Chinese New Year 2021: Year of the Iron Ox

Click here for Chinese New Year 2020: Year of the Iron Rat.

“As far as I know, there is no nation whatever, however polished and learned, or however barbarous and uncivilized, which does not believe it is possible that future events maybe be indicated, and understood.” Cicero, circa 50 BCE

When it comes to the Chinese zodiac, I’m rather skeptical about the predictive validity of astrology and Feng Shui. I’m sure that sounds hypocritical because I’ve co-written our Kung Fu Horoscopes since November 2000 and I’m quite proud of that work. Collaborating with our Feng Shui master Wilson Sun for the last twenty years has been an unexpected learning journey and through his contribution, we made some groundbreaking advances. We were the first newsstand magazine to publish Chinese-based horoscopes in English (and perhaps the last – I don’t know of anyone else publishing Chinese horoscopes in print magazines now). We were also the first to publish them on the web. Back around the turn of the millennium, ‘horoscopes’ were a powerful search word – they were SEO before that acronym came popular in general vernacular. Now there are so many online horoscopes that our Kung Fu Horoscopes doesn’t have the same impact. Nevertheless, Master Sun’s Kung Fu Horoscopes, translated by our Publisher Emeritus Gigi Oh and me, ran for two decades in print for twenty years and a little less here on the web (KungFuMagazine.com launched in 2001 and I don’t remember exactly when we started posting horoscopes here – maybe it was that first year). It is a legacy that makes us all proud.

Master Sun’s quarterly Kung Fu Horoscopes column was at the end of each issue and covered lunar cycle predictions for each sign of the Chinese zodiac. It was a poetic way to conclude each issue with a glimpse of the future. I’m sad to say that we’ve discontinued that. We concluded the series with the folding of our print magazine.

Nevertheless, we just published his 2021 Year of the Ox forecast and plan to keep publishing those as long as KungFuMagazine remains viable. Maybe someday we’ll pick up again with Master Sun’s monthly predictions, but not right now. Regardless of the future of Kung Fu Horoscopes, we had a great run, and it was a lot of fun for me personally, despite my horoscopic skepticism.

No Bull****

My education made me skeptical of astrology. When I was in grad school, I was trained as a scientist, and once you adopt that way of thinking, just like Eve biting the apple, there’s no going back. Recent events have made it clear that few Americans understand the process of science, and far be it from me to attempt to educate everyone on this right now, but Astrology and Feng Shui don’t hold up under scientific scrutiny. They barely hold up to subjective analysis. For example, I didn’t see any astrological columns, eastern or western, that successfully predicted the pandemic. That’s quite an oversight.

Last year for the Year of the Rat, Master Sun did predict that it would be “a year of extreme arrogance,” but given the political arena of January 2020, that wasn’t difficult. He also predicted that it would be “a year of fire and dryness, resulting in drought, a serious crisis of survival,” and I was personally affected by that. I had to evacuate from the CZU fires because the smoke was too much. However, the Australian bush fire season was already well underway last January too in what would be dubbed ‘The Black Summer’ so that, like extreme arrogance, wasn’t a major leap of astrological prognostication. Master Sun did mention disease when he said, “In the United States, the East and South will have troubles, especially the South where turmoil and disease will likely occur.” However, Covid started in Wuhan, China, and with all the other turmoil that happened last year, I cannot remember if any diseases broke out in the southern United States at all. Note that I’m not blaming Master Sun for his lack of pandemic foresight. It just reinforces my general skepticism.

You know who did predict the plague? Science. If you’re skeptical of that, just go back and read “The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?” by Ed Yong (The Atlantic July/August 2018). It’s a chilling read in retrospect. All the writing was on the wall. It’s just no one bothered to read it. And now, here we are.

Throughout my watch at Kung Fu Tai Chi, I strove to keep our content real, which isn’t the easiest thing to do in the world of Chinese martial arts. Are horoscopes real? My scientific mind says ‘no’ but there’s more to it that just that. The Chinese zodiac passed along cultural relevance that contributed to our magazine’s overarching mission, so despite my skepticism, I didn’t have issues with it. It’s akin to practicing Guandao. There’s no real practicality to Guandao practice as self defense because the odds of me having one if I’m ever attacked are miniscule. Nevertheless, the Guandao carries a tremendous amount of cultural significance and that is worthy of preservation and practice.

Why Buy the Cow When the Milk is Free?

Working to bring Master Sun’s Kung Fu Horoscopes to life was a unique challenge. At first, we weren’t sure what to do with him. Our publisher emeritus, Gigi Oh, has great faith in Chinese mysticism. She would have our KungFuMagazine Headquarters fengshui-ed every year (I’ve even wrote about it previously because it was so surreal) and she had found Master Sun. That was when I first started working exclusively for Kung Fu Tai Chi. In 2000, few readers knew about Feng Shui and even fewer grasped its connection to Kung Fu so his inclusion within our pages was a stretch.

It became my task to find topics for Master Sun that would be meaningful to martial artists. We started with an obvious subject: a series of articles, “Feng Shui for Kungfu Schools” That series ran across four issues starting with our March 2000 and ending with in our June 2000 (2000 was the only year that we were a monthly publication). I’m proud of this series too because it explained some Feng Shui basics in a practical way. It’s required reading for anyone setting up a school, or even just a personal workout space, assuming you have some faith in Feng Shui.

After that, Gigi still wanted to promote Master Sun, but unfortunately the successive articles strayed too far away the realm of Chinese martial arts. Our July 2000 featured “Feng Shui and Your Soulmate” because so much of any fortune-telling is about finding love. I remember arguing that this was the antithesis of the martial arts. This was followed by a two-part series on crystals: “Crystal Qi-Feng Shui Power Healing for Kungfu” (August 2000) and “Crystal Qi (Part 2)-How to purify Crystals for Healing & Meditation” (September 2000). Now I do love crystals but the only practical martial application I saw was to lob one at your opponent’s face. And why bother to use an expensive crystal when any rock might do? At that time, we were trying to penetrate the New Age section of the newsstands like some Tai Chi and Qigong magazines, but with Kung Fu as our leading title, that never happened. The western newsstand couldn’t reconcile that it’s all connected so we were delegated to the sports section. Consequently, the crystal articles drew poor response.

Holy Cow

It was in the wake of those New Age tangents that I proposed the Kung Fu Horoscopes, and it was an instant hit. Reader response for this was solid. Several readers told us how Master Sun’s predictions were spot on. I even remember one time he predicted a random shoulder injury of mine. I confess that despite my skepticism, Master Sun made some uncanny predictions over the years. And although I never ran any serious statistical analysis of his success rate, it did seem higher than what one might achieve through dumb luck.

All of the positive feedback was reaffirming because it was a lot of work to make that column happen. Master Sun wrote in Chinese and like any astrologer, his predictions were abstract. His forecasts were heavily based on Chinese idioms, which were difficult to translate. Gigi would work Sun’s Mandarin into very broken English, and I would smooth it out. For various reasons, this was always one of the last submissions we’d receive so it would be a rush to sort this before deadline.

Master Sun would make odd predictions. I’m not sure how much of that was due to translation issues because I’m far from fluent in Chinese. Sometimes he’d predict diarrhea for the month. Seriously? A whole month of diarrhea needs more medical attention than medicinal rice congee. Sometimes we’d hit something that we just couldn’t translate. Some idioms had long stories behind them, too long to explain in our short column. However, I genuinely enjoyed working on these with Gigi because they would often spiral down some obscure rabbit hole of Chinese culture, topics that Gigi knew and delighted in sharing with me. We had so many wonderful conversations while translating these and I learned a lot.

I also studied horoscope writing, not from an astrological perspective but instead from writing style. While I don’t place a lot of faith in astrology, I do understand the power of devices to elicit projection. My degree is in psychology, so things like the Rorschach test have a scientific basis. Additionally, I love the artistry of Tarot, somewhat due to reading Jung and his discussion of archetypes. Consequently, I developed a horoscopic writing style for Kung Fu Horoscopes that embraced that abstractions of translation, even amplified the ambiguity, as a device to engage the reader.

It would be ingenuine of me to say I totally disregard astrology. My wife is very into astrology. When we were making a pilgrimage to Rishikesh, India, the yoga capital of the world, she had her horoscope done by a local astrologer. And it was enlightening, a peek into a universe that I never imagined. But such is Rishikesh as anyone who has ever been there will tell you, and that’s another story.

Don’t Have a Cow, Man

All this horoscope talk is two-fold. Firstly, it’s me sharing (or venting) my experience of writing Kung Fu Horoscopes for twenty years as a little ‘behind the scenes’ for your amusement. That research led to some many discoveries for me personally. Despite my skepticism, I’m very grateful for the opportunity to bring that bit of Chinese culture westward.

Second is because I’ve themed my annual Chinese zodiac features on the relationship of the animal of the year to Kung Fu. This year is the Year of the Ox, or niu (牛) in Mandarin. Perhaps you’ve already read some ‘Happy Niu Year!’ puns. Niu can be translated as ox, cow or bull, and is the suffix for other bovine beasts like buffalo and bison. However, when it comes to ox Kung Fu, I got nothing. There is no ox Kung Fu. None.

Now I have heard stories of ox styles, but I’ve heard tell of flea styles too. There probably is some sort of ox Kung Fu somewhere, it’s just not prevalent enough for me to want to research it here. There are also some random references with the quanpu (fist lyrics 拳譜), the poetic phrases that describe movements. In my foundation style of Bak Sil Lum (Northern Shaolin 北少林), there’s a quanpu in the first of the ten forms called ‘Iron Ox Plows the Earth (tie niu geng di 鉄牛耕地)’ which is appropriate because this is an Iron Ox year, but I’m just not going to dig into that now. Blame it on 2020 and my pandemic blues.

There is one Kung Fu ox reference that has become very meaningful to me throughout the pandemic. It’s an old Shaolin saying, “A boxer can practice where only one ox can lie down. (quan da wo niu zhi di 拳打卧牛之地).” This means that Shaolin Kung Fu is compact. It doesn’t take a lot of space for practice, unlike football or jogging, although full disclosure, I have no idea how much space one lying down ox takes. I’m guessing it is less than my living room, but I don’t really know.

I suspect that like so many Shaolin sayings, it must be taken with a grain of salt. For example, I suspect my Guandao form takes up more space than an ox bed. My wife would have issues with me swinging my Guandao around in the living room, especially because that’s where she keeps her piano. Nevertheless, it has been a guiding principle for my practice whilst sheltering in place. I encourage myself by thinking that my Shaolin is more authentic because it’s practiced within those lying down ox parameters.