I have a confession. I am a hoarder when it comes to T-shirts. T-shirts just come to me. I almost never buy them. It’s really hard to justify buying them when I have so many (but sometimes I still do). I have a few duffel bags full of T-shirts in storage. And even though I work out regularly in T-shirts, I don’t seem to wear them out that often. I have them loosely categorized, the largest being Martial Arts Shirts (of course) and concert shirts (remember that I moonlight in the concert industry and have toured with a few bands, so most of these are actually staff shirts). Why do I save them? As mementos? Memories? It’s hoarding, I confess.

When pondering 2017, the Year of the Rooster, I cannot but reflect upon our most controversial T-shirt, actually our only T-shirt that stirred up any controversy, our Zodiac T-shirt for the last Year of the Rooster, 2005, the YEAR OF THE COCK shirt. Now, we always try to push the edge of the envelope around here – that’s the spirit of Kung Fu – and that T-shirt was edgy. We lost a few subscribers over it, and even back then, twelve years ago, losing subscribers is something no niche print magazine could afford. In those days, we didn’t always produce an annual Chinese New Year T-shirt, so this one really stuck out. And it sold well, better than any zodiac T-shirt so far, which just goes to show, cock sells.

That cock T-shirt was even mentioned in a martial arts novel. Author Arthur Rosenfeld, who previously contributed some freelance articles to our publications, later veered into writing fiction. In one of his early novels, The Cutting Season published in 2007, he referenced the YEAR OF THE COCK T-shirt. Arthur was born in the Year of the Cock, so this was one of his favorite shirts. He told me he wore it so much that he wore it out. Many years later, Gigi crossed paths with him at a martial arts event and we dug out an old obsolete screen long after that shirt had ceased production, just to make him one more as a gift. He was delighted.

It’s the connotation of the cock that makes this humorous, and it has always fascinated me there is a parallel notion in Chinese. So much of our work is translation, so I’m always struck when such analogies appear. The Chinese language has a lot of ribald puns. Certainly every language has bawdy slang, but Chinese is a tonal language, so it has another dimension of homophones. The word for penis in Mandarin is jiba (雞巴). Ji means "fowl," specifically chicken, rooster or cock. Ba means "greatly desire" or "anxiously hope." When coupled together, this equals penis. Now here is where it gets funny in a punny way. There’s a homophone for ba that is a different word (吧); this is a modal particle added to the end of a sentence that indicates a polite suggestion, just like finishing a sentence with "right?" or "okay?" So if you were to ask "Do you eat chicken?" it would be "chi ji, ba? (吃雞吧)," which sounds a lot like "Do you eat cock? (吃雞巴)" So the polite way to phrase fowl dietary concerns is to say "ji rou" (chicken meat 雞肉) instead.

I dubbed 2017 the "Year of the Flaming Cock" (as opposed to the more gentile "Year of the Fire Rooster") at the conclusion of my annual event report, 2016 Tiger Claw Elite Championships: Part 2 – Monkey Steals the Peach. The Year of the Fire Monkey was a tough go for me. As you’ll read in that article, I had just got a new car and thieves smashed my rear window and stole all my gear for the tournament. Composing that article reignited my anger and general pessimism with humanity, so the opinion that this year might be about flaming cocks just popped up. We did consider producing a "Year of the Flaming Cock" T-shirt for this year, but even though it was a bestseller twelve years ago, Tiger Claw decided to avoid the controversy and went with a much more conventional design.

Unlike the Year of the Monkey, where there are countless styles of Monkey Kung Fu, Year of the Cock doesn’t have a style per se, at least not a common one. That’s odd because Roosters are vicious beasts, so much so that cock fighting is a popular, albeit non-PC, bloodsport, particularly in Asia. There’s probably some obscure folk styles of Cock Kung Fu (Iron Crotch not withstanding). One of the Xingyi 12 Animals is prudently translated as ‘chicken’ but it’s that very same ji character mentioned above. Those Xingyi techniques emulate the rooster’s pecking and wing flapping, so it’s aggressive and quick. Paradoxically, to be a ‘chicken’ in the English vernacular is to be afraid. Calling hot girls ‘chicks’ is a somewhat dated slang now too. The sexual dimorphism between ‘chicken’ and ‘chick’ versus ‘rooster’ and ‘cock’ is very extreme in English. Perhaps the Chinese way is better – they make no distinction and just use one word - ji. This begs the time-old question, which came first – the chicken or the ji? (Answer: the chicken is the ji, just like the chicken is the egg).

Now that it’s 2017, I’ll have to dig through my duffle bags of stored T-shirts to see if I still have an original 2005 Year of the Cock T-shirt. My cache of hoarded T-shirts are kind of like fine wines – every once in a while, one is ready to open again and it’s better as a vintage T than it was originally. For example, I do have a Year of the Rooster sweatshirt from when I did a Lion Dance on stage for the Grateful Dead for the Year of the Water Rooster in 1993. That was an exclusive embroidered sweatshirt, limited to a hundred or so, and given only to the Grateful Dead Dragon Crew. But that’s another story (see YEAR OF THE DRAGON 2012: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Head).

I hope you’ll support us for this Year of the Fire Rooster; after all, this marks our 25th Anniversary, which we will be celebrating at the KUNG FU TAI CHI 25TH ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL on May 19–21, 2017, in San Jose, California (just in case you missed the memo). Buy this T-shirt and have a fortuitous 2017. Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Click here for Chinese New Year 2018: Year of the Dirty Dog