Bruce Lee's mother art: Wing Chun

[Ren Blade]

http://www.hawkinscheung.com/html/hcarticle3.htm

Part 1

Bruce Lee's Mother Art:
Wing Chun


By Hawkins Cheung, as told to Robert Chu, in "Inside Kung-Fu" January 1992


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To understand Bruce and his martial art, you have to look at his mother art, wing chun. Wing chun in the 1950s was a popular fighting system because of its reputation in challenge fights with other gung-fu Systems. Wing chun was noted for its simple, direct, economical movement and non-classical style.

Many joined and wanted to learn how to fight. Because of the reputation of wing chun, Bruce and I joined. The thing about wing chun is once you start the first form, you feel frustrated. We questioned, "Why do we have to learn this? How can you fight like this?" Everyone wanted to learn the siu nim tao quickly, so they could move onto the sticking hands exercise. The dan chi sao (single sticking hand) exercise was no fun, so the younger students wanted to get through that even quicker. When you finally learned the double sticking hands exercise, we felt excited and thought, "I can fight now! I know wing chun now!" We liked to copy the seniors. If you could land a punch on your opponent, you felt very excited. "I can beat him now," was our first thought. So everyone wanted to beat his partner first so he could be the top dog.

Everyone also tried to please the seniors so they would teach us more tricks to beat up the guy you didn't like or competed with. So students grouped together and created competition with another group. Each group thought it could beat the other. In my opinion, this is how wing chun politics began. Being 100-105 pounds, I had a hard time against opponents bigger than me. During this time I also tried to collect as many new tricks to beat my opponents. Once the opponent knew that trick, you had to find new tricks. When your opponent knew all your tricks, being a small guy, you were in trouble. The old saying of the, "Same game, same way, the bigger guy always wins" applies to every physical sport.

Later, tricks became useless. I always got pushed out because of my limited power when it came to advanced sticking hands practice. I was very frustrated because the opponents knew my tricks and they were stronger than me. If I threw a punch, it was nothing to them; they could take the blow and throw a punch right back. I learned that sticking hands was very different from distance fighting. In distance fighting a lightweight could move faster than a heavyweight. My dilemma was that I was learning wing chun, not a system that emphasized distance fighting.