On Sunday night, I met up with Master Zhou to interview him. One of his Singaporean students helped out as an interpreter, and I’m grateful to her for giving up her time. We talked for about three hours; I think I got it all recorded, although I haven’t had time to review the file yet (crosses fingers).

To his credit, Master Zhou was very open about his himself, his past, and what motivates him. I learned a lot about him, I must say. I don’t want to say too much until I’ve reviewed the ‘tape’ (why is it that I still feel obliged to say that, even though I used a digital recorder?); I’ll probably write something up after that if I get time, but for the details you’ll have to wait until I write my book

So, in brief: Master Zhou grew up in a very poor part of Shanghai. He was born shortly before the Cultural Revolution started. He got into martial arts because that was all there was; in the absence of any other entertainment, everybody in his neighbourhood studied martial arts. At that time, they had to study late at night and early in the morning, to avoid being seen. With his background, and in that time and place, it was natural for him to become a Red Guard. He got involved in the fighting between different factions, and had to fight for his life, heavily outnumbered, on occasion. (At this time, he was in his early teens). After the Cultural Revolution ended, he was still obliged to fight on a regular basis.

Speaking as someone who has fought for his life against armed opponents, he says that his favourite moves are xingyi’s pi quan, and some bagua techniques.

He gave me a lot of information about the styles he knows, and the masters he’s studied with. He confirmed what Edward mentioned in a comment on the last incarnation of this blog.
What else can I say at this point..? There’s so much! OK, that will have to do for now.

A quick note for anyone who’s interested but didn’t notice Lloyd’s comment on the old blog: the Piper guys will be in Singapore for a few days. They’ll be giving a demo of their Urban Shield system on Thursday; it’s a private event, but they’ve extended an invitation to me - should be very interesting!

OK, this is the new incarnation of Jianghu. Sadly, the old one isn’t accessible from China, so I can’t stick with it.

There are a number of differences between running a blog on Wordpress.com and running a self-hosted Wordpress installation. Plus, for some reason, my hosting service is running an older version. This all means that things will take a while to settle down here - expect to see lots of oddities and seemingly random changes!

What to do in Beijing? There’s no shortage of options, in terms of teachers, forms, and so on! On the other hand, I have a massive list of things that I need to get done while I’m in China - and most of them are career-related, rather than martial arts…

So, right now I’m starting to work out what I want to get done. Here’s a few thoughts:

• I’ve trained with Master Liu Jing Ru before, and would like to do so again. He’s very well spoken-of as being traditional in his styles. However, he lives far away from where I will be based, and his styles are different to what I’ve learned. Do I want to start a whole new set?
• Master Sun Zhi Jun is Madam Ge’s main teacher; he’s the one to go to if I want to maintain my current knowledge - namely, the ba mu zhang, the sword, and the needles. I’m hearing different things, though: some say he’s one of bagua’s best fighters, others say that his styles have too much xin pai (performance style) in them. He does live much closer to my base in Haidian than Master Liu, but it’s still quite far.
• Professor Huang Zhen Huan lives very close to where I’ll be, and I have his phone number. He was a student of Wu Tu Nan for twenty years, so I’m guessing he practices Wu style, rather than the Yang-based forms I know. On the other hand, I may well ask him to help me work on developing softness, and push hands…
• I am very tempted to learn another obscure form - bagua fan I know that Zhang Sheng Li of the Beijing Milun School knows at least one fan form, and in any case I want to contact him to review the Long Xing form he taught me…

Here’s two examples from YouTube:

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