As a rooster announced the arrival of dawn, Grandmaster Dai Kang's slippers hit the concrete. A loud yell from Dai and the lights in the dormitory went on. The students groaned, rolled out of their bamboo beds and pulled on their black and gold uniforms.
They marched down to the courtyard and began to run in a circle. The kung fu master stretched a bit and rubbed his stomach. Then he sat down in a bamboo chair and watched the 18 boys from surrounding towns as they ran for 20 minutes.
'You feel it yet?' he barked. 'Sweating yet?' The rooster, half-crippled, crowed, as the boys puffed their way through their calisthenic exercises. A lame German shepherd waddled across to Dai and the kitchen oven roared to life. After stretching, the boys ran back to their rooms and grabbed their buckets, towels and toothbrushes. Ablutions complete, they sat in small groups, spitting into a drain in the courtyard and slapping hot cloths across their heads.
And so began another day at Dai Shi Men Martial Arts School, in the old town of Hanyuan, an isolated mountain city in Sichuan province.
NINE-YEAR-OLD PU Bajin, the charismatic, reserved leader of an ethnic Yi faction within the school, makes sure his fellow students have cleaned the toothpaste from their lips. He urges them to hurry and keep their voices down. It is a hard task; of the four Yi boys, two are impossibly mischievous and the other is short-tempered and prone to violence.
Dai has begun to pace back and forth as he watches the boys. A strict disciplinarian, he keeps up a running commentary on the failings of his young charges. His expressions and words are fierce but while the boys have a healthy respect for Dai, none of his students seems to fear him.
