American Shaolin
Categories: Travel , Nonfiction
As a Kansas high school student, Matthew Polly used to make lists of all the things that were wrong with him. “Ignorant” topped the list, and after he took care of that by getting himself into Princeton, he decided to work on the “cowardly” and “spiritually confused” items.
His plan for that? Leave college and travel to China, where he would find the legendary Shaolin Temple and study at the feet of the fabled Buddhist kung fu masters he knew from his religious studies readings, Chinese language classes, and countless martial arts movies.
With considerable charm and self-deprecation, this gawky, geeky laowai (white foreigner) takes us along on that surprising journey in American Shaolin : Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China.
This was in the early 1990s, not long after Tiananmen Square, when most Americans would not have wanted to make such a trip. Yet our self-confessed young coward managed to travel solo to rural China, find the temple, and persuade the monks to take him on for two years. Both his ability to speak Chinese and his American dollars helped.
Polly introduces us to his instructors, young and old, and describes life in the temple and its surrounding village. Along the way, he introduces us to Chinese culture, from traditional courtesies to Maoist dating laws to drinking games.
And just as he gradually becomes more comfortable in this very different society, he gradually becomes more adept at one of the temple’s martial arts disciplines, to the point where he takes part in an international competition.
The story is often very funny, and always interesting. Polly does skirt some issues—he gives us some clues about his motivations for becoming a martial arts master and talks about the rage he learns to release in his fights, but probably isn’t really as disingenuous as he seems. The religious part of his quest gets short shift, and for non-martial-artists, the fight scenes may be a bit obscure.
Still, it’s an absolutely fascinating journey, and it’s amusing to meet a young man who actually did what so many American boys have dreamed of doing.
