Kung Fu and Love

Kung Fu and Love
A great gift for Valentine's day or Chinese New Year

Friday, January 25, 2013

Candy Land at the Eggroll Cafe

We were in the Lowell area around dinner time and decided to check out the Eggroll cafe. Our friends are the owners and we are rarely in the area so we decided it would be a good time to order from there. We've never really been there before except the opening, when stuff was free.. we were expecting egg rolls of course, and maybe chicken wings, that sort of thing. The owners are Cambodian but the food is really Asian American in general. If Ming Tsai's Asian mixed with French and other western styles is fusion (btw isn't Vietnamese food already highly influenced by French cuisine? just saying fusion isn't new.) then this would be fusion for the masses. And fused well. They had bento boxes. And I thought, "What a great way to make an Asian meal accessible to Americans, but at the same time, it can still have that Asian flavor. The bento box is a Japanese idea but it's not like bento boxes go back to feudal times. It's a product of the modern world. Also the place looks pretty classy. I've been two Lowell about twice and most of what the name Lowell bring sto mind is scenes from "The Fighter". So let me just say too that the Eggroll Cafe looks pretty classy for fusion for the masses. We ordered and then Noah ran around and we started playing Candyland.
Oh did I mention they have board games you can play? Yeah so it was either that or battle ship, and I've never actually played a board game with Noah before so i tried Candy land first. 
The truth is, I've never played Candyland before, so I kept wondering where the dice were. Then I figured out it goes by color or something. We didn't play a real game because I didn't really know what I was doing and I wasn't going to try the whole taking turns thing. Basically, I drew a card, Noah moved his piece, I drew and other card, Noah moved his piece again. Noah has a guaranteed win. It's more like Alice in Candy Land where his goal is to just finish, not before anyone else, just pretend your little man is moving along  the path and your moves are dictated by cards. Plus you sort of learn about colors. He liked it. He was distracted, we got to play three games. Then it was time to leave and he wasn't having that. Somehow we got home. 
Life with kids is often like Candy Land. We aren't racing anyone home. It's just enough of a challenge to move along our little board, our moves dictated by stop lights or train stops, and our adventures and be tantrums, pooing, crazy people, or what have you. Then we get home and we all win. Sometimes in this cold weather, it s nice to go out, just to go to a doctor's appointment or the store, just to go through the process of getting dressed, going out coming back, getting undressed. It's something to do. A little adventure around the block. It makes getting home seem that much better.
So when we finally did get home and  bit into one of those fajita egg rolls, I thought, "this is such an awesome American Asian idea." Stuff eggrolls with a bunch of steak or hamburger or other American tasting things. 
It was being marketed as something to eat during the Superbowl. I'm not a big football fan, but I can totally see that. Eggrolls and beer, (I'm not a bid beer drinker either) but the taste matches. It's the new Nachos, the new buffalo wings (at a time by the way, when there is a shortage of wings. Did you hear about that? It was on the news.) 
This Eggroll Cafe thing could be big money. If only you could deliver to a wider range of consumers. Like maybe how P.F. Changs has their own frozen foods. (I had P.F. Chang's once. I think it was someone's leftovers, and as I recall I didn't finish it)
There's nothing wrong with American Asian food. Just because you make something more Americanized doesn't mean it has to suck. There's a way to do it. And one of the ways to do it, is at the Eggroll Cafe.
Just saying, of you're near Lowell, check it out.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The Goddess has provided a sacrifice

So I mentioned before I used to be a suited instructor, like the guy in the red man suit (except not red), the guy old ladies knee in the balls in a self defense class, except it's not only old ladies sometimes it's basketball playing women over six feet and in their prime, but you get the idea.
I also used to have a 9-5 job where I was an admin, a secretary for everyone in the unit and sometimes other units too. Except I worked in government so it wasn't a high stress corporate situation like you might imagine.
Everyone knew I did this other job, and a co-worker, higher up, female, lesbian (it matters for the story) thought it was funny. She would say how those girls I taught wouldn't be able to defend themselves in a real situation. Now I first saw Impact when I was in highschool, and I thought some of the girls did come out a little over confident in their skills, but even then, I was sure they were better off than they were when they started, and the ground work seemed pretty good. And the girls who had been through more life experience knew that just because you could now "fight" didn't mean someone couldn't hit you in the back of the head with a brick. But the same is also true of a sharp shooter with a gun that isn't out in his hand.
So on another occasion this Co-worker let us call her Laura (that isn't her name) came by to chat again and asked, "so do you do parties?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well how much would it cost for you to come by and do a little something at this party I'm having at my house."
"Well it's really done with a trained female instructor.." I explained how the female instructor was there to keep me safe, even though the student often saw it as the other way around. The truth is, in those simulated fight, the only person in danger is the suited instructor. We say nasty things, grab them, and bring them to the ground (on top of us so they can't get hurt) we lie on them  but all of it is done waiting for them to finally hit us, kick us in the head and what have you. We never hit them. So if they get over zealous and we give the signal that the character is knocked out, the female instructor is the one that keeps the over zealous student from to continuing to hit us.
"Look it's not a real class," Laura said, " it's more like a joke."
I didn't feel comfortable with that.
"And don't get me wrong, it's going to be a Lesbian party. A lot of older women who did protests in the 60s. We're all women's rights and rah, rah, rah.. look at me. So we get it. It's just going to be a thing. You come in and make sure they don't get all crazy and like you said, they'll only get one hit, either to the eyes/head or to the balls.... so much? We all work in government so none of us are rich, it will be like 15 minutes. is $60.00 okay? Kind of like a favor?"
I said, "Yeah sure why not?"
So, another thing.. I don't drive. I have a license, but for the sake of society I don't get behind the wheel. It's not cause I'm half Asian. My Asian Female significant other is a terrific driver. It's just me, and my poor eyesight, and I just have a natural aversion to cars since I always got carsick as a child.
So I had to hire my friend (asian male terrific driver) to drive me to Laura's house.
He talked to her on the phonefor last minute directions when we got close. (The party was at night by the way) It kind of felt like were about to commit some sort of crime. Laura was a little stressed so came across as rude to my friend. We parked, I jumped out of the car, got out my body bag looking hocky bag and pulled out the suit. I stripped down to the spandex underwear reserved for  work with this suit in the middle of the sidewalk. Nobody was around on the street. I put on a cup, put on the giant cup over that, the one that makes it look like a caricature of some sort of male fertility god or demon. Put on the rest of the suit and the helmet and pants over the giant cup.
I ring the doorbell. Laura already know I'm coming so she meets me in the hallway.
"Wait here I'll announce you" she whispers, "I'll just say really loud.. the goddess has provided a sacrifice and then you come in okay-" and she shuts the door.
So then I hear it "Ladies!-" etc etc.."The Goddess has provided us tonight with a sacrifice!"
Enter me.
They all go nuts. Middle age women covered in tatooes screaming like school girls. A young woman runs by me and hits the cup, screeching and laughing as she runs to the other side of the room. It feels like a tap compared to a real hit but I wasn't expecting it. Vision inside the helmet is extremely obscured. A particularly tatooed grey haired woman grabs a knife, probably a butter knife. I see adrenaline and fear of the suited sacrificial lamb in the eyes of a lot of these women.
Laura is starting to see things get out of control.
"No knives." I whisper to her. I should also mention that the suit only talks in character. In a class, whenever I want to say something as a teacher, I take the helmet off. It's a psychological thing. Put the helmet on and I'm a person you don't know, potentially dangerous. This wasn't a class, so I figured I wouldn't talk at all, and I had mentioned this to Laura. Exept of course I would talk to Laura now to let her know knives were not part of our $60.00 agreement.
"Ladies. So the goddess has provided a sacrifice, but she has declared that you will have only one strike upon him!"
"awwwwwwwww!!!!!"
"One strike in the head...." she gestured," Or........ the manhood! and please put the knife away."
Surprisingly most of the women were scared and said as much.
A couple of women lined up and they hit me, and I sort of pretended to be hurt, but this wasn't a class, and there wasn't a lot of space behind me to fall down. Plus it was just weird. Then when I pretended to be hurt, they sort of started talking to me asking if I was okay. In a class, the Female instructor would take over at this point. Plus it would have been explained that while the character is hurt, the instructor in the suit is not hurt and it is not their responsibility but ours to worry about that. Laura wasn't trained but she just talked to me and I whispered to her what was up and she explained. It wasn't very smooth.
The on of the women, came up to me and turned around.
"Okay so I'm walking down the street and you attack me" (an Impact alumn, They are trained to only fight back. So they don't just attack the suit unprovoked. In fact they learn to use their words first and then when the suit moves in they move in. Or when the suit attacks. Or in reversals, attempted sexual assaults, they go down to zero and when the opportunity arises they attack, because by virtue of the situation, they are already being attacked but hadn't had the opportunity to fight effectively yet.)
Any way so she elbowed me hard in the face, like they do in the class.
"Are you okay" Lauara said. I was, but I hadn't braced for an elbow attack or fallen backward so as not to absorb all the force. The Woman was not the biggest or strongest. It was an effective elbow to someone not wearing a helmet. But some women and really throw an elbow. It's one of the hardest blow to take, especially when you are just standing there posed in an awkward position waiting for them to set up and throw their whole body weight into the elbow. But yeah I was okay enough.
Laura was surprised and the next day she mentioned how maybe the class was better than she had previously thought.
But as for that night, soon it was all over, I was unmasked and shown to be a coworker, and then three $20's were in my hand, $20 to my friend, I was out of the house, stripped back down on the sidewalk and back into normal clothes and we were out.
It turned out to be easy money and an adrenaline rush.
We laughed all the way back to Chinatown.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Kung Fu Forms, poetry and mnemonic devices.

The usefulness of forms (Chinese tohlo or Japanese kata) is often debated in Martial arts. Some consider them useless and for show. Some people only practice their forms like they are magical mantras that will bring about supernatural powers through their order of techniques, like chanting a spell or prayer. Some people just like them.
I used to be of the opinion that forms were like a book. Some of them were like boring manuals, a how to for fighting. Some were manuals that were decorated with fancy gold margins and in a more poetic form. Some were like a story, a poem, in fact a lot of moves have corresponding four syllable poetic lines associated with them.
Al this is true, but recently I missed something in my need to categorize a physical and oral history into the written history I was more familiar with. The missed the mnemonic device hidden in the forms. Mainly because since I was part of a school for a long period of time, I didn't need this device. But watching a series on brain function on Nova opened my eyes to this. Basically there were these memory contests where peopl could memorize vast pages of number sequences, (the host did a list of 40 words instead) in a matter of minutes. The trick with the words was the went around the room looking at different objects to use and then say if the words were "monkey, house, bicycle" the person doing the memorizing would picture a monkey riding a bicycle crashing into a house. The more unusual the action the more it would stick out in your brain.
Aha! I thought. All those poetic names of Kung Fu moves had a purpose other than to sound cool or confuse and awe a student whose chinese was sub par.
I'll give an example of a story.
One of Bak Mei students (pro Qing government) travelled up to White Crane mountain looking for some Shaolin rebels(anti-Qing government) who were hiding out with Woo Dak Dai (anti-Qing or neutral depending who you ask. Founder of our White Crane's Shaolin branch/ possibly one of the Five ancestors depending on who you ask) Anyway, he bumped into a white crane student they got into it, Kung fu fighting on the side of a mountain and what not then..
Bak Mei studdnet...did a  "duk pak wa san!" (uhhhh hammer fist chops into the Wa San mountain range!"
Pause
Okay so you can't actually use the back of your fist to chop and explode an entire mountain range. Though movies often have Kung Fu fighter do just that, through CGI and other special effects.
Start

The the White crane student quickly reacted with "Wu deep cuen jerng!" Butterfly fist palm! (uhh not that bad ass sounding at all) and passed the Bak Mei technique and then "Mang Fu toi San!" Fierce Tiger pushes the mountain.
end

Okay so butterflies don't have fists, nor do Fierce tigers go around pushing mountains from here to there. So what is the point of these names. (What is the real point of this story? Not the plot. A rather unknown WHite crane student kills justifibly defending himself and home and invader who we know is a Bak Mei student. But the Bak Mei student falls off a mountain and the White Crane student is unknown so ho is telling the story?)

This story actually has the applications to three techniques right? Americans are always asking about, when do I get to learn the real applications, I don't want to learn forms all day for ten years, I'm not all Shaolin Temple and stuff. And I don't need to know all this flowery language and story telling, I want to know the real street applications.
Okay, in Shaolin Temple they don't need forms because they have ten years. Forms or for the street. Not street fighting, but street learning.
(As an aside. When my Sifu taught me applications for fighting, that was often a much different experience and conversation then when teaching a technique as it appeared in the form. In the form would start off with more simile, "like a rhino looking at the moon" or "like two people are here and you jump up and strike both of them!" but the tone is like talking to a child. Where as a street application lesson the techniques are less clear than they appear in the form and more maleable and the conversation more violent and less Childlike in nature.)
Where was I? Street learning.
I bumped into a Kung Fu Clasmate I haven't seen in half a decade yesterday and the conversation went to how a certain form looked. So we went over to Copley Square and I showed him the form. I mean I performed it in front of him in a few minutes. Now, he hasn't been training as much, he has become an M.D, since I last saw him, but let's go back to two hundred years ago in China. Everyone had exposure to Kung Fu from a young age, and everyone spoke Chinese and knew various street poems and oral history (not a lot of people could read) and they were familiar with these oral and physical oral traditions often performed on street corners for money, or kept in secret and used as codes to identify various secret societies, gangs, political interest groups etc.
The point is, even today, people who practice Kung fu all the time, especially when passing on a form of the same system can learn a form in a day. I learned the particular form I was performing on Copley Square in two days. 10 minutes each day, enough time for my son to start playing with the swords So basically 20 minutes. Now I haven't focused all my training on this for so it is a little hazy, but I can do it pretty well still even though I haven't been training forms in their story poem fullness that much since I have to keep both eyes on my very curious 20 month old.
But basically this form is easily passed along from one Kung Fu guy of System A to another Kung Fu guy of system A. Even System B guy might be able to pick it up if System B is a close cousin to System A.
Forms around about wasting your time, Their about saving it. You can meet up with a Kung Fu guy walking on the road, learn the form in Five minutes, and then break it apart. All the techniques can turn into thousands of techniques and training methods, whole fighting styles, there are combinations, Yoga like postures to hold, that you will under stand at a glance if you have the proper physical and mental foundation.
It is easier to memorize this series of techniques is it goes in a poetic like order with a dance like flow to it. The Sing-songy four syllable poems depicting impossible human strength and shape shifting (duk pak wa san, Mang fu toi san) are another layer of mnemonic devices to help you recall what you are doing, what the next move is. In fact these poems change and there's no reason why you can't make up your own in English.
Here is an example of a modern one There are some moves hands or swords held up in a fighting form that taken as pcitures by themselves, may vaguely resemble someone surrendering. (it doesn't look like surrender when done in the form because he is still fighting) (Don't make fun now, I've seen boxers do similar moves and they have names like "cuteness" or "peekaboo" also used to help refer to various fighting styles. So don't start calling the kettle black you MMA people you.)
The move is now called surrender, but in politically incorrect and economically depressed China it was called "Yup buen Jai Tau Wong!" or The Japanese Surrender. Just saying that these mnemonic devices and poems didn't suddenly stop changing and developing just because China modernized.
So, work hard on your basics and use these mnemonic devices to learn Kung Fu fast. Kung Fu is hard work, but that doesn't mean it is arduous and slow. There are built in tricks to make things easier and faster and more entertaining as well.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

My People

People who see me walking pushing my older son Noah in a stroller, often ask if his mother is Chinese. They don't ask me this as often when I am only pushing my younger son Jonah. The people who know me ask me oh does he speak Chinese at home, oh she is from Taiwan, so they speak Mandarin... no you guys don't? You speak chinese though how come she doesn't, and then as the conversation goes on they start to look at me funny. I am half Chinese but I look white. Just like my younger son, who is 75% Chinese or Asian (never know how to categorize Taiwanese, depends on the context and the audience) but has blond hair and his slighhtly slanted eyes just make him look Siberian or Eastern European. Just for the record, my white side is German, Irish and Polish and there are rumors of French in there. Apparently a great-great grandmother or aunt confessed this in her dying days as a secret not to be told to people outside the family. The horror. lol.
I guess I should be speaking more Chinese to my children, but to tell the truth, it's not like I learned Chinese from my Chinese father. And it's not like my White mother taught me. It is not the "home language" I just picked it up somehow. From my dad watching hours and hours of TVB series all in a row, and then from Chinese School where I heard it barked at me, and from street language where I was greeted with it by old people but also sword at by it and mainly just listened to other people using it.
I will say I was white for my childhood when I was in Chinatown and visiting my grandparents in Philly. I didn't start thinking of myself as Chinese until nobody else around me was Chinese or white family. Well no that's not true but I didn't have a sudden let me discover my roots issue until the summer after middle school. That's when I started listening to all my Father's old cassette tapes looking through all his old stuff, wanting to go to China and all that. Actually that's when I joined the Kung Fu school as well. In fact in a weird way, I went to Groton, a prep school, because I had heard of other students from my middle school going away to boarding prep school and somehow getting to go on a trip to China. If only I had had a sudden urge to embrace my white side at this point in my life. Or only work on those Asian tendencies that are really white in origin, like violin, debate team, computer programming, or squash.
Why did I have to start learning Taishanese, a language I have no blood connection to, or start doing Kung Fu. Well Kung Fu was good form me, by why did I have to be all Chinese about it, incorporating all the antiquated moral codes yi hei and all that. Part of me wishes that I had know freaking idea what yi hei was, That I only knew about Chinese customs from an outsiders perspective, to be studied, learned about but not absorbed.
I find that recently I have been rediscovering my White side. Having urges to listen to Wagner, read Norse Mythology, and I go to the Kung Fu school and work out with the sword I bought in Krakow. It is a cheap touristy thing but it is metal, unbalanced and therefore kind of heavy so it is good for forearm work.
I have a memory (which I may have elaborated with my imagination over time) of my Grandfather telling my mother something about my name. Maybe that I should take the name Peters since I looked white and don't even let me know that I was Chinese, or at least not focus on it because then I would be all confused and not know where I belonged. This was said in much fewer words of course. My mother got up and called him a dope and said don't talk to him he's a dope. I went over to my grandfather and he said, "follow your mother."
I have to say, if I had grown up, went to Groton, not given a flying F about Chinese heritage, succeeded, gotten a high paying job, and then... then started to want to rediscover my chinese roots, maybe taken a Mandarin class, learned Kung Fu after I had money.... damn it well I guess I wouldn't want to trade my Kung Fu in now. I do enjoy it, I like that I can teach it and I already know it.
When I was going through my most difficult  times adjusting to both worlds as it were. I never had thoughts like I wished I was one or the other. I loved that my life could be more interesting by being both. I loved that I was exactly the combination I was, that I was the class that I was.
Why do I care about any of this now? Why do I even think about it. I guess it comes down to speaking Chinese. It is difficult for me to speak, really speak in full sentences in Chinese to my son Noah (the one that looks Asian) He looks at me funny and I feel like someone else is talking. Chinese to me is the language of teachers ans Sifus, Movie Characters, and some friends who don't speak English.
My second son Jonah, the one who looks white, is better at language and will probably speak Chinese. Cantonese. Mandarin too if he takes it in school. Now if he spoke back to me Chinese, I guess I could speak to him, as a kind of academic exercise, or as a secret code language. Then maybe Noah can pick it up too, but usually now if I try to tell him a story in bastardized cantonese about Hulk he screams, "No! No! No Chinese Baba, I don't like it."
Of course he is exposed to it in school, the same school I went to, so he has some vocab words and I Chinese accent when he says bus, BaSeee. But that's about it.