No, that's not a typo- it was a monk circus! Yesterday I got to witness one of the more bizarre performances that I've ever seen. On Wednesday I heard some students talking about some monks looking for a place to stay. I wondered if they were like the Hindu sannyasin, renouncing material wealth and living an ascetic life, wandering the countryside. Last night, I quickly discovered that that wasn't the case.

Auntie Long, a neighbor who keeps our school supplied with duck eggs, provided the space for the troupe of 'monks' to set up for their performance, and I later found out that they'd eaten dinner at a students' house (and they ate plenty of meat according to her spywork, so that pretty much seals the fact that they aren't Shaolin monks after all...) By late afternoon, Auntie Long's front porch, which is usually used to lay newly harvested crops, had been transformed into a stage under a brightly colored tent that could fit 100 people or so (standing close together). When the loud-speaker started blaring music at 7:00, curiosity got the best of us (plus it was way too distracting to study through for the students), so the boarding students, 2 teachers, and I walked over as a group to check it out.

The performance wasn't actually to start until 8:00, but it was nice to get there early and see a lot of familiar faces from the village. In the midst of their bustle to prepare for the show, the monks all suddenly stopped to drop their jaws in awe at the white woman randomly standing in the middle of the small but growing crowd. The original fee was 2 yuan ($0.15 or so), but Old Mr. Sun, our neighbor, convinced the monk at the entrance to give us a break since our girls were students.

The inside of the tent seemed very bright because of the striped tent, but the decorations were fairly simple, with a couple statues of Amidha Bodhisattva up front and a huge pole in the middle to hold the whole contraption together. I was quite skeptical about the whole thing, especially when they kept bowing and bowing for 20 or more minutes, as one 'monk' yelled long, slurred incantations into the microphone in his Henan dialect (the famed Shaolin Temple is in Henan, and they were claiming to perform Shaolin Kungfu...); but my anticipation began to grow along with the rest of the audience's, as we waited for the first act.

After dancing around for awhile and doing some qigong in front of us all, one of the monks finally started. He had the crowd test his steel loop for durability. It was about the size of a steering wheel, and he wiggled his whole body through it, bit by bit-- it' looked so painful! The audience cheered and applauded at his feat, as a large man with an enormous beer belly took the stage. He too jumped around for awhile, kicking and punching invisible things in the air, and then his assistants brought out an enourmous steel bar that had to be at least 3 meters long. They called for volunteers, and eventually 6 strong farmers joined him on stage to hold a board steady. Using his throat, he bent the long steel bar in half, pushing it against the board that they were holding. I grimaced the entire time, feeling sure that we'd be seeing his exposed trachea at any moment! Another fairly pudgy man came out and used his neck to twirl around some extremely thick wire (I couldn't make it budge when he let me test it), and he ended up all twisted in wire and holding his breath for like 3 minutes. Another monk pretended to break or dislocate his shoulder on purpose, then fell to the ground crying, and the assistants brought out donation boxes for treating his arm... I was shocked when everyone around me was digging into their pockets for change when it was so obviously a scam! It didn't seem to phase anyone that the same monk seemed perfectly fine when he came out for his glass-eating act...

It was at about this time that a stranger came in, dressed in very shabby clothes and covered in soot and dirt, rambling and laughing to himself as he walked in. He squatted on the ground and started writing with chalk, and his Chinese characters were actually quite beautiful. Auntie Liu (our cook)whispered to me (in one of those whisper voices that ends up being louder than someone's actual voice in the first place), "he's a crazy man." One of my students told me that he was from her area, and that he had been a bright man, but he went crazy when a woman he fell in love with refused him... Another student who had stayed behind to study went to make a phone call and didn't think anything of it when she heard some rustling around in our little library/faculty room, but when she glanced up, the "crazy" man was going through my desk! Apparently that's where he got the piece of chalk that he was writing on the porch with at the circus. I got a big scare thinking that people would just wander in and go through our stuff, but at the same time I feel really sorry for people like him, who have mental illness but no means of treating it...

Anyways, during a brief intermission, all of the performers came out holding imitation jade necklaces with buddha sculptures, prayer beads, and fake swords to sell. My students told me to pretend that I didn't understand any Chinese, so I sat there with a dumb look on my face when they came over to sell things to me, and it ends up that they donated a little necklace, "or else she'd think Chinese peopld were cheapskates," as they put it. haha. The final act was an assistant chopping leafy vegetables with a ridiculously large knife, while using another man's belly as a cutting board. And then the man proceeded to lie down on top of two large knife blades and have a huge rock placed on top of him to add to the weight... I couldn't bear to look! It was during this act that I realized the music accompanying his performance was an old song from the Backstreet Boys, and I couldn't help but laugh. When the audience was supposed to count to 3 for the brick-smashing act (on another monk's head), the monk led us in broken English "wan, tooo, sleee!"

After about two hours of performances, screaming into the microphone, bowing to statues, and selling their merchandise, the monks all took a bow, and people began to file out. What the show lacked in quality and authenticity it made up for by creating an exciting atmosphere for neighbors to gather together, and provided an alternative to what seems to be the solitary form of entertainment for adults in the village: gambling on mah jiang games. I understand a little bit better now why people get so excited by the littlest distractions here, and I notice myself gawking more and more at little things too. Just the other day I walked about a kilometer down the path just to check out a dumptruck moving soil. With that said, it's still strikes me as very ironic that I could still be considered so bizarre and gawk-worthy by a troupe of itinerant fake monks who have just pulled all of these dangerous stunts! The funny foreigner of Tall Bridge Township高桥乡的奇怪老外 at it again!

Just after taking their bows, the monks made a beeline toward me and my students to find out what in the world a foreigner was doing here and how much money she made (haha, literally their second question!). This morning, one monk came over, showing a card about mystical treatments and healing or something to that effect, and after I sent him on his way, 2 more monks came over to see if they could chat with the foreigner. I was in the kitchen eating my steamed buns for breakfast at the time, and then it was time for class, so I didn't get a chance to chat more after all. What an exciting ending it was to an otherwise normal week at school!