By Gene Ching
Photos by Kevin Ho
It's been a long road, getting from there to here
It's been a long time, but my time is finally near
It is foretold that the Year of the Snake is twisty. It’s mutable, like a snake shedding its skin.
Last November, back in the Year of the Dragon, I got premonitory twist when I was tasked to write a “The Tiger Claw Elite Championship is going on hiatus” email. Our preliminary planning for TCEC begins around that time. But with the rising rental costs of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, coupled with troubling trade China trade concerns boding poorly for our martial arts industry that imports mostly everything, the prudent path was to take a break. For the final two months of 2024, I was convinced that TCEC was done, for a year at least, maybe more.
However, that snake year twisted again at the beginning of 2025 when planning for TCEC 2025 started up. Some major reformatting was needed to make it work. We collapsed back to a one-day event; this made a dramatic reduction in venue costs. The San Jose Convention Center is a big house to rent, and every venue in the area raised its price to compensate for losses during the pandemic. The sacrifice here was that we’d have to omit any internal competition and the extra day to do load out.
In addition, TCEC 2025 was bolstered by cooperating with U.C. Berkeley’s Chinese Martial Arts Tournament (CMAT). CMAT promised to oversee TCEC’s wushu divisions. It was a very copesetic union, both reinforcing our staff and allowing CMAT to train a new crew. CMAT has been unable to relaunch since the pandemic. That was five years ago and being comprised of university students, that’s a whole new generation of Cal Wushu club members who never worked in a tournament before.
When all the options were examined, this seemed the most prudent course for TCEC 2025. I was fine with these serpentine twists. Sunzi said that a skillful tactician is like a kind of snake, “Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.” That’s a sound strategy for the Year of the Snake. It wasn’t my final decision to make anyway; I can only advise. I was just grateful that TCEC was back in the game for 2025.
The load out that gave me the most trepidation. A typical TCEC Saturday is exhausting. Adding load out would hinge upon the stamina of the real hardcore at the end of the day. It’s my crew that does the load out, my loyal band of martial arts siblings and accomplices, the TCEC Dragon Crew.
And then that snake got really twisty.
Happenstance
Attempting to be auspicious, we opened online registration for TCEC on the same week that the Year of the Snake was celebrated. And right after we opened, KungFuMagazine.com crashed. It crashed hard.
To understand why, know that KungFuMagazine.com was a custom-built website that we launched in 2001. A lot of that programming could not keep up with today’s internet. Anyone who deals with website construction knows exactly how this goes. The internet is constantly shedding skins. This time, one of those skins included KungFuMagazine.com.
We had been concerned about growing website issues since June 2024. We managed as best we could with minor updates and such, all the while working towards a major overhaul. But come the Year of the Snake, our old website collapsed like a house of cards. We weren’t anywhere near ready with the new site. That skin was shed without warning, and we were suddenly naked and exposed.
Ominously, the next article that was queued to be published for the week of the crash was my annual New Year’s piece, Chinese New Year 2025: Year of the Woody Snake. At this writing, you’ll find that article posted on a temporary KungFuMagazine.com website, a placeholder for what is to come. KungFuMagazine.com was completely dark from the final week of January until we quietly launched our temp site. If you’re reading this around publication time, you’re reading it on that temp site. The new website still has not launched yet. Eventually, all articles will be transferred over, all 500+ of them, so perhaps if you’re reading this in the future, and maybe it is the new website. More on this to come…
Fortunately, our social media was still active so we could still promote TCEC. What’s more, our Tiger Claw Elite Championship website was hosted on a different server so we could continue to accept registration applicants. It was very unsettling that we had just opened registration the week when KungFuMagazine.com went down. That almost felt like enemy action.
Thankfully, our IT managed to restore and update our KungFuMagazine.com Forum on March 11 and there was much rejoicing. Initially that went down with the rest of the site, but fortunately, it was easier to salvage. We managed to recover almost all the data and turn it on again.
For many, an online discussion forum is like My Space, a relic from when the internet was young and innocent. However, our KFM forum is a behemoth. There are over 1.1 million posts across over 65,000 topics. And it’s a searchable database – no hashtags needed. I’ve been feeding the KFM forum with martially relevant news (and some not so martially relevant) every workday since we acquired it in 2001. I’ve always linked any copied news posts to their sources; given the mutableness of the internet some of those links are extinct now, but there’s still enough information for a proper citation. Consequently, our online forum is a deep mine of resources and references, and I still plumb its depths now and again for my own personal research. Unfortunately, most of the internal forum links were severed in the restoration but at least the thread titles are searchable. It’s a solid lead if you’re doing research. There’s still a ton of free access information on a myriad of martial arts topics. There’s a lot of noise too, and some hilarious flame wars, all preserved for posterity. Every once in a while, I find myself exploring that rabbit hole with nostalgic amusement.
We originally planned to launch our rebooted KungFuMagazine.com website at TCEC 2025. We even announced it in our TCEC print program. But the early collapse of our previous site threw our IT developers way off schedule, and we were nowhere near ready.
However, stay tuned… A new KungFuMagazine.com is on the way – coming soon! I know, I know, it’s been a month since then, and I was holding off on publishing my annual TCEC report until the new launch, but now it’s old news. So here we are…
Coincidence
Friday Load-in
My 2025 Dragon Crew were Sal Alamillo, Emilio Alpanseque, Oliver Bollman, Nicole Chew, Stephen Chew, Wendy Chew, Jonathan Hung, Jeff Hung, Cindi Liang, Brian O’Shea, Hoel Rainier, Toch-A-Wah Rainier, Mark Carlos Rodriguez, and Keith White. Additionally under my purview were the good people from WildAid: Tara Ching, Alyssa Richards, David Richards, and Janista Person. And I also set up our esteemed guests from Terra Prime Light Armory (TPLA): Chad Eisner, Maria Gizella-Eisner, Jess Kabakjian, and Alan Venable, so they too fell under the Dragon Crew umbrella.
More on both WildAid and TPLA to come.
The Dragon Crew Avant-garde veterans came in on Friday with me, Jonny Oh, and Miguel Carrasco, to set everything on the KungFuMagazine.com side up (the Taekwondo side has its own team). My crew included Emilio, Carlos, Hoel and Toch. Adding to the mix was Chad and Maria, Chad’s wife. Chad is the co-founder of TPLA who invited me to join the TPLA Board. This year, he brought his wife and two fighters, Alan and Jess. And new to the mix was my Kung Fu brother Oliver. I had been trying to get him to TCEC for years, but it was TPLA that finally drew him in (Oliver has a massive lightsaber collection). Despite coming from different directions, everyone and worked well and hard. I always enjoy watching the load-in crew come together.
The Friday load-in is one of my favorite TCEC days – the calm before the storm – only it’s not that calm. Filling that vast empty cement floor with TCEC is a ton of work. The percolating excitement coupled with fresh challenges make for a big day. Every year some new issue emerges (it’s always something). However, with 14 years under our belts, we’ve learned to circumvent most obstacles and are much more methodical and efficient.
This year, Kung Fu Dragon USA offered to send us two of their team to help. When the school car pulled up, five guys leapt out, ready for work. In 2023, our load-in was assisted by a squad of Shaolin monks. This Kung Fu Dragon USA crew was even faster. They got all the mats laid out ridiculously fast. It was like we saw them arrive, turned around, and then all the mats were down. We were so grateful.
What’s more, Master Grace Wu-Monnat came by early with a box of fresh pastries. It’s a sweet gesture, one that she’s done for many years now. Jonny always provides lunch for the load-in crew too, so we all ate well. But not nearly as well as that night.
Friday Welcoming Banquet
The Welcoming Banquet was held once again at World Gourmet, a gluttonous Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet near to the Tiger Claw Headquarters. I was escorting Master Grace and two of her students from San Jose to Fremont. We went to Tiger Claw first, and when I arrived, Grandmaster Liang Shou-Yu welcomed me with a big hug and a request for a selfie. He had a friend with him, Mi Xila, a Chinese influencer managing his WeChat social media. When I asked her to shoot a second photo of Grandmaster Liang and me on my iPhone, she scoffed, telling me her phone camera was better. She grudgingly shot it anyway with my phone and then told me she’d send me her photo via WeChat, which she did soon after. And she was right. Her photo was much better. Again, I was grateful.
Master Pan Shuming gave me a bag of pistachios and said, “This is tea.” It’s good Chinese etiquette to give gifts when reuniting. I was confused by the bag and figured it was a translation error. I love pistachios so it was fine. Everything is fine. I added it to my stuff and didn’t give it another thought until everything was over and I found it while unpacking. That was perfect because I was getting a bit peckish, so I opened the bag to discover it was tea after all. Fine Tian Mu Hu white tea. I love white tea. Chinese etiquette requires gifts to be presented in some kind of bag or wrapper. It’s a custom I often forget. She was travelling so I imagine the only wrapper she could find was that pistachio bag. Once more, I was grateful.
The banquet went smoothly. Nobody did a smash-and-grab to my car like what happened in the Year of the Monkey. My car was brand new then and they grabbed an AED that I borrowed from Rock Medicine for TCEC. Rock Medicine oversaw medical at TCEC since the beginning, but last year, the venue required their own medical, and it gets awkward when there’s two first aid providers. That Rock Med team were my Dragon Crew volunteers too. But that was before. This year, all went well, and everyone returned to the Marriott without incident.
How did TCEC 2025 go? Stay tuned for Part 2: 2025 Tiger Claw Elite Championships - Snake Bites its Tail
About author:
Gene Ching is the Publisher of KungFuMagazine.com and the author of Shaolin Trips.
Thread:
2025 Tiger Claw Elite Championships, May 17, San-Jose, CA
About author:
Subscribe to KungFuMagazine.com here.
Reserve your print edition of the WINTER 2025 here.
Gene Ching is the Publisher of KungFuMagazine.com and the author of Shaolin Trips.
