‘Endless grinding will make a sword treasured’
The last bastion of Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis style is on the ninth floor of a nondescript gray building in Kowloon’s Mong Kok neighborhood — an area known for its street food, cheap shopping, brothels and occasional triad fights.
On a recent Wednesday, 13 barefoot students scuttled across a vinyl floor among boxes of promotional calendars and polythene wrapped unicorn masks. Fixed to the wall was a rack holding swords, staffs, and a spear of the kind used in the elaborate, twirling, Plum Blossom routine. On another wall, extractor fans sucked in grilled pork fumes from the apartment next door, instead of fresh air.
Master Li Tin-loy walked among his acolytes in a frog-button shirt. The sifu used a wooden staff to tap against straining calves and quads. Then he laid it on a fold-out table while he made minute adjustments to the rotation of wrists, or corrected the protrusion of knuckles.
When not attending to his students, Li — a former police officer — talked about the common origin of the various praying mantis styles. “One day there was a monk that noticed a fight between a mantis and a bird. The mantis won and he was wondering how and why,” he tells TIME. “Later on he caught a mantis and was just observing the way that they fight, the way they interact and then slowly developed a style based on its movements.”
Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis is centered around a few seemingly simple sets of those movements. At Li’s gym, there are no flying kicks or Bruce Lee–style, falsetto yowls. Instead, there is the dull, repetitive whack of shin or elbow or fist on flesh, among which Li moves with a mantis’ coiled tension. Mastery comes through repetition and refinement. But since each movement has — to practitioners — infinite depth, mastery can be a long process. It takes five to six years of training before a student is even considered perfunctory.
The grandmaster of the Tung Kong Chow Ka, Lau Shui, moved to Hong Kong in the early part of the last century. Even then, and especially to a new arrival from Qing dynasty China, Hong Kong’s urban environment would have seemed fantastically alien. In the exciting, hothouse atmosphere of a foreign enclave, Lau broke away from the conservative attitudes surrounding martial arts and began teaching a form of praying mantis style to women. It was an astonishing act at a time when respectable Chinese females still thought it vaguely indecent to be seen outside of the home — but he also lost none of his toughness. Among his disciples was Ip Shui, whose feet the grandmaster would scorch with the bowl of his pipe to toughen them up.
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Tang Ming Tung—International Guoshu Association
Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis Master Li Tin-loy performs a set at a park in Hong Kong in 2016
Ip eventually proved worthy of carrying on the lineage, and taught Li for more than a decade, subjecting him to the same sort of arduous physical punishment. To this day, Li will invite an interlocutor to grip his neck and give it a squeeze. Astonishingly, nothing gives. It’s as if the years have grown him an invisible exoskeleton.
Between Li and Ip, and Ip and Lau, there was the close relationship between student and master of the kind once integral to the transmission of kung fu. Historically, students would travel for miles, and endure all sorts of privations, to find a master like Li, but the sifu acknowledges that such dedication today is a rarity. “The new generation doesn’t seem to be interested in learning this kind of cultural heritage — mainly because [they find it] really hard work and really boring,” he tells TIME.
There’s a Chinese adage he likes to quote to his followers: “Endless grinding will make a sword treasured, in the same way that plum blossoms acquire their scent after a bitter winter.” Nevertheless, his fear is that none among the new generation will be sufficiently dedicated to carry the lineage.
In Wo Hang, Lee shares the worry when it comes to the future of his Jiangxi Bamboo Forest Praying Mantis style. “When you start teaching without having picked up the whole package, there’s a bit less there,” Lee says. “The kung fu gets passed on again but less and less gets inherited, until finally it’s lost.”
‘A conversation between the past and the present’
The final keepers of Praying Mantis kung fu may not even be people but instead a bank of quietly humming servers at Hong Kong’s City University — located in the same Kowloon Tong neighborhood where Bruce Lee was raised, educated, and, in 1973, died.
Here, Professor Sarah Kenderdine (a specialist in creating interactive and immersive museum exhibits) and Professor Jeffrey Shaw (a leading figure in creating art from new forms of media) have been collaborating with the International Guoshu Association on what Shaw calls “a conversation between the past and the present.”
Using the same sort of motion-capture sensors employed by video-game developers, 1000-frames-per-second cameras and virtual-reality projections, this project at City University aims to record each of Hong Kong’s disappearing kung fu styles with digital accuracy before their last masters retire, become infirm or pass away.
On a recent Tuesday, Li performed the fundamental movement groups of Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern Praying Mantis in a black-walled room in Kowloon. The room was equipped with scores of scaffold-mounted video cameras. Dressed entirely in black and with almost 100 motion-capture sensors suckered to his body and head the sifu looked more insectoid than ever.
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Tobias Gremmler for City University of Hong Kong.
Still from video of motion visualization at 300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu exhibit at City University of Hong Kong.
Shaw tells TIME that data taken from the recordings of Li will be fed into various installations, which are currently displayed in an exhibition entitled 300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu at the university’s School of Creative Media. One of the displays recreates a typical training hall: there is the scent of incense, information on Chinese medicines, and recordings of the thumps and thuds made at Li’s Mong Kok studio. Another display called “Re-Actor” shows different perspectives of a martial artist thrusting and whirling a spear. When Shaw presses a button on a panel in front of the display, it reveals the shapes of movements through space and time, or the traces left by the paths of the martial artist’s limbs and weapons.
So far, around 40 kung fu styles have been recorded by Shaw, Kenderdine and their team, including Jiangxi Bamboo Forest, Tung Kong Chow Ka Southern, and Iron Ox. The hope is that the work will strengthen the argument for the creation of an institute for Chinese martial studies in Hong Kong, which, Chao says, is the surest way to ensure that local forms of kung fu will be preserved.
For now, the hope is that City University’s work will create a renewed interest in kung fu, attracting the attention of young, digital-savvy Hong Kongers at a time when a desire for greater autonomy or even independence from China — which resumed sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997 — has forced many here to define and isolate a uniquely Hong Kong culture as opposed to a generically Chinese one.
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Back in 1962, a renowned Bamboo Forest sifu called Wong Yuk-kwong came to Wo Hang village in the New Territories. That was the summer 9-year-old Lee was mesmerized by dancing unicorns, and when he learned the visiting sifu also practiced the unicorn dance he resolved to become a disciple.
But Lee’s family was poor and couldn’t afford the monthly tuition, which worked out, in those days, to the local equivalent of $1.70. Instead he would stand at the edges of the classes. Every evening, alone, he would then practice the movements he had seen. Eventually, noting the boy’s dedication, the master consented to take him on as his disciple, waiving training fees and asking only that he brew him a pot of tea every evening.
Fifty-four years later, things are brewing once again for Lee, and for Praying Mantis kung fu.
—With reporting by Kevin Lui / Hong Kong