“My foot is bruised,” I said.
“He’s invulnerable. He could go into a fight like this,” Little Tiger said, spreading his legs farther and tipping his head back as he walked forward.
“Do you practice iron crotch kungfu?” I asked Deqing.
“Oh no, I’m not crazy,” Deqing laughed.
“How does he do it?” I asked.
Deqing turned to Monk Chen, who was an older instructor at the school, somewhere in his midthirties. He had been my teacher for several weeks and was the kindest monk at the temple, always smiling, always helpful. The only thing that seemed to bother him was his expanding waistline, which he was always trying to reduce with little success.
“Teacher Chen, you lived with him for several weeks, right?” Deqing asked.
Chen burped a short embarrassed laugh.
“Yes, we were roommates when we toured in Europe. Every morning he gets up and puts his thing and its two friends on the desk and then—WHAP! WHAP!—he smacks it with his hand. Too weird, too weird. Thirty minutes every day. Think about waking up every morning to that. Too weird, too weird.”
At the other end of the hallway, there was a small group of women from the army marching band. I had been watching them out of the corner of my eye as we were talking about Monk Dong. They were having an animated discussion about the same subject. After several minutes, the group collectively pushed one of the women, the trumpet player Deqing had convinced to punch Monk Dong in the throat, in our direction. She walked toward us slowly with her head down.
Stopping just outside our group, she whispered a question. Deqing asked her to repeat herself. She asked again in a quavering voice, “Is it real?”
“Is what real?” Deqing asked her politely.
“Him, what he did…his thing…is it real?” Deqing looked confused.
I couldn’t help myself, “She wants to know if his penis is real.”
All the boys cracked up. The girl covered her face with her hands and ran off in embarrassment. It was the high school locker room all over again.
Chen shook his head at me with a fatherly smile, “Bao Mosi, you shouldn’t talk like that.”
“She just wants to know if his penis is real,” I said. “Think of what kind of lovemaking master he must be. He could do it standing up without using his arms. How much weight do you figure he can lift with that thing?”
As I demonstrated the concept, Chen kept shaking his head at me, trying not to laugh out loud. The rest of the monks, particularly Little Tiger, were in hysterics.
“You are all naughty boys,” Chen said.
The trumpet player had stopped halfway down the hall, trapped between the two groups, unable to go back without an answer but too embarrassed to ask us again. Finally, the need to know won out.
She returned to ask again, “Is it real? Is it real? Is it real?”
“How are we supposed to know if his penis is real?” I said. “Why don’t you take a look and tell us?”
This was too much for her. She ran back to her friends, as the naughty boys continued to snicker and giggle.
My Catholic guilt kicking in, I looked over at the group of women to see if the trumpet woman was okay. The women were leaning toward her as she recounted what had happened. Several minutes later Monk Dong walked out of one of the back offices and straight into this group of clucking hens. He smiled at them as he continued to walk forward. But as if operating with a single communal brain, all of them surrounded him and the most incredible thing in a night of amazing things happened: The women started—at first tentatively and then with more urgency—to touch him, his arms, his chest, his back, with reverence and fear, like they were trying to confirm that he was real, a man of this world and not some resurrected deity. It was both erotic and spooky, particularly the fact that Monk Dong was smiling pleasantly as if this happened to him all the time.
After lolling for a stint in a crowd of awed women, Monk Dong finally pulled away from his worshippers and made his way to us. I made sure to apologize to him again for hitting him in the face when I saw that his chin was still red from where I’d punched him.
“No problem,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “You’ve got a strong punch, but no problem.”
I apologized again. Not only were his crotch and neck impervious, I had hit him with my best right punch right on the knockout button and he had barely moved. There was no way to hurt this guy, short of shooting him.
Then he startled me by asking, “Would you like to learn iron crotch kungfu?”
“Hmm, that’s a very interesting proposal,” I hedged, trying not to imagine mornings spent punching the family jewels. “I will have to think about it.”
“You are staying here tonight. So am I. Let us talk more.”
As we walked away, I looked back at Deqing. I felt a little sluttish running after the latest kungfu expert, but Monk Dong was too intriguing to ignore.
Later that night we went to his room. It was unusual for visiting monks to be put up in the hotel; they usually had to stay with friends. Clearly, the Wushu Center was giving him the star treatment. Monk Dong asked me what the focus of my training was. I told him I was studying sanda.
“With your height, that is good. Sanda was one of my specialties. Have you ever been to Anhui Province?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I’m from there. I’m leaving tomorrow for home. Do you want to make the trip with me? Even if you don’t want to learn iron crotch, I can show you some sanda techniques.”
I readily agreed. Anhui Province was where Pearl S. Buck had set her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Good Earth, and I hadn’t visited it yet.
The next morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a door open down the hallway, followed by some whispered conversation. I cracked my door open and peeked my head out.
Walking down the hall was the trumpeter from the marching band who had asked us the big question. She was leaving Monk Dong’s room. She froze when she saw me. She thought about turning around, but the staircase was at the other end of the hallway.
As she walked past, the devil made me say, “So, miss, was it real?”
She ran the rest of the way to the staircase.
When I went to meet Monk Dong, I was surprised to find that Tiger Man was with him and obviously prepared to travel with us. I didn’t think Tiger Man had any friends.
I had met him a month earlier. I had been in the practice hall with some of the monks when Tiger Man showed up unannounced. Everything about him was outsize—his head, his body, his bulbous nose. So was his personality. Upon seeing a laowai, he dropped down in front of me and launched into an Ali-like rap about his greatness.
“I am the best martial artist in Shaolin,” he proclaimed. “You’re American? I was just touring in America. They loved me. They’d never seen anyone like me before. I once fought fifty men and beat them all.” Each time he said the word “I” he would jab his huge nose with his huge thumb.
I looked over to Deqing to see if this guy was for real. Deqing rolled his eyes. Tiger Man continued on with his “I am this, I am that” monologue for thirty minutes before growing annoyed with my failure to fawn over him. He jumped up and launched into his unique version of Tiger form to demonstrate his great skill. After he finally left, Deqing told me he got the nickname Tiger Man because the Tiger form was the only one he knew. His only other skill was breaking bricks over his huge forehead. That afternoon he had broken five for my benefit.
Tiger Man was Shaolin’s buffoon and con man, proof that the nuts Shaolin attracted weren’t just foreigners. He had hoodwinked the organizer of the American tour into giving him a spot. He had also conned some of the Shaolin’s younger students into teaching fees. When they discovered he didn’t know any kungfu beyond Tiger form and brick breaking, they chased him out of the village. Deqing described with great delight the scene of a dozen teenage boys running after the giant as he fled town.
As a con artist, Tiger Man wasn’t
unique. The transition from communism to capitalism had given rise to a large number of grifters. Salaries at state-run industries had remained relatively fixed for years, but inflation was running at 10 to 15 percent and the country was being flooded with all those tempting Western goods: microwaves, stereos, refrigerators, computers, home karaoke machines, mopeds, cars, and, most desirable of all, cellular phones—called in Chinese dage da (big brother big) because Motorola cell phones circa 1992 were the size of bricks. Class differences had returned with a vengeance, and the working class was being squeezed at the same time it was being tempted with a lifestyle it couldn’t afford. To bridge the gap many were leaving their state-industry jobs to start their own businesses, a terror-filled act captured by the Chinese phrase that they used to describe it—xia hai, diving into the ocean.
The more criminally inclined chose to become pianzi (con men, tricksters). It was their only reasonable option in a country without guns and with a government that practiced a true “zero tolerance” policy toward violent offenders. The root of pianzi—pian (to con, to trick)—was one of the most frequently used and pungent words in conversation. If someone didn’t believe what you’d just said, they’d ask, “Are you pian me?” The proper response was: “Why would I want to pian you?” You could always pick out the grifter, because his pitch was inevitably punctuated with the phrase, “I wouldn’t pian you”—the Chinese equivalent of “trust me.” Tiger Man used the phrase ad nauseum.
But the most fascinating thing about that first conversation with Tiger Man was that he had flagrantly violated China’s taboo about tooting your own horn. According to a traditional Chinese proverb, “An able person does not boast. A boaster is not able.”
Whereas in America most conversation between strangers getting to know each other begins with a recitation of their résumés—occupation, education background, accomplishments—in China, conversations began with you complimenting the person you’ve just met as extravagantly as possible and your new acquaintance deflecting those compliments as self-effacingly as possible. There were several options for false modesty: straight denial like “No, no, no, my Chinese is terrible,” a general rejection of flattery such as “No need to be polite,” or the classic, “Where? Where? Where?”—as if the flattery must have been aimed in a direction other than yours.
(When Mao Zedong’s attractive wife first visited America, the American translator said to her in Chinese, “You are very beautiful.” She replied, “Where? Where? Where?” Not understanding this was a generic response, he answered, “Your face is beautiful, your eyes, your body, um, your hands.”)
In China, bragging was a tag-team affair. Your friends would introduce you to strangers you wanted to impress with extravagant praise, which allowed you to humbly deny everything—“Where? Where? Where?” Then when your friends needed to impress someone, you took your turn bragging about them, so they could act humble. I had assumed that Tiger Man did his own bragging because he didn’t have any friends who would take up the assigned role. But Monk Dong had traveled with him during the American tour, and they had apparently struck up an odd sort of camaraderie: the star and the fool, both outcasts in a way.
Whatever the reason, I was stuck on a very long bus, then train, then bus again ride with Tiger Man, who was in full form the entire trip. In the old days, Shaolin warriors often traveled with a blanket wrapped around a kungfu staff strapped to their back. Tiger Man, who wore the orange robes and kept his head shaved despite the fact that he wasn’t a Shaolin monk, carried a rolled, laminated, three-by-five-foot enlarged photo of himself with one of China’s top-ranking politicians. I didn’t recognize who it was, but he must have been important, because whenever we changed transport Tiger Man unfurled his poster and proudly displayed it to the peasants who were traveling with us. They all seemed impressed. Tiger Man would tell them how he had performed in Beijing and so thrilled this important comrade that he had personally requested they take a photo together. (Somehow I doubt this politician was carrying a laminated photo of Tiger Man.) This would lead naturally to a riff on his deep guanxi with national party officials, and not content to merely imply that he was a man who could get things done, he would spell it out.
“All of you agree that most people you meet mei you yong,” Tiger Man said. “Have no usefulness.”
In a country where even the simplest task was complicated by yards of red tape, this was one of the harshest things you could say about someone.
“True, true, true,” one farmer said.
“Not me, my friends. I have benshi,” he continued. “The talent to get things done.”
After this set piece, he would edge toward whomever he thought was the richest and focus his attention on him, promising the man he could help him with whatever he might need—for a reasonable fee to be discussed later, of course. During lulls between performances, he would sit next to me and tell me detailed stories about the many times he’d conned businessmen out of money. After each story, he’d ask me if I needed anything done for a reasonable fee, his eyes big and innocent, completely convinced of his own sincerity. I’d stare at him in amazement until he became self-conscious again, a shiftiness creeping back into his eyes. Then he’d turn away from me and launch into another one of his public routines. It was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen. He reminded me of a common Chinese saying: “To trick others, trick yourself first.”
It was a fifteen-hour trip. By the end, we were both having difficulty pretending we could stand each other.
At Tongling, the capital of Anhui Province, we left the train to catch a bus to Anqing. Monk Dong’s home was located somewhere between the two cities. I thought we had finally arrived when he asked the bus driver to stop and we all got off. After walking for fifteen minutes, we reached a small house. An attractive woman—his wife?—bounded out, insisting we stay. Monk Dong demurred. We had to be going. Her son clung shyly to his mother’s leg. Monk Dong pinched the boy’s high cheekbones and pockmarked face. It took another hour’s worth of promises to return soon before Monk Dong pulled away from his baby’s mama.
We went back to the main highway and flagged down another bus and rode for another half hour or so, before the whole scene repeated itself like some Chinese version of Big Love. This time it was a daughter with high cheekbones and bad skin. One of the rumors about iron crotch kungfu was that the practice of it made a man impotent. Clearly not. Before the afternoon was over we visited two more of his families. Monk Dong was the Sir James Goldsmith of Anhui Province. Although China had a draconian one-child-per-family policy, Monk Dong had apparently decided to circumvent the rule by having one child with multiple women, restoring the feudal Chinese custom of polygamy. As I stood back with Tiger Man, watching Monk Dong pull away from another woman, I realized what the connection between the two men was: they were both pianzi.
It was not until we reached the fifth home and a fifth woman walked out to greet him that I knew our long trip was blessedly over. The woman was his mother. Mama’s boys tend to have problems with serious romantic commitments.
Located in the countryside about thirty minutes from Anqing, Dong’s home was palatial by Chinese standards: a five-bedroom brick ranch house. I tried to imagine how a man whose primary skill set was an iron crotch made enough money to support five families.
I had my answer that afternoon. He was a kungfu star. Monk Dong had built his own martial arts academy on land near his home. It was common for former Shaolin monks to open schools in their hometowns, proof of Shaolin’s continued influence on Chinese society. But this was a major operation. There were about 500 students practicing outside a large barn.
After Monk Dong conferred with the instructors he had left in charge, we had a sanda class. He worked diligently on my front side kick for a couple of hours. As we were walking back to the house, he popped the question.
“I could teach you iron crotch kungfu.”
“You are too kind,” I said.
“For $2,000.”
Amituofo.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I hedged.
That night I weighed the pros and cons. On the positive side, iron crotch kungfu seemed to be the Chinese equivalent of Spanish fly, an aphrodisiac so strong women found even ugly men attractive. It would also make me impervious in a fight. On the other hand, if anyone back home found out about it, I’d be forced into therapy. I kept imagining the look on the psychiatrist’s face when he heard I pounded my privates every day before breakfast. Ka-ching!
And yet, what a party trick.
The next morning I woke up to the sound of a man grunting. I walked into the hallway. The sound was coming from Monk Dong’s room. Was he having sex with yet another woman? The door was slightly ajar. Overcome with curiosity, I peeked through the crack.
Monk Dong, naked from the waist down, had placed his testicles on a wooden desk. At regular intervals, he brought down the palm of his right hand hard on his sack. He smacked and grunted. I winced.
After a particularly brutal blow, I involuntarily shouted out in English, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
He turned to look right at me, and I slunk away in shame. A couple of minutes later, Monk Dong knocked on my door. I expected the worst, but he wasn’t bothered at all.
“I was just finishing my morning practice,” he said. “Come, I will show you the rest.”
As we walked back to an empty courtyard, Monk Dong carefully explained that hardening the groin with daily blows was just one part of iron crotch kungfu. Another key was strengthening the muscles in the area. He was able to contract his muscles, actually pulling his testicles up inside his body. So when I was kicking him at the performance, I was actually striking the muscles in the area. In effect, he was able to turn himself into a living Ken doll.
This took care of the balls, he told me. But there was still “the penis problem”—a subject with which I was well acquainted from my friendship with several women’s studies majors in college. To avoid damage, he always taped the little man to his belly before a performance to prevent any painful rebounding between blow and body. This was necessary but not sufficient—strengthening exercises were also required.
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