Old Kung Fu books.

This drawing comes from an old book about “Monkey” Boxing.

Don’t you just love the illustration; I got many of such books where the illustrations alone are worth collecting.

I remember watching old “Fukien” black/white kung fu movies as a kid and they were dressed exactly like that; all sorts of amusing head wears which I was told denote ranks and professions.

Hmmm, so I wear a baseball cap almost all the times; I wonder what that means?

Anyway, that aside, this particular form of monkey booking in the book is not linked to any particular systems – kinda like stand alone. Written in old Mandarin, it’s going to take a while to “decipher” ….

No OTT mimicking of monkey anywhere in the form except for a few “monkey hooking hands” postures.

Appears to be more slanted towards northern schools what with hand striking and leg kicking together – you know like in Tan Tui / Character 10 battle etc etc ….. Jin Wu standards.

 

 

 

Going, going …. gone!

Okay folks, after this entry, I would be taking a short break; on the road again until Monday next.

Got a bunch of pics scanned and waiting to be edited for uploading; this might have been a much faster process if I didn’t linger to re-read many of these old materials.

Occupational hazard….???

The pics you see come from a Malaysian book – one of the few to be published in English in the 80s pertaining to traditional Chinese Kung Fu.

For some reasons, CKF publications were and still are a very small business in this region.

There is no setup that I know of, dedicated to publishing in this genre.

Even in Mandarin, the volume is small, relatively.

The irony is that I found out about many of the styles and Sifus via magazines published in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Then, of course, you have authors like the late Donn F Draeger and Mark Wiley exposing SE Asia CKF through their books; wish there are more folks like them …..

I cannot start to fathom how many styles and forms “died” in the last couple of decades with the passing of the masters leaving no descendants or any form of archives behind.

When I was a kid, I had a classmate who did a style of CKF known as “Sai Boon Koon”. He got it from an old teacher who came over from China and spoke only in a very thick-accented dialect which I now think is “Lei Chew” – a type of Fukien. Not many of those in Singapore but here in Sarawak, there is quite a big community of “Lei Chew” and hearing them speak in their native dialect is, sort of, ringing a bell.

Anyway, this classmate used to show me some of the techniques that he learned and I was impressed; the fast linear stepping with short linear strikes and switching to long circular movement all in one breath – picture White Eyebrow and Lama White Crane done simultaneously.

Later, we attended different schools and only met again many years later. He got married and had converted to Christianity and stopped all forms of MA training.

The line, literally, stops with him; he was the only recipient of this style from that old teacher from China.

Even with all my promptings, he refused to talk about CKF…..

And ever since then, “Sai Boon Koon” has been bugging me.

These last few years, I broached this topic with many of the masters that I’ve encountered and the closest answer I got came from a Chinese physician, a Fukinese, working out of his home clinic

He comes from a long line of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and his grandfather; a Fukien White Crane boxer had brushes with a “Lei Chew” boxer who did “Sai Koon” in China. He remembered his grand father talking about this formidable Sai Koon boxer and his undefeated status in Fukien all those years ago. A very “tricky” long and short hand combo was his descriptions.

Sai = Lion in Fukien dialect.

Koon = Fists.

So could this be a form of “lion” boxing? Spin off from Shaolin “10 animals” forms?

But what’s with the “boon” which in Fukien dialect might be referring to “culture” or “literary endeavors”??

What what what ???