Snakes, blood and sex. What can we say? We're trying to make it happen for the guy. Egging him on, even. Come on, you're a linebacker for the Eagles. You've started in the Super Bowl. You've taken on Jerome Bettis. Why so scared?
"I don't know," says Dhani Jones, squirming in his seat. "That doesn't look too good."
It's a cloudy day in late March and Jones is at the MeiYou Café in Yangshuo, China. A few nights earlier, he dined at a restaurant where the cuisine consisted of beetles, silkworms, cocooned worms, scorpions ("Eat them fast," a waitress told him), turtles, eels, sea urchins, snails, fish eyes, frogs, duck tongue and slugs. At a corner stand, he could have ordered dog on a stick. Not a corn dog. A real dog.
Of course, these weren't his only dining options. At some of the other restaurants lining the street, Jones could have opted for a burger or some pasta. But this trip is about discovery. And right now, staring down a snake, Jones is discovering how strong his stomach really is. The waitress tells him about the cooking process: a live snake is presented, slithering in a box, to the customer. She'll chop off its head, right there at the table, and wait as it convulses and bleeds to death. The snake is then skinned and grilled before being served with a cup of its blood-a beverage, some Chinese believe, that can improve the sex lives of those who drink it.
And no, you can't get free refills.
JONES WON'T eat very much during the 12 days he spends in China, but not because of the food. He simply doesn't have time. He's here--with friend and agent Happy Walters and Walters' photo assistant, Linka Odom--to take photographs. The three are on the road by 7 a.m. most days and don't finish shooting until after dark. Jones packed an $8,000 video camera and three still-frames, including one that set him back another $5,000. He'll take hundreds of pictures and hours of video for an exhibit called "Face of Communism in the 21st Century," which he'll shop to Philadelphia museums. He's bookending the trip with NFL flag-football clinics for teenagers in Beijing and Shanghai.
Jones is spending two days in Yangshuo, a tourist town of nearly 300,000 people etched along the Li River in south-central China. The city is enclosed by a circle of sharp mountains, as if it were sitting on a shark's tongue. But Jones isn't interested in the China you read about in brochures. He discovered photography as a teenager in suburban Washington, D.C., when his parents-Samuel, a Navy commander, and Nancy, an anesthesiologist-gave him the Nikon they had used to take his baby pictures. At Michigan, Jones spent football off-seasons shooting basketball games for the school newspaper. Now he prefers portraits to action photos, and he's used his NFL off-seasons to travel the world and take pictures in places like Thailand, Kenya, Morocco, Jordan-and now China. Jones likes getting close enough to subjects so that every wrinkle and scar is visible on film. "That way," he says, "you can take your time and study people."
Jones and his group use Yangshuo as a base, shuttling to remote villages with their tour guide, a local who calls himself David. When Jones yells, "Ting!"-Mandarin for stop-everyone bolts from the van's purple seats in pursuit of the perfect picture. One cloudy afternoon, they rent a fishing boat on the Li for a 20-minute ride southeast to Fuli, a 500-year-old village. As seven people board the small (30' x 6') craft, someone asks David what a sign inside the cabin means. "Passengers strictly forbidden," he answers. The cabin is so compact that Jones' head hits the ceiling while he's sitting. If he shifts in his seat, the boat lists with him. The waves on the muddy Li nearly crash into the cabin windows, one of which is broken.
At Fuli, the dock leads to a snaking stone stairway that rises to meet the village. When Jones reaches the top step-his shirt stained with sweat from rolling his suitcase filled with cameras, lenses, film and flashes-the locals stop and stare. Jones is 6'1" and 240 pounds and was named one of People's 50 Hottest Bachelors in 2005. He wears a Bob Marley T-shirt, jeans and The North Face hiking boots. With thickframed black glasses and his hair styled long and high, Jones looks like a buffer will.i.am. A man leading a water buffalo through the street stops before Jones and says, "Hei peng you, ni hao." Hello, black friend.
Just then, the dark clouds suddenly empty. Jones and his crew duck into an alley looking for cover. Watching intently and sitting cross-legged in a doorway is a man with a wrinkled face, who offers shelter while flashing a toothless smile. He tells David that his name is Su Churui. He's 82 and has lived in this small stone house his entire life, this home in which his father and grandfather lived. Jones asks Su, through David, if he minds having his picture taken. He doesn't.
Jones and Walters snap away, switching lenses, popping in fresh rolls, as Su sits on his wooden stool. He's wearing a gray stocking hat, black leather jacket, black sweater, blue slacks and slippers. Perched on his nose are reading glasses with a $2.50 price tag still attached. Three clocksall set to the same time-line a wall near his bed, which is just feet from the doorway. A retired
farmer, Su still raises chickens. You can hear them clucking in the back of the house. The counter space in his kitchen is no bigger than what you'd find in an airplane bathroom; his toilet, like most in Fuli, is a hole in the dirt surrounded by boards.
Jones variously asks Su to lean in, to sit back, to gaze out the doorway and to look directly into the lens. They shoot for about two hours, and as they leave, Jones hands him a Polaroid from the session. Su gazes at it with wonder.
THE CAMERAS are pointed. The snake is only a few feet away, the waitress anxious to drop her ax. Everyone waits for a nod from Jones. During the trip, he has tried fish eye ("Crunchy"), duck tongue ("Kinda like a good sparerib where you can suck the meat from the bone") and snail ("Spicy, with a gritty aftertaste"). Now's his chance to try snake. "I can't," Jones finally says. "It's too gross."
In the van the next morning, David harasses Jones for wimping out. "I often eat snake and cat together," he says. "It's called dragon tiger. And dog meat is very good too. We eat it in the winter. It's supposed to warm your blood." Jones stares out the window, trying to ignore the translator. "When you have a very good friend," David says, "you refer to him as your gou rou."
Jones turns and asks, "What's that mean?"
"Dog meat."
Jones and Walters high-five and yell, "You're my gou rou!"
THERE ARE two Chinas. One is ancient and spread across rice fields, where homes often lack running water and electricity. The other is like Shanghai, tight and tall, bustling and loud, filled with freeways and billboards and karaoke bars and skyscrapers where businessmen plot the country's path to economic dominance. But the city is also packed with neighborhoods like Old Town Shanghai, whose main street, Dajing Road, is a crowded marketplace. The shoppers are mostly poor, many wearing hole-ridden shoes and ripped pants. One man in an "I Survived SARS" T-shirt is missing an eye. When Jones shoots in Old Town, locals surround him, looking to see what this strange American deems so interesting. Jones takes a Polaroid and hands it to a woman, expecting her to take a glance and pass it around. But the woman hands the picture back to Jones and says in Chinese, "Why is it so small? Bigger is better. And why isn't it in color?"
Jones laughs at the translation. "Tell her to buy a magnifying glass," he says.
She asks him to sign the picture, which he does: Dhani #55. She has no idea how often he's given autographs. In Philadelphia, Jones is celebrated for his tenacity, for going from sixth-round pick with the Giants in 2000 to Super Bowl starter for the Eagles last season. But it's impossible to consider his recent subjectsthe man who has spent most of his 75 years working on a fishing boat, the women who sew handbags for 10 hours a day, the elderly couple who stay warm by sleeping with lit coal beneath their bed-and not think that while Jones is bigger, faster and stronger than all these people, he's not nearly as tough.
THERE ARE 12 cameramen waiting for Jones when he arrives at the artificial turf field south of Shanghai. The print reporters are from huge papers (China Daily, the country's USA Today) and tiny ones (Young Person's Daily, whose reporter is taking notes in a Hello Kitty pad). They're covering the Flag Warrior II competition, the camp in which Jones will teach kids from 30 Chinese and Tibetan middle schools about American football.
The NFL began investing in China two years ago. When Gordon Smeaton of NFL International first visited the country, he found that the kids liked American team sports-thanks to Michael Jordan and Yao Ming-but knew nothing about playing football. It wasn't difficult for Smeaton to convince 85 middle schools to pick up flag football as a sport or start clinics that train coaches and refs. NFL International also negotiated with Shanghai Media Group, a national media company, to broadcast the Super Bowl. Before 2004, only the Bears' pummeling of the Pats in 1986 had been televised in China. On an early Monday morning last February, 20 million Chinese watched the Pats beat the Eagles.
The kids-all dressed in their school's flagfootball uniforms except for one in a LeBron James jersey-are in awe of Jones. They stare at his inflated biceps and touch their own. One kid turns to his friend and says, "Zhe me hei de pi fu!" Such black skin.
Jones coaches the kids through drills. He tries teaching them to crouch like cornerbacks. Some kids stay ramrod straight, others squat too low to the ground. Then they practice passing. The balls sail high and wobbly: truly, a feast of Peking duck.
Later, there's a five-on-five game. Jones coaches Yang Pu middle school against Fenghen. The kids are better than he thought they'd be; the Fenghen kids, at least. They complete bombs through coverages that Jones designed. They come close to swarming on D. Their coach tries tucking his guys' flags under their belts, making them difficult to tug off, but nothing works. Jones leaves the field (and the country) with his coaching record at 0—1. He snaps a few shots of the kids, who smile as they try on his Eagles jersey and helmet. Then he puts his camera down. After all the shots, after 11 days of mixing with locals and trying new food and learning a new culture by way of 1,000 still frames and seven hours of video, he is pictured-out.
He doesn't even take cameras to his final dinner, at a Shanghai steak house. But he can't resist bridging the gap between East and West one last time. Soon after a waiter pours him a Heineken with too much head, Jones downs it and waves for another. "Let me show you something," he says to the waiter. "This is how Americans pour beer." Jones tips his glass and carefully pours, topping it off just before the foam falls over the side. The waiter brings another one, pouring it perfectly. "Thank you, sir," he says. "I've learned from you, my friend."
That would be gou rou.