Back in the mid-'90s, Sifu Jiang Jianye encouraged me to compete at a Kuoshu tournament where there was a division for my style, Guang Ping Yang Tai Chi. Baltimore was within driving distance from my Little River Kung Fu school, so I decided to enter. I was astounded when I won first place. I’d been training on my own for so many years, without classmates or a Sifu to guide me.
I continued to attend this Kuoshu tournament as a competitor, then a judge, and eventually a performer in the masters’ demo. In 2004, I had a bunch of students competing in forms, fighting and push hands. One of my Little River students would even be competing against my senior brother’s student. She was very keyed-up and emotional because her husband had been killed in a car accident just a month prior. She told us she was dedicating her performance to his memory.
She was very special to me, the quickest study I’d ever taught. She’d been a dancer her whole life and was now the mother of three. One of her daughters was in my original “Tai Chi for Kids” class. On the playground at her first day of kindergarten, she used a movement I taught her called “Calling Block” when a boy ran up to her to push her over. This tiny girl simply did her movement the way she was taught. The boy fell down, ran off and she was never bullied again.
We arrived in time for dinner the night before and shared a meal. I retired early so I could get up and train in the morning before the competition, as I always did. My senior brother and the students were throwing down alcohol, which seemed ill-advised before competing, but I wasn’t a drinker, so what did I know? In any case, I didn’t want to be a killjoy.
The next morning when I got back from training, two of my students, one male, one female, came up to my hotel room. The female, a tiny Filipina woman, looked stunning and immaculate, her thick, jet-black hair pulled back and her heavily embroidered silk uniform glistening under the hall lighting. As she paced the hall smoking cigarettes, I figured she just had some pre-competition jitters. Then the male, her training buddy and also a competitor, told me she was very upset over something completely unrelated but she couldn’t tell me what it was.
Tears were pouring down her face while she paced, and he described what had happened. The night before over dinner and drinks, she’d mentioned a skin condition she had to my senior brother who was a doctor. He offered to give her a treatment for it … in his hotel room. There he told her to disrobe, so she obeyed, covered only with a sheet. She was nervous, but because he was in a position of great authority – an MD as well as a highly respected Kung Fu master – she complied. He then proceeded to massage her nipples and her perineum with a wet finger. How this could possibly cure psoriasis was not the first thing that crossed my mind.
What transpired over the next few hours, before their division was set to compete, was utter chaos. She was overwrought with shame and embarrassment, and wanted to fold. My senior brother tried to convince me his treatment was legit by showing me points in the acupuncture book. Then he accused me and my student of trying to manipulate the outcome of the match by accusing him of molestation, although the logic of that still escapes me. She actually did beat his student, fair and square, despite her upset. The only thing in her favor was a lifetime of dance training, incredible poise, grace and calm under pressure.
It is what happened later, after all of the drama at the tournament, that was so perturbing.
After we got back home, my senior brother came to teach a workshop at my school, but that particular student vanished. I began to inquire about her. I heard that she was going to school in the Bronx, and she’d lost custody of her daughters and they were living with her mom and sister. I managed to get her new phone number and call. What she told me was devastating.
She said she had a bout of alcoholism when she got home. Her kids were taken from her. She moved to a friend’s apartment and was sleeping on a lawn chair, making sure to keep her feet up to avoid the rats running around at night. I was horrified. I weighed the relative value of learning advanced Bagua forms from my senior brother against sticking up for this young mother and did what I should’ve done before. I called my senior brother and told him never to come to my school again. She came home and got her kids back.
What are the consequences of not speaking up? Things can appear fine on the surface, but like Tai Chi, it’s what’s going on inside that counts. There are countless stories like this, and all we see are the effects, but not the cause. How culpable are we if we see injustice and say or do nothing?
While most people who teach the art of Kung Fu are honorable, there are a few sifus who use their inordinate sway over their students to bully, humiliate and take advantage of them. Ironically, the very reason most folks join Kung Fu schools in the first place is because they’ve been victimized and want to prevent it from ever happening again. To be victimized by their teacher compounds that feeling.
Young women are the most vulnerable, but are not the only victims. Some sifus injure their male students to the point of requiring emergency medical attention. These masters are unconsciously seeking to establish dominance by making their students feel fear. A real master can control without injuring.
The most physically damaging aspect to Kung Fu training is due to overly zealous students taking to heart the numerous grandiose tales of the training regimes of ancient masters, but over-training and incorrect training is another subject entirely. The psyche overrules the physical and causes us to hurt ourselves more than any outside forces. Ultimately, bullies of all types rely on fear, or tension, which is the main tool used in Kung Fu fighting. A strike will set up a more lethal strike and stealth is way more important than strength.
Fear is also the most compelling factor for compliance in rapes. Right after I was raped, I found a Kung Fu school. I felt safe while I was training, so I did it all the time. That school was in Santa Monica and I lived in Marina del Rey. I swam and ran to class and back for training because I felt safer in the ocean than on the street.
I spent my second year of training at three different Kung Fu schools in San Francisco, and was subsequently rubbed up against and grabbed by all three of my sifus. I managed to stick with one sifu, Kuo Lien Ying, for five years, despite the groping. All of the young women knew about Sifu Kuo’s proclivities. We thought it was something we had to tolerate, like bad weather, especially because it was the 1960s and '70s. We would squirm out of his clutches and run into the street if he became too aggressive, and we never heard that he’d actually forced himself on anyone, ever. His lack of finesse probably prevented any misunderstandings as to his extremely unromantic intentions, and no one ever did anything about it. But it is possible that he influenced or at least provided self-justification to others down the line.
When I moved to New York in the '70s and '80s, I trained privately under Grandmaster Peter Kwok. He taught out of his home in Wayne, New Jersey. We were alone and in secluded sites for hours on end. Although the lessons were often very physical – he once let me try the “Fireman’s Carry” on him during which I lifted him crotch-first onto my shoulder – there was never, ever, the slightest whiff of sexual tension, and I joyfully transmit those forms to others to this day.
I have experienced friendships, romantic relationships and even partnerships from connections made within Kung Fu schools, and I feel happy when that happens for others. But in instances of intimidation and humiliation, if we don’t call out the sifus (or other students), this will continue to occur. One sifu (a now deceased junior brother) with plenty of money had his student, a small business-owner with a hardware store, build a fence around and paint his whole house. This student paid his own salaried workers, even while still paying his exalted sifu for his Kung Fu lessons.
Sexual abuse is far more insidious. A very pretty young woman who had once been her sifu’s consensual partner, a part of his admitted “harem” of female disciples, told me that her sifu suggested, when she came up short for tuition one month after paying a lot for eight years, that she sleep with men for money and then pay him like a pimp. She quit immediately.
There have even been much sicker abuses brought to my attention by other victims. My senior brother under Grandmaster Peter Kwok groomed students for years before offering them Black Belts for blow jobs … and far worse. One very naive, young student thought he could kill her from a distance. He intimidated her into humiliating sex acts until she had a total nervous breakdown. Her letter described incidents that were too disturbing to repeat.
I have always spoken openly about this issue. It is one of the worst forms of injustice, akin to slavery or kidnapping, and yet it still prevails. Martial arts itself was established so individuals could feel safe within their own frames, free to walk about on this Earth without reservation. Since the #metoo movement, we have become more effective by speaking out en masse.
There is a closed group on Facebook called #metoomartialarts where folks can share their stories with each other. The act of speaking out is therapeutic in and of itself. Unfortunately, the fact that this site is for members only doesn’t help others to avoid the perverted sifus, or at least steer clear of their proclivities. In one case, the sifu-pimp was actually a member for a time until I found out from his student who he really was. While there have been cases of martial arts teachers who’ve preyed on under-aged students (of both sexes), the ones to which I refer are all perpetrated on women above the age of consent, so their actions are simply amoral, but not illegal.
Qigong is even more likely to confuse human relations with its emphasis on libidinal energy, and result in regrets and sighing from consenting females, or even males, when hearts are broken. Sex is held up as a method of qi cultivation, but not integrated into daily life, sharing, community and even child-rearing. My personal victimization led me to Kung Fu. The change must come from within the perpetrators of these acts, not their victims, in order to end this injustice.
