Everyone assumes that because he's Chinese, Jon Wong must be good at math and science and a first-class nerd. No matter how hard he tries, he can't seem to shake the stereotypes. After a kung fu action movie, Jon and his best buddy pretend to be martial-arts warriors. Word soon spreads that Jon is a kung fu master, and the kids begin to treat him differently. Rather than correct the mistake, Jon plays up the role and basks in the positive attention from his classmates. But when the school bully challenges him to prove his skills, Jon must figure out a way to somehow keep his status as the cool kid. Without getting pulverized. The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.
Chinese Martial Arts films have captured audiences' imaginations around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Hunt looks at the mythic allure of the Shaolin Temple, the 'Clones' of Bruce Lee, gender-bending swordswomen, and the knockabout comedy of Sammo Hung, bringing new insights to a hugely popular and yet critically neglected genre. 12 photos.
"From stories shared by his son, this book paints a portrait of the famous Wing Chun Grand Master, Ip Man, providing a set of fifteen principles as a guide to mastery."--Back cover.
Duncan Leung was introduced to Wing Chun Kung Fu by his childhood friend, famed screen star Bruce Lee. At the age of 13, after the ritual of 'three kneels, nine kowtows' in the traditional Sifu worship ceremony, he became the formal disciple of sixth-generation Wing Chun master Yip Man.
Bill Bryson meets Bruce Lee in this raucously funny story of one scrawny American’s quest to become a kung fu master at China’s legendary Shaolin Temple. Growing up a ninety-pound weakling tormented by bullies in the schoolyards of Kansas, young Matthew Polly dreamed of one day journeying to the Shaolin Temple in China to become the toughest fighter in the world, like Caine in his favorite 1970s TV series, Kung Fu. While in college, Matthew decided the time had come to pursue this quixotic dream before it was too late. Much to the dismay of his parents, he dropped out of Princeton to spend two years training with the legendary sect of monks who invented kung fu and Zen Buddhism. Expecting to find an isolated citadel populated by supernatural ascetics that he’d seen in countless badly dubbed chop-socky flicks, Matthew instead discovered a tacky tourist trap run by Communist party hacks. But the dedicated monks still trained in the rigorous age-old fighting forms—some even practicing the “iron kung fu” discipline, in which intensive training can make various body parts virtually indestructible (even the crotch). As Matthew grew in his knowledge of China and kung fu skill, he would come to represent the Temple in challenge matches and international competitions, and ultimately the monks would accept their new American initiate as close to one of their own as any Westerner had ever become. Laced with humor and illuminated by cultural insight, American Shaolin is an unforgettable coming-of-age tale of one young man’s journey into the ancient art of kung fu—and a funny and poignant portrait of a rapidly changing China.
Distilling the martial art known in the West as kung fu, Robert Smith presents Chinese boxing (ch’uan shu) as an art “that combines the hardness of a wall and the softness of a butterfly’s wings.” His lively, pragmatic account conveys the discipline and insights acquired in ten years of study and travel in Asia. Smith describes his work with t’ai chi master Cheng Man-ch’ing, and connects ch’uan shu with the softer aspects and inner power of that popular practice. Fifty black and white photos illustrate this informative and personal account of the Chinese boxing tradition.
In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Legacies of the Drunken Master—the first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy—interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body. It draws on an interdisciplinary engagement with popular culture and an interrogation of the critical literature on Hong Kong and martial arts cinema to offer original readings of key films. These readings pursue the genre in terms of its carnival aesthetic, the utopias of the body it envisions, its highly stylized depictions of violence, its images of masculinity, and the registers of its “hysterical” laughter. The book’s analyses are carried out amidst kung fu comedy’s shifting historical contexts, including the aftermath of the 1960s radical youth movements, the rapidly globalizing colonial enclave of Hong Kong and the emerging consciousness of its 1997 handover to China, and the transnationalization of cinema audiences. It argues that through kung fu comedy’s images of the body, the genre articulated in complex and often contradictory ways political realities relevant to late twentieth-century Hong Kong and the wider conditions of globalized capitalism. The kung fu comedy entwines us in a popular cultural history that stretches into the folk past and forward into utopian and dystopian possibilities. Theoretically rich and critical, Legacies of the Drunken Master aims to be at the forefront of scholarship on martial arts cinema. It also addresses readers with a broader interest in Hong Kong culture and politics during the 1970s and 1980s, postcolonialism in East Asia, and action and comedy films in a global context—as well as those fascinated with the performing body in the martial arts.
This book is a comprehensive study guide to the fundamental and intermediate levels of Shaolin long fist kung-fu. In terms of showing and preserving knowledge for the students and instructors of long fist, this volume provides an invaluable aid for teaching sequences and explaining other aspects of the style. This book lays a foundation for beginning and advanced stages of long fist in terms of giving the student of kung-fu a grounding in fundamental and intermediate knowledge and skill.
