Before arriving at the Shaolin Temple in Henan I had envisioned a white-bearded Shaolin octogenarian monk imparting wisdom and Shaolin secrets to students on a misty mountaintop. Maybe that image is a little embellished, I have still got scenes from Kill Bill and Karate Kid swimming around in my head. Still though, I was hoping to be romanced just a little bit by the Shaolin mystique. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work out that way. In short, no old guy, no mountain and no mist.

This program was a little different because we had no director calling the shots. It was just the cameraman, Mr. Lee, an assistant, Xiao Wei and yours truly. The show was meant to be solely interview based. The plan was this: find a bunch of foreigners training Shaolin kungfu and bullet them with questions re their experience. So, we headed off to the foreigner-training center just near the Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng. I had been told to expect about a hundred friendly foreign faces. There weren’t that many, in fact not even close. There were only ten! Okay, not a train-smash. From them I reckoned we could get six maybe seven four-minute interviews, throw in a couple stand ups and shots of scenery and program done. Only one problem, well three actually. Three of the interviewees are kids and don’t have all that much to say, the Spanish guy doesn’t speak a lick of English and the two Russian girls refuse to be interviewed. Now, we can prep the kids beforehand to get more details out of them, not much we can do about the Spanish guy but we can at least get him training. And finally, I can hopefully coerce the Russian girls to give us a few words. Perhaps.

The following is pretty much verbatim the exchange I had with the one Russian girl.

“Hi there, I’m with CCTV9 and we’re making a show about how foreigners view Shaolin kungfu. Do you mind if I interview you guys?”
“Do you want us to take off our clothes now?”
“Ah, what? (then trying to play along with what I think is some kind of weird Russian sense of humor) No, we’re not making that kind of show.”
“We not like media.”
“Um, it’s just a few questions. Just wanna know why you guys like Shaolin.”
“No.”
“I see. Is it okay if we film you training?”
“No.”

Perhaps not. Now I’ve met some disagreeable people in my time but these girls were positively misanthropic. I can handle people not wanting to be interviewed but let’s at least keep things cordial. So, what were we left with? Four adults, three kids. That would never be enough to make our program. Time for a change of plan.

Fortunately, the Tagou students were competing in Sanda bouts as well as doing form demonstrations outside. We got some good footage of them and then we got our foreign students to compete as well. The four adults said some good stuff, the kids were entertaining and the trainers chipped in with their Shaolin experience. Then we relocated to the Shaolin Temple and accosted tourists determined to glean interesting Shaolin anecdotes from them. This was a mixed bag, most people had just arrived and had nothing much to say about Shaolin kungfu. Then we got a couple shots of this pagoda forest called Talin. This was really cool, each pagoda is basically a tomb stone for a renowned Shaolin monk. They date back at least a thousand years.

What else could we film? Not much. So we bundled up our tapes and returned to Beijing all the while hoping that our 200 minutes of footage would be enough for a 25-minute program. Personally, I think if it’s not enough, we just throw in some Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon so our audience can see how it’s really done. Or maybe we can use footage from an old show. Or maybe I can show off my Shaolin moves by beating up a shop-window mannequin or one of those giant Hello Kitty dolls. Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Filming in Wenchuan was a tiring, frustrating yet ultimately meaningful experience. First off the elements definitely acted as spokes in our wheel of progress. We soon learnt that Wenchuan town and the surrounding villages were all in different climatic zones. Our one float parade was rained and snowed upon more than a few times to be amusing. Then there were the mountain roads where I’m sure I slipped a few discs. But that’s to be expected when you’re doing a story up in the atmosphere. The worst part was the ubiquitous traffic. Every time we hit the narrow parts of the makeshift road between Wenchuan town and Yingxiu we got stuck in the most brutal traffic jams and I’m not talking stuck in one place for half an hour, I’m talking stuck in one place and then going for a three hour hike up the mountain and coming back only to find that the only thing that’s changed is the time and your never again take-for-granted appreciation of well-oiled infrastructure.

On site

Yes, I lost my cool a few times and always, I thought, rightfully so. But that’s when I learnt a valuable lesson in perspective. When you arrive at a village all hot, sweaty, bedraggled and fuming and then you start interviewing the locals about their experiences with the earthquake, how they lost a child, a parent, a friend, how they lost their home, their animals, their farmland, their livelihood, basically everything they once held dear you start to realize that you getting stuck in traffic for a few hours is rather insignificant. In fact it’s so small in the grand scheme of things when you consider how much emotion some people are forced to endure that I do believe my traffic trauma would be shadowed by the freckle on an amoeba’s elbow if scientists could actually prove they had one.

I’m grateful for the locals of Wenchuan, especially those living in the decimated village of Luobuzhai for instructing me in this way. Surely the best lessons are those not intended to be so. Apart from learning a bit about perspective, I gleaned something else from my time there. I learnt that no matter how hard you get monkey flipped by fate you can always get up again and walk out the ring. The people of Wenchuan are doing such that, not forgetting the past of course, but actively looking to the future and what meaning it may hold. Come what may, life can move on.

The Wenchuan group

The sky takes on a softer, clearer blue in Ningxia and this together with the lush green farmland is somehow soothing on the eyes. Don’t forget the pollution free air, which tastes clean and crisp especially first thing in the morning when the sun is flickering on the horizon. It’s pretty quiet too – coming from Beijing it’s quite a novelty to be able to hear yourself think.

Presenting the program with colleagues

But at the end of the day, it’s the people that etch the magic memory in your head. The sunny smiles of the Hui people thawed my cold heart and their awesome hospitality gave me a more healthy, rounded appearance. Yes, I put on few a pounds traveling around Ningxia. I think it was all the lamb that I couldn’t stop eating. Or maybe it was roujiamuo or the other myriad local delights that I was offered. I did try and counter the big eating by drinking loads of babao tea. It has 8 different ingredients and I’m told it’s so healthy that it’ll make you live longer. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see about that.

My best memory was at this prominent Muslim leaders tomb. He died about 70 years ago and every year Hui come from far and wide to celebrate the life of this great man. Anyway, we were there to film it. And by and by, this 12 year-old girl latched onto our group and before I knew it she was holding my hand and dragging me around pretty much making sure I didn’t make a fool of myself. At the end, I gave her some chocolates and the first thing she said was that there were too many and tried to give some back. I told her to keep them because I had more. And then she immediately gave one of them to her friend. Little moments like these give me a whole new faith in the human race.

Ningxia will offer you a whole new perspective on China. Sometimes you feel as though you’re in the Middle East or some other Muslim place. Make sure you go hungry because there’s a lot of great hospitality coupled with good food.