Last Saturday I hadn’t really warmed up when someone pulled me over to practice tuishou with a little older guy sporting exactly two (2) teeth. He was skinny and very flexible, and kept advancing as he pushed, but he didn’t get much of anywhere with me, at least during that session. It was educational, though; practicing with people outsider of our group pretty much always is.

This Saturday I was warming up when another stranger walked up to me. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, and he wore a hearing aid. “Are you the foreigner I practiced with yesterday?” he asked. This gave me pause. How could he actually not know? I hadn’t gone to the park the day before in any case, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“That foreigner said he had practiced tai-chi for 20 years,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me,” I continued. “That guy is probably older than I am.” But he just looked confused at the concept of some people being older than others.

“Anyway, you foreigners don’t need tai-chi, you’re all so big and strong that you just pick us up and throw us!” he said. I glanced at Little Mountain Pig, who is just one of our students who is bigger than I am, and concluded that this fellow wasn’t quite right in the head.

The other groups were fighting in the circles, trying to push each other over the lines in the dirt. One of the guys wore a t-shirt that read “I (heart) giving blood.” I hoped his opponents didn’t take that too literally.

I practiced the forms and sword work in an empty space nearby for a while before noticing that Teacher X’s son was fighting in one of the rings. Not tui-shou, but actual boxing, it seemed. I walked over to have a look. The kid was staying well away from the boxer, who was slapping quick jabs in and jumping around. Afterwards, LM Pig gave it a shot, using tuishou and taichi to deal with the boxer, engaging him and pushing him around in between blows. It was interesting to see how the two dynamics interacted, but I think I’ll stick with tuishou, for now.

I was late again, it being a Sunday, but it didn’t really matter. A couple of kids and their father watched me do the sword form; the boys wanted to play with the sword, which was taller than the younger boy. His older brother grabbed it and started waving it around, so I took it back and astonished them by driving it up to the hilt in the ground, and then then into the trunk of a tree. It’s my collapsible practice sword, of course, but they didn’t know that.

I did some form work with Teacher X for a while, but then he grabbed me by the arm and literally pulled me over to practice with a teacher from another group.

It started out well enough; the guy wasn’t too violent, and we got into a give-and-take rhythm. He paused a few times, which I took to mean he felt he had me in a bind, but I suppose I am not yet advanced enough to realize such subtle conditions. I tried a few experimental “attacks” but he would just fold up like a chair, such was his agility. I would push to a point that I felt appropriate and then let go.

As we continued, he grew more aggressive and a little antsy. I realized that his friends, possibly his students, were watching us practice, and he might feel some pressure. “Come on!” they called, “What is this, free massage class?” The teacher began to try harder and pushed me off balance a couple of times, but not very decisively. I didn’t have anything invested in the exchange except gaining experience, so I was pretty relaxed. The teacher, on the other hand, began to launch quick shoves that Weeble would have been proud of. Not only was this kind of thing a step backwards, it often didn’t work. I felt a bit disappointed at the way things were going and told him I was tired. Still, it was educational.

It was raining pretty hard yesterday, so I didn’t attend practice at CKS Hall. After spending most of the day inside working on photos, I decided I needed to get out of the house today and make up for my laziness by going to the 2/28 Park, where our group practices on Sundays.

I’d never been to a Sunday practice before; I’d assumed that it would be just like the one on Saturdays before, but I noticed immediately as I exited the subway station how many more people were there than on Saturdays. Not only were there more people; they were a lot more aggressive than the Saturday group. Our group was somewhat scattered; I saw Yang Qing-feng practicing with a stranger in black nearby, and Mr. V with another stranger in another spot. I asked him where Teacher X was, and he pointed at the horse statue a ways away, where Teacher X was teaching a group of new students.

I found Little Mountain Pig not far from our usual spot, and decided to put my things down there and find a place to go through the forms, despite the fact that everyone else in the vicinity was wrestling, pushing or downright fighting. After I finished I spotted Little Qin, which was unusual; I hadn’t seen him at practice for months, so I went over to say hello. We practiced for a while, and as usual I learned a lot from him; Little Qin always has a different perspective on things, both physically and mentally. It’s too bad he has so little time to come to practice; he also teaches students at the military base where he’s stationed. As we were practicing, the sun came out for one glorious moment, raising the temperatures noticeably.

A large circle had been scratched into the sand nearby, and guys were using it in sumo fashion, trying to push and/or knock each other out of the ring or on the ground, their clothes covered in dirt and their arms and necks red from all the grabbing and twisting. As I went through the sword form, I noticed a guy watching me very closely. He was dressed in dark clothes and carried a sword of his own. I tried not to let it distract me, but I was ready for all kinds of criticism when I finished. Instead, he just clapped. I’m sure it was insincere, as I was just doing the first warm-up form and wasn’t really into it yet.

I practiced with LM Pig a while, going through the usual drills with him; I have to say they help a lot, though they’re a little monotonous. Then Pig pulled me over to the group of guys who had been wrestling rather violently before, and before I knew it I was practicing with them, one by one. The first guy wasn’t nearly as big of a challenge as I’d thought he would be. He kept looking for chances and I wasn’t giving him any. The second guy, a short fellow with protruding teeth, did better and forced me over a few times. Then I was practicing with an older guy whom the others obviously looked up to. He played his cards close to his chest, pushing tentatively, advancing slowly and taking his time to understand how I moved, becoming slowly more aggressive. All the while all of the guys were complimenting me on my form and my “softness” which they said was a hallmark of Teacher X’s students. I knew better than to take their words seriously, though; they were just being polite. Finally the older guy stopped, and another man who had been very complimentary stepped up. This, I gathered, was their leader and possibly their teacher. He demonstrated his “softness” to me with a few moves where his arms were completely rigid. Maybe he was alluding to some strange definition of “soft” that I’ve never heard of before, but to me he was anything but yielding. In fact, none of them were really yielding at all and seemed very rigid to me.

It was approaching 3 p.m. by that point, and I was hungry for lunch, so I took my leave. It was a very interesting and educational experience, and makes me wonder if perhaps I should try to attend more Sunday practices at the park.

I was free earlier than expected last night, so I went over to Sun Yat-sen Memorial to practice. The veranda was packed with dancing teens. I swear, with the amount of practice all of these kids do, why isn’t Taiwan the Teen Dance Capital of the World? Oh, I know, it’s because they’re just annoying copycats who can’t be bothered to turn their music down to tolerable levels.

I was really out of it, though. I haven’t managed to get back into things since Chinese New Year. I feel like all the other students are advancing while I just tread water. I practiced with Mr. Hu and performed miserably. The new girl has already finished studying the empty-handed form; I think she learned it in about half an hour. I realize that I am probably the worst student there, but sometimes it depresses me more than others.

Valentine’s Day wasn’t particularly notable for anything for me, but I did manage to drag my ass to practice that day. Nobody from our school was at the park when I arrived, however. I figured they must all be late or something and went through the forms as best as I could until I got a call from Teacher X, who told me that they’d moved back to CKS Hall since the construction work there is finished. They still practice at the park on Sunday’s though.

I walked over to CKS and joined the group there. It was a gray day, cool and somewhat forbidding after a week of solid sunshine and warm days. I was tired and really out of shape after such a long hiatus, and UPS guy pushed me over several times. I had a better time of it with Mr. V.

My Tuesday and Thursday nights are almost full up, though, so I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things.

I showed up early, for me, for my first class of 2009 at the park. Only a couple of students were there, but Teacher X, Mr. V and Qingfeng showed up later. It had been so long since I practiced that I lost my place a couple of times while practicing the sword form. The empty handed form is feeling better, though.

An older guy came up and introduced himself as being from Yuanshan and wanted to practice tuishou with us. Teacher X said ok, and the guy started to practice with Mr. Hu. Next he practiced with me. He was very soft on the outside and rigid inside, and we soon began to do moving tuishou instead of stationary for some reason. I could smell some kind of alcohol on his breath and wondered if it were medicine or just booze. He got weary of pushing at me with no real results; I was disappointed when he began resorting to quick, violent shoves. Still, it was interesting to practice with someone outside our group.

I then practiced with Qingfeng, who is really into researching and thinking about tuishou. He is the hardest of anyone there (besides Teacher X, of course) for me to push. I then practiced with Mr. V, who has given up on the quick shoves but is still convinced that rigid, unidirectional power is the way to go. I got pretty tired as I’ve been out of things for a while for various reasons, but it was good to get back into it a bit.

I was sick last week so I didn’t go to classes until this morning. When I exited the subway station in the park I couldn’t spot any of the familiar purple uniforms our group wears, but as I approached the spot I found Teacher X and Mr. V sitting talking with the guy who bangs his wooden stick on things. Nobody else had bothered to show up for some reason.

Mr. V was tired of sitting around, so we started practicing tuishou immediately. Usually I like to warm up with forms first, but it’s not that big a deal. Mr. V’s technique has improved a lot as he implements more subtlety to his strategy, but eventually he will resort to the quick shove. One of the biggest differences between us is how we lose. When I get pushed, I just take a gentle step back, but when Mr. V goes down, he quickly jumps back a few steps, even though I never use that much force. He’s like a spring in that respect.

The weather was strange today, warm and sunny one moment, cold and cloudy the next. After the others left I went through the forms, but I felt like I shouldn’t have still been there. Tai-chi practice in the park is mostly a morning thing, and by the time I left it was pidgeon-feeding time for the kids and families.

Many years ago I sustained a fairly serious injury to my left knee, and as a result it’s a little weaker than my right knee. Therefore, I’ve been practicing more with my left foot back when doing tuishou than with my right foot back, to compensate. Lately I’ve found that I actually do better with my left foot back than the right. Does this mean it’s recovered? No, I think it just means I get more practice in that position.

“Merge your energy with that of your opponent,” Teacher X told us as I practiced with the UPS guy. I guess it’s the only way to manipulate them.

Last Saturday at 2/28 park was brilliant. The weather was perfect. A really old guy sat watching us practice, the same guy from last time. I keep meaning to ask Teacher X who he is, and then forgetting. I was practicing with UPS Guy yet again, and doing pretty badly, when Teacher X told me to forget about what was going on in front and concentrate on pushing “the skin of his back” instead.

It was like night and day. Using this mindset, I didn’t get all bothered about what was going on with all the hands and elbows and shoulders; it didn’t matter. All I had to worry about was the skin of his back, just that, and suddenly it all became so simple and easy. Of course, visualizing oneself in the same way is harder, and I didn’t do so well with that. But I was pretty happy to have gotten at least that one idea down.

UPS Guy also had some advice. Actually, it wasn’t new advice. People are always telling me to “relax” and pushing will become easier. However, we were talking about just what that word meant, and I realized that it wasn’t just to relax your muscles, though it also does mean that. However, in this context it primarily means to put your body into a more comfortable, stable position, even if that means tightening and moving through less comfortable positions on the way there. For example, if I am being twisted and pushed by someone, I could either relax like a rag doll, but ideally just returning to a stable “default” position instead of resisting or just relaxing works much better.

I will have to look into this idea more carefully in the future.

Since construction has completely enveloped the opera hall veranda, and the staff didn’t much like our tromping on the grass in the park at CKS Hall, Teacher X decided to move our weekend practice sessions to 2/28 Park, formerly Taipei New Park. The park is a traditional arena for pushhands and other martial arts groups to train, in the shade under the trees on nice, flat (if dusty) ground.

Our group was easily identifiable by our purple uniforms. Later, Little Mountain Pig told me he doesn’t think we should wear uniforms, as he says it causes other people to be hesitant about engaging us. Pig almost never wears his own uniform, though. He says he’s “not the uniform type” and simply let his wear out. I suspect he places a certain amount of value in the fact that he’s been studying so long he’s worn his uniforms out, and doesn’t want to be seen as a newbie student. I could be wrong, but he seems keen on assuming a teacher-brother” role in the group, especially since he fell out with Little Qin.

Teacher X was talking about a guy wearing a red shirt leading a nearby group. “He loves to brag,” he said, telling us how the guy boasted that he was then-President Clinton’s Tai-chi advisor when all he really did was make a weekend trip to the US. I wondered if there was some history there, as the guy was almost near enough to hear what Teacher X was saying. It’s not really my business, though, so I didn’t ask any further.

Nearby drink machines ate my money like the stock market, so, unlike the average US house buyer, I decided not to give them any more and went out of the park to a 7-Eleven for water. Pig said the water fountains in the park were safe to drink from, but I decided to play it safe for now.

I pushed with the UPS guy and Yang Qing-feng, who hasn’t shown up in a while. NL Guy and Mr. V were there as well, grappling around with each other. Although the ground is level and smooth, every gust of wind blew up a miniature sandstorm that left us coughing.

I felt a lot more on display at the park than I usually do at other practice locations. Although I didn’t catch anyone staring openly, I got the feeling that people were curious about us. I’ve heard many stories about outrageous challenges and fights going down in the park between rival groups. “Some of those guys will stop at nothing to make sure you lose a bout,” Teacher X told me, which explained a little how Weeble was so interested in practicing there. Still, practicing with other groups could be educational.

Teacher X is climbing Yushan this weekend, though, so no class. He wasn’t at Sun Yat-sen Hall last night, either. I’m sure the other students will go, but I probably won’t. The weather’s supposed to be crappy, anyway.

Three older men showed up at practice today at CKS Hall. We’ve moved from the opera house down onto a grassy field by one of the lakes due to construction work. The three men were from Tainan, Teacher X told me later, and were part of a group of people studying tuishou by themselves without a teacher down there. The three, Seven-Samurai-like, had come up to Taipei to seek out a real teacher. Presumably their village isn’t under siege by bandits.

Teacher X talked with them and gave them a few lessons. For some reason. No Lose Guy decided to impart a few lessons of his own, with less than stellar results (let’s just say his nickname isn’t a terribly great description of the encounter).

The three had their pictures taken with us and then left. I talked with Teacher X about a group with no teacher, how that could possibly work. I also asked him about the Hung-men group, which I’d seen on a Discovery Channel program recently. “It’s a KMT-group, founded back in the days of Sun Yat-sen,” he told me. “They’re a good organization; they help each other out.” I was surprised to hear this from Teacher X as he is generally as pro-DPP as they come, but then again I shouldn’t be surprised to find a more subtle understanding of this society from him as compared to English teachers who can only hiss and spit whenever the KMT is mentioned.

Politics aside, the day was clear and bright, with a refreshing breeze. Teacher X taught me some more form moves, including a rather difficult one that involves quite a bit of knee work. I’ll have to get used to that one gradually, I think. “When doing tuishou, remember that you have many joints in your body,” he told me. “Usually, flexibility in just one is all you need to deal with anything your opponent can throw at you. Of course, two or more is even better.”

I didn’t get to do any tuishou, unfortunately. After the others left, I went through the sword form a couple of times, more difficult on the uneven ground, and then went to take pictures of the floats for the upcoming Dream Community parade, which was starting from Liberty Square.