As a small boy growing up in Kansas, Matthew Polly was the target of bullies.
“I was the boy who bullies loved to hate,” he says when we met in a
restaurant in Washington DC. This is hard to imagine: he is broad-shouldered
and towers over me at 6ft 3in. But Polly insists: “Beating the crap out of
Matt was an unofficial play- ground activity. They used to chase me, hold me
down and kick me in the groin. I still find it shameful to talk about. I had
an intense desire not to be knocked about any more.”
Having seen David Carradine in Kung Fu on TV at the age of 9, Polly
dreamt of training at the Shaolin Temple in China to become the toughest
fighter in the world. So, at the age of 21 and in defiance of his parents,
he dropped out of Princeton and travelled to China, where he spent two years
living, studying and performing with the Shaolin monks, eventually becoming
the first American to be accepted as a Shaolin disciple. “I’m not given to
half measures,” says Polly, who has written a book, American
Shaolin , about his experience.
Polly, now 35, is slightly dorky but in a charming way. He is clean-cut,
wears a candy-striped shirt with jeans and laughs a lot, mostly at himself.
This self-deprecating humour peppers his book and makes it very readable,
even to someone (like me) who has no knowledge of kung fu. The book is being
developed into a movie by Fox2000. I ask Polly who he would pick to play
himself. “Brad Pitt, obviously — you can see the resemblance . . .”
When he first arrived at Shaolin in 1992, he was taken aback: “I had expected
to see a few mystical monks jumping up and down in a wind-swept, isolated
monastery; what I found was a tourist trap: donkey-drawn wagons, money
changers, inventive attractions — such as a 2,000-year-old mummy that was
actually a dead monkey. They were so desperate to make money, they’d opened
the floodgates to capitalism with no restraint. Worst of all, there seemed
to be no monks. I was gripped by this terrible fear that this was a gutted
shell and the monks were long gone. I had left everything I knew behind,
journeyed thousands of miles, and spent thousands of dollars in pursuit of a
dream that had seemed absurd to my friends, my teachers, and my parents. And
now it looked as though they had been right.”
Eventually, of course, he did find two monks engaging in a dazzling display
of kung fu and knew that he had realised his goal: “My breath caught in my
throat. For a moment, I believed that man could fly.”
He asked to join the monks, which was allowed in exchange for $1,300 a month
for board, lodging and seven hours of punishing training a day. The fee
surprised Polly: “In the kung fu movies, disciples pay their teachers in
sweat and tears, not American Express travellers’ cheques.”
Polly describes Day 1 at Shaolin: “I was just ecstatic. I jumped around,
nothing hurt, I thought ‘I’m with the monks, I finally did it, I proved
everyone wrong, I’m so cool’. The second day, with every part of my body
aching, was the most awful, painful thing I’d ever been through.”
In his book, he describes his coach, Cheng Hao, putting him through his paces
as he begs for mercy:
“The first stretch required me to place one leg up as high as possible,
keep it straight and then bend my nose to my knee. The problem was that the
tendons behind my knee felt like frayed string about to snap. The pain was
extraordinary, and my foot was two steps lower than it had been the day
before: ‘Master, please let me rest for one day.’
‘No, it won’t help.’
‘My leg is going to break,’ I mewled.
‘No, it won’t.’
At that point I’d have given Cheng Hao anything — money, state secrets,
sexual favours — for a reprieve from kung-fu training.”
Each day would start at dawn with a run up the mountain, then came breathing
exercises and individual training before breakfast, after which the more
rigorous training would begin: a two-hour session involving calisthenics,
kung-fu moves and gymnastics. After lunch, the monks would take a short
siesta, before another two-hour training session. In the evening, it was
back to individual training. Day in, day out, six days a week. What would
induce anyone to do this voluntarily — and pay for it? “I wanted to find the
hardest thing I could think of to do. The fact that it was difficult made it
better. I think boys in particular need to prove themselves in some
extraordinarily stupid way.”
The physical toll turned out to be less than the psychological toll. “The
loneliness was hard. In the early days nobody wanted to talk to me. Sundays
were the worst because there was no training. I’d drink a couple of beers
and read a book but I’d get anxiety attacks where I felt so alone it felt
like solitary confinement. Being the only white guy on top of a mountain in
China is exhausting emotionally.”
Eventually, he made friends with some of the monks and earned respect not
just for his kung-fu skills, which rapidly improved, but for his willingness
to “eat bitter”, Chinese slang for suffer. Soon Polly transformed himself
from a gangly coward into a formidable kickboxer and, after nine months,
volunteered for a challenge match against a kung-fu master from another
province, which everyone, including Polly, was convinced that he would lose.
“I felt an overwhelming fear grip me in the gut.”
Against the odds, he won and became a hero to the monks, having defended
Shaolin’s honour. Rechristened Lao Bao [Bao is the translation of “Polly”
and Lao means “elder” and is an honorific in China], Polly went on to
represent Shaolin in a national tournament and was accepted as a disciple of
the temple. Next he turned to “iron kung fu”, in which a part of the
body is battered so much that over the weeks the bruises become calluses and
the body part is rendered almost impervious to harm. Polly decided to become
an “iron forearm” expert: training involved smashing his arm against a tree
for 30 minutes before breakfast.
If that seems like lunacy, it is thrown into perspective by his meeting with a
man who spent half an hour every morning battering another part of his body.
Unbelievably, Monk Dong (as Polly nicknames him) is an iron crotch expert:
Polly is invited to kick him in the groin and ended up with a sore foot. The
monk, unscathed, offered to teach Polly this special skill and he actually
considered it.
“I thought it would be the most bizarre thing I could do — what a
party trick. Also I was intimately familiar with what being ‘racked’ felt
like — from the playground of my Kansas school.” But he quickly came to
his senses. “I think one of the reasons you go to live in other cultures is
to find your limits: I could go to Shaolin, I could study for two years but
I knew at that moment when he asked me if I wanted to learn iron-crotch kung
fu I had reached my limit: I could not go beyond it.”
I ask if, in retrospect, he can understand his parents’ dismay at his odyssey:
would he want a child of his to embark on a similar mission?
“The weird thing is I think all our children do the exact opposite of what
their parents want. My son will probably say ‘I want to be a lawyer’, and
I’ll be like ‘Son, don’t you want to explore the world?’ ”
As yet he doesn’t have children. In fact on his “Things Wrong with Matt” list,
which used to be headed by the word “Cowardly”, now erased, the top item is
“No wife/family”, which may be crossed off in the near future. “I think I
may be getting there on the wife thing,” he says. “There is somebody that
I’m dating who I’m quite fond of.”
When he returned from the temple, much to his parents’ relief, he resumed his
studies at Princeton and then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, before
moving to New York and becoming a writer for The Nation and Slate.
The kung-fu training went on the backburner and even the iron forearm was hard
to maintain. “There’s just nowhere you can go in Manhattan and bang your arm
against a tree for 30 minutes and not end up at Bellevue Hospital. I did try
to train in a park near my parents’ house in Kansas for a while: my father
saw me and said ‘I dont know what we did wrong to you but whatever it was
I’m sorry’.”
Polly says that since his return from China he has not often succumbed to the
temptation to show his strength — “although there may have been a
couple of incidents where I did hit somebody”. Once a group of townies in
Oxford jumped him as he was leaving the exam halls dressed in sub fusc.
“I knocked one guy back but then one of the girlfriends clocked me over the
head with a purse and I realised I couldn’t hit a woman - even though she
probably deserved it. So I decided to walk away from the situation. And that
is the main lesson I have learnt — to walk away.”
So in a way all the kung-fu training was pointless? “In a way it was,” he
agrees genially, “but I couldn’t have gotten to that point without it. I had
to unlearn the patterns of being picked on. Before going to Shaolin if
someone had tried to attack me, I would have either been on the ground or
running away: I hated confrontation. Now I can calmly walk away and not feel
disadvantaged. No one wants to mess with a guy who wants a fight.”
American Shaolin by Matthew Polly (Abacus), is published on Thursday
and is available at £9.89 (rrp £10.99) from Times BooksFirst on 0870 1608080
