I was on MSN last night chatting to Carlos, who commented that I’ve been quiet for a while. Very true. It’s not that things haven’t been happening, more that I’ve been trying to absorb and process it all.

The yiquan is going very well indeed; I’m loving it. The weekend before last saw quite large classes on both Saturday and Sunday, with the foreigners (German & Russian) that I mentioned before, plus more Chinese than usual. On the Sunday, we practiced with the staff, which was cool; it’s not a weapon I’ve used much before.

Last weekend saw a big change. It turns out that many of the Chinese who have been coming for the last few weeks are not actually from Beijing; they’ve been staying for short periods to train, but have now gone home. The Russians have also left, and the Germans depart next week - which means that before long, it could be just me and Master Yao at the weekend small classes! That’s a rather scary thought, given the language barrier… Of course, I’ve been having 1-1 lessons with non-English-speaking teachers for the last year or so - Master Zhou in Singapore, Master Sun Zhijun, Mi Lao Shi and Sun Lao Shi here in Beijing - but that was bagua… I don’t mean to say that bagua is any less profound that yiquan (much more, in many ways) but if nothing else it’s much easier to actually see what the teacher is doing in bagua! Yiquan is much more subtle… Still, I’m looking forward to it.

I did politely ask Yao Lao Shi whether it would be ok to use the books I’d bought from his brother, Yao Chengguang, earlier this summer. He suggested it would be better not to, as they don’t do things the same way (I couldn’t follow what the differences are, but the point was clear). So, right now, I’m trying to use VLC to rip Yao Lao Shi’s DVD (Yao Chengrong, that is) so that I can put clips onto my iPod. So far it’s not working - the picture is badly distorted

Even with the communication issues, I am learning huge amounts very quickly in the yiquan lessons. My ‘kua’ and shoulders are stretching and relaxing. My weight is sinking more naturally right down to the soles of my feet and is better distributed when it gets there. Although yiquan doesn’t talk about qi, I’m feeling some kind of sensation at my lower and middle dantians while I’m in zhan zhuang (post-holding standing posture). I’m even having new insights into (Cheng) bagua’s palm use and mud-stepping!

And so, speaking of the bagua… I have no idea where Sun Lao Shi is. I called a couple of times in October but his wife said that he was travelling, and that he would contact me when he got back. I haven’t heard anything but so far it’s not really a bad thing… As I’ve mentioned here, I kind of lost my direction for a while, and stopped training solo. However, I began to use VLC to put clips from VCDs of Liu Jing Ru onto my iPod (it works fine with VCDs; the problem is with DVDs) and that finally relit the flame, so I’ve started training again. I’ll spend a while refreshing my memory on the details of the ba mu zhang and ba da zhang at first, and then move on to doing it faster and longer (for aerobic fitness) and with steel rings/wrist & ankle weights (for endurance and strength). A friend of mine says that he often goes to Ditan Park in the morning to work on his Chen taiji, so I may try to join him - it’s only a couple of subway stops away.

So that’s the news up until now….

I went to both lessons this weekend, Saturday and Sunday afternoons. A lot of the people who were there last weekend weren’t there this time. However, there were a lot of new faces, many of them Westerners. Actually, htere was a German couple, fairly young, and a Russian couple in, I would guess, their forties. None of them speak English, as far as I can tell. The German guy speaks Chinese; the Russians had brought another Russian, who didn’t take part in the class but just acted as an interpreter for them. Cacophony! As soon as Master Yao said anything, the German guy would start translating for the girl, and the Russian would translate for his friends! It was incredibly disorienting at first, but I eventually got used to it.

We worked on a mumber of moves - a chop, a palm strke, and various other moves - all in the same way: slowly while standing, slowly while stepping, slow-slow-fast while stepping. Very cool. I could feel my hips opening up, my pelvis swinging, and my back lengthening - excellent benefits! I teamed up with one of the Chinese students to practice power exercises; he’s better than me but not by much - enough to give me confidence that I can improve! He can pretty much consistently uproot me and throw me; I can do it to him about half the time. One the other hand, I can use full-body power and keep walking forward even when he’s pulling me back; he can’t do it to me so well. Heh.

Anyway, more and more. I realise that I really like yiquan. I really look forward to class! Master Yao takes a real interest in everyone, coming around to us individually and asking how we’re getting on, asking whether we have any questions sending us flying against the wall - just what you’d expect from a great teacher

The Great Firewall of China has blocked access to Yahoo! servers again, bah! Since that’s where I host this blog, I can only reach it to post new material by going through a proxy service, which is slow and a real PITA. I’ve got an account on another hosting service, so I may have to try migrating everything there…

What’s been up since I last posted? I had my first small-class yiquan classes last weekend with Master Yao Chengrong. Thoroughly enjoyed them. There was another foreigner there on Saturday; a Belgian guy who was there for the first time. He has a background in Sanda, and is a big guy - but he was totally blown away by yiquan. Both of us were astonished by Helena, one of the Chinese women in the class. She’s an English major, still at university, I think, and tiny - the top of her head only reaches my chest, and I’m not a tall guy. Still, from a static standing position, she was uprooting one of the Chinese students, and throwing him forcefully into the wall. To look at her, you’d never guess how tough she is!

I have a rotten head cold, and my knee still hurts, but I think I’ll still go this afternoon. I want to buy Master Yao’s DVDs - 330RMB total for the set of 6.

Last night, I caught up with Dragoncache and, for the first time, another YouTube contact - taijibum, who’s also a bagua practitioner. He trains with a teacher at Beijing Language and Culture University; this is on the next block from the University where I teach, so I’ll definitely drop by at some point. The three of us had a long chat; a friend of taijibum’s is apparently currently training with Alex Kozma in Wales - I’d been wondering what had happened to Alex. Seems like his plan to move to South-East Asia hasn’t happened. As I happened to have my laptop and external hard drive with me (I’d met them straight from work) I was able to show them some clips of the video from the workshop I attended with Alex, and they were impressed!

Taijibum recommended this clip, which I’d never seen before:

In fact, I hadn’t heard of Jerry Alan Johnson. Comments?

OK, I thought it over, and I’m switching to the small-group classes. This is the ‘individual’ group on Saturday and Sunday afternoons; it’ll cost a little more but it’ll be worth it to be able to stop and go over things, ask questions, etc. I dropped in at the school this evening to confirm this with Master Yao; he’s ok with it, so I’ll start tomorrow.

My shoulders are much improved after the Tiger Balm, and I was able to eat unaided at the restaurant last night! Afterwards we went to the Drum & Bell bar and, from the yard in between the towers, we could see the stars clearly, with Orion’s Belt standing out clearly. The air is so clear and fresh in Beijing now. The leaves are all starting to turn a wonderful gold as well; soon it’ll be time to head out to the Xiang Shan hills west of the city to see the forests there changing colour…

So, I’m sitting here in clouds of Tiger Balm vapour, having doused my shoulders in the stuff in the (probably vain) hope that they will hurt less tomorrow. Yes, I’m back from another yiquan lesson.

As I was setting off from my apartment, my bike experienced what I shall call a ‘completeness discontinuity’ - in other words, a fairly important part suddenly and unexpectedly fell off. In the dark, it took my a while to find it again, and even longer to re-attach it. This meant that I got to the class a bit late, and missed almost all of the zhan zhuang section.

So… it was straight into the tui shou sparring exercises. The story gets a bit eventful now.

Let me be clear: I have no idea what I’m doing with yiquan. OK, I tried it out for a few weeks earlier in the summer, but - and I don’t care what good reasons there may or may not be - I was taken through it really quickly, and didn’t have much opportunity to really do anything in depth. So I am not at all clear what I am supposed to be doing when we do the sparring exercises - I will try to improve my Mandarin, but right now it’s not sufficient to get the drift. So, for me, the sparring is simply: try not to let the other guy hit me.

With the first few guys I sparred with, I landed a few solid punches, and actually made one lad’s lip bleed. This was all totally unintentional: our forearms were pressing against each other, we were both sweating, and my arm just slid over his with the result that my fist suddenly slammed into his face. Genuinely accidental. Unfortunately, I think a couple of the lads got the impression that I was trying to throw my weight around, and the language barrier didn’t help here, and this evening the other two foreigners weren’t around to help me out with that.

So: observation #1. These guys are faster, stronger, and way more experienced than me. They were certainly going easy on me. But: they’re not defending themselves as fully as they should be.

Fairly soon, a little bit of aggro surfaced. One of the younger guys came over for a go. Very toned, must do a lot of work in the gym. This guy wasn’t giving me a break. As soon as we went into stance, WHAM BAM, he would break my guard, spin me around, and throw me into the wall. Now, I don’t mind this last part, because everyone was doing it; it’s obviously part of the culture there, so OK, whatever. He didn’t leave it there, though. Once I was turned around and thrown flat against the wall face-first, he would follow it up with a lot of punches to the back and the back of the head. No real force, of course, but enough to keep me pinned there. So… hmmm. On the one hand, I was just non-resisting, trying to send out the vibe: look, I’m only here to train and learn, not to look for trouble. On the other hand, I was thinking, well, I’m new here, is this some kind of hierarchical thing, and he’s trying to establish himself as some sort of top dog? Because this pummeling really isn’t serving any useful purpose that I can see, when I’m already clearly outclassed and unable to do much. After a while, the whole non-resistance thing clearly wasn’t changing anything, and his act was - excuse me - getting REALLY F*****G ANNOYING. On this basis, the next time he threw me into the wall face-first, I reached back, firmly grasped his balls, lifted and twisted. At the same time, I outlined my view that he’d made his point simply with the wall-throwing business, and that while one or two follow-up punches to reinforce the point were natural, the rest were unnecessary, and I would appreciate it if he would take that on board. This was in Chinese; as we’ve already established, my Mandarin sucks. Since, after this, he was more moderate I think I have to say on this point: non-verbal communication FTW!

Observation #2: these guys rock. Yiquan is a really, really devastating martial art. BUT: these guys (from my limited observation so far) are limiting themselves to “sparring by the rules”. They seem to be vulnerable to the ball-tearing, eye-gouging, ungentlemanly ways of behaviour that Master Zhou Yue Wen, for example, often demonstrated in our bagua classes.

Master Yao, and another student, came over to work with me a bit later on. I managed to communicate that I really had no clue what I was meant to be doing, and so each sparring bout was, for me, simply a matter of instinctively trying to stay on my feet whilst trying to use what I thought it was we had been doing in the zhan zhuang session. This cleared the air, and the student spent a good while talking me through things slowly, showing me the precise movements, and letting me practise them. This was extremely helpful.

Finally, I sparred with one more student. He repeated something that a number of people had said during the evening: I have a strong tendency to raise my arms high, pushing my opponent’s arms up as well. In yiquan, this just lets them overbalance me, and then come smashing through my centre-line. Bad habit! It was interesting, though that when this guy mentioned it, I suddenly had an insight into why I was doing it. I’ve been studying taijiquan for quite a long time, but the only tui shou we’ve done has been very polite, static, cooperative work. I’ve also been studying bagua for a few years, but never done tui shou (except for a bit with Master Zhou; we didn’t have time to do too much, though). Most of my taiji teachers knew no applications whatsover (some did/do, but I’ve not got to that point with them). With my bagua teachers, some are expert fighters, but when I ask them how a move is used, they’re like BAM BAM BAM you do it like that, and when I pick myself up off the floor I say ooh that’s interesting and carry on not much the wiser. So, the last time I did non-cooperative sparring with people who were even close to my level was actually about 14 years ago, when I studied Thai Boxing for a while during my MSc. Now, at that time, I was pretty much the shortest guy in the class. I couldn’t use roundhouse kicks or standard punches, because everyone else had a longer range than me. The only tactic I had left was to get in close, try to lift their arms from below, and then weigh in with elbows and knees.

Observation #3: old habits are hard to unlearn.

OK, this has been a long post. I’m just trying to relate what’s been going through my mind this evening. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, or if you know me IRL, I hope you already know that I do try not to have a bad attitude. Sometimes, not being able to communicate really is an issue, though. As far as my sparring tonight goes, it reminds me of something I read somewhere about sword-masters: they could face expert swordmasters with equanimity - but stood in terror of the novices who didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. Or something to that effect.

My main conclusions, though:

1. I may need to switch to the Sat/Sun small-group classes. I need to ask more questions, and take more time making sure I really understand what I’m supposed to be practising.
2. Yiquan is fast, aggressive, powerful and very effective. I already knew that theoretically, but now I have practical insight of just how overwhelming it is.
3. I’m never going to be as good as these guys, and will never be able to beat them using yiquan alone.
4. If you know that people are better than you, make sure you know something that they can’t, or won’t, do, and keep it up your sleeve to be used only when absolutely necessary.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am really enjoying my experience so far, and I really am trying to approach it in a serious, respectful manner! I’m not, in the observations above, trying to be arrogant, superficial, or boastful. I’m simply recognizing that a) for various reasons, I wish to be able to defend myself against whatever I might be faced with, b) there will always be people who are far superior to me in any given style, and c) I have physical and postural problems that will likely always weaken me. Given b) and c), how do I achieve a)? I’m just thinking that question through, and trying to reach some useable answers…

Anyway, so this is cool, and I’m learning a lot. Right now, the unaccustomed sparring is leaving my shoulders in PAAAIIIIN! I have a date tomorrow evening, and I’m afraid I will have lost the use of my arms by then. I’ll be incapable of raising chopsticks as high as my mouth, and will be forced to ask the young lady in question to feed me. Heh. I’ve already mentioned this possibility via MSN. She laughed at length, and then agreed. She’s a martial artist too, she understands

Feel free to weigh in with advice, comments etc.

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