(pt. 2)
Wing Chun Comes to Hong Kong
A few minutes of careful consideration will reveal that the foundations of Wing Chun’s much later success were laid with Ip Man’s immigration to Hong Kong in 1949. While he had some previous teaching experience during WWII, Ip Man never really considered himself to be a “professional” martial artist. As a young man he had been supported by his family’s wealth, and later he was employed as the head of a plainclothes detectives unit in the Foshan police force. While he was fascinated with Wing Chun and studied it intently he had never sought to become a “Sifu,” leaving the majority of the instruction that happened in the local area to others.
In 1949 Ip Man arrived as a refugee in Hong Kong following the Communist take-over of Guangdong. Due to the unexpected closure of the border he found himself living alone, without his immediate family or any means of economic support, at exactly the time of life when most people are thinking about retiring. After taking some time to collect himself and talk things over with some friends (the most important of which were probably Lee Man of the Restaurant Worker’s Union and Chan Tau, a prominent local martial artist) Ip Man decided to formally take up the mantle of Sifu and to open his own Wing Chun school.
Of course there were immediate challenges. The student body that he worked with in the early years of his career in Hong Kong was comprised of working class individuals who often lacked an extensive education. They were also highly mobile (moving rapidly from one restaurant job to the next) and retention appears to have been a problem.
While the composition of Ip Man’s student base would change substantially over the next decade, these same two limiting factors remained a constant. Many of the young students who began to patronize Ip Man later in the 1950s and early 1960s (individuals like Hawkins Cheung, Bruce Lee and Duncan Leung) were from wealthy families. But they had a western style education and tended to lack a deep understanding of traditional Chinese philosophy. And while they did not have to follow service jobs around the city, like all young people, they craved excitement and progress.
Faced with serious retention problems in his first few years of teaching Ip Man appears to have begun a systemic review of how Wing Chun was presented to students in what was a rapidly modernizing urban environment. I think it is safe to say that we all know what happened next. It’s a story that has been recounted many times. Increasingly the old master moved away from using traditional philosophical concepts (including both the five elements and the eight directions) in the explanation and teaching of his system. He dropped many of the “sayings” or rhymes that usually accompany postures in the Chinese martial arts. In their place he adopted simple explanations that would be accessible to modern students with a western education.
Nor were all of the changes confined to how the system was discussed. The actual methods of training were also modified. Extensive stance work and basic drills had been common in Foshan era Wing Chun. Ip Man retained the traditional forms, but devoted most of the class time to drilling applications, Chi Sao (sticking hands) and other sensitivity exercises. This approach proved to be more dynamic, and it forced him to move critical discussions of punching, intercepting, angles and structure right to the very forefront of the teaching process. As a result Ip Man discovered that his students were both more likely to remain interested in the material, and to do better when they met other amateur martial artists in the challenge matches that dominated much of Hong Kong’s youth subculture in the 1950s and 1960s. These early successes brought more young people into the system.
It is worth pointing out that while Ip Man did much to reform the way the Wing Chun system was taught and understood, he may have bristled at the suggestion that he was primarily a “modernizer” or a “reformer.” He quite consciously cultivated the air of a traditional Confucian gentleman.
As such Ip Man never taught any western students, and he probably never considered how the system he had sculpted would fair in the global marketplace. Rather he was responding to the demands of his immediate environment. In so doing he brought about a number of reforms that would make it much easier for westerners to absorb this style in the future, but that was an unintended consequence of what he was actually attempting to do.
So to recap, how did this happen? We need to start by thinking about geography. Or maybe we should be even more specific and say “urbanization.” Globalization is the process by which goods, ideas, information and people cross state boundaries. But this sort of trade does not happen everywhere and all at once. Instead it tends to move along certain trade routes and to be concentrated in a handful of urban marketplaces where goods are traded, repackaged and distributed throughout a region. Social scientist have known for a long time that goods, institutions, ideas and even martial arts schools tend to move through the international system most efficiently if they are found in close proximity to a major urban area along an important trade route.
This means that the martial arts that managed to make it to Hong Kong and Taiwan prior to 1950 had a much better chance of slipping into the global system than even very popular and widespread arts that were confined to less connected areas (like the various schools of Emei Boxing in Szechuan, or Red Fist Boxing in Henan.) Realistically speaking, southern arts like Wing Chun, Choy Li Fut, Southern Mantis and White Eyebrow survived as well as they did precisely because some of their students had connections in Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora, and were able to move their traditional bodies of knowledge from relatively isolated to economically interconnected areas.
Still, this observation about the importance of geography raises other questions. Why do more people study Wing Chun and Hung Gar (two classic styles from the Pearl River Delta) than Southern Mantis and White Eyebrow (two more wonderful styles from the same general area)? All of these styles had geography working in their favor? All of them had important masters end up in Hong Kong or the West?
-BY BENJUDKINS
