American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

  He complied.

  The head nurse motioned us to sit down on some chairs and then walked away, leaving us there to wait. For what, I don’t know. There were no other patients. As I’d discovered with my dysentery treatment, the Deng Feng hospital was a place you visited only if you didn’t want life.

  By the second hour of being ignored, John was getting desperate, begging me to do something. It was time for Crazy Foreigner Kungfu.

  I have to give the nurse credit. She was a tougher nut to crack than the merchant had been. First, I physically blocked her passage, “My friend is in severe pain, but you do nothing. You must help him.”

  “I’m busy. Move out of my way.”

  Having failed to impress her, I decided to give my insanity a little local color, cursing her in Henan slang instead of Mandarin.

  “Nong sha le ni. Wo nosi ni,” I snarled. “What the hell is the matter with you? I should strangle you to death.”

  “Who do you think you are?” she shot back.

  I backed her into a corner and towered over her. “Who am I? Who are you? You listen to his cries and still do nothing. You’re not even human.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that!”

  I punched the wall. “In a second, I won’t be using words, I’ll be using my fists to talk to you.”

  I went over to the cage where the pharmacy was located. I grabbed the bars, jumped up like a monkey, and rattled the cage. “If you don’t fix my little martial arts brother’s hand, I’ll tear down this shithole!”

  Just as I was reaching the limits of my Crazy Foreigner Kungfu skills, she finally agreed to treat John.

  I should have known it was a ploy. Along with paper and gunpowder, the Chinese invented passive-aggressive revenge.

  In the X-ray room, she instructed me to hold John’s hand open. She pulled the ceiling-mounted, potato-gun-looking X-ray machine back at a wide angle and started firing away. It was not until the moment before she snapped the first shot that John and I both realized at roughly the same moment that she had “forgotten” to give us a lead shield. “Protect the jewels,” I cried. As we twisted our waists away, John and I each clasped our free hand over our groins in a futile attempt to protect our reproductive capabilities from a direct exposure of radiation.

  Afterward, the nurse led us to the operating room, which looked like a primitive torture chamber. The operating table was a metal rack with leather straps, the scalpels and knives were dirty, and the floor was uneven concrete with puddles and piles of dirt just like in the lobby.

  The nurse promised to deliver the X-rays promptly. Instead, she walked out of the hospital and went home for the day. I doubt there was even any film in the machine.

  A Chinese man dressed like a taxi driver walked into the room. He had a scruffy white silk shirt, brown slacks, white silk socks, and brown leather shoes. There was peach fuzz on his face, his hair was unkempt, and there was dirt under his fingernails. I figured him for another patient who had gotten bored waiting. It didn’t surprise me when he showed an interest in John’s injury. The Chinese are a curious people, which is a polite way of saying they are a little hazy on the concepts of personal space and privacy.

  I was surprised, however, that he was smoking. He nonchalantly puffed away on a Marlboro as he leaned over to get a closer look at John’s injury. It was the sight of him blowing smoke directly into the wound that made me snap. I no longer had to pretend in order to be the Crazy Foreigner.

  First I jerked him back by his collar. Then I knocked the cigarette out of his mouth. I followed this by grabbing him by the front of his shirt and jacking him up against a wall. And finally I asked him, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I think I am the doctor,” he said.

  “Oh right, sorry. So sorry. How embarrassing,” I said, letting go of his shirt.

  As I tried to smooth out the wrinkles, I said, “Would it be too much trouble to ask you not to smoke?”

  I don’t know if he was used to getting jacked up against a wall by patients’ friends or if he was simply a man possessed of an incredibly even temperament, but he was not fazed in the slightest. He nodded with this slight smile on his face, went back over to John, pulled up a chair, and went to work.

  It turned out that it wasn’t a fracture but a compound dislocation. The bones had been separated at the second joint. The doctor grabbed each end, pulled them apart and put them back together. After one brief scream, John went quiet for the first time since the accident happened. Things were looking up, until the doctor went to sew up John’s finger.

  When you are the son of an orthopedic surgeon, you pick up a certain amount of medical knowledge as you are growing up, like the fact that needles should never be reused and if you have to reuse one it probably shouldn’t be rusty. You also know how small they should be. So I was more than a little disturbed when the doctor reached into a glass filled with dirty water and pulled out a needle the size of a deep-sea fishing hook with rust marks visible from a distance of five feet. I was even more disturbed to see that the string he was going to use was as thick as twine. But what pushed me over the edge was that it appeared that he planned to sew up a wound that needed fifteen stitches minimum in five or less. This was going to be a hack job worthy of a Civil War–reenactment Oscar.

  I broke out in a sweat. This was all my fault. I had invited John to spar with the team. As the self-recriminations clouded my mind, the room started spinning. The next thing I was aware of was Coach Yan’s thumb digging into the space between my upper lip and my nose. (The Chinese believe there is a qi meridian—a nerve center, in Western medical terminology—at this point and that pressing against it can revive someone who has passed out.) This realization, along with the fact that I was staring up at the ceiling and the back of my shirt was soaked from one of the puddles on the floor, were my first clues that I had fainted.

  “You need any help?” the hack doctor asked me, mid-stitch.

  “Hey, buddy, I’m supposed to be the one hurt here,” John said.

  “Sorry,” I said, as Coach Yan led me out of the room.

  I wasn’t able to save John from a permanent scar, but I was able to save his reputation. As soon as the monks heard I’d passed out when I wasn’t even the one injured, they stopped talking about John’s lack of stoicism in response to his injury and went on nonstop about me. They had never heard of anything like it. They were so inured to human suffering that the idea anyone could be so sensitive was incomprehensible. Afterward, anytime one of them complimented me by saying something like “the laowai is not afraid to eat bitter” or “his kickboxing is pretty good,” a different monk would always add in response, “Yeah, but he fainted at the sight of someone else’s blood.”

  BOOK FIVE

  DISCIPLE

  July–September 1993

  “Wine and lust are the agents of disaster.”

  —TRADITIONAL CHINESE PROVERB

  1

  CHALLENGE MATCH

  Coach Yan clapped his hands and stepped back.

  I stared at Master Wu, my body tense with anticipation.

  But Master Wu didn’t move. As we both waited, the pressure mounted. It was a vacuum of action, and I felt myself sucked forward.

  I attacked with a front left side kick—the kick I had practiced 10,000 times, or something close to it. But fear had pushed my mind into the rafters. My left foot fluttered out like a dying quail. My kick was more a toe-tickle than the thunderbolt I had intended.

  Master Wu caught my foot easily. But instead of pulling my leg down and toward him, in order to spin me to the ground, he lifted my leg high above his head, intending to make me trip backward. But I had the height advantage and, through hours of extremely painful training, had become fairly flexible. He could not get my left leg up high enough to tip me over and, hopping on my right leg, I was able to pull free.

  My brain was lost in a thick fog of fear and adrenaline. The front side kick was my best technique, and i
t had failed. After a dozen seconds bouncing on my toes, I scratched it off my mental list and went to my second most practiced technique: my right thrust kick.

  If anything, this kick was even slower than the side kick and easier for Master Wu to catch. Luckily for me, he did not change his pattern. After he caught it, he tried to lift my leg above my head as he did before. And I was able, as before, to pull it free without falling down.

  I was already running out of workable techniques. I felt as if I were about to give up. But then something remarkable happened. Time slowed. Or rather, my perception sped up. As I stood there, my previous two attacks looped in my mind’s eye like instant replay. Both times as I had lifted my leg to kick, he had gazed down to my feet and lowered his hands in anticipation of trapping my leg. I suddenly saw the flaw in his defense and knew how to exploit it.

  I took a jump step at Master Wu, initiating a side kick. I slid my right foot up to my front left foot. I raised my left foot into the air. Master Wu dropped his eyes and his hands. But instead of kicking again, I planted my left foot back on the ground, and then torqued my entire body off that single point, twisting around as I threw a wild overhead hook—a haymaker—with my right fist. In fact the entire motion must have looked less like a kungfu or boxing punch and more like a baseball pitcher winding up and then hurling a fastball.

  Still focused on my left foot, Master Wu didn’t see it coming.

  As the punch connected, his eyes widened in surprise.

  I hadn’t practiced the motion 10,000 times. I’d never even thrown a punch like that before. I have no idea where it came from. And I doubt Master Wu had ever seen such an attack.

  I danced back away from him.

  When I had watched boxing bouts, I used to think that the sole reason for breaks between rounds was to allow fighters to rest their bodies. What I hadn’t realized is that fighters need that time to reassess their strategies and refine their tactics. After the pain and punishment starts, the adrenaline pumps, emotion flares, and self-awareness is eliminated. In that state the mind freezes up, dooming a fighter to repeat the same mistake over and over again.

  I jumped forward and lifted my left leg. Master Wu’s gaze dropped down again. Once more I planted my left foot instead of attacking with it and pitched another haymaker, hitting his unprotected face with all the force I could muster.

  I floated back, waited a moment, and then jumped forward again.

  Wash, rinse, repeat.

  Master Wu and I were locked into the same dance steps. I kept raising my leg and pitching that haymaker and he kept looking down at my left foot, each time forgetting that a punch was coming. The same sequence probably recurred six or seven times. I lost count. I lost myself. In my head the fight was happening in slow motion. As if a strobe light were flashing, I saw my fist busting his lip, then bloodying his nose, then sending his glasses sprawling across the room. I remember moving back and forth. I remember the shock through my body, the charge of electricity as my fist hit his face again and again, exactly the same technique with exactly the same result. After each blow he staggered back, bloodied. But he would not go down.

  Coach Yan’s directive broke through the fog.

  Down to the ground!

  As the blood ran down Master Wu’s face I began to wonder why he wouldn’t go down. As I moved in to hit him again, a word from my training repeated itself in my head. Combinations. Coach Cheng was always talking about combinations. Don’t rely on one lucky punch or kick. Combine them. Pile them up. Stack one on top of the other until the weight of the collective blows brings your opponent down.

  After another successful punch, I stayed inside his range instead of dancing back, negating my arm-length advantage and risking his greater strength and size. I hooked with a left to his gut, another right to the head. I roundhouse kicked him in the leg. I punched him in the head again with another right. We got tangled up. Out of my line of vision, the flat of his fist slammed against the right side of my head, pinballing my brain around the inside of my skull.

  I took two halting steps back out of his reach.

  We stood facing each other. My head ached, and my legs were wobbly. Blood was now streaming down Wu’s face from his nose and mouth.

  Master Wu raised both his hands.

  He quit. He’d had enough. The Chinese kungfu master from Tianjin had surrendered to the laowai with the wild right.

  I turned away. There was no elation. Instead I felt lost. I paced back and forth, trying to figure out where I was. Why was I surrounded by a bunch of Chinese peasants, their faces flush with emotion, shouting unintelligible words at me. Who were these people? What was I doing here?

  Then I heard Master Wu arguing with Coach Yan.

  “The laowai cheated. We agreed no punches to the face. I wear glasses. He’s pianzi,” Wu said. “A cheater.”

  Before China I had always bottled my rage. I’d been angry before but had almost always controlled it. But at that moment I snapped.

  I began screaming at him. A string of curses flowed out of me involving what I had done to various members of his family, what I still intended to do to him, and what I was going to do after that to his corpse. It was a barrage.

  It was also all in English.

  “What did he say?” Master Wu asked Coach Yan in Chinese.

  “Oh, you understand me, motherfucker!” I continued in English, unable to stop myself.

  I then drew an imaginary line in front of me with my foot and dared him to step across it.

  I was completely out of control. With each curse, I stepped closer to Master Wu, jabbing my finger in his direction. Before I was within attack range, he threw up his hands again and turned his back to me and walked over to his students.

  I continued to follow him, taunting him to turn and fight so I could have another chance to put him down on the ground. Deqing grabbed me from behind.

  “That’s enough, Bao Mosi,” he said. “It’s over.”

  I just stared at Deqing, uncomprehending. He smiled and brought me back.

  Deqing did not let me go until he’d steered me into the restaurant where he ordered a bottle of baijiu for the table of monks and expats who had followed us. The adrenaline letdown was so intense I couldn’t force my hands to stop shaking. I spilled my first shot.

  “To Bao Mosi,” Deqing toasted. “The American who defended Shaolin’s honor!”

  One of the younger monks stood up, “To Lao Bao, bottoms up!”

  “Lao Bao!” the monks repeated.

  Lao means “old” or “elder” and is an honorific in China. Lao Bao is also a historical reference. It was the nickname of Bao Gong, a twelfth-century Chinese prime minister who was famous for being extremely brilliant and extremely ugly. Looking at myself from their perspective—big-nosed, ghost-eyed, college-educated—it was a pretty accurate allusion. After the challenge match, Lao Bao became my nickname with the monks, especially the younger ones.

  There was one person who did not join the toast. Coach Yan came over to sit beside me.

  “Why are you celebrating?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “I told you to beat him to the ground. At the end of the fight, was he not still standing? Next time, when I tell you to knock someone down, do it!”

  Coach Yan finished my shot and walked away.

  Deqing poured me another.

  “Don’t listen to him,” he said. “Sometimes his disposition is not so good.”

  But even Coach Yan’s disappointment could not temper my elation. For the rest of the night, I was the toast of Shaolin. I had fought a challenge match and defended Shaolin’s honor. As far as anyone there knew, it was the first time a laowai had ever done that. And as far as I know, the last time as well.

  The next day, I dragged my achy hungover body out of bed, washed out the abrasions on my right knuckles, and, having already missed breakfast, made my way to morning sanda class. My teammates were already in a line when I a
rrived. I slid in next to Baotong, head down.

  “Nong shale ni?” Coach Cheng asked me in Henan slang. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sorry, master. I’m late.”

  “You fought for Shaolin last night,” Coach Cheng said, suddenly smiling. “Today you should take the day for yourself, Lao Bao.”

  My teammates slapped me on the back as I left class.

  I spent the day in a restful, dreamless sleep.

  That night I demonstrated to Pierre, the tightly wound French photojournalist, Deqing, and John the joys of my favorite computer strategy game, Civilization II. I had brought my Mac Powerbook to Shaolin after the winter break to try to do some writing, but instead found myself playing Civilization with most of my free time. The game is like crank for nerds with Napoleonic complexes. You start at the beginning of civilized history controlling one tribe and progress to the present day by mastering technological advances and conquering everyone else on the planet. After a night of extreme physical danger and a day of a severe hangover, there was great comfort in escaping into a virtual battle.

  “This is nothing like a real war,” Pierre said. “This is like your Gulf War, cruise missiles and video screens. Have I shown you my photos from Serbia? That was a real war.”

  “Yeah, you did,” I lied. “But you haven’t shown Deqing. Why don’t you take him back to your room, so he can see them.”

  “Will you ask Deqing in Chinese for me?” Pierre asked.

  “The French guy wants to show you some of his war photos in his room,” I said to Deqing in Chinese. “Could you help me out and smile and be nice to him, so he doesn’t want to come back?”

  Thirty minutes later, I was in the process of transporting King Abraham Lincoln’s cannons and knights across the Bering Strait (circa 800 A.D.) to launch my meticulously planned invasion of Asia, when Pierre came crashing into my room in a complete panic. It took him several moments before he could speak.