My Road to Taichi (Part Two): A Brief Foray into Yang Style

 I left off the first segment in my recounting my journey to taichi with my story of never having studied with my intended master, James Wing Woo. As I mention, it would be forty-four years until I would revisit the art, and that is where I will start this segment.

Come to think of it, my return to taichi, or, since I never actually started, to the door of taichi began not forty-four years later than my first interest but rather forty. And it began rather inauspiciously in the anteroom of a Barnes and Noble store in Clackamas, Oregon. There on one of the bargain book tables, I spied a thin volume with an exceedingly western-looking man and woman dressed in their taichi clothes, taichizhuang, (his blue, hers gold), standing in a taichi-esque sort of pose, which my now more knowledgeable self believes to have been Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg. It had some form of generic teach-yourself-taichi type title, and it was in the bargain bin, so it was sold with does of doubt. Still, it cost next to nothing and came with a DVD.  It seemed a sign - a cheap and brightly colored trip back to those younger years. How could I not give it a try?

And so, I got it home and went straight at it, and it was clear that my two teachers were Australians, and it was sort of fun trying to follow along with them. The lessons were well laid out in the sense that one of the two "teachers' would face you doing the target movement while the other would do the same movement with his or her back to you. There was a bit of instruction here and there, but most of it was mostly forgettable, the only phrase that was etched into my mind, in fact, was "carry the ball." For the most part, however, the approach was mostly watch and duplicate. Of course, I would later learn that such is the way many classes and online materials are, so no complaints about that per se.

After a week or so, however, I started to feel my two "teachers" seemed oddly robotic - robotic in movement, robotic in speech, robotic in their interactions. There was something androidish about them - as if they were factory siblings of Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, albeit with more natural flesh tones. If I were to discover the same lessons online somewhere today, I would be positive they were not real people at all, but rather the product of AI. That all said, I decided to start doing some research online, and sure enough, after watching other examples of taichi, I could see that my yellow and blue clad maestros were in fact a bit off. Not only were they indeed stiff, they were also doing their form backwards, and their form didn't match anything else I found online. They seemed to be doing Yang style moves, but it was a form that seemed to be a short hodgepodge of moves that existed nowhere else other than on my DVD. I thought of those groups of people doing taichi in the park, and I thought to myself that if I ever hoped to join in on such an event, I had better learn a more universal form. Yang 24 seemed the perfect choice, and I decided to take that up. And then, like a cat, I got distracted by life and sort of back-burnered the taichi quest for a while. 

Four years later and I am in Puerto Rico for a conference. Somewhere along the line, but most likely on the long and strangely arduous journey back home, I developed a DVT in my right leg, which I happened to have checked out because my leg was so swollen and felt as if a spike had been hammered through my calf. There were no nice and easy pills back then to treat the thing, so the treatment regimine consisted of daily injection into my belly and daily doses of coumadin (a kind of rat poison). It was an awful couple of months, and when I got over that, I thought to myself, "Enough of this nonsense! Time to get myself moving!" And I took to riding my bike again and. . . looking for a tai chi book!

This time around, I decided upon Tai Chi for Beginners and the 24 Forms by Dr. Paul Lam because with its many photographs, foot diagrams, and well-organized DVD, it seemed very easy to learn from. I also liked that the DVD lesson provided multiple views and group demos with participants of different sizes, ages, and physical capabilities. And so, I practiced with Dr. Lam and his Taichi gang for a few weeks, and I felt that I was making good progress. I also found it amusingly coincidental that the Dr. Lam gang (and the production studio) were, like my first DVD a few years before, in Australia. Was it a sign?

Oddly when I watched the video of Dr. Lam demonstrating the full form at the end of the DVD, I felt felt sort of the opposite. I could do a fair job of approximating the level and smoothness of some of the gang in the videos, but Dr. Lam did his form with flourish and style, and I felt as if I was years away from getting anywhere. No, if I wanted to progress, I am going to need a real teacher, I figured. If nothing else, I thought that it might be fun and/or useful to try learning taichi in a class environment. 

I figured it would be easy to find a school given the fact that Yang Style 24 was so common, but to my surprise, it was not common in Winston-Salem, NC, where I was then living. I scoured the papers and community boards and sites to find out who was offering classes in taichi, but call after call I would ask what style they taught, say I was looking for Yang style, and they would invariably say they taught this or that style or this special hybrid form of x and y, then ending with the phrase: "but its of equivalent benefit." I got so annoyed with that phrase after hearing if for the 3000th time. I just fumed to myself: I AM NOT LOOKING FOR EQUIVALENT BENEFIT! I AM NOT AFTER BENEFIT! I WANT TO LEARN YANG STYLE!!" 

Eventually I did find a school in downtown Winston that not only said that it taught Yang style but even offered free classes on Saturday mornings. Free?! Sign me up, I thought, and off I went that very next Saturday. I must admit that was a bit taken aback by the look of the place when I entered. Living in a L.A. as a boy and dreamingly peering at the mysterious Chinese weapons in the window of Master James Wing Woo's school back in Hollywood, I was expecting something equally martial. Instead, this place looked more like a Chinese tea shop meet New Age book store come Tibetan mediation center. I almost thought I was in the wrong place. Soon, a teacher came out to greet me and since it seemed that i would be the only student there that day, we began. Too late for me to chicken out. The teacher was probably in his late 30s, early 40s - a western guy who looked a bit like Art Garfunkel. He started off by doing a sample of the form. 

I watched as he moved around doing seemingly meaningless poses, not a one of which looked familiar from my Australian androids DVD or that by Dr. Paul Lam, but parts of it did look a bit Yang-ish. After he was done, I found myself, to be honest, a bit underwhelmed. He then decided that we would then do "the most important exercise there is in taichi: Zhan zhuang, or Standing like a Post. He demonstrated, and it looked simple enough, though it also looked boring to my untrained eyes. Basically, you stand there, feet shoulders width apart, arms in front of you as if holding. . . a big ball, and then you sort of sit your buttocks back a bit while your head is upright but light as if hanging from a string. Yeah, a lot to think about indeed. . . even if the diagrams make it look like a piece of cake!

And so the two of us stood there in that unlikely pose for eight minutes - the longest eight minutes in my life to that point. I felt exhausted in just a couple of minutes, and shortly thereafter I felt as if giant spike had been driven though each of my inner thighs after having been roughed up with barbed wire. I was scared because it felt as if I had DVTs again but of a worse nature. When we were done, the teacher didn't look so good himself, his face being very red and his breathing seeming a bit strained and heavy, giving the impression of a tea kettle about to whistle. I felt better knowing that I was not the only one who felt a bit stressed by the experience. 

We then sat down, and it was time for Q&A. I asked about the free classes, and he said that essentially, they had a different teacher each week and they basically did the same thing we did that day. I asked about the form, inquiring if it was indeed Yang style.  He said, "Oh yes! Well, it is based on the Yang form, but our founder has tweaked some of the movements and added moves from other forms, and. . . "  And at that point, I was fully expecting him to toss in the phrase "equivalent benefit," but fortunately he did not. Nonetheless, I essentially turned off at that point. What is it these locals have against leaving things alone? Let Yang be Yang was being chanted in my head.

Needless to day, I did not go back to that school again, but I did discover another option. The local Lutheran church offered classes in Taoist Yoga for a reasonable cost. I was told that it was essentially the same thing as the Yang style 108. That sounded confusing (What did that "essentially the same" bit mean?) but it was the only other thing I could find. And so, I went. 

Well, my experience with the Taoists was different but not much more satisfying than that at the the downtown school. The form did look to be "essentially the same," but it was like a semi-comatose variation. The movements were slow, but not slow in the usual taichi way, Instead they looked more xanax induced. It was genuinely odd. I also heard people gossip that the whole Taoist Taichi organization was some sort of cult, and so since there were so many red flags with the place, I decided to give that up. 

Later, I came to the conclusion that part of the problem is that while I found the Yang 24 to look pretty punchy and attractive, the 108 form might just not be exactly what I was looking for. I figured I might want to start searching for another taichi style that was more my liking. Time for more research.