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Go here to view a gallery of Xing Xue in action.
Xue Li Zhang’s grandfather dug deeper and deeper, until the sides of the hole came to the top of 4-year-old Xue Li’s hips. “Jump out!” his grandfather commanded. “Again!” “Again!” After hours of jumps, he taught Xue Li how to do “the punch” and started him kickboxing.
At 6, Xue Li won a martial-arts competition in his hometown, Bozhou, in China’s Anhui province. Several of the judges were from Shaolin Temple. They glanced at each other after his performance. When the competition ended, one of the judges approached Xue Li’s father.
The following week, Xue Li’s father took him on an 11-hour train ride. They got off the train and rode a bus for a couple of hours, then climbed into a rickshaw, then started walking. When Xue Li realized he was being taken to Shaolin Temple to learn traditional Shaolin kung fu, or wu shu, his tears fell like rain.
But then they started to ascend Mount Shaoshi, the highest peak of Songshan Mountain. Gulping, Xue Li looked around at the waterfalls, the rock jutting into blue sky, the ancient, gnarled cypress trees that looked like giant bonsai. “I want to stay!” he exclaimed.
Xue Li’s father gave him a few yuan and said, “I will see you soon. Listen to your teachers.” This was Xue Li’s way to help the family, he said.
“I already help!” Xue Li thought. Both of his parents worked, so he cooked egg and noodles and rice, simple meals for his little sister and brother, and walked them a mile to school. But his father was firm. “We will visit, and you can come home once a year,” he said.
Six months went by before Xue Li saw his family again. He would spend the next 15 years at Shaolin Temple.
He was given a new name: Xing Xue (pronounced zhing zhew-eh). He was also noticed, almost immediately, by a sifu (literally, teacher-father) from the temple’s international department, which trains Shaolin martial artists to represent China abroad. “You can do the screening test,” the sifu told him. “You will have to perform a little. If you pass, you will come directly to my department.’”
Xing Xue performed. “Everybody was very happy and impressed,” he says, neither savoring their praise nor feigning modesty. A conversation with him is a condensed course in cultural difference—also, perhaps, in the way constant discipline shapes a child’s mind. You cannot ask about his personal dreams and private triumphs. Everything he does well is for China, or Shaolin Temple, or his family.
At Shaolin, Xing Xue practiced outdoors eight or nine hours a day, even in snow. Before and after, he meditated, not for religious reasons—he wasn’t there to become a Zen monk—but to achieve the iron control of a kung-fu master. In winter, the temperature inside would fall below freezing while he slept. On steamy 100-degree days, he and his “kung-fu brothers” ran up and down the steep mountainside, clinging to trees. “You had to pay attention to the flower, the branch, the stone,” he says. “If we don’t grab [a tree] properly, we will fall off.
“There are no roads,” he continues, “and there are 18 different curves in the mountain. Usually when we started, it was still dark. When we ran on paths, my teacher would follow us—on a motorcycle!—and if we slowed down, he used the stick.”
Not once did he shirk practice, he says: “I would have been punished, not only because I didn’t want to do something, but because I didn’t do it well enough. So I didn’t dare to say no to my sifu, ever.”
After runs, they sometimes headed to Da Mo’s Cave. “To go to this place, we have to cross five mountains,” he says. “Da Mo was a Shaolin master who practiced meditation in that cave.”
This is a slight understatement: Da Mo, also known as the Bodhidharma, founded the Zen form of Buddhism and also invented kung fu to keep the monks supple during their long hours of sitting. Kung fu only became a martial art when the monks had to defend the temple, which has been destroyed and rebuilt many times since its construction around 495 CE.
At Shaolin, Xing Xue learned the flying leaps that make Westerners’ jaws drop and their movie popcorn spill. He punched concrete walls every day: “The blood from my hands soaked into the walls of the temple,” he says. He practiced handling a 30-pound spear, a sword, a staff, a three-jointed baton. “In a show, the spear is made from bamboo, and only the head is metal,” he confides. “When I practice, the whole thing is metal. My sifu told me, ‘When you feel it is light and part of you, you will be ready.’”
The same was true for breathing: They wore sandbags (made heavier every year) to run up and down the mountain. “Afterward, we were out of breath, but our sifu made us breathe slowly and smoothly through our nose. At 17, when I tried to run up the mountain without any sandbags, it took only 8 minutes to go all the way up!” His eyes light. “The Olympic champions are very fast in the field, but if they run on the mountain, I think we can beat them.”
Much is made of the deliberate harshness of the Shaolin teachers, who express their love and dedication by forcing students to “eat bitter.” Asked if he thinks such rigor necessary, Xing Xue looks down for a minute, then looks up—and chuckles. “Well, I feel like some other people work even harder than me, so I don’t feel like I was pushing hard enough! It was very natural, very normal for us.”
He was badly hurt only once: “My partner threw me up in the air, and I had to turn my body 720 degrees, two full spins, and split my legs open when I landed,” he explains. “I got it, but I was showing off, and I did not land very successfully.” Still, he says, his suffering was nothing. “Some of my brothers, my colleagues, practice to the extreme. One could hold up his body’s weight with two fingers, and that caused very serious injury to his body. He cannot bend his fingers even to use chopsticks. I really do not like that extreme.”
Xing Xue mastered about 72 of the hundreds of sets taught at Shaolin. “One day, my sifu asked me to learn Praying Mantis boxing,” he says. “I said, ‘Show me,’ and he said, ‘No, you have to learn on your own.’” I asked my kung-fu brothers, and they said, ‘You need to find a praying mantis and watch him.’ So I went to the mountain, found one, and stared at him. I thought, ‘Oh, that is nothing.’ Then I put the praying mantis back on the tree, and it went back to its own lifestyle, moving and jumping. Then I began to learn.”
Having mastered Praying Mantis on his own, Xing Xue decided to use it on a poisonous snake he encountered in the woods. It didn’t go well, and finally, he broke and ran. The next day, his sifu told him not to be silly. “Use Praying Mantis on a human doing Snake boxing,” he said, “never on a snake!”
There were other forms—Monkey boxing, Tiger boxing, Dragon boxing, Scorpion boxing, Hawk boxing—underlining the idea that man and nature are one. But what really mattered were the three elements each student had to learn for himself.
Jing is “the root of our vitality, the foundation of all activity,” Xing Xue explains. “It’s not only that you build up your muscle tone; it’s also inside your muscle. You have this special power, so if you need to respond, you respond very fast.”
Qi, pronounced “shee,” has two meanings, he says: External qi is the air around us; internal qi comes with deep “belly” breathing that fills and empties the lungs. “Qi helps to build up our energy; we use it to protect ourselves and make ourselves stronger.”
Finally there is shen, awareness or consciousness. Xing Xue leans forward, his black tunic and pants a perfect contrast to the oversized, bright-red chair. “To understand shen, you have to look in the eyes,” he says. “The eyes connect to the brain.”
Every day, Shaolin students would “look left, right, up, down,” at rapid-fire speed, “so we can be spontaneous, have a very quick reaction, and predict things.” They would also stare into a candle’s flame for 30 minutes. “Then the candle is covered with cloth or paper, so you have to see through this shield. Now, when I look at a person, I see through the physical, the muscle, to the inside, the qi. Then I know for sure if I can beat this person.
“Some of my colleagues, their eyes look very sharp, scary for me,” he adds. “I think mine are soft-looking.” How did he keep that quality? “I don’t remember exactly what I did,” he admits. “I just try to relax and be nice to people, and it happens naturally.”
He steeples his hands, fingertips touching each other lightly, protecting a rounded, empty space under their arc. His muscles are entirely relaxed, his mind entirely alert. “You pay attention to the hair in the pore,” he says, and it’s hard to decide if this is profound or just a casual directive. In brief translation, across a huge cultural divide, almost everything he says sounds sage.
Until you ask how he learned about sex, dating, or romance, and the translator blushes, and Xing Xue says in a rush, “It was an arranged marriage, by my parents, so I didn’t really know, but when I went back home, she was there. She is an acrobat, so we practiced together, and sometimes we would go eat and watch TV together.”
And did he fall in love with her? “Yes. I don’t know. We have been together for at least five years. She was always on my side when I practiced, when I exercised very hard, to support me and care for me, so I have no reason to say I don’t love her.”
He’s won a spear championship, a Praying Mantis boxing championship, and a Tiger Claw competition in the deceptively loose-limbed Drunken Style. He judged the international Las Vegas Chinese Martial Arts Championship. And he’s competed or performed in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Tennessee, Texas, and Branson.
Yep, Branson. He represented China in performances there in 2007. Then he flew to the West Coast to teach at a Shaolin studio, didn’t get along with the master, and wound up working at a restaurant in San Francisco. Dr. Paul Lee, a St. Louis chiropractor who is Chinese but grew up in Vietnam, learned of this from his brother. “What a waste!” Lee exclaimed. “Get a phone number for him, so I can see if he will come here and open a school.”
Sifu Xing Xue agreed, and he arrived this fall with his wife and twin son and daughter. They found an apartment near the International Institute of St. Louis, so he could learn enough English to open the International Shaolin Wushu Center in University City. It makes Missouri, by his count, the sixth U.S. state with a Shaolin studio.
And will he make his American students eat bitter? “It has to be different,” he grins. “I will focus on wu de, the moral understanding of martial arts. If they learn one push-hand, one style, I want them to learn the exact right way. They don’t have to practice 3,000 times like I did, but they need to do it right.”
Ah, but can they do it right if they don’t practice 3,000 times? His eyes twinkle. “The purpose is for them to have self-defense and do it properly,” he says after a pause. “I will train them how to breathe and how to exercise.” Even China is different now, he notes. When he was a boy, everyone learned martial arts as self-defense, because there was so much poverty and crime. “Nowadays, people just do exercise for their physical health, so they don’t work as hard!”
What Xing Xue does not want are wannabe heroes who study kung fu so they can go out and fight. His defense is toughness: “Ordinary people, if they use a stick to beat me, I don’t feel any pain,” he says. “We were told, ‘Never use martial arts to abuse other people or take advantage of them.’ Except one time, I caught a thief.” He and his kung-fu brothers were on a train in Indonesia when they spotted a pickpocket. They tried to ignore him, but when he started harassing a female passenger, they’d had enough. Once the train pulled into the station, they surrounded him and gave him a bit of a lesson before handing him over to the police.
Could Xing Xue hold his own against someone with a gun? “It is helpful, but the bullet is faster,” he says dryly. “If there is a gun pointed at me, I will hold up my hands—unless I have to protect other people. Then there is no doubt I will sacrifice my life.”
What engraved such strong values? “I spent a lot of time with my sifu’s sifu,” he says. “After my practice, I went to see him, I ate with him, and he taught me a lot of stories from Buddhism, like the way the Bodhidharma cut his own flesh to feed the eagle. He taught me how to help other people, and that kind of shaped my character. He also said, ‘A name is just a title. You have to figure out who you are, who you should be in the future.’”
Xing Xue plans to stay in St. Louis several years, he says, “long enough to accomplish something.” Then he will return to his country, his family, and Shaolin, where his blood once soaked the temple walls. 7
Many thanks to attorney Yi Sun, who translated Xing Xue’s responses from Mandarin.
