About All This TWC / HFY Stuff
Rene Ritchie, February 3rd, 2008
See here, again someone involving our Smiling Dragon, DrLeungJohn.
This is a giant sized food fight where ain’t nobody dashing through without getting their face splattered with tatters and pie.
First, just to clarify further down the thread, Gwai Ma is technically not in any of the forms in YKS/SN WCK (not in SLT, CK, BJ, HJ, etc.), it’s in an extension to the second of the 12 free hands (Side Punch is extended into Kneeling Side Punch, which is also a heckuva leg workout…)
Second, pulling my jacket tight over head and sprinting, there are only two ways to settle a discussion like this one: asking the people at the top, and/or doing a detailed move by move comparison of the choreography and power generation methods of both systems.
To the former, both Cheung sifu and Gee sifu have reportedly said they don’t know each other, haven’t met, and never trained together. Complicating this slightly are older stories from both camps which say William Cheung, while in China, trained with another sifu and learned a different branch. I’ve personally been told this story by highly (or formerly highly) placed people in both camps, to the effect that Cheung sifu learned from Gee sifu’s teacher, or one of Gee sifu’s sihings, and that the two would meet whenever Cheung sifu came through the US on a seminar tour. Complicating this significantly is that neither sifu seem to have anything to gain from denying a connection if there is one, and (as pointed out several times by internet guru Anerlich), neither seem to have the type of personality that could be prevented from revealing a connection, were there one, by a pack of temple lions. Where does this leave us? Three blocks past “confusing” near the corner of “why does it matter so much aside from mysteries and innuendo being so dang compelling?”
To the latter, similarity and difference in choreography are relative things. Yuen Kay-San and Yip Man Wing Chun Kuen are far closer to each other in terms of choreography than either are to TWC or HFY, and are both subject to ridiculous rumors of connection via Ng Jung-So, yet both are distinct systems going back to several generations (splitting following the generation of Wong Wah-Bo and Dai Fa Min Kam), and TWC is, of course, coming from a direct student of Yip Man.
Likewise, as pointed out by noted internet scrapper canglong, it’s all Wing Chun Kuen anyway, so if you go back far enough, wouldn’t there have to be a connection? (Or even a little inbreeding down the line…)
Perhaps longtime internet fence-mender Taltos offers the only Rodney King-esque answer to this problem: Can’t we all just shut up about all this for a while?
Point taken. (Though not likely by Ultimatewingchun, he’s a New Yorker, and they invented enquiring minds).
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