Submitted by admin on Thu, 2007-03-29 08:00. ::
A bad travel memoir is like a dinner guest who natters on about some personal experience, encounter, or adventure -- the inept camel ride, the drunken night in Bangkok, the beggar's mundane wisdom -- all the while oblivious to the listener, whose pasted-on smile can barely conceal a look of utter tedium.
Rambling, self-absorbed travel writing is published all too often these days. These narratives foreground the writer, not the place; when local color manages to creep into the prose, it often reveals the writer's ignorance. Encounters with locals take the form of sumptuous meals in tourist-friendly restaurants, posited as the reward after a day haggling in the kasbah.
Fortunately, Matthew Polly's debut, "American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China," suffers from none of the genre's fatal missteps. Polly's chronicle of his two-year hiatus from Princeton to study kung fu in China is an original and insightful book, moving beyond mere fish-out-of-water territory to become a story of personal redemption that's never a drag.
The action begins in 1992. Feeling cowardly, boyish, unattractive, and spiritually confused, Polly arrives in China ignorant and determined to find the legendary Shaolin monks he had been dreaming about ever since absorbing "Kung Fu" reruns back in Kansas. He hopes their brand of "chi ku" ("eating bitter") training will rub out his character flaws -- "Things That Are Wrong With Matt," a self-improvement to-do list that becomes the book's running joke and connecting thread.
On this journey from wimpy novice to confident journeyman, we meet Polly's trainer, Coach Cheng, and colleagues like Deqing, one of the Shaolin Wushu Center's top athletes. In clear layman's terms, Polly describes the history and practice of the fighting styles he studies. He also reveals a China in transition. To support themselves, the monks must perform tourist shows. Bastardization saves their Buddhist art but also dumbs it down for an increasingly consumer-driven Chinese public.
Polly is no prose stylist, but he does write with a pared-down efficiency that focuses on dialogue and action, not flights of fancy. Passive voice -- " I was," "it was" -- is his only major grammatical offense. As for lapses in content, the female locals he encounters exist mainly as one-night stands. Not that a lonely, male "laowai" ("foreigner") in remote China wouldn't obsess about sex, but a more generous view of women would have served the book well.
Telling details make up for the occasional dull verb or meatheaded comment. In one clever passage, Polly must face the Triad (the Chinese mafia) but his knowledge of them is limited to Chow Yun-Fat movies. "Based on those, I'd need two handguns that I'd need to fire simultaneously while diving horizontally in slow motion through dozens of white doves."
Polly is unabashed in expressing his feelings -- his anger, his isolation, his frustration with local customs. As he crosses items off his mental list, he comes to love, and fear, the "pure joy" of his growing power. "What does it feel like to hit another man so hard you knock him out? It feels like Christmastime."
Polly's winning memoir manages the near impossible: maintaining a careful balance between acute observation and forthright views of his Chinese hosts without condescension. The arc of "American Shaolin" may mirror the most mundane self-help tome, but it does so with an adventuresome and self-deprecating slant. It's worth accompanying Matthew Polly on this tough-love quest from humble to cocky and back .
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