Laurette had studied Lama with Sifu Chan for about 8 months and then Sifu Chan left NY. He had gone back to Toronto, Canada for a while. I won't tell you why now, some other time maybe...

When I met Laurette, he'd mentioned Sifu Chan to me, but since he wasn't in NYC, it never was much of an issue. Then he came up to Steve Ventura and I and said that he'd just bumbed into Sifu Chan on the street and that if we wanted to meet him, he'd set up a meeting...

Here is the real kicker to this. At the time, I was teaching Hung Ga and Shuai Jiao. I'd done some Mantis, some dragon, a bunch of stuff, but I was pretty happy with what I was doing. I had no real desire to learn a new method. But I had one problem, the version of Hung Ga we did only had the 4 core forms. There were all long, and none were really fancy or pretty....

When I first asked to meet Sifu Chan, my initial desire was just to learn some pretty forms! That's pretty f-in ironic in the long term...

We arranged to bring Sifu Chan to the space I was using for my own classes. Laurette translated. Sfu Chan asked if we would pay him $80 per month for lessons. He'd come a few times a week and teach us what we wanted. I forget the hows and whys, but Steve Ventura originally asked to learn Choy Lay Fut. Laurette and I decided to do Lama. Actually, I think Laurette had asked for a particular set already, Siu Lo Han.