Shaolin temple

I went to the Chinese city of Zhengzhou in early December of last year to speak at a conference and figured out after I was booked that it was near the Shaolin Temple – the birthplace of Kung Fu. Zhengzhou is a 3^rd tier Chinese city in the middle/northern part of China with aspirations to be something more. It sits in the middle of the Yellow River valley and has a large agricultural area around it. I thought if had an agricultural feel despite the fact that it had a large urban area and pollution that shows the presence of surrounding industry. I admit that I could hardly wait for my speech to be over so I could get out to the temple. The temple was about 1.5 hours out of town and the ride was nice enough once you got out into a little more of the countryside. At that point some rather large mountains jutted up abruptly from the Yellow River valley that Zhengzhou sits in and they were very pretty. Near the base of one of the mountains was the Shaolin Temple. It was hardly isolated and rather small, but it was pretty and there is a large cemetery outside with tall pillars marking the burial spots.

The funny thing was that there were tons of Kung Fu schools all over the place. There were literally hundreds of kids sparring in school yards on the sides of the roads. Later I read that there were something like 100 Kung Fu schools there. The kids looked to be about 8 to 18 years old. They had sticks, shield, boxing gloves and sparring helmets. Some had these swords that were more decorative than sharp, but still, they were swinging them around like crazy.

The big question that came to mind for me was what do you do after Kung Fu school? Sure, China is a big country, but what are all these wannabe Bruce Lees going to do when they grow up? We can’t all be Ralph Maccio.