Bak mei (white eyebrow)
kung fu master
Leung Sheung proudly demonstrated another self-defense technique to his
class: side kick, grab, punch. Leung Sheung executed the movements with
as much fluency and precision as would be expected from any 20-year
veteran of the fighting arts. The students then imitated the perfection
of his form. In the back of the room, the old man quickly turned his
head away and bit down on his tongue, swallowing his laughter.
Side kick! Grab! Punch! The old man leaned against the wall for
support. Now his body shuddered as he struggled to conceal his
amusement. Suddenly, his efforts failed, and his silent chuckles grew
into loud roars of laughter.
Leung Sheung stopped his class, his face red with anger. “Hey, old man!” he snapped. “What are you laughing at?”
“Oh, nothing,” he replied. “Please continue. I’ll try not to disturb you further.”
Leung Sheung took a deep breath and paced across the room. He was
still furious. “Look, old man, a few months ago we found you living out
of garbage cans in Macao,” he said. “We brought you here to the Union
Hall. We gave you a place to sleep and food to eat. The least you could
do is show a little respect when I’m teaching.”
The old man perked up an ear. Had he heard the man say “respect”?
“Then the least you could do is show a little respect for the art
that you teach,” the old man growled back. “All you do is have your
students punch air.” He quickly moved through Leung Sheung’s technique:
side kick, grab, punch. “But the air doesn’t hit back. What happens when
you face an enemy who will?”
The old man shook his head. “If you are going to practice kung fu,” he said, “you should do so seriously — or not at all!”
“Look, old man,” bellowed master Leung Sheung, “if you think you know something, why don’t you come up here and teach me?”
With this challenge from Leung Sheung on that day in 1952, Yip Man
officially opened the doors on his 20-year career as a martial arts
instructor and patriarch of
wing chun.
Standing only 5 feet tall and weighing 120 pounds, Yip Man proceeded to
throw the 6-foot, 200-pound bak mei master around the room with almost
no effort. No matter how Leung Sheung attacked, he always found himself
carefully deposited on the floor.
When all was said and done, Leung Sheung had surrendered his kung fu
class at the Restaurant Workers’ Union Hall to Yip Man and had become
Yip Man’s first disciple.
The Master’s Past
Yip Man did not happily accept his new role in life. Before World War
II, he had been a member of a wealthy merchant family in the southern
Chinese town of Fatshan, in Kwangtung province. He had owned a large
manor house, a prosperous business and a farm, and he had enjoyed a life
of relative ease with his wife and family.
Between 1937 and 1941, Yip Man served in the army during China’s
valiant effort to repel the Japanese invasion. He returned to his family
in Fatshan during the years of the Japanese occupation. Times were
hard. His farm was ruined, and his wife became ill.
The end of the war brought little improvement. China needed to
rebuild its ravaged cities and towns but found itself embroiled in civil
war instead. The nationalist Chinese government recruited Yip Man to
the post of captain of the police patrols for Namhoi County. Although
the government appointment helped the living conditions of the Yip Man
homestead, it did not come in time to prevent the death of Yip Man’s
wife from extended illness.
After the Communist triumph in 1949, Yip Man left his two grown sons
in Fatshan and fled to Hong Kong. If he had remained, his position as
police captain would have meant almost certain death at the hands of the
Communists. Thus, at the age of 51, Yip Man was forced to start an
entirely new life from scratch.
“When the Communists took over, he lost all his major tangible assets,” explains William Cheung,
one of Yip Man’s most senior disciples. “But he still had whatever he
could carry: money, gold bars, etc. But Fatshan was a very small town
compared with Hong Kong and Macao. There were a lot of shrewd operators
in the city. So he immediately lost some of his money through people
cheating him.
“Then the heartbreak of losing his home and his wife and being
separated from his family caught up with him. He became disillusioned
and perhaps began to pity himself. Soon, the Chinese nobleman found
himself destitute.
“Then Leung Sheung and a chap called Cheng Kao found him wandering
around at the pier of Macao. He seemed to be homeless. They didn’t know
that he was a martial artist. They were just being kind. They would have
helped anyone they could. So they took him back to the premises of the
Restaurant Workers’ Union Hall. They let him stay there. When Yip Man
started teaching at the Restaurant Union, he first taught Leung Sheung,
Lok Yiu and Cheng Kao. Then there were a few others, like Tsui Sung
Ting. Of course, Leung Sheung, being a kung fu master already before he
studied wing chun, progressed much faster than the rest.
“A few months later, the rest of us turned up.”
Yip Man quickly proved to be a most unusual instructor. For example,
William Cheung recalls that during the seven years he spent with his
teacher, he never once saw Yip Man actually teach a wing chun class. Yip
Man was usually present in the back of the room, supervising the
assistant instructors and correcting his favorite students, but the
actual tasks of instruction were left to Leung Sheung, Lok Yiu, Tsui
Sung Ting, Wong Shun Leung and William Cheung.
“He never taught classes himself,” William Cheung says. “Well, only in
some situations … with the big clients, the ones who could pay very
heavily for a private session. At those times, he would often take me
along. Then, suppose he was going to teach a wooden-dummy technique, he
would show the technique once. After that, I would help the person.” Yip
Man’s regular classes generally consisted of forms practice,
chi sao (trapping hands) drills,
wooden-dummy techniques
and free sparring. There was no set pattern to the sessions. Each
assistant instructor was allowed to exercise some personal discretion.
At rare times, the grandmaster might touch hands with one of his
favorite students in chi sao practice. But those occasions would last
only for a few seconds at a time. Yip Man feared that by doing chi sao
with a junior, his own technique would deteriorate. He would have to
slow down to create openings for him.
Yip Man had a soft-spoken style that taught more by example and
suggestion than by the spoken word. He urged his students not to bully
people or to act in a rude or arrogant manner. And he tried to keep them
from fighting in the street gangs of Hong Kong, though he did encourage
organized competition.
Bruce Lee’s Memories
In
Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (Warner Books, 1975),
Linda Lee Cadwell quotes from an essay written by her husband,
Bruce Lee, for freshman English in 1961. The essay clearly illustrates the subtle tactics Yip Man would use to influence his students:
“After four years of hard training in the art of gung fu
(kung fu), I began to understand and felt the principle of gentleness —
the art of neutralizing the effect of the opponent’s effort and
minimizing expenditure of one’s energy. All this must be done in
calmness and without striving. It sounded simple, but in actual
application it was difficult. The moment I engaged in combat with an
opponent, my mind was completely perturbed and unstable. Especially
after a series of exchanging blows and kicks, all my theory of
gentleness was gone. My only thought left was somehow or another I must
beat him and win.
“My instructor, Professor Yip Man, head of the wing chun school,
would come up to me and say: ‘Relax and calm your mind. Forget about
yourself and follow your opponent’s movement. Let your mind, the basic
reality, do the countermovement without any interfering deliberation.
Above all, learn the art of detachment.’
“That was it! I must relax. However, right here I had already done
something contradictory, against my will. When I said I must relax, the
demand for effort in ‘must’ was already inconsistent with the
effortlessness in ‘relax.’ When my acute self-consciousness grew to what
the psychologists call the ‘double-blind’ type, my instructor would
again approach me and say: ‘Preserve yourself by following the natural
bends of things and don’t interfere. Remember never to assert yourself
against nature; never be in frontal opposition to any problem, but
control it by swinging with it. Don’t practice this week. Go home and
think about it.’
“The following week I stayed home. After spending many hours in
meditation and practice, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On
the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and
punched at the water. Right then at that moment, a thought suddenly
struck me: Wasn’t this water, the very basic stuff, the essence of gung
fu? Didn’t the common water illustrate to me the principle of gung fu? I
struck it just now, but it did not suffer hurt. Again I stabbed it with
all my might, yet it was not wounded. I then tried to grasp a handful
of it but it was impossible. This water, the softest substance in the
world, could fit itself into any container. Although it seemed weak, it
could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I
wanted to be like the nature of water.”
Although
Bruce Lee added a bit of his own genius to the events he related in this
essay, it does indicate the intellectual as well as technical heights
to which Yip Man inspired his students. But at the same time, the wing
chun grandmaster also had a playful streak. He loved Bruce Lee’s
practical jokes — which was probably tough to do when he would show up
for class with itching powder, handshake vibrators and water-squirting
cameras.
“Yip Man had a very good sense of humor,” William Cheung says. “He
liked to give his students nicknames, and he would take a long time to
dream them up. Like Wong Shun Leung was called ‘Wong Ching Leung,’ which
means that he’s like a bull. I was called ‘Big Husky Boy.’ And Bruce
was nicknamed ‘Upstart.’”
Two years after Yip Man began teaching at the Restaurant Workers’
Union Hall, he was asked to leave. His classes had grown so large and
included so many nonunion members that the hall had actually become a
kung fu school. So Yip Man and his followers opened the first commercial
wing chun school on Lei Dat Street in the Yaumatei District of Kowloon.
Although Yip Man was now a self-supporting member of society with a successful business, his life was still not a happy one.
“He remarried in 1954,” William Cheung says. “He was
about 56, and she was about 40. He met her in a restaurant, I think.
Anyway, some people thought she didn’t have a very clean past. All his
students sort of looked down at her, and this made Yip Man very upset.
“People do not realize that life changes. It moves in cycles.
Sometimes it progresses, sometimes it transcends. So there are times
that you have to forget about the past. The students were very
narrow-minded. They just didn’t show any respect for their master. They
even used to address him as ‘old man’ sometimes in a very disrespectful
way.
“This was one of the reasons Yip Man never taught a class personally.
And I don’t think he was doing the wrong thing by not teaching. Only
after the fame of Bruce Lee
did they realize that the master was so great and that the style was so
great because they saw that it could produce practitioners like Bruce.”
According to William Cheung, Yip Man’s difficulties with his students
were further aggravated by his continued drug use. Sometimes the school
rent would go unpaid. By 1956 Yip Man had been evicted from his first
school in Yaumatei.
The wing chun clan then moved to an apartment in a
government-supported housing project, where Yip Man lived and taught.
His students formed a committee that collected the school tuition, paid
the rent and left Yip Man with a living allowance.
William Cheung recalls that during this period, his master would
sometimes have to fight for survival — literally. “At the time we moved
to the government house, there was a restriction on water,” he says.
“They only turned on the water once every four days for
four hours,” William Cheung recalls, “so you had to collect buckets of
water to store until the next four days were over.
“Usually I did all the chores and organization around the apartment,
but that morning, I was at the market and my master wanted to get some
water. Now all the tenants had to get their water from the same
government tap.
“The local gangsters got a hold of this tap and charged everybody 50 cents a bucket.
“Well, because it was so early in the morning, Yip Man didn’t have
the humor to argue with these characters, so he challenged them.
“I had just gotten back to the apartment when I heard the commotion. I
could see what was happening and I started running toward it. Yip Man
was fighting at least six or seven. The thugs all had poles for carrying
buckets. They probably used them to threaten people. Yip Man took away
one of their poles, then he flattened them all within seconds. When I
got there, they were all dragging their poles, holding their heads and
running away.
“From then on, every morning — not just every four days, but every
morning — two buckets of water were delivered to the apartment.”
As the years passed, Yip Man’s reputation as an instructor grew, and
he was eventually able to afford better accommodations. In fact, by 1964
he was able to bring his two sons and their families out of mainland
China. Three years later, due in part to the prosperity brought to him
through Bruce Lee’s
The Green Hornet fame, Yip Man made his final move to a large, well-equipped gymnasium.
Today, Yip Man’s martial arts legacy has been encased in mystery.
Many wing chun instructors claim to be his direct disciple or the
personal inheritor of some secret set of wing chun techniques. However,
as William Cheung confirms, “Probably fewer than six people in the whole
wing chun clan were personally taught, or even partly taught, by Yip
Man. Yip Man had to teach the first two so that the first two could
teach the next six.”
“But Yip Man was so intelligent in the martial arts that
he could not stand a slow student,” William Cheung says. “He was very
impatient with slow students. So he could not stand to teach more than a
few. Also, he belonged to the old tradition, influenced by the Boxer
Rebellion, which believed that the martial arts should not be passed on
to Westerners. He even believed that wing chun should be just a
household art.
“Yip Man was a well-educated man who never wanted to teach kung fu.
His best loves were watching soccer and attending the Chinese opera. His
strongest hatred was for ignorance. That’s why he did not like many
martial artists. He was a man of perfection. He believed that there’s no
halfway to doing anything.
“That’s why a lot of people did not understand him.”
In May 1970, Yip Man permanently closed the doors on his career as a
martial arts instructor. He died from throat cancer on December 2, 1972.
He was 79.
.