For years now I have been hurt and saddened by the persistent thoughts that :
- I don't remember my tai chi very well
- I don't think I understood it very well at the time
- It's possible my instructor was just making stuff up.
He was a pothead, I was a pothead, it was the middle 70's so a lot of things were crazier than you might realize. He used very few Chinese words other than Tai Chi, that I remember, even though he lived in China as a child and spoke it quite well. We really didn't talk about it that much. We did forms, he showed me movements and I followed, often with no words spoken. Then we would get high and eat Chinese food at the one restaurant in town.
. . . the intervening 40 years passed.
About halfway through, the internet switched on and I started having access to a wider base of information. The first time I went to alt.rec.martial.arts I was called a liar for saying that I had learned tai chi, because I couldn't tell them the names of my instructors lineage, or discuss forms using the names they used. I even became convinced that "chuan" was the correct spelling of the only other Chinese word that my instructor used often enough for me to remember it.
Then Youtube came out and I didn't recognize anything I was seeing. We never did [that] and we did [that thing] completely differently. I regretfully came to the conclusion that my instructor was just making things up. I stopped talking about Tai Chi. Years of study and practice for nothing, even though I really felt like the movements were somehow right for me. I was devastated, no longer trusting myself, my memory, or my old friend.
But for the last few days I have been studying what the internet says about Tai Chi today. There's a lot more info than there was 20 years ago when I was first poking around it. And I found an interesting thing that makes me wonder.
Chen Style Taijiquan
I think "Chen" was the word I was thinking of... when usenet tricked me into thinking it was "chuan" (quan). Jerks.
Oddly, the movements in the videos seem much more familiar! Now I see the strikes I remember. Now I see the changes from slow to fast, the big circular movements, the proper positioning for defensive combat. Some things seem different, but most things seem familiar!
Wikipedia assures me that Chen style didn't make it to America until 1989? I started working with Keith in 1972-3. But his family lived in China, his father was a importer or something and had to leave with the Cultural Revolution. It's entirely possible that he learned it while there, and came here to teach it to me. I feel like that study and practice has been vindicated, and much too late I apologize to Keith, posthumously, for my lack of faith in him.
I hope I'm not wrong about this. I have a lot of research to do.