I saw many performances of martial arts while I was growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I watched students from schools with names like Northern Shaolin, Southern Shaolin, White Crane, Dragon Style, Praying Mantis, or Eagle Claw. I looked at lion dances* and demonstrations with impressive fighting movements. But when I saw the handsome and muscular young men in their black satin uniforms, I wilted. I never thought that could be me.
The Chinese New Year’s parade† in San Francisco ends with a long dragon made of bamboo and bright cloth held aloft on dozens of poles. I participated as a student of the Chinese language school I attended, once leading a drill team, once holding one of the poles. I ran with other boys who were in the martial arts schools. But I didn’t feel like I wanted to practice martial arts until years later when I was in college. One night, my best friend wanted to see a “kung fu movie” showing on campus.
No, I didn’t want to go. I saw myself as a nonviolent person and a pacifist. I dismissed those movies as exploitative cultural stereotypes. Despite that, my friend insisted, so we went. The auditorium was packed. The packed auditorium cheered every intricate fight. When the actors took off their shirts, the girls screamed.
The movie was the Shaw Brothers production, “Shaolin Martial Arts.”§ The premise was simple: the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), aided by ruthless martial artists with nearly supernatural abilities and hellish brutality, wanted to wipe out the Shaolin school. Two students managed to escape being killed. If they were to win, they had to go through a long period of arduous training, using methods that seemed irrational and tortuous. They had to learn strange techniques, including the one-inch fingertip strike.
When I left the campus hall and walked into the cold night air, everyone was excitedly trying to mimic that technique. For the first time, thought, “I want to do that.” The message was clear: the two heroes were defeated, humiliated, and weak, but they managed to build themselves into winners by sheer determination and hard work. Maybe there was a chance for me too? That was the start of a lifelong ideal: no matter how much the odds are stacked against me, I could change that through practice.
My only personal reference was the people I saw training in Portsmouth Square.** They were ghostly profiles in the foggy mornings training in Tan Tui (Springing Leg) and Taijiquan. The master was Kuo Lienying, and he seemed especially mysterious as he stood stock still in Standing Meditation (Zhan Zhuang). I didn’t understand any of this, but it was the only living example of training that I knew.
One afternoon, I passed a storefront in Berkeley that had the same list of styles (including “Shaolin,” just like the movie) and the same graphics on its front windows as Master Kuo’s school. The teacher was Professor T. R. Chung, a senior student of Master Kuo. I went in. In addition to being my first teacher, Professor Chung had things I’ve never seen again: two gleaming and heavy double-edged straight swords in scabbards covered in real snakeskin, and two Yang Family Taijiquan albums with text, portraits of the great masters, and class photographs. The photos looked like my Chinese school yearbooks. It seemed familiar and possible.
Over time, I went to martial arts demonstrations and tournaments, including several by the Beijing Wushu Team. I was dazzled. I saw amazing performances. Some scenes were imprinted in an instant and are still fixed in my mind. The reaction was always the same: “I want to move like that!”
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_dance
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Chinese_New_Year_Festival_and_Parade
§ https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Shaolin+Martial+Arts%2C+shaw+brothers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0e2c5bb1,vid:aGf1TSoLews,st:0