By Gene Ching

Photos by Kevin Ho and Gene Ching

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.