Shaolin Temple, Part 1

Last Friday I and about 20 other HBA students took an overnight train to the Henan Province of China to spend a week studying Kung Fu at the Tagou Martial Arts School near the famous Shaolin Temple. My first impression of the city near our hotel was that this part of the country was a lot more "China." Unlike at Beiyu, the university where I attend class, there were very few foreigners, and it was a definite step-down in terms of our comfort level. Especially up in the mountains, where we were staying, it was easy to see that China is a developing country.



We woke up the first morning (and every other morning) at 5:30 for our daily exercises. After a breakfast of carrots, cabbage, and other pickled vegetables, gross pasty bread, eggs, and coffee (yes, I became a coffee drinker last week), we met with a teacher for a few hours of kung fu lessons. I've always considered myself a flexible person. When I was a little kid I even used to be able to put both of my ankles behind my neck, and in elementary school I could do a split with ease thanks to a few years of Taekwando. But I don't know where that all went. I already felt sore after our morning stretches, and after hours of various kicks and punches (all while rapidly switching between squatting really low and standing up and squatting even lower) I was ready to call it quits. But wait! After a vegetarian lunch of carrots, cabbage, pickled vegetables, pasty bread, eggs, soup, and Sprite, we had a small break and then it was back to fung fu for the afternoon!

Actually, it wasn't bad. The first day of kung fu was exciting and fun. We learned a routine that we're going to perform in a few weeks at HBA's talent show.

I felt it in the morning. I couldn't bend down as low during the next few mornings' exercises, but the excitement of being in such an ancient place, different from anywhere else I've ever been, kept up my spirits. We only had one other full day of kung fu (although I felt kind of sick the second day and sat out on the afternoon session). The other days, we visited nearby temples and touristy sites, like the Longmen Grottoes. We also climbed Song Shan. I'll write about both experiences in my next post.

One of the cool things about being at Shaolin was that you constantly see large groups of uniformed children just marching and chanting in unison. These kids enroll at Tagou at the age of 4. Watching them perform was awesome! One night we went to one of their competitions. At Shaolin, you don't have to worry about your kung fu not being as good as someone else's, at least during competition time, because the students here cheer in unison and show the same level of enthusiasm for every single student. Actually it was a little weird. Someone would go up to the front of the crowd and do their routine for the judges, all while the audience cheering "Jia you!", stopping and starting at the same time as if on cue.


We went to Shaolin to write social study reports, but one thing I was disappointed about was that we weren't given as much time for interviews as we were told we would. I chose to write about minority students at the Tagou school: girls and international students. Girls were admitted in 1985, and we saw very few of them while at Shaolin. We saw some American students, too, including the number one kungfu student in our country, at least according to his annoying father. Another American couple we met, who now live in Beijing, had enrolled their three young sons in the school for the summer. They have lived all over the world, and their kids can now speak perfect English, Spanish, and Chinese, and they're not even 12 yet.

On a different note, our hotel was better than I imagined, but was still lacking. One flaw were the centipedes all over the floor. Another was that the room was always either freezing or suffocatingly hot. Also, the bathroom's walls were made of clear glass, giving us no privacy from our roommates. The cafeteria we ate at was also dirty and unattractive. We ate the same food almost everyday, and I think it was the fast pace and rigour of our exercises and the lack of variation (and protein) in our meals that left me feeling less-than-perfect at the end of the week.

We did eat out once in a while though. At one restaurant, we were given metal trays and directed toward a central table. At first I thought it was just a buffet, so I was a little creeped out to see raw meat and seafood among the bland vegetables and weird noodle-cake things. But it turns out that those things were just ingredients, and when we got back to our seats we could put the ingredients we had chosen into our personal pots of boiling broth. The meat cooked very quickly. Our vegetables and noodles also absorbed the flavor of the broth, and it was all very, very good. The only downside was that the waitress made a mistake and gave me spicy broth (things in China are usually spicy unless you request them not to be.) No worries though, our teachers at HBA are always telling us to 入乡随俗 (rùxiāngsuísú), which is the Chinese equivalent of "When in Rome, do as the Romans Do." My classmates and I use that phrase pretty often, actually, including when my roommate had to use the handle of a hotel toothbrush to spread peanut butter because we had forgotten to buy knives at the supermarket. Except in that case I don't think the phrase was entirely appropriate :)