[Wong Shun Leung] “told me stories about the sufferings [in Hong Kong during WWII].  He had seen many who fought over left-overs found on the street.  Some even grabbed food directly from children’s months only to be kicked and punched to death by the people around.  The crippled … simply starved to death helplessly on the street.”
Kim Man Au Yeung, Wong Shun Leung Through My Eyes

Wong Shun Leung was born in June 8th, 1935.  In 1931, the Imperial Japanese military perpetrated was later called the “Manchurian Incident,”  in which a Japanese officer sabotaged one of their own railways (not really doing any significant damage).  The Japanese blamed the incident on Chinese “dissidents” (the 1930’s equivalent of terrorists) and used this staged event as a pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria (a big chunk of Northeast China).   In 1937, the Japanese invaded the rest of mainland China and soon controlled the country all the way down to the Shenzen River, opposite Hong Kong.  “Hong Kong” is a region which includes both the island of Hong Kong and a big section of the Kowloon peninsula.

Hong Kong’s population swelled with refugees escaping the Japanese.  The population nearly doubled from 879,000 in 1931 to 1.6 million by 1941.  The Japanese finally got around to attacking Hong Kong itself, then a British territory, on the 8th of December, 1941, the day after they attacked Pearl Harbor.  Hong Kong surrendered by the 26th.  From 1941 to 1945 (when the Japanese unilaterally surrendered after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Hong Kong was under martial law.  This was the Hong Kong in which Wong Shun Leung grew up, as noted in Kim Man Au Yeung’s new book, Wong Shun Leung through My Eyes.

This aspect of the book really opened my eyes to some of the possible motivations behind the hardcore training of Wong and others of his era.  He grew up in a nightmare.  Its hard to imagine how bad it was, but as an example, there was one incident referred to as the St. Stephen’s Massacre.  St. Stephen’s was a British-style university (Ip Man went there).  At this time, it was being used as a hospital.  Japanese soldiers broke in, raped and killed the nurses and killed all the patients.  I’d heard about the Japanese atrocities on the mainland (Nanking for instance) but had not heard about what went on in Hong Kong.  Curious, I looked around and found various sources (such as this page) detailing the events of the occupation.  Basically, there was an untold number of rapes and murders (and who knows what else).

This was the backdrop of Wong Shun Leung’s childhood.  I was motivated to learn to fight by incidents that are pretty small in comparison to any of this.  Imagine the levels of insecurity and rage you would feel as a little kid surrounded by the rape and pillaging of your city!

How is the book otherwise?

Its seems like a (not very good) English translation of a Chinese text.  But this very characteristic makes it interesting in its own particular way.  The phrasing and the allusions to culture are an interesting peek into the “Chinese mind,” and Chinese culture of the time.  There is a infusion of Confucianism and Taoism into the everyday that is very illuminating, if you like me are interested in the mindset and ways of thinking behind the development of Wing Chun.  As a Western non-Chinese speaker, I can probably never know certain nuances about Wing Chun, but this book helps bridge the gap a bit.

Also, this book is probably the best examination of Wong Shun Leung’s Beimo (challenge fights) we’ll ever get.  Kim Man Au Yeung has been able to combine his first hand accounts with media accounts (the fights were covered in the newspapers) to present a detailed picture of Wong Shun Leung’s “career” as a challenge fighter.  In many cases, we get a blow by blow description, as well as an understanding of the social practices surrounding these fights.  We sometimes forget the deep cultural differences between the West and the Chinese – these accounts really allow you to see some of these differences, such as in the formalities of the fights stemming from the clan-like school groups and other sorts of family ties.

“One of the biggest problems in researching the history of the martial arts is the martial artists themselves. They love their styles (or the businesses that they support) so much that everything needs to have an elaborate back story. A straight forward account of the first guy to open a Wing Chun school is not enough. Instead we need a tale of mystery, adventure, and potentially traitorous opera-singing terrorists.”
Ben Judkins, Kung Fu Tea

I’ve heard a handful of versions of the story of Wing Chun’s development.  There is the classical (and most popular) story of Ng Mui and Yim Wing Chun.  Then there is the tale of mystery and intrigue Ben alludes to, which is the story I think I got from Robert Chu’s Complete Wing Chun (or possibly a related web-based article), about the Ming and the Ching and the Red Boat Opera company.

There is a website called Kung Fu Tea run by a Professor from the University of Utah named Benjamin Judkins. It presents a more academic perspective on the history of our art and in a article on his site, he posits that the true author of Wing Chun were not the Hon revolutionaries, nor Ng Mui, and not even Leung Jan (martial hero of such films as Prodigal Son), but Leung Jan’s sole non-familial student, Chan Wah Shun.

Chan Wah Shun and the Creation of Wing Chun

Wong Shun Leung student, sometimes Wing Chun teacher, and full-time movie star Philip Ng (of Once Upon a Time in Shanghai ) is breaking into English language cinema soon with his new movie Birth of the Dragon.

The film apparently follows a white guy in the early 1960s who becomes a student of Bruce Lee’s back in his Oakland/San Francisco days and culminates in the famous fight between Bruce and Wong Jack Man.  From what I can see, the film is highly mythologized, but frankly, the more I find out about the history of Asian martial arts, the more I realize that a large chunk of what we think we know is in fact myth.

I’m in the middle of a bunch of reading about martial arts history and discovering how many of our most basic ideas are probably false (like, the idea that Kung Fu came from Shaolin or that Judo and Jujitsu are ancient arts).  There has been a recent upsurge in the serious academic study of martial arts history in the West.  I first heard about this material on Ben Judkins’ Kung Fu Tea website.  Ben is the Wing Chun student and professional academic who wrote The Creation of Wing Chun  (with Jon Nielson) .

Its an odd contrast that I had read about half of Striking Distance: Bruce Lee and the Dawn of Martial Arts in America when I saw the the trailer below for  Birth of the Dragon.  In the book, I’m getting an historians best take on what happened.  In the trailer, clearly we are getting the highly stylized movie version.

But I do think I will like Sifu Ng’s “cool” version of Bruce Lee.  Bruce was by all accounts a cocky bastard and highly polarizing — people loved him or hated him in real life. He was clearly able to polish a lot of his rough edges and more irritating characteristics when inventing his screen persona.

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