Q&A - Vietnamese Wing Chun
Rene Ritchie, February 6th, 2008
hakao posts:
I think Rene knows a lots about the vietnamese lineage as his lineage has the same origin.
Not a lot, or even much at all, but I have come across some info over the years. Simply, Yuen Chai-Wan’s Chinese student in Foshan (Yiu Choi who later learned from Ng Jung-So) has the same kind of Wing Chun Kuen system as pretty much everyone else (Siu Lien Tao, Chum Kiu, Biu Jee, etc.) so I’d guess anyone who learned just WCK, and the whole WCK system from Yuen Chai-Wan in Vietnam would also look pretty much the same.
Of course, not everyone cares about lineage or systems/forms. Some people just want to fight and survive, especially considering the Vietnamese were dealing with war with the French and then the Americans.
Cantonese migration brought many systems into Vietnam, and more WCK (Chan Wah-Shun’s student Lui Yiu-Chai/Luong Vu-Te also moved to Vietnam).
So, if someone knew 5 animals, Qigong, village Hung, etc. and also picked up Siu Lien Tao, some wooden dummy, and various weapons from different systems, it’s not hard to imagine how the branches all developed.
TiFei adds:
The question is, what do we ‘define’ as Wing Chun?
If we include both Chant Spring (Wing Chun) and Everlasting Spring (Weng Chun), which we must when considering long ago, literacy was not high, and the character also changed back and forth over generation and within families (e.g., Chan Wah-Shun’s son used Weng Chun), then the name is not unique in China or Chinese MA.
There’s a Weng Chun county in Fujian, where Weng Chun White Crane comes from. There’s a Fong Weng Chun character in Chinese legend (the White Crane version of Yim Wing-Chun in basically the same story), who in other stories married Hung Hay-Goon, and the name can be found in some Hung systems. It’s also, apparently, used by some Hakka art (Weng Chun Hung Kuen).
If we tie in rebel slang, it could be used beyond MA, and it’s possible what we nowadays call Wing Chun is that sort of slang applied to an art that otherwise didn’t have a name, or a popular one (i.e., Wing Chun just mean the martial art of a specific rebel group during the Red Turban rebellion).
So, to get back in a roundabout way, I don’t think anyone has the trademark on the name, and considering some families in China trained it alongside Choy Lai Fut, Hung Ga, and other village boxing (where the village rather than the specific systems was the distinction), I don’t think Vietnamese Wing Chun is unique in it’s variance either.
Add Your Reply!