“Four?” I asked.
“They compete with each other,” the hotel manager said. “They rotate daily performances. But only one team gets to go on the foreign tours.”
It was Machiavellian—just what I should have expected from Deputy Leader Jiao. On the old team, the best performers—Deqing, Lipeng, Cheng Hao, and others—refused to be the quiet puppets the leaders wanted and expected. They also emigrated at inconvenient times.
Cheng Hao had moved to Houston, where he had opened his own studio. So did two other less prominent members of the former team. With three Shaolin monks, Houston now rivals New York City for Shaolin representatives. The two monks who defected in 1992, Yan Ming and Guolin, have schools in downtown Manhattan and Flushing, Queens, respectively. Lipeng also teaches in New York. He originally moved to Holland, where he built up a large school, but came to America when he married a Brooklyn woman.
“She’s much older than him, right?” the manager asks.
“Yes,” I said. The Shaolin rumor mill was still very effective.
“An older American woman…guai, guai.” he said, shaking his head. “Too strange.”
“They had a child together,” I told him.
Deqing’s story was the most unique. Due to the vagaries of visa regulations, the best he could do was Hungary, where he was working as kungfu instructor for their military’s special forces. I had met up with him two years before—in Las Vegas of all places. A PBS documentary crew doing a feature on overseas Shaolin monks paid for him and two guests to come. He showed up with his mother and a deadly looking Slavic commando who was a blackjack fanatic. Deqing may not have been able to build his mother a new house with all the Hong Kong movie money he dreamed of making, but a free week in Las Vegas was not a bad consolation gift.
As for everyone else, a few have gone to Beijing to try their hand at becoming mainland kungfu movie stars. One was trying his luck in Hong Kong. Several had opened kungfu schools in Deng Feng. The number of kungfu students in that town had jumped from a few thousand to 40,000. The net result was that I knew almost no one at Shaolin anymore.
China was so busy replacing old buildings with new ones that there was little energy for renovations. The Wushu Center was the first place I’d been to that had kept the same exterior structure but received a complete makeover. The courtyard, which had been filled with traditional kungfu training equipment, now had marble pathways that led to stone stools around stone tables that had Chinese checkerboards carved into their surface. It was darling. And inside the main building, I had to stop for a moment. Marble had replaced the cracked linoleum floors and the concrete pillars. The staircases had wooden (wooden!) banisters. I walked over to the staircase underneath which Lipeng’s father, Doc, and mother used to live. It was a storage closet with walls and a proper door, like something you’d find in a Park Avenue duplex.
The biggest change was the performance hall. Before, it was basically a training studio: one big red mat, surrounded by rows of wooden chairs. Now it had gone Broadway. Stadium seating, a raised stage, and set backdrop, which was a life-size version of the Shaolin Temple’s gate.
I slipped in on an afternoon performance. I didn’t recognize any of the martial monks. But they were as good as they used to be, perhaps even a bit more professional. No doubt the surround-sound music timed to sophisticated stage lighting helped. The old team, my team, thought of themselves as martial monks first, performers a necessary second. Like actors waiting tables, they were doing it to support their art. The group performing now seemed to take their dramatic job much more seriously. They were breaking bricks over their heads and wooden staffs over their arms with precision and a dearth of emotion. They whipped through their forms (drunken sword, monkey, Shaolin Small Red Boxing) with brio. Shaolin was always unique in having two types of monks: the cultural or Buddhist monks (wen seng) and the martial monks (wu seng). It seems they now had a third type: the performance monks (biaoyan seng).
Afterward, I wandered back to the training hall where I had spilled sweat and blood for two years. It was exactly the same: the same tattered green mat, the same cracked wall of mirrors, the same hand-and footprint-stained white walls (we used to punch and kick them to harden our feet and hands).
One of the teams of martial monks was beginning practice. Their coach was sitting, his foot in a cast. I introduced myself, somewhat wishfully thinking he’d recognize the name, Lao Bao, my legend having lived on (the challenge matches, the tournaments), but it hadn’t. Soon I found myself telling him these stories, about how I trained here from 1992–94 and fought in this international tournament, where I placed second. Did I mention there was this big challenge match I fought with a Tianjin master? The coach nodded politely, trying his best to look interested.
A voice in my head said, You are now officially the sad, old alumnus back on campus to bore the current class with stories of your glory years.
It took a minute or so of internal wrestling, but I finally managed to stop my ego trip down nostalgia lane and asked him some questions about him and his team.
It was as I had suspected. This new breed had very little connection to the temple. They were extraordinarily skilled martial artists who had basically tried out and won parts in the long-running hit musical Shaolin’s Martial Monks.
At the back of the Wushu Center, where there were apartments for employees, I ran into two of the martial monks who used to be on my team, Little Wang and Tiwei. They were married with children and running their own kungfu schools in Deng Feng, the nearby town where all the schools displaced from Shaolin had set up shop.
“Are you married?” Little Wang asked.
“No,” I said. The still-current list flashed in my head:
THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT
No wife/family
Not enough money
“I had to get married and have kids,” Little Wang smiled. “Otherwise, my mother would have killed me.”
I asked about my kickboxing instructor, Coach Cheng. We had lost contact with each other, and I was hoping to find him. Little Wang told me that Coach Cheng was working for his older brother, Big Wang (the man who went on the lam when he beat up the nephew of a Guangdong party official), at his new school in Deng Feng. The town was hosting a traditional forms competition tomorrow. I could find Coach Cheng there.
The Shaolin Temple’s gate still gave me a thrill of excitement. I could never stand in the courtyard and not think I was in the middle of a kungfu movie. As for the rest of the temple, it was still fairly modest, despite some recent renovations. Shaolin still didn’t make the cut in most package tours.
I bumped into the Tall One, Abbot Yongxin’s top disciple, in the courtyard in front of the temple. I asked him if our master was there.
“The abbot is in Beijing,” he said.
We talked about the changes to Shaolin as we wandered through the temple. It was near dinnertime, so the day-tripping tourists were mostly gone. Inside, I discovered a group of Buddhist monks gathered for evening prayers. Many of them were from other monasteries, because Shaolin was hosting a Buddhism conference. According to the Tall One, Abbot Yongxin had invested a great deal of time and money to rebuild a community of Buddhist monks, a welcome change. It was now even legal for foreigners to study with a monk inside the temple instead of only at the Wushu Center. Currently, at the temple, there was an African-American who had stayed for a year and a German who had crushed my record, having trained for nearly eight years. I tried to be Zen about it when the Tall One told me but failed miserably.
The Tall One teasingly asked if I wanted to run up to Damo’s cave for old time’s sake. I didn’t. It was a steep haul up the mountain behind the temple. The coaches assigned runs to Damo’s cave as punishment. We used to joke that Damo stayed meditating in the cave for nine years because he was so exhausted from getting there.
I returned to the Wushu Center’s motel. They were planning to replace it next year. They needed to. It hadn’t been cl
eaned since I left.
As darkness descended, the memory of just how lonely and isolated I felt when I first arrived here in 1992 thumped me in the chest. How did I manage to stay for so long? And then I remembered. It was the kungfu, the glorious kungfu. Ten thousand of us practicing together in a narrow valley in the mountains of the Middle Kingdom. It was like being wrapped in a cocoon of common purpose. The key was to stay healthy. As long as I was practicing, everything was good. It was only when I was hurt and unable to practice that I felt like I was living on the opposite end of the earth.
As luck would have it, I could not practice with the monks in Shaolin, because I had injured myself before my trip in the most non-bad-motherfucker way possible. I had been engaging in my first ever Men’s Health “six weeks to perfect abs” program because I was worried that the first thing Coach Cheng would say to me when I saw him was, “Lao Bao, you have gotten fat.” (The Chinese are extraordinarily polite about almost everything except physical appearance. “Old fatty” is considered an affectionate nickname.)
And I had managed to pull something in the back of my knee on the treadmill during a workout. Or at least I think that is what happened. I half-suspect the injury was psychosomatic: My subconscious knew my ego would try to prove I still had it in Shaolin, so it took out my knee to prevent a more serious injury.
Whatever the cause, when I found Coach Cheng the next day in Deng Feng, the first thing he said to me was: “Lao Bao, you have gotten fat.”
“Yes, master, you know you told me I was too thin before,” I said. “Not enough power in my attacks.”
“I said gain some weight, not get fat. I almost didn’t recognize you. Are you still practicing?”
“Some, not enough.”
“Obviously. To practice kungfu you must not fear to eat bitter. You look like you have learned to love to eat sweet.”
God, I missed him.
He still had the same sorry excuse for a mustache, still walked with the same hunched shoulders, and still had the same ham hocks for hands that dropped so many of his opponents back when he was a national kickboxing champion.
Coach Cheng showed me Big Wang’s school, the Special Shaolin Wushu College. It was one of the five massive kungfu schools that had been built on the highway leading to Shaolin. They each had thousands of young boys studying kungfu and had been built in a phony European-style complete with domes and pillars. It was the Las Vegas aesthetic, faux-coco.
But it was a dramatic improvement.
The kungfu students actually did classroom work in the mornings, math and literature. They used to talk about that at Shaolin, kept promising it, but there never seemed the time, money, space, or will. I always worried about the consequences of training a large number of illiterate boys to be very good with a stick, because so many eventually went on to serve in the army and police force. (When your only tool is a hammer, everyone starts to look like a nail.)
Wandering around town, I mentally apologized to the city of Deng Feng, which a decade ago I considered to be the irredeemable armpit of China, a justification for mass suicide. But when the kungfu schools moved from Shaolin to Deng Feng, the government declared the city a special tourism and economic zone, and just like that it was completely transformed. They even tore down the old, hateful hospital that had tried so hard to kill me and replaced it with a five-story structure with clean, level floors and an efficient staff who wore white smocks and didn’t smoke indoors. The difference was so dramatic, it bordered on the miraculous. I started snapping pictures with my camera, much to the surprise of everyone inside.
Big Wang and Coach Cheng threw a banquet to celebrate the prodigal son’s return. And being a banquet, there was a great deal of toasting and Playing Hands. I was rusty and lost frequently.
“I can see your patterns,” Coach Cheng said.
“Are you married?” I asked him.
“Yes. I have a six-year-old daughter.”
“Did you marry—”
But before I could say Shou Ting’s real name he shook his head as if mentioning it was bad luck.
“Someone else,” he said.
I dropped the topic.
As the baijiu took hold, Coach Cheng softened. We reminisced about the time he knocked out the Japanese challenger with one kick, and the time I knocked out the Taguo instructor with several kicks. He reminded me of the time I passed out in the Deng Feng hospital, so I told the story about the time he slipped during the challenge match in the International Hotel. We even tossed in a few stories involving Big Wang so he wouldn’t feel like he wasn’t the most important man at the table.
After the banquet, we all went to watch the traditional forms competition. The participants were mostly the young students, but there was a seniors category, which in the kungfu world is anyone over the age of forty. Most of the seniors were kungfu instructors from the various schools. They were heartily cheered by their students. The man who impressed me the most, however, was a peasant in his seventies, his gray hair peppered with a few black strands. He did not wear the flowing silk garb of kungfu forms competitions. He wore what he wore to work every day: a thick blue cotton jacket, gray cotton pants, and traditional black kungfu shoes. His weapon was the pudao, a large staff with a thick blade at one end and a spear point at the other. It was not a light performance pudao, which was made out of hollow wood with a tin blade for increased ease of movement; it was the traditional version with thick wood and a rusted steel blade, the kind of heirloom handed down from father to son.
His technique was not great—clearly he would not win one of the top three prizes—but he moved with a certain grace. As he slowly maneuvered the pudao around his body, pacing up and down the mat, his back bent, it occured to me that he had been practicing this form for at least the last sixty years, which meant he was practicing it during the Japanese invasion, during the Civil War, during the ban on kungfu, during the Cultural Revolution, and during this capitalist explosion in wealth. From the roughness of his hands and the deep wrinkled tan of his face, he had been either a farmer or a manual laborer his entire life, a tough, dusk-to-dawn, backbreaking life. But somehow he had found the time to keep at this form.
All this rolled over me in a wave of unexpected emotion. And as I took his picture, I found myself having to keep the camera against my face to hide the flow of tears, which, loosened by the baijiu and mixed with the feelings about seeing Coach Cheng again, wouldn’t stop.
When I was twenty-one what I admired most was the tremendous skill of the monks. I wanted to be that good at something, anything. But as I watched this old man, what most impressed me was the devotion. It was what had allowed this culture to survive—and now thrive—despite the traumas. As he finished his form, what I wanted was to love something, anything, as fiercely as he so obviously loved Shaolin kungfu.
Amituofo.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book recounts the experiences of the author while he lived at the Shaolin Temple as accurately as his aging, baijiu-damaged brain would allow. A few names, however, were intentionally changed to protect the innocent. And as long as he is in a confessional mood, he would like to admit to an occasional reorganization of events for the sake of the narrative. He also wants to fess up to being far less charming and clever in real life than how he has portrayed himself in the book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“When drinking water, don’t forget who dug the well.”
—TRADITIONAL CHINESE PROVERB
It was about the hundredth time I started a sentence with the phrase, “This one time, at the Shaolin Temple,” like I was talking about band camp that my friend and editor Brendan Cahill, hoping to shut me up, first brought up the idea of a book. It took him only five years to convince me to start it and another two for him to cajole me into finishing. Actually, it was more like three years to finish—okay, four, but the point is my life would be very different without Brendan’s encouragement, and, frankly, I’ll never forgive him for it.
> A number of friends and colleagues provided crucial help to strengthen the structure, improve the prose, and reduce the number of errors. Tim Mohr helped me unpack the story and rethink the ending. Elana Zeide offered some keen fashion advice. (Orange is the new black.) Drew Hansen brushed up my prose and provided a great deal of moral support in the early stages. Andrea Fessler helped to rescue several lost chapters and to reign in some of my excessive tendencies as a writer.
Gene Ching, who has taken up Shaolin’s cause in America, filled me in on the palace intrigue of recent years and in the process helped me to avoid several grievous mistakes. Jingjing Chen answered countless questions, fixed my horrid pinyin spelling, and made crucial suggestions as to how to avoid offending a billion Chinese people. Unfortunately, it was advice I ignored. Marla Geha gently told me when it was time to let go and sat on my chest while Patrick Mulligan and William Shinker at Gotham Books pried the manuscript from my cold, dead hands.
My unflappable agent, Joe Veltre, was as good on the editorial end as he was on the business side. My creditors owe him a great debt (as in mine) of gratitude. They should also consider sending a thank-you note to Howie Sanders at UTA who deftly made all the movie arrangements with Elizabeth Gabler, Carla Hacken, Drew Reed, and the rest of the wonderful people at Fox 2000. I have final cut, right?
After reading an early draft my mother taught me a new kungfu move: Angry Tigress Washes Cub’s Potty Mouth Out with Soap. The book possesses hundreds of fewer curse words thanks to her relentless scrubbing. My sister Shannon’s edits were excellent. My father kindly bit his tongue and didn’t mention law school once the entire time I was writing.
Finally, I must thank my teachers and friends at the Shaolin Temple who shared not only their knowledge but also their lives with me. I hope this book does their generosity justice.
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