In China, every child wants to be a kung fu star. Fintan O'Toole visits a Shaolin school that trains children to be the next Bruce Lee
Huang Xiheng is wearing an orange T-shirt and black tracksuit bottoms above his white trainers. Like the Brazilian footballer, Ronaldo, the centre of his scalp is shaved bare, leaving an odd triangular tuft at the front. He strolls out into the middle of a cavernous hall, casual as a farmer in his own field, does a little twirl, then drops to his knees and becomes a frog. He hops across the big grey mat, jerking his legs outwards. Coming towards the end of the mat, the legs jolt out in a high, sharp kick that causes his body to judder in mid-air before he lands again and twists back in the other direction. He pauses for a moment, padding his "feet" on the ground, then twists his body until, in a split second, his entire weight is resting on the top of his head. He flicks his shoulders and launches himself into a single movement of four back-somersaults that takes him back across the mat in the blink of an eye. He pushes his feet up into the air and flips himself round on to his knees again.
He hops around in a circle, his cheek puffed out like an angry bullfrog's. Then he's balancing on his head again, spinning around like a cyclone, turning four full circles in a tiny instant. He stops, assumes his frog shape again, pads around for a moment, then gets to his feet and ambles off.
Huang Xiheng is six years old, and he's been here in the Shaolin Ta Guo kung fu school for three of those years. He's a little lost boy, hungry for affection, but if you lift him up, he's like a rock, hard and heavy with solid muscle. I ask him where he came from, and he has to think before he remembers that he was born far away in the hot southern province of Sichuan. His father sent him here, he says.
When did he last see his parents, I ask. "I haven't seen them for two years," he replies.
Does he miss them? "No, I don't really remember them."
Why did they send him here? "To be a kung fu star."
He is one already, albeit at a relatively low level. Last year, when he was five, he made his first appearance as a performer on national television.
Ta Guo is the biggest and most prestigious of the cluster of kung fu schools that has grown up around the famous Shaolin Temple in Henan province. At the height of summer, when its ranks are swelled by foreign students on short trips, its ranks are swelled to 18,000, but all year round it has as many as 12,000.
Though it has a huge new school complex in the nearby town of Dengfeng, Huang Xiheng lives and trains in its old complex next door to the temple itself. The place feels halfway between a monastery and a barracks, with low, two-storey, balconied blockhouses forming a series of semi-enclosed squares. The rooms within the buildings are spartan dormitories, with rows of bunk beds, but most have movie posters on the walls. There are cold taps outside the rooms and when they are not training the kids sit on the stoops, chatting and washing their clothes.
When I call to the school at 2pm, I am told that no one could talk to me until after 4pm because everyone was asleep. The long afternoon nap breaks up a day that starts with breakfast at 5.30, followed by four hours of study, when the students learn languages, computer skills and "culture", a category that includes literary and historical study.
After lunch and sleep, there are five hours of physical training. Sure enough, at a few minutes to four, a shrill horn sounds around the squares, and within half an hour row after row of youngsters, all dressed in the school's uniform of a red T-shirt and black tracksuit bottoms with a wide white stripe down the seam, line up on the drill grounds.
One mixed group of boys and girls, ranked in a dozen rows, stand to attention in the afternoon sun until, at a signal, the kids each stretch out a hand at shoulder height and, in unison, leap to kick it with a resounding smack. Another group is made up of boys armed with staves which they twirl and thrust in a fierce ballet. A third drills with swords that shine like metal but seem as thin as paper.
One of the kung fu coaches, Zhang Hu, tells me that this part of the curriculum breaks down into four elements: fist work, acrobatics, the mastery of 18 traditional weapons and performance. The last is the key: these kids want to be kung fu stars.
Or, more precisely, their parents want them to be stars. And, as Zhang Hu explains, that means starting young. "If you want to be good, you have to begin to train when you are little. If you leave it until you are big, it's too late. You'll be too soft. You won't have the co-ordination or the flexibility."
And so, to follow the new Chinese dream, kids like Huang Xiheng, who have barely stopped being toddlers, are left by their parents in a strange place far from home. It is not accidental that the kids I speak to mostly came from Sichuan or Anhui, rural provinces where the children of peasants still have relatively few prospects of a life beyond the village and the field. The fees at Ta Guo - around €100 a year plus the cost of food - are pitched at a level low enough to give the dream of escape into riches and fame at least a veneer of feasibility.
The psychic space in which Chinese kids used to dream of being a hero of the Long March, fighting off the nationalist traitors, or a model worker surpassing pig-iron production quotas, has now been filled by flying fists and death-defying leaps.
KUNG FU IS sufficiently redolent of Chinese tradition to appeal to official patriotic values, but also sufficiently glamorous to contain the new capitalist dreams of money and prestige. In this new cultural revolution, Bruce Lee is the new Mao. In his ancestral home of Foshan in the southern province of Guangdong, which issued postage stamps in his honour two years ago, a huge 200-hectare kung fu theme park is under construction, and it will include a Bruce Lee Memorial Hall and a giant statue of the original kung fu star.
In December, the state broadcaster CCTV will start filming a drama series called The Legend of Bruce Lee, dealing, in no fewer than 40 episodes, with his life from the age of nine up to the making of Enter the Dragon (thus, of course, avoiding his still-mysterious death). According to the director, Wu Ziniu, "We hope to portray a charismatic Bruce Lee who is not only a brilliant kung fu master, a top-notch action star, but also a man of strong will, independent thinking and national esteem."
At the moment, another 40-episode kung fu series, based on the popular novel Seven Swords of Mount Tian, is being broadcast on state television. A Chinese version of Pop Idol, except with the aim of uncovering a kung fu star rather than a pop singer, has recently finished a successful run. The K-Star Global Chinese Kung Fu Star TV Competition put 108 martial artists through their paces (the number deliberately echoing the 108 heroes of the classic Chinese novel, The Water Margin) and was jointly organised by Shaolin Temple itself, with the winners promised roles in yet another TV kung fu series. When I visit Ta Guo school, there is already a team from a film production company on the premises, interviewing kids for possible roles.
The young students I talk to are all in this group of possible stars, the cohort from which an elite might emerge. These were the ones who get to perform in the school's elaborate, highly choreographed shows, staged for TV or for foreign tours. But, as Zhang Hu observes, only a tiny minority even get to this level. "From over 10,000 students, only 100 will be chosen to perform," he says. "The standard is very, very high, so you have to be really good to be chosen."
Even the elite, of course, will still face ferocious competition in the quest for stardom, and the chances are that most of them will end up as bodyguards, bouncers or as PE teachers. But each of them seems certain that such ordinary lives will belong to someone else.
"I have just one purpose," Heng Xue Chang tells me, "and that is to be a very famous kung fu star." He's 18 now and he tells me that his parents in Anhui, who were small business people, sent him here when he was eight because he was "a very naughty kid". They threatened to send him to a boarding school but he had heard of Ta Guo from a classmate and persuaded them that, if they were going to send him away to be disciplined, he might as well learn kung fu. As a 10-year veteran of the school, he looks tough and blithe, but when I ask him how he felt when he first came here, his face falls into a melancholy, vulnerable expression.
"I was very sad. I missed my home and I found it very hard to adapt. Once, when my parents came to visit, I pleaded with them to take me home, and I cried a lot. But after a while I got used to it."
With a wiry body, cropped head, long face and big ears, he doesn't really look like a potential star, but he is an amazing performer. His speciality is a monkey routine. He leaps sideways, flailing his fists, then springs forwards in a somersault, hunkers down, jumps up in several directions waving his "paws", stands on his hands, does four backward somersaults, tumbles forward, holds himself up by his arms while spinning his legs around in a circle, then twists onto his backside with his body in a v-shape, bounces five times forward on his behind, while doing a monkey-scratch under his arms, and leaps into the air for a final bow - all in precisely 25 seconds. It's not the Leaving Cert, but it's rather more impressive than what most of us learn in school.
WHAT STRIKES ME as being more impressive still, however, is not the physical feats that these kids can perform, nor even the mental toughness that allows them to get through the experience of being taken from home between the ages of three and eight, sent 1,000 miles away, and thrown in to an austere barracks with 10,000 strangers.
It is how nice the kids are to each other. Even when they are not obviously being watched, there is no sign that the scramble for a few places in the narrow firmament of kung fu stars has made them hard and spiteful. What they learn is something that is not on the curriculum: the old Chinese lesson of enduring together.
Walking around the squares as the evening light declines towards bedtime, I can see them chatting amiably in groups. Little Huang Xiheng is still buzzing around and as he bounces from one group of boys to another, there is always an older kid to pat his head or lift him up as a parent might. One group of kids who couldn't have been older than eight sit hushed in neat rows while an older boy of about 12 tells them a story. I can't understand what he is saying but I wonder if it is a fairytale in which they all become kung fu stars and I think how nice it would be if it could come true.