yle Taijiquan.
Meeting with Master Chen Zhenglei and school staff
The actual name of the village is Chenjiagou, which literally means “Chen Family Ditch”. Unfortunately, the name is pretty accurate. The small village sits under a grove of trees in the middle of miles and miles of fields. There is nothing scenic about it, certainly nothing to indicate that it was the home of one of the most influential styles of Chinese martial arts in history. The houses nestle in little clusters under the trees. Most of them are made of mud bricks as they have been for centuries. Bundles of chili peppers and herbs are hung up to dry beside most front doors. These, along with the occasional torn good luck couplets and faded door god pictures, are the only color to be seen among the faded yellow homes.
A typical mud brick home.
The few shops along the street have a long open window area and a brick counter with a corrugated fiberglass overhang. To buy anything, you have to lean over the counter and point to what you want, not that there is much to buy anyway. When the rains come, as they do quite often during the summer, the dirt roads became impassable mud pits The village appears frozen in time like nothing there has changed in hundreds of years.
Main street after a rain storm
The Chen Taiji school itself was not too impressive. It was a large non-descript two story brick building. Most of the glass panes in the windows were missing. On the front of the building were three large characters that proclaimed that this was a “Wu Shu Guan” or martial arts school. There was nothing to indicate that this was the original and only Chen Taijiquan school in the country.
With a classmate in front of the school
The area in front of the school was divided into three packed earth practice areas. Classes were held in these areas, unless it was raining, The main building did have a nice little gym area with a dusty painted concrete floor but we were only allowed to use it when it was raining. Even though most of the windows were missing their panes of glass, there was little air circulation so the gym was extremely hot and humid.
Practicing in the indoor gym with Chen Zhongliu
In the afternoons, after the local school let out, village children of all ages would gather in the main yard for wushu practice. They would spend hours punching, kicking, jumping and falling on the unforgiving ground. I came to realize why so many Chinese became so good at martial arts. With no movie theatre and precious few TV’s in the village, there simply wasn’t anything else for them to do.
The conditions at the school were rough, more so for the Chinese students than for me. I had a private room made of bare cinder blocks on the second floor of the school. I also got a small electric fan which helped a lot at night even thought the air blowing on me constantly made me catch a small cold. There was no toilet in the room. To go to the bathroom at night, I had to make my way through completely dark gym, unable to see my hand in front of my face. From there I made my way to the outhouse which was basically a trench with a couple of boards stretched across it. To defecate, you made your way to the middle of the boards over the pit and prayed that you didn’t loose your balance. There you would squat and do your business while trying to keep the flies and mosquitoes off your ass. I’m not proud of it but I will admit that, on some nights, especially when it was raining, I would urinate out of the second floor window of my room. I felt guilty but it was better than the inconvenient and dangerous trip to the outhouse. As I did so, I prayed that one of the students had not decided to sleep on the walkway below. I never heard any outraged cries so I think I managed to miss everybody.
The the rest of the students did not have it nearly so good. They lived in two large dormitories. And when I say “dormitory” I mean a big common room filled with beds. The room had space for about thirty beds and was packed with almost no room between beds. I was shocked to see that many of them didn’t even have mosquito nets. The mosquitoes were a major problem. There were lots of them and they were big. I used to joke that they were so big that they came with landing lights. They were everywhere and even came out during the daylight hours. It was very hot at night this time of year and there was no form of air conditioning for the students, not even a fan. Some students slept outside on the hottest nights, bravely enduring the constant mosquito attacks. I was not immune either as I had to keep the windows open to get some air in the room. Luckily, I had a mosquito net and burned anti-mosquito incense so I managed to find some relief during the nightly onslaught.
Bathing was done outside with cold water from a large open topped cement cistern. In the hottest weather, the local village kids would use it as their swimming pool. Needless to say, the water was pretty filthy. Bathing itself consisted of using a large enamel bowl to scoop water out of the cistern and pour it over your head. Then you would lather up with soap, then rinse with another bowl full of cold water. Everyone wore shorts while bathing for modesty as there was no privacy whatsoever. It was so hot that I usually ended up dousing myself three times a day or more. Clothes were washed on Sunday, in a sink with running water standing on its own in the front courtyard. I had never washed my clothes by hand before so I was at a loss. Much to my relief, a couple of the girl students offered to help out and washed them for me.
Bath time
I was a vegetarian at the time and luckily for me most of the meals were vegetarian. This was not by choice but because the school was too poor to afford meat. While good for me, it was rough on the students. What was even worse was that the school said that they couldn’t even afford rice. This really upset the students, especially those from the South of China as they were used to eating large quantities of rice at every meal. Instead of rice we had some sort of corn grits porridge which served as a staple in the area and which I came to actually enjoy. There were also huge steamed bread buns and some tofu at every meal. Even today, I crave steamed buns and buy some whenever I can find them.
Breakfast consisted of the corn grits porridge with preserved vegetables and steamed bread. For lunch there was usually some form of noodles and a few vegetables. Dinner was the same as breakfast. We were charged for our meals but they were incredibly cheap, at least for me since I made a lot more than the average Chinese. The meals were generally less that one yuan (about 15 cents) a day. Occasionally there were small portions of meat available but we were charged extra for this and it was usually more that most students could afford. The meat included the in the rice dish so I had no choice but to pick it out. The pieces were so small however that it usually took the entire lunch period to make the meal safe to eat. One day the cooks actually managed to find some rice, which was rationed by the government, and this was a big occasion among the students.
In between classes the other students and I would sit around under the trees and munch corn on the cob and watermelon. Even though the students were curious about the foreigner in their midst, they were polite enough to leave me alone most of the time. No one treated me special which made me feel like I was just another student in the group. I was told however, that I was only the third foreigner who had ever studied at the village school.
Most of my classmates were college students or teachers. There were several of them around my age (30) or younger. The was one student who was 49 years old. He had a difficult time of it but never complained. The students came from a wide variety of backgrounds. There were many different levels of experience among them. Some had obviously never studied any kind of martial art before while others were quite skilled. All were united in their desire to learn Chen Taijiquan. For me, it felt great to be part of a martial arts community again.
I got plenty of practice speaking Chinese because no one there spoke English. There were a lot of different dialects present so many of the students were hard for me to understand. That included the teachers who spoke with what I called the “Henan Mumble” but was actually just the dialect that had developed in this isolated village over hundreds of years. Luckily the older student in the class was a teacher and spoke beautiful, clear Mandarin. He was kind enough to translate the teachers dialect into standard Chinese for me. It felt weird that someone had to translate Chinese into Chinese but that is a fact of life in China. There are many dialects and often even the Chinese themselves are unable to communicate with their countrymen. Luckily, the writing system is the same for all even if the pronunciation is different. So if all else fails, people can still communicate via the written word.
Most days were the same; we got up, practiced, ate, practiced, took a nap, practiced, ate dinner, practiced and went to bed. I had thought that boredom would be my biggest problem there but as it was, I had very little time to myself. There was a half an hour break between classes but I usually did not have the energy to do much more than rest. The daily schedule looked like this:
Monday - Saturday:
6:30 AM - Wake up
7-8:30 - First Class (Qigong and Self-practice)
8:30 - Breakfast
9:30 - 10:30 - Second Class
11:00 -12:00 - Third Class
12:30 PM Lunch
1:30 -5:00 - Free time
5:00 -6:00 - Fourth class
6:30 - 7:30 - Fifth Class
8:00 - Dinner
9:00 - 10:00 - Sixth Class ( Self practice)
11:00 PM - Lights out
Sunday- free time
The classes were excellent and went at just the right pace for me. I was afraid that they would rush through the form but the teachers seem really concerned that we learn it correctly. I was confident that I would have a pretty firm grasp of things by the end of my stay.
The first three days were spent on basics. Every morning started with an hour of standing Qigong. Chen Qigong is called Zhuang Gong which is often translated as “Standing Post. This required you to stand with knees slightly bent and your arms stretched out in front of you like you were hugging a big tree. As you inhaled, you visualized the breath traveling down to the energy center below your navel know as the Dantian or "Cinnabar Field". The posture was hard enough but maintaining concentration for an hour was extremely challenging as well. As time when on I began to feel more comfortable but it was not something I ever looked forward to.
However, that first day during the first class I learned that hugging an imaginary tree for an hour was nothing. The very first class introduced me to a whole new world of pain. Even with a year of wushu training, I found the basic exercises to be brutal. Everything was done from the Chen bow stance (gong bu). It is a unique stance that is somewhat like straddling a large beach ball or riding a very fat pony. After a day of that, I was sure that I would never walk upright again. My only consolation was that it appeared to be just as painful for all the others, no matter how flexible they were. It was then I had an important realization. Just because a martial art is classified as “internal” does not mean it is easy.
Our class had two teachers; Chen Zhongliu and Chen Xiaoliu. Chen Zhongliu was a big guy who seemed to me to be from local peasant stock. His stances were not the lowest but his movements were powerful and flowing.
Getting instruction from Chen Zhongliu
Chen Xiaoliu was tall and thin and his movements were smooth and perfect. He had incredibly low stances. I was told that he had just taken third place in that year’s All China Taiji Championships. He was quite stern during class but quite friendly outside of it. The two taught in a standard pattern. Zhongliu would introduce the movements to give us a rough idea. Xiaoliu would then correct and refine our movements.
Chen Xiaoliu
I had a few physical problems in the beginning. I had recently bought some Nike shoes that gave my bad ankle great support. However, they were made of synthetic material and not did not breath at all. It was extremely hot and humid in Henan in August. The hot weather plus the heat generated during practice quickly gave me a wicked case of foot rot. The toes of my left foot looked like raw hamburger.
Unable to bear the pain and itching I was directed to the village hospital. It was a small two room building that looked more like a residence than a hospital. A doctor named Ting looked at my foot, put some iodine on it and gave me some kind of pills. My skin had also broken out in heat rash . The doctor said the pills would help with that as well and not to worry. Sure enough, my toes soon felt better. I tried to rest and air my feet out as much as possible which really cut into my self practice time.
A couple of days later I went back and saw a different doctor, also named Ting(they all were named Ting there, I was told) He gave me some powder to put on my toes since my condition had not improved very much. It burned like hell but worked quickly and by afternoon I was able to walk fairly normally. I ditched the Nikes and bought some traditional black cotton shoes which breathed much better. My feet cleared up pretty quickly after that.
In class, the emphasis was always on performing the movements properly. There was never any discussion of possible fighting applications. During one class however, Xiouliu decided to show us the application for one of the movements. It was a painful chin na finger and arm lock. Xiaoliu applied it to everyone in class, obviously enjoying our yelps of pain. However, nobody in the class could get it to work for them. Obviously frustrated, one of the students confronted the teacher. Xiaoliu told the student to attack him any way he wanted. The student shot in and tried for a one leg take down. Xiaoliu simply pivoted and dumped him on the ground. The student got up suitably chastened and we went back to practicing. No one challenges any of the teachers after that. Unfortunately, that was also the only application we were shown. They obviously were kept secret and taught only to trusted closed-door students.
On Sunday, our only day off, I went with a group to see the Yellow River. We started out on bicycles but the terrain was so rough that they soon proved to be useless. We continued on foot through the mud and it turned out to be quite a hike. The river was indeed yellow from all the silt. It was an interesting trip but by the end I wished I had stayed home and rested.
On another day off, I made a journey to the village open air market, I ran into a man named Chen Kaoliu. He invited me back to his room to sit and talk. Kaoliu had lived his whole life in the village. He had graduated high school but had not gone to college, which is not unusual for people from the countryside. He began learning Taiji from his father when he was about 8 years old. He said that everyone in the village knows it although there are people of differing ability and interest. He himself had incredible technique and was a very good teacher. Every motion he made was clear and precise.
The daily training continued until we had completed all 75 of movements of the Lao Jia (Old Frame). After that, we spent several days learning the double edged sword (jian) form. The movements of the weapon forms was very different from the empty hand forms. While not performed at top speed they were not done very slowly either. The stances were much more like conventional Chinese martial art stances and the signature Chen bow stance was not used. This should not have been too surprising. An edged weapon provides its own power by way of its sharp edge therefore rooting to the ground is not necessary to generate cutting force. In fact, it can be dangerous to have a wide, relatively immobile stance as most weapon combat requires quick and nimble footwork to be effective. The Jian is considered a finesse weapon and was often the preferred sword of the scholar class as they had more time to devote to it’s mastery. The broadsword (Dao) on the other hand, was considered lowly and crude. It was the weapon of the soldier who had no time for fancy techniques but had to be trained quickly because his survival on the battle field depended on it. It was said in China that it takes 10 days to master the broadsword and ten years to master the Jian. Therefore, it should have been no surprise to me that the Chen broadsword form was taught in a single afternoon.
On the last day of the session, we had our final examination. For some reason, it was not held in the gym but in one of the large rooms on the second floor. The room was normally used as a bedroom. In fact, one of the younger teachers was sleeping while the exam was going on, although I don’t know how, what with all the stomping. I was one of the first five to go. Naturally I was nervous but happy to be getting it over with. Halfway through the form, Chen Xiaoliu told me to stop. I was shocked and terrified. I felt sure that I had screwed up something badly was going to be failed. The people that had gone before me had completed the entire form without anything being said. I sat on the sidelines in a cold sweat. All that work for nothing, I thought. Then, the student that followed me was also told to stop about halfway through. I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that the teacher was stopping everybody in the middle to save time. Since the form takes at least 10 minutes to complete and there were over 30 students, that seemed like a smart thing to do.
Class graduation picture. I'm 3rd from left, second row
After successfully passing the exam, it was time to go. I gathered my things to head back to Zhengzhou City where I had found a job teaching English at a technical college. About eight other students were also heading to the city so we decided to ride back together. However, there was no bus service to the tiny village, We had to figure out another way to travel the mile or so to the highway where the buses ran. There were few, if any, automobiles in the village so we had to find an alternative means of transportation. Luckily, one of the villagers with a horse drawn cart was heading that way and said he would be glad to give us a ride. We tossed our bags in back and sat on them, using them as makeshift seats. The day was sunny but not too warm so we were comfortable. We laughed and joked among ourselves as we enjoyed the hour long ride to the highway.
Studying at the Chen village had been challenging. The classes were physically demanding and the life style primitive. Still, I felt comfortable there among others who accepted me as just another martial arts student. Even though I was able to continue my studies for the rest of the year in Zhengzhou; getting private lessons from a top student of Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang, I missed the comradery and challenges of the village. I am grateful that I was able to study there for it has given me an insight into Chen Style Taijiquan that I could not have gotten anywhere else.
