Sunday November 25, 2012
Kungfu adventure for Nick Hurst
By ROUWEN LIN
star2@thestar.com.my
It was a martial arts adventure for the Englishman, and a battle of wills for the Chinese kungfu master. It was also an unlikely alliance.
HE could drive six-inch nails into a wooden slab with his bare hands, spoke no English, and had a formidable temper. That was essentially all Nick Hurst knew about Quek Chong Tze, the martial arts master he was going to train with in Malaysia for six months as he took a sabbatical from his London-based marketing/advertising job in 2006.
Even armed with a decade of training, having gone for kungfu classes since his university days, could not prepare the avid martial arts fan, then 31, for what awaited him halfway around the world.
Quek, though diminutive, was a ball of energy and one *****ly old guy. And as his student, Hurst was about to bear the brunt of his wrath.
In a recent e-mail interview from London, Hurst recalls his trepidation prior to their first meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
“It was compounded by the fact that each of the few facts I did know seemed to have been crafted to scare unimpressive Englishmen setting out to meet legendary kungfu grandmasters,” he quips.
“The martial arts he practised were rooted in Buddhism, so it made me think there must be a counter to the more rumbustious impression I had been given,” he says of Quek, whom he refers to as Sugong (“grandmaster” in Chinese).
But the moment the Londoner set eyes on Quek, any hope he had of a calm elderly kungfu master was immediately dispelled.
It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon after a thunderstorm when Hurst first met Sugong, in the middle of a class on a school playground.
“He was in full flight scolding a group of students. He was also impressive physically – despite being nearly 80 he was still built like a bull with muscles bulging in every direction. I remained intimidated for a good while as he spent most of the first month shouting at me,” says Hurst.
Classes were held at least five days a week, starting at 6am each day, in Cheras or central KL. No matter how well Hurst thought he did in repeating the steps demonstrated to him, he would be greeted with a dismissive wave or a grimace of disgust from Sugong.
“He was the most irrational, bad-tempered and at times self-centred man I had ever come across,” says Hurst.
But the man was a study in contradictions.
“Just as often he would be kind, generous and funny, and he was without doubt the most charismatic man I’ve met. He would attract attention like a magnet and his delight and enthusiasm for the smallest of things, such as an Englishman eating particularly Chinese food, would be so charming it would encourage repetition,” adds Hurst.
Despite this, training under Sugong was no walk in the park. But after he endured one especially tough day of scolding and still came back for more the next, Hurst found the master more willing to assess him as a person.
“We got on well despite, or perhaps because of, the language barrier,” he says.
And Sugong’s assessment of Hurst? “He takes a scolding well and he practises hard.”
That perseverance culminated in a near-four-year stint in Malaysia, where Hurst trained, travelled, and wrote a book, Sugong: The Life Of A Shaolin Grandmaster, which was published earlier this year.
Work in progress
If there was a time when Sugong would be in high spirits, it would be during breakfast, which invariably followed morning training.
“The stories Sugong told at the breakfast table would be translated for us (Hurst was later joined by a British friend who also trained under Sugong) and in passing I said that someone should write a book as it was a tale that shouldn’t be lost to posterity,” says Hurst.
Sugong, the second of six children, was born in 1927 to a peasant family in China. He grew up in Fujian province, and at the tender age of seven, was initiated into kungfu by an opium-addicted master and had to pay for his classes with opium stolen from his uncle. He went to school at the late age of 11 and was expelled two years later for beating up a teacher who confiscated his pen. Sugong started kungfu because he liked to fight and he wanted to win.
In 1956, Sugong followed his sifu (master), Buddhist monk Sek Koh Chun, to Penang, after spending nine years in Singapore, where he had worked as a port labourer and drug courier to pay off his relocation debts, according to the book. The young man had earlier fled to the island republic to escape conscription in China not long after the Japanese Occupation.
Sugong had quite a tale to tell.
But Hurst was dismissive when it was suggested that the someone should be him as it seemed “a long-drawn-out way to commit career suicide”, but the seed was sown.
“I did come back to England at the end of the six months and even went to a job interview. All it did was convince me that I wasn’t ready to get back into office life. I made the decision to return to Malaysia there and then,” he recalls.
If Sugong was pleased to see Hurst return, he didn’t show it by going any easier on him during training. But he toned down a little on his shouting as Hurst got used to his style, made fewer mistakes and didn’t take the scoldings personally.
“It was in fact my enjoyment of training that made life much easier when he was being difficult to deal with about the book,” he says.
Interviews with the octogenarian, done through an interpreter, would start after training and end whenever Sugong exploded in rage.
“The first month or so of interviews were probably the easiest, even if the air was frequently turned blue when he was not impressed by the personal nature of the questions,” says Hurst.
The problem came when Sugong, after recounting his life from birth to present day, felt he had done his bit.
While Hurst concurs that he couldn’t complain that Sugong hadn’t been cooperative, there were times when “further probing could lead to spells of up to six months when he would refuse to give any further information”.
It was during Sugong’s longest period of silence that Hurst threatened to throw in the towel and return to Britain.
“Fortunately, Sugong opened up after this,” he says.
The result, which presents Sugong’s life story interspersed with Hurst’s experience training under him, was described by a reviewer as “part-biography, part-social history and part-memoir”.
“It sums it up pretty well, but perhaps makes it sound like a more ‘worthy’ approach than intended. I did want to cover things I found interesting, but just as much I wanted it to be a book that people could just enjoy. I let myself be guided by what I found interesting rather than try to contrive a narrative,” Hurst says, adding that he decided to include his experiences for a contemporary and more light-hearted perspective.
“While I think it’s unlikely the literary world will be shaken I hope I’ve provided something different to other books on sale, and at the very least that I’ve recorded an incredible real-life adventure story that would otherwise not have been told.”
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