“Muay Thai is the ancient art which has kept the Thai people free.” Explained Pra Kru Ba, a stocky, bald-headed monk, who had once been a famous boxer. He was laying on the bamboo platform in his jungle hut, giving me my daily lesson on life. After months of living in the monastery, my Thai had finally progressed to a point that I could make some sense of what he was saying. “Muay Thai is a spiritual pursuit.” He said. “The body is pure. The heart is pure. Only the head can create evil.

And if evil invades your heart, then you cannot win in a boxing match.” Religious tattoos played across his muscles, as he reached for another handful of food. “You live too much in your head. Evil can come into you faster than it can the others, because of your education.” He told me flatly. “You are a good man. But your anger will destroy you.”

“Even when you are meditating you look sad.” He said with pity. “I hope you will stay with us long enough to overcome these difficulties.”

At the monastery we shared everything. The problem was, we didn’t have all of that much, only the food which the hill-tribe people gave to the monks, in exchange for merit. A long day of farm work and Muay Thai training, had left me famished. I loved hearing Kru Ba’s words. And I cherished our quiet time together. But what I wanted now, was some food. Finally, when I judged that the rate of his consumption had slowed enough that I could ask, a sentence came out of my mouth that I thought I would never utter. “If you’re finished with those fried cockroaches, could I have them?” Once again, it dawned on me, just how far I was from Wall Street.

Before the 911 terrorist attacks, I had been a successful investment banker, in New York City, living and dying by the stock market. When the market was up, people bought stock, and I made money. When the market was down, people sold stock and I made money. Every year my salary increased. Every year my life style increased more. I had grown up poor and had spent much of my youth as a boxer, soldier, and later a student in Europe. Wall Street was to have been my settling-down time, the crowning achievement of my life. As Frank Sinatra said, I had made it in the city that never sleeps. And the money was proof. But I was still restless.

In financial terms, there didn’t seem to be any freedom in making a lot of money. You just struggled on a higher level. My average monthly restaurant bill was close to $1,000 US. My credit cards were maxed, and my spending always increased to match my salary.

On some level, I knew that I was a wage slave. I felt strangled, and escape seemed impossible.

Spiritually, I felt bankrupt. We had been taught to plan for a twenty-four hour work day, seven days per week. Before investing time into any activity, I would calculate the financial return it would bring me. The culture of the investment banker is that you cut ties with anyone less successful than yourself, so that they don’t pull you down. I stopped seeing old friends. The only reason I ever went out was if I thought I could meet someone who was important to my financial future and success. My secretary screened my calls, and I went months at a time without even seeing my sisters.

In August of 2001, doubts began circulating in my mind. I had always wanted to work in finance, and I was doing well. And, I certainly enjoyed the money. But there was so much more I wanted to do, so much of the world I wanted to see. I wanted to write great books, and be remembered. I wanted to learn every language, experience every culture, and live every life.

None of the other bank officers knew what it was to be a penniless rice farmer in northern Thailand. They had never trained at the Shaolin Temple. And they weren’t outraged that Prime Minister Hun Sen was about to abolish the monarchy in Cambodia. They hadn’t woken up in a tribal village, surrounded by soldiers, waiting for the entire race to die out. They would never go five rounds of professional boxing with a boy who would use the twenty-five dollars to buy medicine for his aging mother. They didn’t know that the medicine was counterfeit or calculate that in a culture with a life expectancy of fifty-five, middle aged was twenty-seven.

Mentally, I quit the financial world. A month later, my employer stepped out of investment banking business, closed down the department, and returned to conservative private banking. The last deal I was working on had been so large and innovative, that I was enjoying a bit of fame in the investment world. Within hours of me leaving the bank, calls began to pour in, offering me a new job, and larger sums of money to move my deal to one of my competitor’s companies. There was a lot of money at stake, the very thing I had dreamed of. But for the short term, at least, I decided to follow my heart, and told the other companies they would have to give me thirty days to make a decision. I had been given a large buyout package, and actually didn’t need to return to work for a long time. But, I wasn’t brave enough to ask for more than a month. During that time, I began training in earnest, having decided to make a boxing comeback. I invested much of my time and energy into learning yoga, in the hopes of repairing the tares in my soul. And, I pulled some dusty manuscripts out of my closet and began writing again.

On Tuesday morning, September First, 9-11, I was in a yoga class, a few doors away from my former office. When we had were told that the first of the twin towers had been hit by a plane, we barely paused. When, just minutes later, we were told of the second plane, we knew that it was a terrorist attack. Mayor Giuliani ordered all of the buildings in Manhattan to be evacuated. Soon, I found myself wandering, along with millions of other New Yorkers, dazed, through a surreal fog of fear. We were packed shoulder to shoulder silently marching nowhere. The tunnels, bridges, and subways had been closed down, and there was no place for us to go. The air was full of a thick white powder, which clogged our nostrils and stung our eyes. If this is anthrax, I thought to myself, we have all been sentenced to death. I would later learn that the white dust was not anthrax, instead, the grime I would wash off my body that night, was made, at least in part, from the charred remains of the more than 3,000 victims died that morning.

It would be twenty-four hours till I was able to get back to my apartment in Brooklyn. Cell phones began working again. But, the land lines and internet would be down for days. Mail service was suspended, and New Yorkers felt a great sense of isolation. When I finally managed to get a call through to my oldest sister, she was crying on the phone, relieved to know that I was OK. Apparently, when the towers came down, many of the surrounding buildings had been destroyed, including an office that I had worked out of a few months earlier. One by one, I contacted any of my friends who might have been in the Towers that morning. They were all unharmed. Next, I wanted to call my financial counterparts, from other firms, who I had worked with. But many of them would never answer a phone again.

Later, when the transcription of recorded phone lines were found, there were recordings of young stockbroker trainees, trying to close a sale, in spite of the sound of fire alarms in the background. While their office filled with smoke, their discipline kept them at their desks. The image was too vivid, and the lesson, was too simple. They died because they loved money too much.

In the end, Giuliani informed us that 3,000 people, who worked and lived, just as I did, had perished. I knew I had to find another way. None of the things those people had put off till tomorrow was ever going to happen. Someday would never come.

I took my buyout, and went to Taiwan. My real goal was China and the Shaolin Temple. But, I saw Taiwan as China light, a chance to learn the culture and language, and to ease my transition into the mainland. I took a job teaching second grade, and the innocence and unconditional love of those eager young children taught me patience. Like a tightly wound spring, I began, slowly, to unwind. Wandering around a park in the Kaohsiung, the island’s second largest city, I felt as if I had wandered into a scene right out of a movie, when I stumbled on a Kung Fu teacher training his team in an old temple. He invited me to join them.

For the next fifteen months, I lived and trained with my new team, learning Chinese language, Kung Fu, and Buddhism. My teammates were quite religious, and taught me the rudiment of prayers and ceremonies. They knew nothing of money, living only to train.

The Sifu never asked me for a dime, not even for my food. Slowly, I let go of my old life and my old desires. My only ambition was to go to Mainland China and continue my training, at the Shaolin Temple. My book about my experiences in Taiwan, studying kung fu, teaching English, learning Chinese, studying Buddhism, and loosing my ambitions, is called Taiwan Days. Currently unpublished, I am currently looking for representation for this book.

Eventually, I made my way to Mainland China, and took up residence at the Shaolin Temple. I learned a lot there, but not necessarily the things I had gone there to learn. For one thing, I discovered that China smells really bad, and that I was so full of my opinions, perception and ideas, that there was no room to add anything new. One of the closest friendships I have ever had was with my training brother, Miao Hai, who always had a way of explaining Shaolin culture to me, in a way that I could understand it. He defused potentially bad situations and made my life with the monks livable.

Understanding that I had once had a job related to money, Miao Hai proudly showed me his portfolio, an account at the informal Shaolin bank, containing 10 RMB. I laughed, Miao Hai smiled, and I knew that I was on the right path.

During the SARS epidemic, widespread paranoia swept China, resulting in distrust of foreigners. The central government went so far as to tell the people that foreigners had introduced the disease to the country. Foreigners were being pulled off of trains and buses, some, including myself, were detained in hospitals. I escaped from the hospital and returned to the Temple. Next, the Temple administration tried to confiscate my film, possibly to erase any record that they had had a foreigner living among them, or to prevent the outside world from seeing the filthy squalor in which they lived. I woke one morning to find myself embroiled in a wild-west showdown, which almost turned violent.  In the end, I was forced to make a somewhat daring escape from Shaolin, landing in Hong Kong, with no plan, and very little money.

Because of SARS Taiwan wasn’t issuing visas to anyone who had recently visited China. So, I was adrift in one of the most expensive cities in the world, living off of savings. When my money ran out, I took a job working for the local Trinity College affiliate, who needed a Chinese-speaking Trinity graduate to return to China and investigate their local partner. When I had verified that he was indeed stealing from the company, I was asked to remain in China, and win back the contracts he had stolen from us. Unfortunately the partner, Steven, was the most unpleasant human being I had ever met in my life. He was slightly more obese than Jabba the Hut, and had an ego which rivaled the size of the sun. Because he was Singaporean, he thought he was better than the Mainlanders, belittling and bullying everyone. He tried to intimidate me and dissuade me from doing my job. He went so far as to push me. But I was loyal to my employer, and I have never been one to bend. I knocked him flat, and hopped a high-speed boat back to Hong Kong only a few steps ahead of the police.

In Hong Kong, I prowled book shops and spent long hours in Waterbucks, reading books about explorer Wilfred Thesiger and his famous crossing of the Open Quarter, a particularly remote and difficult stretch of the Arabian Desert. As soon as I received my salary for my work in China, I returned to the Mainland, this time, crossing the Taklamakan Desert in the northwest province of Xin Jiang. Unable to afford camels, I peddled the 540 KM from Aksu to Kashgar on a tricycle rickshaw. Along the way, I met the Uyghur people, a Turkic race, following the religion of Islam, who until just after World War II had been the independent nation of East Turkistan. Shortly after China invaded Tibet, they also annexed East Turkistan. The plight of East Turkistan is less publicized in the west, than is the Tibet situation, most likely because Richard Geer had never been there. Politics aside, the desert was desolate, harsh, and beautiful. To quote Forest Gum, “When I was hungry I ate. When I was tired I slept. And I had to go, I went.” I rode my crazy cycle, with no thought beyond the next meal, next drink of water, or the next kilometer. At night, I slept beneath a giant sky filled with stars. There was no freedom like the freedom of the desert.

Back in Taiwan, I was teaching English and growing restless, once again. I had tasted adventure, seen something new, and now I was hooked. Unable to sit still, I bought a bicycle and circled the 1500 KM around the island, sleeping in temples, churches, and one aboriginal village along the way. Until that trip, I only knew the over-developed ultra-modern and very narrow strip of land on the west coast of the island, running from Taipei to Kaohsiung, where most of the Taiwanese population lived. Cycling opened up new worlds for me, and introduced me to the beauty of the east coast of Formosa, where a quiet traditional life could still be found, and where tribal languages and Taiwanese were spoken more often than Mandarin.

My stories about Shaolin Temple and the Taklamakan Desert were purchased by magazines, as was my Taiwan cycling story. I quit my job, and became a full time adventure writer, climbing mountains, tracing rivers, kayaking on the ocean, and fighting Kung Fu.

My first book, The Monk from Brooklyn, the diary I kept during my studies at the Shaolin Temple, was accepted for publication by GOM publishing, who distributed books over amnazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. The cover photo shows me standing next to my two brothers, Miao Hai and Miao Ping. The photo has since appeared in magazines and websites around the world, and there is no way I can even reach them to tell them about it. I occasionally receive reader mail, asking how Miao Hai is doing. I miss my friend, and sadly, he will never know that he has become a minor star in the west, appearing on posters and postcards. That photo always serves to remind me of that final, fateful day, when I made my escape, clutching tight to my negatives.

When I had first come to Taiwan, I read a story in one of the Taipei papers, about the last fighting monk in Thailand, Pra Kru Bah. He had built a monastery in the jungle, on the Myanmar border, where he taught Muay Thai boxing, horsemanship, and Buddhism to hill tribe boys, many of whose parents had been murdered in the War on Drugs. The story intrigued me, and I saved the article, filing it away for a some day adventure. A year and a half later, when I was packing to leave for the Shaolin Temple, I uncovered the long forgotten article, pasted into an old notebook. Because I was bound for Shaolin the next day, Kru Bah would have to wait.

I flipped on the TV for company, and on the Taiwanese equivalent of National Geographic television, I saw an hour long report about Kru Bah. Now, I knew that I had to go study with this interesting man. I wrapped up my Taiwan adventures and complied a book entitled Adventures in Formosa, which is due to be released in March of 2006.

Still seeking my true path, I flew to Thailand and found my monk, Pra Kru Bah. Within minutes of arriving in is forest monastery, he put me in a boxing ring, and I went four rounds against two opponents. Kru Bah didn’t speak more than twenty words of English, and in the beginning, I had no Thai at all. But as time went on, we grew to understand each other. Of all the Kung Fu teachers and monks I have studied with, he was by far the greatest. Pra Kru Bah was one of the few people I had ever met, who was leading a true Buddhist life of service to others. Once a famous professional boxer and soldier, he had given everything up to save the northern tribes, who were caught up in the drug wars on the Myanmar border. The federal government of Myanmar was seeking to eradicate the tribes, and was denying basic human rights to the various ethnic groups, most of whom had formed armies and were resisting the government’s crushing power.

Kru Ba, accompanied by his army of little monks, their orange robes blowing in the wind, would ride into hill tribe village, along the border, and ask if there were any children without parents. Gratefully, orphans and displaced adults came to share the disciplined life of a forest monk, living in a fighting monastery.

Just before I left the monastery, we fought one professional fight, and my winnings, 300 Baht (about six dollars) were given to poor hill tribe families. In this monastery, my training brother, Payong, had told me he was an orphan. I was shocked on fight day, when his parents showed up to collect his winnings. They told him he was a good boy, and encouraged him to keep fighting. Then they drove off, leaving him in the jungle, with the monks. My book about my experience in the monastery, Toni Farang, is completed, but I am still looking for a publisher.

The hill tribe issue became more of a reality for me later, when I would do several stories, staying in villages with the Akha, Pahlong, Lihsu and Lahu tribes. The Thai government was doing all they could to stifle and ultimately kill these people. And I was witness to the slow methodical genocide of a simple people, without a written language, who didn’t understand the pressures of the modern world, and wanted nothing more than to be left alone, to live in harmony with nature, as they had done for centuries.

The war in Myanmar, however, was financed by drugs, and the tribal people often became victims when they were used as drug couriers or dealers. But the worst atrocities were the ones I would later learn from the Shan State soldiers recuperating in hospitals in Chiang Mai. The Burmese army was using tribal people as human mine detectors, forcing them to walk in front of the soldiers. They were also used as slaves, in forced labor camps, where they would generally drop dead from over-work and starvation.

My Thailand adventure book was published, under the title Bikes, Boats, and Boxing Gloves.

My next destination was Cambodia, where I had heard that there was an ancient martial art, called Bokator, which had never been written about. The art was nearly dead. As part of their program to eradicate the old culture and break with the past, the Khmer Rouge had hunted down, and killed nearly all of the traditional dancers, artists, singers, musicians, authors, and martial arts practitioners. In 2004, when the first conference on Khmer Bokator was held in Phnom Penh, it was discovered that only eight masters had survived.

In Cambodia, I hit the ground running, immediately being cast as the evil foreigner in a really bad Kung Fu movie. From Phnom Penh, I wrote for magazines in Thailand, Taiwan, UK, Canada, and the USA. locally, I got a lot of interesting work, translating old French documents, editing, writing, teaching, and working for the Australian government, as well as the Cambodian police.

My book about Xinjiang, The Desert of Death on Three Wheels, was published.

One of the most heart-wrenching stories I did in Cambodia was about an entire village, hundreds of people, living in a garbage dump, drinking fetid ground water, and earning abut one dollar per day, recycling trash. My first Cambodian book, Letters from the Penh, is a mix of journalism, diaries, and short stories, which gives an accurate picture of the life of modern Phnom Penh. It deals with everything from cock fighting, the Khmer Rouge trials, government corruption, boxing, poverty, ethnic minorities, glue addicts, the coronation of the new king, banking scams, a military coup, education, language, religion, and culture. The book is full of the quirky and memorable characters who blow in and out of Phnom Penh, journalists, both real and fake, do-gooders, missionaries, drug addicts, backpackers, sex tourists, police, and spies. Probably my most important book, Letters from the Penh has yet to find a publisher.

Cambodia is a country in constant flux and political turmoil. And, there is always something new to discover. You could write forever there. But, Letters from the Penh had been exhausting to write. I speak and read Khmer fairly well now, sometimes conducting my interviews without a translator. I don’t speak Khmer as well as I can speak Mandarin, but this is a different country, with different opportunities, and I have done the best I could with what was given me. If you know Cambodia, you can’t possibly love it. But you can’t let go either. Just as I had made plans to return to China, I was offered sponsorship to write an adventure travel book about Cambodia, as I had done in Taiwan and Thailand.

My tour, beginning at Angkor Wat, in Siem Reap Province, included hiking, bicycling, riding elephants, fighting, and scuba diving. The book ends in Ratanakiri province, on the Vietnam border, where I visited hill tribes, interviewed the Cham Muslim minority, met the headman of the Chinese community of only 125 people who controlled all the wealth of the province, and, I climbed into a gem mine, where miners were dying at a rate of one per week.

The book, Discovering the Khmers, is finished, and I am now looking for representation. 

Although conditions were often dirty, dangerous or just annoying, I have loved the places I traveled and the peoples I met. I often dream of going back, but there is much of the world I have yet to experience, that the pull towards the new and unfamiliar is often too strong to resist.

"And so I saved the first (path) for another day. And yet, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever be coming back." (Robert Frost)

Presently, I am in the USA doing my book tour, feeling like an imposter or at the least, an old man, talking about my past. My days booked up by my publisher, the nights still belong to me. And I lie awake in bed, dreaming of my next adventure. I want to study wrestling and horsemanship in Inner Mongolia, go de-mining in Cambodia, and study in a Madrasa in Pakistan.

Adventure leads to more adventure.

Antonio Graceffo
BA, Dip Lic, AAMS, CMFC, CTC, RFC