We’re currently staying at the Cordis Hotel in Mon Kok for the week we’re in Hong Kong. Kimberly found it for like $150 a night and it has 2 bedrooms and 1.25 bath which is really convenient for the 3 of us. One of the major selling points of the hotel is that they have daily tai chi classes every morning at 9am that you can sign up for. I was not able to register for the classes until we were done with quarantine. I’ve been looking forward to this for months because I took a few weeks of tai chi in college and loved it but never pursued it further because I have an attention span of a squirrel when it comes to sticking with hobbies. Everyone so far is impressed that I’ve kept with beekeeping for 3 years now.
I signed up by myself on Tuesday morning and was the only one in the class. Master Cheung was the instructor for the class. He’s 84 years old and has been practicing Tai Chi for about 40 years. The lessons were mostly in Cantonese, I understood about 60% of it because I’m not familiar with vocabulary for history or Chinese idioms which there are a lot of. Like for example 鐵飯碗 (Iron Rice Dish) is a saying describing an occupation with guaranteed job security.
Because it was basically a private lesson and I had 5 days to take classes, Master Cheung went into a lot of specific detail about each of the different stances that he would cover.
I was anxious to get started with learning the moves and stuff but he stopped me and said if I’m just mimicking the moves and don’t understand the why behind each of the stances then there’s no benefit. For example with the greeting, he talked about how the right fist is placed inside an open palm to show that you can fight but are there in peace and are showing humility. The arms are rounded to represent the entire world community. Another example is with Seven Star Style, if the feet aren’t shoulder width apart the opponent can push you over easily as there’s not enough stability in the stance.
The fact that he was willing to go into such depth with me told me that he was willing to invest his time into me rather than just getting it over with. In the first lesson, we were only able to cover 2 of the 5 stances that he wanted to teach.
Attacking the throat with grasping the bird’s tail
Blocking with grasping the bird’s tail
Joanna came to watch me about 3/4th of the way into the lesson and he encouraged her sign up the next day. Within 5 minutes of the next class he was saying that she’s “Teen Choi” naturally gifted and that her body positioning is better than mine. He spent the next few days going in depth on how to attack and defend using each of the moves, feet and hand placement, and he would also go on 10 minute stories that end up going nowhere because he’s a chatty old grandpa.
He asked me what kind of exercise I enjoy doing at home. I said I lift weights. He laughed at me and said if someone comes up to me in a fight am I going to tell them to hold on a second while I grab my dumb bells? He also said it doesn’t matter how big you are if I can pluck your eye out of your head then he did the same hand motion as in Kill Bill vol 2. (so badass)
I loved all of this time with him and he was kind enough to allow us to film parts of the lesson so that we could take it home to practice.
At the end of our stay, he taught us a few extra positions and gave us his contact info in case we come back to Hong Kong soon to learn with him. This is easily the highlight of my trip and honestly the highlight of all the trips I’ve ever done. I love how these tai chi positions all have purpose with your body and it’s definitely a leg workout when you’re doing it as slow as we were. He recommended training half an hour a day until I have these moves memorized and seek out instruction with a new master in town. I would say this is very much like yoga where you have your vinyasa flow but you can beat people up with it. Joanna and I have basically been doing kung fu moves to each other at random times now because it’s so fun.
