Recently, one of the greats of Wing Chun, Hawkins Cheung, passed. He had a great influence on the development of Wing Chun world wide. Below is an excerpt from a post at Kung Fu Tea. The full post may be read here.
As many readers will already know, Master Hawkins Cheung Hok Jin passed away on Sunday February 3
rd 2019,
in Los Angeles. Within the martial arts community regrets take many
forms. One of my great regrets is that I had never had a chance to
study with Hawkins Cheung. Yet he still had a profound effect on my
understanding of both the nature of this art and the wider Wing Chun
community. When Jon Nielson and I were researching
our book on the development of Wing Chun,
we frequently found ourselves coming back to the published accounts and
interviews that Hawkins Cheung had provided over the years. We felt
that these were some of the best, most reliable, descriptions of Wing
Chun’s early years in Hong Kong (1950s-1960s) that one could hope to
find.
Some of these accounts have already gained a fairly wide following
within the Wing Chun community as they provided a remarkably frank
assessment of Hawkins Cheung’s relationship with both Bruce Lee (his
close friend and schoolmate), as well as Ip Man, his Sifu. It should be
noted that throughout his life he spoke on many other subjects. He
offered his own assessment of the true nature of Jeet Kun Do (JKD) and
William Cheung’s innovations, styling his own instruction “classic Wing
Chun” at least partially in response to these other developments within
the community.
Readers of
Black Belt magazine will even remember Hawkins Cheung as an early and passionate advocate of a more combative approach to Taijiquan.
There is much that one could say about the life and career of such a
remarkable martial artist.
Cheung possessed a restless spirit always
seeking progress. Throughout his life he sought to not just master Wing
Chun, but to understand what made it work. This same curiosity would
lead him to explore several other styles. Hawkins Cheung was a student
of Goju-Ryu Karate in which he achieved a fourth Dan. He also developed
a strong interest in Wu Taijiquan, which he approached with his
signature direct practicality. After coming to the United States he set
up a succession of successful schools in Los Angeles and introduced
countless students (including individuals like Phillip Romero and Phil
Morris) to Ip Man’s art.
By any standard Hawkins Cheung’s career was remarkable. He was one of
just a handful of individuals who really shaped Wing Chun’s spread to
North America. This brings us to a second, deeper, level of regret.
Despite his many contributions, Cheung’s life and career are not well
understood, except perhaps by his closest students. Bruce Lee was a
luminary figure who ignited a Kung Fu fever. We would be remiss if we
did not acknowledge his role in creating a global environment where Wing
Chun might succeed. But we must also acknowledge his absolute talent
for sucking the oxygen out of a room, or dominating any conversation
that he might appear in.
Sadly, Hawkins Cheung is typically discussed only as Bruce’s
sidekick. When reporters or researchers approached him, it was almost
always to ask about his friend Bruce. This seemed to bother Cheung on a
few levels, the most important of which was that Bruce had been a very
close friend, and losing him was painful. Yet in death Lee’s myth grew
to such proportions that it was impossible for anyone to escape his
shadow.
All of this is in equal parts ironic and regrettable when thinking
about Hawkins Cheung. It is ironic as he conveyed to current students
so much historical knowledge about Hong Kong in the 1950s, yet accounts
of his own career in the 1970s-1990s are extremely rare. It is
regrettable as his life growing up in Hong Kong, and immigration to the
West, mirrored Wing Chun’s global journey. Indeed, the two are
inextricably linked. Serious historians and social scientists would
better understand the process by which the Chinese martial arts
succeeded as a global phenomenon if we could write his story. Even if
Bruce Lee was critical to igniting the fire, it lasted because
individuals like Hawkins Cheung were capable of feeding it.
Perhaps the first step toward better understanding is to simply
appreciate what we already have. In the remainder of this post I will
explore a basic outline of Hawkins Cheung’s life and contributions to
the Asian martial arts. It is my hope that this will not only provide
some insight into him, but also the ways in which history itself is
memorialized and created. Indeed, traditional Chinese lineage
structures have been making sense of the present by linking certain
sorts of facts about the past for a long time. These highly stylized
patterns of remembrance tell us something about the environment and
sorts of challenges that our community faces. Yet other types of
memory, ones that explicitly focus on the decades of quiet effort that
are so often forgotten in our rush to construct martial immortality, are
necessary to build a fuller understanding of how we got here and where
we might be going. Hawkins Cheung’s life and career may be particularly
important in this respect.
Only a limited amount of information about Hawkins Cheung’s early
life seems to have made it into English language discussions. He was
born sometime around 1940 and grew up in Kowloon. After 1949 the area
became increasingly crowded with refugees and homeless individuals
fleeing across the border with Communist controlled Guangdong. Even as a
child Cheung was acutely aware of the bleak nature of life in Hong Kong
emphasizing (as a repeated talking point in his later interviews) the
problems with overcrowding, unemployment, homelessness and organized
crime. These structural limitations would weigh heavily on the group of
sometimes angry young men who gathered to train with Ip Man.
Still, Hawkins Cheung was more fortunate than most. He grew up in a
relatively wealthy family. His father owned a luxurious car and could
employ a professional driver to ferry his young son to school.
It was
also natural that Hawkins Cheung would be drawn to the martial arts
given his small size, propensity for aggression and boundless energy.
It was at the Francis Xavier Intermediate School that he first met and
befriended the similarly predisposed Bruce Lee, who had recently been
expelled (with good cause) from the much more prestigious LaSalle
school. I will refer anyone who is interested in the gory details of
that episode to
Matthew Polly’s recent biography.
Being relatively affluent had other benefits as well. Hawkins Cheung
reports that he was either 13 or 14 when he began to study Wing Chun
kung fu with Ip Man, sometime around 1954. Interestingly, he was at
first unaware when his friend Bruce also began to study with the same
teacher, probably because the two were attending class at different
times.
Phil Morris suggests that
later the two purposefully went to separate classes at least in part
because the intensely competitive young men did not want to reveal their
level of skill to a potential rival.
Some of our best accounts of life within Ip Man’s school come from
a series of interviews that Hawkins Cheung gave to Inside Kung-Fu magazine in 1991.
He speaks frankly about the competitive nature of outside challenge
fights, but also the internal Chi Sao culture that developed among some
of the younger Wing Chun students. Everyone wanted to be “top dog”, and
Hawkins Cheung was at a real disadvantage due to his small size. I
think that many Wing Chun students today will be able to relate to the
frustrations that he expresses in these interviews.
Interestingly Ip Man, who didn’t typically handle the day to day
training of the younger students, intervened at a point when he may have
been considering quitting, guided him through an exploration of the
basic defensive structures in the art’s unarmed forms. This helped
Hawkins Cheung to build an understanding of Wing Chun that worked for
him. Readers should remember that even by Hong Kong standards Ip Man
was a pretty short individual of slight build. It would have been hard
to think of a better mentor when addressing these problems.
Hawkins Cheung continued to study with Ip Man until 1959. One of the
most important, yet often overlooked, causes of Wing Chun’s global
success was the chronic under-development of Hong Kong’s educational
sector in the 1950s and 1960s. There simply were not enough slots at
Hong Kong University for all of the good students coming out the city’s
school system. Nor were there enough high paying jobs to satisfy the
children of the city’s middle class. The fact that Hong Kong was a
British territory meant it was entirely possible for the children of
wealthy families to do something about this.
Ip Ching has noted that many of his father’s better off young
students traveled to North America, Australia or Europe to pursue both
University degrees and better job prospects. Bruce Lee was far from
alone in this exodus. Indeed, this pattern of global dispersal ensured
that when Wing Chun became famous there were already a handful of well
qualified individuals spread throughout the globe who could promote the
art. Meanwhile, others had already acquired the language skills and
life experience necessary to immigrate to the West and set up schools of
their own.
Hawkins Cheung decided to further his educational prospects in
Australia, but it seems that many of his experiences there were far from
positive. As he noted in subsequent interviews, WWII had resulted in a
high degree of anti-Japanese/anti-Asian prejudice, and it was not
uncommon for Chinese students to be subject to racist attacks and other
forms of violence. There were also tensions within the local Asian
expatriate community, and Hawkins Cheung reports frequent fights with
Thai kickboxers.
After finishing college Cheung returned to Hong Kong in 1962. He
continued to study with Ip Man (now as a more senior student) until the
time of his death in 1972. Adding things up, it appears that Hawkins
Cheung enjoyed about 15 years of study as Ip Man’s student, both before
and after college. While many individuals trained with Ip Man, due to
retention problems and Ip Man’s many moves, relatively few students
could claim such long periods of continuous training.
While in Hong Kong, Hawkins Cheung explored other arts, including
Goju-Ryu Karate. Despite what one might assume, it was not uncommon for
Chinese individuals to study Japanese arts (in either Hong Kong or
Australia) during this period. What was much less common was for
someone to maintain close ties to both communities while gaining a high
degree of expertise. These styles were, after all, peer competitors.
Cheung relates that he was fascinated by the speed and power that
Goju-Ryu practitioners could project through years of practice. He
desperately wanted to learn how to counter this using Wing Chun
structures, as well as to improve his own abilities. Yet he was also
attracted to Karate as it offered a place where legal, socially
approved, sparring could happen without the fear of police or gang
involvement. He considered this essential to his training.
In fact, it seems that Hawkins Cheung was almost as skilled a
diplomat as he was fighter. That might be a surprise given his often
direct, kinetic and demanding teaching ethos. But even within the
complex and fractured political landscape that emerged following Ip
Man’s death, it is hard to think of any of his students who immigrated
to the West who were more generally liked. As anyone who has read his
articles or interviews knows, Hawkins Cheung was not shy about making
his opinions known. Whether the subject was the true nature of JKD or
the Taijiquan’s combative potential, Cheung was always willing to wade
into the fray. Yet he remained almost universally respected. As any
political scientist can tell you, diplomacy is also a martial art.
Hawkins Cheung immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, a
few years after Ip Man’s death. I have not been able to figure out much
about his first few critical years. Yet by 1980 he was running a
school with Dan Inosanto in Culver City Los Angeles.
In a two-part article published in Wing Chun Illustrated in September 2017, Phillip Romero relates how he first discovered Cheung and began to train at his school.
Romero’s reminisces are valuable and readers are encouraged to head
on over and examine them in full. They suggest an outline of the
California period of Cheung’s career. But beyond that, they provide the
same sorts of highly textured description of a school life that Hawkins
Cheung himself had given us when describing his own training with Ip
Man. Indeed, these rich descriptions are every bit as valuable to
students of martial arts studies as any biographical details that may be
related.
Romero paints a picture (largely supported by accounts from other
students) of Hawkins Cheung as a demanding teacher. If as Sifu he
embodied the “fatherly” archetype, his was the exacting and goal driven
Chinese patriarch.
On a more technical level, as a still relatively young man he was
concerned with how Wing Chun structures could be made to work in a
variety of combative environments. The sorts of students who thrived in
his early schools were those willing to risk bruises, split lips and
other injuries in full contact drills and sparring that didn’t employ
the sorts of safety equipment that would now be standard issue. Rather
than MMA gloves (which did not yet exist) Romero relates how he found
Cheung and his students using lightly padded gardening gloves where the
fingers had been cut off.
Romero followed Cheung through multiple school locations. After
closing his martial arts supply business (something that I would like to
learn more about) to focus exclusively on teaching Hawkins Cheung
opened a larger, two story school on Venice Blvd., “not far from the
Culver mall.” This must have been a good location as Romero goes on to
describe nightly classes with over 90 students split into three separate
sections. This was followed up by another class for the senior students
who helped to teach large sections of beginners. Still, not everyone
was interested in the intensity and “reality” of the training on offer.
I must confess, however, that many of the reminisces of Cheung’s
training in this period remind me of the sorts of contact levels and
expectations that I experienced when I began my own Wing Chun
apprenticeship some years later. Prior to the eruption of the UFC, MMA
and BJJ there was more combative interest (and talent) being invested
into the traditional striking arts. Yet every art has a certain
reputation, or set of social expectations, which allows it to survive in
a competitive marketplace. These seem to have changed dramatically for
many systems following the rise of MMA.
I have often wondered whether the perceived combat deficiency of Wing
Chun really reflects fundamental shortcomings in the system, or if a
more sociological explanation is needed. By in large, the sorts of
students who are willing to sacrifice the most and train the hardest are
now siphoned directly into an entirely different set of social
discourses around the modern combat sports.
My
friend Sixt Wetzler attempted to provide a theoretical basis for this
sort of observation in an article that he wrote on applying systems
theory to explain change within the martial arts communities. Still,
a fuller and more granular exploration of what was going on in within
Hawkins Cheung’s large Wing Chun community in the 1980s and 1990s might
prove an interesting test case for these sorts of models.
In 1989 Hawkins Cheung closed the Ventura Blvd. school, and opened
his final location a few miles away. This third school ran until 2014.
It seems that with age his interests and teaching methods evolved
(though his intensity did not necessarily mellow). And Romero points
out that the blossoming of BJJ and MMA had a definite impact on the type
of training that happened.
Still, Cheung’s contributions to the global martial arts community
were not confined to his teaching activities. His name appeared in
martial arts magazines, both in articles and letters, throughout the
1980s. Nor did he confine his contributions to the discussion of Wing
Chun. He even emerged a popular advocate of a more combative
understanding of Taijiquan, another art that he was deeply invested in.
In the early 1990s Hawkins Cheung gave what can only be considered
a seminal (four-part) interview to Inside Kung Fu magazine.
It must be considered mandatory reading by anyone interested in the
development of Wing Chun during the post-WWII period. And it is hard to
understate how much these articles shaped subsequent discussion of Bruce
Lee’s legacy. Just check the footnotes of any of his biographical
treatment published after 1992 to see what I mean.
Cheung was also something of an early adopter in the area of film and video recording. Steven
Moody has noted that
he collected 16 mm film of many of the most important figures in Wing Chun’s modern development.
He is also reputed to have had films of various roof top challenge
matches recorded earlier in Hong Kong. In an effort (only partially
successful) to distribute some of this information,
Hawkins Cheung established a Youtube Channel in 2013.
There readers can find a manageable selection of his demonstration,
discussions and interviews. He even posted some of his engagement with
Wu and Chen style Taijiquan.
In fact, you probably owe it to yourself to check out this vintage interview.
