Raise your banners

Ever since I saw Seven Samurai I always wanted a flag like the one they made out of two sticks and a cloth with six circles and a triangle. Not those particular symbols. I just liked how simple the flag was, how small it was (our Kung Fu flags are usually quite large and somewhat ungainly) I think at some point in the movie somebody straps the flag onto themselves, which means in theory that you could have a flag and say, play drum or something like that, and no matter whether the wind is blowing or not you can see the flag because of the stick at the top.

It's not as good looking as the huge Kung Fu flags, but a small flag has it's uses. Especially for a small group.

In fact a lot of the banners advertising things now seem to be a modernization of that flag. Instead of two sticks it is one curved metal pipe and the nylon banner reads T-Mobile or whatever.

Yesterday, I decided to make a family banner for the Wake Up the Earth Parade on May 3rd. I spent all this time cutting out a T-shirt and ended up writing the kids names in Chinese, one on each side of the flag, in ink. It took a long time and looked pretty crappy. And then when Noah got home he was pissed because he wanted to make his own flag. I was going to have them just paint on the flag after I wrote the names.

For someone who doesn't read Chinese, they just see pretty (well crude in my case) Chinese Characters no matter what it says. And for my boys reading it, they might as well get familiar with the characters for their name. But the more I looked at how crappy and tattered the flag looked I thought somebody with the Cheung family name might get offended to see their name on such a tattered cloth. And if I wrote White Crane, same thing. I scrapped that, made another flag staff with Noah and went with paper flags, and had them paint them. And the more I thought about it, nothing could possibly symbolize what our Kung Fu playgroup is about more than a flag in an Ancient Chinese or (Medieval Japanese) style put for symbols having multi-colored finger painting.

Apparently when I went to take out the trash the kid sgot all excited and started marching around with their banners and everything. Wel now they are bugging me to do a class so I will.