African Mein Lei Jum

I just awoke from a dream. I was back at our old Kung Fu school in Tai Tung. I was visiting and had been away from some time. The I shook Vincent's hand and Sifu was working on patients. The playground outside was really active. And the school was crowded. I was talking with people during really Americanized Karate class. I guess we partnered with this White Karate guy. I just say Karate because he and all the kids were wearing Gi's. But they were just doing a simplified version of Kung Fu. They were doing forms to music. But the forms were good. They were hard like Karate, but they weren't Kata like I've seen. They looked more like Hung Gar than the Fujianese White Crane stuff. But everything was recognizably from Sup Ji. In fact, I have already done these sort of simplified forms for schools. I just don't wear a Gi. The songs played were all 1970's tunes. "Hey this one is from Musashi!" I declared. And nobody said anything. Now I remember the tune was actually from Lone Wolf and Cub.

The next class I actually hopped in with. It was a Mein lay jum class, but right after the first move the form had become different. There were a ton of repeating low kicks and the form was very much like an African Dance. I have never taken African dance, but that is undoubtedly what it was. I tried to follow along and quickly realized it would be impossible so I began dancing around and filling in moves with other Kung Fu and turning around so I was face to face with the instructors and the new students trying to follow along. Most of the students were new and so their technique was not clear which made it harder to pick up these newer kicks.

Nobody questioned what I was doing. They all knew who I was, I visiting senior student, but I recognized none of them. The woman leading the class was a light skinned African American woman who had a new born bijorned to her body while leading the class. I looked in and saw that the baby was sleeping. The mother had her eyes closed and was doing her form very intensely. But the focus was internal and yes, all the moves were FOR either pregnant mothers or mothers with newborns bjorned to them. But there were still planty of young women and really old women in the class and even some men. The whole crowd was very JP looking.

Sifu was still surveying the whole thing from his desk, cigarette in hand. Though I didn't smell smoke. And nobody mentioned or cared about smoke.

Back to the form.

There were sections where you sat down and in flowed in and out of Mein Lay jum moves very smoothly. I took this for granted because when I woke up and tries to do this form, it came out too African or Too Mein Lei jum. But in the dream is was so obviously and easily both. Being of a Chinese Tai Chi Rythm and an African dance rythym SIMULTANEOUSLY. We did not play any music to the form. It was done in silence. I completed one round and then hopped in and out and talked to people waiting on the side. Yes it was so crowded that there were always people chatting on the side and that didn't bother the people using the main floor. The kitchen was there and coming in there was actually wires and pipes hanging out of a section of the wall, which wasn't true in real life.

In other words, in my dream the school looked more dilapidated than I recall and there was still a crowd of American women there just for the class and maybe some treatment. In fact as I walked in, this woman in tight workout gear was sitting in a chair. not for Teet da treatment, but to do this physical therapy exercise for her arm after her workout. She chose to sit right in front of the exposed part of the wall. It didn't bother her.

We had always attributed our lack of female students to the environment. But thinking back, when women came to do treatments there were prep school mothers who came regularly and did not mind the appearance of the school. Just because certain women who spoke Chinese would comment on this as a deterrent doesn't mean that it was a big a deal I think. There are a lot of ECO women out there who enjoy travelling to countries with squat toilets and enjoy using them. My mother was one of those and I think JP is full of them.


Anyway, the main reason I am writing this is because of the form. I tried doing the form and of course when I did it, it was different than in the dream. I felt a lot of snake and crane coming through, which didn't strike me during the dream, but as I did the moves, shielding the womb that I don't have (though I had used bjoyns.... actually it wasn't bjorn in the dream is was a cloth that held the baby that ended up getting recalled.) I though about how snakes and cranes are in Africa. Maybe it's also because Sifu has a snake and crane fighting form but I never learned it, as well as a snake and crane double shape form that I never learned fully as well, just takled about some techniques. And way that's how the moves came out. Plus my foot work was different that regular Mein lay Jum. Because of the African Dance thing and because of the form is supposed to be for pregnant women or mom's with newborns.

Also this definitely was not Capoeira. Not to say that all the moves were easy to do. There was a focus on toe strength with some of the foot placement. You would put your weight onto the toe, so that move wasn't really so much of a kick but almost like a toe exercise. But I had thought it looked like a kick.

The moves were still difficult to do but possible for a pregnant woman to do, and seemed to have some how developed out of Mein Lay Jum. In fact in the dream, there were two Americanized sections of the school that had developed so fast that in my absence (at school presumably) they had developed to the point where Sifu's students students students were running the class and I didn't recognize any of them.

But it definitely was African, even though most of the students (except the instructor who looked like she was half black and was the most into it. As in she could do the form with were eyes closed and feel chi and was sweating. The other people were still watching her to see what move came next.) Well the rest were all white. And a very gentrified white.


Anyway, another thing that came to me while I was trying to do this form AWAKE, was that the stance was with out turned foot to open up the hips. In lion dance, the Dai Tau fut (big headed Buddha) walks like this, supposedly because he is so fat.

I thought about the way religion and stories develop, and how Guan Yin was traced back to a male deity that was skinny and therefore looked feminine. I know lion dance (the southern style) was first mentioned or recorded in the Han Dynasty. But a story and a dance where the monster is called a nian seems to me to reach back to a time before writing. I mean even if there isn't a continuous lineage, Lion Dance, especially the flat faced simplest lion dances, always seemed to be form the dancing around a fire sharpened stones as tools type of origin.

What's my point?

I wonder if you were able to go back far enough, if the fat male Buddha was not actually a big breasted 9 month pregnant woman type of deity. About to give birth. Maybe to time itself, or at least to the Year or something like that. Well wouldn't that actually make more sense too? And it would also make sense that a naked pregnant woman dancing in front of a nian became a clothed overweight monk.

But yeah I'm just making this stuff up. It's just something that popped into my head while trying to figure out the moves to a form I saw in a dream. But to me, all of this is significant.

I might have to ask Sifu about some of the weird moves.