Kung Fu night at the Peabody Essex Museum

Since my last demo I have been told by Master Ng, (the Feng Shui Man) that I have become a little famous in a new circle of people for being a white guy that speaks “bak wah” a term for Cantonese. Interestingly when I first heard this term years ago I though it meant English because it sounds like “White Language.” Master Ng one of the Principals at ABCD told Master Ng’s friend, “that white guy speaks better ‘Bak wah’” than you!” (This is because Master Ng and his friend speak Taishanese as their first language. In fact as Master Ng was telling me the story, the man standing next to him yelled at me that I should have spoken Taishanese instead. (My Taishanese is not as good though I can sort of fake the Doushan dialect of it.)

Anyway, more recently I did a Kung Fu demonstration  at the Peabody Essex Museum for an exclusive event for members who were top donor and their kids. Gung Kwok Asian Woman’s Lion Dance team was hired to perform a dragon dance and they referred me as someone who could do a Martial Arts demo.

I decided to bring very fake looking weapons to perform with, which ended up being a good decision. I was just thinking that maybe the parents would be a little apprehensive about the weapons if they looked real. I didn’t take into account the fact that the stuff we practice with might look like artifacts. I guess in many ways our school is living history.

I did two back to back half hour performances/workshops where  I punch, powed, cupped, tiger clawed, and crane beaked the air and then had the children and their parents do the same while speaking the Chinese Names of the forms as well. The first group had a chinese mother who helped the energy of the group tremendously. The weapons forms came with a little history from WWII and from the Three Kingdoms period.  The kids then went on to other galleries in a sort of scavenger hunt which ended in the lobby with a surprise dragon dance from Gund Kwok, a meal, and the movie Mulan on a big screen. It was a pretty cool  event to have at a museum.

The Museum itself is probably most recently famous for the old Chinese House that they dismantled and rebuilt. The video on it shows how it was going to be destroyed anyway so  the family that owns it and the ancestors would be relatively happy that the house is at least preserved given the alternative. There was a little video about the life in the surrounding village (probably not there anywmore.) that involved a lion dance for new year. It was interesting because the head looked neither northern or southern. In fact it looked like a box with colorful paper on it. It also didn’t follow a lot of the rules that the Southern Heads usually do, like backing out of the doorway instead of just leaving a house head first. But clearly the people in the village were following other strict rules when it came to making offerings to ancestors and such. It kind of made me loosen up my perspective on what a lion dance was and its place in society, if in parts of China they are almost starting anew with these traditions that might have a disconnect due to the Cultural Revolution. I guess traditionalism was hammered into me by my si hing. My Sifu cares about us following the traditional rules, but says if other people aren’t not to even care about it, just as long as we kept the traditions.

As for myself, I seem to care about tradition when it comes to Kung Fu and Lion Dance, but in other aspects of my life I don’t care at all. Or maybe in my whole life I’ve only really listened to my Sifu and now that I have a family and am not living with him, I am somewhat lost. Like that house at the Peabody Essex Museum, that used to be for living in but is now in a museum.

I guess I do these demonstrations mostly to show myself that kung fu is still living and relevant and that I am not an artifact.

-Adam

acheung-whitecrane@hotmail.com

This entry was posted on February 4, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under LIFE AND STORIES OF ASIAN AMERICANS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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