As a boy in Kansas, Matthew Polly was the object of a particularly barbarous schoolyard torture. 'They called it 'racking',' says Polly. 'They'd chase you around the playground. Then four guys would hold down your arms and legs and another guy would kick you in the groin. I guess that might be where my interest in iron-crotch kung fu comes from.'
The childhood thrashings inspired Polly to leave Princeton University in 1992 and set off for Shaolin, a 1,500-year-old Chinese monastery famous for training generations of martial arts masters. Polly describes his two-year quest to remould himself into an 'enlightened badass' in his wry new memoir, American Shaolin.
'The idea came from this fear of being cowardly and not being able to protect oneself,' he says. 'I remember seeing a Bruce Lee movie when I was 13. Here was this little guy who was tough. So I had this idea that if you were a Shaolin dude, it didn't matter how big you were, you could defend yourself. At the same time, I was studying Buddhism. So I kind of had both things in my head when I was at Princeton. The moment I decided to go, it all made perfect sense. It was like this explosion in my head.'
The decision seemed less intuitive to Polly's parents. 'They thought they raised a good son,' he says with a chuckle. 'They paid for a good school. They were expecting a doctor, maybe a lawyer - not a kid who'd run off to China. I'd say they were shocked and deeply disturbed.'
Undeterred, Polly boarded a plane for Beijing. Unfortunately, he'd neglected to figure out where Shaolin was. So, in the first of many comic follies, he wandered around the capital asking people how to find the famous kung fu temple.
When he finally reached Shaolin, it wasn't the windswept, ascetic retreat he'd imagined, but a tourist trap - a gaudy, ersatz version of the temple familiar from countless kung fu films. Although Shaolin is the home of Chan Buddhism (according to legend, the monk Damo spent nine years meditating in a nearby cave) it's perhaps better known for its association with chop-socky cinema, particularly Jet Li's 1981 classic Shaolin Temple, which put the place back on the map after the lacuna of the Cultural Revolution. Thousands of aspiring action stars and curious tourists still beat a path to the temple's doors. 'You'd walk out the temple gates, and there was this humungous billboard for Chinese booze,' Polly says. 'Every part of the place was commercialised, and not in a dignified way.'
Nevertheless, Polly stayed for two years, enduring regular beatings, dysentery and grinding all-day practice sessions. 'At first, a lot of the monks didn't want to train me,' he says. 'Over time, they saw I was sincere. But it took four or five months before they'd talk to me like a fellow disciple. I was the first American to be accepted as a disciple of Shaolin. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't stayed for so long.'