Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Apr 13 2009

4/12 park

The park was full of tourists when I got there on Sunday morning, including several foreigners. Teacher X even walked over to talk with a couple of foreign guys sitting and watching us practice. It felt like summer. I warmed up with some formwork and then practiced tuishou with The Dentist, whom I am thinking deserves the moniker “Mr. V” more than Mr. V himself these days, as he is all about trying to overpower his opponent. It was tiring. UPS guy was in the fighting ring wrestling with a guy from the other groups, and a fighting class practiced nearby.

It was one of those rare times where Little Qin showed up, so I practiced with him for a while. He is always full of good ideas about technique, and showed me how just one touch with one hand completely changes and strengthens the dynamics of the other. I commented about how hard it was to grab and maintain a hold on his shoulders, and he said that most tai-chi practitioners end up with thick shoulders, or as he put it, “A back like a turtle and legs like a stork,” as someone described Master Zhang San-feng at one point.

Later on, an older guy in a yellow shirt came up and told Little Qin to hit him. He did, and the guy kept saying, “No effect!” He was really proud of his ability to be hit and not feel it. Then they did a kind of tuishou stance, and the guy in the yellow shirt would throw Little Qin off with such force the Little Qin’s feet would actually leave the ground. If you know how not little Little Qin is, you’d know that this is no mean feat, though I suspected he was doing it for show. I took some pictures of this and a line of us all trying to push the man in the yellow shirt. It was pretty funny.

push sequence

posted by Poagao at 12:14 am  

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment