The facade shattered, my stylist led me by the hand to that back room. Here was the massage parlor half of the business. A windowless room with only one door. Nine flat beds, barely wide enough for an anorexic, sat next to nine chairs. Each pairing was divided by five-foot cubicle walls to the left and right. And the fluorescent lights were bright. The whole effect was about as erotic as a dentist’s waiting room—and less private. I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so, because it was completely empty. My stylists led me to the massage cube farthest from the door.

  Still the macaw did try to get a gander at what was happening as I lay down. She dashed down the row of cubicles, leaned her head around the final partition, and then fell back in mock disbelief. “Laowai! Laowai! Laowai!”

  My stylist leaned in close and said sotto voce, “You are lucky she was out to lunch, and you got me. Her character is very low. She would have cheated you.”

  This put me at ease. You haven’t really established a relationship with a Chinese person until they feel comfortable enough with you to bad-mouth one of their colleagues.

  I said, “I trust you will be very fair.”

  And with that bond established, she started massaging my shoulders. She wasn’t nearly as good at this as she was with the hair washing, but it would have been all right if she had just kept quiet. But now that we were fellow travelers she felt the need to unburden herself.

  “I’m new to the city,” she said. “I grew up on the countryside.”

  “Ah.”

  “You can’t trust city people. They are too jiaohua,” she said. “Slick.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not like the countryside. The people there are laoshi,” she said. “Honest.”

  “If you don’t like the city, why don’t you go back?” I asked.

 
This was a mistake. I had come here for a happy ending. Instead I received a depressing backstory.

  “I can’t go back. My father doesn’t understand me. He never listens to me. Does he ever consider what I want? His ideas are backward, but China is changing. He can’t accept it. He always says, ‘China was very poor, but we were equally poor.’”

  I sighed internally. There is no bigger turnoff than a woman talking about why she dislikes her father. If she can’t stand the man who helped create her, how long before she decides she hates me?

  After ten minutes more of why her father didn’t understand his massage-parlor daughter (apparently the sex industry is not the best place to find women with positive father/daughter relationships), she asked in a sad, hesitant voice, “Do you want to turn over?”

  I couldn’t go through with it. It was obvious she didn’t want me to say yes. But then again I didn’t want her to feel I was rejecting her, so I blurted out, “I can give you a backrub.”

  She looked at me like I was insane. I briefly considered trying to explain that in college, exchanging backrubs was the equivalent of a first date, but I didn’t think it would help things.

  “…or not.”

  “Perhaps I should cut your hair now,” she said.

  “Good idea.”

  When I returned to Shaolin, my teammates didn’t believe me when I told them I had gotten only a haircut.

  “The laowai is too jiaohua,” they said, laughing.

  2

  IRON CROTCH KUNGFU

  Being specialists, the Beijing wushu team had more gymnastic talent than the Shaolin Temple, and Wuhan’s kickboxing team was better in the ring than our sanda fighers, but considering the sheer range of martial arts displayed—from modern wushu to traditional forms, from kickboxing to iron kungfus—the Shaolin martial monks gave the best kungfu performances in the world. They were also the only live entertainment in town. So for months I had attended every single demonstration. But a steady diet of the same dish, no matter how rich, dulls the palate, and over time I was skipping more and more of their smaller performances, only attending the big shows they reserved for VIPs and foreign tour groups, where they pulled out all the stops. After several elaborate performances, I thought I had seen everything. The monks were as awesome as always, but it wasn’t fresh anymore.

  One night in March there was a huge buzz at dinner about an upcoming performance later that night. Prominent party officials from Beijing were bringing down a delegation of high-ranking German politicians to see the monks perform. Word was this would be the best performance yet. The Wushu Center had brought back some former monks to add their talents to the mix.

  As part of the festivities, the Henan provincial army regiment had sent its marching band to open the show. So by the time the monks started to perform, the hall was filled with members of the marching band, the politicos, and various locals who had heard rumors of a big show. The performance was amazing as always, but I didn’t lean forward until a monk I’d never seen before entered from a side door. He was not a pretty man. His face was acned, his cheeks too wide for his recessed jaw, his torso too short for his legs.

  The new monk walked into the center of the hall. He began with some qigong breathing exercises, the prelude to an iron kungfu demonstration. He was breathing in and out of his nose, and his hands roamed around his body. You can usually guess which extremity is about to take the abuse among iron kungfu masters because the hands will focus on that part of the body, directing the qi energy out of the palms and onto the limb in question as a kind of protective covering. This monk started with his neck, so I assumed he was an iron neck practitioner, of which there were a number in Shaolin. They usually stuck the points of spears into the notch in their throat that had so obsessed Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient and bent the spears in half. But after rubbing his neck, this monk moved his hands down and around his groin area. It was like a bad Chippendale impression. He kept at it long enough that there were soon some embarrassed coughs from the German contingent.

  Finally, to everyone’s great relief, he stopped massaging himself. Deqing came out onto the floor to invite audience members to participate in the demonstration. After all the crotch rubbing, the audience was understandably a little reluctant. Deqing pantomimed to the audience that they were invited to punch the monk in the throat. No one volunteered, and in fact most recoiled when Deqing entreated their section. To demonstrate that this was all perfectly safe and they had no reason to worry, Deqing walked back over to the monk, who had clenched his jaw to tighten the muscles around his neck, pulled back his fist and faster than the eye could follow popped the monk in the throat. I jumped out of my seat in awe. The throat is arguably the most vulnerable part of the human body. It takes very little force to break the trachea, a lethal blow. This is one reason fighters are always told to keep their chins down. (The other is because a blow to the chin—specifically the points about a centimeter to the left and right of the tip of the chin, known as the “button”—is one of the surest ways to be knocked unconscious.) Here was a man doing exactly the opposite, tipping his head back, holding his chin high, leaving his throat completely exposed, and inviting a free shot. His trachea’s only protection was the flexed neck muscles on either side of it. If something went wrong, he’d be dead, his last minutes on earth spent writhing on the floor like a fish on dry land, his brain desperate for oxygenated blood as his lungs, no longer able to access fresh air, filled with carbon monoxide.

  Deqing finally convinced one of the women from the marching band, a trumpet player, to come out on stage with a friend. They both, after much coaxing, made halfhearted attempts to punch him in the throat. They giggled and tried to return to their seats. Deqing stopped them. They were not done. Deqing wanted them to help demonstrate one more of the monk’s iron kungfu specialties.

  While the throat is the most vulnerable part of the human body, it is not, in the case of the male half of the species, the most tender. Deqing was asking these two women to stand in front of 400 people—including their direct army superiors, a collection of foreign diplomats, and a half-dozen national party officials—and kick a Shaolin monk in the nuts. Even Deqing was not fast enough to catch them as they fled to their seats, shaking their heads in horror.

  Deqing pleaded with others in the audience, but there were no takers. The Beijing officials were trying to push their German counterparts out of their seats, which they were gripping for dear life. None of them was foolish enough to risk the possibility of the international papers acquiring a photo of a German politician kicking a Chinese Buddhist monk in the balls. Deqing walked away from the Germans and returned to the monk, who calmly spread his legs and thrust his hips forward. Deqing slipped the shoe off his right foot, reared back and snapped a kick into the monk’s groin that was so vicious it literally lifted him off the ground.

  Without realizing it, I was up on my feet shouting in English, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

  Deqing saw me standing there like a fool. He motioned me over. I shook my head. I was intimately familiar with what being “racked,” as we called it on the playgrounds of Topeka, felt like. I wasn’t going to do that to another man, even if he were volunteering for it. Deqing took a couple steps toward me and motioned again with a sharper movement, his eyes narrowing, letting me know this wasn’t a request. I’d pay for a refusal during the next stretching session.

  Better him than me, I decided.

  Amituofo.

  The monk waited for me, legs spread, hips thrust out. I hauled back and let him have it, lifting him off the ground with the blow. He seemed completely unaffected by the kick. I could feel the top of my foot throbbing. His groin was harder than my foot.

  “Again,” Deqing said.

  Annoyed that I’d hurt myself, I kicked him again and again and again, trying to get some reaction. I lifted him off the ground—two inches, four inches, six—but the expression on his face never changed. Finally, I stopped. My foot w
as numb. The crowd erupted in applause. I bowed to him and turned to my seat, but Deqing stopped me and pointed to the monk’s throat.

  My first punch was self-conscious, fluttering with the fear that I might kill him. But it bounced harmlessly off his neck muscles, which felt like hardened rubber. My concern switched to annoyance: Was he smirking at me? The crowd began shouting. I’d give them a show. I threw a flurry of punches, right, left, right, left, right, knocking him back step by step with each blow. My last right flew a little high, however, landing smack on the button of his chin. The monk’s eyes flew wide with surprise. My eyes went wide with fear.

  “I’m sorry, master, extremely sorry, so very sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” I groveled, pressing my hands together and bowing.

  After a long pause, he said, “No problem,” and bowed back.

  His demonstration was over.

  The performance hall was rocking after the show, the atmosphere like there’d just been a last-minute championship victory by the home team. No one wanted to leave. Everyone wanted to talk about the star player’s mastery of one of mankind’s most primal fears. The monks and I gathered outside the hall to discuss the evening’s hero, who I decided to nickname, in tribute to John Hughes, “Long Duk Dong,” or “Monk Dong” for short.

  Little Tiger imitated Monk Dong’s routine: legs wide, hips forward, and popping up and down on his feet as if he were being kicked.

  “He was amazing,” Little Tiger said. “His penis must be made of stone.”

  As we laughed, Deqing tried to hush him, “Don’t use that word.”

  He seemed slightly miffed that Monk Dong’s performance had eclipsed his own.

  “Bao Mosi, what did you think?” Little Tiger continued.