2020 TIGER CLAW ELITE KUNGFUMAGAZINE.COM CHAMPIONSHIP – CORONA-POSTPONEDby Gene Ching For 2019 Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship – Is It Raining with You? CLICK HERE.Just prior to posting this article, Alameda County issued a Shelter in Place order, which includes the Kung Fu Tai Chi Headquarters. The order was issued for March 17 and is in place until April 7. At this writing, I do not know how severely this will impact production. Please bear with us as we face this new challenge. United we stand. Stay Healthy everyone! ~Gene

The statement above was one of the hardest press releases I’ve had to write in my twenty-year watch here. The Tiger Claw Elite Championships began in 2006, and we’ve held an annual tournament every year since. This year would have marked our 15th consecutive Championship in the San Francisco Bay Area. But fate didn't go our way.I’ve been tracking COVID-19 since it was first recognized as Wuhan Pneumonia at the end of 2019. My ears perk up whenever I hear that whinny and gallop of the White Horse of the Apocalypse, that first ominous steed of pestilence. I lived in San Francisco for some of the AIDS epidemic and I witnessed friends dying of it. I was also in China when SARS broke out, which solidified my wariness. In the wake of SARS, I kept track of Bird Flu and Swine Flu. COVID-19 was different than those from the start. It’s so much easier to transmit than those previous threats. The symptoms don’t show as quickly so a carrier can spread the disease without even knowing it. It’s viral in the true sense of the term.Some still take COVID-19 lightly. A culture of deniers has emerged in the United States in the last few years – Flat Earthers, Climate Change deniers, decriers of "fake" news. There are even claims that it’s all political distraction during an election year, but if any American political party was powerful enough to orchestrate quarantines of China, Europe and the Middle East, they could just control the government directly instead of going to so much global trouble. It’s that we’ve all become so jaded, tired of so many cries of ‘wolf’, coupled stubborn attachment to maintaining the "norm," to going back to the way things used to be and make the world like that again, as if that was so much better. As a traditional Kung Fu practitioner, I do sympathize. Heck, I still train in swordsmanship. But progress is inevitable and I’m not about to forsake modern luxuries like my smart phone or the internet for some romantic ideal of the way we were. And sometimes, that dire wolf really is at your door.Ironically, the word "viral" has been viral on the web for years. It entered our common vernacular to refer to anything that circulates quickly and widely across the internet from one user to another. Here’s the disconnect. Those naysayers didn’t read past the "corona" in Coronavirus to get to the viral part. It’s typical for our ADHD social media-addled society. Viral is exponential expansion. Understanding exponentials is harder math than figuring out how much to tip your waitress, but not

that much harder. One becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, and the next thing you know, the Kardasians become influencers. It’s this viral spread that’s scary. We all need to act to inhibit that spread.Martial arts tournaments are postponing across the nation and rightly so. Just prior to our postponement, U.C. Berkeley’s venerated Chinese Martial Arts Tournament (CMAT) cancelled, and soon after the Santa Cruz Open cancelled too. Santa Cruz Open is a major Taekwondo event that TC Media has worked with for years. Now alongside ours, many more have followed. A few stubborn tournament promoters are struggling to soldier on, but it’s just revealing that they value money more than the health of their community.Postponing this year’s Tiger Claw Elite Championships is the prudent course of action, despite the heavy financial loss it will incur on Tiger Claw. Our core mission in the martial arts is to promote and cultivate health. While the extreme example of self-defense is fending off an attacking perp, the real world day-to-day practice defends against illness, injury and lethargy. We would be remiss in our mission to go on with this event if it poses such a health threat.The good news is the recovery rates for COVID-19 are increasing and some researchers believe that the disease is susceptible to high temperatures, so there’s a chance that it may subside by May. But it’s a gamble that we cannot afford right now. Tiger Claw already stands to lose invested deposits with the postponement, not to mention the thousands of hours already spent in preparation by our team. The Ides of March marks a turning point when we must invest more to proceed. We’d have to double down on this crisis being over by May and that’s just not a good bet to make given the circumstances. Never bet against the White Horse of the Apocalypse.Beyond event cancellations, COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the martial arts world because we’re so closely connected to Asia. The majority of mass-produced martial arts gear is made in China, not just Chinese gear but also equipment for Korean and Japanese styles. Even some MMA gear is imported from PRC. This not only affects Tiger Claw. It affects the entire martial arts industry. Frankly there aren’t that many manufacturers of martial arts equipment in the world. We know the major suppliers for our competitors too. We’re all in the same situation and we all must support each other to get through it.COVID-19 struck at Chinese New Year. Any company that does business with China knows that everything shuts down for about two weeks during the holiday, so orders are made in advance to cover the downtime. Unfortunately, the coronavirus crisis triggered Customs to go into High Alert on anything coming from China, so our CNY container was held up for weeks. It wasn’t a slow boat from China. Our cargo ship was on time. It just got stuck at the port. This impacted Kung Fu Tai Chi because our magazine mailing envelopes were in that container.We had held a special subscription drive for our SPRING 2020 issue. Subscribers received an exclusive 8 Section Brocade qigong poster (ironically the Brocade was touted as a recommended qigong practice during the outbreak). However subscription fulfillment was delayed because our envelopes were stuck in our container in Port of Oakland for weeks. And when they finally arrived, our order came up short, probably due to the pressure our China shippers were under from the coronavirus Chinese New Year. So we had to sticker envelopes with our return address and bulk mail postage permit number by hand. I’ve been inundated with calls, emails and messages from subscribers wondering if their subscriptions had expired. I’m grateful that our readership was understanding after I explained this situation but it did cost me a lot of time on task.Our China factories are back up and running; however, they are only a little past 50% capacity at this writing. Another container full of restock products is on a boat somewhere in the Pacific. Hopefully that won’t be delayed too. However, we’re small compared to major corporations like Apple, Disney, Nike and others experiencing similar COVID-19-related supply issues. They also rely on China for their supplies. The overall impact on the global economy remains to be seen. It far overshadows the postponement of our Tiger Claw Elite Championships. One thing is clear – we are at a pivot point in world history. Nothing like this has happened before and it is changing how everything works, right now, right before our eyes.

 Fighting COVID-19 Transmission with Traditional Kung FuThere are fundamental health practices that everyone is recommending: wash your hands, cover your cough, sanitize, stay home if you're sick, all basic courtesies that we should all be practicing all the time. Some traditional Chinese medics are proposing cure-alls like they always do, and when one works, I'm all for it – but I'll need some proof before buying into any of that. In the same manner, some traditional Kung Fu masters are propounding qigong practices as a curative – the aforementioned 8 Section Brocade and Six Healing Sounds have both been advocated. Qigong is not going to cure your coronavirus and it's a shameful attention grab to make such a claim now. Like hand washing, qigong is something we should be practicing all the time. It’ll help you be healthy in general, but it’s no panacea when it comes to this disease.I wish I could take some premonitory credit for running my "Unravelling the 8 Section Brocade" article in our SPRING 2020 issue (the one with the exclusive 8 Section Brocade poster for subscribers only that got delayed). But no. The Brocade is my daily practice and it was just coincidence. Nevertheless, there are other practices within traditional Kung Fu that can help curb the spread.At first, schoolmasters were being proactive: buying air filters, wiping down everything with disinfectant after every class, and shifting to no-physical-contact training sessions for the time being.  Keeping a school clean is another one of those basic courtesies that we all should be practicing daily. When I studied Kendo, cleaning the dojo was part of the warm-up and cool-down ritual. I remember pushing a broom using Kendo footwork and wiping down the floor in a spider-like crawl. There was a spiritual element to it too.No physical contact is trickier. This is easy to implement with forms-based styles. Finding a large open space where form practitioners can maintain a few yards of distance from each other isn’t too difficult assuming the weather is okay. They just train outdoors in very small groups. However, any style that dwells upon physical contact – the grappling arts like Judo, Jiu-

Jitsu, and MMA – have less recourse.  In this unique case, those forms-only schools are safer than sparring schools for counteracting COVID-19 spread.By now, many schools across the nation have closed their doors to further inhibit the spread. Even before the Shelter in Place was issued, we were watching this because the Kung Fu Tai Chi headquarters is north of Santa Clara County, one of the hardest hit regions in the nation right now. Many are launching online courses. I hope I can encourage you to invest in an instructional DVD. Not only will this allow you to learn something new at home, it’ll help support Kung Fu Tai Chi during these challenging times. We all must pull together to support each other through this.Martial Arts schools are like families, so some schools are forming support networks to look after each other. This is the traditional way. To be part of a family, we must help our young and our elders. This is why we train, to be strong for the weak in times of need. I’ve been fascinated to see which schools are rallying their students, and which can’t get out of the habit of violating social distance. Don’t forget to help your masters. If their school is closed, they’ve lost their source of income, and for many masters, their margins might not be able to sustain that. Here at Kung Fu Tai Chi, I really don’t know what the future holds. I hope that we’ve stored enough karmic credit that we can withstand this obstacle. If you want to help, you can support us by supporting our sponsor, MartialArtSmart, because that’s what pays our bills here. And after that, once we’ve managed to care for our own, we must extend our compassion to help the community at large that’s in need, because this is what true martial artists do. There’s a lot of challenges ahead but martial artists thrive on challenge.

A meme went viral recently about replacing the greeting gesture of shaking hand with the Vulcan salute. As a general rule of thumb, martial artists don’t shake hands. We bow. There is a very practical reason for this beyond preventing the transmission of disease. There are so many attacks that can be delivered when you have someone’s hand, so martial artists simply don’t want to provide an opening for that. Ironically, one of the origin tales about handshaking is that it was a way to show that you didn't have a weapon. That doesn't quite work for martial artists either because most of us have a daily carry, a blade, a Tactical Pen, or some sort of Self Defense tool. That's just our nature. So it’s not just social distancing. For martial artists, it has always been a method of basic self-defense.

Martial arts bowing has a vocabulary of its own. Within traditional Kung Fu, different sects have different bows. Generally speaking, the Kung Fu bow is executed with a left palm covering a right fist. Students of the original Shaolin Temple on Songshan will bow with one hand in an open palm. This is an artifact of their Buddhist tradition. Buddhists will bow using both hands held with palms pressed together in front of their heart. Those of Shaolin lineage will use only the right hand in deference to Bodhidharma’s successor, Huike. There’s a legend that Bodhidharma refused to accept Huike as a disciple until "the snow turns red." So Huike cut off his left arm, bloodying the snow surrounding him, and offered it as a gesture of his sincerity. Wudang followers will bow with the left thumb tucked inside the right fist. This forms a secret yin yang symbol that only the Wudang follower can see. Practitioners of many southern styles like Hung Gar will bow with the empty hand forming a Tiger Claw. There are more variations in other sects, however the bottom line is that there’s no touching when bowing, so less avenues for the transmission of viruses.Speaking of bowing hand positions, there are so many different types of fists in Kung Fu and these have their utility in preventing viral spread too. Viruses can live on objects that infected people touch, like elevator buttons, touch screens and door handles. Touching these with your fingertips and then touching your face can get you infected. However, using an

alternate Kung Fu fist can keep the germs off your fingertips. Use a Phoenix-eye fist to press small buttons and the back of a Crane’s beak to open doors. Not only does this reduce your exposure, you get to practice more. While far from a cure-all preventative, this might reduce the potential of contracting the virus when accompanied by vigorous handwashing.

The Next Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com ChampionshipWe will reschedule the Tiger Claw Elite KungFuMagazine.com Championship as soon as the COVID-19 crises abates. At this point, we cannot say if that will be later this year or in 2021. Everything is in place already – the rules, the divisions, the showcase championships – so it should come together easily once we have a venue again. They've been talking about dismantling South Hall for years, but it seems more likely this year than ever; so after a decade of staging our Championships there, 2019 may have been our last. Despite my issues with this venue, I will miss it. I’m very disappointed for my pet projects, the WildAid Tiger Claw Champion, the Ku Yu-Cheung Bak Sil Lum Championship, and especially the Tiger Claw Heavy Guandao Championship because that is a new one that I’ve been working on developing for years. But they’ll be good to go when we reschedule.Until that time…