Of all my martial research, the iron crotch of Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng is the funniest. I mean that both as in "funny ha ha" and in "funny strange." It's "funny ha ha" because crotches are intrinsically funny. Don't ask me why. They just are. It's "funny strange" because no one else I know tows trucks with their genitals. What's more, Tu is the only person who has asked me to kick him in the crotch. A lot of masters ask me to strike them, but nobody ever just stood there and invited me to take a direct shot at their crotch. I kicked him several times too. It was impressive. And funny, because kicks to the crotch are intrinsically funny too. Again, don't ask me why. It's not so funny on the receiving end, but it can be hilarious when it happens to others. That's just the way things are.

All fun aside, Grandmaster Tu is an exceptional master once you get past his penis fu. Among his many talents, he's well-trained in Taoist shamanism. For the Chinese New Year of the Fire Dog, he performed a special ceremony to bring good feng shui to our Kung Fu Tai Chi production office building and Tiger Claw headquarters, right here in Fremont, CA. Ever wonder what it's like to work at Kung Fu Tai Chi? Here's a little peek behind our bamboo screen.

We have a special brand of cross-cultural craziness here, reflective of our San Francisco Bay Area style. The Chinese dubbed San Francisco "Gum Shan" or the "gold mountain." They immigrated here in hordes and continue to come. Our Chinese Diaspora is colossal, exemplified by the annual San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. Today, there's even a plethora of Chinese strip malls scattered throughout the surrounding suburbs. Many of them are monstrous. This Mecca of Chinese culture is home to more kung fu masters than anywhere else in America, and their numbers continue to grow. It's great for Kung Fu Tai Chi.

Tiger Claw is more pan-Asian because it caters to all styles of martial arts. The bulk of our staff, including the Oh family (the founders and bosses here) are immigrants, as are many of our visitors, guests and customers. In our distinctly American, multihued mix, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish are spoken here as much as, if not more than, English. This elicits plenty of funny episodes. The cross-cultural misunderstandings of our daily workdays would make great grist for a sitcom. Just ask Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, TV's first intercultural pioneers. If we were a sitcom, we could call it "I Love Tiger Claw."

I Love Tiger Claw: Episode One: Moxa Madness
Here's how the pilot episode of I Love Tiger Claw might go. Our publisher, Gigi Oh, likes to burn moxa in the office whenever someone is feeling ill. Moxa, or more technically, Artemisia Moxa, is used as a cautery in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). That means it's burned to stimulate acupoints, sometimes by just heating them, other times by burning flesh. Moxa is a relative of wormwood and mugwort ? some say it is mugwort (Artemisia Vulgaris) but I'm no botanist and am unclear on the exact distinctions. Mugwort is found worldwide. It's used in herbal medicines not only by TCM, but by Japanese, Europeans and Native Americans. Some Native Americans smoke it for its psychedelic properties, utilizing this ritual as a doorway for shamanic journeys. Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium) is the source of thujone, the vital ingredient in absinthe, the psychotropic liquor that fuelled the impressionist era. It's in the bible too, in REV 8:10-11, and I quote: "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." This prophesy is frequently cited since Chernobyl is the Russian word for wormwood. I once experimented with Absinthe because it's legal in some places outside America. It was disastrous. I projectile vomited all night. It was fun until the vomiting started.

Sorry, was that too much setup for our sitcom? That's the problem with translating Chinese culture. There's always too much back story and if you let yourself get caught up in it, your writing turns to vomit. I warn our freelance writers about this all the time. Some still submit vomit which I must reject like a stale shot of Absinthe. Let's get back to that episode.

So, in our pilot, Gigi notices that Patrick (AKA Design Sifu) is sick. Patrick comes in coughing a lot, so Gigi sparks some moxa to rid the office of those nasty feng shui cooties. There's nothing like more smoke for a cough. The warehouse guys quickly catch a whiff of the pungent burning herb. Now moxa has an earthy aroma that could be mistaken for pot ? not high-grade Californian pot, but maybe brown Mexican weed ? and our warehouse is run by a Mexican soccer team. They get rather agitated about the odor and narc on us to our president, Thomas Oh (Gigi's husband). Mr. Oh charges over to our department in a huff, just in time to see Patrick stumble coughing out of our production office, followed by billows of heady moxa smoke. Behind Patrick is Gigi, singing giddily at the top of her lungs while working, as she's prone to do. Mr. Oh shouts, "What's going on here?! Gigi! You got some 'splainin' to do!" Cue the laugh track and then go to commercial.

The funny thing is, this isn't a sitcom, it's reality TV. That episode really happened here, although I've embellished it for our "pilot." We all had a great laugh about it at the end, just like Ricky and Lucy always did. We're still not happy about those warehouse guys narcing on us, just on general principle, but we'll get even someday.

Working for Tiger Claw is cross-cultural chaos incarnate. With increasing globalization, culture clashes are rising within many companies, so it's best to have a sense of humor about it. Ours is particularly odd because we add the magical powers of martial arts to the mix. Then it gets really funny - funny like crotches are funny ? which brings us back to our special guest for this week's episode, Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng.

I Love Tiger Claw: Episode Two: The Wrong Door
The Tiger Claw building lies on Encyclopedia Circle, an industrial area in the East Bay city of Fremont, California. The building was purchased by the Oh's in the late nineties. Originally, they were looking to buy the building right next to us, on the corner of the circle. Corner of the circle, you ask? Despite our street name, Encyclopedia is really a square. Actually, it's more like a "q" as in "qi." A circle would have been better since feng shui abhors corners. Corners are often deemed as points of poor feng shui. True to form, we've seen several companies go through that corner building. There's something funny about it. It's not stable. No doubt it's bad feng shui.

This building we're in now has better feng shui, but not optimal. Naturally, the best feng shui real estate is the most expensive and those plots are gobbled up by major computer companies in our area. So we settled for this building, despite some outstanding feng shui issues. The biggest problem was with our front door. Our lobby is another poor feng shui point, only this one is made of glass instead of asphalt. Several feng shui masters noted the problems and prescribed remodeling the lobby. Designing lobbies is a major market for feng shui masters. It was an extensive project, but in Asian culture, the lobby is critical. A lobby is like the "face" of the house and ours needed an Extreme Makeover.

There was something "unlucky" about the position for our new door, so it was re-hung at a more auspicious angle. A special frame was constructed so the door is not flush with the wall. Instead, it's permanently askew. This is one of those subtle architectural adjustments that only feng shui experts notice. The rest of us are totally oblivious. This new front door, the askew one, was the old side door. It used to be covered with display racks, serving more as a wall than a door. The old front door, which faces our parking lot, was sealed up. Now our customers and guests have to go around the corner to enter by the new front door. Many still try to use the old door now and again, even though we put a huge arrow over it to redirect traffic. Our receptionist finds that funny. So much for martial artists being aware of their surroundings (in truth, I made the mistake once too). Along with the door, the entire lobby was rearranged. A new faux wood floor was installed. The counter was moved. All the display shelves were rearranged. Even the employee access way to the back office was changed with the installation of a new, more strategic, door. The old employee entryway was sealed.

In feng shui, there's significance to everything. The tiger paraphernalia (after all, in I Love Tiger Claw, our sets are adorned with tiger d?cor) had to be balanced with dragons, and they had to be looking in the right direction. All weapons had to face the right direction too. That's based on sound tactical practice, not just some woo-woo new-age feng shui. I'm always amazed how many martial artists are insensitive to the proper way to display swords. I even co-authored The Feng Shui of Sword Display: A Place to Hang Your Sword with our resident feng shui master Wilson Sun and Gigi the moxahead, just to address this situation. Improper weapon display demonstrates a blatant lack of understanding of swords as weapons. A weapon near the door is not just decoration. It serves symbolically, and sometimes literally, as home defense. Consequently, it's more advantageous to have the sharp part pointing out towards anyone coming in. The "logic" for feng shui weapon display is strictly strategic.

After all the reconstruction and rearranging, a door opening ceremony was in order, and the grandmaster of iron crotch was eager to help. An auspicious date was chosen: Monday, February 6th, Bob Marley's birthday and the day after Jackie Chan co-starred with a can of diet soda on a Superbowl commercial.

Enter the Iron Crotch
There are universal principles in the universe. "Crotches are funny" is one such universal. "Mondays suck" is another. A case in point was that Monday after the Superbowl. For months, our department had been slammed. Publishing Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine and KungFuMagazine.com is only a small portion of what we do here. Our department is formally known as TC Media, International; we also design tournament posters and flyers, medals, plaques and awards, logos for schools, websites, anything you can imagine in the martial arts that might be graphic. We even do some jobs outside the martial world. Ever since the holidays, our department had been overwhelmed by projects and deadlines. So you can imagine our delight when we discovered our graphics programs wouldn't open on that post-Superbowl Monday.

Here was the "Mondays suck" principle in action. Nothing moves in our office without our graphics programs, and with all the deadlines, our crew was scrambling to figure out why the crash and how to correct it, just to get the day started. As for me, I spend Monday mornings digging my way out from under the ton of email we accumulate over the weekend. My email provider had been buggy for weeks. It wasn't displaying previews anymore, despite repeated attempts to activate the preview window function. Opening every email added a half-minute or so to each one, which might not sound like much until you consider that there can be hundreds of emails waiting for me after a busy weekend. This "auspicious" Monday sucked even more than most Mondays do.

So we were all very eager to see what Grandmaster Tu had up his sleeve for the new door blessing. It was a chance to escape our compounding Monday hassles and to get back to the kind of work we all enjoyed most. Outside our fluorescent-lit building, the day was sparkling, rare for that time of year, cooled by a slight southeastern breeze. The sun was shining and the weather was sweet. Outside our lobby, Tu had hung red paper bearing mystic calligraphy on the door frame. A table of offerings was set up, full of candied treats and fresh fruit: oranges, apples, pears, pineapples and other goodies. Incense was stacked near a large crucible.

As the ritual drew near, I badgered our Tiger Claw representative, Andy Ching, about breaking one of our lions out of stock for a lion dance. Andy is a Fut Gar man from Hawaii, and they're known for their lion dance. I had done some lion dancing back in the day too, so I found the idea of Andy and I partnering under a lion amusing. I even offered to be Andy's lion butt, just for kicks. But Andy was smart. He deflected my ruse by correctly noting that we didn't have an "awakened" lion. Lions have to be awakened with a special blessing ritual, and one ritual was enough for the day. That was fine. In truth, I had no real desire to be Andy's butt.

As Patrick was snapping shots for posterity with our digital camera, he noticed something funny. An odd flash kept appearing in the shots. It looked like a beam of light, a lens flare perhaps, but it was present in many of the photos he took, even from different angles to the sun. Even though we have a fully-loaded permanent photo studio here, we often shoot outside because you just can't beat natural light; so we've shot in our parking lot many a time. We never caught a flash like this before. It looked just like ectoplasm photographs that ghost hunters snap. Was it qi? Was Patrick able to photograph the cosmic qi being generated by this ritual? You can look at the shots yourself and be the judge.

Tu needed twelve assistants, one representing each animal of the Chinese zodiac, to volunteer. A few employees declined ? ironically, two of our Chinese immigrants. Jason, our videographer, had recently lost a family member, so he was not permitted to participate. Kevin, being Christian, didn't participate either. The rest of us lit incense and bowed. Then we were told to walk through the door, stomping our feet, clapping our hands, and chanting "Wang! Wang! Wang! Wang!" The character for "wang" combines the radicals for sun (ri) and king (wang) to mean prosperous, flourishing, or vigorous. A funny thing happens when you get a group of people together and make them stomp, clap and chant. Eventually, inevitably, they all fall into a rhythm. Chaos can create order. It's a paradoxical sub-principle of entropy. If everything succumbs to entropy, which is to say that orderly things fall into disorder, then entropy itself must succumb to entropy. Even disorder breaks down, and when that happens, order emerges. For a moment, there was no separation between us all, cross-cultural or otherwise. We all chanted in unison.

Grandmaster Tu led Gigi and Thomas in a special ritual offering. There was a lot of burning of paper and incense, as well as the sprinkling of liquor and rice akin to christening, for lack of a better term. When it was all over, we were told to eat the fruit and candy. Then, rather reluctantly, we went back to our office like donkeys trudging back down into the salt mine.

Here's where it gets real funny as in "funny strange." As if by magic, our graphic programs were back online. My email was fixed too. And we even found our lupe (a special magnifying glass used in graphic arts), which had gone missing for months. I'm generally pretty skeptical about such things, but the timing was as undeniable as it was uncanny. Even Gigi, who is a firm believer in Grandmaster Tu's powers, was taken aback. Maybe we shouldn't model our sitcom on I Love Lucy after all. Maybe we should model it on the Twilight Zone. The Tiger Claw Zone. Iron crotch would fit in there quite snugly, I imagine.

The Tiger Claw Zone
There's been a funny trend towards "reality" martial arts lately, clearly fallout from the "reality" TV fad. Reality martial arts are reductionist. Strip the arts down only to what works on the street, wherever that might be. Mix up the styles into a simple tangle of combat methods proven effective by ring fighters. Forsake tradition for what works. I'm sure anyone from that camp scoffs at the idea of both iron crotch and feng shui.

While I totally agree that martial arts should be genuine and authentic (and I love to watch a good cage match), realists do us a tremendous disservice by disregarding what might be for what is. If, in our dogged quest for reality, we discard imagination, then the martial arts will soon devolve into little more than a gladiatorial circus. To think outside the box, we must think outside the ring.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Tiger Claw Zone."

Grandmaster Tu, iron crotch, and feng shui shamanism are but a few residents of the Tiger Claw Zone, of martial arts outside the ring and beyond the norm. This tangential area provides some redemption for the medieval practice of martial arts. There's never been any "real" threat to "reality" fighting. Ring matches have been with us since the time of Christ and will no doubt continue until the Apocalypse. Mankind will always fight and that nature will always keep the martial arts "real" on some level. Our fascination with gladiatorial matches is another universal. Sadly, the preservation of tradition is not.

Now that we are centuries into the gun age, all unarmed fighters grapple with the reality of firearms, chemical weapons like mace, and a vast array of modern personal weapons. Even those stripped-down ring techniques falter when facing a firearm. If an assailant knows the first thing about gunplay, you'll never get close enough to use that fancy disarming technique. What's more, it's always foolish to disregard the lessons of tradition, because embedded in tradition is history. Don't forget your history. Know your destiny. Now is not the time for reductionist thinking in the martial arts. To survive into the new millennium, martial arts must be expansive.

Our most stalwart example of expansive thinking is the use of tai chi as a complementary therapy for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's or AIDS. While the traditional martial arts have always boasted healing properties, it's unlikely that our martial forefathers could ever have conceived of AIDS, much less imagined that martial arts might be useful as a therapy. However, many of the afflicted already benefit from this imaginative application, and future generations stand to gain even more. So by shrinking the boundaries of martial arts to the ring itself, we not only offend our ancestors, we cheat our children.

Tu's iron crotch feng shui no doubt strikes some readers as beyond funny. For many realists, I'm sure it seems downright preposterous. But in this land of shadow and substance, of things and ideas, this place we call the Tiger Claw Zone, it's best to keep an open mind. Here at Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine, we don't question the funny stuff as long as our graphic programs keep running. We'll keep it real. But we'll also continue our journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of the imagination.

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About Gene Ching :
Written by Gene Ching for KUNGFUMAGAZINE.COM

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