Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Dec 21 2006

12/20

Due to movie-related business and other things, I skipped tuishou class for a few weeks. Last night was the first time in a while for me. Of course it was raining. It’s been raining every single Wednesday night for a month or so now. Depressing, but that’s winter for you. At least everything is shiny.

Just after I arrived at the the war memorial shelter, under which we practice when it rains, one of the newer students showed up, followed by Mr. You. Before long about ten students had gathered, many of them newer ones. A good sign for Teacher Xu, I guess. I went through the sword form a couple of times on the treacherously slippery concrete floor of the memorial, followed by the empty-handed form, or at least what I’ve learned of it. Then it was time to push some hands.

I started out with the guy who is not from Hong Kong, not really pushing. I wasn’t really interested in pushing, being in a rather lackadaisical mood. I simply yielded and yielded, only pushing when a glaringly obvious opportunity offered itself. The guy was is not from Hong Kong pushed me over a few times via brute force, but I honestly didn’t care.

Next up was a new guy, a bit shorter than I and built like a grizzly bear. He approached tuishou like Sumo, crouching down and rushing at his opponent. He pushed me over a few times as well, at least before I realized that all I had to do was literally stoop to his level and employ the same tactics as I normally would. Though this entailed a lot of work, I met with success. Basically he was all low-center-of-gravity force and relatively easy to deal with.

Last I pushed with Mr. You. Both of us were determined not to give the other any openings, so we just went at it for a while with nobody pushing the other over, until the end of class. I was the last to leave, walking back to the subway in the rain. The session tired me more than usual, but it was good to get back into it.

posted by Poagao at 10:29 am  

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment