News and Articles Step Back, Thread Palm, And Finish Form by Gene Ching -- Head Shaolin & Tai Chi Instructor Dear readers, submitted for your approval are a few fleeting observations on the martial journey just before the millennium. If you have been following our little newsletter up until now, you may have noticed reoccurring symbol that has been a consistent thread through a few of our previous issues - the Buddhist Wheel, or Dharmachakra. This was unintentional, subconscious on my part perhaps, but believe me, I wish I could have planned it so elegantly. The wheel is a symbol of change. Right now, as we all approach the greatest turn of the clock that any of us will live to experience, it seems only fitting to close the millennium with one more allusion to the wheel. After all, if Y2K comes and goes, and we experience no change, won't that be anticlimactic? Personally, it is a time of great change for me. As I write this, my wife is expecting our first child. For once, I am following my martial brother and fellow instructor and employee Onassis Parungao, who many of you already know from his articles and fine customer service here. He recently became a father too. In fact, I have just returned from my fourth journey to Shaolin Temple, where part of my mission was to ask my monk master Shi Decheng to choose a Chinese Buddhist name for my baby. As I reflect on my unborn child's future, I find myself flashing back like Caine to his days with Master Po. I remember my own childhood when I first walked into Lam Kwoon. Back then, our school was in a converted storage garage just down the street. It was a mere fraction of the size that our school is now. There was one tiny closet of a bathroom that we all took turns sharing as a changing room. Sifu Lam's office was little more than a counter he built by the garage door and weathered sofa where he read his Kungfu books. There was just enough room for two people to recite a set at a time, as long as it wasn't one of the long weapons. But there were also advantages to being a small school. There were no instructors; Sifu Lam ran every class and taught every student, all by himself. What's more, we all wore real silk uniforms, tops and bottoms, tailor-made by hand by Sifu's first wife. I remember practicing lots of blocking drills and horst stance back in "the day". It was then when Sifu Lam began me on my own Shaolin journey that has been the connecting thread for the majority of my life. It has taken me around the world five times, and now, it has given my child a name. Back then, Lam Kwoon was just a small fish in the martial sea. But from these modest beginnings, Wing Lam Enterprises arose. It was Sifu Lam's dream to create an unprecedented video series that documented the breadth of his teachings, the complete systems, but he needed full-time help. Strange at it may seem, I was working as a swordmaker on Folsom Street in San Francisco at the time. While this might sound like a romantic job, in reality it is shop work - harsh, dirty and dangerous. After a few industrial accidents, such as catching a metal splinter in my eye, I was quite ready to accept my Sifu's offer. After all, it was a dream come true. My day job was my passion, Shaolin Kungfu. Besides, when my Sifu asked me to serve as the first full-time employee in his fledgling company, well, that was an honor that I could not pass up. The first days were the hardest days. Running the school was difficult enough. Some days I would find myself leading as many as five classes: a morning, two children's classes in the afternoon and two evening classes. But that was great fun, because I got to work out a lot. The real challenge was to create the video series. Sifu Lam had it in his mind what he wanted to create. It was my job to see that this vision was actualized in video. Very soon he hired a second employee, our Shaolin Instructor Gary Shockley. My job was to script the narration and help run the school while Gary Filmed and edited. That's often his voice you hear over the narration on our videos. Sifu Lam, of course, demonstrated. We would shoot every weekend, and assemble it over the week. It was furious work, but we all learned a lot from the process. Together we made over 75 videos in less than a year almost exhausting Sifu Lam's knowledge at the time. However, times change and since then, he learned more. We never stop studying here at Lam Kwoon so our video production is an open-ended process. There is always more uncharted territory to explore. Our next hurdle was to distribute them, so in 1994, we made our first catalog. But in typical Wing Lam Kungfu fashion, we added more than just videos. Our martial way is to strive for excellence, and this has always been reflected in our approach to this business. Naturally, we included the selection of uniforms and weapons that we already sold at our school. Sifu Lam's second wife, Lynn, got her family in Beijing to send us martial arts books from China. Furthermore, my wife was a book buyer at that time, which gave me access to even more book suppliers, in particular our best selling title, Shaolin Kung Fu, Treasure of Chinese Nation by Xing Yan. We were the first to offer it at the lowest price - $19.95. It remains one of the best items that we offer and if you haven't got one for yourself by now, what's keeping you? That book gave me my first real preview of Shaolin Temple, and just in time because the following year was my first pilgrimage there. Since 1995 was the 1500th anniversary of Shaolin Temple, it seemed a good time for me to go. Well, needless to say, it was a phenomenal experience. I brought back as much as I could, and we followed up on contacts I had made there to bring to you so many of the special Shaolin items that we have now. We also fused our school newsletter and our catalog into one publication. You are now reading volume six, issue three of that publication. Furthermore, through this column and through publishing articles in many of the major martial arts magazines, I wrote several articles on Shaolin, the most in English. I even have the exceptional honor of having two simultaneous cover stories last September. Both stories were on Shaolin, of course. And to think that it all began with Sifu Lam sitting me in a horse stance back at the old storage garage down the street. Now my Kwai Chang flashback fades to only a few weeks ago. Instead of sitting in a horse, I am sitting in a dilapidated hotel room in the village near Shaolin Temple with my other master, monk Shi Decheng. He passes me a name he has chosen for my daughter, selected in the traditional manner using Chinese Astrology, along with a gift for her - a jade pendant of the goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin. We chat about how his life has changed now that Shaolin Temple has grown in popularity again. These days, his mission has become teaching abroad, so he is frequently on the road spreading Shaolin Kungfu and Chan Buddhism around the world. As with Wing Lam Enterprises, it appeals to my own egotism to think that I had some significant hand in both of my teacher's successes since I have done so much work to help promote both of them. But in fact, they have had more impact upon my success. After all, without them, I would have never found my way going to and for on the Shaolin path, and from walking up and down on it. I'd have no teachings or teachers to promote. I can't help but ponder the interconnecting threads behind it all; teacher to student, husband to wife, parent to child. Husband to wife, did I say? Yes, that reminds me, I had another mission at Shaolin during this pilgrimage. My originally fellow employee, video editor extraordinaire, Gary Shockley was going to get married to Lori White. Most certainly you will remember Lori, IKF's Writer of the Year. She wrote the following in her article in our last issue, "I've seen it happen far too many times; "I've seen it happen far too many times; one of my fellow students at the kung fu studio finds a new boyfriend or girlfriend or gets engaged or -- God forbid -- gets married" (my emphasis). At Lam Kwoon, Gary and Lori are fellow senior Shaolin instructors who have both been teaching here for almost a decade. I have been blessed to be able to share the Shaolin journey with them. We three have all trained together since the late '80s (Gary and I since the late '70s) as well as traveled together to China together with Sifu Lam twice to compete and train. Before I left my most recent trip to China, they asked me to be minister at their wedding. Just like when Sifu Lam asked me to be his employee, it was another honor that I could not refuse. So I went to Shaolin bearing with their written meditations about each other. My wife and I learned this method from our Zen priest when we took our vows. I promised Gary and Lori that I would offer their meditations in the fires of a sacrificial burner inside Shaolin Temple. Of course, this is not a conventional or traditional practice (such is often the nature of Zen), but it had meaning for all of us, one that I am sure that all fellow martial artists can understand. I had to use my Shaolin skills inside the temple to sneak them into the burner when no one was looking. But flashback to my last China trip for a peak moment. A few days after Decheng passed me my baby's name, I would find myself on a new frontier, the summit of Wudangshan, China's next most famous martial mountain second only to Shaolin's Song Mountain. This was uncharted territory for me, full of promise and adventure. Few places exude power like the summits of mountains, especially the sacred martial mountains of China. From this lofty place, it was as if one could see across time. As fate would have it, I was there on an auspicious day for Y2K chiliasts (millennium believers). It was 9/9/99, which is lucky to the Chinese, because the word for nine sounds like the word for longevity, but unlucky for chiliasts, because it was the date that some computers were allegedly set to fail. Did any fail? I don't know. I was on top of that mystic mountain, deep in China. If all the computers failed around the world, Wudangshan would remain relatively unaffected. If you're really afraid of Y2K, go somewhere that doesn't care. From Wudangshan, surrounded by a timeless heavenly range and exquisite ancient temples, the very concept Y2K is ridiculous. Computers crashing? It was absurd to worry about the survival of something only a few decades old as Wudangshan stood immovably beneath me to testify its survival of thousands of years of history. By its venerated calendar, next year is not Y2K, it is the year of the dragon. Now dragons are another symbol of change. They can represent transformation. For example, near Shaolin Temple is Longmen, the dragon gate that crosses the Yellow River, where it is said that a carp may be transformed into a dragon if it can get across it. To me, that gate is a metaphor for the martial arts. If we can pass through that arduous task, we can become dragons from carp. Indulge me in one more flashback to when I served as minister for the transformation of Gary and Lori into husband and wife. Theirs was a "martial arts" wedding, held right here at Lam Kwoon. Some people get married on roller coasters, others while parachuting from airplanes, but Gary and Lori, they got to do it like a Shaw Brother's movie. It was quite a day. Our whole school came out to honor them in their martial arts finery. General's Mandate played as the wedding march. The cake was in the form of yin yang, and was cut with a straight sword. I could finally don my full Shaolin robes and be the real "fake" monk that I wanted to be in last issue's column (I can just see those few remaining Shaolin critics fuming at me for this one -- A monk with a pregnant wife! What a fake! It brings me great joy. That's me, the real "fake" monk, I'll cop to that anytime). Despite the martial wackiness, their ceremony was full of good humor, love and profound respect. During the ceremony, Sifu Wing Lam's eyes were filled with joy, for just like Wudangshan for me, this wedding was uncharted territory for our school. He was beaming like a proud father, as delighted as the rest of us that the martial journey could bring us all here to such bliss. Our hall of war was transformed into a hall of love. If there is one constant in Buddhism, it is impermanence, but perhaps even that could change. Senior monk Shi Su Yun reminded me of this during my last visit to Shaolin. The years were weighing heavily upon him now, so he greeted me with the sobering Buddhist dictum "birth, death, rebirth, no one escapes the wheel." From our all-powerful computers to the ancient temples of China, no one and nothing escapes change. But change can be positive, just as the carp transforms into the dragon. We transform into husbands and wives, parents and teachers, never regretting the loss of carp in us. As the millennium encroaches, Wing Lam Enterprises is undergoing its own transformation. Onassis and I are leaving the company. We will both continue to teach and train here, guarding the northern and southern gates of Lam Kwoon as we like to say, but we will no longer be involved with the mail order company. Neither of us will be answering the phone or emails anymore, something we will both miss. Furthermore, I will step down from my position as Program Director of the Wing Lam Kung Fu Federation, and a replacement has yet to be decided. Onassis has found work as a choreographer in independent film (so watch out Jackie, Jet and Sammo!) I have accepted a position with TC Media as assistant publisher of Kungfu Qigong Wushu Magazine. I think I can speak for Onassis when I say it has been an honor for both of us to serve our teacher, Sifu Wing Lam and a pleasure to serve all of you. Your support and understanding, especially during the infancy of this company, has been extraordinary. We sincerely hope that you will continue to support Wing Lam Enterprises into the next millennium. So with Sifu Wing Lam's blessing, we walk off into the sunset like Caine at the end of the episode. But not to worry, next week is another episode. And next year is a new season, since our series is far from cancelled.