Reply: What Is A Martial Art?

Usually the responses this blog evokes come from friends with smart-ass remarks. Or spammers. Here's a real one, and one to which I've decided to respond. This guy read the posting, "Why Wing Chun Is My Martial Art." His reponse?

wing chun is about harmony and zen bushism, not being an asshole or giving the finger. You will not understand it until you understand this.

OK. I'll admit the posting was written a bit tongue in cheek. But this writer, "Zentelligent," is absolutely wrong. He could not possibly be more wrong.

Still, I did mis-speak in that posting. Wing chun in practice is not about being an asshole. It's about being a bigger asshole than the guy you're fighting. (Both guys in a fight are already assholes.)

Wing chun is most certainly NOT about harmony and Zen Buddhism, as "Zentelligent" suggests.You know why? Because the term "martial art" is a misnomer. There's no art to wing chun. Art is subjective. Art is Renoir and Picasso, and who can definitively determine which is better?

Wing chun is a fighting method. A fascinating, sophisticated fighting method, and if I say "my wing chun is better than yours," and you disagree, we can settle it definitively with a fight. The person who can walk away wins the argument. There's no subjectivity involved.

You want harmony? Go to therapy. (I hear it can do wonders.) You want Zen Buddhism? Go see a monk. You only want to get fit? Go to a gym or do some yoga. Self-discipline? Join the Marines. Self-confidence? Grow a set.

Wing chun will teach you to fight. To hit the other guy as many times as you can, as fast as you can, and as hard as you can, until the other guy falls down, while simultaneously keeping the other guy from hitting you. That's it. That's all. It's that simple.

In truth, Zentelligent's response is typical of those who are destroying the purity and beauty of the "martial arts." I can't tell you how enraged I get every time some talkinghead media idiot writes that "X style of martial arts is not about fighting or self defense. It's about self confidence/respect/discipline." Blah blah blah.

Every martial art started out as a fighting method. A bunch of guys wanted to NOT get killed or beat up and came up with a method that they tested, and if it worked, they survived to pass it down. There's no philosophy involved. There's nothing deeper than that.

What I just said about wing chun holds true for all "martial arts." It's just that wing chun is more honest about fighting being all about being an asshole, to such an extent that it comes out in our tactics and techniques. Name a style, and I can point to a bloody, violent origin. Tai Chih was developed to kill raiders and bandits. Shaolin quan was developed because monks were tired of being robbed. Karate? A peasant-class response to tyranny. Escrima? So Filipinos could kill invading Spaniards. Even judo, which thinks of itself as not that warlike, was developed with combat in mind. The idea behind judo was that jujitsu had become ineffective because they just sat around talking about their theoretically deadly techniques that they couldn't actually practice in a "live" setting. (That stuff about self cultivation is just what they told the public to assuage the government and get taxpayer funding.)

And, on a personal note to "Zentelligent": real Zen masters don't need to talk about how enlightened they are.

Names

I'm not sure about this, but I believe that I have a below-average number of acquaintances and friends in general. This is partly because I tend to be shy around people I don't know, and also because other people drain my energy; I recharge best when I'm just by myself. That means I don't go out of my way to meet people or add people to my circle of friends just for the sake of doing so. To add to all this, I have a pretty low tolerance for bullshit and stupidity. The end result is that if you're in my phonebook, you're either family or I really really think quite highly of you.

Still, when a friend and co-worker of mine named Christina left our formerly mutual place of employment a few weeks back, it somehow triggered a realization that for a guy who doesn't have a particularly huge list of acquaintances and friends, certain names pop up with surprising regularity -- more than basic probability can explain, I think.

A quick count, for instance, shows that in my life (going back to high school, anyway), I have been been friends with, had crushes on, or dated at least six girls named Christine or Christina.

Similarly, I have been friends with or had crushes on at least five girls with "Jean"-variant names (Jean, Jeannie, Jeannette, etc. etc.) (Never got to date any of those. I suppose Jean's are a bit more discerning and have better taste in guys.)

I've also had four friends named Rich or Richard.

I don't have a point I'm trying to make here. Just noting an oddity.

Why Wing Chun Is My Martial Art

When a Taiji master, proud of his rock solid stance, challenged Bruce Lee to try to push him out of it, Bruce walked over, punched him in the face and knocked out a tooth. Stunned, the Taiji master fell over as Bruce Lee looked at him and said, "I don't push. I punch. Maybe you should stop boasting."

When an "iron shirt" qigong master boasted on stage that he could withstand any blow to his body, noted wing chun practitioner William Cheung walked up and flicked a standard centerline punch to his body. When the "master" relaxed, William let out his real punch, knocking the wind out of the guy.

When noted bare knuckles no-rules challenge fighting champion Wong Shun Leung was asked if he thought he was the best fighter in the world, he said, "No, only the second best." Who was the best? "Don't know. Haven't met him yet."

And when noted wing chun practitioner Jason Lau worked as a bodyguard for a Saudi prince, he was fired because he had stolen his employer's Rolls Royce to take out a woman, then proceeded to total it.

I've studied (or at least dabbled in) eight different styles of martial arts. I tell a lot of people that the reason I stuck with wing chun is because Phil, my teacher, was the only martial arts teacher I'd ever known who thought that it was not only okay to drink alcohol, but encouraged it; who had no problem telling an incredibly tasteless joke; and who believed that a martial art is, indeed, for fighting.

These are all true. But the fact is, when I fight, I'm an asshole. Everyone in a fight is, if they're honest with themselves. And wing chun is the perfect art for assholes. Every move is not just a defense or an attack, but a pugilistic way of giving your opponent the finger. We don't defend and then counter, we attack at the same time. Sometimes, our defense is a punch up the middle. It's our way of saying, "You fucking pussy. This is how little I think of your attempts at attack." We face our opponent because we can't fucking be bothered to get into a proper "fighting stance." And when we encounter an obstruction to our attack, we slap the offending limb out of the way and continue it without pause. "Get the fuck out my way and take this punch like you like it, bitch!" is the metaphorical expression that we're conveying. Our answer to just about any problem is to punch. Sure, there are nicer, more ethical or moral ways to defend ourselves. We just don't care to, because by the time a conflict's descended into physical violence, ethics, morals and niceness have long fallen along the wayside, so why not let it all hang out?

No other martial style, provides such a frame work that allows a practitioner to be an asshole -- even as compared to the average guy assholish enough to get into a fight in the first place. In this sense, practitioners of all other arts are deluding themselves into thinking there's such a thing as a "nice" fighter."

God, I love wing chun.

On Fitness

Lately, my cousin Vapid has dedicated himself to the study of various Chinese martial arts -- Taiji and Baguazhang in particular -- with a fervor that matches and possibly exceeds mine at the height of my training in Wing Chun. And another cousin, Colin, has become a fairly competent student of the arts in his own right. This prompted my mother to ask me recently what the appeal was. What, she wanted to know, drove us to participate in such a low-class, useless, time-wasting activity? For that matter, she wanted to know why I was so dedicated to working out?

After all, she continued, no one else in our family ever needed to fight, and plenty of Asian Americans of my generation are perfectly happy devoting themselves to nothing but hitting the books.

Well, though mom will never read this, here's my answer:

I do it for Lily Chin.

Lily Chin is perhaps better known as the mother of Vincent Chin.

In the early 1980s, Japanese cars were proving themselves to be far superior to anything beind made by their American counterparts, and tons of American autoworkers were being laid off. A lot of racist, irrational anger was directed at the Japanese, and on one summer evening, Vincent Chin was mistaken by two autoworkers as Japanese and beaten to death with a baseball bat. He was 27 and just days away from getting married.

The two autoworkers never served a day in jail for Chin's murder, and a heartbroken Lily Chin eventually moved back to China, unable to continue living in a country that valued her son's life as $3,780 in fines.

My point is not that Chin might have been able to defend himself had he been in better shape. True, he might have made better judgement calls during the course of what would be the last night of his life, but by the time he was cornered in that parking lot, he would have had to be a very lucky and very skilled fighter to escape.

Vincent's death is credited with galvanizing the disparate groups of Asian Americans to unite into a single, pan-Asian movement (or at least a more tightly knit group), who believed that Lily Chin's failure to get justice for her murdered son was due to a lack of organization and experience in working the legal system on the part of Asian community groups.

They're right, on the surface. But on a far more visceral level, Vicent's killers got away scot free because Asian Americans are generally regarded as too meek, quiet and physically frail to make any trouble. The impression is that you can push us around and walk all over us because we'll just sit there and take it. And they're right.

It's true that violence is often not the best solution to conflict. But it is also true that the typical Asian American male's physical frailties makes people more likely to bully them and makes them more willing to take it.

I started training martial arts at a fairly early age, and though I wasn't actually all that good back then, it gave me the confidence to think I could hold my own in a fight. In my high school, the Asians were often the target of racial insults and bullying, and because I thought I had a little something in my hip pocket, I didn't really believe in taking that kind of shit. That meant I got into quite a few fights in the early days of high school; most of the time I won, sometimes I lost. In the beginning, I would attack instantly if I heard the words "chink," "slant-eye," or "gook" -- even if they weren't directed at me. But I found that when the principal would come and ask who had started the fight, the other Asians in the crowd would never back my side of the story. "I didn't see anything," and "I don't know," were the fearful responses coming out of their quivering mouths. They were too scared to even speak up in support of the guy who had tried to come to their defense.

Of course, all kids learned to adapt. I stopped fighting on their behalf, and they learned to pretend that it was funny when some gwailo punk yelled "chink" and shoved their books out of their hands or dropped something foul in their lunch.

The weakness of these kids made me nauseous. To this day, the sight of some skinny, frail antisocial FOB Asian infuriates me, and reminds me again that I never want to be like that. I think if they'd only get themselves to a fucking gym, they'd walk with the confidence not to be an embarassment to us all. These days, I see more and more of my fellow fobulous Asians getting into shape -- and learning social skills to boot!

Maybe, just maybe, if we as a demographic had started ignoring our parents' advice and learning to work out and socialize a little earlier, Lily Chin wouldn't have died such a heartbroken woman.