Chinese Martial Arts in the Early 20th Century

There is another great article at Kung Fu Tea. This one has to do with what the Shanghai Police had to deal with in the early 20th century, by examining the weapons confiscated from the bad guys. An excerpt is below. The whole article may be read here. Do yourself a favor and click through.

Through a Lens Darkly (9): Swords, Knives and other Traditional Weapons Encountered by the Shanghai Police Department, 1925.

Introduction: Practical Martial Arts in the Age of the Gun.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, when thinking about the traditional Chinese martial arts we have a tendency to assume that these systems were created in an era without firearms.  With the coming of the almighty gun they either became obsolete or were preserved for their spiritual, philosophical and traditional value.  This theme became a troupe in countless Kung Fu movies, novels and newspaper stories.  Of course it is totally untrue.

Worse than that, it is almost exactly backwards.  The current complex of ideas and institutions that we identify as the “Chinese martial arts” seem to have first arisen and come together in the middle or late Ming dynasty.  This was a time when both early rifles and artillery were coming to dominant the battlefield’s of Asia, the Middle East and Europe.  China was no exception to this trend.

As social order disintegrated in the 19th century the Chinese martial arts once again started to gain social momentum around the country.  This was a period characterized by banditry, urban crime, and the rise of organized narcotics smuggling (first opium, later morphine and heroine).  From the mid 19th century onward criminals and bandits had disturbingly easy access to both rifles and handguns.  During this same period the Colt revolver became the preferred weapon of many “armed escort” companies.

Of course this is exactly the same time that the foundations for the modern Chinese martial arts were being laid.  Many of the most popular styles practiced today were invented during the end of the 19th century, and other older styles were reformed and repackaged to make them appealing to a new generation of students.  Rather than martial arts and firearms being substitutes, they are actually complimentary goods.  The consumption of both goods actually rose at the same time.

This should not be a huge surprise to modern readers.  After all, firearms are a plentiful feature of the modern world.  For that matter crime and a pervasive feeling of insecurity are still with us today.  These are some of the very factors that drive individuals in the West to study martial arts in the first place.  Nor has the plentiful supply of modern firearms led police, intelligence or military organizations to abandon hand combat training.  Far from it.

I want to reiterate this point because it reminds us of a fundamental, but often overlooked, truth.

The martial arts, as they exist today, are a fundamentally modern phenomenon.  For all of the rhetoric of  “traditional culture” and “ancient customs,” the truth is most of the arts of Japan and China that are actually practiced are a product of the late 19th or early 20th century.  They survive and thrive today because at least some of the tactical and cultural issues that they were attempting to address at that time are still problems that we face today.  The feeling of vulnerability in the face of social decay, or the need to find a means of self-actualization in an increasingly hostile world, are not problems that any one culture has an exclusive monopoly on.  That is good news for students of the traditional fighting arts.  It means that we can find new ways to adapt and stay relevant.

The Weapons of the Chinese Martial Arts as Encountered on the Streets of Shanghai.


I recently ran across a set of wonderful photographs that really illustrated this tension between the coexistence of multiple types of violence during the Republic of China era.  This was a time when the martial arts were experiencing rapid growth in China.  In fact, these different technologies of violence did not just coexist, rather they interacted with and fed off one another, leading both to evolve and change in the process.

Nowhere is this mutual give and take more apparent than in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s.  We are quite fortunate as a number of good studies of both the cities various police efforts and its prodigious supply of organized criminal factions have been written over the years.  Other research has focused on the importance of the foreign concessions or the different intelligence agencies and secret police forces in shaping life in the city.  I have only investigated the question briefly, but I have not been able to find a similar literature on police and crime for any other Chinese city, or region, during the 1920s.

Students of Chinese martial studies are often interested in the relationship between law enforcement and criminal groups as these two sectors of society were among the largest, and best funded, employers of martial artists.  Police departments hired martial arts instructors and were interested in the creation of new hand combat skills to solve concrete tactical problems.  Likewise the various secret societies and criminal factions of urban China also employed boxing instructors and used these skills in both their business ventures (gambling, protection, prostitution) and their frequent disputes with one another.  By the 1920s and 1930s it was not uncommon for the Triads and other gangs to use both martial arts schools and lion dance associations as fronts for their criminal enterprises.

This created something of a problem for the police.  On the one hand most serious criminal gangs were armed to the teeth with modern rifles and handguns.  At this period of time basically anyone who could write a large enough check could buy a tommy gun through the mail.  As a result the police also began to carry automatic handguns, flak vests and carbines.  The photograph at the head of this article is of a set of police officers in Shanghai in the 1930s.  In most respects they look exactly like any modern unit that you might see today.

However, the older modes of violence never totally lost their place in the criminal order.  Swords, knives and daggers continued to be commonly encountered weapons, and they were used to kill people on a routine basis.  A wide variety of other weapons were also encountered by police officers in the course of raids and arrests.  These weapons are interesting as they give us a glimpse into the milieu that the modern Chinese martial arts came of age in.

Translation of The Science of Nei Jia Quan

We have another guest post by Jonathan Bluestein, who is the author of two of the all time favorite posts at Cook Ding's Kitchen: The Versatile Whip of Pigua Zhang, and Master Zhou: The Man, The Artist, The Teacher.

Today he brings us a translation of an important book on Internal Chinese Martial Arts from the 1920's, The Science of Nei Jia Quan by Zhang Naiqi

The Science of Nei Jia Quan
By:  Zhang Naiqi
Translation by:  Nitzan Oren and Jonathan Bluestein
Forward by Nitzan Oren

As I was strolling the used book markets in China when I was living in Tianjin, I encountered a book (more of a booklet actually) whose name caught my eye: “The Science of Nei Jia Quan” – published in 1928. I hurried to purchase this piece, which turned out to be a real treasure. The next day I showed it to my teacher, master Zhou Jingxuan, who had remembered reading it long ago, back when he was younger. Zhou was enthusiastic about me reading and researching this book.   

The Science of Nei Jia Quan is one of the most fascinating books that I had read on the subjects of Qi

Gong and Nei Gong (Internal Skill). It describes the benefits from training internal methods in a language which is coherent to any reader. Unlike in many other Chinese martial arts books (back then and nowadays as well) who use all sorts of complex lingo related to Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Cosmology, the author of this book had attempted to provide scientific explanations to the beneficial results which arise from training Internal Methods. Even though the content of this book is relevant for us even today, it is important to take into account that the book was written over 70 years ago, and the knowledge we have now is slightly more advanced than it had been back in the day.
To better understand the contents of the book and in order to read more materials published by its author, Zhang Naiqi, I began to look for more information about his life, his education and his practice in the traditional Chinese martial arts. Most of my efforts came up in vein, and I couldn’t find much – neither on the Internet, nor in martial arts circles. From the little written in the forward of the book itself it appears the author had trained in Xing Yi Quan, Bagua Zhang and Taiji Quan. Recently I’ve managed to find out he was also involved in the revolution in China in the beginning of the 20th century, and that he had written an additional article on Qi Gong.

In 2006 I reread the book several times, and decided to translate it into Hebrew, so the Israeli reader could also benefit from its content. The book was later further translated into English, under my supervision, by my student – Jonathan Bluestein, in May 2013. As the book includes lots of descriptions, stories and explanations which I did not think were so important, I chose to skip them and only translate the parts which I felt were meaningful and useful to the reader.

Internal Skill and Fatigue

The Internal Skill eliminates fatigue in the following 3 ways:

1. During rest, the Chest and Abdomen, which contain the vital organs, are completely relaxed and flaccid.

2. While moving, the tension is transferred from the Chest into the Abdomen area.

3. By avoiding unnecessary tension in bodily areas which remain static.

Wu Ji – Full Body Relaxation at Rest

Before you begin to practice movement in the art of internal skill, there is a preparatory stage consisting of a static posture, in which the entire body is brought to a relaxed state. This preparatory position is very important for the whole practice. First, one should stand in a frontal stance or slightly facing sideways, while the entire body is in harmony with the mechanical principles of a fulcrum. Discomfort does not exist at any point in the body, and all the joints are naturally slightly

folded. Afterwards, one should use his Yi (Intention) to conduct an orderly inspection of the body: from up to down – head, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, abdomen, buttocks and feet – and feel whether there exist any unnecessary unconscious tension at some place or another. Tension created by improper posture should be corrected, and tension which was originally unconscious (created by mental causes) should be consciously released. Now, one should sense whether the breathing is natural and without disturbance, and make sure it is calm. Afterwards, the whole body, together with all the loosened and relaxed organs, should be allowed to drop down by the influence of Gravity. This dropping and sinking should become unconscious and completely natural.
The positioning of the skeleton is based on the laws of mechanics and that of the fulcrum, and the structure need not necessarily lean upon the muscles and tendons to keep itself together. The muscles and tendons should be as ‘hanging from a coat-hanger’, while the breath is in parallel light and calm like trail of smoke coming up from incense. Natural breathing is completely dependent upon the expansion and contraction of the lungs without directed intervention. 

At this time, it should not be allowed for the eyes or ears to notice the outside world, because as soon as they become aware of what is going on around them, an unconscious tension appears in the chest. One should only focus on keeping the relaxed state of all bodily parts, and especially make sure the breathing is natural. This sort of focus helps one avoid what goes on around oneself. Sometimes the breath is vocal and heavy. This is many a time a result of undue tension in windpipe, and not because of fast breathing. All that should be done to resolve this is to avoid any tension in the mouth, nose, neck and chest, and as a result the windpipe will expand and the breathing becomes easy.

One could notice that unlike adults, children do not have any tension in their chests. Among children, the abovementioned relaxation of the muscles and breath are natural. Their chests and bellies slightly protrude outwards. In this state, the stomach and intestines are lain rather than hanged. Even though practically and physically we are not really ‘hanging’ them, psychologically there is a feeling of ‘having no safe place to lay them, so one is forced to hang them up in order to prevent them from dropping. This also works the other way around – the feeling of the stomach and intestines being hung also produces the anxiety of their possible dropping in the unconscious, and this anxiety in turn produces a pressure from the abdomen upwards, supposedly ‘providing support for the stomach and intestines’. These two phenomenon produce and create each-other. Further,

the tension in the chest contracts the chest muscles and the internal organs.    
This cycle of anxiety and tension in the chest leads to fatigue. An upwards pressure of the intestinal wall is extremely fatiguing – anyone could feel it. Because of the fatigue, once in a while one has to loosen-up. But as soon as a thought arises, or there is a will to perform some sort of action, the upward pressure immediately returns. These cyclical contraction and release lead to a lot of excessive movement of the stomach and intestines and lead to fatigue.

(Jonathan:  Albeit being fairly accurate, the word ‘Psychologically’, which was used in the last paragraph, is a modern translation and interpretation to what Zhang was saying)

We must aspire to a state in which the entire body is free from any undue tension. This state of release from tension and the looseness of the body is in Daoist literature referred to as ‘Wu Ji’ (Without Poles), or: “Yin and Yang have yet to be determined”. What is Yin? It is Absence/Emptiness. What is Yang? It is Fullness. At this time, the entire body is free and loose. The chest and the abdomen too are in a state of complete looseness. When we start to move we should keep the belly full and the chest broad. Of this was said: “Emptiness and Fullness have yet to be determined”. All these names bear the identical meaning:  “Pre-heaven”, “Wu Ji”, “Yin and Yang not yet determined”, etc. It Buddhist literature this is called “Serenity”, or “Existing Naturally”. At this time, the inside and outside of the body accept the authority of gravity and sink downwards without the tiniest bit of resistance. At this time, all the ‘bodily cells’ (not to be taken literally) are separated from each-other, unrelated and care not for one-another – each of them exists by itself and for itself.   

Fullness in the Abdomen, Openness in the Chest

When we rest, our body is relaxed and loosened, but it is no longer so once we move. There are two reasons for this. First – to move our body we have to lengthen and shorten our muscles. Second – for us to be able to produce power we have to change the tension within the muscles and the intensity of their contraction. Therefore, tension in the muscles is unavoidable.

Like what we had now described as a form of more ‘external’ tension, so do the more ‘internal’ parts need hold some kind of tension. This can be easily felt – when issuing a punch, a momentary tension will appear in the chest and solar plexus areas. There are four reasons for the appearance of this type of tension:

1. Recoil, or a counter-force to the movement. While operating force with the hand or the leg to the outside of the body (away from it), a counter-force reacts upon the body. While throwing a movement in the air, the air itself is resistant with a tiny amount of force. When firing a cannon, for example, the body of the cannon is pushed in the opposite direction when a shot is fired. This recoil affects the internal organs, and it is natural that it would create some tension there so they can resist.
2. The connections between all the nerves. Even though the limbs and internal organs are connected to different nerves and nerve-systems (sympathetic and parasympathetic), a command given through one nerve commonly affects others. So, when we command the body, through our nervous system, to issue a punch, the spinal nerves commands the arm muscles to contract, which also affects the sympathetic nerves and causes tension to appear in the internal organs.
3. The movement of the lungs. When the limbs issue force to the outside of the body, the lungs are stimulated to ‘blow’ air, which helps produce that force. The action of the lungs contributes to the creation of pressure within the chest.
4. Tension in the intercostal muscles (the muscles between the ribs). This tension is directly affected by the onset of tension in the arms, because both the arm muscles and the intercostal

muscles are connected via the nerve plexus of the spine, which yield mutual influence. Tension in the intercostal muscles shrinks the volume of the chest cavity, which then creates a sensation of pressure in the heart and lungs.
Most people will feel this sort of tension in the chest area. For many, this tension in the chest is unavoidable even when doing nothing, and as soon as they use outwards-driven force, the pressure levels rise significantly.

Unification between Awareness and Movement

When the body is active, the tension reaches the limbs. Because of the nature of various movements, sometimes the left side is loose and the right contracted, or vice-versa, or they can both be contracted. Contraction means Fullness, or being ‘Yang’. Loose means Absence (lack of Fullness), or ‘Yin’. The mutual relationship between contracted and loose, between Fullness and Absence, is one of the five rules that explain the ancient principle of Tai Ji (same as ‘Tai Chi’ in ‘Tai Chi Chuan’ or ‘Taiji Quan’).

A lack of uniformity between movement and Intention (Yi) can point to a state in which the Intention predates bodily movement, or that the body reacts before one has the Intention for it to do so.

When we practice one movement for a long time in succession, it often happens that the bodily action comes ahead of one’s intention For example, among Xing Yi Quan practitioners, when they practice one of the Wu Xing (Five Fists) for a long time in a row. It can happen that before one had the intention to throw a punch, it already came out.    This is a state in which the intention chases the limbs instead of commanding them. In a state in which the intention has noticed the limb movement only after the movement has already began, the intention loses its ability to command the body, and is instead commanded by it.    

There can also exists a state in which we strongly strive towards a certain goal or target, and the intention very prominently projects itself even before we move (Jonathan: A good example would be what has been referred to in Western martial arts as ‘Telegraphing’ one’s strikes to the opponent).
Because of impatience, there results a situation in which the bodily movement is still half-way, but the intention already rushes ahead towards the target. This does not mean that the intention can really physically get ahead of the body, but that in our imagination and thought it is already there (too soon). Inside the body, this causes the feeling of a tendency and momentum forward, as the skin is some exterior shell we yearn to break through.

Awareness Towards the Inside and Towards the Outside

In the previous chapters I have explained that attention must be given to the state of the abdomen, and that one should be aware of the tensions in that area. I have also explained that in movement, one should pay attention to the hand and its outwards-driven power/force. Meaning – one should command the force with Awareness, or Intention (Yi). In this state, the Intention has to make two actions simultaneously, in opposite directions. How is that possible?

In fact, it is impossible for the Intention and Awareness to be directed at two opposite directions at

the same time. Therefore, the direction should alter interchangeably, and flow from an outwards focus to an inwards focus and back again. How can this be done?
While moving the hand away from the center of the body, the Intention commands the hand outwards. When moving the hand towards the center of the body, the intention commands the hand inwards, and at the same time, the intention should move towards the abdomen area. Inhaling air while the intention moves towards the abdomen area assists the intention to follow. One’s awareness accompanies the air that is sucked and moves inwards with it, because the distance to the abdomen is short. When pointing one’s direction outwards, the blowing of air guides it, and the direction of one’s stare helps a lot as well.

In movement among many people, the act of breathing becomes loud and vocal. As I have explained in previous chapters, this results from the narrowing of the windpipe due to excess tension. So one has to loosen the muscles of the mouth, nose, back of the neck and chest cavity, and reach a state in which albeit the breathing being heavy, it is not loud.

This unification between Awareness, Movement and Breathing is what is called ‘The Three Internal Harmonies’, or the harmonies between Qi, Yi (Intention) and Li/Jin (Power). What is called ‘Shen’ (Spirit), which is expressed in one’s gaze, is affected by this. Interchanging between inside and outside awareness aids in the concentration of intention and prevents one from becoming scatterbrained or being easily distracted. In case one makes a movement with the hand towards the center of the body, but forgets to aim and keep the intention pointing to the inside, then the following movements would be intentionless.

When the ancients said ‘The Real Power of the Dantian’ they were utterly wrong. They were mistaken to think of Intention as a type of power by itself. They were mistaken to think that the gathering of intention and concentrating inwards is ‘collecting power’. They were mistaken in that the thought that outwards concentration equals a release of force. The lower abdomen which they called Dantian is nothing but what  I have referred to earlier as ‘Fullness in the Abdomen, Openness in the Chest’ (as something which manifests downward pressure).  

(Jonathan: I don’t think Zhan Naiqi was trying to say that the Dantian is useless. He probably meant to suggest that the Dantian is a physical thing which could and ought to be explained with physical actions and language rather than a metaphysical one). 

The Importance of a Steady Posture, and the Vigor of Muscles, Tendons and Bones

Important posture is very important. First, when standing, the limbs should be in harmony with the principle of the fulcrum. The purpose of uniform movement of the hands and feet in the Internal Martial Arts is to find the correct fulcrum. When we release a punch outwards with all our might, if the hand and foot are not sent ther, the body loses balance because it loses the fulcrum.

Additionally, (it loses balance) because there is created a fear of slipping even before one has slipped, which prevents one from using all his power. Outwardly, the sending of the punch should be accompanied with sending the foot to provide as fulcrum. Inwardly, there is growing firmness in the belly, which supports the generation of downwards power vector. This way, the body gains stability.

In the Nei Jia arts there is a very interesting saying: “The three tips point at the same direction”. The three tips are the edge of the nose, the edge of the hand, and the edge of the foot. When the edges of the nose and hand point in the same direction, one’s eyesight is directed at the hand, and the Will and Intention are focused. When the edge of the hand and the edge of the foot simultaneously point at the same direction, the body gains a proper fulcrum.

In Nei Jia arts one should maintain the hand and leg joints slightly bent. This way, springiness is maintained when the tendons and muscles near the joints are flexed or extended. This helps assure that an outwards pressure cannot break the joint. Additionally, a state is created in which the tension in the muscles and tendons is low, which enables one to produce more power. Attempting to use any sort of force while the arm is fully extended can lead to the breaking of the elbow joint. On the other hand, insisting to overly flex the joint inhibits the initiation of forward-driven movements.












_________________________________________________
The author of this article, Jonathan Bluestein, may be contacted directly at:  jonathan.bluestein@gmail.com .

Don’t miss on his other articles!   

The Versatile Whip of Pigua Zhang:   
http://cookdingskitchen.blogspot.co.il/2012/11/the-versatile-whip.html

Master Zhou: The Man, The Artists, The Teacher:   
http://cookdingskitchen.blogspot.co.il/2012/12/master-zhou-man-artist-teacher.html

Anyone who wishes to study martial arts with master Zhou, teacher of both Nitzan Oren and Jonathan Bluestein, can contact us and read further details through our official website:
http://swz.weebly.com

You may also visit our Youtube channels, in which there are many videos of master Zhou, performing and teaching our martial arts:
http://www.youtube.com/jingang
http://www.youtube.com/jonathanbluestein
___________________________________________________
All the pictures and illustrations in this article, with the exception of the picture of Sun Lutang, belong to Nitzan Oren, and may not be used, copied or otherwise taken advantage of without his written consent.

Up the Yangtze

A friend sent me an article from the NY Times about traveling up the Yangtze River. The full article may be read here. An excerpt is below. Enjoy.

Up the Yangtze River With a $50 Paddle

By SETH KUGEL

As the Hai Nei Guan Guang 2 blasted its deafening foghorn and pulled into the Yangtze River port of Fengjie, I brimmed with confidence. Two days earlier, I had nervously boarded a similar workaday passenger boat along another leg of the Yangtze, no idea what was in store. But now, I knew the routine. I’d say san-deng (third-class), hand over some cash, receive a handwritten slip with my cabin number, step over sunflower-seed-spitting passengers camped on the floor and settle into whatever rock-hard bunk remained in a room of instant-noodle-slurping Chinese passengers.

Soon enough, the ship would arrive at my destination — in this case, about 24 hours later in the mega-city of Chongqing.

But for novice travelers in China, there is always a surprise. I entered Cabin 2012 to find its four bunks overflowing with a family of five and a fluffy white cat with butterscotch splotches. I returned to reception, typed “cabin full” into my Google Translate app, and a woman accompanied me back to the room. She addressed the slumbering family — did I mention it was 4 a.m.? — in Chinese. This prompted a boy to vacate his bunk and climb into one with his sister. His bed became mine. There was no apology or change of sheets.

The mistake was mine: four beds didn’t mean four people.

By the next morning I was in a better rhythm, making stunted conversation with the family via a phrase book and accepting a free meal in the ship’s dining room from a young physical education teacher who ordered a whole fish in pungent sauce from a menu on the wall I did not even know was a menu. From the deck, I gazed through a ubiquitous haze at new Yangtze River cities, the result of the Three Gorges Dam project, completed in 2006. I posed for cellphone photos with passengers amused by the presence of a non-Asian.

I was an ignorant, hapless and occasionally clownish first-time tourist in the world’s most populous nation, and one of its most mysterious to Westerners. And I was enjoying (almost) every minute.

Here was the daunting mission: a 10-day trip up the Yangtze River, taking trains and boats, for $50 a day, enough to pay for food, bottom-end hotels and public transport, but not enough for the organized tours and cruises that travelers commonly take through this part of the country.

Along the way, I learned some key lessons that will help travelers avoid my mistakes. Don’t worry: you’ll still make plenty of your own.

Less

Simplify!
 - Thoreau

I saw the angel in the marble and  carved until I set him free.
 - Michelangelo

Small movement is better than big movement. No movement is better than small movement.

 - Wang Xiang Zhai

A few years ago when my oldest daughter moved out of the house, we under took a big project in clearing out a lot of stuff. Stuff we had accumulated. Stuff we had in boxes that we haven't opened since we moved into our home 16 years ago; or even when we moved into the last house! 

For a regular person it is hard enough to get rid of your stuff, but how about if you have a LOT of stuff? How about if you have everything?

I ran across an interesting article from which I posted an excerpt below. The full article may be read here.   

---

March 9, 2013

Living With Less. A Lot Less.

By GRAHAM HILL

I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.

I have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff — electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets.

Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an Internet windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things isn’t.

We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. 

Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.

There isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it seems the reverse may be true.

For me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with less.

It started in 1998 in Seattle, when my partner and I sold our Internet consultancy company, Sitewerks, for more money than I thought I’d earn in a lifetime.

To celebrate, I bought a four-story, 3,600-square-foot, turn-of-the-century house in Seattle’s happening Capitol Hill neighborhood and, in a frenzy of consumption, bought a brand-new sectional couch (my first ever), a pair of $300 sunglasses, a ton of gadgets, like an Audible.com MobilePlayer (one of the first portable digital music players) and an audiophile-worthy five-disc CD player. And, of course, a black turbocharged Volvo. With a remote starter!

I was working hard for Sitewerks’ new parent company, Bowne, and didn’t have the time to finish getting everything I needed for my house. So I hired a guy named Seven, who said he had been Courtney Love’s assistant, to be my personal shopper. He went to furniture, appliance and electronics stores and took Polaroids of things he thought I might like to fill the house; I’d shuffle through the pictures and proceed on a virtual shopping spree.

My success and the things it bought quickly changed from novel to normal. Soon I was numb to it all. The new Nokia phone didn’t excite me or satisfy me. It didn’t take long before I started to wonder why my theoretically upgraded life didn’t feel any better and why I felt more anxious than before.

My life was unnecessarily complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clear, floors to vacuum, roommates to manage (it seemed nuts to have such a big, empty house), a car to insure, wash, refuel, repair and register and tech to set up and keep working. To top it all off, I had to keep Seven busy. And really, a personal shopper? Who had I become? My house and my things were my new employers for a job I had never applied for.

It got worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east to work in Bowne’s office in New York, where I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo loft that befit my station as a tech entrepreneur. The new pad needed furniture, housewares, electronics, etc. — which took more time and energy to manage.

AND because the place was so big, I felt obliged to get roommates — who required more time, more energy, to manage. I still had the Seattle house, so I found myself worrying about two homes. When I decided to stay in New York, it cost a fortune and took months of cross-country trips — and big headaches — to close on the Seattle house and get rid of the all of the things inside.

I’m lucky, obviously; not everyone gets a windfall from a tech start-up sale. But I’m not the only one whose life is cluttered with excess belongings.

In a study published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too jammed with things.

Our fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.

Apparently our supersize homes don’t provide space enough for all our possessions, as is evidenced by our country’s $22 billion personal storage industry.

What exactly are we storing away in the boxes we cart from place to place? Much of what Americans consume doesn’t even find its way into boxes or storage spaces, but winds up in the garbage.

The Natural Resources Defense Council reports, for example, that 40 percent of the food Americans buy finds its way into the trash.

Enormous consumption has global, environmental and social consequences. For at least 335 consecutive months, the average temperature of the globe has exceeded the average for the 20th century. As a recent report for Congress explained, this temperature increase, as well as acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and Arctic Sea ice are “primarily driven by human activity.” Many experts believe consumerism and all that it entails — from the extraction of resources to manufacturing to waste disposal — plays a big part in pushing our planet to the brink. And as we saw with Foxconn and the recent Beijing smog scare, many of the affordable products we buy depend on cheap, often exploitive overseas labor and lax environmental regulations.

Does all this endless consumption result in measurably increased happiness?

In a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.

I DON’T know that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an aberrant or antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo. But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Best of My Love.

Yet Another Instance of #31 of the 36 Strategies

From The 36 Strategies, #31: Scheme With Beauties.

Below is an excerpt from a story which was printed by the NY Times. The full article may be read here.

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble

By MAXINE SWANN

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”

Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have children. But she worried what he thought of her. “Do you think you could ever be proud of someone like me?” Of course he could, he assured her.

Frampton tried to get Milani to talk on the phone, but she always demurred. When she finally agreed to meet him in person, she asked him to come to La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. On Jan. 7, 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia via Toronto and Santiago, Chile. At 68, he dreamed of finding a wife to bear him children — and what a wife. He pictured introducing her to his colleagues. One thing worried him, though. She had told him that men hit on her all the time. How did that acclaim affect her? Did it go to her head? But he remembered how comforting it felt to be chatting with her, like having a companion in the next room. And he knew she loved him. She’d said so many times.

Frampton didn’t plan on a long trip. He needed to be back to teach. So he left his car at the airport. 

Soon, he hoped, he’d be returning with Milani on his arm. The first thing that went wrong was that the e-ticket Milani sent Frampton for the Toronto-Santiago leg of his journey turned out to be invalid, leaving him stranded in the Toronto airport for a full day. Frampton finally arrived in La Paz four days after he set out. He hoped to meet Milani the next morning, but by then she had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She promised to send him a ticket to join her there, so Frampton, who had checked into the Eva Palace Hotel, worked on a physics paper while he waited for it to arrive. He and Milani kept in regular contact. A ticket to Buenos Aires eventually came, with the promise that another ticket to Brussels was on the way. All Milani asked was that Frampton do her a favor: bring her a bag that she had left in La Paz.

While in Bolivia, Frampton corresponded with an old friend, John Dixon, a physicist and lawyer who lives in Ontario. When Frampton explained what he was up to, Dixon became alarmed. His warnings to Frampton were unequivocal, Dixon told me not long ago, still clearly upset: “I said: ‘Well, inside that suitcase sewn into the lining will be cocaine. You’re in big trouble.’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be careful, I’ll make sure there isn’t cocaine in there and if there is, I’ll ask them to remove it.’ I thought they were probably going to kidnap him and torture him to get his money. I didn’t know he didn’t have money. 

I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.

On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Budo and Self Discipline

Budo is supposed to enhance your life, not replace it. How many people do you know that train, train, train, train, train and have no life to speak of outside of the dojo?

Training for a specific event is a special situation, but generally speaking martial arts training is training for life. Sometimes you might focus on one thing and sometimes something else as is appropriate for the time and situation. In the long run your practice should be balanced.

According to lift.do where I track my own practice, I’ve now logged 160 consecutive days. I’ve accomplished this by waking up a little extra early every day and working out before I go to work (I’m also assisted by a couple of young dogs who are eager to start the day). I really don’t like getting up early, but I like training everyday a lot more than I dislike getting up.

Steven Pressfield is a well know author. He wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was made into a movie; The Gate of Fire, which I hope will someday be a movie; and a host of others including the War of Art and Turning Pro, which are about actually doing something with your creative abilities. While he writes specifically about the business of writing, everything in those books could just as easily be applied to the study of martial arts.

Mr. Pressfield has an excellent website and blog. On that blog recently appeared an article by his associate, Shawn Coyne entitled “The Difference Between Self Discipline and Self Flaggelation.” Below is an excerpt. The full article may be read here.

The Difference Between Self-Discipline and Self-Flaggelation

By Shawn Coyne | Published: March 8, 2013

I have a difficult time determining whether or not my internal insistence that I bang out xxx number of words in a  day—no matter what!—falls within the realm of constructive self-discipline or destructive self-flagellation.


There’s no easy answer. The words don’t magically type themselves.

I asked Steve about this when I was in LA a couple weeks ago. He reminded me of his friend who trains thoroughbred horses. He wrote about him in TURNING PRO. What the trainer told Steve is that he never grinds the horses, making them finish a lap when they stop running. While he certainly has an agenda each day and he nudges them with encouragement to improve, once they get tired or bored, he takes them off the track. Tomorrow’s another day.

 ...

Self-discipline is simply having the nerve to sit down with a pile of construction paper or a laptop or a band saw every day at an appointed time and letting that little guy come out to play. If he gets fidgety after a while, let him go do something else.

Lau Bun, One of the Kung Fu Pioneers

At the Kung Fu Tea blog, there was a nice article about Lau Bun, who brought Choy Lay Fut kung fu to the US. Below is an excerpt. The full article may be read here.

Lau Bun: A Pioneer of the Chinese Martial Arts in America.
Most observers of the Chinese martial arts agree that Lau Bun was the first individual to open a permanent, somewhat-public, Chinese martial arts school on the American mainland.  That fact alone makes him an important figure to know about.  However, the details of his life are fascinating for other reasons as well.  As well as illustrating many aspects of the Chinese American experience, his career demonstrates the many ways in which the martial arts intersected with, and were useful to, the broader political-economy of immigrant communities.

Whether it was providing physical protection, settling disputes, or creating a sense of cultural continuity, Lau Bun’s life provides us with an interesting window into how the martial arts interacted with, and were used by, the broader Chinese society in the early 20th century.  For that reason I felt that a brief biographical sketch of his career would make a valuable contribution to our lives of the “Chinese Martial Artists” series.

Before starting I should state that my own background is not in Choy Li Fut.  Rather, my interests in this subject are purely historical and social.  When discussing the background of Choy Li Fut in China I have relied on Zeng Zhaosheng’s 1989 volume Guangdong Wushu Shi (A History of Guangdong Martial Arts).  I have drawn the basic facts of Lau Bun’s life from a 2002 article entitled “Remembering Lau Bun” by Doc Fei-Wong published in the July edition of Inside Kung Fu.  Lastly I would like to thank Derek Graeff for his insights into the history and development of the American Choy Li Fut community.

Lau Bun was born in Taishan in Guangdong province at the end of the Qing dynasty in 1891.  Taishan is southwest of Jiangmen and sits on a coastal region of the Pearl River Delta.  The area is known for both its musical traditions (something that Lau Bun enjoyed and promoted throughout his life) as well as its large expatriate community.  The local language spoken in the region is Taishanese, a cousin of Cantonese.

Large groups of Taishanese speaking immigrants left for the American west in the middle decades of the 19^th century.  Some of these individuals worked for the railroad, while others took service jobs in gold mining communities or worked in San Francisco.  Until very recently, Taishanese was the most commonly encountered dialect spoken in Chinese American communities.

While the working conditions endured by these early immigrants were bleak, the wages they earned were often quite generous compared to what was being made in their home villages.  Family members in America often mailed home some of their salaries as “remittances” which became an important source of liquidity in the local economy.

Lau Bun was born into a family situation that was deeply dependent on the tides of late 19^th century globalization.  His father worked in California and sent home the remittances that supported his mother and siblings.  This source of income allowed the divided family to enjoy a comfortable standard of living.

For Lau Bun this meant that his family could afford to hire martial arts teachers to instruct him (recall that at this point the idea of the “public commercial school” had not yet become standardized across the region).  Accounts state that his early teachers may have exposed him to Hung Gar and Mok Gar.  For whatever reason, the family continued to look for a teacher and eventually settled on a well-known Choy Li Fut teacher named Yuen Hai.

Yuen Hai was trained at the Hung Sing Association Hall in Foshan, north east of Taishan.  Following the death of the legendary Jeong Yim (who did much to establish Choy Li Fut as a major force in the Pearl River Delta region) Yuen Hai was sent to Taishan by the new leader of the organization (Chan Ngau Sing) for the express purpose of opening a Choy Li Fut school and promoting the spread of the style.  This probably happened in 1893-1894, but there is no universally accepted date for the death of Jeong Yim which complicates our account.  It is also important to note that these sorts of assignments are not all that uncommon in Choy Li Fut’s history and they may help to account for the arts rapid geographic spread in the late 19^th century.

Yuen Hai’s career was rich and varied.  He quickly became caught up in the expatriate driven economy that was so important to the region.  When he first moved to the area he rented space in clan temples to conduct his classes.  This was a fairly common practice in the era, especially in Guangdong where clan associations were strong and owned most of the real estate.  Later Yuen Hai traveled to Indonesia where he worked a five year stint as a private bodyguard for a wealthy businessman.  After returning to the region he once again took up teaching Choy Li Fut.

It was at this point that Lau Bun began his studies with Yuen Hai.  He also is reported to have learned a “Shaolin Five Animals Form” from his teacher’s wife, who was also an accomplished martial artist.  Most accounts of Lau Bun’s life are brief and do not give exact years.  Still, we can make some informed guesses about when this instruction started.

The Boxer Uprising in 1900 proved to be a watershed moment for martial artists across the country.  In Guangdong the provincial governor had every martial arts school and association in the province closed in the wake of these events.  This order was taken quite seriously and was actually implemented by local officials.  The great fear was that local martial artists would seek revenge against foreign traders in the region, or engage in copy-cat anti-Christian violence, giving the British a pretext to seize the entire Pearl River.  Nor was this fear unreasonable.  The British were looking for an excuse to expand their holdings in the area.

As a result of this order the Hung Sing Association in Foshan was forced to close its doors, and many of its instructors actually ended up going to Hong Kong for a few years to seek other means of employment.  I expect that the same thing happened in Taishan, and that Yuen Hai’s five years contract working as a bodyguard in Indonesia probably spanned the period from 1900-1905.  It just wasn’t possible to teach for much of this time.

After 1903-1905, the order restricting martial arts schools was eased.  The Hung Sing Association in Foshan reopened its doors, Chan Wah Shun rented a new school space in the Ip family temple (effectively inaugurating the modern era of Wing Chun) and Yuen Hai returned to Taishan and resumed teaching Choy Li Fut.  Still, his teaching career had been disrupted at a critical time, and this may have limited the size of the organization that he could build.

Luckily the remittances from America allowed the families of his students to pay consistent tuition. 

Lau Bun studied diligently and eventually became his teacher’s successor.  I point this out because I find it interesting that apparently none of Yuen Hai’s first generation of students (who studied with him from 1894-1900) remained in the lineage after the Boxer Uprising.  This is a valuable reminder of how volatile events were at the turn of the century and the impact that they had on the development of the martial arts.

Lau Bun had sufficient time to complete his martial arts training, but the situation in southern China was becoming strained by the middle of the 1920s.  Warlordism became a major problem and the Nationalist government struggled to assert control of the country.  The economy of Guangdong was slow to industrialize in the 1920s and did not receive the same level of investment as more quickly growing areas like Shanghai.  Economic opportunities started to dry up, crime and narcotics became an increasing problem, and in 1927 the Hung Sing Association was officially suppressed by the Nationalist Party because of its association with leftist political elements (the CCP).  Adding to this general sense of calamity, as some point during this period Lau Bun’s father appears to have died.

Sometime in the 1920s Lau Bun followed the path of so many of his countrymen before him and decided to seek his fortune in America.   However, this process was now vastly more complicated than it had been half a century years earlier.  A series of legislative acts passed between 1870 and 1924 essentially banned all legal immigration from China.