“With Our Thoughts We Create the World” – Buddha
Many years ago…
We had just finished pushing hands, and everybody was smiling, giggling, and bursting with energy. Sifu Bill used to say: “If there is no laughter, the quality of pushing hands is very poor.” Deliberately, I had my students sit down and guided them through a simple meditation to calm them and end class.
I brought them out of their meditation and concluded class with a piece of Kung Fu or Zen wisdom.
As was my custom, I asked my students if they had any questions. One student asked: “What got you into T’ai Chi?”
“Oh,” I said, “I had heard about T’ai Chi and wanted to study it. I found Sifu Bill and signed up for his class. “
“Well, what made you want to study T’ai Chi?” my student asked.
“My friend Matt Harris was big into the martial arts when we were in college. He bounced from dojo to kwoon to dojo studying whatever he could. I was interested in studying martial arts, but I didn’t want a combat or competition course, and was really waiting until something interested me. One day he told me I should study ‘T’ai Chi.’
“I asked him, ‘What’s T’ai Chi?’ He replied with ‘I don’t know. But we had a guy talk about it briefly at Wing Chun last night and he sounded like you.’
“Like me?
“’Yeah, with all the Taoism and Asian philosophy. I think it might be the art for you.’ And, you know? He was right.”
“Okay,” my very curious student said. “What got you into Asian philosophy?”
That made me pause. It seemed like I had always had it in my life, but I knew that wasn’t the case. I was a guy from Utah who grew up in a small town where everyone was either Latter-Day Saints or, at least, pretended to be LDS.
I thought about my discovering the word Zen, then going to my community college library to find a single shelf devoted to Asian philosophy. I smiled as I remembered where I had discovered the word “Zen,” and said to my students, “from a comic book.”
The exact comic book was The Question, written by Denny O’Neil and draw by Denys Cowan. Published by DC Comics from 1987 to 1990. O’Neil wrote the series in a way that applied Zen and Taoism to the crime fighting adventures of the titular hero and his editors, thankfully, included a “recommended reading list” book from O’Neil at the end of each issue. It was through that reading list that I discovered Zen and Taoism, and that fundamentally changed my way of looking at the world.
In 1993 I had transferred to the University of Utah to work on my bachelor's degree, and there, in the course catalog was a T’ai Chi course. Remembering what Matt had said, I signed up for the class --mostly because I needed the 2 credit hours to meet my financial aid requirements. It was in that class that I met my Sifu, Bill Parkinson, and began my serious study of T’ai Chi Ch’uan (Taijiquan). Leading me to my apprenticeship, my first student, my first class, and that particular class of students.
I dismissed class and started thinking about The Question and the influence it had had on me. I was still reading comic books but couldn’t identify any comic that would have reached me the way The Question had.
“Where’s that book for this generation?” I wondered. And a voice in the back of my head said, “You’re going to have to write it.”
I got home and wrote down the following words in my “ideas” book: “Zen: A Martial Arts Story.”
Remembering Empowerment.
To say it was easy to go from those words to a completed comic book, would be a lie. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. I thought about making my main character a student, but that would mean his master would have to die. They always died in the Kung Fu movies, after all. I thought about him being a ronin-like figure. I thought about him being white, like me. I thought about him being Asian to eliminate that “great white hope” trope that had run through martial arts comics for decades. Finally, I thought about him being a woman, and a lightbulb clicked on.
With that initial breakthrough, I was forced to get come back to the real world, and “Zen” unfortunately languished, only coming to mind in fleeting moments between projects, deadlines, and life events.
A decade passed, as decades often do when you’re in your thirties, with everything seeming so important and everything going wrong far too often. I would sit down to work on “Zen,” but despite having a character idea, I really didn’t know what I wanted to write about. I needed a theme.
Fortunately, Donald Trump ran for president. And there was a backlash. First a Women’s March, then the #MeToo movement. I listened to the protests, and I read the stories. In nearly every case the overwhelming thought that kept coming to my mind was “lack of personal empowerment.” Women too often must take a back seat, demean themselves, or flat out suffer in man’s world.
Being naturally empathetic, I put myself in their shoes. Despite my gender, I also once had to learn about personal empowerment. I had been a weak, nerdy kid who cried too easily and was a constant target for bullies throughout my childhood. Sifu Bill talked about how T’ai Chi would change us, how he had students who found themselves in bad situations and had been able to fight their way out of it because of T’ai Chi. I remembered my first time, after becoming an advanced student, walking through a dangerous area, and noticed only not feeling scared, but not being hassled by the adult bullies who hung out there.
“What if that’s the theme of the book?” I thought. “My main character teaches women how to fight back against the world of men.”
But where would that come from? The term “Shaolin Nun” came to mind. Were there “Shaolin Nuns?” Had there ever been “Shaolin Nuns?” I researched it and discovered Master Wu Mei, later called Ng Mui, who taught Yim Wing Chun.
What was most interesting about Wing Chun’s story was that Ng Mui didn’t have time to teach her Kung Fu in the traditional way. Instead, she took Wing Chun’s natural talents and honed them for martial arts. Sifu Bill used to tell us that he wasn’t training us to be martial artists, rather he was bringing the martial artist out of us. Bill spoke of Michelangelo, who used to say that he didn’t carve the rock for his sculptures, he found the sculpture inside the stone and just chipped away the excess, and that’s all Bill was doing for us. He said he would come to a point where he would have to tell us, “I can teach you no more, because for me to teach you more, I would have to teach you to be me, and I want you to learn to be you.”
Now, if you’re a Wing Chun practitioner, “Ng Mui created a system for Wing Chun” is the end of Ng Mui’s story. But the storyteller in me wondered “what if?” What if word had spread among the women of China what and they, too, came to her for training? What if some of these women stayed with Ng Mui, becoming nuns as well, and carried on her teachings after she died? What was the name of that temple she was at, again? The White Crane temple? Perfect.
Mei Yin, my main character, would be a warrior from the White Crane temple, sent to America to expand their teachings on a new continent. But where in America? San Francisco Chinatown came quickly to mind and was just as quickly dismissed. I thought of New York Chinatown, but as I’ve never been there, I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Los Angeles Chinatown, though, seemed natural to me. Yes, it’s mostly a tourist trap, but it is smack in the middle of L.A., and I decided that was where I wanted her based.
Now I just needed a plot. A way to introduce the various characters who would help her and give her that all-important first adventure. I googled “major crimes in Los Angeles” and human trafficking was right at the top. Perfect. I opened a blank word processing page and drafted my first six scripts in three months.
The Shaolin Nun
The nuns of the White Crane temple in China serve a single purpose: training women to fight back against the world of men. Their mission and location have been kept a secret for over two-hundred years, told by women only to other women. But now, they have sent their greatest warrior to Los Angeles. Will her dark past and feelings of unworthiness prevent her from carrying out her mission to defend the helpless?
The first six-part story, The First Precept, introduces the reader to the Shaolin Nun, Mei Yin, and her disciple, Heather Turner, as they protect a kidnapped girl from a human trafficking ring.
Drawn by two artists who were selected to be in the inaugural class of DC Comics’ “The Milestone Initiative,” run by The Question artist, Denys Cowan, and having completed three successful Kickstarter campaigns, The Shaolin Nun is currently seeking funding for its fourth issue. All four issues are available through the campaign, so you can catch up and be with us through issues five and six!
Back us today at shaolinnun.com/kickstarter.
If you miss it, there will be a Kickstarter for issue five before the end of 2023 (and maybe another Kickstarter for issue four if we don’t meet our funding goal by March 2). The link above will take you either directly to the active campaign or to a sign-up page where you can be kept informed of our next launch.
