… OK, so it’s an Evita quote, so sue me. Actually, the tale of how I wound up going to see Evita in the company of a wildly eccentric Spanish artiste is a whole other story that shall not be told here. I use the quote to make the point that I have had the most amazing evening…
I went out to work on my taiji and bagua in Duxton Plain Park, as usual. I decided to try out my new approach to bagua practice, and discovered that I’m on the right path. I just concentrated on two things: 1) breathe from the tantien 2) keep facing the centre of the circle. I don’t say that I managed to do both of these all the time, or even most of the time. But when I did, everything else just worked. The stepping, the posture, everything just fell into place. Tonight was more difficult than it ought to have been, because I was also breaking in a new pair of shoes (in the shop, and in my apartment, I was able to mud-step very smoothly, but when worn on concrete they suddenly became super-grippy). All the same: I really feel like I’ve made a breakthrough.
As if to reward me for getting it right, a number of other things fell into place. Mr Wang, who I’ve mentioned before, came along again – but this time he was in a chatty mood. He said that he’s 56 now, and he started learning yinfu style bagua when he was 6 years old; he was taught by his father, who was also a yinfu style expert. We talked for some time. I can’t call it a conversation; my Mandarin is so bad that I wasn’t so much answering him, as trying to use any vocabulary I have in order to say something that might be tangentially related to what I thought he might have said. Nevertheless, he gave a demonstration of his bagua, comparing it to the Cheng style that I know.
Since I was just finishing as he came along, we walked along the park together until we came to where the Chin Woo (Jing Wu Men in Mandarin) were practicing; they were out in force tonight, with maybe thirty people there. This was where I was meeting a friend, so we parted company at that point. Through my friend, I know quite a few of the Chin Woo people, so I got talking to one of the senior instructors. It turned out that they had a special guest instructor visiting from Shanghai, so I was introduced to him… and it turned out that he knew me and wanted to talk to me: he was one of the two guys who stopped to watch me working on my bagua on Monday night – the one I didn’t talk to on that occasion. He also knows bagua, and gave me a demo. I really had trouble with his Shanghainese accent, and couldn’t understand much of what he said, to my shame, but it looked a lot like the Fu style I’ve previously seen at Chin Woo. I liked him immediately; he came across as a really nice guy, the kind of upright, straight-talking martial artist you just have to respect.
I arranged to meet my friend at the coffee shop I mentioned on Monday; when I got there, who did I see but Mr Ng (who I’ve often written about here), who is also part of Chin Woo, and also knows bagua. He was hanging out with a group of friends who, from what I caught of their conversation, are also martial artists. I got talking to the waitress I mentioned before; she’s from Shandong province.
I know that these words won’t convey as much to you as I would like them to. Understand that when I was still living in Wales, colleagues and ‘friends’ would see me practising taiji, and say to me “You’re into some weird stuff, aren’t you”, in the kind of voice that meant ‘We think you might be a serial killer’. To have moved to Singapore and get so much martial arts goodness in one night, I really think I must have done something double-plus good in a previous life! Which is also a kick up the backside to remind me that I need to get started on doing good things in this life, because I would appear to be well overdue on that account. Still… I have two important take-aways from tonight. Firstly, it’s to recognise how amazingly open and friendly people can be once you’ve established that you’re serious about practicing martial arts. Secondly, it’s that I must, must, must improve my Mandarin, because without good Chinese I’m crippled.
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