Pag 51
THE GREAT
DICTATOR
That was the first day of the worst days of my life.
Yuen Lung used his authority in ways big and little, and all of them were
designed to make things as rotten as possible for the rest of us.
As I mentioned, Yuen Ting hadn’t been an easy
taskmaster, but he was usually fair. Yuen Lung, on the other hand, was a
tyrant. He was one of
the school’s best fighters, a sure hand with weapons, and surprisingly graceful
in acrobatics. In short, he demanded perfection from himself and no less from
the rest of us—even those of us who’d been at the school less than a year.
He found flaws with everything. If it wasn’t in our
execution, it was in our style. If it wasn’t in our style, it was in our
energy. If it wasn’t in our energy, it was in our attitude. Sometimes he just
didn’t like the way we looked. And every mistake we made was greeted with a
taste of Biggest Brother’s iron fist… uncles he had Master’s stick which case
he heartlessly beat us with the full force of his thick arms.
Outside of practice, Yuen Lung was even worse. Nome of
us little kids were safe when Yuen Lung was near; he would demand his tribute
as Biggest Brother, and thrashed any junior who dared to deny him. If he liked
your clothes, he’d just say, “Nice T-shirt,” and the next day he’d be wearing
your T-shirt. If he saw you eating something, he’d say, “How’s that taste?” and
he’d walk off with it in his hands. There was no help for it. Everything gave
him whatever he wanted. Because if you didn’t, you knew that the next day he’d
be leading practice again, rod in hand, and that he would remember.
Yuen Lung was a bully and a thug, and I have to say
that through most of our time together at the academy, I hated him. But looking
back, I’ve realized that Yuen Lung wasn’t crueler than the rest of us by
nature. This was the way he was expected to behave according to the system
under which we lived and learned. It was like being in military school: seniors
had rights, juniors didn’t. Living through abuse at the hands of big brothers
bound us younger kids together. And surviving our master’s punishments helped
turn all of us students into a team.
A harsh as it may have seemed, it was a system that
had worked for
Pag 52
even centuries, producing the very finest acrobats,
singers, and fighters that the world has ever seen.
The kind of training we received just doesn’t exist
anymore. There are still opera schools, but they don’t allow you to punish
students physically; that kind of discipline is now against the law. And to
tell the truth, younger generations of performers aren’t as good as we were,
and the ones who went before us. The schools are still good, and the students
still learn, but many of them are just doing it because their parents want them
to, or because they want someday to star in movies. We did the training even if
we didn’t want to. Because there was always the stick. Unless we wanted to
follow Yuen Ting—and what a humiliation that was! What a waste of years of
study!—we didn’t have a choice. There was never a choice.
So I guess you could say the system worked. But even
the constant threat of beatings couldn’t completely crush the will to rebel.
Especially not in a boy like me—someone driven by a love for independence and a
hatred of authority. Even back on the Peak, I’d always hated it when older kids
pushed younger ones around; it turned my stomach. And I couldn’t stand it at
the academy either.
It wasn’t a problem when I was the littlest brother,
because when I was at the bottom of the food chain, I could take care of
myself. But time passed, we grew older, and our family eventually had to
expand.
And though I didn’t know it at the time, the arrival
of our newest brother was a momentous occasion; one that would eventually
change the oath of my life—and the life of my nemesis, Biggest Brother Yuen
Lung.
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