waka waka waka

It is with the profoundest sorrow that I must mark the death of Grandmaster William J. Chung, who was my kung-fu master for many years. He had been suffering from cancer, and collapsed at his home in New Jersey a few days ago. Attempts to revive him failed.

Master Chung was one of the most important influences in my life. In late 1975 I was a wild and fractious 19-year-old, and a friend who had just joined a class being taught by one of Master Chung’s disciples at the youth center in Princeton, where I then lived, suggested I give it a try. I was deeply impressed by the grace and power of the Hung Gar system being taught there, and signed up at once. After a couple of weeks I was invited to attend one of the classes being taught by Master Chung himself, and was so bowled over by his formidable presence and obvious command of his art that I resolved at once to do whatever it would take to learn whatever he could teach me.

“Whatever it would take” turned out to be an awful lot. For two years I pretty much dropped everything and attended classes with Master Chung five or six days a week — in Princeton, at his home in Spotswood, at the firehouse in Jamesburg, and at the old Aaron Banks karate academy on Broadway in Manhattan. The Hung Gar system involves, perhaps more than any other style, ruthless conditioning of the body — in particular the training of the legs for its deep, low stances, and of the forearms with endless blocking drills — and Master Chung, who had been a drill instructor in the Army, was a pitiless taskmaster. But after a year or two under his lash I was transformed: my body and will were hardened, and my childish habits of sloth and indiscipline burned and beaten out of me.

It was not easy being one of his inner circle of students. He had grown up in New York’s Chinatown in the strict southern-Chinese kung-fu tradition — he was a disciple of the great Gin Foon Mark, as well as having trained in the Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar lineage — and expected total dedication from his own disciples. We were often called upon to run some errand or perform some menial task, and there were endless demands in the form of meetings, impromptu training sessions, performances, and ceremonial occasions, including the annual Chinese New Year trek through the frozen streets and alleys of Chinatown — which in those days before New York City’s ban on explosives, was more like a tour of duty in Vietnam than a parade. But for what we got in return it was a bargain.

Master Chung was a man of frightening phsyical mien. He was not especially tall, but was as stocky as a pit bull, and inhumanly strong. He had hands like meathooks, scarred and discolored from decades of Iron Palm training, and a round, grim face with jutting jaw and glittering dark eyes. His unslender middle belied an extraordinary agility, and his hands moved like lightning, with deadly accuracy. He had a quick temper, and every single one of us was utterly, abjectly terrified of him.

For all that, though, he was very fond of, and fiercely loyal to, his students, and he had a marvelous sense of humor. He also loved the opera, and sometimes, having invited some of us over for an afternoon of training, he would spend the time instead serving us tea and playing music for us. He was very fond of horses, and often took us on riding outings in the park near his house.

Much of what I am as a man today I owe to Master Chung. By the time I earned my black belt from him in 1982 or so I had learned, of course, an awful lot about Hung Gar and Praying Mantis kung fu — including some things that I think most students of such matters these days will never learn from anyone — but he had also taught me some far more important lessons: that there are some things in life that are worth working and suffering patiently for; that everything of value in this world, without exception, must be paid for; that the greatest blessings often require an act of submission; and that no matter how tough you think you are, there is always somebody tougher.

We parted ways in the late 1980s — I will not go into the details here — and I never saw him again after that. A few months ago, having heard he was ill, I sent him an email, and had been hoping to pay him a visit. The last I had heard was that he was cancer-free, and recovering; the news of his relapse and death was a terrible shock. My thoughts go out to his many friends, students, and disciples, and of course to his son Phil, an extraordinary martial artist in his own right.

Thank you, Sifu. May you rest in peace.