Snake vs Crane Wing Chun

Hawkins Cheung Interview from Inside Kung Fu

By Steven Moody February 12, 2019 Leave a Comment

There is a great four part interview with Hawkins Cheung by Robert Chu, first published in Inside Kung-Fu magazine starting in November of 1991.

I was pointed to it by an article on Kung Fu Tea, where it was hosted on the USADojo site. It appears that Inside Kung Fu went out of business in 2011. It doesn’t seem as if anyone is offering its backlog of articles and it made me think I better backup the USADojo site’s hosting of this really important article. If Robert Chu or any representative of Inside Kung Fu would like me to take this down, I will do so – my principal aim is preservation.

In this article, an interview with Sisuk Gung Hawkins, many interesting points are made about Wing Chun. Hawkins asks many questions that cut to the heart of the system and bring to light certain questions with the system with which we all contend, and the approaches to answering these questions that were tried by both Hawkins and Bruce Lee (i.e., Jeet Kune Do). One question being how to bridge against opponents who do not “stay” but zip in and out with either/both their body or their strikes. Boxers come immediately to mind, with their jabs and quick footwork.

A system like Wing Chun, which seeks a bridge and uses relatively slow footwork (to preserve the potential for structure), will naturally have to contend with this feature of such fighting styles and every WC practitioner needs to work on their response to attacks such as the jab used by the “outside fighter.” I’ve heard many discussions over the years about how one should handle this issue. The fundamental Wing Chun approach is that we Jeet once we get close enough. But its a high level skill to work against a skilled opponent. Some people take the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and incorporate jabs into their fighting repertoire. While, as Wong Shun Leung said, Wing Chun is what works, I think people sometimes try to incorporate elements from other systems before becoming competent at the Wing Chun approach, and that sometimes the non-Wing Chun element is brought in to try and plug a hole in the person’s understanding of Wing Chun. This patchworking of systems is a feature of the post-MMA world, but I think with Wing Chun we have a pretty integrated system and we need to truly understand it before starting to cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster of our own devising. We are standing on the shoulders of Giants and they thought a lot of this stuff through. But, once you have become truly competent, then there are some valid discussions to be had about ground game and closing the distance and other aspects of dealing with the strengths of other systems and customizing the system to your own physical idiosyncrasies, such as we find in these interviews.

Beginning in November 1991, Inside Kung-Fu published the following four-part interview with Hawkins Cheung, reprinted below.

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BJJ Might Not Be the Best Thing for Street fights

By Steven Moody October 23, 2018 Leave a Comment

Let me preface by saying that I’ve studied Jujitsu a few times (less than a year total) and I’m a big believer in its power in certain circumstances. I think these days we should all at least have some takedown defense and some skills in the guard (like how to get up).

But the reason I study Wing Chun is because I think the most likely streetfight scenario will involve standup striking. This is where I decided to specialize. Once I decided this, I did some searching until I landed on Wing Chun, then I did some lengthy searching until I found a school that could teach me how to use Wing Chun in a streetfight with the sort of attacks I’m likely to see out there in the real world.

One of the other reasons I chose WIng Chun, instead of, say, boxing or Muay Thai, is that I want to study a technology that isn’t also going to damage my health. I understand I’m sacrificing a level of reality here. I believe that the closer you get to actually fighting in your training, the more prepared you’ll be. It only makes sense. This is why Bruce Lee called some forms of martial arts training “swimming on dry land.” But, I think its best to weight the pros and cons of these things in a mature and sensible way. What are the odds I’m going to be in a fight? What is the level of skill I’m likely to encounter?

The developers of Wing Chun devised a very clever methodology to get you as close to real fighting as possible while developing your reflexes (which they also realized was of the utmost importance), called Chi Sau or Gwoh Sau. We have some newer technologies which might help us train other corners of this skill (reactive striking with full power to help develop the correct stimulus-response loop).

As we’ve seen in the UFC and other mixed martial arts sports, as the fighters evolve, the most dominant have the best mix of physical capabilities (endurance, strength, reflexes, ability to withstand strikes) and skills (striking, takedown defense, grappling). Those of us who are amateurs have to do the equation (how much time and money do I have) and come up with their individual answer (what should I study in that time to get me closest to my goal, minus the time I need to spend to be strong and to have cardio capacity).

Some BJJ people (and I often think many if not most of the commentators are armchair BJJ people who don’t train) are so into their art that they have this mindset that its the ultimate and can beat anything. I think its true that in the UFC, if you don’t have a well-developed ground game (BJJ or outstanding Greco-Roman or something similar), you don’t stand a chance. Just look at Connor Macgregor’s last fight.

But out on the street, you may find you want to make sure your striking game is developed. Here we are have two knowledgeable guys making this point with a lot more experience behind their conclusions than I bring. I think Rogan is a Brown Belt in BJJ (and of course, is the main “color” guy for announcing UFC fights) and Eddie Bravo is a Black Belt in BJJ who has beaten Royler Gracie in competetion.

Wong Shun Leung’s Challenge Matches (Beimo)

By Steven Moody October 14, 2018 Leave a Comment

[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.