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As a high-school student, I studied with a man who went by the name “Kuan” from 1974-78 in San Francisco. Practices were held early on Saturday and Sunday mornings in Brenham square, across from Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church. I had previously studied Taiji, Northern Shaolin, and Xingyi Chuan for several years with a two very well-known Masters, who I will not name, in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
I heard of Kuan through a friend named Derek, who at the time was studying Kinesiology at Berkeley. Derek billed described Kuan as a master of Monkey, Drunken Boxing, Mizhong Yi, Bagua Chang, and several other arcane styles. With my youthful enthusiasm, I imagined that I would learn from Kuan all of the great secrets that other teachers did not possess or were reluctant to impart. Indeed, Kuan’s approach to teaching was very different from the slow, methodical, and demanding approaches I had previously experienced. My other two teachers expected students to develop tremendous patience. They would only teach a few movements of a form at a time. Only after it was clear that a student had absorbed the essence of those moves would they teach the next sequence of moves. Kuan, on the other hand, would take a new student and expose him (we were only male at the time!) entire forms in a single session.
Within less than a year of studying with Kuan, I developed serious doubts about him. The forms seemed to change from week to week. He was somewhat clumsy and portly and possessed little flexibility. He had nowhere near the mastery that my previous teachers possessed. In addition, he displayed many characteristics of an inveterate liar. He told us that he was an apprentice in the Beijing opera as a boy. He told us that he studied with various illustrious masters in China. He told us that he was a Golden Gloves champion. The stories often contradicted one another on various levels. My most servious questions arose when, at a student’s request, Kuan began to teach the group Xingyi Chaun. It appeared to me that he had found a book on Xingyi. He could not remember the (rather simple) forms and continuously stumbled and changed the order of movements. It was a farce.
After class on Sunday’s the group would often eat at a restaurant named Huibing Lou. Kuan apparently knew one of the cooks. He would stuff himself. One day after class, a few of us went instead for a barbeque at Kuan’s apartment in the Mission district. It was a ground floor unit overlooking the garden that he was sharing with the senior student, named Jeffrey. The garden had at least one Wing Chun dummy. There were shockingly obscene pornographic magazines (at least to my rather sheltered eyes) strewn throughout the place, which was a shambles and smelled rank. I was dismayed. The food was also what I would summarize as “white bread.”
While there someone saw Kuan’s passport. I do remember the first name “Frank” on the passport. This raised all kinds of red flags.
About this time, Kuan, Jeffrey, and another student (who was very overweight, had serious back problems, and was a Sufi) began to study Chigung with a herbalist in Chinatown. They became obsessed with Chigung and would practice it during our practices, practices which became increasingly chaotic and disordered. I found the snorting and the awkward postures that they would assume, which were completely lacking in the grace that I had come to associate with Chinese martial arts, to be rather strange.
I continued to study with Kuan until I graduated from high school and went on to Berkeley. This gave me the opportunity to smoothly break ties with Kuan.
To this day I regret that I did not stay with my other much more traditional and reliable teachers.
By the way, I do agree completely with Michael that Kuan had a very playful spirit. I also agree with him completely that Kuan is a trickster. I should, however, add that even as a naive high school student, I picked up and was repusled by this aspect of his character. Finally, it is true that the majority of the adults who were studying with Kuan at the time I was, somehow needed to believe that he was all of the things he told us he was. The worst was Jeffrey, who was Kuan’s lieutenant during the period in question.
