I Might Have to Spend the Weekend Reading

"This is insanity. You don't even know where the Shaolin Temple is."

He had a point. Professor Gu did not know where it was. None of the travel books about China had its location. Officials at the Chinese embassy had hung up on me three times when I put the question to them. And since Al Gore had yet to invent the Internet, I couldn't search for "Shaolin." (Today it takes less than five seconds to find its location on Google.)

To be fair, I probably could have found the location if I had really applied myself to the problem, but for me the mystery of Shaolin's location was part of the excitement. I had decided to fly to China and ask around until I found someone who knew the answer. That's the way quest heroes did it in the fantasy novels I favored. Maybe I'd chance upon an old crone who'd give me a magical artifact to help me on my journey.

At 15, Matthew Polly of Topeka, KS decided one of his flaws was ignorance. He flung himself completely into changing that. In 1992, after his junior year at Princeton, he decided he had succeeded. Next on his list of flaws was cowardice (followed further down the list by spiritual confusion). He decided he'd deal with that by learning Shoalin Kung Fu from its source, and promptly set off to do so.

I just started reading American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China. A true story. I'm absolutely hooked.