Today, however, is their lucky day. The Chinese father points. There it is. A twenty-foot long green anaconda, the largest snake in the world, sunning itself at the side of the water.
The teenager picks up a rock and aims it at the reptile’s head. He flings it. Bull’s eye—the game is on.
The angered serpent slinks into the water. The boy jumps in and swims after it.
The snake tries to coil itself around the boy’s torso but the intrepid boy hammer-punches the snake in the head.
Shocked, the snake releases its hold while the boy descends below the surface. He grabs the snake’s tail and pulls on it.
The snake slithers to wrap its tail around the lower legs of the boy and pull him down into the water.
Struggling, the boy punches the snake’s body, but the blows easily deflect off the serpent’s tough skin. Besides the water slows down the velocity of the boy’s thrusts so that they are virtually impotent.
The snake continues to coil itself around the boy, tighter and tighter.
The man has jumped into the water and watches but does not attempt to interfere.
Panicked, the boy struggles harder, causing the snake to coil itself tighter.
He kicks at the snake, he kicks at the water and he punches at the snake’s body, all to no avail.
The man swims up to the boy. Without touching the snake or the boy, he waves his arms gently, like an orchestra conductor moving his arms during a slow movement of a Romantic symphony.
The boy understands. Lull the creature into a sense of false security.
The boy relaxes and does not fight.
The snake coils tighter, getting ready for the kill. Barely moving and without fanfare, the boy moves closer to the snake’s head.
Without warning, the boy opens his mouth and bites one eye out of the snake. Totally shocked, the snake loosens his tight grip around the boy’s waist.
That split second is enough for the boy to break free. He uses a two-fingered martial arts move with full force and drives his fingers directly into the other eye of the snake.
Blinded now, the snake begins to thrash the water angrily but aimlessly.
Underwater, the father hands the boy a Dao, a martial arts dagger with a twelve-inch blade.
Operating only on its sense of smell, the snake opens its jaws wide enough to swallow a baby deer. With lightning reflexes, the boy grabs the anaconda’s tongue with one hand and slices it off with the dagger.
He then drives the knife up through the top of the snake’s head then pulls the dagger forward, slicing open the upper part of the snake’s head.
The boy then takes the snake’s throat and slits the knife down the middle of the snake’s belly. After grabbing a breath of air and plunging back into the water, the boy continues his carnage, cutting the snake down its entire twenty-five foot body. The serpent’s blood turns the swamp water red.
Underwater, the boy watches as the snake finally stops moving. He grabs the snake’s body and emerges from the water shouting, “I am the King.”
Ten minutes later, father and son have cut up part of the anaconda into smaller pieces that are still moving. Each puts a piece of the snake flesh into his mouth and chews.
Chapter Ten
The Chinese do not have the fear and loathing of snakes so prevalent in Western cultures. Rather, snakes are respected, revered and worshipped for fierceness and protection. In some Chinese myths, snakes appear as supernatural beings, sometimes with human body parts.
Even those to whom the serpent’s spiritual or supernatural powers are unimportant don’t doubt its powers to regenerate and rejuvenate. In Chinese pharmacies, dried snake is a medicinal staple. Chinese herbalists use the scaly skin, gall bladder and meat to treat everything from skin eruptions and hemorrhoids to arthritis. From fresh snakes, the bile and blood are mixed with rice wine to create a tonic that stimulates energy and is a potent aphrodisiac. In select restaurants, fresh snake meat is a specialized delicacy―fried, baked, in hot pot―including every part of the body from its skin to its blood to its bones.
In Shaolin Martial Arts, there are five animal styles: tiger, crane, dragon, leopard and snake. For Chin, each of his five children went through rigorous martial arts training specializing in one of the styles. Duke, the son who lost his life battling Noah, specialized in the Tiger Style. Prez specializes in the Dragon. Prince is a master of the Leopard. Queenie has a special emphasis on the Crane. King’s concentration is the Snake.
For King, snakes are more than just a martial arts style. For him, these cold-blooded reptiles are an obsession that has infused every part of his life. His private collection of snakes is the largest in the world. Twenty-five thousand snakes representing seven hundred and fifty different species are housed in secret hiding places primarily in Asia. They are not hidden because they are illegal. They are hidden because King, wanting to ensure their purity and safety, grows and harvests many of them for his own personal use.
King uses about twenty-five percent of his snakes for his own research purposes. His experiments include removing the venom sacs and replacing their poisons with strains that he personally develops, adjusting the potency of the venoms and trying different techniques of behavior modification to see what is most effective to make the snake more vicious or cause it to react faster to stimulation.
He needs to constantly replenish the supply of vipers because the experiments have a high mortality rate due to their low success rate. He also needs a lot of snakes because it is part of his food supply. In any given month there will be at least two hundred snakes offered to guests for their blood or for their meat. For King himself, not a day goes by without him slicing open at least one live snake for a meal or snack. Every snake is edible if one is careful and every snake has its own unique taste: King is the undisputed world connoisseur of eating snake parts and drinking their blood, being able to differentiate species and age, often with a single bite or sip.
Much of King’s effort with the elongated, legless reptiles focuses on breeding and purification. Like ocean fish, each snake from the wild has an unknown history. While its taste may be more flavorful, one is never sure how much contamination the creature has been exposed to. If the snake comes from a personal residence, that snake’s meat may be infiltrated with rodent poison from a rat that the snake might have eaten. If the snake is from a home garden or a farm, herbicides to kill weeds may be found in the snake’s flesh. While there is no guarantee of purity, snakes fed according to King’s controlled diet will be free of any potential outside poisons after a period of three months.
From the diminutive Eastern Garter Snake to the huge boa constrictor, King has tasted them all. Sometimes he will eat the snake raw, sometimes he will sauté it at the table with soya sauce, onions and garlic. In winter, he particularly enjoys the warmth that the nutrients of snake soup, scotch and Chinese herbs bring. On special occasions, he will mix snake meat with one-hundred-dollar-a-pound abalone. No part of the animal is wasted. The skin will be used for leather. Internal organs are preserved for use as medicines. While some Native Americans proclaim that the rattles of rattlesnakes have healing powers, King has found that the greatest use of them is to impress young children with them, as toys.
Today’s lunch is young cobra. He calls his particular method of eating fusion Asian style because he has combined methods of eating the animal from Vietnam and China with a touch of Japan. With two deft moves, King slices it across the throat then down the snake’s belly. He removes the beating heart and dips it into rice wine then eats it directly. He drains the blood and drinks it without adding rice wine like so many others do. He then scrapes the meat off the skin. He’s impatient today so he cuts the flesh of the snake into thin slices and eats it raw with a touch of fresh Japanese horseradish, wasabi. Snake sushi, anyone?
He completes his meal with a bowl of noodles with a broth made of what else? The snake bones and skin from yesterday’s luncheon.
Satisfied and sated,
he moves to a large open area room, his private training quarters.
Like his siblings, King was trained to the highest level of martial arts. Like his father, Garret and Master Wu, he began with Hung Gar, the Tiger and Crane style. Unlike his family, his fascination with the long reptiles resulted in him using the Snake Forms as his personal inspiration. Without legs, a snake must rely on agility and blinding speed reaction time. The ferocity of its tiny tongue spitting out, the litheness with which it moves, the ability to coil around its enemies to kill, the eyes of danger when it holds itself erect; all contribute to its sinister, lethal beauty.
Every day without fail, King spends a minimum of three hours practicing one or more of the various Snake Forms of martial arts. They are based on the principle of cooperation between opposites: hit the head and the tail will react; hit the tail and the body will react; hit the body and the tail and head will react.
He has already done his morning regimen, so this afternoon he is practicing the traditional three-movement form: 1. Snake spitting out its tongue 2. Snake coiling its body 3. Snake slithering through the grass. The movements are fast, furious and seem to be in perpetual motion. Low stance, high stance, arm circle, arm strike, leg circle, leg strike. His body is chiseled and hard. Not a gram of excess fat.
For the first hour, his focus does not waver from the exercises.
For the final half hour, he brings in one of his men, a favorite sparring partner. This session is not for building form or technique but for hardening the body. For the next thirty minutes, the two men trade blows that would destroy an ordinary man. At the end of the session, both men are drained of energy, eyes swollen, bodies throbbing in pain―a great amount of snake medicine and salve is definitely in order.
Finishing, King dismisses his opponent.
He then bows to a ten-foot mural of three intertwined King Cobra snakes. The largest snake faces outward toward the room with two smaller snakes on either side that look up to it. The central snake that stands is black with yellow cross bands down its body length while the two flanking snakes are green with the yellow cross bands. King has loved this snake since he was a boy. Although as an adult, he knows the legends are not true; King was fascinated with stories of the cobra’s violent temper and its evil hiss before striking. Most of all, King loves the King Cobra for the dual attitudes of awed reverence and bone-chilling fear it creates when it raises the front part of its body and flares the ribs in its neck to display its hood.
After showing the cobra his respect, King walks to a storage case and selects a pair of Shaolin Double Broadswords with thirty-inch blades, The Courage of all Soldiers, from the vast collection of weapons.
Gently twirling one of the hand-forged combat weapons in each hand, he walks to a snake holding area where a ten-foot python slithers impatiently. Without cutting into its body, King carefully uses the swords to lift the angry beast.
King watches in fascination as the python coils itself around the two swords. Despite the weapons’ blades being sharp enough to slice a board into pieces, the snake’s tough leathery skin withstands dissection.
The man who posed as a blind monk at Master Wu’s studio enters. He bows to King before speaking.
“You were correct. Attack the soul and the body will die. It hit a nerve with the old man. He was afraid.”
King slaps him. “Never insult a grand master. He may have been concerned, troubled, or distraught, but he was not scared. No Shaolin Sifu is a coward.”
“I’m sorry,” says the man on the ground. “The expression on his face when I told him that his sins would not be forgiven... the expression was like a man who had seen a thousand ghosts, like chills were running through his body.”
A thousand. How about a million or more? Master Wu knows what my father has done and that he has created countless ghosts, living and dead. Threat of death is enough for the average person to betray a friend, give up their virginity, or hand over thousands, even millions of dollars, but Master Wu is far from average. That was the problem with my father. A great man yes, but he believed only in the power of muscle. Intimidation will not work on a person for whom life is a cause, especially a spiritual man like Master Wu.
“Those are the ghosts whose lives he helped take. That is not fear. That is guilt.”
“Yes, King. Of course.”
“Where are my snakes?” asks King coldly.
“One of them tried to bite me. I had no choice. I... I killed it... and the other disappeared.” The man fumbles. “I... it... the stupid thing got away. Just slithered off.”
“I see,” nods King.
Without warning, King flicks the python off the swords, then with gentle force, flings both swords at the man.
The weapons twirl in the air for a brief moment and then their tips pierce his chest. The blades go in one inch deep before falling out.
The man drops to the ground, clutching his bleeding, painful wounds.
King picks up the snake and places it onto the man’s body. The serpent wraps itself around the man and begins squeezing.
King emotionlessly guides the serpent’s head toward the red gouges in the man’s chest. To this carnivorous snake, all meat is meat. This could just as easily be a rat or a deer and its reaction would be the same. It squeezes tighter and tighter, all the while trying to fit the man’s head into its mouth.
“No, no! Why, King, why? I did what you wanted. Please don’t do this,” begs the man as the snake’s constricting force increases.
King speaks emotionlessly as the man’s bones begin to snap. “You killed one of my precious animals and you lost the other. You called my snake ‘stupid.’ My snake is not stupid, but you are. You insulted my treasure and you let it get away. You can be replaced in five minutes, but it takes years to breed, raise, train and prepare one of these creatures you just insulted.”
The snake has coiled itself around the man’s head, muffling any sounds coming out of his mouth. It will take it a few hours but eventually the formerly blind man will be one with the snake.
Chapter Eleven
Seventy-five-year-old Dr. Tang and his young female associate, Dr. Mah, hover over Master Wu as he lies down on a bed. Ever since coming to Hong Kong, forty some odd years ago, Dr. Tang, a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, or “TCM,” is the only physician that Master Wu has ever seen. Over the years, Master Wu has seen Dr. Tang as a patient for everything from hemorrhoids to broken bones to sudden onset of pain due to kidney stones.
Over this time, they have become friends as well as having a doctor/patient relationship. A few times a week, Master Wu will visit Dr. Tang in his office and the two will have a pot of ginseng tea or Chinese herbal soup made with ingredients from Dr. Tang’s personal apothecary. Like good friends of all ages, they joke and give each other a hard time but when things go sideways, they are buddies who can count on each other.
The martial arts master’s objections to seeing a doctor of Western medicine have nothing to do with racism or Chinese jingoism. For Master Wu, it is because the philosophies of TCM are in harmony with a deeply spiritual Sifu―the body is a gestalt, not a collection of isolated parts.
Under TCM, there are no specialists like cardiologists, gastroenterologists, or nephrologists. Doctors of Chinese medicine treat the body as a whole with one part impacting another. The body’s life energy―Qi―has a series of meridians that connect it together. That’s why a Chinese doctor may be working on a vein in the foot to treat a kidney or putting a long thin acupuncture needle in the arm to treat gout.
The training and philosophies to become a Doctor of TCM also differ from Western medicine.
Whether you attend Columbia Medical School or Aberdeen Medical School, the process of training to be a Western physician is similar. You attend an undergraduate college and then attend medical school for a four-year program. After four years, you can begin to practice as a general practitioner. If you want to become a specialist, you begin further training which, depending on yo
ur area, may take another ten years or even more.
Similarly, the knowledge is universal. Whether you study in London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, or Singapore, what you learn is substantially the same. The textbooks are in common. All physicians attend similar conferences. The hospital rounds are similar.
Not so with TCM. While there are generally accepted principles of how the body functions, there is no universal system of study, training, or treatment. This is why your background and the person who treats you are so important with TCM. While today many colleges and schools offer courses in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Dr. Tang received his training the old way: he apprenticed. There was no set period of training, no prescribed curricula. Most importantly, he learned to develop a relationship with his patients to understand the inner rhythms of their bodies. It is this familiarity that Doctor Tang has with Master Wu that gives him an innate sense of what can ail the Shaolin master even without a full examination.
His mentee, Dr. Mah, is part of the new breed of TCM practitioners. Taiwan-born but American raised, she received her initial training as a Naturopath in Seattle, where courses in Traditional Chinese Medicine were electives. Finding these courses valuable not only for their approach toward medicine but as a means of going back to her roots, she spent three years studying TCM in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where she earned Certificates “With Distinction.”
This is not what brought Dr. Mah to mentor under Dr. Tang though. When Chin was a disciple with Master Wu a lifetime ago, he noticed that Dr. Tang had the master’s complete trust. In one of his rare meetings with his son, Chin told King seven years prior that it would be good to develop an inside connection with the doctor.
That was easy. King was already in a relationship with the soon-to-be Dr. Lisa Mah. She offered to be Dr. Tang’s associate at no charge to himself, saying she wanted to apprentice under a great master. Over the years, Dr. Tang had rejected hundreds of such offers but the stunning young woman suggested “extracurricular activities” that the lonely physician could not resist.
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