The last time I saw the monks before I returned home was in Beijing. They had a two-day layover before they went on tour in Europe. At their request, John and I took them to Kunlun Hotel, which had the most popular discotheque in town. As the foreign diplomats and Beijing entrepreneurs with their mistresses formed a circle, Deqing, Cheng Hao, Coach Cheng and the rest of the team put on a kungfu/dance extravaganza filled with backflips, flying kicks, and break-dance moves. At the end of the evening, we exchanged addresses and promised to stay in touch.
I was relieved when I first landed on American soil. But the country had changed on me. I found a nation enthralled with the O. J. Simpson case, all-protein diets, and email. It took me several months to stop missing life in a village with only one international phone, a diet with all the carbohydrates you could eat, and political show trials with a 100 percent conviction rate. I returned to Princeton that fall with plenty of material for my senior thesis, but with all of my friends graduated and moving on in their lives, I felt terribly alone, caught between two worlds.
That Christmas in Kansas, my mother threw a party to celebrate her prodigal son’s return. She invited all the people in Topeka with any connection to China. Unlike when I’d left, China was now hot. The news media had done a 180-degree about-face. Japan Inc. was moribund. The Asian Tigers—Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand—were small potatoes. By late 1994, the future was with the Rising Dragon. Newsweek and Time put China on their covers. Hacks across the country were unearthing Napoleon’s famous quote: “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes the world will tremble.”
A VP from Payless Shoes cornered me. He’d been in China recently to open a factory. He was concerned because he didn’t drink alcohol, which seemed to offend his hosts. I told him he needed to bring a designated drinker to cover for him.
“They won’t mind if you don’t,” I said. “But you need an underling to toast in your place.”
He said, “Your skill in Chinese gives you a real advantage in the job market. When you graduate, you should send me your résumé.”
As the party unfolded, it was clear that my prior faults had become the family’s future hopes. My mother was finally pleased I had gone to China.
After the guests had left, I bear-hugged my father. It had been a ritual between us since I was an adolescent. I’d grab him around the waist and try to lift him into the air. As a counter, he’d press his palms against my forehead and push. With forearms that had labored on farms as a youth and had yanked broken bones into place as an orthopedic surgeon, he’d always been able to bend my thin neck back, leaving me staring at the ceiling, overpowered and helpless. But that night, after two years at Shaolin, the muscles in my neck held. Like Hercules, I picked Antaeus off the ground and danced him in the air like a rag doll before setting him down.
My father turned to my mother and said with an awkward chuckle that was both regretful and proud, “My son is too strong for me. I can’t beat him anymore. He’s a man now.”
The list flashed in my head. There was one less item on it.
Amituofo.
EPILOGUE
SHAOLIN REUNION
November 2003
“Is it not a joy to have friends visit from distant lands?”
—CONFUCIUS,THE ANALECTS
“Dude, you have to go back,” John told me over the phone. “Everything has changed,”
We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years. I was just telling him that I was finally writing my Shaolin book. Since I’d last seen him, John had done one better than become like his father. He’d become his father. He was married with a kid on the way, and he had replaced the old man as the head of the family company. He was moving to Beijing to oversee operations from up close.
The mainland Chinese call the overseas Chinese who were returning home to exploit their Western-educated skills in China’s explosive economy “turtles,” because turtles return home to raise their young. John knew a trend when he saw one. After college he had started as a consultant, then a part-time day trader, then head of a dot-com start-up, then unemployed, and had now gone turtle. Chinese-Americans, Taiwanese-Americans, mainland Chinese foreign-exchange students were all returning to the motherland. They were voting with their feet, vivid testimony to China’s continued success.
November 2003 was exactly ten years since I had fought in the Zheng Zhou tournament. I decided it was time for my reunion. I was determined to see what was totally new and what had remained the same.
The flights to Beijing from the U.S. were now, blessedly, nonstop: no eight-hour layover in the price-gouging Tokyo Narita Airport. But a look at the newspaper gave me a certain chill of déjà vu. As in my first journey in 1992, a Bush was president, and he was presiding over a troubled economy with a massive deficit and a serious unemployment problem. The Asian country that the current President Bush blamed for our troubles was no longer Japan, however; it was now China. It was exporting too many goods (textiles, electronics, bras) too cheaply. One category he left out was female babies, which, from a look at the passengers on the plane, were also a major export. There were a number of white couples with very young Chinese daughters who were going back for another. They spent the flight giving advice to the young white couples who were going to China for their first.
SARS had displaced AIDS as the major concern of the Health and Quarantine Declaration Form on Entry Into China. “Fever, cough, and difficulty breathing” had been added to the “Please check the box before the items of the following symptoms or illnesses if you have any now” inventory. But I was amused to see that “psychosis” was still on the list. It made me think of the Finn Mikael and his sixth race, the French photojournalist Pierre and his boots, the Spanish kungfu instructor Carlos and his nocturnal visit from Jesus, and me and my self-conscious quest for manhood. Extended stays at Shaolin required a bit of psychosis.
Beijing’s airport was my first big shock. Mental exclamation marks started firing off in my skull. ATM machines! Sound-dampening panels! Sit-down toilets! Moving sidewalks! Efficient and almost-friendly customs agents! With its recent renovation, the Beijing airport was a good deal spiffier than LaGuardia or JFK.
But I was most excited about the chance to speak with a Beijing cabbie. Conversations with them always started with the same formula. He’d compliment my Chinese. I’d say it wasn’t very good. He’d ask where I was from. I’d say America. He’d say America was a great (or powerful or rich) nation—the greatest in the world. I’d say not really. He’d say, oh yes. I’d say, well, China is certainly advancing rapidly. He’d say with a certain degree of frustration, oh no, China’s advancement is too slow (or inadequate). I’d say it is getting better every day. He’d say with a certain degree of doubt that it would take fifty (or sixty or a hundred) years for China to be adequate.
I wanted to see if the pattern had changed.
I plunked myself into the cab and asked to go to the Great Wall Sheraton.
“Hey, your Chinese is very good,” my cabbie said.
“Oh no, please, there is no need to be polite.”
“No, it is very good. Do you live in Beijing?”
“No, I’m just visiting,” I said. “I haven’t been in China for nearly ten years.”
“What do you think?”
“It has changed a lot. China has advanced rapidly.”
And this is where he completely ignored the old formula.
“Yes,” he said. “China has changed a great deal.”
I was momentarily at a loss for words.
Doesn’t he want to know what country I am from?
“Ah, yes, just look at the airport,” I said, to change the subject. “It is so much better.”
“No, it is still inadequate,” he said, dismissing my compliment. “They are going to build a much better one down the road in time for the 2008 Olympics.”
“Oh right, the Olympics. I remember when I was here in 1992, everyone was disappointed that the 2000 Olympics wen
t to Sydney, not Beijing,” I said, with a little bit of concern. The Chinese still held America, who switched its vote at the last minute from China to Australia, responsible for that loss.
“True, we were not happy,” my cabbie said. “But it is better this way. Eight more years of preparation. Now the conditions are much better. When we are introduced to the world, the world will respect us.”
“The world will give China face,” I said, and he laughed.
“Where are you from?” he asked me.
Finally.
“America.”
“America is a very rich country.”
“Not these last few years. It has been tough.”
“Yes, I have read that,” he said. “But look at it this way: America is at the top of the mountain. It is very hard for her to keep going up.”
I was stunned. Was that pity?
After a moment of silence, he continued. “But America’s economic report for the last quarter was very strong, so maybe things will start to improve.”
This made me smile. They were still watching us as closely as ever.
“How long before China is America’s equal?” I asked.
“Never happen,” he laughed like he didn’t mean it.
“Come on.”
“Fifty years,” he continued still laughing.
The Chinese dream was still the same: to catch up with America. And it was still a multigenerational marathon. But there was a confidence now that wasn’t there before. Look at the mile markers they had already passed: membership in the WTO, manned space flights, and soon the Olympics. Catching up with us didn’t seem so impossible anymore.
The Green Hotel, where I first stayed in Zheng Zhou, was gone, replaced by a supermarket. The International Hotel was being renovated.
“Its time has passed,” my cabdriver, Chang, told me while taking me to the new four-star Sofitel.
He pointed out what is new about Zheng Zhou. But truthfully, it was not much. China’s transformation was trickle-down. Huge buckets of foreign capital had flooded the coasts, totally remaking cities like Shanghai and Beijing. By the time this cash flow dripped into the interior its impact was less obvious. There were more cars, fewer bikes on the road, and no oxen, but it was still the same city I remembered.
Chang, who had served in the army for four years, was in his mid-thirties with a paunch and spiky black hair. When he was discharged, he went to work for a state-run danwei, or work unit. It went bankrupt—the government had stopped propping up failing state industries. The leader of the danwei had absconded with what was left of the general funds to America, where rumor had it he bought an entire street. Now Chang drove a taxi to support his wife and son.
Chang had insisted on driving me everywhere I needed to go. When I asked the price to go to Shaolin, he said it didn’t matter, we were friends, my Chinese was so good, it was a pleasure simply to drive me around, I could pay whatever I wanted, I didn’t even have to pay.
All of which meant that he intended to squeeze every RMB he could out of me.
I didn’t mind. After six years of living in New York City, it had been a long time since anyone thought I was rich enough to waste time trying to rip me off.
Chang was a font of illicit information. Can guns be bought on the black market? Yes, for $500 he could get me a German handgun. Really, it used to be only zip guns. That was ten years ago. What about the legal system? Can you still pay a fine instead of serving jail time for murder? Sure, if you know the right people. How much does knowing the right people cost? $15,000 to $20,000. That’s ten times what it was ten years ago. That was ten years ago.
But it was his military service that interested me the most.
I waited until we had almost reached Shaolin before asking him, “So when you were in the army, who were the enemies you were taught to train against?”
At first he didn’t take the bait.
“Oh, no enemies,” he said. “We just trained. You know—marching, drills. It was the army.”
I didn’t say anything in response, letting the silence linger. After fifteen minutes, he finally bit.
“Do you think, and I do not mean to be rude, but do you think America could beat China in a war?” he asked.
“That is not an easy question to answer.”
“Oh yes, of course. It doesn’t matter,” he said. “War is between governments. Not us common folk.”
It was the standard preamble for any politically sensitive discussion.
“The common folks always suffer in war,” he continued. “We are just talking, two friends, common folk.”
“Yes, yes, we are just two friends talking, common folk,” I said. “I guess it depends on what you mean by win. On the ocean, probably. On the land, in China, I doubt it.”
“Yes, well, America has the most advanced weapons on earth. But America could never take over China.”
“I agree. There are too many Chinese.”
My last comment revved him up.
“This is just talk, two friends talking,” he said. “But that is exactly it. China has five people for every one American. Any Chinese city America might capture, we’d still have you surrounded.”
“Yes. And there is the small problem that both countries have nuclear weapons.”
“But it will never happen. This is just talk. America and China should be friends.”
I agreed with him. But what I was thinking about as he was talking was that before 9/11, many prominent neoconservatives—speaking of nerds with Napoleonic complexes—were shopping around for America’s next enemy, and China had been a leading candidate. When an American spy plane was downed on Chinese territory in April 2001 and the Chinese government was tardy in returning our boys, the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol went on Meet the Press on April 15, 2001, and said, “Well, I think we’re engaged in a kind of Cold War with China. I think the right combination of pressure, and some inducements, could work to help topple, ultimately, the dictatorship in China. That should be the goal of U.S. policy, not to get along with dictators who are brutalizing their own people and who are aggressive abroad.”
I found myself standing in my apartment and screaming at the TV. “Are you insane? Even the gay Buddhist monks would fight us!”
John Lee had told me what to expect, but the new Shaolin was still a shock. As driver Chang veered off the highway into the half-mile, one-road cul-de-sac of the Shaolin village, my breath caught. This was how I imagined Shaolin would be the first time around, how it was portrayed in countless kungfu movies: a lonely monastery tucked into a valley surrounded by five mountain peaks.
Almost everything was gone except for the temple: all the lean-to restaurants to feed the tourists, all the corrugated-tin-roof shacks selling kungfu tchotchkes, almost all the private schools. Even the sublimely absurd attractions had been removed: the World War II cargo plane with a sign claiming it was Mao’s first plane, the ski lift that took tourists up to the top of one of the mountain peaks where they could fire machine guns, and even the 2,000-year-old mummy, which turned out to be an ape skeleton wrapped in cloth.
Kungfu World was no more.
In 1999, Suxi, the legendary acting abbot, had finally succumbed to ill health. He was replaced, as everyone anticipated, by my master, Yongxin. Abbot Yongxin recognized what everyone who lived there did: Shaolin’s reputation (not to mention its spiritual life) was seriously undermined by all the tourist trappiness. Capitalism had certainly been better for Shaolin than communism, but it was awfully tacky. But unlike the rest of us, Yongxin had the connections and the authoritarian determination to make the necessary changes. Over the last couple of years, he called in his markers (rumored to have been very expensively purchased) inside the army and police force, and they came into the village and physically removed all the local merchants and knocked down their property—the Maoist version of eminent domain.
As I walked down the street, it was like visiting a ghost town. Over to the left was a movie t
heater. And next to it was the outdoor stadium. And wasn’t that where the Shaolin Kungfu University was? Where were all the people?
Since I had left, the population had dropped from around 10,000 to below a thousand. Where there once was building after building, there was now one big wide-open space with a few cinderblocks lying on open dirt. When the grass grows back, it will be very contemplative. At the moment it looked like it was about to be turned into a huge parking lot. This was what we all had wanted, talked about constantly, but once I saw it, I missed the old tacky village. It had life, vitality. This place felt like coming home to an empty house.
The only significant structures remaining were those that existed prior to the 1980s tourism revival—the temple itself and the Pagoda Forest—and the few institutions that had enough guanxi of their own to resist Abbot Yongxin’s iron will: the Shaolin Wushu Center (my former home); Taguo, the kickboxing machine; and the ticket center (you still have to buy a ticket to enter the village, and another to enter the temple).
I stopped for lunch at the Shaolin Wushu Center’s restaurant. The place I ate breakfast at every day for two years was one of only three restaurants left in town. Aside from new curtains and a new floor, it was the same: big and awkward. The only person I recognized was the hotel manager, who was wearing the same outfit (black slacks, gray shirt, green leisure jacket) that he had ten years earlier. He sat with me and caught me up on the goings on at the Wushu Center.
Leader Liu had been assigned to another top government post. “He really wasn’t Shaolin,” the hotel manager said. Deputy Leader Jiao had replaced him in the top spot, as I always suspected he would. He was too devious not to grab control. He was at this moment in Japan negotiating another tour. Coach Yan, my Playing Hands master, was head coach of one of the four martial monk performance teams.
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