“What is it?” I asked.
“The monk, he is gay!” Pierre cried out.
“Who?” John asked. “Deqing?”
“Yes, Deqing, he wants to fuck me in my ass.”
“No, no, no,” John said, starting to laugh.
“Oh yes, yes, he is touching me, my back, rubbing. He wants my ass! What am I to do? A gay monk wants to fuck my ass. A kungfu master. How can I stop him? He has knowledge of ancient fighting arts.”
“He was just being friendly,” John answered.
“Yes, I’m sure he was just being friendly,” I said, catching John’s eye. “You’re not his type.”
“Not his type?”
“You’re way too old. And too big, too broad in the shoulders,” I continued, biting the inside of my cheek.
John caught on, “Yeah, Deqing likes them young and skinny. Like Matt.”
He flashed a grin at me.
Turtle’s egg.
“Like you?” Pierre asked.
“Well, it’s all part of the martial tradition,” I explained. “Young disciples and all. Like the Spartans. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as I expected.”
Pierre was edging his way to the door. “Everyone is crazy here. You are all assfuckers. I am flying this coop.”
“Hey, hey, Pierre, where you gonna go at this hour?” I asked.
“Yeah,” John said, “There’s no buses at this time of night.”
“No cabs either,” I added.
“He could walk the highway.”
“True,” I said. “But that’d take three hours just to get to Deng Feng. And there are no streetlights. One false step. Splat! Right off the side of Song Mountain.”
“Besides, Deqing has a motorcycle,” John said. “Well, it’s Coach Yan’s, but I’m sure he’d let Deqing borrow it if one of his white boys was trying to get away.”
“You see! You see!” Pierre cried. “He wants to fuck my ass.”
“No, I doubt it,” I said. “He was grabbing your shoulder, slapping your back, you said? See, that’s just him being friendly. He didn’t rub your head, did he?”
Pierre turned ashen, unable to speak.
“Oh, he did. Well, you are in trouble then. He’s taken a liking to you.”
“Ask Matt,” John said. “He should know.”
“I guess you could try hiding in one of the other rooms,” I said.
“Yeah, but Deqing is friends with the key girl,” John said. “It won’t take him too much time to search twenty rooms.”
“True, true. Well, Pierre, you can always stay with me, if you want. Deqing will leave you alone if he knows you’ve become my disciple.”
“You dirty sick!”
“No, Pierre, please don’t talk like that. That’s hateful talk. I’m trying to do what’s best for you. I’ll be very gentle.”
There might be a more enjoyable way to spend an evening than winding up a temperamental Frenchman in the middle of a gay panic attack, but I’ve never had one. Finally the fun was too much and it burst over the dam of our self-control in the form of paroxysms of laughter.
Pierre stood there trembling for a minute before he realized that we had been putting him on.
“He is not gay?” he asked, finally.
I explained it was customary for men in rural China to be physically friendly and that it didn’t mean anything.
It took many more minutes of apologizing before he stopped cursing us, our mothers, and everyone in our families.
As if to mock my failure to end my celibate status, it took John less than a month to score himself a girlfriend. One Saturday, he was off to Zheng Zhou. By Sunday morning he was practically hitched.
“Her name is Yeli,” John said. “She’s a dancer.”
“So you’re saying she’s hot.”
“She’s so hot.”
“That’s great, you bastard.”
“I want to invite her to Shaolin, but she doesn’t want to come alone. She has this friend…”
“John, Shaolin is very conservative. I could get arrested.”
“We’ll get them their own room. It’s not prostitution until after midnight.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“Matt, she’s a dancer,” John said.
“I’ll think about it.”
I consulted with Deqing that night.
“John’s new girlfriend is a dancer in Zheng Zhou,” I told him.
“She must belong to Henan’s dance danwei,” he said.
The danwei, or work unit, was one of the basic organizational structures of Chinese society. It provided employment, free housing, schooling, and health care. In return it monitored for antiparty sentiment and controlled every other aspect of the workers’ lives. If they wanted to change apartments or jobs or move to another city or travel abroad or marry or divorce, the leader of the danwei had to approve. The Chinese often called themselves danwei people.
“But what does the dance danwei do?” I asked.
“They perform traditional Chinese dances at festivals and public events.”
“So they are like the monks.”
He thought for a moment before saying, “You know Chinese VIPs, leaders, they like to dance, right? Sometimes, when they have a party, they need partners. So the dance danwei sends some of the pretty girls to dance with them. These men are old and powerful…you understand?”
I did. I went back to John and told him to invite the girls immediately.
Because John’s date, Yeli, and mine, Miling, arrived in dresses that were a little too garish for the countryside and, unlike rural women, wearing makeup, it took only seconds for the waitresses at the Wushu Center restaurant to clock our guests as tarts and spread the rumor that a couple of prostitutes had landed at the Wushu Center to take care of the Americans. The manager of the hotel was snickering by the time John got around to arranging a “separate” room for them.
“Do you want the extra key?” he asked John.
The damage already done, there was nothing to do but go forward.
Besides, John and Yeli made a beeline for his room. As soon as Miling entered my room, she lay down on my bed without any preamble. I swallowed my surprise and awkwardly slid next to her for a smooth approach landing.
As I leaned in closer, she pulled back. There was something on her mind, a question.
“Is it true that Americans are very kaifang?” she asked. “Open.”
“Some are,” I said, knowing from her tone that she was referring to sexual, not political, openness. “Why do you ask?”
“Do you…” she paused. “Do you have AIDS?”
The Chinese government was terribly afraid of an AIDS outbreak at the time. News reports were filled with stories about the AIDS epidemic in America. Pools in big cities were segregated out of fear of contamination. To get a yearlong visa, Americans had to take AIDS tests to prove they were HIV-negative. For someone as paranoid as me, it was not a pleasant experience.
Being the only laowai within a thousand miles was never easy. This issue was just the most extreme way China made me feel less than fully human. I’d like to say that I understood it wasn’t Miling’s fault—her question a result of political propaganda, not personal prejudice. But the Beijing government was far away, and she was oh-so near. Plus, I was feeling pretty full of myself after the challenge match.
So I deadpanned, “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
She pulled back in terror, which offended me further.
She actually believed me!
So I continued, “But I only have a little bit of AIDS. It’s not the kind that kills you, just makes you tired. But not to worry, you probably will not be infected.”
Then, to my great regret, I laughed in her face.
As soon as Miling realized I was mocking her, her horror transformed into rage, and like a gunshot, she was up and off the bed, out of the room, and over to John’s room where she stayed just long enough to tell Yeli what a damn turtle’s egg I was
. It was a sentiment shared by John, who had been interrupted in flagrante delicto. His mood was not improved by the fact that the dancers decided to return back to Zheng Zhou that night.
“Why did you have to be such an asshole?” John asked me after they left.
“That’s easy for you to ask. You’re Chinese,” I said. “You try spending a year living in a country that treats you like a Ugandan street prostitute.”
But John was right. I had been an asshole, and, worse, I had violated the first commandment of the wingman: Thou Shalt Not Mess Up Thy Main Man’s Play. So I apologized. But it bothered me to do it. I was Lao Bao, defender of Shaolin’s honor. Why did I still have to roll as wingman, damn it? I should have let it go, but I couldn’t.
“Hell, we’re probably better off,” I said. “We might have gotten arrested, and those girls weren’t worth it.”
“Matt, I love her,” John said with suddenly naked emotion.
“Shit, John, they’re basically call girls!” I said, before thinking about it.
Seeing his hurt reaction, I immediately apologized. He didn’t say anything. It took many apologies and many days before he finally forgave me.
Later, Coach Yan told me that one of the new coaches at the Wushu Center, a slimeball named Baoping, had wanted to call the police to have us fined, so he could collect a finder’s fee. Coach Yan had stopped Baoping by yanking the phone out of his hand and threatening him with severe bodily harm.
“Don’t invite them back to Shaolin,” Coach Yan concluded.
2
MISTRESS MANAGEMENT
I met Yunfei one spring day while training. He was the son of two professors. His folks had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, which had turned Yunfei off to the idea of a university education. He’d decided to become a student of life and had left home to wander China after high school. He’d ended up at Shaolin and specialized in sanda, realizing as I did that it was the only martial arts discipline that someone starting so late in life could master in a reasonable amount of time. Soon after I joined the sanda team we became fast friends.
He was also that most dangerous and irresistible type of man for women: the commitment-phobic romantic. He was forever falling in love with another beautiful young woman, having a short torrid affair, and then breaking it off, because he did not “have the money to support a wife” due to his nomadic existence. I thought that was putting the cart before the horse. He led a nomadic life so he would have a good excuse to avoid settling down and marrying. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
The day Yunfei met me it was the first week of his most recent return to the temple. He had been away from Shaolin for a year for reasons involving a woman as well as some vague business opportunities, returning when both turned sour. Within days he had scoped out the ten or so beautiful young women hidden around Shaolin. Living in a straw hut across the Shaolin stream were two sisters whose father, a kungfu fanatic, had sent them to Shaolin for two years of training. There was the diva-ish wushu instructor at the Shaolin Kungfu Academy. Taguo had a tomboyish sanda practitioner who had started filling out her chest pads.
Yunfei was in the courtyard outside the gates of the Shaolin Temple with a group of teenage girls from Deng Feng, and I, having glued my wingman self to his side for the past month, was there as well. The young women wanted a tour. Yunfei considered himself Shaolin’s official tour guide for attractive young women, so he agreed to show them around. Of the group of five or so, one had my attention—Jewel. She was the first young woman I’d met in Shaolin who looked at me with even a flicker of genuine interest.
As we walked back to the bus that traveled between Shaolin and the nearby city of Deng Feng, Jewel and I fell behind the rest of the group. I screwed up my few slivers of courage and asked, “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
Jewel was pleased but played coy.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What will people say?”
“I know the owner of a restaurant at the far end of the village,” I said. “We can meet for a late dinner, say ten P.M., when the rest of the village is asleep. Then no one will see us together.”
She was relieved that I understood what was at stake for her.
“Next Friday,” she said out of the corner of her mouth as she turned to go.
That Friday I arrived at the restaurant early and ordered a half-jar of baijiu. My conscience had been working on me all week—my interest in Jewel was purely functional—and I knew I’d need some Dutch courage to quell the internal debate. I had paid up-front and extra for the meal to ensure the owner/cook avoided saying anything inappropriate. She arrived fifteen minutes late and extremely nervous. After some furtive glances and attempts at small talk, she hit me over the head with this question: “If a foreigner promised a Chinese woman he would come back to see her again, would he? Or was he lying?”
“It depends on the laowai,” I said, playing for time. “Why do you ask?”
“There was a German TV crew here filming the monks last year. One of the cameramen promised he’d come back to see me.”
As part of the peace settlement with my conscience, I had promised myself I wouldn’t make false promises or lie to Jewel to get her into bed. “A year ago?” I asked. “He’s not coming back.”
It was the right answer. She relaxed, deciding she could trust me.
“So you live in Deng Feng?” I asked.
“Yes, with my father.”
“Ah, how is that?”
“It’s difficult. He is a difficult man. He doesn’t understand me.”
Amituofo.
I waved the chef over. This was going to take more baijiu than I had anticipated.
The streets were deserted and the lights off in most of the dorm rooms as we walked back to the Wushu Center, but we did not speak and she followed a step behind me as if we were strangers.
I led her around to the back of the hotel. When the manager went to sleep, he locked the front doors from the inside with a bike lock—fire safety wasn’t a big priority—and closed all the windows except for the one to the indoor outhouse, which was such a foul, holes-in-the-ground job that it needed to be aired out constantly. I climbed inside and then helped Jewel through the window. I have to say that carrying her across the bathroom while holding my breath and carefully stepping to avoid falling into any of the holes took a great deal of the romance out of the illicit affair.
Once inside my room, she turned her back and undressed without saying a word. When she was done, she slipped under the covers. I followed.
I won’t go into the graphic details here, but my first thought upon officially ending my self-imposed celibacy was: No wonder she asked about the German coming back—that sneaky Hun got here first. This was followed just moments later by a second thought: Oh no, not yet!
Without a word, she rolled over and immediately fell asleep, out of boredom, I presume. I knew I had to stay awake. She needed to be out of the hotel before dawn broke and the village roused itself, and I didn’t want to take the risk of not hearing my alarm. I needed to think dark, irritating thoughts, the kind that keep a man awake at night. Fortunately, that was easy for me.
THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT
1) Bad in Bed?
I had to see her again. It was a question of patriotic pride. I was very likely holding in my arms Henan Province’s first G-8 groupie. (With Germany and America already under her precious belt, could Canada, England, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan be far behind?) It’s bad enough that my fellow citizens rank last in international math and science testing, but now I had given evidence that we were rotten lovers as well. What if she told her friends and they told their friends? How long before Chinese women were saying to laowai, “Your Chinese might not be as good as the Canadian Dashan’s, but your lovemaking skills are much better than the American Lao Bao’s.”
At 4:30 A.M., as I lifted her out of a first-floor window, I asked, “Will you see me again?”
“I
don’t know,” she said. “It is risky.”
“We can go to Zheng Zhou,” I said. During the evening, I had developed the hypothesis that perhaps the danger of the situation had caused my premature excitement. Zheng Zhou was safer than Shaolin.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“We can take separate buses and meet in front of the big department store in Zheng Zhou’s shopping district.”
“Next Sunday, two P.M.”
As before, I was early, and Jewel was late. As I waited in front of the department store I thought about the story I had been told about the man who built it—Zheng Zhou’s first millionaire. It was in the mid-eighties, and the amount of money he made was shocking to everyone. The province’s envious political leaders instituted a kind of informal taxation policy on him. When the city needed a new airport, they went to his office and asked him to pay for it. They did the same when they needed a new highway to connect the city to the airport. Same for a new water tower. Now, this businessman was, as most successful businessmen are, a prideful man. He didn’t like the way the politicos were bleeding him, acting like it was their money, not his. So finally one day, when they asked him to pay for one project too many, he not only refused, he threw them out of his office. His friends pleaded with him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t budge.
Being good Maoists—“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun” is one of Mao’s more famous sayings—the leaders sent in the police to arrest him, seized all his assets, and sold his department store to another businessman who was more accommodating. That is socialism with Chinese characteristics.
When Jewel finally arrived, we went up to the fourth floor so that I could buy a new suitcase I needed. The salesgirl was thrilled to help me, until she saw I had come with a Chinese date, whereupon she immediately disappeared with a look of disgust and did not return. In her place we acquired an audience of young male peasants. They gathered a respectful distance away to stare at the laowai and his Chinese date. They did not seem shocked or appalled or even particularly interested. In fact there was little sign of any sentience. They just stood there completely still and stared, every minute making me more and more self-conscious of the social transgression we represented.
American Shaolin Page 28