American Shaolin Read online

  I looked over to the other end of the room to see Coach Yan negotiating with Master Wu. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see Master Wu motioning to his eyeglasses and shaking his head.

  Coach Yan walked over to me.

  “Do you know what a challenge match is?” he asked.

  I wobbled my head side-to-side with uncertainty.

  “Chabuduo,” I said. “More or less.”

  “A challenge match has rules,” he said, tipping his head back at Master Wu and rolling his eyes in disgust.

  Coach Yan’s face was tight with rage, his body tense and ready to lash out. I tried not to look him straight in the eye. Of all the monks, Coach Yan was the most in touch with his inner monster—especially if less than totally sober—and was the most likely to crack a bottle over your head if you made the mistake of offending him. His mean streak wasn’t wide, but it was deep.

  He stepped closer and lowered his voice so only I could hear him.

  “Fuck his mother,” he snarled. “He came into our house and challenged us. Tai bu gei women mianzi! This fight has no rules! I want you to beat him to the ground. You hear me? To the ground.”

  Coach Yan stepped back, switching into the role of referee, and waved with both hands for the combatants to approach. Master Wu and I walked out into the center of the room, stopping about five feet from each other.

  Master Wu shifted into a cat stance, his weight largely on his right foot, his left foot resting lightly in front, a strong defensive position. His hands slowly circled in front of his body like a waterwheel. His dark eyes locked onto me from behind his thick glasses.

  I moved into the standard Chinese kickboxing opening stance—my body at a forty-five-degree angle to Master Wu with my left leg forward, my weight balanced about 40/60 between my front leg and my back, my left fist forward, my right fist up protecting my chin. I was trying to relax my body. It was an exercise in force of will to get myself to stop bouncing on my toes. Bouncing is seen as a sign of nervousness.

  Wu was heavier and stronger than I was, with the kind of stocky frame common to farmers, but I was taller and had the longer reach. That was going to be crucial because by settling into a defensive stance he clearly had no intention of attacking first.

  TALE OF THE TAPE

  I tried to clear my head. I had sparred extensively since arriving at Shaolin, but this was the first real fight—street clothes, no rules—that I had ever been in.

  Coach Yan clapped his hands to indicate the start of the challenge match, then stepped away. He wasn’t going to referee after all. We were on our own.

  BOOK ONE

  WANDERER

  September 1992

  “It is only when a person gets into difficulty that

  one can truly see his heart.”

  —TRADITIONAL CHINESE PROVERB

  1

  THE FIRST STEP

  Some people have an inner voice. I have an inner to-do list. And since I’m a glass-half-empty type of guy, my list is entitled “Things That Are Wrong With Matt.” Whenever I am in danger of feeling too good about myself, that list starts flashing in my head.

  When I was fifteen the list read:

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Ignorant

  Cowardly

  Still a boy/not a man

  Unattractive to the opposite sex

  Spiritually confused

  “Ignorant” was at the top of the list because that summer I had picked up a copy of The New York Review of Books at the local Borders in my hometown of Topeka, Kansas, and tried to read it. Even with a dictionary I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I didn’t catch the references, comprehend the contexts, or understand the meaning of the foreign phrases like fin de siècle, which popped up constantly in almost every review. I’d discovered there was this entire intellectual world where people were talking to each other above my head, and it bothered me.

  I examined the bios of the authors. They were mostly professors from elite universities. So I went back to Borders and bought all the books with titles like How to Write a Winning College Essay, Applying to the Ivy League, How to Cram for the SAT. I did everything they advised. I crammed all summer. I read War and Peace and wrote an essay on it. When I went back to school that fall, I started the Spanish club at my high school so I could be president and demonstrate leadership potential.

  It worked. They let me into Princeton.

  During the fall of my junior year of college, I was in a Cornel West philosophy seminar and had just finished a little soliloquy expounding on the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger when I realized I actually understood what I was saying. As I finished, I leaned back in my chair with pride, and the list flashed in my head.

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Ignorant

  Cowardly

  Still a boy/not a man

  Unattractive to the opposite sex

  Spiritually confused

  I was suffused with the sweet glow of success. I had eliminated number one and couldn’t have been happier. I was only a junior, but in my head I was done with college. It had served its purpose.

  The feeling lasted for a good couple of weeks or so, and then the list started flashing again.

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Cowardly

  Still a boy/not a man

  Unattractive to the opposite sex

  Spiritually confused

  I was back to my slightly depressed baseline. But now there was hope. I’d found a way to happiness. All I had to do was eliminate the rest of the items on the list, and I’d be blissful forever.

  While my primary focus since starting college had been the elimination of “ignorance,” I had also been working on “cowardly,” which had been the original chart-topper on my list ever since grade school. I had been taking kungfu classes since freshman year, because when I was nine years old I had seen a rerun of David Carradine’s Kung Fu and was never the same again. Carradine’s character Caine, the half-Asian Shaolin martial monk who wandered the Old West righting wrongs, seemed to be as strange and helpless as I felt, but yet was a total badass. Whenever I’d reread my favorite fantasy novels—The Lord of the Rings and the Dune series—I would rewrite them in my head with myself as the hero’s sidekick. And I always had super Shaolin kungfu powers.

  My obsession with kungfu had led to an interest in Chinese culture. In my sophomore year, I took a course on the intellectual history of China and fell in love with the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu. He was the only religious thinker I’d read who had a sense of humor and took delight in the absurdity of the universe. His teachings later influenced the creation of Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japanese), and that soon became another passion of mine. I was so earnestly obsessed I even signed up for Chinese classes in order to read Chuang-tzu and other Zen texts in the original language.

  But with all the reading and language study, I hadn’t had much time to devote to kungfu, and by the spring of my junior year I felt no more able to defend myself after three years of study than when I began. My heart still trembled when I felt physically threatened. And my first instinct whenever I heard a voice raised in anger was to look for the exit. I was all flight and no fight.

  So I decided to apply the same method to eliminating “cowardly” from my list as I had “ignorant.” I had attended a venerable institution that specialized in educating ignorant young minds, and after several years of hard work, I no longer felt like an idiot. Now all I needed was to find a venerable institution that specialized in turning scrawny, ninety-eight-pound weaklings like me into badasses. And if it was also a religious institution, then maybe I’d be able to eliminate “spiritually confused” in the process.

  It was around this point, through some fateful realignment of the cosmos, that I happened to read Mark Salzman’s memoir Iron and Silk, which tells the story of a Yale graduate who studies martial arts with a kungfu master in China, and got a bright idea.

  I went t
o Professor Gu, who was the only professor I knew from mainland China.

  “I want to go to China and learn about kungfu and Zen Buddhism,” I said in Chinese.

  He looked at me seriously and asked, “Do you want to learn really real kungfu or just have some fun?”

  “I want to learn really real kungfu, of course.”

  “Are you afraid to chi ku?” Professor Gu asked. “Eat bitter?”

  It was Chinese slang for “suffer.”

  “No,” I lied, unable to keep from smiling. The same question had been put to Salzman when he was studying kungfu in China, and he had given the same response.

  “Then you must go to the Shaolin Temple,” he said.

  He continued to speak about how hard it was to study kungfu and how diligent I would have to be, but I wasn’t listening anymore. As soon as he said “Shaolin” I was sold.

  As the birthplace of Zen Buddhism and kungfu, Shaolin was, basically, the father and mother of both my obsessions. But I hadn’t believed it was real. It had always seemed like something from the mythical past, the Camelot of martial arts. Hearing that the Shaolin Temple actually existed in the present day was like destiny tapping me on the shoulder. I was absolutely certain it was the right place to go for my training.

  Unfortunately, no one but Professor Gu and I thought this adventure was a good idea. My friends assumed this was one of my flights of fancy, and that I’d change my mind at the last minute. My other professors suspected it was a covert cry for help. And when I returned to Kansas at the end of the school year and told my parents of my plans, they were beside themselves.

  They had good reason to be worried. This was 1992, before China had become a cover story for Time and Newsweek as the next superpower, before China’s wealth and development had advanced far enough to be obvious to the rest of the world. In 1992, the international image of China was that of an impoverished country run by Communists who had only three years earlier slaughtered hundreds of unarmed democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square. As far as the world was concerned, China was North Korea with a larger population, food, and slightly better hairdos.

  My mother, who puts the welfare of her children above all else, cried.

  “What will happen to you?” she asked. “They kill boys just your age.”

  “They don’t kill foreigners.”

  “What if they put you in prison, torture you, and make you sign confessions?”

  “Mom, that was Vietnam.”

  “We don’t know anyone in China to help get you out. You’d be stuck there, forever!”

  At first my father tried to reason with me, because as a doctor he prides himself on being a rationalist. Given the woman he married, it’s really his only option.

  “I was talking to some of the Chinese surgeons at the hospital,” he told me one day. “And they say China isn’t safe.”

  “Of course they say that. They’re Taiwanese. It’s like asking Miami Cubans what they think of Fidel Castro.”

  “They say there is a lot of Buddhism and kungfu instruction in Taiwan.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not Shaolin.”

  “This is insanity. You don’t even know where the Shaolin Temple is.”

  He had a point. Professor Gu did not know where it was. None of the travel books about China had its location. Officials at the Chinese embassy had hung up on me three times when I put the question to them. And since Al Gore had yet to invent the Internet, I couldn’t search for “Shaolin.” (Today it takes less than five seconds to find its location on Google.)

  To be fair, I probably could have found the location if I had really applied myself to the problem, but for me the mystery of Shaolin’s location was part of the excitement. I had decided to fly to China and ask around until I found someone who knew the answer. That’s the way quest heroes did it in the fantasy novels I favored. Maybe I’d chance upon an old crone who’d give me a magical artifact to help me on my journey.

  “I don’t understand why you won’t go to Taiwan,” my father continued. “You could teach English.”

  “Anybody can go to Taiwan and teach English. That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “But how are you going to make any money if you go to a country that is too poor to pay you to teach English?”

  “I’m not going to teach. How would I get any good at kungfu if I taught English eight hours a day?”

  His patience finally exhausted, he laid down the gauntlet.

  “Then I don’t see how you’re going to pay for the trip,” he said. “Because I won’t.”

  “There’s money in my college fund.”

  “That’s my money.”

  “But it’s in my name,” I said, looking down at the floor.

  I knew I was crossing the Rubicon with him.

  My father didn’t talk to me for a long time after that. Every once in a while over the next few days I’d catch him staring at me with that look of primal male suspicion: Is this really my son?

  I can’t say I blame him. My father is about as decent, honest, and hardworking as it’s possible for a man to be. He had grown up poor and put himself through college and medical school so that his children could have a better life. And after all this expense and sacrifice, after sending off his Catholic, Ayn Rand–reading, science and math geek of a son to one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning, what did he receive back three years later? A liberal, a religious studies major (not premed!), and a Buddhist. It was enough to break any God-fearing, Reagan-loving father’s heart.

  I wanted to explain it all to him, but I was too ashamed. How could I tell my father that I had been the boy that bullies loved to hate, that along with tetherball and four-square, “beating the shit out of Matt” had been an unofficial playground activity, that I had never once stood up for myself and fought back, that even years later when one would have expected any normal person to have grown out of it I still shook like some abused Pavlovian dog whenever a voice was raised in anger, that the playground still infected my dreams, that I was tired of running, that I couldn’t live with myself as I was? No, it was better to let him think I was some spoiled, ungrateful little shit than a coward.

  I requested a leave of absence from Princeton, ostensibly to research my senior thesis for a year, and began making preparations for my journey.

  On the first day of September, my mother took me to the Kansas City airport by herself. She was crying as I stepped onto the plane.

  I was smiling with eager anticipation.

  2

  LOST IN TRANSPLANTATION

  It was a shock to discover that after three years of studying Mandarin in college I could not actually speak Chinese. I had been pretty certain I could right up until the moment I landed in Beijing and caught a cab at the airport.

  I’d handed the cabbie a little card that read GREAT WALL SHERATON in English and Chinese and said in what I thought was Chinese, “I go there.” From that moment on, he talked to me nonstop in a language I did not recognize. I tried to interrupt him.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “My Chinese speaking level is not very high. Please, could you speak more slowly?”

  But he didn’t seem to hear me, so I tried to interrupt him again. And again he ignored me. He kept on rambling, and I kept on not understanding.

  I panicked, suddenly losing all sense of the outside world. I didn’t notice the brand-new, perfectly straight highway the government had recently built to connect the city with the airport. I barely noticed the tollbooth, another new installation. I no longer even heard my driver, who would not stop speaking. All I could hear was a voice inside my head quietly cursing, you stupid shit, over and over again.

  It had been twenty-six hours since I stepped onto the plane in Kansas City. The jet lag was affecting me like extremely strong pot—my body felt dense and heavy, my mind was disoriented and paranoid. Where was I? Was this China? Did I get on the wrong connecting flight in Narita?

  I rolled down the window. I felt lik
e throwing up.

  The cab pulled beneath an underpass. A wooden wagon driven by an oxen and filled with scrap metal pulled to a stop beside my cab as the light turned red. At the last moment a black Mercedes with tinted glass whipped around and in front of the wagon. (I would soon learn this was the sedan of choice for high-ranking government officials.) Angered by the car’s exhaust, one of the oxen head-butted the back of the Mercedes. The driver of the Mercedes and the peasant driving the wagon were still shouting at each other when the light turned green and we pulled away.

  After dodging the traffic, we turned into a street that took us through an outer wall and delivered me to the entrance of the Great Wall Sheraton. As I paid my fare and hopped out of the car, the red-coated, gold-buttoned doorman at the Great Wall Sheraton said to me in stilted English, “Wurcome.”

  “Do you speak Chinese?” I asked him in Mandarin.

  “Your Chinese is very good,” he said to me in Mandarin with a Beijing accent—heavy on the “r” sounds.

  Overwhelmed, I hugged him. After an awkward moment, I let him loose.

  As cover, I said, “My driver does not speak Chinese. Why?”

  He glanced into the car.

  “He is not from Beijing. Probably from the South. Everyone down there speaks a different dialect. I was in Shanghai and didn’t understand a word people were saying. But what are we to do? People are now free to move around. It is luan,” he said. “Chaos.”

  I had solved my first, unexpected problem. I was in fact in China, and I did know how to speak the language, albeit haltingly and at about a sixth-grade level. The sudden relief I felt was quickly displaced by the daunting task of finding the Shaolin Temple in such a vast country.

  As the doorman carried my bags through the marbled lobby of the five-star Sheraton, I asked him, “Do you know where the Shaolin Temple is?”