Eating, Training… and a bit (a lot) more Eating….

Mark’s China Travelogue: Part 3

As students of mine will well know, it is important to sink your weight when practising tai chi. This becomes easier when training in China, as the deliciousness of the food ensures that there is more weight to sink!

Like most places in China that I have been fortunate enough to visit, Jieyang has a large amount of eateries, each one with a slightly different speciality. Most places were very basic roadside, plastic chairs, fold away table, type of ‘restaurant’. Usually with the food cooked out front on a couple of gas stoves. However, they served up some of the best Chinese food that I have ever tasted. I can’t say that I always recognised what I was eating but the area specialises in beef. It is also close to the coast – so the seafood was particularly delicious. As were a specific type of local noodle.

Anyway, I didn’t go to China just to eat (well…) and after a bit of a rest or walk to digest, most of the afternoons were spent on training with Master Ping.

I have spent a lot of time over the past 5 years training with Master Ping, both in person and online. I have learnt many tai chi and qigong forms and continue to train with him weekly online. So the plan for my week with him in person was to focus on partnered work, namely push hands and tai chi wrestling.

To paraphrase Master Ping’s words, it’s okay learning forms – and of course there are many tremendous benefits – however, there comes a time when to understand how good your tai chi actually is, you need to feel someone’s power.

After a warm up and basic exercises to relax and train the body in the correct way for Chen tai chi, our first session started with some tai chi wrestling. Basically you are trying to root yourself to the ground, whilst pushing/pulling your opponent off balance. In addition to remaining rooted, you also need to be soft, pliable, flexible, and have the ability to ‘listen’ to your opponent (ie. feel how they are moving and respond accordingly).

One of my favourite concepts within the martial arts is: ‘invest in loss’…. And competing with Master Ping at tai chi wrestling gives you plenty of opportunities to contemplate this!

Investing in loss partly for me means going back to the absolute basics and building ever stronger foundations. So for the week our daily training sessions took me right back to the fundamentals of tai chi push hands, and was spent building up ever more complex routines and learning tai chi wrestling skills and techniques.

Push hands is a vital component of our tai chi training, I see it as bringing the principles of tai chi to life with an active partner, who is there to help you improve. It can be practiced competitively or non competitively and we mostly spent the week working on skills in a non competitive way.

I was very lucky in a (kind of selfish) way that Master Ping’s new school is not yet finished, meaning there were no other students around and I was able to spend a lot of time one-to-one with him, learning a great deal, and talking about tai chi, running a tai chi school, plans for the future, etc.

An afternoon of good training always needs to be punctuated with a great meal, and our evenings were spent in some of the fantastic local restaurants, usually with Ping’s wife and children, and mostly eating outdoors. I was also really fortunate to spend one evening at his home with his parents, and treated to some fantastic home cooked food.

So my time in Jieyang drew to an end and I headed back to Shenzhen for a day and a half. It was a better day and a half than the previous one I had spent there, ill in my hotel.

I did embarked on an almost day-long walk around a lot of the city, taking in a couple of nice parks, some residential areas, business areas, and really felt like I got a feel of the place…. But I didn’t get a feeling of being in a historical or cultural centre, which is really what I need from a city. However, it’s very clean, modern, has a good layout and doesn’t feel polluted as a lot of large cities obviously do.

Most memorable from my time there was being spotted by some local tai chi practitioners doing my morning practice (trying to be discreet) in the park. I was beckoned over and “invited” to demonstrate the Chen 74 form in front of around 25-30 onlooking tai chi practitioners. Quite daunting for a start I relaxed into it and was encouraged by some compliments and grateful for a few tips from a couple of other practitioners, one of whom did a demo for me…. An incredibly impressive one, made even more impressive by the quite dramatic heavy guitar music he blasted out from a stereo whilst doing it. (I’m a big fan combining tai chi and heavy metal myself. Yin and Yang!)

I then took myself back to Hong Kong for a half day before my flight departed in the afternoon. Not much to report from there other than some more nice food and a couple of hours sitting in a sunny spot in Kowloon park before heading back to the airport to buy some presents and fly back to the UK via a long layover in Doha again.

I’m sitting here now six or seven weeks after my return and already planning my next trip in the summer, this time with my eldest stepson, Sam, for what will be his first trip to China. So that’s really exciting for me, as I’ll be able to experience everything for the first time with him, and we’ll also get to stay at and train in Master Ping’s new school.

Reflecting upon my time there last December and mostly I just feel incredibly grateful and lucky that I can travel to such an amazing country with such a rich and fascinating culture, visiting old and making new friends to learn and practise Mandarin and tai chi, and somehow I get to call it my “job”!

Thanks for reading my China blogs. I’ll be reporting back in summer ‘24!