American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

  As we walked into the courtyard, I saw a large stone roller and several boulders with ropes wrapped around them. The iron crotch method of strengthening Mr. Happy was not the one with which most teenage boys are so familiar. Monk Dong dropped his drawers, picked up the rope attached to the stone roller, and tied it to his Johnson. The roller looked like one of the wheels on Fred Flint-stone’s car. It must have weighed 500 pounds.

  With the rope running between his legs, Monk Dong leaned forward and pushed with his feet, trying to walk forward. The roller was stuck. The rope was so taut it vibrated. Monk Dong was grunting again, breathing heavily. And then, ever so slowly, the roller began moving forward, step by painful step. It was like watching a porno version of the World’s Strongest Man contest on ESPN2.

  Five steps into his penis-pull, I knew with certainty there was absolutely no way I was going to take up iron crotch kungfu. Even my masochism had its limits.

  After Monk Dong untied himself, I said, “Master, your skills are tremendous. However, I am afraid to eat so much bitterness. I am not a dedicated enough student. I would not want to waste your time.”

  “It would not be a waste.”

  “I’m sorry I would not be able to stand it. Tomorrow I should go back to Shaolin.”

  “I understand.”

  That evening Monk Dong’s mother fixed dinner for Tiger Man, Monk Dong, and me before retiring to her room. I’m not exactly sure what the food was, but the Chinese version of spam played an important role in the main dish. While I picked at my meal, my stomach still a little queasy from my up-close-and-personal look at iron crotch kungfu, Tiger Man retold all of his favorite grifter stories. My Chinese had improved dramatically over the last six months, but by the end of the day my mental translator would still get tired and slow down. When I realized I’d fallen several sentences behind in a conversation and needed to catch up, I’d often repeat, “Right, right, right” to be polite and cover up. Because Tiger Man was a blowhard, I’d stopped listening to him.

  “Right, right, right.”

  He must have assumed that I couldn’t understand Chinese very well, because after about twenty minutes, he turned to me, smiling and patting me on the shoulder as if he were about to pay me a compliment, and said in a pleasant voice, “Son, you really should listen more closely when your father speaks to you. You know I fucked your mother’s pussy, right?”

  Without missing a beat, I smiled back at him, “Right, right, right, my great-grandson. You know I fucked your eighteen generations, right?”

  His face fell, and Monk Dong fell off his chair laughing.

  For the rest of dinner, Monk Dong relived the moment, “You cursed him thinking he would not understand, but then he cursed you worse. That is too funny!”

  Tiger Man did not speak another word for the rest of the meal.

  Amituofo.

  The next day Monk Dong decided to join us on the thirty-minute bus ride to Anqing, where Tiger Man and I were to catch a bus back to Zheng Zhou. Feeling guilty about turning him down, I told Monk Dong he shouldn’t waste his day, but he said, “It’s something I should do.” The Chinese were very serious about sending off guests, often taking an entire day to make sure their visitors caught their transportation without trouble. Given the rickety and unpredictable nature of China’s transportation infrastructure at the time, and the number of very serious wrecks, it was a useful, as well as polite, custom. Monk Dong took us to the Anqing bus station and, after helping us buy tickets, said his good-byes.

  Anqing was the poorest city I had visited yet. The only visible industry was bicycle repair. For lunch, I bought some peanuts and looked for a Coke, but apparently in the soft-drink wars, Anqing had fallen to the Pepsi Empire. I sat down next to Tiger Man on a stone bench in the center of the outdoor bus station. Tiger Man had been very friendly since we left that morning—as if the embarrassment of the night before was totally forgotten, and it may well have been. Looking back at his behavior, I wonder if breaking all those bricks over his forehead hadn’t damaged his short-term memory.

  In a town this poor and this far away from the coasts, a laowai was still a big deal. From the way the people were drawn toward me, I assumed most had never seen one in the flesh before. They were not rude, just extremely curious. They gathered in a semicircle around me at a respectful distance. As I continued to eat, the crowd grew. I increasingly felt like a circus animal.

  After ignoring the fifty people quietly watching me eat for several minutes, I finally looked up and said in Chinese, “Hello. It is very nice to meet you.”

  A murmur rippled through the crowd: The foreigner speaks Chinese.

  An ancient woman pointed at my face and said something in the local dialect that I was unable to understand.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t understand you,” I said in Mandarin.

  She repeated herself.

  Smiling, Tiger Man said to me, “She wants to know if you are blind.”

  “Why?”

  “She has never seen blue eyes before. She wants to know if they are broken. She says you have the eyes of a ghost.”

  I stood up, put my arms out, and pretended to be blind. I fumbled toward her like a mummy. The crowd tensed. The ancient lady leaned backward, but had nowhere to go. Just in front of her, I stopped, put my hands on her shoulders, looked at her directly, and said, “I can see you, Grandmother.”

  That broke the spell. The peasants burst into laughter.

  The ancient lady smiled at me and said, “Naughty boy!”

  The crowd dispersed, and the peasants slapped each other on the back, retelling the story of the ghost-eyed laowai who’d given an old woman a scare by pretending to be blind.

  3

  GETTING SCHOOLED

  It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he’d like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us—at least partly—as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, “You don’t seem like an American.” When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, “Because you listen.”

  Once word got out that the laowai was pretty good at sanda, 10,000 Chinese martial artists suddenly had an American in their midst who they could smack in the face without going to jail for it—the right circumstances. I didn’t realize until later that Coach Cheng was acting as my gatekeeper. He turned away dozens of kickboxers who wanted a chance to spar with me. The first person to volunteer who Coach Cheng didn’t feel he could turn down was Coach Ming, one of the Wushu Center instructors who taught the Wushu Center’s Chinese students. They were of equal status.

  Coach Ming and all his fellow coaching buddies were waiting for me when I showed up for a Saturday morning sparring session during my second month. It is a little paranoia-inducing to suddenly discover that you are the student all the teachers want to beat up.

  As the match started, I was bouncing on my toes. Coach Ming looked like he was set in stone. He didn’t move when Coach Cheng clapped his hands to start the fight, and since I was the anxious one I attacked first with a front side kick.

  The one problem with a “reach advantage” is that longer limbs take longer to arrive at their target, and this is doubly true for beginning students. Because sanda allows for throws, slow attacks can be very dangerous. From the time Coach Ming noticed my foot leaving the ground to the time it was inches from his body, he could have sat down and stood back up again. Instead he waited stock still until my foot was almost touching him before flying into motion. He grabbed my ankle, stepped back to straighten out my leg, and then whipped it around and forward in a motion that looked like a man reaching back for a bucket of water and then throwing it on a fire.
When done properly, this throw creates a centripetal force that causes the throwee to go flying and spinning through the air like a helicopter without its tail rudder. Being a coach, he did it properly. I was airborne long enough to make two complete rotations before crashing to the floor.

  Coach Ming’s friends whooped it up.

  “That’s right. Show the laowai how it’s done!”

  “Did you see how the laowai flew?”

  “Beat him up!”

  “Show him who is the master and who is the student!”

  It was like being back on the playground.

  I tried to make my next kick, a roundhouse, so fast he couldn’t catch it. Instead it unfurled with the languorous pace of a fat man on a humid day. Before it arrived, I knew what was going to happen. Coach Ming grabbed my leg as he had the last time, spun me around again, and threw. Only this time as I was flying past him he stuck out his foot to trip my standing leg. The technique is used to put an opponent down hard and fast, and it did. This time I got up more slowly.

  It was the second throw that is taught to beginning students. This wasn’t a sparring match to him; it was a teaching seminar. This is what his friends found so funny. He was schooling me, literally. He wasn’t going to try to get inside my reach to attack with punches or kicks. He was simply going to sit back and wait for my kicks so he could run through the repertoire of sanda throws. It was a good strategy, but I had noticed a flaw on his previous throw. In his overconfidence he was failing to tuck his head when he grabbed my leg with both hands, a necessary precaution because otherwise the face is completely exposed.

  So this time when I kicked my slow roundhouse, instead of extending my hips, I kept them tucked to shorten my leg. Coach Ming grabbed it and stepped in to sweep my standing leg as I had anticipated, the third technique taught. With his hands around my leg, his face was defenseless. I torqued my hips and punched a right hook as hard as I could. I wanted to drive his nose into the back of his skull. Stunned, he failed to let go of my leg to protect his face. So I smacked him twice more before he backed away.

  Not wanting to give him any time to recover and change his strategy I kicked a slow, short roundhouse again. He caught the leg exactly as he had before. And exactly as before I punched him hard three times in the face. Blood sprayed from his mouth and nose.

  This time when he let go, his shock bordered on panic. His eyes darted around the room trying to reconfirm that this was the world he grew up in and not some parallel universe where laowai are miraculously able to defeat Chinese kungfu coaches. He bent his knees, testing gravity. He looked out the window and found the sky still blue. He cranked his neck to make certain his fellow instructors were still with him. They were, but they were laughing at him now, which proved the principle of face and shame still held in this universe. With downcast eyes, he raised his arms toward Coach Cheng to indicate he’d had enough.

  I could hear his friends continue to laugh at him as they walked away. But none of them ever challenged me. That was the first and last time a Wushu Center coach asked to spar with me.

  4

  THE SIXTH RACE

  As the birthplace of Zen Buddhism and kungfu, Shaolin had become a major stop on most Far East truth-seeking package tours geared for Westerners: a week bathing in the Ganges with your Hindu guru, fourteen days of silence in a Nepalese monastery, several sessions of Zen and the Art of Archery in Kyoto, a trek to Tibet, kungfu with the Shaolin monks.

  Over time I grew used to this type of laowai and came to appreciate their relative value in buttressing my self-esteem. Compared to them, I was the model of sanity. There was the Belgian woman who spoke to the dead. She claimed she had to leave Shaolin because so many of the souls in the vicinity had died violent deaths and were still seeking revenge. Then there was the Swiss couple that spent half the year collecting welfare benefits at home to pay for their search for inner peace in East Asia. The Shaolin segment of their journey ended after the third night when the husband tied one on and gave his wife a black eye. But the absolute king of the wacko spiritual tourists was a Finn named Mikael.

  Nearly four months after my Spanish friend Carlos’s departure, Little Tiger rushed into my room to tell me another foreigner had arrived in the village, a young man about my age.

  I asked the only question I needed answered.

  “Does he speak English?”

  “I don’t think so, because he didn’t respond when I said to him, ‘Fucka ah youah, madafacka.’”

  “Little Tiger, I told you not to use those bad words with strangers.”

  “I couldn’t help myself. I have no one to practice them with except you.”

  As acting president and only member of Shaolin’s laowai welcoming committee, I decided to find out if this foreigner spoke English, as all good foreigners should.

  “What is his room number?”

  “He is not staying at the Wushu Center. He is at the Shaolin Kungfu Academy.”

  “Which one is that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of it.

  “It is far west of the temple. Come, I will take you.”

  I was so excited at the possibility of another English-speaker that I didn’t even notice all the “Hallo”s and “Look, a laowai”s directed at me on the tourist-jammed road.

  I’d never visited the Shaolin Kungfu Academy before. It was as small as its name was big—just a single stone dormitory with a couple dozen Chinese students practicing outside it. They pointed to a room on the first floor, knowing whom I had come to see. Outside the room was a flatbed truck with four Chinese movers wrestling an upright piano to the ground. I poked my head into the room. In the middle of it was a less skinny version of me: my age and my height with brown hair and light eyes. When he turned to look at me, I could see his eyes were green, not blue, but otherwise the similarity was striking, particularly after being the only white man in town for so long.

  I felt like pointing at him and saying in Chinese: “Look, a laowai. So tall. Too tall.”

  Instead, I said in English, “Hi, I’m Matt.”

  “Nice to meet you. Mikael,” he replied with a very faint northern European accent.

  I smiled. “I’m sorry to barge in on you. I was just excited to hear there was another Westerner in town. Your arrival has doubled our numbers.”

  His expression didn’t change, and his piercing green eyes stayed fixed on me without blinking. I grew afraid he might know only a few English phrases. But as I quizzed him about where he was from and what he was doing in Shaolin, it became clear that he was fluent.

  Mikael had been living and studying kungfu in Beijing for the past year. He had grown bored with his training there and decided to move to Shaolin. His teacher had not been happy about it, but had arranged for him to study with a former Shaolin monk who lived in a town just west of the Shaolin village. When I asked him why he wasn’t staying at the Wushu Center, because it was illegal for laowai to live anywhere else, he said the Wushu Center was a rip-off and he didn’t think he’d have a problem. He didn’t mind the spartan living conditions of the Shaolin Kungfu Academy. All he needed was his piano.

  As we were getting acquainted, the movers were valiantly trying to drag the upright piano into one corner of the tiny room. I had been studiously avoiding any mention of it, the pink elephant in the room, because it was such a bizarre thing to bring to Shaolin and did not portend well. But he brought it up, so I asked him.

  “Where did you get a piano in Henan?”

  “I bought it in Beijing.”

  “You had a piano transported from Beijing to Shaolin?”

  “It wasn’t very expensive.”

  “But there’s not even a highway connecting Beijing and Zheng Zhou, just back roads.”

  “Yes, I’ll need to retune it. But I love having music around me.”

  The movers had finally placed the piano where Mikael wanted it. He sat down in front of it and whipped off a better than average rendition of some classical piece I knew I should recognize
but didn’t. My own piano career, which I tried not to think about very often, had been a short and bitter affair that ended at age eleven. Watching a Finn play his piano in a Shaolin kungfu school in the middle of East Bumfuck, China, was so disconcerting I felt like I had vertigo. As soon as I had listened long enough not to seem rude, I excused myself and invited him to visit me when he settled in.

  Mikael visited my room that night, sat down across from me, and, without any preamble, immediately launched into his pitch.

  “Matt, have you heard of the sixth race?”

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t. What is it?”

  “Up until this point in time there have been five evolutions in human consciousness. Were you aware of that?” he asked, staring at me with his piercing green eyes—guru eyes, I thought—and blank expression.

  “Um, no, I must have missed the meeting. So you’re saying that we are the fifth race of humanity?”

  “Exactly. But the sixth race is coming soon. Human consciousness is about to evolve again, creating the sixth race.”

  “I see,” I said, my heart sinking.

  “Not everyone will evolve, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “It is Spiritual Darwinism.”

  “You mean like Social Darwinism but without the Nazis?” I said, hoping he might laugh and reveal that this was some sort of joke, a Scandinavian version of a put-on.

  He didn’t.

  “The sixth race will possess a higher state of consciousness. People will be able to read each other’s thoughts, so there will be no more miscommunication. Without miscommunication, there will be no more violence, no more war.”

  “Really? I would think that knowing what other people actually thought about you would make violence more likely, not less.”

  “No, the sixth race will exist in a higher state of consciousness, where all those ugly thoughts will be gone. We will see that we are not separate individuals but connected at the same source.”