(To celebrate the release of our good buddy Matthew Polly's new book Tapped Out this Thursday, we'll be sharing some choice excerpts from one of my favorite books - American Shaolin. Polly trained in China with the Shaolin monks back in 1993 - before it was cool, as the hipsters would say - and this book chronicles all the ridiculous situations he got himself into.)
It had been a calm night at the Shaolin Temple before the fight started.
A French photojournalist named Pierre was throwing a small banquet at the Shaolin Wushu Center?s restaurant for several of the martial monks and Shaolin?s ?expat community,? which consisted of two Norwegians who were visiting for the week and Shaolin?s two American students, John Lee and myself. Pierre had been assigned to take photos of the Shaolin monks for a French magazine, and I had arranged for my friends and instructors Monk Deqing, Monk Cheng Hao, and Coach Yan to pose for him. The session had gone so well that Pierre had invited us all to dinner.
We were seated around a large table in the middle of the restaurant, which was built by the government and reflected the Communist Party?s taste in architecture: oversize, poorly constructed, and rectangular. Maoist aesthetics are a tyranny of straight lines. The restaurant had the dimensions of a high school basketball gymna-sium and was only three years old, but already rundown. It was usually only filled at lunch when droves of tourists made day-trips to visit the Shaolin Temple, famous throughout the world as the birthplace of both Zen Buddhism and the martial arts. The only other guests that night were a group of six Chinese men sitting at a banquet table a hundred feet away. A dozen waitresses were lounging around arguing with each other about who had breakfast duty the next morning.
We had finished the toasting phase of the banquet, where much thanks is given and much baijiu is choked down. (Baijiu is Chinese rice liquor that tastes and affects the digestive system like a combination of sake, moonshine, and Liquid Drano.) We were just settling into the main course when the waitress who was serving the other table came over and whispered something to Deqing and Coach Yan.
Deqing?s face immediately went red with rage. He and I had become close friends over the last nine months of my stay, so I was used to his mood swings. But I had never before seen him this angry.
?He really said he wants a qie cuo?? Deqing asked, gripping his glass so tightly I though he might shatter it. ?Challenge match??
(The rest after the jump)
Source: http://www.fightlinker.com/american-shaolin-the-challenge-match
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