Back in China, his fitness regimen is intense, lasting up to four hours a day, and might be classified as old-school, as it seems utterly invented by Wang himself, who’s as old as oldest-school gets, like, horse-and-buggy-school, from grainy photographs of Chiang Kai-shek days. Before coming to Milan, he’d made only one demand: He needed a Designated Special Comrade Workout Space, what we call “a hotel gym,” which was a problem easily solved.
When I arrived, the cramped, windowless gym was bereft of all human bodies but Wang’s. He was clad in black spandex leggings, with his shirt off (again!), which startled me because in all the hotel gyms in all my years of travel, I’d never entered to find someone with their shirt off, in full pec parade, let alone an octogenarian with the cojones to let it all hang out. He’d already been at it for 45 minutes, and a sheen of sweat glistened over his torso. By any objective standard, he had a very good body—lean but shaped, perfectly apportioned—a better body than, sorry, dear shapely GQ reader, 99 percent of those 30, 40, even 50 years younger. By most objective standards, okay, he was pretty hot, easily the hottest grandpa, but still, something more than just grandpa hot. It was a hotness that perhaps I couldn’t fully appreciate, or needed time to assimilate. Because there was some amount of cognitive dissonance. Except for a couple of wrinkles and puckers, he really could have been in his 20s with that body. And on top of it, that expressive face, distinguished and striking, framed in a whorl of gray hair like that of a Tarantino elder, seemed like a computer-generated meme. That is, as a whole, Wang Deshun seemed more like invented clickbait, something fictional.
When I arrived, he was involved in an exercise of wing-flapping, with weights. There was an esoterica to his workout, a self-tabulated Tai Chi. Were these old Communist drills? Was he his own Jack LaLanne? At home, in winter, he skated in a bodysuit (in summer, it was swimming); then he retired to the gym for two hours of this Kama Sutra with dumbbells. If it might have felt creepy, being alone in a gym with a shirtless 80-year-old, it wasn’t. Wang only had eyes for himself in the mirror. Eventually, his DJ daughter (and manager), QQ, appeared, tall with long black hair dyed party blue, chitchatting amiably, translating for her dad as he explained the exercises.
As she spoke, her father remained undeterred, completing a series of weight-lifting maneuvers. He waved the weights around in front of him, and then kind of segued into more wing-flapping. It was hypnotizing—he was nothing but eye-of-the-tiger.
“How many of these?” I asked, having stripped down to my T-shirt but daring to go no further.
“Two hundred.”
I wanted to say: Seems like 175 more than I was planning.
He started jumping up and down in place, and I followed. Three hundred, he said. Wait, what if my head is telling me 50? He kept jumping.
When it came time to stretch a little, he took his leg and hoisted it up by his ear, hooking his heel onto the bar of the weight-lifting cage. He encouraged me to do the same, though my leg only lifted 90 degrees, as high as my waist. QQ laughingly pointed out the obvious—I was as stiff as the unoiled Tin Man—though Wang showed no disappointment, no interest at all, really. When he spoke, it was to the exercises themselves, their progeny and prescription. He had his head to his knee now and was bouncing a little. Wasn’t that how you popped a hammy? Not Hottest Grandpa! He did all of this with an almost grim intensity. It’s what kept him young and limber, he was sure of it, and what had built his body to its current form, these hours (in Milan, it was truncated to one or two) of calisthenics each day: weights, cardio, stretching.
Afterward, in the Comrade Food Consumption Zone (the hotel breakfast buffet), he suctioned eggs, turkey, pancakes, cheese, mushrooms, pears, pastry, juice, macchiato, and green Jell-O cubes. (He really dug those Jell-O cubes, eyebrows rising with pleasure as he swished them around in his mouth.) “He eats whatever he wants,” said QQ, narrating as he masticated, as if we were watching a documentary.
According to her, after her father’s walk, he’d been offered millions of dollars to shill things like longevity pills and pricey automobiles, though he didn’t take any pills and didn’t know how to drive, either. (He rode his bike everywhere.) Yes, he’d created a global sensation, and yet, he said, he’d felt only one thing during his ten-second walk: “on fire.” Much as he liked the attention—and he did!—he hadn’t asked to be a sex symbol, exactly. He had a wife, who was in her 70s, and they had a life. With many chapters, nearly 50 years of them, in fact. They’d been the poorest of poor at one point, comfortable enough the next, but the struggle had been theirs together. She was a movie director and ran the home: laying out Wang’s clothes in the morning, feeding him, dictating his schedule. She always told people that there was something stubbornly childlike in him. And she seemed to nurture that, infantilizing him just a bit. Meanwhile (he reminded me again and again) he was an actor, not a model; an artist, not an ever-so-fine piece of grandpa meat.
What the world couldn’t see was that everything in his life was whittled into making whatever artistic impression he could in the precious hours he had. He was trying to reach that place where the physical and ephemeral meet, where the body becomes exalted. The walk had been that, too. He didn’t want money for it. He knew exactly who he was and where he was going. At every crossroad, he already knew the right direction. He’d committed to it decades earlier.
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