Ving Tsun: You Can Go Home Again, a pandemic story

 A while back, I wrote a series of posts journaling my epic two-year journey from chubby chronically-ill suburban mom to chubby chronically-ill suburban mom who also does kung fu. A few things have happened since then. Let's catch up.

I finished the two-year program and kept training, rain or shine, an average of about ten hours a week. There were minor obstacles, sure - the occasional lupus flare-up, that one time I had major abdominal surgery - but even those problems became opportunities. Probletunities! Chances to sit still and observe, study how my Sifu teaches and how different students learn. I took a lot of notes. Helped out around the school, herded the cats during seminars, and eventually got back to training hard with a new focus - my Sifu trusted me to start instructing. As I took on more responsibilities as a senior student, the school became my second home.

Then the pandemic hit, and I couldn't go home anymore.

My compromised immune system lands me squarely in the high-risk category for covid-19 ... with all the ugliness that entails. So I went into ultra-mega-lockdown quarantine mode, and learned how to do life from inside a bubble. For over a year.

I never stopped training - the Texas schools teamed up to host classes on Zoom so we could all keep working out together from a nice, safe distance - but I'm not about to lie and say the isolation didn't have a serious impact on my training. Good and bad. There were a lot of introspective epiphanies about my forms, my structure, where energy comes from, etc, that I never would've had in a crowded class. ... But ... I was suddenly the sole driving force of my motivation to train, and most of my daily energy was being devoted to little things like keeping my family safe in a global pandemic and shoring up my crumbling mental health while processing bottomless buckets of existential dread. 

It's exhausting. There were days when I just couldn't train. When doing two-person drills in the air, by myself, in my house, in front of a screen full of little screens, filled my chest with such a tide of melancholy that it spilled out of my eyes. I was homesick. 

Kung fu is patient, though. It waited for me to finish wallowing and remember that there are a million things to study that don't involve having a training partner. So I wiped my face, worked on my forms, and tried to be as patient as my kung fu.

Waiting is not my favorite thing. I'm more of an instant gratification gal at heart. But one of the biggest lessons Ving Tsun has taught me is that some things just can't be rushed. Take a deep breath. Play more siu nim tao. No amount of fussing on my part would get a vaccine into my arm any faster.

Time passed - a thousand years? the blink of an eye? who knows? - and suddenly there's light at the end of the tunnel. I find myself fully vaccinated and, with some precautions on the advice of my doctors, ready to get back to class.

I can finally go home again! And y'all ... it is daunting. On multiple levels.

For one thing, I've spent the past year avoiding being within six feet of other people, nevermind touching their hands with my hands. I think about the years I spent blithely breathing the same air as dozens of other sweaty people and I shudder. The thought of going back to that now is a teensy bit anxiety-inducing. 

For another thing, I am Not In Shape. The past many months have drastically skewed my carbs/cardio balance. My quarantine physique is now much less "kung fu warrior" and much more "charmingly precarious stack of soup dumplings". And sure, yes, everybody loves soup dumplings, but nobody expects them to win a fight.

Getting back to training at my school is going to be difficult. It'll take work, a lot of it, not just physically, but also mentally, emotionally. I'll get tired. I'll get overwhelmed. I'll get scared. There will be uncomfortable conversations with other students as I set boundaries for my health. Sometimes I'll fail; have to pick myself up and try again. It would be so much easier to just stay home and be a hermit forever. To just ghost my Sifu and never come back.

But if I wanted easy, I wouldn't have started training Ving Tsun in the first place.  

So I reached out to my greatest resource - my Sifu and Simo. We talked about what it'll take for me to come back to in-person training, and worked out a plan. The rest is up to me - my Sifu can't do the training for me. I've got to put on my Big Girl Pants and actually go to class. It helps that I get to train in a place like this:

I'll have to use every lesson that Ving Tsun has ever taught me. Relax. Advocate for myself. Stay aware of my surroundings. Relax again. Don't expect, don't compare - my kung fu will not be the same as it was a year ago, and it shouldn't be. Relax harder. Don't give up; play more siu nim tao.

It's finally time to put in the work. See y'all at class.

Ving Tsun Kung Fu: Focus On The System

There are thousands of Moy Yat Ving Tsun practitioners, but very few of them will achieve the caliber required to become a legitimate Moy Yat Family Sifu. It takes around ten years of dedicated training under one’s Sifu and literally thousands of training hours (10,000+).

The Sifus of the Moy Yat Family put an extraordinary amount of work into passing down the Ving Tsun system. Grandmaster Moy Tung has spent his entire adult career dedicating himself to the art of Ving Tsun under his Sifu, Moy Yat, who did the same with his Sifu, Yip Man. Sifu Moy Sup Tung of the Austin school continues that tradition of hard work, dedicating himself to his Sifu, Moy Tung, and the Moy Yat Family by passing the pure, unchanged Ving Tsun system down to his students and grandstudents. Because of the dedication of Sifus, the Kung Fu that is taught today is the same as the Kung Fu that was taught to Moy Yat by Yip Man.

In order for the Ving Tsun system to continue to be passed down to future generations and preserved in its purest form, it is important to remember that the focus of our school should always be on the Kung Fu.

During the course of your training, you will encounter distractions. One of the most common is the temptation to socialize. Talking during class should be kept at an absolute minimum out of respect for the Ving Tsun system and to avoid disrupting the focus of other students. The Ving Tsun school is a place of study, not a social club, or a networking opportunity for students to build their own interests outside of Kung Fu. 

Another common distraction is the tendency of students who are young in their Kung Fu to compare their progress to others’. Seeing other students playing more advanced forms or working on chi sau can be exciting, but it can also distract by making you want to skip over your current training to “advance” through the system more rapidly. It’s good to be excited about what you’ll learn in the future, just be sure to stay focused on the Kung Fu that your Sifu wants you to work on at the moment. Everything else will come in time.

Remember that your Sifu is passing the Ving Tsun system down to you. The details that he teaches have been acquired over the course of decades of study with his Sifu and the Kung Fu family. It’s these details that combine to make up the Ving Tsun system; they’re very important and students should pay careful attention to them. If Sifu gives a detail in class, it should spread through the school like wildfire, with students putting effort into actively focusing on that detail until it becomes ingrained habit.

While details should be shared between students, it is never a student’s job to teach another student. Only Sifu, or people he has specifically trained to instruct the system, should be teaching. This ensures that the system is being honored and passed down pure and unchanged.

Do your best not to fall for any distractions you may encounter inside or outside the school; stay focused on your Ving Tsun. To show respect to all the dedicated work of your Sifu and the Sifus that came before him, all you need to do is show up to class on time, wear your uniform, pay attention to what’s going on around you, train consistently, and represent the school well. This Ving Tsun work ethic will serve you well in all areas of life.

Not Your Pretty Clickbait

It’s rare for women to train in martial arts. I know, because I’m a woman and I train in ving tsun kung fu. All I have to do is look around the room during class and I can tell you this is a male-dominated art.

Male students outnumber female students by at least ten to one. The ratio varies from school to school, but it’s never an even split, let alone a majority-female group of students. Which is odd, considering this system was invented by a woman and designed for a smaller, weaker person to effectively defend themselves against a bigger, strong attacker. The system uses physics and the geometry of body structure to effectively and efficiently overcome brute strength. Ving tsun is ideal for women to study. It has been for centuries. It stands to reason, then, that it’s not the kung fu that’s driving female students away. When we, as women, decide that we’d like to train in some form of martial art to become badass warrior goddesses capable of defending ourselves and others, we do our research. We dive into social media to see what’s out there. We watch tae kwon do videos from the Olympics, MMA fights, etc - tough, athletic, brutal stuff. Then we look up women training in kung fu, and the majority of the media we find falls into two categories: 1 - women fluttering ineffectual slapfight butterfly hands at indulgent men 2 - women with real skill being scolded and corrected by a dude every time they bring a hint of power Look. Women spend a lot of our lives being underestimated and condescended to. We know it when we see it. When you trot out your handful of female students like trained poodles to show off their kung-fu-like dance moves … When you square off with a woman who’s got some real structure and then chastise her every five seconds … When the entire tone of your female-focused media is “Aw, look at her go! Doing her li’l chi sau like she thinks she’s a real kung fu person!” … We know what we’re seeing. We can smell this kind of condescension a mile off - it’s familiar to us, y’see. It tells us everything we need to know about training kung fu: that we shouldn’t. That kung fu is a male space, and the only reason for women to train there is to smile pretty for the camera and not make the dudes feel bad about their own kung fu. That if we train at your school we’ll be patted on our pretty little heads and applauded just for being girls in a kung fu school, not for actually learning anything. Social media has magnified this problem. Post a picture or a video of a woman training - regardless of how good that training actually is - and you’re guaranteed a fresh flood of likes and shares and attention to your school’s online presence. And if that’s your entire goal, then congratulations. I guess you win. But if the goal is to actually show some respect to your art and train more women in good kung fu, then take a long look at the media you’re putting out there. Would you post that picture if it showed two dudes doing the exact same drill? If not, then don’t post it just because there’s a girl in it. Would that video have more kung fu and less mansplaining if it featured a lesson with a male student instead? Then either do the video again with a guy, or - better yet! - change how you teach your female students. Why are you sharing this picture or video at all? Is it because you’re proud of the hard work the female student has done, or because you just want the attention? Wouldn’t it get even more attention if you showed kickass women doing good kung fu? Don’t water down our kung fu. Train us like real students, represent us like you take women’s training seriously, and more of us will come train. Female students are not your school’s walking participation trophies. We are not your pretty clickbait. We are kung fu students and we just want to train.

Moy Yat Kung Fu Academy: Facebook & Instagram

Month 24: I Made It.

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}

{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12, Month 18}

Kung Fu Story Time:

I kicked a car.

In my defense, the car totally started it.

One fine morning, I’m walking my kids into their school (they’re in elementary, so they’re still young enough to enjoy being seen in public with their Mom), and I have one kid holding each of my hands. We’re about to cross the line of cars dropping off their respective kids, so I clock which car we’ll need to walk in front of and catch the driver’s eye. My hands are full, so I gesture with my head as if to say “Hey, we’re gonna walk past you”. The driver nods. The three of us start to walk in front of his car when it suddenly lurches forward and -

BAM!

- I shove both kids behind my back, plant one foot on the ground in backhorse stance and slam the other foot into the bumper of this guy’s car so hard the sound of it turns every head in the school drop-off line. I don’t even think about it; just get the kids safe and kick.

The driver is staring at me, all wide eyes and dropped jaw. I’m staring at him, my heel digging into his bumper like it wants to punch a hole through the engine block. Everyone, teachers and kids and other parents, is staring at both of us. Slowly, I take my foot off the car and hold the driver’s gaze with a hard glare while my kids and I finish crossing his path. Only once we’re safely past do I glance down to make sure I didn’t leave a dent on the bumper (nope, not that strong, more’s the pity).

As we walk away, my son asks, “Mommy, why did you kick that car?”

My daughter answers him, “Because that car wasn’t Being Safe, so she had to kick it to make it stop. Right, Mommy?”

“That’s right,” I reply, with all the quiet satisfaction of a Mama Bear polishing her claws.

~fin~

So, okay.

Maybe his foot slipped off the brake accidental-like.

Maybe he misinterpreted my eloquent head gesture to mean “Hey, you in the car, go ahead and drive by while my two young children and I stand here in the middle of a parking lot because that’s totally safe” and was honestly surprised when we walked in front of him.

Maybe he got swept up in the Lord of the Flies-esque entitlement warzone that is the elementary school drop-off line and tried to intimidate us in retaliation for the two-second delay we were causing him.

I’ll never know. We did not have a conversation. My inner Mama Bear was in charge at that moment, and she didn’t give a shit what the driver of the car that nearly ran over her two children had to say for himself. He seemed to sense that and wisely stayed in his car.

To be clear: I am not saying that kicking cars is a good strategy. It’s not. Don’t kick cars. There is nothing a wee human foot can do to stop a half-ton of moving metal. I’m very lucky the driver stopped.

What I am saying is that, once upon a time, my reflex would’ve been to grab my kids by the scruff and jump back. Maybe squawk a little. Definitely scurry out of the way and splutter with impotent terror and anger at our near-collision. But nowadays, when confronted with an incoming threat while my hands are full of my beloved offspring, my reflex is to calmly plant a solid horse stance and kick the bad thing as hard as I can till it stops coming at us. Apparently.

That is a fundamental change. A thorough rewiring of basic caveman-level functions. Somebody took the time to tinker with my Fight or Flight responses, bypassing Flight entirely and adding a complex option tree of aggressive defenses and crippling techniques to Fight. That somebody was me, and my Sifu, Simo, a small army of other students, and Grandmaster Moy Tung. And the time it took was two years.

I have completed the Two Year Training Program at Moy Yat Kung Fu Academy.

According to the structure of the Two Year Program, based on the consistent time and effort that I’ve put into my training, I am now a basic expert in Ving Tsun kung fu. Which is quite possibly the strangest sentence I’ve ever written about myself.

At first, it didn’t feel real. For a while now, I’ve been cruising on a wave of steady momentum in my training, only somewhat hampered by my wackadoo health. Somewhere along the line in the past 24 months, kung fu became less about physical therapy for my lupus-addled body and more about genuinely enjoying the training. I’d been happily trucking right along on my kung fu journey, so interested in the new bits of road beneath my feet that I missed the milestone as I passed it by.

Then Simo reminded me to stop wearing my dingy white training shirt (for 2nd year students) and start wearing my bright blue training shirt (for 3rd year students). I blinked. That couldn’t be right. No way that kind of time had passed. I mean, sure, I had been attending class three times a week, almost every week, for as many weeks as it took to add up to two years. And yeah, finishing the Two Year Program had always been the goal, but … surely that was still in some kind of hazily defined distant future, like always?

Grappling with my own warped kung fu space/time continuum, I slipped my old training slippers off of my feet, the ones I’d been wearing since my third week, ready to replace them with a brand new pair. I stopped. Stared at the soles of my slippers, old and new. There was all the proof I needed.

One hour of training (left) vs 500+ hours of training (right)

My old slippers had been through some tribulations. The seams were frayed, the insoles were shredded, and somehow the hard plastic soles had been worn paper thin by floors made of smooth wood and slate. Unless some mischievous fey creatures had been sneaking into my home at night and gnawing on my slippers, this damage was all done by me. By my training. For two years.

Well hot damn, I actually made it. Me. The middle-aged overweight chronically ill suburban mother of two. I did that.

Technically, I could stop here. Having completed the program, I have all of the basic tools of kung fu that will serve me well for the rest of my days even if I never set foot in another class again.

Physical Protection - While I have no desire to know if I could kick someone’s ass, I’m confident in my ability to keep someone from kicking mine.

Health - My mind and body have reconciled, and now my body is stronger than it’s ever been. Not in terms of raw power, so much as what it can endure and how easily it can recover. And when you’ve got a forever-disease that’ll drop-kick your body through the seven layers of hell just for funzies, that comes in pretty handy.

Patience With My Limits - Used-to-be, I’d rage against anything that tried to limit me, fling myself against barriers just because they dared to thwart me and then sulk when I couldn’t get past them because that’s kind of how barriers work. Now, though, I know what I can handle (a helluva lot) and what I can’t. I’ve figured out that if it’s bigger than what I can handle, it’s probably pretty damn big. I’ll either try again when I’m stronger, or just ask for help.

Doing Less Harm … - I’ve been hit really hard, many many times, by people who are much scarier than me. The world didn’t end. In fact, I kept going, knowing that if I got hit again I’d be just fine. Bruised, maybe, but fine. The calm that comes with that knowledge seeps into my everyday life. I’m nicer than I was two years ago. Not too nice (*cough-car kicker-cough*) but certainly more patient, more helpful. Less cantankerous now that I don’t feel like I have to gnash my teeth and swipe my claws at the whole world just to keep myself physically and emotionally safe.

… Taking Less Shit - All of those things - self-defense, health, knowing my limits, being at peace - add up to a person who can’t easily be pushed around. It’s hard to intimidate a woman who happily spends her free time learning the most efficient ways to make an attacker swallow their own blood.

All of that is my kung fu. Every student has their own kung fu. There are others like it, but this one is mine. A big shiny treasure trove of skill and experience that I’ve spent the past two years building, gathering bits from other students, catching pieces from instructors. My own personal hoard of calm badassery. I could stop my training right here, and for the rest of my life I would be a better person for what I’ve achieved.

But …

… why in the WORLD would I stop now?

Now, when I’m finally comfortable enough with my own kung fu to enjoy the work so much that I forget to compare myself to other students.

Now, when the voice in my head that used to be so loud when it told me how fat and slovenly and ridiculous I look can barely be heard over the roaring quiet of my kung fu.

Now, when I suddenly realize that the amount of effort I once spent scrambling for a white-knuckle grip on just one or two concepts in a class, I can now spend on absorbing multiple new details and integrating them into known techniques and flowing comfortably from one drill to the next because I’ve either done them before or I know the pieces that make them.

Because it turns out the more kung fu you have, the more kung fu you get. Which means that there is a potentially infinite world of kung fu out there, an endless landscape of wisdoms and humilities and epiphanies and tricky brutalities, all waiting for me to learn it … if only I have the will to keep training.

My choice is pretty clear.

Month 18: The Foundation

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12, Month 18}

Eighteen months ago, I walked out of my first kung fu class feeling like I’d just spent an hour trying to calculate pi to the last digit while composing a symphony in a sauna. Everything was new and weird and really hard to do and also I was sweaty.

But I went back for a second class because … well, for a lot of reasons that I could wax all poetical about for a few thousand words and paint myself and the school in all the noblest of lights, but if I’m being honest with myself and the internet, there was really only one reason: for a few blessed hours after I left the school, for the first time in years, my hands didn’t hurt.

One of the hallmark symptoms of my systemic lupus has always been painful inflammation of the knuckles and wrists. Turns out, if I do enough huen saus I can clear that up right quick. At least for a little while. For someone who despaired to find any non-pharmaceutical solutions to a hellscape cornucopia of ailments, being able to do this one thing to help myself was a game changer. Give anyone with chronic pain an “off” button for their hurting that doesn’t involve addiction or creepy side effects, and they’ll happily keep pushing it.

So I kept going to class. Kept chasing that temporary relief from my forever illness because instant gratification is kind of my thing. And somewhere along the line, almost accidentally, I built up my kung fu.

And that’s the thing. The kung fu. When I first started training, I heard folks talk about kung fu like it was some kind of quantifiable substance. Someone could have a lot of it, or not enough. It made no sense to me. They were using the wrong kind of noun. Kung fu is a martial art, a philosophy, not an object. They might as well be talking about trading handfuls of impressionism or pieces of epiphany.

Which is, of course, exactly what we do.

Pictured: a staggeringly wide range of kung fu quantities.
(hint: I'm the sweaty, tired, disheveled one. ... no, the other one ... no, the other other one...)

Kung fu is a thing. Everyone has their own kung fu that they make for themselves. Nobody else can make it for you. Students can exchange it back and forth. Sifu can give bits of it that seem like pebbles when they leave his hands but grow to boulders by the time they reach mine. I don’t know how to explain it better than that without touching hands with you.

Over the past year and a half, without really meaning to, I’ve developed my kung fu. I’m not sure what anyone else’s kung fu looks like to them, but mine looks like less pain in my life.

... Like hands that can grip a coffee cup.

... Like getting knocked flat on my ass by injuries or setbacks, and having not only the desire to overcome them, but (finally) also having the physical ability.

... Like not being forced to take a nap every single day.

... Like slowly digging, inch by hard-earned inch, a well of stamina that can handle a weekend’s intense training workshop or a serious bout of illness without running dry.

... Like walking without a limp.

... Like not starting half of my days wondering if I’ll plummet through a Series Of Unfortunate Medical Events and find myself in a hospital by bedtime.

... Like a patient friend, on those days when I’m too sick to train, waiting quietly nearby with no judgement in its steady presence, just a readiness to get back to work as soon as I’m able.

Whatever else my kung fu may be - self confidence, personal safety, strength - it is, above all of that, the thing that has allowed me to regain some control over my health.

Not complete control, of course. Never that. No lupus patient dares to dream quite that big. But ...

After eighteen months of training, my kung fu is the solid foundation that I’ve built beneath my feet, layer upon layer of effort and focus and sweat, that makes sure that when my house of cards does inevitably come tumbling down … it doesn’t tumble quite so far.

2016 Women's Workshop: A Mighty Family

3:30am - Scramble to shush my alarm before it wakes anyone else. My husband and kids aren’t crazy enough to be getting up this early; that’s all me. I have this morning planned down to the minute. Hell, I’ve been preparing for this morning for weeks, resting and eating right and generally pouring on as much self-care as I possibly can to ensure that my madcap illness will let me do all the things I want to do for the next three days. This is my first time ever travelling out of state for a Kung Fu workshop, y’see, and I’m determined to make sure everything goes right. I jump into the world’s fastest shower, scoop up my pre-packed bags, and slip out the door.

4:15am - Pull up to Simo’s house. I don’t even have time to wonder if I should knock or text to let her know I’m there before she’s opening the passenger door and climbing in. Good, no precious seconds lost. We cruise through the sparse traffic of a barely conscious city, on our way to the airport to meet the other ladies with whom we’ll be traveling. I’m all over my phone, navigation and clock, are we where we should be at this moment? Are we ahead of schedule? I get a little smug about how well it’s all going.

4:45am - Score a princess parking spot in the airport’s long-term lot and hustle to catch the little bus that’ll take us to the terminal. I check that I’ve got all my bags as the bus trundles away from the parking lot. Pretty sure we’re exactly on schedule to catch our flight, but probably I should double check the time.

4:55am - Realize that I left my stupid phone in my stupid car.

Looking back, I can pinpoint this as the first of many (many, many) kung fu lessons of the weekend. I could either pitch a hissyfit and burn a bunch of energy that my sickly self really couldn’t spare on something that would achieve nothing more than making everyone’s life difficult, OR ... I could just take a breath, laugh, and go with the flow of fate. Honestly, I was about to fly 1400 miles away from home to learn Ving Tsun from Grandmaster Moy Tung … what on Earth did I need my phone for? Was I gonna live-tweet about the workshop? Scroll through some Tumblr memes in between rounds of tsui mah? Pffft.

So I caught Simo’s eye. Told her about my phone. We got some dirty looks from the other travellers on the bus - apparently nobody laughs in a pre-dawn airport. Some folks just don’t appreciate irony.

Hours blended together and the passage of minutes became meaningless. For the next three days, we drifted on the tides of kung fu in a strange new world where training, learning, working together, laughing, more training, basically everything … is more important than such mundane details as sleep or the concept of time.

Even the weather seemed uncommitted to any particularly rigid schedule. The wind that howled in over the Atlantic brought everything from glorious sunshine to angry slate-colored clouds and swirls of this mysterious white substance that I would later be assured was, in fact, snow. In April. In a place with “Beach” in its name.

Luckily, the extended kung fu family that gathered for the workshop all banded together to get done whatever needed doing. We fell into an easy rhythm of training, working together, gathering groceries and securing lodging and, yes, making an urgent run to Target for some extra layers of clothes for those of us (me) who were too Texas to handle the weather (I am a delicate flower).

And … look, I don’t like many people. I’m a curmudgeonly sort by nature, though mostly it’s bluster to cover introversion and a sometimes-crippling shyness, so meeting new folks stresses me out and makes me cranky. But there was something about this place, something about all of these women coming together from all over the country, that bypassed my attitude problems completely. We were all there with the same goal in mind: to train, and train hard. To listen and learn and sweat and pass out and get up to do it all over again without even once complaining because we had all moved our own personal mountains to be there.

It’s impossible not to like people under those circumstances. Or, at least, it was for me.

The family that plays forms together, spends time together without talking to each other, is totally my kind of family.

This was a workshop just for women - the only menfolk on that beach were Sigung Moy Tung and his baby boy (I heard that a few of Sigung’s male students were around, helping from behind the scenes like magical elves to keep things flowing smoothly, but I never saw them) - so the entire weekend had its own unique energy. Maybe it’s the same with any all-ladies athletic type thing. Maybe any large group of combat-trained women would gather together this harmoniously. I wouldn’t know; I avoid the hell out of crowds and my most athletic pursuits in the past couple of decades have been marathons of the Doctor Who variety.

What I do know … what I learned from my brain all the way down to my bones over the course of the weekend … is that the women of this Ving Tsun Kung Fu family are a force to be reckoned with.

It's not every day you get to watch a very nice lady put her fist through your Simo's chest.

Ving Tsun women are strong and they know it. But not once in the hours upon hours of training did I encounter so much as a flicker of competitiveness. We tested each other, pushed each other’s limits, but it was never about winning or proving who was stronger. The only person I felt the need to compete with was myself, and I kicked my carcass all over that floor. So yeah, I won, but I also lost. Which is what learning feels like.

Ving Tsun women can fuss and laugh and holler and sing as much as they like, each to her own desires, but when it comes down to violence we all fall silent. Focused. For hours on end, the only sounds in a room full of women was the shuffling of kung fu slippers across slate floors, the rustling of cloth, and the occasional dull thump of impact.

In those long stretches of kinetic silence, I found myself imagining how eerie it would be for an attacker to find themselves dealing with a victim who, instead of screaming or flailing, steps forward with all the quiet inevitable aggression of gravity and every intention to, as Sigung put it, “do everything you can to make them swallow blood”.

Ving Tsun women can drive through five hours of blizzard, in the middle of the night, in solid flurries of silver-dollar-sized snowflakes, at 20 mph in darkest rural Ohio to get to a VT workshop. Some of the ladies at this workshop did exactly that, and stepped right into training the moment they arrived. Luggage still in the car, a long night’s horrible road behind them, and they were doing forms with the rest of us.

Because to a Ving Tsun student fatigue is not an obstacle, it’s a training tool. The more exhausted the muscles, the more solid the structure had to be. All of us survived for days on single-digit hours of sleep grabbed in bits and pieces on whatever horizontal surface happened to be available. We trained until we were tired and then we kept training until tired was a distant unlamented memory.

When midnight rolled around on the last night, Simo, the other Texas ladies, and I looked at the handful of hours stretching between us and when our flight was scheduled to leave and had a decision to make. We could either take a tiny, unsatisfying nap followed by the epic struggle to be awake enough to travel, OR … we could just keep training through the night until it was time to leave. So we trained. Because duh.

A single day in the life of this workshop consisted of …

... absorbing every ounce of education from Sigung Moy Tung that we could,

... dozens of siu nim tao played in slow, deliberate unison like some kind of epic performance poetry,

... chasing giggling babies,

... hours of clashing in rows of chi sao like the world’s quietest mosh pit,

... throwing literally thousands of punches,

... cooking vats of pasta and from-scratch marinara sauce, chopping piles of fresh salad, enough to feed the entire small ravenous army of us,

... taking brutal powerwalks on a beach relentlessly sandblasted with frigid gale-force winds,

... comparing notes on our training experiences,

... laughing together,

... clocking enough hours of touching hands to equal at least month of regular training,

... taking care of each other so that we can wollop the breath out of each other all over again,

... and maybe a nap. Maybe.

The women of this Ving Tsun Kung Fu family are a mighty tribe. And I’m honored to be counted as one of them.

Been there, done that, proudly wear the t-shirt.

A brief word about training with Grandmaster Moy Tung:

There is nothing else like it. Because there is no one else like Sigung Moy Tung. Over the course of this weekend, I started to understand why the term is “martial artist”. Because that level of interpretation, of dedicating one’s life fully to the study, of never losing the joy of discovering new applications of technique, of becoming so brimming-over full of knowledge that it has to spill over and be shared with students who will know its value … that is Art.

This workshop was an immersive experience. Jump into the kung fu pool and start swimming. Lessons were everywhere, in everything we did, around every corner. That’s why we only slept when we absolutely had to - when those lessons are being taught by Grandmaster Moy Tung, you really don’t want to be caught napping. You’ll miss something awesome.