A VERY grand opening ...
So, the grand opening seminar for the Detroit Moy Tung Wing Chun School has officially come and gone. Both my Sifu (teacher) and Sigung (grandmaster) were in attendance. Not a common occurrence. The school was packed with fellow students from all over the country working out together … clobbering each other, in celebration of the birth of yet another strong child in the Wing Chun family. The Detroit school is a fairly unique child too. In my limited experience (6 years), I’ve noticed that Wing Chun folk tend to look kind of unassuming … for the most part. You’d never think to view them as much more than average joes.
- They are not particularly large or impressively built, for the most part.
- They don’t have that “killer look” about them. Hell, they don’t even have “the walk”, in most cases! (Other martial artists will know what I mean by that.)
- They hide their Kung Fu very well. On this note, Detroit Wing Chun students DO hide their Kung Fu, rest assured, however …
- Many of us look and dress like assassins. There’s just no other way to put it.
- We seem to have an “intensity” about us (which probably has less to do with our Kung Fu and more to do with where we live).
OK, so I promised I’d explain the whole Rozan Waterfall thing last time: It’s a reference to an anime called Saint Seiya. One of its heroes, St. Dragon Shiryu (also one of my userpics), trains at Mount Lushan (phoneticized by the Japanese as “Rozan”, due to their alphabet) in China. To complete his training, Shiryu must master Lushan’s Rising Dragon Wave (Rozan Shou Ryuu Ha) and reverse the flow of a waterfall … by punching or kicking it! It’s a long and arduous undertaking, to say the least. After 7 years of ---literally--- superhuman martial arts training, it takes him a year of non-stop effort (we are given the impression that he doesn’t rest, once he confronts the task), before he kicks the cascade and causes it to rise … in the shape of a huge Chinese dragon. A chimaeric analogy, to be certain, but it IS symbolic of the hurdles one faces as a Kung Fu student. Sometimes, especially as a novice, one is told do something that seems every bit as implausible as striking a waterfall and reversing its flow. One may think, “That’s impossible!” until shown that it CAN be done, with lots of practice and hard work. So, it’s no coincidence that the term “Kung Fu” is perhaps best translated from Chinese to English as “hard work”. Hence, my opinion that most everything in life is Kung Fu.
Oh yeah, Sigung gave me more Kung Fu yesterday. It’s Fu that I’ve wanted since last year (when my Kung Fu wasn’t one-tenth what it is now), but when the time came to accept it, I was ... apprehensive. Ah well, time to go hit this damn waterfall again …