“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
Wrestler #1 looked me dead in the face and then turned away. He knew what Long Spear was doing, too, and he refused to take the bait. He was the big man on campus, and he wasn’t going to show deference to some random laowai. Long Spear was annoyed but couldn’t think how to rescue the situation.
Feeling obliged to Long Spear’s hospitality, I said, “Big Brother, I have heard so much about you, I asked Long Spear to introduce us. Everyone says you’re the most important man on campus. I want to throw a banquet in your honor.”
Picking up the lead, Long Spear said, “Yes, we can invite your entire team and my wushu team.”
This elicited a grudging smirk, but Wrestler #1 still wouldn’t look at us.
“Wednesday,” he said.
And with that we were dismissed.
Long Spear invited me to the school cafeteria for lunch. The students were university age, but the place reminded me of high school. Tables in the school cafeteria were divided by team-based cliques. The boys talked of fighting and rivalries. The girls on the wushu team were the Heathers—pretty, popular, and mean. The level of sexual tension and physical rivalry was high. Compared to Wuhan, Shaolin was a sea of tranquillity.
That afternoon, Long Spear took me to the kickboxers’ practice room. It had the sweaty feel of an old-time boxing gym. In the center of the room was the leitai. Two heavyweights were banging on each other with thunderous claps of punches and kicks. They had muscles on their muscles. They looked as juiced as Barry Bonds.
Long Spear brought the Champ over to meet me, explaining why I was here. We exchanged pleasantries as we checked each other out physically, a habit among sanda fighters, looking for weaknesses. The Champ didn’t have any. His body was the perfect shape: height about five foot ten, legs slightly bulkier than his torso, not an ounce of extra fat on him. He looked at me, measuring the length of my legs. He saw my weakness: With such long legs on a six-foot-three frame, I had a high center of balance, which made me particularly vulnerable to throws. The Champ knew I knew what he was looking at. In a flash he ducked down, grabbed me around the waist and lifted me like a feather into the air.
“You have to protect against that,” he said when he’d set me down.
It was a free lesson and also a psyche job. It worked on both levels.
“Thank you,” I said just once. “I will try.”
We sat on a bench. The Champ cracked open the Sprite I had brought to give him. He was warm with no affectation. National champions in sanda were invariably the nicest martial artists I met in China. They were the best and had nothing to prove, but the sport had little fame and no money to swell their heads. The Champ had studied at Taguo before graduating to Wuhan. We discussed mutual acquaintances. After the appropriate interval, he excused himself to return to practice. I stayed to watch. The Wuhan team was awesome. Their skill level was light-years beyond mine.
At Chinese banquets, the seating is always precise. As the honored guest, Wrestler #1 took his seat at one end of the long table, and as host I took mine at the other. The wushu team sat on one side, with Long Spear seated next to Wrestler #1. The wrestlers sat on the opposite side.
I observed all the formalities. I opened with two toasts. The first to the friendly relations between our two great nations. The second to Wrestler #1, who had so graciously welcomed me to Wuhan. Then I grabbed four shot glasses and walked around the table to Wrestler #1 and toasted him twice. But Wrestler #1 refused to be impressed. This was all his due. As plates of food filled the table, Long Spear tried to warm Wrestler #1 up, whispering into his ear, but he was annoyed with Long Spear’s scheming.
As the banquet was drawing down, Long Spear looked glum, and Wrestler #1 looked ready to leave. The beer and baijiu had flowed and the participants were getting bleary. I felt a duty to save the evening for Long Spear. I had a pretty good idea of the temper of the attendees. They were jocks, so I decided to tell the one dirty joke I knew in Chinese. It was a Hail Mary pass.
“Listen up, listen up,” I said. “I have a joke I learned in Beijing. You want to hear it?”
“Yes,” Long Spear shouted.
“Okay, there was this Beijing girl named Little Fang. And let me tell you, this was one horny girl. I mean she really needed it. All the time. She exhausted her poor boyfriend. Well, one day she and her boyfriend take a miandi bus [a van where everyone sits in a circle facing each other] to go shopping. There’s only one seat available. So her boyfriend takes it, and she sits on his lap. Well, you know how the roads are. She is bouncing up and down,” I said, bouncing up and down on my seat as if I were Little Fang and my chair the boyfriend.
There was dead silence around the table. They had no idea how to react to a laowai telling a dirty joke in Chinese. Having passed the point of no return, I continued.
“Pretty soon, she begins to feel her boyfriend’s excitement. And this drives her crazy with desire. But what can she do with everyone watching? Per usual she’s a wearing a skirt but no panties. So slowly, ever so slowly, she inches up her skirt, reaches around, pulls out her boyfriend’s member, and puts it inside her without anyone noticing. But wouldn’t you know it? The bus hits a long patch of smooth road. His thing is in her, but she can’t move without someone realizing what is happening. She is going insane. What do you think she does next?” I asked the table.
Dead silence.
“She leans over to the man across from her and says”—I lifted myself off the chair about five inches, looked at one of the wrestlers, and said in my best imitation of a high-pitched Chinese girl—“‘Sir, where are you traveling to?’”
I sat back down, then lifted myself up five inches, looked at one of the wushu team members, and said in the same falsetto, “‘Grandmother, where are you going?’” Back down. Back up. “Where are you going?” Back down. I was riding the chair, reverse cowboy position, faster and faster. Up. “Where are you going?” Down. Up. “Where are you going?” Down.
Imitating Little Fang as she finally reaches her climax, I clapped my hands and squealed, “We are all going there! We’re all going there! We’re all going there! So good! So good! So good!”
For a moment as I finished the joke the only sound was of breaths being sucked in, and then Wrestler #1 exploded out of his chair, raised his beer glass, and shouted, “Good! Good! The laowai is good!”
As he started howling, the laughter rolled over the table, knocking some of the boys off their chairs. Wrestler #1 had to wipe tears from his eyes.
For the rest of the night, I was the most popular guy at the table. Even Wrestler #1 brought four shots around to my seat to toast me personally.
At some point I wandered outside to take a leak. Not able to find an outhouse, I settled for a tree. Moonface wandered out to do the same. As we stood in the dark, he said, “That was so funny, so funny. ‘We’re all going there.’ So funny.”
“Where? Where? Where?” I said.
He didn’t speak for a few seconds, as if considering a new thought, and then whispered under his breath, “I wish I were you.”
6
PRIDE AND PENANCE
By May, our Saturday-morning sparring class had acquired such a regular audience that it had been moved to the performance hall. When I walked in one Saturday morning, I found a sanda coach from Taguo sitting in the front row. Coach Cheng had a slightly embarrassed smile on his face when he told me that the Taguo coach wanted to fight me. Given Taguo’s reputation as a sanda powerhouse and its rivalry with the Wushu Center, this coach should have been challenging either Coach Cheng or our team’s best fighter, who was Baotong. Wanting to fight me was a cheap stunt. And as I looked at the softness of the Taguo coach’s belly and the rings around his bloodshot eyes from too many nights of drinking, I could picture him last night with his buddies talking about how he was going to beat up the American. He thought of me as an easy way to recapture his glory days.
As I told Coach Cheng I would do it, I
went cold inside. It was like all the emotion had drained out of my body. Usually before a match I felt a gut-wrenching mixture of fear, dread, and anxiety. But for the first time, I knew with absolute certainty that I wasn’t merely going to win this fight. I was going to crush him.
After putting on gloves and a cup, we both walked into the center of the hall. Coach Cheng clapped his hands together and stepped back.
I had become used to my opponents calmly waiting for me to attack first. Instead, the Taguo coach charged me like a bull, opening with a roundhouse kick directed at my left thigh and followed by a series of left and right hooks. I backpedaled, bouncing and circling around to my right, keeping my head beyond his reach. Ferocity was one of the aspects of a kickboxer that Coach Cheng felt I lacked. I was too calculated, too cerebral. “Ferocity at the right moment can overwhelm your opponent,” he had told me. “Turn his legs weak with fear.”
The Taguo coach charged again, yelling and swinging for the fences, throwing everything he had into each punch. As I backpedaled again, jabbing and retreating, I felt like smiling. Chinese kickboxers rarely open with punches, preferring to kick first because of the greater range. But the legs are the first thing to go with age. At Shaolin, most kickboxers’ careers were over by the age of twenty-five. The Taguo coach had to be at least thirty and his legs were shot. He had half the weapons I did, which was why he was trying so hard to end the fight as quickly as possible.
His punches came in combinations of five and then he had to rest for a second to catch his breath before launching into another flurry. By the fourth flurry, I was backpedaling and waiting for this pause. This time I reversed direction and feinted a left side kick to misdirect his attention. It worked, and his head and hands dropped to prepare a defense. Instead of attacking with the left, I planted and turned on it, coming around with a high right-roundhouse kick. Coach Cheng had taught us to work on the high and low planes, because it is mentally difficult to process attacks at different heights: fake high, attack low; fake low, attack high.
The Taguo coach didn’t see it coming. This is the most dangerous type of attack because the body and mind don’t have time to flinch and prepare for contact. The kick landed flush across the left side of his face. His eyes glazed and rolled back up into his head. His body stiffened with the onset of unconsciousness, and he fell like a tree in the forest, hitting the ground hard.
What does it feel like to hit another man so hard you knock him out? It feels like Christmastime. The joy was so pure, so primal I felt like I was glowing. Male violence isn’t an aberration; we are hardwired to enjoy it.
The joy was diminished slightly as I watched the Taguo coach regain consciousness after his head hit the mat. The impact woke him up. Once he was back on his feet, he quickly charged me again, swinging with everything he had left. After two flurries, I reversed course, and the scene repeated itself. I faked with the left and followed up with a right roundhouse kick that caught him unaware and momentarily knocked him unconscious. He hit the ground and woke up again. He attacked. I feinted and kicked. The eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the ground a third time. A grudging respect filtered through my frozen veins. He was tough.
But the third time was enough. When he stood, his shoulders were slumped. He raised his arms and walked away.
I paced back and forth with the regret of unfinished business. My kicks were too weak. Had I landed one with real power, he should have stayed down. I wanted another shot at him.
But when I looked at him, I saw him sitting all alone on a chair near the exit. He hadn’t brought an entourage, and no one would go near him, like he was infected with failure. The devastation of the loss was vivid in his face and posture. I felt a pang of pity for him. I went over to try to console him.
“You are very tough,” I said.
“No, no, no, I am no good anymore.”
“No, you are very strong. You kept standing back up.”
“No, no, no, you are a great fighter,” he said. “You kept knocking me down.”
“It was just a lucky kick. It can happen to anyone.”
After I said that he looked up at me with this unexpected expression, an odd combination of neediness and admiration that repelled me.
“You must be the greatest fighter in America,” he said.
That’s when I stuck the shiv into him.
“Oh no, I am not,” I said. “There are many, many, many fighters in America who are better than me.” The blade was long and my aim was true. The last little bit of self-respect drained from his face. I had stripped away the only face-saving excuse he could think of, and he sat there completely naked of any pride.
I was so shocked at what I had done that I literally backed away from him in horror. I hadn’t actually felt any sympathy for him. I realized I had only tricked myself into thinking that so I could go over and soften him up for the final strike.
The difference between a man and a monster is demarcated by moral lines, and I’d drawn mine around the leitai. In that instant, I’d crossed over, becoming the thing I had hated most, a bully, looking for weakness and feeding on it. I was the villain. Most physical wounds heal, but those to the pride rarely do.
In his case, they didn’t. Twice more over the next two months, I entered the performance hall to find him sitting there. He wanted a rematch, a shot at redemption. Each time I refused him, and he left. The first time I told myself it was an act of mercy. I knew as certainly as I had before the first fight what the outcome would be, and it was better to let the Taguo coach think that maybe I had just gotten lucky. By the second visit I knew that wasn’t true. The truth was I couldn’t stand to be near him. His physical presence brought back those vicious feelings, reminding me of what I had done, and letting me know just how much I wanted to do it again.
After the second refusal, he never came back, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I dreamed about him at night, and it was the first time in my life that in my dreams I was the aggressor rather than the victim.
I tried to talk to Deqing and Cheng Hao about it, but they couldn’t understand what was bothering me.
“But he came here wanting to make you lose face,” Deqing said.
“Yes,” I said. “But I still shouldn’t have said that to him.”
“But what you said was the truth.”
“It was cruel.”
“Bao Mosi, you should have seen yourself when you first came here,” Deqing laughed, launching into an imitation of me. He hunched his shoulders over, drooped his head, and put on this frightened face. “You were just this college student, scared of everything. But now look at you.”
It was a good caricature. It struck home.
Deqing asked Cheng Hao, “Did you see that look in his eyes when I said he was scared of everything?”
“Like he wanted to kill you,” Cheng Hao said.
“Exactly. Six months ago, he did not have that look.”
“No. He used to look like a strong wind would blow him over.”
“Bao Mosi, now your eyes have fierceness,” Deqing said. “This is good. You cannot be a good fighter if you are always afraid of what might happen.”
I knew he was right. I had won the fight against the Taguo coach because I had reached a state of mind where I no longer cared about the consequences. What frightened me was how much I had enjoyed being there. And how hard it had been to come back. A good fighter must enjoy hurting his opponent. A good human being has to feel remorse about it. The only way for me to square the circle was to separate who I was and what I did inside the ring from how I acted outside it. What I had said to the Taguo coach happened outside the ring, and after several weeks of raking myself over the coals for it, I was desperate for some kind of extra penance so I could forgive myself. And because those seem to be the kinds of prayers God likes to answer first, He plagued me with dysentery.
Actually, I don’t really believe God gave me dysentery—I’m not such a narcissist as to think that the Almighty to
ok time out of his busy schedule to punish me personally. That’s what the archangels are for. I’m not sure which of them handles fallen Catholics searching for enlightenment in Buddhist monasteries (Gabriel, perhaps?), but he had a wide selection of microbes at Shaolin to choose from. As a result, no Westerner spent much time in Shaolin before getting a severe case of diarrhea.
My first case during my first month at Shaolin lasted only a day, but during that day I wanted nothing else but my mommy. Despite drinking only Coke, I caught it so frequently—about twice a month—that I began to think of it as Mao’s Revenge, a kind of viral guerrilla warfare bent on expelling the imperialists before we completely undermined his collectivist revolution. It was too late for the Chairman’s rearguard action actually to win the war against the bourgeoisie—the number of capitalist running dogs and counterrevolutionaries was growing exponentially every day—but it was certainly demoralizing on a personal level.
Previously, Coach Cheng had come to my room to see why I wasn’t in class, and then give me some Chinese antidiarrheal medicine. The pills looked like licorice gumballs and were made of an unknown substance (and it was probably better that way). But they had always worked.
Not this time.
As the diarrhea worsened on the second day, it was joined by a fever and violent vomiting. My body was on fire, and the fluids inside me were charging for the exits. Fortunately, the sink was right next to the toilet.
I knew I had dysentery. As the fever became hallucinatory, I imagined my trips to the bathroom as mini–Bataan Death Marches. I became obsessed with the toilet paper, which in Shaolin was about as baby-soft as industrial sandpaper. In my fevered brain, it became a metaphor for the rise and fall of China. The Chinese invented toilet paper. They even invented perfumed toilet paper. And here they were after several centuries of bad luck, bad decisions, and bad neighbors, scraping their butts with a product that could remove wood varnish.
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