Not the TV series (never saw it, but I loved Serenity). A real one.

I took a break from work this evening, and headed out to the usual small garden park to practice. It was heavily overcast, and rain occasionally came spotting down, but I decided to persevere and eventually the raindrops stopped falling.

I was working on the ba da zhang tonight, and in particular the 7th palm (the Overturning Body Palm), which Sun Lao Shi went over with me on Wednesday morning. It’s very ‘twisty’, and Sun Lao Shi described it as intended to train the waist. Liu Jing Ru’s book just says ‘the Overturning Body Palm strikes by overturning the body suddenly‘. Heh.

Anyway, so I was overturning, which is to say leaning backwards, and rolling my palm around the back of my head, elbow above my face, when I saw a point of green light before my eyes…. Night had fallen by this point, and the park was only dimly illuminated by the light from the windows of the surrounding apartments. I thought at first I was imagining it, but no! A solitary firefly had come to investigate me. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen in Beijing! It stayed around for about ten minutes or so, minding its own business (I wish I could say the same for the mosquitoes!). Eventually, it vanished. Heh, hope it’s there with some friends next time I go there; it was beautiful – a tiny spark of phosphor flitting around…

I’ve now pretty much memorised the ba da zhang, and now I need to work on fluidity – being able to do it smoothly, without thinking about it. It’ll take a while, but it’s doable. I also did more work on the first set of the linear 64 palms, which similarly is now remembered but looks ugly when I go through it.

Tomorrow I need to work on the second set of the 64 – I would like to have it remembered to some extent at least before I meet Sun Lao Shi on Sunday. Not sure if it will happen, though.

I really enjoyed the early morning training sessions; I’ll have to try to do it more often. I totally failed to get up early yesterday and today though – I guess I need the incentive of having to meet someone.

Wednesday’s session was funny. Productive, but funny. For once, it was Sun Lao Shi who begged off early; he’d met up with friends the night before, and they’d had a lot of baijiu. It reminded me about a, shall we say, cultural disconnect I’ve run into before. In the West, teachers of the internal martial arts in particular seem to commonly fall into the “my body is a temple” school, spiritual, non-violent… I’ve certainly come from that frame of mind. In Asia, though – Singapore almost as much as China – masters of ‘internal’ styles drink, smoke, fight…. and in fact, are totally regular blokes, as we might say in the UK. Real down to earth fellers. Perhaps Daoist monks on their mountaintops live the way Westerners are thinking of… not many other people, though. Heh. The people in the UK who are full of “taiji is like a Chinese yoga” need to meet my teachers, and the other masters like them, that’s all I can say!

I was interviewed by BBC Radio today, and got commissioned to write a magazine article – both about the Olympic experience… It seems to be a media month for me…

This is a rant. You’vebeen warned!

The TV crew were in touch again last week; they wanted to film me at my bagua needles class. I said sure, as long as Master Sun agrees. There wasn’t much problem there, as they’ve already been filming Dragoncache and others training with him. So, all cool there.

Yesterday morning, they were in touch again. It was heavily overcast, and they were afraid it was going to rain – so, could we move the lesson forward to 2pm? OK, I said, as long as Master Sun is OK with this. They called back a bit later – sure, all fine.

So, I arrived just before 2, and find the TV crew sitting in their car outside the apartment block. We go up to Master Sun’s apartment, I ring the doorbell… and start getting a very bad feeling… Plainly, no-one is expecting us. Master Sun, his family, and two of his Chinese students are there… the students speak good English, and say of course we couldn’t move the lesson – Mi Lao Shi is still on her way and won’t be here till 3… Of course, at this point I felt terribly embarrassed. Turning up unannounced with a TV crew behind me is not how I like to approach my teachers! Very clearly, nothing had been agreed. I’m increasingly feeling that the director simply lied to me about that. So, at this point, I said very sorry, I’ll be back at 3, left and went outside to train on my own for the next hour. The TV crew emerged very shortly afterwards but, frankly, I didn’t want to talk to them, and they kept their distance.

At 3, Mi Lao Shi arrived, Master Sun and his other students came out, and we got started. The previous hour of practice had helped a lot, so I was pretty warmed up and able to give the lesson my best – which isn’t very good at all! The cameras brought out lots of gawkers, even though they must have all seen me many times before; it’s funny what a media presence does to people! Anyway, so there was quite a crowd. Master Sun and Mi Lao Shi gave me lots of correction on fine details, which will make me look even more clueless on the film, but which was very very useful all the same!

I had a quick chat with Mi Lao Shi afterwards; I wanted to take a break for the summer. I’m not paid when I’m not teaching, so (at that point) it looked like I would be without any income until the end of October. More on that in a later post.

Anyway, at this point things really went off the rails. The whole point of my involvement in this TV thing is that they wanted to profile foreigners in China who are studying martial arts. No problem. I agreed to this, and said that it was fine to follow my life. However, let me be clear that I’m not being paid for my involvement in this. From this point onwards, it became clear that the TV crew had an agenda, and they didn’t want to just film a documentary; they have a narrative they want to tell, and Dragoncache and I are going to be fitted into it,whether we like it or not.

So… after the class I planned to go to the Bookworm, where Dragoncache and I normally meet up. The director had other ideas. She wanted to take me to a martial arts shop. Well, the penny hadn’t yet dropped, and it sounded interesting, so I called Dragoncache, we agreed to see what happened and stay in touch, and so the crew and I went off in two cars. It turned out that we were going to Tiyu Daxue, the Sports University…

We arrived in the wrong place. My car did at least… We came to a martial arts equipment store that I already knew – it’s the same one that my other teacher, Sun Ru Xian, recommended to me, and where I’ve already bought a few things. The cameraman went in to see if this was where he was meant to be going… it wasn’t;he called the director, who was in the other car, and found out we were going to another shop, in the next street. However – the owner came out, and recognized me. Now, once again, I felt really bad. Perhaps I’m taking this too seriously, but because I’ve been given discounts there as a student of Sun Ru Xian, I felt very awkward that the cameras had gone in, turned around, and walked out again – so I insisted we go in and film. And, as it happens, they have some very cool, very high quality – and thus very expensive – weapons there. While we were doing this impromptu filming, Daroncache and his wife arrived, as did the director and the rest of the crew.

We were there for quite some time; the owner gave some kungfu spear demos, and got interviewed. After that, we all left. Dragoncache and I were both really hungry, but we were told that we still had to go to the original shop… “because it was cheaper”…. I have no idea why. We went there, milled around, didn’t do anything structured… and there really wasn’t anything interesting there… The quality of the equipment was much lower. Dragoncache thought it was because they wanted to film us haggling over a purchase, but neither of us wanted to buy anything…

Phew. Finally, we got to eat. They took us to a Shanxi restaurant, and I have to say, the food was good. The crew paid, so at least I’ve got a free meal out of all this… at the expense of any remaining dignity. At one point, someone said something to the effect of “look, they can use chopsticks”, so they insisted we be filmed picking up peas and eating them… Yes, guys, hairy foreign devils can be taught how to use chopsticks, get over it, it’s not a big deal any more….

At this point, Dragoncache and I just lost interest in the whole affair. We made our excuses and got out as soon as possible! His wife and another student took a cab downtown; we headed off to Wudaokou, and finally got to catch up! It’s been a while since we last met, and we had a fair bit to chat about… I’ll talk about that another time, though.

So… on the whole, I don’t think the TV crew are bad, as such. They’re just… media people It’s been an interesting experience. It may even have another chapter… When they filmed me on campus, they said it was just backup because the weather was poor – but yesterday, they said they may not have time to film ‘for real’… but maybe they’ll come back next Friday, we’ll see. It’s pretty clear now, though, that this programme, if it gets aired, will be basically fiction as far as I’m concerned – goodness only knows what they’ll do with the editing

Dragoncache sent me an SMS a couple of weeks ago – would I like to be on TV? I should know better – I’ve had bad experiences of being on TV – but like a fool I still said sure, tell me more..

It turns out that CCTV (China’s State Broadcasting Agency) have set up a new English-medium channel, to be broadcast in the US (and maybe Europe?). Someone had had the idea of a programme about foreigners coming to China to study martial arts. You can see where this is going, right..?

I met the reporter, Sunny, shortly afterwards at Lush, and we chatted for a few hours. She decided they would feature me, and arranged to come to the University on Tuesday last week. Well, that got cancelled, rearranged, altered, etc, and eventually they came on Friday. We spent most of the morning in the garden where I normally train, plus some time filming me cycling around campus.

Heh. I don’t think they asked me the right questions… They filmed me going through a taiji set. Now, I was perfectly happy to tell them that it wasn’t a form taught in China, but instead was developed by a high-ranking Guomindang official who subsequently moved to Taiwan and New York… but they didn’t ask…. When it came to bagua, Sun Lao Shi’s admonition that I’m not good enough to represent him yet was still fresh in my mind, so I used the form I first learned from Zhang Sheng Li back in 2004; I’ve practised it regularly, so no problems there.

Of course, I’ve always said on this blog that I’m not very good, and that’s not false modesty. Now, who knows, you may get to see it on TV or, more likely, on YouTube… I’m not embarrassed by this, btw – I’m learning at my own pace and in my own way, and I’m happy enough; I don’t feel any need to compare myself to anyone else!

It was interesting, given that I’ve thought about trying out acting sometime; we had to do some shots many times, because the cameraman thought my expression wasn’t quite right… They interviewed me about why I’m here, and as usual, my brain turned to mush as soon as the camera went on – all of the coherent arguments and turns of phrase that worked well in rehearsal turned to blah bleh uuurgghh dribble….

It was also interesting because the cameraman asked me to repeat certain moves so that he could shoot from different angles; not see easy to know what he meant, when the translator says can you repeat the bit where you [cue waving of arms that's apparently meant to indicate what I should do... but doesn't...] Even when I worked out what he wanted, I found it really hard to do just a couple of moves in isolation; I needed to work up to them by repeating part or all of the form….

Later, they filmed me in class, (they needed material to show my daily life) and we had a clash of wills as the director started ordering my students around; I had to remind her that this was my class, not hers, and she should just film and stay out of the way…

In the evening, I was due to meet friends at the Drum and Bell, so as part of the ‘daily life’ bit, the camera crew tagged along. We got there early, so they filmed me strolling around the hutong to the side of the Bell Tower, and tried to get me to play badminton with the local kids… I refused – no problem filming my ‘normal life’ but I’m not going to let them make stuff up….

Oh, and that day had really bad air quality, so they say that the footage they took of me practising is “just in case”; they’ll get back to me again to shoot more when the air is clear and the sky is blue. Plus, they want footage of Dragoncache and I chilling out, chatting, practising together (which we never do), and drinking beer together (which we often do)….

Aiyoh…. I should have learned that being on TV only means trouble… now I’ll end up on YouTube being mocked by people who are actually good at bagua and taiji…. What have I done????