Episode 212 - Sifu Jean Lukitsh
Sifu Jean Lukitsh is a Chinese martial arts practitioner from Boston with connections to some very famous martial artists.
Sifu Jean Lukitsh - Episode 212
"I just saw a miracle, she held that woman up all by herself!" and I said, that wasn't a miracle, that was Kung Fu. They all laughed but its true.
Jean Lukitsh
It was from a recent conversation with an upcoming guest that I learned about Sifu Jean Lukitsh. After exchanging a few emails I knew this would be one incredible interview. As the photos arrived featuring Sifu Lukitsh and everyone from Donnie Yen to Jackie Chan, it was clear that we'd hear some great stories. Having trained under Bow-sim Mark, Donnie Yen's Mother, Sifu Jean Lukitsh has ties to some incredible martial artists, but it was her passion and dedication that originally brought her to Boston.
Did you see the latest issue of the newsletter? Over the last few weeks we've sent out only a few - we never want to spam you. Inside we've included really great discounts - more than 30% off. We've also made announcements about new products, events, sparring gear colors, upcoming episodes and more. Look, we all get a lot of emails, so we're careful about what goes in our newsletter. They're short, to the point, and from what we see in the numbers, people really like them. Sign up today at the website.[gallery size="full" type="slideshow" ids="3602,3603,3604,3605,3606,3607,3608,3609,3610,3611,3612,3613,3614,3615,3585" orderby="rand"]
Show Notes
Jean Lukitsh
Movies - Once Upon a Time in China 2, Iron Monkey, Drunken MasterActors - Donnie Yen, Bruce LeeBooks - Combined Tai-Chi Chuan by Bow-sim Mark, T'ai Chi Ch'uan for Health and Self-Defense: Philosophy and PracticeYou can reach Sifu Jean Lukitsh via the Bow-sim Mark Association website - here.
Show Transcript:
You can read the transcript below or download a PDF here.
Hi there and welcome to whistlekickMartialArtsRadio episode 212. Today I'm speaking with Sifu Jean Lukitsh Chinese arts practitioner from Austin. I don't want to spoil anything but you're going to hear some names that you'll definitely recognize in this episode. At whistlekick we make the best sparring gear and here on martial arts radio we bring you the best podcast on traditional martial arts twice every week. Welcome, I'm Jeremy Lesniak and I'm the founder of whistlekick sparring gear and apparel. Thank you to the returning fans and welcome to all of you, new listeners. Did you see the latest issue of our newsletter? Over the last few weeks we've sent out only a few, we never want to spam you. Inside each we've included some really great stuff, discounts including some more than 30% off. We've also made announcements about new products, events, sparring gear colors, upcoming episodes and more. Look, we all get a lot of emails, so we're careful at whistlekick about what's going to go into ours. *** Short to the point, and from what we see in the numbers, people really liked them. Sign up today at whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.com or at whistlekick.com. It was from a recent conversation that an upcoming guest that I learned about Sifu Jean Lukitsh. After exchanging a few emails, I knew this would be one incredible interview. As the photos arrived featuring Sifu Lukitsh and everyone from Donnie Yen to JC it was really obvious that we're going to hear some great stories. Having trained under Bow-sim Mark - Donnie Yen's mother, Sifu Jean Lukitsh has ties to some incredible martial artists but it was her passion and dedication that originally brought her to Boston. Rather than me telling her whole story, I'd rather you hear it directly from her. So, let's welcome her to the show. Sifu Lukitsh welcome to whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.
Jean Lukitsh:
Oh, thank you very much for inviting me, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Well, I appreciate your willingness to come on the show and listeners, I’m just I’m going to give you just a slightest bit of where this may go. As you may expect, there's is a number of emails back and forth before we record and Sifu here sent me the most and the best photos of any guest in 200 plus episodes that anyone has ever sent me and let's just say 1, 2, 3 of the photos involve her with people that we have done profile episodes on. So that gives you an idea of where we may go today. But before we go anywhere we've got to get a sense as to who you are and how you got there and you know just context, we need some context for everything else that we're going to talk about today. And I'm hoping you might indulge me with that and tell us how you got started as a martial artist.
Jean Lukitsh:
Okay, I started studying Tai Chi in 1976 and I was living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania then and I could not really think of it as a martial arts but purely by accident cause ***once that many tai chi teachers especially in Pennsylvania back then I did end up with a teacher who taught a little bit of the combat side and I honestly wasn't sure how I felt about that but at least from the beginning I was exposed to the set up that the tai chi isn't just like a spiritual pursuit or a health exercise but it's also originated as a fighting art. I have been studying in Pittsburgh for a couple of years I think it was probably around the spring of 1978 a student came into the class talking about this Chinese woman who was teaching up in Boston and who was really supposed to be amazing. And that kind of caught my attention because my Pittsburgh teacher had said at one point that if it's at all possible you still try to find a teacher with the same body type as you because that means they've already done a lot of the work of translating the movement for that body type so I kind of said it as a joke, so that means I need to find out a woman teacher right and he was like good luck with that, at that point I didn't even know of any woman that were teaching so I heard about this Chinese woman in Boston and the other thing that I liked about that idea was that I was familiar with Boston I have friends here and I thought okay maybe I’ll just go to Boston for a couple of years and learn some Tai chi and then I can come back to Pittsburgh and so in I think July or August of 1978 I planned a trip to Boston visited my friends and I had tracked down the Chinese woman that I heard about and which was not easy because this was before the internet and everything. I had to go to the local telephone office where they had phonebooks for all the big cities around the country and I actually went through the Boston yellow pages and wrote down all the names and phone numbers of the Kung Fu schools in Boston and went home and started calling. And I think it was about the third one I called the guy said "Oh I know who you're looking for and her school is the Chinese Wushu Research Institute" and you know I kind of wish I could go back and thank that guy again because you know that was nice of him he was a teacher in another school and yet he's steering me to the competition and through him I knew exactly where to go and I knew her name now - Bow-sim Mark and so I went and visited her school when I was on my vacation in Boston, watched the class and after that I bought the t-shirt, paid the first month tuition. I said I’ll be back at the beginning of September to start classes and then I went and rented an apartment in Boston. So, when I went home to Pittsburgh I told everybody Oh I'm moving up to Boston at the end of the summer and then they're like What? But it turned out to be just the most wonderful adventure it was like the best decision I could have ever made. But the only thing I hadn't realized was that I wouldn't be able to learn everything I wanted to learn in 2 or 3 years. Fast forward it's going to be you know I think 39 years this September and I'm still working on trying to improve and advance my art. But it was just the most amazing opportunity to walk in, and again, completely random but here I walked into the school, one of the best martial artist in the world.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Now we’ve got to go back cause there’s a piece that, may be the listeners, are with me in this and maybe, I don’t know why maybe you're gl-- 06:57 over this or you're not realizing it. There aren’t a whole lot of people that based on a brief conversation are going to relocate to train with someone. So, I think that gives us an idea of how important your training was even before you move to Boston. This wasn’t just something you were doing casually. 07:22
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah. I would’ve said I was really serious about it but then when I got to Boston I realize that, you know what I was doing and what I was exposed to and ---- was just you know, scratching the surface of the art that there was just so much more than I had even realized. But yeah, I think, you know, I like movement disciplines, I actually had studied pantomime before I went into tai chi so that’s why I say I wasn’t a martial artist but I did like doing physical disciplines and tai chi. I’ve seen a demonstration of it that’s what sent me looking for a teacher. I just love the look of the movement, there was like an aesthetic quality to it that really appealed to me. Like I said, I didn’t make the decision to actually move until after I watched her teach a class. And you know, it was like if I can move like that, it’s worth any sacrifice. Cause, you know, I was twenty-eight years old you know when you're young you can pick up and move some place. I couldn’t do that now that's for sure.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What was, of course for listeners that might not be picking up what we’re putting down with the name here, Sifu marc of course. We’ve referenced on the show a few times in various episodes, not only an amazing martial arts practitioner with a tremendous history and the respect of, I would guess anyone who's ever trained with her but also the mother of Donnie yen.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah. And Donnie was in high school then. I think he was about fifteen, sixteen years old. So, he was around but you know he had his crew and you know, I hung out with some of the other students. Actually, what you were saying about how everybody respects her, one of the things I’ve been doing with her school here in Boston for the past two or three years is I’m in charge of organizing all the school events. We do every five years we have an anniversary celebration. Celebrating the anniversary of the founding of our school in 1976. So, every five years we do a big bash, like a whole weekend of events, seminars and performances and of course the banquets. And then, on a yearly basis we usually have a banquet. So, I reach out to a lot of our own students and I’ve tracked down people that have been sort of out of touch for a long time and of course they’re always glad to hear from us and try to get them to come back with some of these events. Plus, I talked to a lot of old students and people that you know studied with her over the years as private students and in her group classes and in her Boston university classes and you know all the different places where she's taught and every single person just has so much respect for her. Nobody has anything negative to say and everybody talks about how she's one of the best teachers they've ever encountered you know it doesn't even matter what subject it is just that she was able to tailor the information to the individual and she could see what you needed and how you needed to work on it and where to get, where you wanted to go and if you followed her instructions you would find yourself advancing and the reason I say if you followed her instructions is because sometimes that wasn't what you wanted to do. It was funny because a lot of us realize back in the day you know people would come in and they just want competition wushu. They just want you know fighting techniques and since they know you have to learn tai chi because you're too tight, you need to learn to relax, you need to learn to use your weight. And then there'll be people like me that just you know like peace and love would be tight because you don’t want the tai chi for fun and since they know you have to do the long boxing you have to do the shaolin, do kicking drills, do punching drills you know you think you can do tai chi if you're so weak? No, you have to be strong to do tai chi, so maybe that was the opposite of what you thought you're seeing there for but it was because she could see that if you really wanted to do this art correctly you needed to become a more well-rounded practitioner. You know you can't just, just follow a narrow path to the school you have to like expand them and absorb a lot of different skills and influences so she was just really, really good at zeroing in on what each person needed and sometimes striking them, kicking and screaming to the place where you know they needed it so but everybody that stayed with her and that paid attention what she was trying to show them realize that it was like you know like one of my friends call this like it's a treasure box and she keeps pulling out treasures and giving them to you like wow I got another treasure. But you know that's kind of the way it feels she could work at such a high level in her own skills and she could look at a complete beginner no background at all and say ok this is what you need to do and you know if you follow my directions someday you'll be at this high level too. So, it was just, you know everybody still has these wonderful memories of just how stimulating and exciting it was to be part of her school.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What was it like at that time learning from a woman, because obviously I’m not a woman, I’ve never been a woman, will never be one. But I know enough about martial arts to know that just gender wise we're not quite equal yet in terms of the percentage of practitioners the percentage of instructors and back then it was even more lopsided. So, what was that like for you as a female practitioner training with not just a woman but someone who was so universally lauded?
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah well, there's actually kind of maybe two parts to that response and one is how Sifu had to deal with being pretty much the only woman kung fu teacher in Boston and I, yeah, I have heard stories about the kind of challenges that she had to deal with when she first opened the school by the time I got their people were still coming in to challenge her but at that point she had students that she could say okay you try my students first if you can beat them and you get to try me. And like one of my friends, says we'd take them out in back alley and show them what's what and they wouldn’t come back. So, but at first, she really, she had to actually fight and I’ve heard stories about, in fact just this past weekend I was talking, one of my students as a retired MIT professor who studied with her for a couple of years when she first opened her school at 76-78, and he was talking about how people would come in and ask if they could try her skills and he said she wouldn't just knock them down, she would humiliate them. I guess, you're not going to try that, again are you? So, you know she definitely had to deal with some stuff and I think even in the classes sometimes you know she'd have to like sort of bring the guys down and 15:13 but you know again she knew how to deal with 15:17 you felt this thing but you still you know 15:22 devoted to. Now as a woman studying there I know talking to some of the other women students we would always say, at least we never have to worry about being the only woman in the class, you know it's like she had a lot of women students obviously you know this was a draw 15:41 And so you know most of the classes there'd be almost 50% women so it wasn't like you were isolated and you know even those individual guys might be like you know trying to act like you know they're stronger than you and they can do more than you. You always had Sifu there to back you up. I remember one time we were practicing a counter where one person stands behind the other and gets them in a choke hold and the guy that was doing it to me was not letting me respond with a counter that I was supposed to use he was just tightening his grip and I couldn't make it work and Sifu comes over to me and you know and was like hands on the hips and looking at me up and down and then she says okay jean she sort of 16:30 he was standing behind me with his right hand across my throat and she slipped my right hand like just inside the crook of his elbow and then she told me "Hold my left arm and the embrace **16:43 position 16:45 I brought the left arm up in a curve and she said "No, turn to the left" and I just turned an I heard the guy behind me go "Oh" and my elbow was on right into his stomach. She set me up and she said do this and it worked just perfectly so and a she could always tell when you needed a little help to kind of tell people yeah, I can do this stuff I just you know sometimes need to practice first but it was a very sort of validating experience to be a woman in her school.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Cool, well you've hinted it and already told some pretty good stories, here on this show it's all about the stories.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah
Jeremy Lesniak:
You have, you know maybe a longer form one you'd care to share, your favorite martial arts story?
Jean Lukitsh:
For me, my favorite story I think is that I'm a retired nurse and in the early 90s I was working at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and it was a shift where there were 4 other nurses working with me on the floor and we didn't have any nurse’s aids. It was just the five nurses taking care of everybody. And one of my nurse colleagues had a patient who had head surgery a few days before and the doctor said it was time for this woman to get up out of bed because if you stay in bed for a long time you get pneumonia, the fluids kind of collect in your lungs. So, it’s really important to get people up into a more upright position but the problem was this, I would not to give too much information you know for patient confidentiality but she was a very big, an obese woman, an excess of 30 pounds and she only had one leg and her left leg is amputated at the nee. So, in order to get her up out of bed, all five nurses went into the room and because I was the smallest one they put me on the right side where the side where her leg was. We had a sitting** on the side, I was standing beside her on the right holding on to her right arm there was another nurse on her left holding her left arm. We put the walker in front of her with a nurse in front of the walker bracing it, the idea was she was going to stand up, hold on to the walker and then she was just going to pivot on her right foot turn to face me and there were two other nurses standing with a big reclining chair on her left and they were just going to push that right up behind her and she's going to sit down in it. So we had it all planned out and we stood her up and she started falling into me, and nobody else could reach her she was falling to the right, so what I did was I dropped right down into a horse step a really low one where my thigh was parallel to the floor with my knee behind her, my left knee behind her right knee and using her right arm, I steered her down into a sitting position on my leg and kept her upright in balance over my leg and everybody and the walker is flying and the nurses are crawling over the chair trying to you know get at this woman to hold her up and I’m going "it's okay, it's okay, I got her" and finally all five of us surrounded her and we did a dead lift, got her up into the chair you know put the 20:11 in reach and the sheet up under her chin and a glass of water at hand and we walk out of the room and one of my nurse colleagues said "I just saw a miracle, she held that woman up all by herself" and I said, that wasn’t a miracle, that was kung fu. And they all laughed but it’s true. You know, I don’t use it for fighting but I use it all the time and especially when I was a nurse, I use those skills all the time especially tai chi it’s all about, you touch the other person that means you can feel what they’re doing and you can feel how to control them and that's very useful when you’re working with elderly sick people who are at risk of falling. I could be walking with them and I could feel they were going to fall and I would like maneuver them back into a stable position. So, you can get them off balanced but you can also get them back in the balance with tai chi. So, that’s one of my stories that I feel like you know, I was able to draw on skills when I needed it in an emergency and they worked just fine.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I love that story because it is a martial arts story through and through and yet there’s no combat at it whatsoever. And I think all too often, when we look at what we develop as marital artist, we look at the physical stuff you know I’m stronger, I’m healthier. We look at the mental stuff like discipline and depth of character and we look at our combat skill but we don’t necessarily look it where those other things intersect in everyday life. And that story illustrates that.
Jean Lukitsh:
Right.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We're far more likely to have benefit from martial arts day to day in a non-confrontational situation that we are in a confrontational situation.
Jean Lukitsh:
Exactly. Yeah. That’s what you use all day long. My nursing background is actually gerontology nursing22:09 I have a Masters in gerontology nursing and I teach a lot of tai chi classes for seniors and I have students who are in their nineties. And one woman who is, I think around 90-91, has been working with me for almost 25 years and she was saying she has changed a light bulb in her kitchen and so she climbed up on a chair and reached up and unscrewed the light bulb and put a new one in and all of her friends are standing around looking and horrified like you changed the light bulb in your kitchen because they’re all in their 80s 90s too. She said she got down off the chair and she said, thank your genie that was all tai chi. But yeah, exactly. Everything that she does around her house, everything that they. They keep on telling me draw on the tai chi when they're walking, when they start to lose their balance. It’s especially good for older people because all the skills that you develop from practicing tai chi are the ones that you need as you start to age in order to stay independent and stay23:12. Again, I keep telling them you know I can teach you, we do pushing hand sometimes like seniors call it sliding. They can do it, it’s they can feel like they’re you know actually practicing a martial art but it’s all soft and it’s all controlled and they say you know, you can use this stuff for fighting but most of the time we're going to just use it to stay healthy and stay active. It’s just a wonderful art, yeah.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You’re not going to fight everyday but hopefully live every day. At least every day you're alive, you're living so you might as well make that stuff better.
Jean Lukitsh:
Right.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Other than tai chi and Chinese arts, I mean lets kind of lump it in their because you mentioned other disciplines that you’ve practiced. What else do you do? Do you have other hobbies or things that you're passionate about?
Jean Lukitsh:
You know it’s all kind of martial arts related to a great extent. I love kung fu movies and that actually came from working in Chinatown movie theaters and that job also arose from being a student at Sifu marc's school one of the local movie projectionist was taking classes and when she told me that she worked in the Chinatown theaters and I was like, that must be best job in the world and how do you get a job like that and she said well one of our people is leaving in a couple of months so I can train you to do it. So, that’s starting in 1979 until 1986. I worked in Chinatown movie theaters the star and the cinema in Boston and just fell in love with not just kung fu movies but Chinese cinema in general. So that’s one of my passions and o started researching a lot of the history of kung fu movies, tracing them back to the 1920s which is really such a fascinating subject for me and also the history of Chinese martial arts in general. I guess I’m a little bit of a history geek and you know just learning these stories about the people that sort of contributed so much to what the art is today. For me that just enriches my experience from it. I can actually...
Jeremy Lesniak:
I was going to ask you to elaborate on that a little bit, the idea that these movies help...
Jean Lukitsh:
I was going to say, I have this theory. I told Donnie my theory. He looked a little bemused by it but, I think there’s lineages in kung fu film making just as there are in the martial arts schools. And I think that the lineage that I considered Donnie part of goes back through his mentor Yun wu ping26:10. Yun wu ping's father yun tsu tsin who worked since 1930 with a director named len pen yan 26:16 who probably directed the first kung fu movie. It was a short film around 1919. So, they’ve been since 1919, since 1930, they’ve been trying to figure out how to show these arts most effectively on screen and all the research that they do. I know from when I did, I used to do interviews with Donnie for kung fu cinema. I probably did about 8 or 9 of them over the years each time he had a new movie coming out. And he would talk a lot about how hard it would be sometimes to work with people who had no previous experience making martial arts films. Even a director, who’s a very good director, they don’t understand where the camera has to go to show the technique to the best advantage. They don’t know how to change the angle of the technique from what it would be in a real fight to what to has to be in order to register on camera as a powerful technique. They don’t understand how to choreograph a fight scene so that the timing and the angles and everything comes together with just the best possible result. This is something that comes through. Learning form a mentor and then researching, it’s the same as learning a martial art. You have a Sifu and then you have to research the movement and make it your own. That goes on in martial arts film making at least the Hong Kong variety just the way it does on the martial arts schools. Donnie has kind of building on these generations of previous film makers and he takes their skills and then advances them even further and yeah. Maybe it’s just me but that sort of image makes a lot of sense to me that he’s part of this kung fu movie lineage the same way he’s part of the traditional martial arts through his mother.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Makes sense to me. And I think I cut you off you were headed to speak about something else when I asked you to elaborate their, we were talking about the things you're passionate about.
Jean Lukitsh:
I think that’s what I was. Oh what. Sorry
Jeremy Lesniak:
No. This is your episode, we can go where ever you want but we had been talking about hobbies and pursuit’s and you have talked about the theater.
Jean Lukitsh:
Right, and I don’t have any life outside of kung fu unfortunately not too much anyway. But one thing that I would like to talk about a little bit is Sifu's art, Bow-sim mark's art. And it’s very wide-ranging and I was thinking to those early days as a student of hers and back then she had a double curriculum that she actually had posted up on the wall and I dug out this little booklet that she used to sell for a dollar to her students that had her history in it and explain the curricula. And you've made me aware that she is the first person here in the united states who was teaching the standardized competition forms that had become popular in China that I think started in the 1960s. These were the ones that29:48 Jet Li became famous as the champion of competition wushu. They were very acrobatic, they were very athletic and nobody else at that time, most people were still doing in this country I think was mostly was southern boxing which is very grounded. So, she was teaching stuff that has like aerial cartwheels or 30:11 split. You know and doing multiple butterfly kicks in a circle, and a lot of really elaborate acrobatic techniques. And there were a lot of people that came to her just to learn that kind of stuff but she also had her second curriculum which was the traditional martial art and that came from her main teacher, her Sifu Fu Wing-fei, Grand Master Fu Wing-fei. And so it was the fu's tower, the fu family arts that she offered as her traditional curriculum and that was the side of her art that appealed to me the most and fu's style comes from Grand Master Fu Wing-fei's father, su tien sung and he was the founder of the art. He was a Master of tai chi pakua thingy and ruduang swords31:10 and so his son fu win fey. Also those were the main skills that he taught but the father fu tien sung, he worked with a lot of very famous martial artist in China in the 1920's and 30s in the sense that they were colleagues, they were army trainers in the same army. They shared a lot of techniques so a lot of the fu style sing yi 31:36 comes from some mu tang and then if you’re familiar with some of these old Masters, su mo tang in the 1930s or the series of books about tai chi pa kuan sun yi is very well known as one of the first real popularizers of these arts. The whole fu style system is a very dramatic looking type of movement. There’s a lot of waist twisting a lot of spiraling of the movement, both the pakua and the wudong styles are very. The way you twist your body into these sort of very graceful arches and spirals, visually it’s very appealing and I really think again when I look at Donnie’s art on screen even if he’s doing wing chun and something has nothing to do with fu style, there’s always that little bit of a torque to his waist. I mean nothing that’s just simply straight up and down, you’re always kind of working slight singles and feeling the energy going in in multiple directions, and I think that one of the reasons why she, Sifu mark, had such an impact when she first came over here. It wasn’t just she was the only one teaching these competition styles, but even when she did her traditional art, even her tai chi it was just really dynamic looking and you could see the power looking through it in a way that some of the styles that had been popular up to that time, they don’t have quite that drama to them so. I think that was one reason why I fell in love as soon as I saw it. I remember watching her and her students perform, a month until after I started studying at eh school. They were performing one of her forms 33:47 which combines tai chi and pakua and it’s a beautiful form and it’s really fun to do but it’s 81 movements. I keep saying it took me twenty years to learn how to do it. I was just watching with my mouth hanging open, it’s just so gorgeous and I think one of the reasons that people got so excited about studying with her it’s just that she could do this beautiful art at such a high level that you know like, it’s like watching almost like watching supernatural. You know, it was like she doesn’t have real hips like the rest of us she has like ball bearings or something. Nobody can actually that smoothly that gliding that power it’s just you just left her performances, left her classes feeling so inspired. You know if could get a little piece of that I’d be really happy.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Certainly, in watching a little bit of her that I’ve seen is it’s either supernatural or superhuman depending on how you’re looking at it. It’s clear that there are some people who were born to do martial arts but born to do martial art in a certain way and they were fortunate enough to find, and I guess to a certain degree, forged that way for themselves and exemplify it. And that’s what we see whenever we see any footage of her and it’s great to hear you describing it that way as someone who was so up close and personal with that training.
Jean Lukitsh:
Right. And I’ve been doing some research cause I’m trying to put together an update of lineage chart for our school website so whenever I have the chance, I’m trying to do some research. She learned all those competition wushu forms as well as the combined tai chi form which eventually became her signature tai chi form. Combined tai chi is not a fu style form but she ended up kind of adopting that as her own tai chi form and putting a lot of fu style flavor to it but the combined tai chi is one of the standardized competition forms and it was created around 1960 and combined movements form the five major tai chi forms that are popular at time. All that stuffs she learned from a wushu coach in the early sixties in fuan jao 36:23 and his name his deng cam do. I’m probably not pronouncing these Chinese names completely correctly. We’ve only just recently, I’m actually going to talk to her tomorrow cause I’m working on an article about the origins of combined tai chi and we started talking about this coach recently and he’s a very well-regarded teacher. He has passed away now but there are students of his teaching all over the world. And he was actually her first real teacher and I think going through that wushu training with all the acrobatic stuffs. With you know, everybody learning to do the kicks at this level of precision, learning all to do the flips and the jumps and everything and then going to the fu style. So, she did that for about five years and I think she continued training with him even after she started practicing with Grand Master Fu but I think it’s the combination of wushu and the traditional fu style that really made her art pretty unique. Because they’re not the same but they’re both very precise, very demanding and they both require a lot of control, what she called 37:43 basically using your center to make the movement happen.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That all make sense. And for anyone that had seen video of this stuff that we're talking about that certainly makes sense to you and for those of you that haven’t, we'll try to get some video up on the show notes that may help illustrate some of these concepts because if you haven’t spent time in Chinese arts, or maybe you’re more of a Japanese or Korean art practitioner, some of these concepts that were talking about might seem really foreign to you. So, I will try to find some stuff to illustrate it at the show notes. If you're new to the show, that’s whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.com. We’ve heard a lot of happy things today certainly. You know, you’ve talked about a lot of positive stuffs, things that have really resonated for you through your life but I know that life is always for all of us, there's stuff that’s not on that end of the spectrum. And I’m hoping you might tell us about a time in your life where things weren’t so good and how you were able to lean in your martial arts to get through to it.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah. Maybe I’ve been pretty lucky I haven’t had any really, obviously everybody has some losses, you know, things go up and things go down but as long as I can maintain my practice, that really does help keep me feeling like I’m on an even keel. But the one time where I feel like I had to make a decision about what direction I was going to go and after I went into nursing and I finished nursing school, it was a Master’s program that was at the Mass general hospital. It was pretty demanding and I finished that around 1990 and I was intending to make a career as a nurse and especially with a Master’s degree. I spent a few years doing staff nursing to get that experience and then it would be expected that I would either become a nurse practitioner or move in into an administrative work. I was working at, actually the Chinatown nursing, I never get carried far away, I was close to my art. I was working at the Chinatown nursing home, learning Chinese like talking to the residents there, watching the Chinese tv with them and I was kind of expected to move up the ladder. They gave me administrative job then I think eventually if I’ve wanted to I could’ve become the director of nursing but after I’ve been in nursing for about five or six years, I felt like I wasn’t practicing, I wasn’t practicing my tai chi, I wasn’t practicing art, I wasn’t advancing, I wasn’t learning new stuff. I was too busy working and then too exhausted after work. I really had to make up my mind. Was I going to pursue a career in nursing or was I going to just devote myself to my practice and they basically cutting up my hours back to part time and taking the financial loss with the idea that once I retired, I would supplement my retirement income by teaching tai chi. So, that was kind of again, I had to decide what shape my life was going to take and do I want to pursue money or do I want to pursue this art and it wasn’t actually too hard to make the decision. It was harder to justify to, like my family and other people but for me the right choice seems very clear. I’ve always kind of prioritize my art over everything else in my life. I think you kind of, it’s for some people you get so obsessive about it and some of my good buddies are just like me it’s like, this is all that really counts. Everything else is secondary. And I think Sifu is like that to a certain extent too and I know she talked about sometimes she felt guilty that she wasn’t always there for her family because she was really driven to you know, accomplish not just the physical she was working on herself but also to present it to the larger world. That kind of was always her dream to you know, to show wushu to the American public and I think, you know she definitely succeeded in that. She definitely caught people's attention. You know, id also say that you know to a certain extent that was just she and Mr. Yen for their family it was like kind of a typical immigrant experience. They were both really busy with work and I think both Donnie and Chris maybe didn’t see their parents as much as they would’ve liked because there was just always so much work to do. And Sifu was at the school from morning through night seven days a week you know, there wasn’t much family life. I actually, I was talking to Donnie a couple of years ago when he was in Boston and I had seen an interview with him when he said that he doesn’t have to memories of family dinners from when he was a kid. He said something about, it seems that there were always students around and I know in the early years they actually rented out space in their house to some of Sifu's students and again that’s very immigrant thing to do. You just sort of get as much money form as many different sources as you can cause usually people come here with nothing. And I said you know, after class, sometimes Sifu would say, who wants to go out to dinner? I'll be like, oh that’s great, we're going to have dinner with Sifu and Mr. Yen and Donnie and Chris and it’s like I didn’t think that you know, it meant that Donnie and Chris wouldn’t have any private family time. You know, there wasn’t a family dinner, it was like instead it’s a dozen people sitting on a big table in China town. Everybody talking at once and I think they lost out a little bit on that kind of family experience because the school was really Sifu's baby as much as her kids were. She was really devoted you know, making it thrive. But you know, they both turned out to be just fine and I think I understand now but it was tough when they were young.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We have a lot of people that listen that are not martial arts instructors. You know certainly a good chunk are. But for those folks out there that are students and have always been martial arts students, you just told a story about from unseemingly prioritizing their teaching over some aspects of life that others would not make that sacrifice for. You’re an instructor and you’ve given up a lot of your life and you told us a story about how you considered giving up more of your life to focus on your teaching. Are you able to articulate what that mindset is like for people that haven’t been there?
Jean Lukitsh:
Well, it’s not just teaching but my practice in general but definitely teaching. For me teaching is part of my own practice. You learn a lot from having to break the material down and you learn a lot form having the answer your students’ questions because they’re always going to come up with questions that you’ve never even thought about. And then you're going to have to research or look at something form a slightly different point of view before you can answer. So, as far as I am concerned teaching is a really important part of your practice but practicing for me just means that every day you try to do something. It means that you’re always trying to, I always say whenever you think or say I got this that’s when your practice dies. You always got to be super critical and say no it can be better and that’s something I learned from Sifu. She never, never said okay this is fine so let’s move on, it was always you can make it better, you can go deeper, you can refine it a little bit more, you can make the technique more difficult. It was just really important to her for us to realize that all she could give us was like a set of tools. She couldn’t teach us exactly how to do the movement, that had to come from us. You just have to repeat it over and over again mindfully and trying to, she gave us what she called the characteristics and requirements. Six characteristics, six requirements. We always had to measure what we were doing against that and so you have an ideal but you’re always a work in progress trying to reach that ideal. And I think for a student even a casual student I think it’s important to realize that memorizing the steps is the only the beginning and it’s not even the most important part. You know, if a student is having trouble remembering the tai chi movement I’ll tell them just do tai chi beginning, try to do it mindfully not just arms up arms down but really what’s going on in your body. If you can do that, you’re a lot better off than somebody that knows twenty movements that just sort of buzz through them without really feeling too much of what’s going on. So, that’s something I got form my teacher that I found extremely valuable in my craft is just that keep doing it. Not always the same keep changing it and then figuring out why one way works better that another. Again research, she originally called her school the Chinese wushu research institute cause she wanted to emphasize that you have to do a lot of the work yourself. Now the school's name is the Bow-sim Mark tai chi arts association but a lot of people still use that old CWRI name because that’s how she first became known but she deliberately wants to put that in the name of the school because that was so important. And it’s all research. When she reaches a certain level, everything is research. Nursing became research for me, walking my patients you know, like trying to do a dressing change on somebody who’s little demented and trying to fight you so you use your pushing hands technique to redirect them away from hitting you while you're trying to change their bandage. That was like you were saying before, it just becomes parts of your everyday life it’s not something separate. It’s just always there.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And certainly, in nursing school they’re not going to teach you how to use pushing hands, to gently subdue the patient and change that dressing and they’re not going to teach you to change a bandage in tai chi or in wushu so you have to do the research.
Jean Lukitsh:
But I do have to say, a lot of what I learned in nursing just confirmed that tai chi is really good for your health because there’s like actual physiological reasons why the stuff that do is good for you and also keeps you active later in life. And one of our other students, Rick Wong is a physical therapist and so I talked to him about using tai chi as part of your job and he uses a lot of the concepts in tai chi in his therapy works so it’s super adaptable. I find myself wondering why don’t everybody do this you know? Everybody can benefit from it but I guess some people love it and some people just don’t see the point. The great thing is it’s an exercise and it’s a sport and it’s a combat system that you’re never going to get too old for. You can keep doing it for the rest of your life so whatever skill I can build at any point in my life I’m just going to keep advancing and advancing. For me that’s a big motivating factor.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We heard about your first instructor in Pennsylvania. We’ve heard your love and reverence for Sifu Mark. But other than those two, is there someone that you can look at and say this person is really influential on my path?
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah, I’ve actually been working with two people, Sifu pretty much retired six or seven years ago and she and Mr. Yen spend a lot of time in China now. And I’m teaching a lot of classes I teach at our school in China town but I still want to go on learning. So, the two people that have been really valuable for me in the last few years are Sifu's younger sister, suyen mark. Actually, Sifu's sister and her brother also studied for many years with Grand Master Fu wing fei and fong jao 51:39 but they didn’t open schools and they didn’t do public performances or anything but they kept their practice going and su yen is more interested in the chi kung side of the art as opposed to forms or you know, martial applications but she goes deep, deep, deep into the connections between the various parts of your body and what you're supposed to be feeling as you do these movements. She doesn’t live in Boston but she comes here about at least three or four times a year and does seminars and I’ve found her instruction to be very useful and to a great extent it’s because it’s very complimentary to what I’ve learned from her sister. Basically, when su yen breaks down these movements and says this is how you make the waist move this way and then the arm moves that way and it’s like I’ve seen Sifu do that and I wasn’t sure exactly how she was doing it and now, I’m starting to realize because I wasn’t ready to go that deep before but now I can and so the chi kung stuff I get from su yen and then one of Sifu's first Boston students is a guy who teaches here in the Boston area, he teaches advanced internal classes and by invitation only and I started going to his classes about four years ago and he really pushes me to be more combat oriented. We work sometimes with pads, trying to get power in the strikes and we do a lot of two-person exercises. He had me doing her sing yi and he taught me the foo style tiger boxing form which is not the stuff I did when I was younger. It’s seem too intimidating but, now I find that I enjoy that the stuff gets a little easier to me now. But it’s definitely a more kung fu like, more fighting looking. Anyway, it’s good for me I’ve always, like I said, I’ve always been more on the soft, peaceful side. This guy helps me to get the power out and think about controlling the other person being more martial. So, I have chi kung and I have combat tai chi going for me right now and so I’m happy, it’s like were all part of the same family. Again, the great thing about Sifu's art and Sifu's school is that you know, it’s not just her, she’s always been part of this huge network and even years ago there would always be visiting martial arts artist coming. Old friend of ours would come from Hong Kong and teach seminars and you know it was just all about learning is much variety if you can. In that sense, there's a lot of different people that have influenced me but I think the ones that I would consider the most influential after Bow-sim Mark would be her sister su yen and then my friend. My kung fu brother, 55:00
Jeremy Lesniak:
If you could train with someone you haven’t, who would that be?
Jean Lukitsh:
Is it just people alive now or can it be...?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Anybody, anywhere in time. We'll make it as open as possible.
Jean Lukitsh:
Well, I would just have to stay in my own family. I would like to go back to the originator of the fu style, fu tian sung. I study photos of him and try to imagine what must have looked like when he was actually moving. He was bad **. He was I mean, he killed people with those strikes. He was an army trainer, he was one of those professional body guard back in the day. He fought bandit’s, he was a real kung fu fighter and stories about him are right out of the kung fu movies except they’re true. And I will have to say though if I’m fantasizing about going back in time and studying with him, I would specify I would want to do his public classes in kuang jao. I think he taught in the YMCA back in the 20's and 30's because I heard he was really hard on his private students he would hit them all the time. I have a feeling the public classes were probably more just here’s the forms just follow so if I could go anywhere and anytime to study with anybody it would be his public classes in the 1930s and the 1920s.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I like that qualification of the answer. We don’t usually get qualifications you know, we get this person but we don’t usually get when in time, where in time or in what context.
Jean Lukitsh:
Well that’s the history geek in me coming out.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, well that I mean that’s completely appropriate because when we think about most of the good martial arts instructors that we know, and I’m thinking of the ones that I know, they do teach differently to different people. Just as you mention very early in the episode Sifu mark, had this way of knowing what would bring you forward in the best way that was always what you wanted to learn. I think most of great instructors are like that. They know the best path to get you where you want to go or where you deserve to go in the time that you have left. Because let’s be honest, we could study any martial art for multiple lifetimes and still not get all the way to the end, there’s no end, I think we all know that.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah you know, we have a lot of things from Sifu mark that we tend to quoted each other and one I think that comes out more than anything else is that tai chi or wushu or Chinese internal arts which ever term you want to use is rich in content, which just seems there’s just so much there. So many variable, so many variations, so many options so much to learn, so much to Master, so much to enjoy. It’s rich in content.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Undoubtedly. Let talk about competition for a second. That’s not something that we tend to hear about as much from the guest that we’ve had in the show that are of a Chinese background, but was that ever part of your path?
Jean Lukitsh:
Not really. There’s only one time I actually competed and that was in China. If you can imagine.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If you can do it, do it right.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah right, well in 1984 Sifu got an invitation for what was being built as the first tai chi competition and friendship meeting something like that. Tai chi chuan and jian so fist and sword competition and friendship meeting and it was being held in wuhan in China. I don’t know if they ever had any other ones, but this was a pretty big deal. They had about a dozen of the top tai chi Masters from all around China. 59:21 I think he’s the only one that is still alive cause mostly they were elderly but then if you’re familiar with chan 59:25 he’s like the fourth generation chen family practitioner. He travels around a lot and he teaches classes. But he was representing chen style tai chi, the daughter of samo tang was there, representing samo tang style. The founder of wu style, wu jian tiang, I keep on mangling these names, but his daughter was their wu ying hua, and her husband ma yuel yung. 59:58 he’s a legendary pushing hands expert and he did a demonstration on that. The guy named xia guo chang, one of the yang family guys was there. And li tian ji who became Sifu's second major teacher. I mean, there was a wushu coach I guess was the first and then fu ling fey and li tian ji I guess would be her third teacher. He’s the one that created the combined tai chi and that’s a whole other story too, she ended up studying with him for a while in the early eighties but he was there. And so, it was just, she took a group of about I think thirteen or fourteen of us over and she wanted all of us to compete. Some of the guys didn’t some people they didn’t want to but it was a friendly group you know, basically they gave everybody a score and then all the people that got the top third of the scores got a gold medal. All the people that got the medal third in the scores got silver medal and then the lower third of the scores got a gold medal. So, everybody got a medal. But you sort of knew where you were in the ranking. So, I got a silver medal, my score was right about dead middle between the highest and the lowest. And I had to tell you the high score was a young woman who was a Chinese national champion in tai chi from Beijing and the second highest score something like .02 or .2 point behind the high score was my Sifu. I also have to say people that were there told me beforehand the national champion in tai chi was going to get the high score and that was kind of given. I think they were a little bit of like weighing like okay Bow-sim Mark and this other woman okay we got it. So anyhow, Sifu got the second higher score but you know when she was performing the audience was applauding and there was a woman form Canada she was next to me was watching and she had been studying martial arts in China for a couple of years and she said, I’ve never seen anybody applaud tai chi like this. People just don applaud for tai chi, it was considered boring. So, you know she really impressed the audience and that was a really interesting experience. That’s the only time I ever got an award or even competed and like I said it was friendly in a sense that you know, nobody was going to be treated too badly even the low scores didn’t go that low but it’s also intimidating because all these Masters were sitting there watching you. Some of them were the judges and so I felt like well, if I get through this, alright I’ll never be this nervous about getting up and doing my tai chi in front of an audience again and that definitely worked. Whenever I get stage fright after that I just remember what was like being in China. This isn’t as bad so I can get through this.it was great and Grand Master Fu was there too. That was when I had a chance to meet him and he was just a wonderful very, very sweet natured, very young, very kind person I think. But the first thing he asked us how many hours each of us practice every day.
Jeremy Lesniak:
How many hours. Not how many hours a week. How many hours a day.
Jean Lukitsh:
How many hours every day do we practice. And everybody kind of looked at each other and one guy said well we all have jobs and the second thing Master Fu said to us was do you know how much time your teachers spent studying with me when she was my student and we said yeah, something like ten hours a day right and he said, all day every day. So, then we felt really inadequate
Jeremy Lesniak:
One way to get really good at something.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah right. But I think you know, that’s what they did I mean that was back in the sixties and she just, sometimes they’d start at like 4 o clock in the morning and just train. Different world. Yeah, I don’t know if people are going to be able to advance to the level of these old-time practitioners because we have so many distractions in our life now. The world has changed so much even in China, I don’t know if people can train with that level of dedication for that long.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I don’t think so, but one of the things that I always see in, listeners know, you may not know, prior to whistlekick, I had an IT company and a lot of the marking that we did involve me writing and I did a lot of writing and worked on some online publications. One of the things that I found and it’s easier to see in hindsight is a new technology comes in, and it kind of consumes everything and then it backs out to some degree and find its place, you know kind of like the ripples from a wave. So, I’m expecting that were in this peak of technology involvement and then it will back out in some way. We're already starting to see the very younger generation resistant to it in some ways and what I’m hoping is that we have enough technology to document the older the Great Masters that it’s going to skip my generation but then the next one will be able to look back and they will allow themselves more time, they will train harder, they will be more passionate because technology will just kind of be there rather than something to 1:06:07 on to.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah maybe be more in their body instead of on the screens, focused on the screens all the time. I think that would be a big thing but the other thing is like I said I study the photos that we have of great Grand Master Fu tian sung trying to imagine ow he looked when he moved, but after mid twentieth century, the good martial arts practitioners have all been recorded on film or video, so you're not going to have to look at still pictures and try to imagine what the movement looked like. There’s going to be all these recording of the highest-level people doing their art. Like I said, sometimes I think it can take, sometime decades to be able to figure out how to do some of the really deep adjustments that make the movement happen on the outside but and I know now how much of the deep stuff you can reconstruct just from seeing a visual record of it. But certainly, people, students in the future are going to have a lot more resources and they’re going to be able to study these videos and again, it’s all research so you get some ideas from watching somebody and you try to incorporate that into your practice and then your practice gets a little richer. I think it’s great in a way that we have all these recordings and my dream actually in the future is that they’ll start doing motion capture on the best people, you know where you wear the sensors and goes to your forms and then they’ll be able to look at it ideally, I guess, I’m assuming you are going to be able to rotate the image and see it turn to some different angles and then you really be able to get a good sense of what that person is doing.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There was a project I bumped in to in some news article and if I remember it correctly was from China that was doing just that. How big it was and how much money was behind it, I don’t know that’s not an inexpensive thing to do but they had that same goal that same idea that you did and as that becomes less expensive I think we'll see more of that. Because that can lead to holograms and that can lead to analysis. I mean, I think we’ve all always dreamed of the ability to study remotely and we’ve never really been able to do that but there's an opportunity that technology might actually make that possible to do it in a closer to what I think most of us call the right way.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah, I think so too.
Jeremy Lesniak:
To have that feed back to, I mean heck if we combined that with holograms you know, you can have people training right alongside you and you can see them and how neat could that be.Right, right. You know I’m talking to my friends about this and what I think would be a very necessary component of that is some way for you to get feedback though. Whether it is by some way the system could analyze your movement say, your hip always goes up when you do this, this part of the movement and you know that sort of thing. Are you straightening you knee too much at this point you know. Cause that’s the sort of thing that you know, you don’t always pick up on and you need somebody with a skilled eye to look at you and say okay, if you just made these tiny adjustments everything would flow a lot better. But you know, I’m sure eventually they’ll have I don’t know, AI or expert programs of something that will give you that feed back to analyze the video of you and say you’re doing strong and you’re doing that wrong and okay yeah, this time it was better and then the system or the program will be your teacher. But I think without the feedback
Jeremy Lesniak:
I think there’s a lot of, yeah, I agree. I think that there's. I think all the technology we need to make that work exists but were just not there because it’s expensive and ...
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah but it will come.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah but were also kind of resistant to change as martial artists aren’t we. For good and for bad, I mean there are certainly two sides to that coin.
Jean Lukitsh:
Well yes, yin and yang.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yes, without a doubt. Let’s talk about movies. Now this might be a different sort of line of questioning for you versus a lot of our other guests because I’m going to guess, if I was a betting person I would put a good chunk down that you’ve seen more martial arts films that our other guests because of the job you have and...
Jean Lukitsh:
Right yeah, I’ve seen a lot of weird ones too...
Jeremy Lesniak:
And you’ve probably seen a lot of them more than once.
Jean Lukitsh:
Yeah
Jeremy Lesniak:
Do you have a favorite? Can you pin it down that way?
Jean Lukitsh:
It’s hard to pick out just one, you know. There are a couple of classic movies that I think I could watch over and over again and one would have to be Once Upon a Time in China 2, the second one which Donnie is in and like the whole like the half, last half hours of the movie is just one great action set piece after another. I just consider that to be some of the best and the best executed choreography that has been recorded on film. Another one that I’d put right up there is Iron Monkey and again that’s a Donnie movie and then some of the early classic Jackie Chan movies like, drunken Master, the first one I think is just, there’s just so much in that and it’s so funny you can watch it over and over again and it never get old and some of the other ones that he made around the same time there’s one called The Young Master that I really like. But I used to think I wish there was some way that you know, when I passed on if my consciousness could be projected into those movies, I would be perfectly happy. I would be like my ideal paradise would be just like you know following Jackie Chan and Donnie around the streets of these old fashion towns while they get into trouble and get into fights.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Those are great films. Yeah, I’m wondering about actors. Obviously, you have a special place in your heart for Donnie in a way that I’m going to say nobody else listening does, which is great. So, I’m not going to...
Jean Lukitsh:
Were like family.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah and obviously we think about differently about those people that were close to when we see them achieve things and do something like he’s done it and I’m the first one to say he is the greatest that is currently acting, I mean there’s nobody that holds a candle to what he’s doing currently on film for me. But if you had to look back over time, is he your favorite or there’s somebody else maybe occupy that spot?
Jean Lukitsh:
Well I think that the people that are active now, he’s the one that I’m most excited about, most interested in seeing what he’s going to do next and I do want to say too that you know, I’ve known Donnie since he was in high school and his movement has always been really outstanding. What super impressed me and I really maybe couldn’t have predicted is that he became such a good action director, choreographer. And I remember watching one of the first movies he directed, Ballistic Kiss, and about fifteen minutes into it thinking, you know this movie is really well made considering it was on a shoe string budget. Visually it’s really arresting and you know, it draws you in, the action scenes are extremely well done and I thought you know, I’ve always thought of Donnie as like a good martial artist and now I’m starting to think of him as really good director too. So that was a skill that I kind of didn’t see coming that you know again I think from the studying with his mentor and working in the Hong Kong film industry all through the 80s and the 90s they work so fast that if something doesn’t work you just try it again in the next movie until you finally get it right and I think that’s how he reached the point where you know, now he knows. He knows what to do, he knows what’s going to look good and what you should avoid because it’s just not going to work and I really have a lot of respect for him for staying with it this long and you know. Again, you have to be obsessed to a certain degree to advance in the art of film making as well as in the art of martial arts and he’s been willing to put that time and effort in to reach that pinnacle. But in terms of other favorite actors, like everybody else, is a fan of the golden age of kung fu cinema, I tend to go back a little bit further and of course these people like Bruce Lee and Gordon Liu and the actresses back then Angela Mao and there was a woman named Shu Fong. I don’t know if you're familiar with her but she did a lot of movies with King Hu. The director King Hu and there was a woman named Pau Li Xang Kang Ling Fung1:15:57. It was you know, a real fighter and you know quite a fiery personality on screen, Wei Ying Hung a cara wei ying hung sometimes, I don’t know if you're familiar with her she was a Shaw Brothers actress. Who is still working in Hong Kong and she actually studied with Sifu when Sifu was teaching in Hong king back in the 70s. Yeah, I like the old movies a lot. Of the newer films like you know I mean, there’s a director working now, Xiu Hao Fong. I don’t know if you are familiar with his work. He wrote the screenplay for Long kar Wei's The Grand Master.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I’m not familiar with that one.
Jean Lukitsh:
Okay. But Xu Hao Fong is a kung fu novelist in China. He seems very well versed in history of Chinese martial arts and his stories takes place in specific historical periods and they involve like the politics and the martial world politics of that time and his movies are new ones that I really liked and nobody particularly famous in them although I think he has one coming out pretty soon that has one of the old Shaw Brothers' actors Chen Kuan xai starring in it but I think he is doing really good work right now and my dream project would be Donnie working on a film with him because I think that would be really amazing but right now they’re kind of moving in different circles but it could happen.
Jeremy Lesniak:
How about books? Are you at all a reader of martial arts books?
Jean Lukitsh:
Some, yeah. I realize a long time ago that reading martial arts theory for me, it doesn’t make any sense until I can do it and once I can do it I’m not interested in reading with somebody else has to say about it. But I do have to say I think my favorite book is my Sifu's combined tai chi kuan book1:18:16 which is out of print right now but you can still find it on amazon sometimes but there’s just a lot of, it’s not just the form, there’s a lot of text in there where she talks about tai chi, she talks about the philosophy behind it, the health benefits. She translates some of the classic writings on tai chi and does some annotation on them and there’s just a lot of really good theory and suggestions for practice in that book. And then the other one that I remember from years ago that was, one of the ones that actually made sense to me is by a man who used to teach here in Boston, T.T. Liang, I don’t know if that rings a bell.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It doesn’t.
Jean Lukitsh:
But he was teaching, he was quite elderly in the 70s when I first came to Boston. He was still teaching and then retired and he passed on a long time ago. He has a book tai chi kuan for health and self-defense and it’s not a book about, here’s my form and how to do it. It’s just essays on how to practice tai chi and you know some of the visualizations and connections that you can feel while you’re going through you’re practice. So, those are couple that I’ve gone back to over the years and always found something inspirational to them.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Let’s talk about you again. Let’s talk about what’s keeping you going. You’ve been training for quite a while and at a higher level a more intense level which is kind of ironic to say as were talking about tai chi than most people. So, I’ve got to ask why are you still actively training, you’re teaching. What is it that you’re working towards? Is that a particular goal or is there something else that’s keeping you motivated?
Jean Lukitsh:
Well I think, my goal is when I actually sometimes I think of it in these exact terms is, I want to try to Master as much as the Fu style technique as I can before I die. That’s the goal I don’t expect to get it all but you know like I said that I’m still training, I’m still trying to advance the art you know when you make those connections, it’s another treasure from the treasure box. I really like that image cause that’s how you feel like, oh man, I’ve been watching Sifu do that all these years and now I’m able to reproduce just a little bit of that and I know how to do it now. And that’s just so exciting I think that’s what keeps me working towards learning little bit more. A little bit more, a little bit more. Feeling just having that control of what goes on in your body. To that degree is almost addictive in a way. So, I’d say I can understand why everybody is enjoying it because it’s you know, we all live in our bodies and why wouldn’t you want them to work and move as efficiently as possible and so that's essentially what I keep doing. I just keep trying to find ways to make it better, better, better. And I’m lucky enough to have some friends and some people I practice with and train with and share that point of view. Anybody else that wanders in would probably think that were crazy, that’s all we talk about. It works very well for us so I guess it’s just yeah, it’s just wanting to attain as close to state to perfection as I can, as long as I can keep this art, I’m going to keep working towards that ideal.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Now's your opportunity if someone wants to reach out. Maybe they’re nearby or they’re coming to visit or you know, they’re training three states away and they’ve been looking for a woman to teach them. How would someone get a hold of you or find you online you know. This is what we call sort of call commercial time.
Jean Lukitsh:
Okay. Yeah you can reach me through the Bow-sim Mark Tai Chi Art Association website if you send an email through the website. I always check that account to see what’s coming in, that’s probably the best way to reach me. I do the school's Facebook page too but I don’t always respond to Facebook queries as I get too busy but through the school's website and that’s tai chiarts.com or you can just search Bow-sim Mark and I’ll think it will come up as one of the first listings on google.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Okay. And we'll certainly link that in the show notes. Whistlekickmartialasrtsradio.com again for those might have missed it.
Jean Lukitsh:
Can I just say where I am teaching? Well okay. Where I’m teaching right now, I have classes just about every day of the week. I teach on Monday and Thursday mornings at the Dorchester YMCA. I teach on Saturday mornings in Cambridge in porter square through a senior program called the living world network. I also have an informal Thursday afternoon senior class that’s the one where they’re all in their 80s and 90s cause were working together for like over twenty years in that group. And then I teach in China town in different location but usually under the auspices of Sifu's school. Our main class is now are, I don’t even know if I should say this but they’re in her condo building so she comes down stairs and practices with the 1:24:43 town. But we just we just rent the function room in that building and that’s where we meet on Tuesday afternoons and Sunday mornings and then we have another space as back up that we use for some other classes.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Sounds kind of full circle to me. I like that.
Jean Lukitsh:
And we also like I said, we have seminars, we have su yen coming in and do the chi kung seminars. We have some of Sifu's old students will come in and do seminars on whatever topics they’re interested in and once a month I do a Sunday morning seminar on Chinatown on lun yi which is the tai chi pakua combination form that I mentioned before and yeah so, it’s not all day everyday like when Sifu was young and full of energy. Now everybody’s sort of contributing part time. We keep it going, we keep her school going we just celebrated the fortieth anniversary last year and a lot of her students came from all over. She has students teaching in Europe and in Asia too. It’s a far-flung group, a lot of very accomplished people and as I said every single one of them remembers her with a great deal of fondness and respect and it was just so wonderful being part of that lineage cause it’s a real kung fu school with the pictures of the ancestors on the walls and everything it’s like really just like the movies. If you’re a fan of the movies, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, so cool. I really appreciate your time on the show today, I want to thank you for being so open and telling such absolutely amazing stories. Listeners I’m sure you've enjoyed this and I’m hoping you might send us out with some great parting words.Oh okay, let me see what I can think of. Let's see, well okay actually not my words I’m going to give you one of Sifu's favorite saying about tai chi and about wushu or Chinese martial arts in general. She would always say that, it should be a sport a health exercise and a performing art and what she meant by that was that you know you can look at all these as martial arts as combat that's the sport side but also it should be good for your body so that's the health exercise and it should also look very elegant that's the performing arts aspect so she that was the again a phrase that she would use a lot when people would ask her what her school was about or what is the art for and that she said all three components were important that you should understand what she called the intent the martial side of it. You should feel what’s good for your body and practice it as a matter of routine so the health exercise but it has to look good to if you’re not doing a full extension of the arms getting that elegant line she said that your circle becomes like a moon it's not quite full. She really wants, she was really concerned that the appearance of the movement that it looks balanced that it looks graceful that further shows the inside as well so very balanced and you know that you're feeling it from the inside.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I have exchanged a lot of emails with Sifu Lukitsh both before and after our recording. She's been quite the supporter in making connections with other potential guests and I really appreciate that. I had a great time speaking with her for this show and we even kept talking a bit after we were done recording. There are some events coming up where I might get to meet her and I truly hope so, thank you Sifu Lukitsh for coming on the show today. Over at whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.com you can find the show notes with some of the best photos we've ever posted. All those names that I’ve mentioned before, all the names that you heard during the interview, we've got quite a few photos there, check it out. Find whistlekick on social media we're at whistlekick on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and just about everything else. You can also checkout the shows Facebook group whistlekickMartialArtsRadio behind the scenes, just search for it and it's going to come up. Find the newsletter sign up at whistlekickMartialArtsRadio.com or whistlekick.com. That's it for today. Until next time, train hard smile and have a great day.