Interviewing 'friendly' foreigners at Shaolin Temple

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.