As my body weakened and my mind tripped out, I began to conflate my condition with the destiny of America. I became certain it had to avoid my mistake: a unilateral land invasion of Asia. I believe I hold the distinction of being the only person that dysentery ever turned into a foreign-policy realist. To this day the policies of the neoconservatives send me searching for the Imodium.
Coach Cheng took one look at me on the morning of the third day and left. When he returned he was pulling Comrade Fish by the arm.
“You see, he’s sick nearly to the point of death,” Coach Cheng said.
Comrade Fish looked everywhere but at me. He clearly did not want to be here. Coach Cheng was demanding that a decision be made, and Comrade Fish avoided making decisions with the same fervor with which he avoided work. He was the Bartleby the Scrivener of Shaolin. He had also gotten a good whiff of my restroom as he walked in, and he was starting to look as sick as I felt.
“How are you?” he asked.
“No problem,” I said. This was what the monks always said when they were really hurt.
“He seems all right,” said Comrade Fish.
“We must take him to the hospital.”
“No problem,” I repeated.
Comrade Fish left the room, followed closely by Coach Cheng.
My coach must have leaned hard on Comrade Fish because about three hours later, which was extremely fast decision-making by Chinese standards, I was being helped into Leader Liu’s Toyota Santana. Leader Liu had even loaned me his driver, which really scared me. He would never have been that generous if he weren’t seriously worried that a major revenue stream was about to dry up on him.
The several layers of clothing I was wearing could not stop my feverish shaking, so Coach Cheng loaned me his full-length People’s Liberation Army winter coat. The driver took Comrade Fish, Coach Cheng, and me to Deng Feng.
Deng Feng’s hospital was a one-story concrete bunker on the outskirts of town, which was particularly inconvenient because it had no ambulances. As we drove up, a man was dropping off an accident victim he had pushed to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. The parking lot, which was strewn with unevenly packed dirt and rubble, matched the hospital floor inside: The unevenly laid concrete had its own terrain, with hills and valleys where rainwater had collected into mini-lakes. And the dirt had been carefully swept into piles and left in mounds that had to be dodged as we tried to trace our way from the front door to the infirmary. The walls were painted Turkish prison green.
Coach Cheng talked to a nurse in the pharmacy about my symptoms. She was standing behind a window protected by metal bars, like a liquor store in the South Bronx. The nurse, after some intense haggling, handed Coach Cheng the same set of diarrhea pills he had given me when I first got sick and that I had been taking for the past three days to no effect.
“These do not work,” I said.
“If those do not work, then there is nothing I can do,” she replied and turned away from the window, but not before she sneered at me, like I was some homeless man begging for change.
Ah, socialized medicine.
“I need some tests,” I insisted.
“That will take much time and money,” Comrade Fish said.
Feeling as close as I did to death’s door, I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to take someone else with me. This desire must have been evident on my face as I towered over Comrade Fish—eyes wide—and said, “I insist that I receive some sort of medical test,” because he ran down the hall to grab one of the doctors, who pointed us toward another room.
I guessed that this room was the hospital’s laboratory. The giveaway clue was not the “scientists” sitting behind a series of desks, because they were wearing street clothes. It was the amazing discovery that these researchers had the exact same chemistry set my uncle had given me on my eighth birthday. There was the wooden rack to hold up half a dozen glass tubes. There was the same low-intensity microscope. And…well, that was it. That was all the equipment in the lab.
Comrade Fish told them that I needed to have some tests done, because I had a severe case of diarrhea. The researchers did not respond. This was not uncommon in government-run operations, where a request that someone do their job often induced a catatonic state that might last anywhere from a couple minutes to an hour. Comrade Fish waited a couple of minutes, and then repeated his request. One of the lab guys looked at me, then looked at his partner, then looked back at me. He lit up a cigarette while he considered the situation some more.
Finally, he said, “Go to the pharmacy and buy some diarrhea medicine.”
“It is not working,” Coach Cheng said. “We don’t know what is wrong with him. He needs a test.”
“If you don’t know what is wrong with him, how are we supposed to know?” the lab guy asked.
“This is a hospital, right?” I asked, feeling flush with fever and anger.
“Hey, the laowai speaks Chinese. Your Chinese is really good.”
“Where? Where? Where?” I responded.
“Hey, the laowai is humble, too.”
This minor miracle finally stirred the lab guy to action. He grabbed one of the long, thin glass tubes, dumped out whatever liquid was in it, and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “give us a sample.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.
“Go out the door at the end of the hallway.”
In my weakened state, it took me a second to realize, as Comrade Fish, Coach Cheng, and I walked out the door at the end of the hallway, that it was in fact the exit to the building and we were standing at the south end of the parking lot.
“Am I supposed to do it in the dirt?” I asked.
“No, I think there is an outhouse over there,” Comrade Fish said.
I looked at Coach Cheng, who, unlike Comrade Fish, had traveled to other countries—Italy, France, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He knew what this must have seemed like to me. He gave me an embarrassed, what-can-you-do smile and shrugged. I had always been fond of Coach Cheng. He was my kickboxing coach, after all, and a legitimately good guy. But at that moment I felt an intense love for him. That smile was the only recognizably human emotion I had encountered in this entire surreal trip. I clung to the memory of it as I walked across the uneven dirt, dodging the rubble, to the hospital’s outhouse.
The state of the outhouse made the one in Trainspotting look like the Ritz-Carlton. I had expected that it would consist of a series of holes in the ground that you squatted over. I had even expected the stench from holes filled with excrement. What I did not expect was that every inch of the outhouse from the walls to the ceiling would be smeared in human filth.
In the kungfu movies, the adept has to go through a series of increasingly difficult tests, which are often quite bizarre. But I had never seen anything quite like this trial. I had been bedridden for three days. I was feverish and weak. My balance was off. I needed to pull down a pair of jogging pants, long johns, and tightie whities and then squat over one of the holes. There was nowhere to hang Coach Cheng’s full-length jacket, so I had to cradle it in my left arm without letting it touch the floor. And with my right hand, I needed to place the glass tube underneath me and hit its thumbnail-size opening…without any splatter, because there was no toilet paper.
Somehow I managed to pass the test: My aim was true.
Standing up, I flipped the coat over my shoulder and used my left hand to pull up my underwear, long johns, and pants, while holding the test tube and its sample as far away from me as possible with my right.
The lab guy took the test tube from me with a smirk on his face. He directed us to sit on a bench outside the lab. We waited outside the lab for another hour as I dozed. Finally, the lab guy handed Comrade Fish a prescription before he went back into the lab and locked the door.
We walked over to the pharmacy.
The pharmacist handed me a set of pills.
They were the exact same licorice-ball diarrhea pills I had been taking before.
I just stood there in disbelief. This wasn’t your average, everyday, say-five-Our-Fathers-and-call-back-at-Easter kind of penance. This was some serious old-school, Book of Job, wish-you-had-never-been-born retribution. At that moment, I gave up. I was too sick and too exhausted to fight anymore. I paid for the medicine, went back to Shaolin, and prepared for death.
But on the fifth day of my sojourn, God looked down, saw how bad it was, and finally relented.
I returned to training the next day.
7
ANOTHER AMERICAN
Ever my faithful spy, Little Tiger burst into my room one evening in June and delivered the words I’d been longing to hear. “Bao Mosi,” he said. “There is an American here who has come to train for the summer.”
As Little Tiger and I rushed to meet my fellow countryman, he gave me the new arrival’s credentials, which was always the first information Chinese shared about strangers. His father was a wealthy businessman who owned several factories in China. The head of his father’s China operations had delivered the son to the Wushu Center to smooth his path here. I was envious of his guanxi.
In one of the back offices in the main building, which doubled as an equipment room, I found a party in progress. There was a case of Tsingtao beer and a platter of food on the desk. The room was filled with young Chinese men—Coach Yan, Deqing, Cheng Hao, several other monks, and the American. He was ethnically Chinese, but he was a fully melted member of the American cultural stew: the baseball cap turned backward, the jeans slung low, the slouch hip-hop casual. Upon seeing me he called out in English.
“Yo, what’s up? I heard there was another American up in this joint. It’s good to meet you, bro. John Lee.”
I introduced myself, grinning from ear to ear. The envy I felt in seeing he’d known before he’d even arrived what it had taken me months to figure out—that free booze and food is the key to the Chinese heart—was washed away in the sheer joy of having someone to exchange a hearty “Hey, bro” with. We clasped hands, and without thinking, completed the standard young American male handshake, shifting from hand to thumb to the tips of our fingers, which we snapped as we pulled our hands back. The monks stared at us.
“You want a brewski?” he asked.
“Sure, bro, absolutely.”
The party went well into the night. And in between all of John and my broing and maning and dudeing, the real show was the monks’ curious, envious, prideful, resentful assessments of their Americanized cousin. It was like a display of “The Evolution of the Chinese Man” at the Museum of Natural History. To the left were the mainlanders, their bodies all sinew and bone and gristle, covered by a tight, stringy musculature. At the next stage was the Chinese-American, four inches taller with perfectly straight, white teeth and an easy, open expression. His weight-lifted, corn-fed, beef-eating muscles were thick and marbled, a filet mignon compared to the monks’ rump steak. This was a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the prosperity effect. No wonder ambitious Chinese wanted to go to America. Who wouldn’t want their children to be taller and stronger than they had been?
Of course, the body is one thing, the mind quite another. First-generation immigrants are cultural hybrids, and certain structural flaws are inevitable in the painful straddle between their parents’ culture and that of their white friends. It didn’t take many beers before John was telling me about his father.
By beer three, dad was still the great man who cast a long shadow. John said his family had been the second richest in Taiwan before the “Nationalist-Communist” Civil War cost them everything, which made me smile to myself because almost every single Taiwanese-American I had ever met had told me that their family used to be the second richest in Taiwan before the war. To rebuild the family’s fortunes, John’s father, an engineer by training, had come to America with nothing, built a successful company from scratch, and was now the patriarch of the Lee Manufacturing clan.
By beer six, the old man had morphed into a totalitarian somewhere between Stalin and Mao—an emotionally inaccessible man of unreasonable, impossible-to-fulfill standards. This made me smile to myself because it pretty much summed up the ideal Confucian father. John asked rhetorically if I could believe that his old man made his own flesh and blood fill out detailed monthly expense reports from college? Did I have any idea how hard it was to hide kegs of beer under school supplies month after month?
The truth was that John’s father was like many successful Asian immigrants. He was educated, an engineer, so his move to America was a matter of choice, not desperation, and therefore represented the gamble of a lifetime, a bet that his and his family’s life would be better in America than back in Taiwan. The problem for Taiwanese immigrants is that their birth-nation—perfectly positioned between huge consumer markets in the West, the technological savvy of Japan, and a huge pool of cheap labor in mainland China—refused to remain a backwater, which made keeping ahead of the Wangs that much more stressful. By the late eighties Taiwanese doctors, engineers, and businessmen were waking up across America to discover that their second-rate classmates who had never been smart or ambitious enough to emigrate were now extremely rich VPs of sales at Taiwanese microchip firms.
If John’s father had been an economics professor from Bangladesh or a gastroenterologist from Zimbabwe, John’s high school B-average, his preference for the weight room and the keg party to AP exams and SAT crash courses, and the easygoing second-child nature that had landed him at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) instead of Harvard or Yale might not have been such a family disgrace. It certainly didn’t help that John had one of those nightmare older brothers, the kind all younger siblings of immigrants dread. Mark Lee was Harvard-squared: Crimson undergrad, Harvard Business School.
In such a family, John stuck out like a sore thumb, a sore thumb that was jammed into the eye of his father’s American dream. So when his freshman grades at RPI had not improved from high school, he arrived home for summer break to find not a cushy job and plenty of free time to drink beer with friends and chase old flames, but a plane ticket to Beijing and a sentence of three months in Shaolin. His father had decided John needed discipline and believed the monks would give it to him. Shaolin also offered an excellent vantage point on the kind of poverty his family had been fleeing for generations.
After the party broke up, John and I went back to his room to finish off the rest of the beer. Drunk and furious at being banished to Shaolin, John was expressing his rage in a time-honored male fashion. He was punching holes in the closet door.
“Why am I treated like the bum of the family?” he said, punching his first hole in the wall.
“If I were white, my family would be proud of me!” he continued.
Two holes.
“It’s not like I’m a criminal or a drug addict!”
Three holes.
“What’s so special about Harvard anyway?”
Four holes.
I felt I had to do something. We were both American expats in Shaolin, and he was younger than me and had arrived at Shaolin later, making him, by Shaolin’s social-familial structure, my younger martial arts brother. It was my responsibility to look out for him, and he was like a big puppy. He didn’t know his own strength. So I spent the rest of the evening showing him how to make the proper fist—wrist bent so you strike with the bottom three knuckles instead of the top two—to break plywood without injury.
Out of respect for John’s family’s wealth, Coach Yan decided to train his first laowai in several years. He started John with Shaolin’s basic movements and Small Red Boxing. John did his best to go through the motions to keep his new master happy—Coach Yan was not someone you wanted to annoy—but his heart wasn’t really in it. He didn’t like forms. I sympathized. I had never liked them much either.
To keep John interested, I invited him to join my kickboxing teammates for an afternoon class. John was doing fine with the kicking and punching. The disaster arrived with the throws. We spent a great deal of time lea
rning how to catch an opponent’s kick and then throw or sweep him to the ground. Despite being only worth two points, the same as a kick to the chest, a successful throw has a disproportionate psychological affect on the judges. One fighter is standing and the other is flat on the canvas.
I showed John how to trap a side kick, telling him it was like catching a football. You lock it into your chest, hunch over, and clap your hands together. Next I picked out one of the less intense members of the team, so he would go easy on John. The first few catches went well. As a former football player, he already had the muscle memory for the motion. I watched him do it several times before turning away.
That’s when I heard the snap of bone, followed by a guttural scream.
I turned to see John gripping his right hand, staring at an index finger suddenly pointing in a direction it was never intended to and alternating between hollering, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! My finger! Matt! My finger!” and “Fuck! My fucking finger! Fuck! My fucking finger! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
John’s fingers had been splayed and he’d misjudged the height of the kick—a common beginner’s mistake. The kick had caught the top of his index finger and snapped it back.
Coach Yan rushed into the room. The nerve-rattling nature of John’s cries—and the possible consequences of a permanently injured son of a powerful Chinese-American entrepreneur—helped Coach Yan and me secure Leader Liu’s car in slightly less than thirty minutes of cajoling, needling, and negotiating. Warp-speed by Chinese Communist standards.
Coach Yan and I both had our arms around John in the back-seat. Comrade Fish was riding shotgun and Leader Liu’s driver was racing down the mountain road toward Deng Feng’s hellhole of a hospital.
When we arrived, Comrade Fish pulled me aside.
“Tell him not to curse in English,” he said.
“Why?”
“If they find out he’s American, they will charge him more.”
I turned to John. “Bro, could you try to curse in Chinese? Just repeat, ta made,” I said. “His mother.”
American Shaolin Page 26