San Francisco | 1960
At the start of the 1960s, the Asian martial arts were still largely an obscurity in America, though to varying degrees. The Japanese art of judo had enjoyed some international popularity throughout the century, and in many ways was the best known and established of the arts in America. The Okinawan striking art of karate had made inroads among U.S. servicemen stationed overseas during the past two decades and was quickly gaining popularity in recent years. The Chinese martial arts, on the other hand, were almost entirely unknown at the time Bruce Lee returned to America from Hong Kong in 1959.
In San Francisco, Chinatown began the decade with little variation to its own well-established structure of the neighborhood’s insular kung fu culture. Lau Bun’s Hung Sing and T. Y. Wong’s Kin Mon were familiar institutions in the community and were moving into their third decade of local operation. Their presence within Chinatown was most noticeable during Chinese holidays, neighborhood festivals, and business openings, when their schools would perform lion dance ceremonies as a ritualistic blessing (in which “the spirit of the lion chases away evil spirits”). This made them not only visible but also essential to the spiritual customs and traditions of the community.
However, there was a third and final foundation to the neighborhood’s martial arts culture, which was less visible yet every bit as relevant. The Gee Yau Seah—“The Soft Arts Academy”—was located down Old Chinatown Lane, a narrow and inconspicuous alleyway along the ascending slope of Washington Street. Known to many longtime residents as “Horse Stable Alley,” Old Chinatown Lane extends northward between closely situated apartment buildings deep into unseen Chinatown. It was there, in the furthest recesses of Chinatown, that the Gee Yau Seah was located. Far less a formal school environment than Hung Sing or Kin Mon, the Gee Yau Seah was more a gathering place, a martial arts social club with an emphasis on the soft arts of kung fu. Appropriately enough, it was formed around the same time as the neighborhood’s other two martial arts institutions.
In 1939 the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association funded Choy Hak Pang, an accomplished practitioner of Yang style tai chi chuan, to relocate from Hong Kong to San Francisco to provide a source of exercise and recreation for its local members. Choy was a student of celebrated master Yang Chengu Fu, and his arrival in San Francisco is often heralded as the start of formal tai chi instruction in the United States.
While in Chinatown he established the Gee Yau Seah, modeling it on a similar tai chi social club founded years earlier in Shanghai. Choy traveled often to teach in other Chinese communities around the United States and founded similar clubs in New York and Los Angeles. After close to a decade of instruction within San Francisco (and around America), Choy returned with his family to Hong Kong in 1947, where he continued to teach, and where his career took another fascinating turn in the form of a very unexpected student.
Gerda Geddes was born in 1917 to upper-class society in Norway, the daughter of a prominent national politician. As a young woman she gravitated toward prewar bohemian life in Oslo, training as a dancer and mingling with the local art world. She studied the teachings of controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich during her time at the University of Oslo and joined the resistance against the Nazis in her midtwenties. With the advent of World War II, she narrowly evaded the Third Reich after a series of dramatic encounters. Escaping to Sweden hidden beneath a cart of lumber, she would have seemed an unlikely (or perhaps perfectly sensible) candidate to one day play a notable role in spreading Chinese martial arts around the world.
Her marriage in the postwar years brought her to Shanghai, where her husband held a new business position. Early one morning Geddes became transfixed watching an old man perform slow dance-like movements in the misty predawn hours alongside a canal. Like most other Europeans, she had no concept of or exposure to tai chi. At the time Geddes had been exploring ways to merge dancing with her university studies in psychoanalysis to develop a sort of physically oriented mental therapy. Now, watching tai chi in Shanghai, she felt as if she no longer had to invent it, since the Chinese had already cultivated it for centuries. She recalled, “As I watched I had a sensation of hot and cold streaming up and down my spine . . . and I remember thinking, ‘This is what I have been looking for all my life.’”
Held under virtual house arrest in Shanghai for two years following the Communist victory in China, Geddes and her family were eventually allowed entry to Hong Kong. There in the mid-1950s she approached Choy Hak Pang with an interest in studying tai chi. When she performed an interpretive dance for Choy and his colleague, her efforts were met with much confusion: “They did not seem very impressed,” she said. “In fact, they indicated that most of what I did was bad for the body in one way or another.” Despite any misgivings, Geddes seems to have won Choy over and soon began training with him five days a week.
In the same culture and in the same time period that a young teenage Bruce Lee was demoted from Ip Man’s school for his mixed racial heritage, the elder Choy’s decision to take a European woman as a student was nothing short of revolutionary. Classes were in private, and there was an unspoken rule of no physical contact. Geddes learned under Choy until his death the following year, when she then began studying under his son, Choy Kam Man, who at first proved very nervous interacting with an older European woman.
The younger Choy’s martial arts evolution was in itself a fascinating trajectory. Engaged in the Hong Kong street-fighting culture of the 1950s as a teen, Choy lifted weights and excelled at Southern Mantis style (learning under local master Yip Shui), but only practiced tai chi reluctantly at the insistence of his father. However, he soon began to notice that the softer arts were benefiting his martial abilities in tangible ways. This awareness culminated in an experience that would shape the younger Choy’s career, when he had a sort of transcendental experience while practicing tai chi alone one afternoon, feeling as if his body had “disappeared” in the process. As he committed more time to practice, the experiences continued. He confided not in his father but in other practitioners and meditation instructors, who collectively congratulated him for finding true balance in the yin/yang. Subsequently, the younger Choy felt that his skills were evolving well beyond petty street fights and weight lifting. Soon he anchored all his martial focus around the perfection of the soft arts.
Geddes trained with the younger Choy for a year before returning to England, intent on introducing tai chi to Europe (in 1960 she even had a brief segment performing on the BBC). However, Geddes was routinely met with widespread disinterest and bewilderment. She finally found her niche a few years later when she integrated tai chi into her teaching curriculum at the London Contemporary Dance School, where she would teach for the next thirty years.
(Interestingly enough, this nearly exact scenario had played out with American-born Sophia Delza just a few years earlier. Born to a liberal and artistically minded family in New York City, Delza studied dance as a young adult and eventually accompanied her husband, a UN diplomat, on his new assignment in Shanghai. Like Geddes she successfully sought out a Chinese tai chi instructor. Whereas Geddes learned Yang-style tai chi and returned to teach in London, Delza learned Wu style and returned to teach for years in New York City, at the United Nations and Carnegie Hall. It is one of those peculiar historical synchronicities without any direct connection.)
Meanwhile, the younger Choy returned to San Francisco, where he took up his father’s legacy in Chinatown within the Gee Yau Seah, continuing to teach Yang-style tai chi in America. Handsome and studious in appearance, Choy Kam Man—or, as he became known around the neighborhood: Master Choy—rounded out the small group of teachers in Chinatown at the start of the 1960s. Younger, low-key, and unaffiliated with the Hop Sing Tong, Choy was a quiet contrast to the status quo of Lau Bun and T. Y. Wong. Although Choy was a teacher of tai chi, his martial abilities would leave the rare witness in awe. “Master Choy could fold space and time,” explains former student Jack Wada. “His movements defied a certain logic. It was as if he could worm-hole his way with a punch or kick. You might see it start, then it would be in and you would pick it up on the way out.”
Choy lived in a tiny apartment on Stockton Street with a large family that had a penchant for taking in stray canines. At any given point in the day, their home was a cramped riot of screaming children and barking dogs. Yet Choy never had a proper tai chi studio of his own to retreat to. In addition to the Gee Yau Seah, he taught for years at the YMCA on Sacramento Street, where like the other neighborhood masters, his enrollment was steady, though hardly booming. This changed as the decade picked up momentum, and both martial arts and San Francisco’s youth culture gained prominence. In the late sixties, Master Choy would draw a large and loyal following of non-Chinese students, young San Franciscans, and recent transplants who didn’t buy into the era’s well-known subculture gurus but still sought new avenues toward spirituality, or at least peace of mind.
Within the neighborhood, however, this following would eventually earn Master Choy threatening calls in the dead of night, warning him to stop teaching Chinese secrets to other races, almost twenty years after his father first taught Geddes in Hong Kong. Although known as a teacher of soft style, Master Choy would eventually fend off his critics by taking a hard-line stance.
A genuine glimpse of Old World kung fu could be found with another well-known figure of the Gee Yau Seah, who in his old age had become a legendary figure in early American martial arts circles. Almost twenty years a senior of his close friend Lau Bun, Mah Sek was a well-respected master with a benevolent glow who possessed strange and amazing abilities to match his long and colorful history. Born in a rural Chinese enclave of the Sacramento Delta region in 1876, Mah Sek was sent back to China at the age of seven to live with an uncle in Canton. Once a Shaolin monk, his uncle had assumed a new identity after killing an opponent in a martial arts challenge and becoming a fugitive of the law. Mah Sek was trained by his uncle from a young age in old-style Shaolin kung fu, before returning to San Francisco as a young man. He watched Chinatown burn in the 1906 earthquake and later worked as an instructor and enforcer for a tong in nearby Stockton. Like his uncle before him, he killed a man in hand-to-hand combat and spent years lying low of the law. His opponent’s death weighed heavily on him and spurred him to refute using martial arts for the purpose of fighting.
In the years that followed, Mah Sek turned his martial arts abilities inward and used them to showcase feats of the body, becoming a sort of martial arts acrobat and contortionist who would enthrall spectators at demonstrations for years to come. He was a master of Qi Gong, the internal art of cultivating the human body’s intrinsic energy. Long an esoteric concept that dates back to Chinese antiquity, notions of Qi (natural energy or life force) would be integrated into medicine, religion, and martial arts throughout Chinese history.
Mah Sek combined his Qi Gong abilities to his iron body training, the kung fu practice of hardening parts of the body through constant and extremely arduous physical conditioning. Over time Mah Sek had rendered his body malleable and impervious, becoming “like a hard rubber ball” capable of withstanding any blow. His Iron Shirt Qi Gong demonstrations were legendary in early American martial arts circles, as he withstood body blows from crushing weights and sharp weapons with no injury.
Historically, martial arts street performers were regarded as the bottom rung of the culture’s hierarchy in China, stigmatized as a mixture of charlatans and kung fu circus freaks. Yet they played a key role as provocateurs of the martial arts imagination. In this sense Mah Sek represented tangible evidence, well into the twentieth century, that perhaps the Old World stories were in fact true, that the limits to a true master’s abilities were seemingly boundless.
Yet even as these old masters held sway over Chinatown’s martial arts landscape at the start of the decade, a more modern era was inevitably set to dawn. And the incident—the fight—that would significantly shape martial art’s biggest name of this coming era would be born of the alleyways of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yet for all the grit and badass reputation of Lau Bun’s Hung Sing and T.Y.’s Kin Mon, the showdown would emerge instead from Old Chinatown Lane, from within the Gee Yau Seah.