Five Fingers of Death: On Revenge and the Martial Arts

In 1969, when I was in sixth grade, my brother and I liked to play kung fu in our shared bedroom at the top of the house. This was because the first wave of Hong Kong martial arts movies to hit America was pouring over the airwaves in a blitz of commercials for Five Fingers of Death, an especially violent entry in the genre. We never saw anything but the trailer, but that was enough: Lo Leih catching a samurai sword thrust at his face between two palms before breaking it with his forearm (symbolizing the Chinese arts beating the Japanese arts). This was pretty compelling, as was the wild variety of techniques—tiger claw, sun fist, willow palm, shadowless kick. I couldn't understand the social implications, but in some visceral way I knew there was an incredible beauty to the discipline that could move with such exactitude and cause so much damage. And what was amazing to us was that the striking hand was often not clenched into a fist, but open, and the fighters were leaping into the air, not rooted to the ground like boxers. As fairy-tale in plot and cheap in execution as those movies were, they still formed a part of how my child's mind conceived things: the underdog, by force of will and mastery of technique, could defeat all odds.

Kung fu, I was to learn, is all about perfecting movements written on the wind, revising form through strict self-criticism, and conforming gestures to a Platonic ideal. It is a kind of writing with the body, an obsessive formalism, and a childlike adoration of hidden power. There was something about this discipline I wanted as a boy and I never got. Soon after landing my first real full-time job, after enduring the elaborate hazing of graduate school and the extended intellectual paddling necessary to obtain a Ph.D., I signed up for my first real kung fu school and began my journey through several styles. I needed another challenge as difficult as the one I'd just been through, but one that was purely physical. But I wasn't just looking for health and fitness, though those things did come, and I wasn't just looking for self-defense, though there was much practical knowledge in my classes. I was looking to be dangerous, which is something else; I wanted to exude a kind of feeling you don't acquire any other way. I wanted to remake my personality, to learn real strength.

Of course, when we were kids, my brother and I imitated the fake flight from the earth accomplished on wires by the magical movie fighters. We jumped on my brother's bed and began leaping about, flailing at each other with our winter gloves on, as if that gave us a secret power. It didn't. Before long, the mattress collapsed through the frame like a continent sinking through an ocean. In a flash our stepfather was in the room, angry as Bruce Lee, and he punched my nine-year-old brother in his stomach hard, so hard Jay couldn't catch his breath for a few minutes or cry. And I was terrified. Dick (my stepfather's actual name) promised that after a while I would get mine, but I never did, and that was worse. Wide-eyed, I waited that night, waited and waited.

That sense of paralysis in the face of overwhelming force, all the more ironic because of our game, still hovers like a smirk above my universe. In order to taunt me and embarrass my mother, Dick used to say I had a "shitty grin" and I guess I did, having learned it from his mockery. He pointed out that my chest was sunken, and said that I used to have the tattoo of an eagle on my chest until the eagle flew...