Television is a fun gauge of a nation’s psyche. A look into how a people entertain themselves speaks volumes about who the people are. In America, football, zombies, gritty cop dramas, and sophomoric, snarky sitcoms reign supreme. Chinese TV is dominated by historical fantasies of slaughtering Japan’s invading soldiers, romantic melodramas, singing showcases, dry news reports, and sports (basketball, volleyball, and ping pong- what else).
I didn’t watch much television in China. While it was an entertaining spectacle to flip through when I was home alone and bored, which was quite often, I instead spent most of my free time on the slow-as-molasses and “Great Firewall” blocked internet, or out exercising and exploring around my college campus. When I did watch TV, I would spend a minute on the (mostly) ping-pong and volleyball channel, then click up through several song and dance channels, some serials, and one movie channel that would occasionally play something spoken in English or subtitled. I was at times so desperate for an English-language movie that I’d stay up late to watch whatever forgotten American garbage was airing, like Cheaper by the Dozen 2 until I couldn’t take it any more and went to bed.
Mostly I turned on the television to watch the English language news channel and try to feel somewhat connected to the outside world from my surreal hinterland outpost. The news channels were state-controlled, like all the rest, so it was interesting to note the edge in Chinese reporters’ voices when discussing an issue related to U.S. actions and Chinese sovereignty (not so ironically, each channel is called “CCTV” followed by a number, which stands for China Central Television instead of closed-circuit television). On the surprising bright side, a typical newscast was a plain rundown of international headlines and summits, so the number of biased statements and gimmicks per minute was surprisingly fewer than a typical American broadcast.
Chinese newspapers were completely impenetrable by my illiterate eyes, so I never bothered with one. In my observation, daily newspaper reading was not all that common of a habit in the small (by Chinese standards) cities where I spent the majority of my time. I didn’t see anyone carrying them in hand while commuting through the subways and crowded streets of the Tier 1 cities, either. While I cannot comment on daily readership numbers, I can say from my perspective that I did not notice anyone carrying a newspaper with them, reading it over breakfast, or collecting piles of old papers in their living room or office. The first time I noticed the local newspaper was when I penetrated its sports page as a story. And as long as I am going to do a little boasting, I should add that this was after I was featured on the local television news channel.
So first: how I got on television. It began when Aunt Fong took me around to try and find a martial arts school.
Martial arts training can be very informal in China, and by that I mean I regularly saw tai chi and kung fu groups meeting in the park- perhaps as few as two or three friends practicing their techniques together, or one man sweeping a two-handed sword or pole-arm through the air. Aunt Fong introduced me to a colleague or friend of hers (someone connected to her gwan-shee network) who practiced his routines every morning in a riverside park, so I did get a taste of this do-it-yourself kung fu. About once a week during the spring, Aunt Fong would nag me to wake up extra early and take a taxi to meet “Big” Wei, or Da Wei, as we called him in Chinese, before he finished his 6 a.m. practice and headed back home. While I was thankful to Aunt Fong and Da Wei for the time he spent teaching me a lengthy kung fu routine, and I was open to learn and integrate kung fu techniques into my martial arts knowledge, my heart was just not into performing choreographed, fossilized routines. I wanted to continue the martial arts I had pursued in the United States and develop my skills to a competitive level.
There were no schools nearby for me to practice any wrestling or grappling like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu I studied back in America (those schools exist only in China’s major cities- it is still a nation obsessed with its ancient traditions over contemporary fascinations like mixed martial arts and BJJ), but Aunt Fong had a friend who practiced Sanda, or what might generically be called “kickboxing” in America. She knew I wanted to practice at a serious gym, so she took me there to meet the coach. Master Wei, not Big Wei, was a trim, middle-aged man with an army crew cut and a block-shaped head. His physique did not immediately tip me off that he was a former champion and coach, but when I felt the power of his right hook and watched as he used breath control to take my best punch to his stomach again and again without flinching, I sensed serious power in his modest size. Also, he amazing abilities like the way he could sit cross-legged and use his only his two pointer fingers and thumbs to elevate himself off the floor.
Master Wei’s school was on the second level of a small retail space, indistinct from all the other dingy, white-walled retail spaces lining the downtown city blocks. The gym upstairs was filled with weight-lifting machines, heavy punching bags, and floor mats. During class nights, young kids would come after school and horse around until Master Wei or his nephew would step in, blow the whistle, and start class. Then, all the kids and some adults would run in circles or perform the same leg-swinging exercises for what seemed like forever. Thirty minutes is a very brief time respective to most things, but it is an unendurably long time to repeat the same floor exercise or run in tight ovals without a break. Master Wei would just shout, “Come on!” or blast his whistle as we struggled. He was a strict taskmaster who had never been influenced by the American idea to keep all of the students engaged or entertained.
Sometimes, he would pair students up for sparring or a partner exercise, tell us to begin, then go downstairs to take a half-hour phone call, leaving us to continue the exercise indefinitely. Other times, he would sit and watch his nephew and I fight each other, chiming in “Very good!” if I did something right, or pulling his nephew to the side to scold and slap him with his whistle cord when he did something wrong. Not that I was the one getting the best of his nephew- more often it was just the opposite, but Master Wei wasn’t related to me so that meant I was spared these whistle cord whips.
Those punishment breaks were the only pause in the action. Normally, Master Wei’s nephew and I would fight each other until I saw parents arriving after dark to pick their children up from the gym. Then, I knew my reprieve was mercifully near. Aunt Fong would walk me home as I hobbled on ankles and shin bones that felt like crushed glass. (Here, I tell how a minor injury from fighting at the gym turned into a serious problem that made necessary my first hospital visit.)
My very minor television appearance occurred one afternoon after I finished my classes and took a taxi to meet Aunt Fong at her university before heading off to my normally scheduled Sanda practice. At her campus, I was surprised by a small group of her colleagues and student friends who were expecting me as my taxi arrived. One of her excited students told me that a television crew was coming to film me for the news. I wasn’t sure I could believe her; I did not see why they would be interested in filming me or how the local TV station would even know about me.
But in small city China, word of a young, tall foreigner gets around. Students in my English classes would tell me how their friends had seen me eating at the cafeteria, or shopping downtown- sometimes they would show me unnerving pictures that their friends had taken of me unaware in the middle of class or from across campus. Uncle Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) once forbid me to run outside the university campus after the school security guards (I assumed) told him or a link of the social grape vine that they saw me running along the street outside the school’s gate. So I was skeptical that I was newsworthy, but not completely surprised when I came to Aunt Fong’s office building and saw a camera crew waiting outside.
They filmed me walking around the campus, playing ping-pong with a ping-pong professor (they really have those in China) and play-fighting with another young man in front of a crowd of students. Then, the camera crew followed me to the Sanda gym and filmed me training on punching mitts with Master Wei. After the workout, one of Aunt Fong’s friends served as a translator so I could be interviewed. She relayed questions to me about my training and competition experience in America. I tried to explain to her that I had only fought a few fights, as an amateur, and my competition awards were not championships but awards for having finished two of my fights with the “Submission of the Night”. Good luck explaining what “Submission of the Night” meant to a provincial Chinese audience. I was afraid I was being set up as the great white hope of my college town, and as a foreign novelty I would be matched to fight some Chinese giant with bad intentions.
“No, no, I said I killed seven FLIES with one blow!”
I never did get to see my segment on the news. It aired during a holiday week, while I was away in Shanghai, and Aunt Fong said she couldn’t record it.
Master Wei thought that I was good enough to audition, along with his nephew, for a spot on the national broadcast of kickboxing fights: Wu Lin Feng. The prospect of fighting professionally and being able to earn an income from martial arts became my incentive to return to the gym for my regular session of Thursday through Sunday beatings by the hands and feet of Master Wei’s nephew. I was always relieved when Master Wei told us to practice boxing- no knees or kicks- because it was less painful to be hit primarily in the head versus the legs and body, and I could use my long arms to outbox Master Wei’s much shorter nephew.
My newspaper appearance came a couple months later, also due to my training at Master Wei’s gym, and also reported by the same journalist who produced my TV story. In a Chinese martial arts school, students are accepted by their teacher in a formal ceremony where the student pays obeisance to the teacher, is accepted by him, and then they dine together with friends. The night of my ceremony, I knew something formal was about to take place, but I had only a foggy idea of what it was all about and could not fathom how formal and well-attended it would be.
I met two other students, also being officially accepted by Master Wei as students, in the lobby of a nice restaurant near the gym: Ma Cao, a colleague of Aunt Fong’s who taught exercise science and possessed the largest calves proportional to body mass I have ever seen on a human being, and a very skinny college student who I suspected was mostly into training Sanda so he could boast about it to girls. Ma Cao was wearing a mandarin suit; I only had on the khaki pants I wore to my classes that day and a black, wool jacket over my sweater. I felt shamefully underdressed in my normal teaching clothes and I began to get the sense that this ceremonial dinner was of much bigger import than I had assumed. I thought we would probably bow, shake hands, and sign a certificate before training at the gym, but the event at the restaurant was shaping up to become an all-night affair.
Ma Cao showing off his giant calves.
Before most of the guests arrived, we three students took out our billfolds and divided our “lucky money” into three red envelopes so we could present them as gifts to Master Wei. If you want to be someone’s student in China, you had better have a red envelope full of lucky money with their name on it. We had to count out the luckiest of numbers- 888 Chinese yuan- which had me smirking because this number in Chinese is said, “ba bai ba shi ba.” For a moment, as our small group counted and repeated the sum, we sounded like a small chorus of sheep. Then, minutes later, Master Wei, his family, and all of his old kung fu friends arrived. The journalist came with camera in hand to take pictures of our ceremony.
One after another, we three students stood in front of Master Wei and his wife, who were seated on a small couch in the dining room. Then, we poured them each a cup of tea, and bowed. My two friends did a full kowtow on a floor cushion, but Aunt Fong told me to do just a formal standing bow, hands held together. The newspaper reporter captured this scene and it ran under the headline “A Handsome American Guy/ Studies Kung Fu.” I am not making that up. The sub-heading read how I strived to conquer the competition arena “Wu Lin Feng” within one year. This translation was made for me by a Chinese friend with an English degree and excellent English skills, so skeptical, bilingual readers can check the translation for themselves. The original Chinese headlines are 美国帅小伙/ 珠城学功夫 and 力争一年内“武林风”擂台扬威.)
I’m featured in the story on the right, not the one above the women’s curling team.
After the bow, Master Wei, his kung fu colleagues, and I signed a red certificate that said something about how he would teach me and I would be a good student. I was afraid Master Wei would resent it if I ever trained at a different school and possibly track me down to challenge me to mortal combat, like in the movies, but Aunt Fong assured me our teacher-student agreement was not exclusive. I am still alive to this day, so it turns out she was right.
With the contracts signed, the kung fu teachers and students went out into the lobby to take commemorative pictures for a full hour. I stood in with every possible permutation of people involved with the ceremony. After eight o’clock, the picture-taking died down and I was able to join all the people in the dining room who had already been eating while I was in the lobby. It was typical in China to eat foods that had been sitting on the table for half an hour or longer, so coming in to find stacks of room-temperature food didn’t bother me. Master Wei’s new students footed the bill that night, so all the platters and excess amounts of rice liquor were partially funded on my honor. (More about Chinese dining and drinking customs in “Bottoms Up!”)
The wannabe heart throb on the left (I never learned his name), Master Wei sitting in front of me, and Ma Cao on the right.
Joining the students of honor in this picture are Aunt Fong and, I think, a kung fu teacher or university professor in the red jacket.
Master Wei’s very tough nephew on the left.
So how did my training with Master Wei turn out? Did I realize my dream of competing as a professional martial artist? After my foot injury in the fall, I trained regularly at the (unheated) gym over the winter and got toughened up quite a bit by Master Wei’s Spartan practices. But, concurrently, China as a whole was dragging down my health and emotions. By the time the spring semester had wrapped up and I had open days to devote to training in the now sweltering gym, I felt so forlorn that I lost nearly all spirit to fight. It didn’t feel good to train anymore. Master Wei could tell that my emotions were poor and my heart was fading. He proposed that if I wanted to compete on the televised show, I would need to train full-time for two months and try out in August. I would need my visa extended for that, but I thought it might be worth it. Realizing a martial arts dream seemed worth it to try with all my might, even if that meant staying in China for another two months or a year.
Alas, I could not deny my flagging spirits and health, and at the end of June/early July I became so ill that I had to stay in the hospital for three days.
Training became unthinkable.
Looking out at the brownish-gray sky from my hospital bed, I only wanted to leave China for a clean country where I could convalesce in soul and body. At the end of July, I departed from the Hefei airport with a souvenir newspaper in my luggage.
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