Wushu Retrospective (Part 2) – 1995: The Honeymoon

I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is Mark there? I’m returning his call.” a woman’s Chinese-accented voice said on the other end.

I figured it was someone from the school’s office or maybe a parent that helps with registration.

“Yes, I’m interested in taking Wushu classes?” I said.

“Have you taken any martial arts before?” she asked.

“No”, I admitted. I hadn’t, really and certainly didn’t count the 2 months of Jungae Moosul when I was 19 and half year of Karate when I was 15.

“You can come to watch a class.” she offered and explained how to get to the school on the following Sunday.

I had a million questions (mostly geeky ones) running through my mind but all I could get out was “Are you the instructor?”.

“Yes, I am” she replied.

GULP.

“Oh .. okay! I will see you on Sunday then!” We said goodbye and I hung up the phone.

I was pretty anxious for the next few days. I think I showed up a little early on Sunday to the small studio. I didn’t actually know where San Pablo Avenue was since I hadn’t hung out in Berkeley outside of the area near the University.

It was a small space, but I didn’t care. I was anxious to see what this wushu stuff was all about. After so many years I would finally see it in person!

I met the teacher, Hao Zhi Hua, who also called herself Patti Li, and I watched the class. I don’t think I even needed to stay through the whole class. I could have just watched them do the opening salute and I would have been sold. Not knowing anything about wushu, they all looked amazing. I couldn’t wait to get started.

I wanted to start as soon as possible, but I wouldn’t get paid until that Friday and I hadn’t enough money to pay the tuition, so it would have to wait a week until the following Sunday. Unfortunately she was going to be out of town to judge at the U.S. Team Trials in Texas.

She offered to postpone it for a another week until she returned but I was too anxious.

Sunday, March 12, 1995 at 9:30 a.m., I showed up to the studio ready and raring to go. A guy named Tony was going to teach that day. A former student of hers that I never saw again. The class was a bit of a blur, but I recall being taught the first half of a beginning form by one of the students named Yolanda.

By the next day I was sore beyond belief.

Around the same time I noticed a poster at the sandwich shop I usually ate lunch at advertising a performance by the Beijing Wushu Team at the Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday, March 17. I didn’t want to miss out so I went to the ticket office and picked up a seat. It turned out I was in the farthest seat from the stage possible, my back literally against the wall, but it was better than nothing!

Since I had signed up for class twice a week I came back to the studio on Thursday, where all the students were a-buzz about the upcoming performances by the Beijing Wushu Team. It got me even more excited. In class I learned the second half of the beginning form. Some people were looking at me funny, but I wouldn’t find out why until later.

Sure enough, come Saturday, I walked down to the performance hall from my apartment and was blown away. Not just blown away, but my brain was literally turned to liquid goo in my skull and I was all a-quiver.

These pictures and many more from the performance can be found on Raffi’s website,beijingwushuteam.com

These pictures and many more from the performance can be found on Raffi’s website,beijingwushuteam.com

After the performance I took my program and got it signed by the members of the team. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure who was who as I had only been doing wushu for 2 classes.

I saw a girl who looked like she was part of the group standing there and handed her the program and a pen.

“You want me to sign it?” she asked.

Okay … she spoke perfect English. Obviously not a Beijing Wushu Team member.

“Sure” I answered, shrugging with a smile. So she signed it and to this day I have no idea who she was.

(Oh, and Russell Wong was there too, so I got an autographed picture of him with his shirt off doing a high kick. My female roommate, Seema, was quite jealous.)

On Sunday I went back to class. This time my friend David Nixon from Seattle was visiting me so he tagged along to check it out. I figured since I had learned the beginning set in the first two classes that I would probably have to practice them for a while to get them down before learning something else.

Apparently I was wrong.

In the middle of class Patti pulled me and two other students aside and told us that we were going to learn the 1970’s Compulsory Long Fist Form. She showed us a little of the beginning and it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. She proceeded to teach us the first several movements and we practiced them for the rest of the class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pH5QFOfNYQ

Zhao Chang Jun performing the 1970’s Youth Compulsory Long Fist Form for men.

I was getting strange looks from people in the class again, but since I had a friend there watching and I didn’t know anyone I didn’t pay much attention to it. After class we went home and as we were walking along David echoed a sentiment that has since been said dozens of times by dozens of different people I’ve met both in and out of wushu:

“Its interesting, because that one girl who was doing her form — she wasn’t particularly beautiful or anything. She wasn’t ugly, but just sort of average looking. But when she did her wushu, she suddenly became much more attractive.”

Amen, brother. And from what women have told me, it goes both ways. Men with good wushu are apparently hotter too. I suppose it’s true of any really intricate physical art. Proficiency and aesthetic excellence breeds attraction.

So, I continued going to class, and I continued learning my form. I met several of the other people in my school too. Kaz, a fellow half-Japanese guy, 6 months at the school, and originally from northern California and a good friend of Green Day (used to bum around Europe with them back before they were famous) and Tabala, an african american man who was one of the more advanced people in the class and credits his upbringing not to his father, but to watching Bruce Lee movies (which he could recite from memory, beginning to end).

There were a few others too, but those were the two I connected with the best and hung out with the most. In fact, both of them would eventually be roommates of mine.

Oh, and for those of you who know him, this is what Cary looked like when I first met him (at the tender young age of 4).

I later found out why people gave me strange looks in the beginning. In fact, I found out why one student, who worked with Kaz and started when he did, quit taking wushu right after I started (or at least it was a factor, so I was told).

Before I had arrived there, Kaz and the other students had all spent a minimum of 6 months to a year learning the beginning long fist form. Patti would drill them on the same (to be honest) simple/boring form for over half a year. They didn’t want to ask her to teach them anything new for fear she would think they were being impatient, but at the same time they were getting a little frustrated.

Enter this random guy who joins class, learns the form in 2 days and is then learning an intermediate form with them. It had taken them 6 months to get her to teach them something new, and it took me only 2 classes. Understandably they were a little upset about that, but it made me realize something about myself that I hadn’t really realized up until then.

I tend to pick things up quickly.

Even these days, I can look at a form and figure out most of the details on my own. Being physically capable to do the moves is one thing, as I’m limited by my body’s condition. But mentally, I learn forms quickly.

I’m not saying this to brag or sound special. It is just something I’ve learned about myself.

Granted, an ability to learn quickly and $2.00 still just gets you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so it’s no big whoop unless you apply it to something.

Over the following weeks, during the Beijing Wushu Team’s stay in the U.S. I would get to see them on one more occasion. This time in April at San Jose State University. I had been training for a month and so I was able to carpool with Patti, her husband and a few other students. The show was equally amazing. But this time I was right up front in the first row having a major wushu conniption.

If you look carefully, I’m in a red shirt below the word “STATE” on the right side.

These pictures and many more from the performance can be found on Raffi’s website,beijingwushuteam.com

These pictures and many more from the performance can be found on Raffi’s website,beijingwushuteam.com

After the performance we even got to go to a dinner with the Team. And we took pictures with a bunch of them too. I must have used up 3 disposable cameras in the span of an hour. Unfortunately I don’t have many of them scanned in except for these two:

L to R: Tabala, Kaz, Ka Li (Beijing Wushu Team member), Lee (Taiji student) and a much younger me.

Patti and Wu Bin (her coach) at dinner

My first picture with my coach! Taken in Berkeley, California on University Ave.

The next several months were a wonderful, happy blur. I was learning cool moves, I was hanging out with people who were as geeked out about wushu as I was, and I was beginning to feel like I had joined a new family of like-minded souls who all enjoyed what I enjoyed.

Wushu had me wrapped around it’s finger and I was planning our future together with reckless abandon. For a whole year I could have told you exactly how many hours and days of wushu I had taken classes. I had planned out which forms I would learn over the following 10 years of my life. I was even taking some mandarin lessons with Patti’s aunt (to not much success).

But I knew that eventually the honeymoon with wushu would come to an end. The newness would wear off, or the first plateau of non-progress would hit. I knew it would come eventually, but I still enjoyed what I was doing. And I planned to keep enjoying it for as long as I could.

That was, until I came to class one day and was told that I would be competing at a tournament in August. Just 5 months after I had started wushu!

To Be Continued next week …