Made in China: Saving One's Neck

Last week I found myself with a photographer named Mark searching for Jesus in China's Henan province. That's right. Jesus is back, and she's Chinese. We'd heard a tip that her followers were in a certain town, so off we went. I kept an eye on the countryside along the way in case she'd happen in sight, bathed in light next to a Henan cornfield.

Mark and I didn't spot Jesus, but we noticed three things on the drive. The first was the total absence of long-distance commerce. Henan is poor, and people evidently don't earn much buying things cheaply on one side of the province and selling them dear on the other. Whereas most roads in China are given to flatbed trucks filled three stories high that list and totter and often bust their axles, Henan moves rocks. Henan is the gravel basket of China.

The next was a marvelous invention. Some tinker had lashed the bamboo handles of eight long straw brooms into a giant pinwheel and attached it to the back of a tractor. The tractor would drive, the pinwheel would turn, and the straw brooms would sweep the soot off the shoulder of the road and into the air, where it would hover in a dun-colored cloud before settling back onto the road. We saw this several times so somebody must have built a business on the idea. I hope that person is rich as Midas, or is at least the township's model peasant- engineer.

Finally, we passed a large tent. It stood in the parking lot of an inn, and outside the tent was a poster of three women in fuzzy black brassieres. This was shortly after noon, and Mark and I resolved that if we hadn't found Jesus by that night, we'd catch a Henan strip show.

What we found, eventually, were thousands of child kung fu masters. The town we sought, it turns out, is near the famous Shaolin Temple. Its Buddhist monks have for centuries disciplined themselves by perfecting their punching and kicking, and now the surrounding towns run hundreds of kung fu academies. Thousands of boys in sweat suits drilled martial arts and jogged in lockstep along the streets. The boys dream of becoming the next Bruce Lee. Most will become bodyguards.

We didn't find Jesus, so at 8 p.m. we hired a taxi, a minivan, to take us to the show. I was extremely clear with the driver: I would pay $10 for the round trip, which was a straight shot down and back on the main road, and he would take care of the tolls. He agreed. Almost immediately we found ourselves jouncing past haystacks on a dirt path in the middle of harvested cornfields. We held our bags in our laps -- my computer and Mark's cameras -- and yelled from the back that this violated our agreement. "Take care" meant he was supposed to pay for the tolls, not drive around them. The taxi struggled along, scuffing up dust and driving no faster than a person can trot, which Mark proved by leaping from the car and refusing to sit until the driver promised to take us back to the main road. He promised, Mark re-entered, and the driver continued in the same direction, only faster. A drive that should have taken 20 minutes took well over an hour. "How long will you be?" the driver asked when we arrived, but we slammed the doors without answering.

A man behind a plywood desk sold us tickets. We ducked under the canvas tent flap and joined about 50 men -- most of them peasants -- watching a young woman on a low stage perform aerobics in her underwear. Her arms went up and down while she shook her hips from side to side. These were her only movements. She perspired and looked bored. Nobody clapped or shouted ribald encouragement. Nobody even talked. Periodically the music stopped in mid beat and she stopped too. The men kept staring as she stood with her arms at her sides wearing precisely the same expressionless face waiting for the music to restart.

Thirty minutes later we climbed into the taxi when the driver said the $10 we'd agreed to pay was only one-way. The whole trip would cost us $20. So we climbed out of the taxi and looked for another. The driver ran after us saying everything would be fine, just get in his car. He still wouldn't confirm what our agreement was. Mark had had enough. He handed him $5, told him it covered a one-way trip, and we climbed into another taxi. The old driver tried to hold the door open but Mark managed to slam it shut. Our new driver sped off.

I saw the trouble first. We had just pulled up to our hotel, when the first taxi driver screeched to a stop 10 meters away. Ten teenage boys in blue sweat suits and shaggy hair poured out from both sides of his minivan. They looked thin but fit. Kung-fu school dropouts, I assumed. Mark and I clambered out from opposite sides of our car just as they surrounded us.

They went straight for Mark, probably because he's ethnic Chinese and they could land in more trouble for hitting a guy with blue eyes. Mark made a break for the hotel lobby but they grabbed him and shoved him around. Some of them moved closer to me. This is bad, I thought.

The boys shoved Mark, who struggled to keep his balance. The driver was yelling and Mark was yelling. A hotel security guard was yelling and suddenly there were police everywhere. Over the din, the driver announced that we tried to rip him off so that we could watch girls dance in a tent. Everybody looked at me. I was the foreign rapscallion who cheats Chinese men and lusts for their women. I pretended not to understand. The cops would surely check my passport, see the journalist visa and keep me up through the night, saying I'd broken regulations by not requesting official interviews with Jesus, and what was I doing with those dancing girls anyway?

The police looked me over curiously, then climbed into their sedans and drove off. The security guard explained that they were from Shandong province, here on holiday. Their unexpected departure calmed everything down. I pretended not to speak Chinese while Mark put his hands on the drivers' shoulders and told him that there must be a way to make everybody happy. The way turned out to be Mark paying him what we owed. "Only in a place like this can you buy your own neck for $5," Mark said later.