23
Traditional Chinese Martial Arts and the Transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritagez
Introduction
In these days of globalisation and blaa, blaa, blaa. You know, I think that all of us are losing our cultural identity … Chinese kung fu is very unique. It’s a total art form. It is not just about fighting; it is a way of life. It is philosophical, spiritual, it’s physical. It’s everything.
I think for too long when you talk about culture, it is always how you dance, calligraphy. How often do you hear martial arts being spoken of as cultural heritage?1
I arrived in Bintulu, a small town on the coast in Sarawak, East Malaysia, in mid afternoon as part of a project to document traditional Chinese martial arts. Master Edward was waiting for me at a coffee shop and, after a cup of tea, we drove to a small park on the beach. As we pulled up, Grandmaster Yeo was walking around a park bench, lightly twirling an old basketball around in his hands and moving it back and forth in circles in the air. A short man in his late 70s, dressed in a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks, he walked over, handed Edward the ball and shook my hand. I introduced myself and explained my interest in traditional martial arts and how it is transmitted, and gave him a letter of introduction from a mutual friend. He read the letter intently and without saying a word, walked over to the table, pulled a sword out of a bag and started a form (a sequence of linked movements central to kung fu training) with grace and intensity that belied his age. After he finished, he requested that Edward join him to show me some two-person sparring drills. Edward handed me the basketball, which I almost dropped in surprise; it was filled with iron filings and weighed nearly twenty kilos.
After about an hour of watching the two men – master and student – demonstrating their kung fu on the beach, we sat around the table for the first of several long interviews. We talked about traditional Chinese martial arts in Malaysia, how they are being transmitted to subsequent generations and the challenges that he faced as the senior bearer of his kung fu lineage. He told me that he feels an obligation to his masters to keep their kung fu system alive and that he has had more than 2,000 students over the past thirty years. When I asked how successful his efforts to transmit kung fu have been, he shook his head sadly. ‘First off’, he told me, ‘out of one hundred students, no more than two or three will be able to learn the arts fully. It is very difficult to master [kung fu], and takes years of dedication’. I asked how many of his students who managed to learn his entire system are also teaching. Again he shook his head, ‘out of more than two thousand, there are none. In these times, with the changes in lifestyles, it is difficult. Even the ones that learn need to go and make a living, and so they move on. As of now, none of my disciples are teaching; it is just me’. At this point Edward, one of his senior students spoke up:
In the past, maybe eighty years ago in China, it is very valuable for a person to learn [kung fu] because he can protect his whole family, as well as his village if there is trouble. It is different now. The change in society, the value judgment towards this art is different now. The economic value … even though I am master, what can I do with it? Everybody is expecting me to teach you free, free! How can I do that when I need to make a living? And then there are other issues. No government support, no society support. So I am lucky that I follow him [Yeo]. He tries to teach me as much as possible. Sometimes I also think to myself, why do I spend so much time on this? Suffering man. Go to the seaside, go to other places and have a relaxed time, better. I learn for what? It doesn’t give me one single cent! My wife also scolds me. Edward, why are you playing like that, for what? The kids’ homework still is not complete. You better go and guard the kids, not doing this one [kung fu]!
This small example is an acute illustration of the challenges faced by many forms of intangible cultural heritage in Asia today. As mentioned in the opening chapter of this volume, the region is undergoing massive transformations, which increasingly places heritage in difficult situations. While there are certainly converging forces and conflicting values transforming heritage, there is also an unprecedented competition of interests that distract from traditional cultural practices. Within the span of a generation, dramatically changing lifestyles and opportunities have interfered with the transmission of long standing cultural practices. There are still bearers of many forms of intangible cultural heritage in Asia, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find receptive students, the proper contexts and the time and resources to dedicate themselves to transmitting their heritage.
This chapter is based upon a period of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo in 2004 and 2005. During this time I was affiliated with the Sarawak Museum in Kuching and one of my research interests was how ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia serve as catchments for traditional practices brought from China. In particular, I focused upon traditional Chinese martial arts (TCMA or kung fu) and spent eighteen months of near daily contact with a variety of kung fu masters and practitioners, including several hours a day participating in training processes, as well as engaging in social activities. This work culminated in a documentary film that focused on efforts to preserve aspects of traditional Chinese martial arts.2 I draw upon dozens of detailed interviews with masters and students, as well as observations made in the field for this chapter.
In part I wrote this chapter to push the boundaries of practices that are typically recognised as intangible cultural heritage. For such an internationally iconic aspect of Chinese traditional culture, there is a remarkable lack of academic historical and cultural studies about kung fu and its role within Chinese society over the centuries – at least for non-Chinese speaking audiences. There are massive amounts of material about kung fu within the non-academic domain, with thousands of books, pamphlets, websites and magazines dedicated to kung fu. However, almost all of this has been produced by and for enthusiasts and practitioners and concerns the histories of specific styles or instructional material, leaving a distinct lack of social analysis. Most of the academic focus on kung fu has been within media and film studies, focusing upon kung fu within movies and popular culture (i.e., Siu 2001; Ongiri 2002). It is important to acknowledge, as many non-academics have, that traditional martial arts have been part of Chinese history for several thousand years (e.g., Chow and Spangler 1980; Fu 2008; Wong 2002).
The situation facing traditional Chinese martial arts is relevant to many forms of cultural practices in Asia that are facing existential crises. In this chapter I focus on the core mechanisms through which traditional Chinese martial arts in Malaysia are transmitted. My research shows that modes of transmission are complex and integral parts of ICH and the mechanisms through which some forms of ICH are passed from generation to generation are incompatible with changing economic and social contexts. There are three main questions that drive this research. First, how relevant are TCMA in contemporary contexts? Second, what are the main impediments to transmission? Third, can traditional Chinese martial arts be safeguarded through altering methods of transmission? I have decided to present data in this chapter at a very intimate level to bring some of the individual voices of the ‘bearers of culture’ into the discussion about heritage in Asia. Towards this end I quote liberally from interviews I conducted during the course of my fieldwork.
From Shaolin to Sarawak
There is a long history of Chinese engagement with Southeast Asia. Archival and archaeological records show important Chinese settlements in the region dating to the thirteenth century, with evidence of a Chinese presence centuries earlier (Miksic 2011; Miksic et al. 1994). There was significant movement of Chinese to Southeast Asia in the mid nineteenth century, mainly from areas of southern China, tied in with labour opportunities. This was heavily structured by the political economy in China and the needs of various colonial powers, especially within Malaya and Indonesia (Reid 1995). The main waves of Chinese migrants into Malaya brought traders, tin miners and manual labour for the rubber plantations (Saptari and Elmhirst 2004). Additionally, a wealthy class of Chinese merchants developed around the region, playing critical roles in the flows of capital and products, heavily influencing the regional economy and forming the heart of the Chinese urban communities.
In the twentieth century, periods of conflict and social upheaval in China, such as the Japanese occupation and civil war between the communists and nationalists, prompted additional movements of people out of China into the surrounding areas. The end result are the large and thriving ethnically Chinese communities found in almost all urban centres in Southeast Asia; communities that serve as rich repositories for a wide range of cultural practices and traditions, especially in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia (Kuhn 2008; Ma and Cartier 2003; McKeown 1999). The presence of Chinese cultural heritage within this disapora is amplified by the extensive repression and damage to cultural resources in China during the Cultural Revolution – one of the most significant examples of a modernist rejection of tradition – as discussed by several of the authors in this volume (Ai, Wang and Long). This leads to a situation where perhaps some of the best, undiluted examples of certain traditional Chinese cultural practices are found outside of mainland China.3
During the course of my fieldwork, masters recounted narratives of migration and tales of hardships related to their (or their ancestors’) movements out of China. Some of the masters faced tension during the Malaya conflict with communists, which occurred in a milieu of distrust of ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. According to one master: ‘We could not train openly back then, and had to practise in secret … it was not so easy to be Chinese here then’. Throughout all of these difficulties and major changes in contexts – the benefits of mobility and the challenges of dispossession accompanying modernity in Asia – masters were able to continue transmitting traditional Chinese martial arts, bringing their styles and setting up schools in their new homes. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and parts of Malaysia became well known for their concentrations of traditional Chinese martial artists. However, masters point out that changes in lifestyle and society over the past two decades related with ‘progress and development’ have put many styles of TCMA on the verge of dying out. In fact, I had the unfortunate honour of spending time with and recording the practices of masters who may be the last to teach their particular styles. It is worth questioning how incredibly resilient arts that have been handed down for several thousand years and have survived major disruptions and changes in context – including wars and mass migration – are being threatened by periods of economic growth, stability and prosperity. Before moving on to the empirical core of the chapter, I want to visit some of the current thinking about safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.
Immaterial Asia – Safeguarding and Transmitting Intangible Cultural Heritage
It is impossible to discuss cultural heritage in Asia without considering intangible cultural heritage. It has become firmly established that various non-material elements of human culture should be considered heritage and steps have been taken to recognise and formalise this (see, for example, Ruggles and Silverman 2009; Smith 2006; Smith and Akagawa 2009). Over the past decade, the intangible has become a major topic for discussion within heritage studies, resulting in numerous publications and an academic journal dedicated to ICH.4 Recognising the intangible goes beyond expanding global heritage inventories and redresses historic imbalances within long-standing heritage practices (Smith and Akagawa 2009). This builds upon critiques of the material-centric view of heritage, as well as Western hegemony over ‘official’ heritage discourse and practice (see, for example, Byrne 1991; Galla 2008; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006) and is influenced by concerns for marginalised groups and indigenous communities whose heritage was previously underrepresented by formal mechanisms like the World Heritage listing (Aikawa-Faure 2009). The 2003 Convention, following the 2001 Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, gave new momentum and direction to efforts to manage and preserve cultural traditions, folklore and oral histories, and provided a formal mechanism for recognising and safeguarding intangible heritage (see, for example, Blake 2009, 2007; Aikawa 2004; see also Lloyd, Chapter 9 of this volume for a detailed discussion of legal mechanisms for managing ICH).
There are widely held concerns about the vulnerability of ICH and the loss of important intangible cultural resources in Asia. The 2003 Convention identifies some of the main threats to ICH as ‘processes of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create’, echoing the long-held belief of the modern as a threat to the traditional (UNESCO 2003). Such forces are clearly prevalent throughout the region, as economic development and urbanisation have led to massive and ongoing social changes. Additionally, aspirations of modernity have caused a re-evaluation of many forms of traditional practices by people in Asia (see Byrne, Chapter 19 of this volume). Unsurprisingly, such threats have made safeguarding one of the primary tropes for approaching intangible heritage in Asia, which both neatly dovetails with and potentially contradicts the language of sustainability that has come to the fore within heritage discourse (as discussed in Winter and Daly, this volume).
To explain, it is instructive to look at the phrasing in the 2003 Convention defining ‘safeguarding’:
‘Safeguarding’ means measures aimed at ensuring the viability of the intangible cultural heritage, including the identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission, particularly through formal and non-formal education, as well as the revitalization of the various aspects of such heritage.
(UNESCO 2003)
It is important to ask to what extent efforts to record, protect and promote ICH facilitate transmission, while at the same time maintain the integrity of the cultural practice in question. Can efforts to identify and document sustain cultural practices, or do they lead to the creation of cultural archives divorced from actual lived practice? How can approaches to preserve and protect cultural practices be carried out when it is widely recognised that, in the words of UNESCO: ‘to be kept alive, intangible cultural heritage must be relevant to its community, continuously recreated and transmitted from one generation to another […] but safeguarding does not mean fixing or freezing intangible cultural heritage in some pure or primordial form’ (UNESCO n.d.)? Finally, do efforts to promote and enhance ICH – discussed in more detail below – fundamentally alter the basic conditions of cultural practices and undermine their meanings and integrity, and how should concepts of ‘authority’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘expertise’ be understood?
Two of the stated goals of the 2003 Convention are to recognise unique cultural contributions to the diversity of human expression and encourage actions to better understand and promote intangible cultural heritage. Efforts that document endangered practices, often on the verge of dying out entirely, are important for cultural revivals in which groups re-engage with cultural practices to connect with or construct new forms of identity. Indeed, it has been argued that attaching new meanings to traditional practices is part of the dynamism of intangible cultural heritage and essential to its transmission (Nas 2002). Additionally, documenting can be part of a basic assertion of cultural rights, in particular within the context of intangible cultural heritage and intellectual property (Shankar 2010; Wendland 2009). However, while recording and documenting heritage can lead to increasing practice and transmission, ‘it is only through its enactment by cultural practitioners that ICH has any current existence and by their active transmission that it can have any future existence’ (Blake 2009: 65).
Along these lines, there are many examples of efforts to increase the viability of ICH through encouraging and fostering enactment and practice, many of which centre upon the economic value of traditional practices or their outputs. In some contexts, the production of traditional crafts has long been part of economically driven processes and caters to local markets. In an informative example of traditional craft revitalisation in Afghanistan, Kennedy (2010) points out that there are associated rituals and social conditions that underlie modes of production and efforts to revitalise include a place for such mechanisms – recognising that traditional crafts are more than just skill sets and products, but also are often embedded within a complex social system, with nuanced meanings that extend far beyond production. This is something that I will return to throughout my discussion of traditional Chinese martial arts as there are clear parallels. However, there is great concern that economically driven ways to sustain ICH lead to commoditising culture. This is especially the case within the tourism industry, as cultural practices lose meaning and context and are often modified considerably to provide an engaging and entertaining experience or consumable product (for a detailed discussion of this, see Winter 2009). As mentioned above, substantial efforts have been made to commercialise traditional kung fu. With strong government encouragement there has been an explosion of ‘traditional’ kung fu schools and academies in China, many situated near the famous Shaolin Temple, the historic point of origin for many kung fu styles.5 However, the real question to be asked – and one that was very pointedly asked by many of the kung fu masters that I interviewed – is what is being passed on in such situations, as these wide scale enterprises are driven by profit and have made obvious alterations to traditional training methods to cater to large numbers.
It has been argued that preservation of ICH needs to be based upon compromise and sacrifice, which challenges static notions of authenticity (Skounti 2009). In some cases, traditional practices have an internal logic that is inherently fluid and can fit into different contexts without undermining their form or value to the bearers of culture. Lanier and Reid (2007) provide a useful illustration of one example of this in terms of the changes in the context in which whalers’ shanties in the Caribbean have been adopted outside of the confines of traditional whaling activities. These shanties function as a mode of communication and, as part of a recent revival, modern lyrics have replaced traditional lyrics about the whaling industry while maintaining the melodies and the essence of the practices, which re-energised their use within contemporary situations. However, there are many forms of ICH that are not so inherently flexible or adaptable and there is a long list of such practices that have faded out.
One of the arguments I make in this chapter is that cultural practices are transmitted in ways particular to each practice and these processes of transmission are complicated social practices in their own right. Processes of transmission are an integral part of the ICH and modifying how they are passed on can fundamentally alter traditional cultural practices. From the perspective of safeguarding, this can create the awkward situation in which strict adherence to traditional processes of transmission can prevent ICH from being passed on, whereas modifications of these processes for the sake of safeguarding can undermine the nature of the ICH as critical elements get abbreviated or altered. This paradox lies at the heart of many of the ‘threats’ to ICH in Asia, as rapidly changing social and economic situations have fundamentally altered the types of engagements people are having with traditional cultural practices. In order to be successful, attempts to safeguard ICH require some combination of flexibility in terms of practice and transmission to suit contemporary contexts. In this chapter I want to look in more detail at how flexible transmission is and at how integral traditional methods of transmission are to intangible cultural heritage.
Ethnography of Transmisson
Qualifications and Integrity
Qualifications, whether one is qualified to teach or not, are important in any teaching profession. You want to teach, you got to have the credentials. You are sick, you go to see a doctor, you want to make sure that this doctor is properly trained. It is the same. You want to learn kung fu … you need to make sure the person who is teaching you is qualified. If you want to learn an authentic art, it is important to be sure that the person is in the position to give you that authentic art, period.
Sifu Ling Eric
There is an appreciation within the TCMA community that authenticity is important for kung fu as a form of cultural heritage and this is largely determined by transmission through established lineages of kung fu styles6 and adherence to certain sets of principles. As part of a basic introduction, people within the TCMA community often connect themselves and the people they are speaking to with multiple generations of masters as part of a process ostensibly to introduce, but also to establish credibility. It is common when meeting someone to find out about their style and their master. For example, perhaps the most important Tai Chi master in Sarawak was the late grandmaster Huang Sin Sian, who moved to Malaysia from China. His name came up repeatedly during my fieldwork when dealing with the Tai Chi communities across Sarawak, as people made connections to his disciples and, in some instances, to the master himself (one of his grandsons still teaches in Sarawak and is held in very high regard).
This appreciation for ancestry and style is a way to distinguish the types of arts one practises. Additionally, it acts as a form of peer review of the skills and integrity of a master – and thus the arts, which is especially important for someone taking on students. Being able to connect your practices to respected lineages and masters is key to establishing your identity and legitimacy as a master or practitioner and a prerequisite for teaching. This can be seen when a master moves to a new location to set up a school or begin teaching, especially outside of Asia, as shown in the following example from a traditional kung fu school in New York’s Chinatown:
Master Yee started his kung fu training with his father at the early age of six. He began his formal Tang Fong Hung Ga kung fu training under the tutelage of Grandmaster Yuen Ling, who was a disciple of Tang Fong, who in turn, was a disciple of the legendary Wong Fei Hung. Master Yee immersed himself in his Hung Ga training and studied intensively and diligently under the watchful eye of his sifu, Yuen Ling. After years and years of dedicated studying, he was rewarded with the bai see ceremony and became a disciple to his sifu.
(Yee’s Hung Ga Kung Fu Academy 2010)
This emphasis upon lineage establishes the pedigree of the arts, which has become especially important over the past several decades as commercial interests have led to a proliferation of nontraditional outlets for learning ‘traditional’ Chinese martial arts – a notion I return to below. Belonging to established lineages is how styles of kung fu are authorised and legitimised, and ensures that members of the community are positioned within the rich history of the arts and are able to continue passing on the traditions. The weight of this legacy creates strong obligations to uphold the practices and associated beliefs of each style and to respect traditional methods for transmission.
Relationship Between Master and Student
One afternoon, I met several grandmasters at a park in Sibu, a logging town on the massive Bantang Rajang river in Sarawak which has a large population of Chinese, mainly Foochow originally from southern China. I was told when I started my fieldwork that if I wanted to learn about traditional Chinese arts in Malaysia, I needed to go to Sibu; that it was a place of ‘hidden tigers and hidden dragons’. The two masters alternated, talking about the training processes that they went through. We spent time talking about technical aspects of their style and the masters demonstrated some of their kung fu. We talked in detail about training and how they were involved in passing down the arts. The men were linked in kung fu through the same master, who came from China more than seventy years ago and taught in Malaysia for decades. One man, who had trained under four masters, explained in a very serious tone how it was when he began to learn kung fu as a child:
Every night, we went to his [master’s] house to learn. He was a Christian. So we had to kneel down to Jesus to ask for forgiveness for our sins first. We had to read the Bible for half an hour. After half an hour of praying, to cleanse the ‘killing chi’ from our minds, he let us learn. He was very strict. This is my first master. As for my second master, he made us burn incense first, swore in the open, then he let us learn. Or sometimes he wouldn’t teach. We didn’t know how he would be each day. This was my second master. People who learn kung fu must have patience for things like this.
This narrative resonated with much that I heard during my interviews about transmission, as it reflected the very different, always difficult and often arbitrary nature of passing on traditional kung fu. It also demonstrates that at the core of transmission is the relationship between master and student. Within all kung fu lineages, there is a structure in which the eldest master influences who can teach and learn and how instruction should be carried out. Masters and grandmasters are commonly called sifu in Mandarin, which combines the notions of father and teacher. This underscores the depth of the relationship that is necessary for the arts to be fully transmitted. Typically, masters may train students, but it is not until students have been accepted as disciples, as part of the master’s ‘family’, that the real learning begins.
The culmination of this is the formal mutual acceptance of the bond between master and student, sometimes ritualised in a bai see ceremony, in which the student offers the master tea. This is more than just a gesture of obedience. Rather, it is a life-long commitment in which the student promises to honour the master and his style and adhere to the values passed on by the master. Additionally, the master agrees to accept the student into his style and to pass on the entire essence of the system – which goes well beyond demonstrating physical movements. This is summed up in the quote of one master: ‘I can teach anyone to punch and kick, but unless I really accept [a student], he can never learn real kung fu’. It is important to recognise the importance of the intimate relationship between master and student to the transmission of TCMA. Without such bonds, physical skills can be taught, but kung fu as a comprehensive cultural package cannot be transmitted.
Processes of Training
People who do not truly understand the arts will never understand when and how to use them properly – if a student cannot learn this understanding, then it is not right of me to teach them. It is this understanding that is the most important thing to learn and the most difficult thing to teach.
Sifu Ngui Kwang Sang
Instruction in TCMA is an esoteric and variable process – almost completely lacking in systematic standards. All of the discussions that I had with masters and students stressed the difficulty of studying TCMA and the sheer diversity of how it is done. Each style and master has different approaches to instruction and learning, which are often slightly personalised versions of the methods through which masters were initially trained. While most styles of kung fu have forms – linked sequences of moves and motions – that are learned and practised, the methods and pace of instruction are variable. It is common for the initial phases of training to be repetitive, drawn out and strenuous, in which the pupil slowly establishes the physical foundation for generating stability and power. In some cases students have to stand in difficult positions for hours on end to build up strength and endurance. Some masters told me that they expected their students to go through this remedial stage for many months, up to years, before they were ready to begin learning.
My interviews made it clear that this served multiple purposes. Physically, it certainly builds endurance and strength. However, masters pointed out that the intensity and pace of training was important for building up patience in the students – to remove ideas of instant gratification and instill within them the idea that excellence can only be achieved after extensive investment of time, sweat and energy. One master summed it up by saying:
Youngsters nowadays would like to achieve all the skills in 3 days! It’s impossible. I told them even if I cut my hand and fix on your arm, it won’t work [give you kung fu] right? I told them that learning kung fu is like studying. You need to gather your knowledge slowly. Then gradually you can get the best out of it.
It is important to recognise that training – the practical aspects of teaching the sets of physical movements that visually characterise kung fu – runs far deeper than demonstrating skill sets. Rather, the approaches used for training are multi-layered. They serve as a way to evaluate the intentions and character of the student and to inculcate the main values associated with TCMA.
The transmission of TCMA is a very complicated and difficult process, which is about creating and maintaining inter-generational relationships through which systems of values, as well as physical skills, are passed on simultaneously. Additionally, many of the masters strongly believe that these stringent and comprehensive training processes are integral to the arts as a form of cultural heritage. This creates a situation in which it would be difficult if not impossible to continue transmitting the arts – to a standard acceptable to many bearers of this culture – in the absence of the full cultural context outlined above. However, it also raises important questions about the designation of cultural authority and the role that this plays as a potential threat to TCMA.
The ‘authorized heritage discourse’ that Smith has deconstructed is predicated upon binaries of the western and the other and highlights systems – which can be largely seen as elements of modernity and globalisation – that create and enforce ‘official’ heritage narratives (Smith 2006). While this work is useful for recognising the impact of various forms of ‘outsider’ expertise on vernacular and local heritages, it does much less to challenge claims of expertise by the ‘bearers of culture’ – a phrase that is in itself problematic. As the above examples show, within TCMA there are highly prescribed notions of authority and the argument that these are important to the transmission and preservation of the arts needs to be balanced by critiquing the implicit power relations in play. While masters were quick to emphasise the necessity of strict adherence to traditional roles to maintain the arts, it needs to be recognised that this is part of the broader self-construction of authority and social positioning. The perceived onslaught of modernity is not just an assault upon TCMA, but also upon long-standing power-structures, systems of knowledge production, flows of social capital and lines of patronage – all of which are demonstrated above. Therefore, it is important to read deeper into discussions of safeguarding to situate intangible cultural heritage within a broader context of social contestation and the unravelling of pre-existing social expectations that are implicit parts of many ICH practices and embodied within modes of transmission. The masters that I interviewed were quick to point out a wide range of external reasons for why their traditions are fading, but much less inclined to be critically reflective of their roles within this process as potential obstacles to adaptation.
Sparring with Modernity: Disruptions of Transmission
Need to Make a Living
Not long ago, a group of people came looking for me. They wanted me to teach kung fu. I wanted to, but I can’t. I have no time, no space, and I need money for my daily expenses.
Sifu Ting Huat Yion
During my fieldwork it was immediately obvious, and continually emphasised, that many of the masters had some desire to continue passing on TCMA. Some saw it as an obligation to their masters and were actively trying to promote kung fu, while others were more fatalistic about the future of their traditions. The first thing conveyed by almost all of the masters that I interviewed was that everyone had to make a living, and – at least in Malaysia – it is nearly impossible to make a living as a kung fu instructor. The masters I interviewed ranged from highly trained professionals in business and IT, to a former pig farmer, food stall worker and cobbler. In all cases they emphasised that they have families to support and it is not economically feasible to concentrate full time on martial arts, which many of them regret. While some of the masters get small financial contributions from their students, this is generally symbolic and it is not economically viable to teach full time. In fact, many of the masters were no longer actively teaching. This is summed up in the following statement:
You can not really make a living making money out of teaching kung fu. I don’t make enough to get by if I just teach kung fu. It is different in Asia. In the US, in the west – you run a kung fu commercial school, you have 1,000 students, 500 students, 200 students, and you do nothing but teach kung fu. Here I am a landscaper by day. I work out in the sun like this. I dig holes … So it is tough. It is really hard. So most of the sifus here are amateurs when it comes to teaching. And a lot of us, a lot of the sifus, actually pay to teach. They don’t make enough for rental, for the hiring of the space. Kung fu is no longer economically viable.
The masters who are teaching are mainly confined to working with small groups of people, sometimes members of their family, on a part-time basis. Instruction fits around peoples’ schedules and often occurs in parks, community centres and private homes. Unsolicited, some masters pointed out that while they are willing to teach more, they do not get support from the government, cultural groups, or community associations. Interestingly, most of the masters are aware that there is some economic value in their arts – just not in Asia. A number of masters mentioned kung fu brothers who went to Australia, the US and Europe to start schools, and who make good livings doing so. It was often with some bitterness or disappointment that the masters reflected on the irony that non-Asians were so eager to support and continue Asian culturald heritage, given the lack of support for TCMA in Malaysia.
This brings up a number of interesting contradictions when framed within the broader discussion of Asian modernity and post-modernity. First, forces of globalisation seem to have simultaneously shifted the social and economic contexts in Asia to the detriment of TCMA. However, globalising forces have opened relatively new opportunities for TCMA to expand into non-traditional domains and geographies. The partial irony is that there is a strong demand for ‘authentic’ traditional kung fu in the west, while at the same time, there is a significant decline for such ‘authenticity’ within Asia. Second, critiques of modernity as representing the culture-destroying arm of global capitalism are complicated when it comes to TCMA. Many of the masters are very willing (and often successful) participants within the global capitalist economy. Their primary lament was not the threat of free market capitalism to traditional culture, but rather the market value of their heritage within Asia which they feel is undervalued. Almost all of the masters I spoke with were fine with the idea of making money from teaching kung fu.
Competing Interests
I spent considerable time with members of the Chinese Martial Arts Association (CMAA) in Kuching. CMAA was founded over thirty years ago to teach traditional Chinese martial arts. Currently they have many young students, but their main focus is on teaching modern wushu, which is a style of performance-based athletics popular in Asia. Developed and strongly encouraged as a sport by the Chinese government, wushu derives from traditional kung fu and is composed of techniques and maneuvers selected from many different TCMA styles. However, because it was established for performance and competitions, the emphasis is upon the aesthetics and difficulty of the movements, creating a bias towards acrobatic routines.
When talking with the director of CMAA about why there was so much interest in modern wushu rather than traditional martial arts, he explained:
Since the early 1990s, when wushu was introduced on the international platform by the International Wushu Federation, it has been a sport that is recognised under the auspices of the Olympic council of Malaysia. That means basically that it is a sport that is competed in the Asian Games, World Games, Southeast Asian Games […] and that gets a lot of government support. From that perspective a lot of juniors or the youths they take part in this activity because it is part of the school curriculum, and they earn merits for it. Now you don’t get that for traditional Chinese martial arts in school! From that perspective it is very much expected that the kids will start learning wushu more than traditional Chinese martial art. In the olden days when you learn traditional Chinese martial arts it is very combative and it is an art of self-defense – you actually use it to the fullest. With wushu, you just need to look good in the competitions, whereas traditional Chinese martial arts doesn’t actually look good on the arena because it is serious stuff.
In addition to wushu, there are large training centres and formal programs in which large groups of enthusiastic Malaysian students study traditional Japanese and Korean martial arts – a point lamented by a number of the kung fu masters, often with a helpless shrug of the shoulders. The organised and standardised methods for instruction make karate and tae kwan do well suited for inclusion within formal school programs. The high level of formal ‘scientific’ training and standards are very appealing to schools, parents and students. Part of this derives from the levels of certification and advancement that one can achieve in both arts. Through periods of study and passing ‘exams’, students earn belts and other obvious indications of advancement and progress. These are standardised, can relatively easily be replicated across large numbers of students and provide people with clear benchmarks for charting progress. Unlike in traditional Chinese martial arts there are clear, predictable and comparable indications of achievement. It is clear from the numbers of students practicing traditional karate and tae kwan do, that ‘tradition’ in itself is not the key variable turning people off from TCMA. Rather, the attributes most widely cited as being attractive for both karate and tae kwan do are their rational structure, linear trajectory and standardisation; all of which are widely held characteristics of modernity. Both of these arts can conform much more easily to ideas of class, ranks, grades, examination and certification than TCMA, without a substantial overhaul of how tae kwon do and karate have been traditionally taught. Traditional Chinese martial arts have hierarchies, often seen as one of the trademarks of modernity, but they lack the rationality that has allowed some other traditional fighting arts to continue and prosper.
Conclusion
During an extensive interview with several kung fu masters in Sibu, we sat at a food court, drinking beer, while one master began telling stories about his youth. After a number of entertaining anecdotes he got more sombre and mentioned that it is sad that people were not learning traditional kung fu. When I asked why he was not more active teaching himself, he answered in a gravelly voice:
In my opinion, the world has changed. I never teach my son and my grandson. People asked me to teach, but people’s minds nowadays are wicked. You know them in appearance but not their inner character. If I accept him as my disciple, I must know his character! If he has a quick temper, after learning, he may create problem and will bring disgrace to the school and even your name. People will look for his master. They will come to find me.
A real master can only teach real kung fu to his disciple who learns under him for at least 10 years in order to know his character well or he will create problems. We’ll not teach the practical use of kung fu to those who learn for only 2 to 3 years. This is the traditional culture. That’s why a lot becomes extinct. Chinese traditional kung fu is like this.
When I asked whether it was possible to modify the way that students were selected and basic training methods, all of the masters at the table said ‘no’. They made it clear that the processes through which they learned kung fu were integral to the arts and that it would not be possible to teach properly if things were made ‘easier’. One master commented that each master is an individual and expresses his kung fu in a personal way, but that they all have an obligation to honour the methods that have passed the arts down to them and must retain the essence of the traditional training methods. Furthermore, they said that even if they wanted to change the methods, they could not, because they made an oath and were obligated to continue teaching the way that they were taught by their masters. One commented:
It has carried on from generations to generations in this way. From master to student through time. So we can’t do it freely as we wish. We must respect the way that things were done. This is how we respect our masters.
The case of TCMA in Malaysia provides a useful look at the complications of transmitting ICH within the rapidly changing social and economic contexts in Asia and represents one of the major fault lines between positioning the past within contemporary Asian societies and aspirations for modernity and development. The transmission of many traditional cultural practices comes with implicit temporalities – years to start and build up a foundation, years to master and then years to teach. Given a multitude of other pursuits and pressures, many people are increasingly not willing or able to undertake this. Masters claimed to be very limited in terms of how they can speed up the learning curve and make the arts more accessible to people who will not be able to commit fully to them. Many of the masters emphasised that the temporality of transmission is a key part of the learning process and connected with core values; as one master pointed out, ‘how to teach patience, if one can achieve quickly?’.
For a number of reasons, it seems that TCMA does not lend itself readily as an activity where people can get standardised instruction and earn merits and accolades for performing and competing. There is an internal logic within kung fu that prohibits it from fitting within modern standardised and rationalised frameworks the way that karate and tae kwan do. As the example of wushu illustrates, it is possible to repackage TCMA to make it more ‘audience friendly’ and attractive to the younger generation – and such approaches have been very successful. However, such approaches compromise some of the main components and intentions that are deeply embedded within TCMA. What have become important to many of the younger generation (and their families) are not attributes that can be found within TCMA. There are few gold medals, opportunities to represent school, state or country, no yellow, blue or black belts; you can spent twenty years studying traditional kung fu and never earn an official certificate.
Finally, while there are examples of masters adapting their methods, teaching practices and philosophies to ensure that the arts do not die out, many of these same masters recognise the loss that occurs when this happens. Much of what makes TCMA a form of cultural heritage is deeply embedded within the processes of transmission, in which social relationships are formed, the past venerated and values conveyed. Extensive modification of training practices disrupts this and can seriously undermine the core values of TCMA and reduce them to merely a form of self-defense or a showy performance. This is something that many of the old school masters are not willing to do, as they believe they have a firm obligation to their ancestors to teach in certain ways and to uphold the core values of their system. They see changes to suit modernity to be a dilution of the arts and have serious reservations about efforts to safeguard that would require them to deviate from practices that they are deeply invested in. Also, the core notions of TCMA – the very ones which are less and less desirable to youth around Asia – are seen by many masters as the real reason to pass on the arts. The process of transmission is a form of inculcating values and cultivating character, without which there is no kung fu.
Ultimately, the custodians of the ICH are the final arbiters of the validity of transmission, which has implications for wider and more formal efforts to safeguard. In the case of traditional Chinese martial arts, there are no easy answers. Some masters are determined to make sure that at least some of their arts are passed on and they are willing to ‘change with the times’ to keep kung fu alive. This involves both a fundamental reworking of the core mechanisms of transmission – such as less stringent training requirements – and processes of selection about what to retain and how. However, many of the old masters – the last of the generations who brought the arts from China and were versed in the TCMA as a fighting art – are not passing their arts down in a sustainable manner. A combination of dwindling student interest, other pressing life concerns and a conscious lack of desire to change their arts to make them more acceptable in modern society are conspiring to end the arts. To many of these men and women, there is only one way to transmit the arts – the way that they were taught.
Notes
1 Quotes from Master Ling Eric, Kuching, East Malaysia, August 2005.
2 More information on the documentary, Needle Through Brick, can be found at www.needlethroughbrick.com
3 There has been significant effort within China to reposition cultural heritage over the past decade, which includes a range of efforts to revitalise traditional practices that fall outside of official policies. For a discussion of such issues, see McLaren 2010.
4 For more information, see the International Journal of Intangible Heritage website: www.ijih.org/101_web/ main.jsp
5 There is an interesting discussion of this within the March 2011 issue of National Geographic Magazine, ‘Battle for the Soul of Kung Fu’, which focuses upon how the Shaolin Temple has been positioning itself as part of the commercialisation of traditional Chinese martial arts (Gwin 2011).
6 While impossible to get an exact number, it is estimated that there are hundreds of distinct styles of kung fu.
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