Baguazhang in Singapore

When I came to Beijing last year, one of my main aims was to pick up my study of Bagua. I started learning when I first came here in 2004, before the start of of my MBA. On that occasion, I studied hard for three months, became reasonably good at a form derived from the Swimming Dragon style, and lost a lot of weight in the process!

When I went back to Singapore, I couldn’t find a teacher, and in any case the MBA didn’t allow much time for wushu. I studied Xingyi for a while, but had to give it up, and managed to keep my Taiji going with private instruction. I forgot most of my Bagua: I started to realize that I was forgetting things and making mistakes, and decided that practising incorrectly for a year and a half would get me set in bad habits, so I stopped until I came back to Beijing.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be: I did attend practice, but the school had expanded while I was in Singapore and, with more students, the teaching had become patchier and more erratic. Sometimes we started learning a form, would work on it for a few weeks, and then be told we wouldn’t carry on because the teacher wanted to work on something else. Politics started to raise its head in the school as well. Despite all this, I really enjoyed going, and had some good times there. Eventually, though the distance I had to travel to get there became too much of a problem; the final straw came when the job with the China Theatre Arts Academy fell through and I realised I needed to start economising until another job came up. So, I haven’t practised for a few months now.

If I had found a job in China, I would have started again, but of course that hasn’t worked out and so I’m going back to Singapore. I’ll be abe to do a lot of Taiji there – I’ll go back to Nam Wah Pai because their Taiji Gong is so good, and I hope I can start studying the Cheng Man Ching form with Rennie Chong – I’ve seen him teach, and I knew one of his students fairly well, so I know he’s good. Still, it seemed like I would have to give up on the Bagua for good, which was a real disappointment. Bagua – especially the Swimming Dragon form – is an incredible martial art, especially once you add in the qigong and philosophical elements.

There may be hope, however! I decided to do a new search on Google yesterday, and I think I’ve found a Bagua teacher in Singapore Not just any old teacher, either, but one who teaches Swimming Dragon style, and is well-known and respected in China as well! It seems to good to be true…. Anyway, I’ll get in touch once I’m back in Singapore and see if I can start classes…

Update:
The best description of Baguazhang I’ve found yet is here, on the Sonshi site. Read it, and you’ll understand why I’m so enthusiastic about Bagua!

Crossing cultures…

This is a stream-of-consciousness ramble, I’m afraid, inspired by the fact that I’m killing time before going to the airport for my flight to Singapore.

Niti Bahn had posted a list of attributes that she felt are characteristic of ‘global citizens’, or ‘global nomads’ – and not, as I said, of a generation as a whole. Fair enough, and it’s not the first time I’ve told off for taking small piece of someone’s post and going off on a tangent with it. I suspect that we are both right, in that today’s culture-crossers, and ‘global nomads’ are developing a skill set that will be much more widely necessary for the generation that are in school now.

Anyway, this all got me wondering what sort of culture is going to be generated by the mixing and sharing of cultures that’s going to be happening in the near future.

In the colonial past, fairly large-scale physical transfers of population took place, voluntarily or otherwise, and some fairly fascinating things came up out of that. I wrote in a recent post about Vodou, which grew out of the transplanting of fractured African cultures to the Caribbean; and about the generation of new languages in the South African gold mines. Doing some reading about Kalarippayattu (which when transplanted to China led to the martial arts of Shaolin), and Silat led me to the discovery that when Malay slaves were taken to South Africa, Silat merged with Zulu stick fighting techniques to form a unique Afro-Malay martial art. Wow. It isn’t just the Zulus who fight with twin sticks, though: the BaSotho do as well. While I was working in Lesotho, we often saw small groups of youths wandering, in isolation as they went through initiation rituals. Wrapped in blankets or plastered in white or red clay, and armed with sticks, we were told on no account to go near them, for our own safety. The world they lived in wasn’t ours. The oddness was in seeing these small armed groups moving alongside the highways, with trucks and minibuses roaring past them, a reminder that the modern world has gaps in it, I guess – to adopt William Gibson’s maaxim that The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed, maybe even the present isn’t either.

So where am I going with this? I don’t know. It just seems worth bearing in mind that introducing ubiquitous access suddenly, connecting parts of the world that have the skill sets for that with parts that only comparatively recently didn’t have any communications at all, could lead us to some strange places, and I wonder whether we might be very surprised at some of the results. We like to think that our Westernised, liberal, capitalist model will dominate – even if we question whether it ought to – but perhaps something entirely different and unexpected will be created by the online meetings of minds.

A great quote!

From Cloud Hands, a blog I’ve just started reading, comes this quote as part of an excerpt from a taijiquan manual:

Meditation is seeking movement in stillness; Tai Chi Chuan is seeking stillness in movement.

I like it.