I remember sleeping over at a friend’s house when I was little, probably about 3rd grade or so.  The beauty of being that age is that your body has a natural alarm clock, and mine was set to 6 AM, so I got up, got my friend up, we had some breakfast, and went to explore outside.  We got to a park, and I vividly remember seeing this elderly couple doing these slow movements synchronized with each other on a tennis court.  Matthew, my friend, knew that these guys did this every morning, and so was less shocked.  This was the first time I remember seeing tai chi, but at that age I don’t think Matthew or I knew what it was.

The movie “The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey West” documented a group of Tai Chi students that studied under Cheng Man Ching.  The documentary is filled with modern day commentaries from people who studied under him in the 70’s, mixed with older archived film of their actual classes.  Much of the time, the students talked about how great their teacher was at showing them the way one can manipulate another person’s body based on the other person’s movement, sort of similar to what I saw from the elderly couple.  What I found most interesting though is that Cheng Man Ching also spent time teaching his students how to fight with swords, how to write calligraphy, and even gave them prescriptions for Chinese medicine, which they could then take to a nearby apothecary.  In all the videos, everyone was wearing everyday American style clothes.  And given the broad range of things the tai chi teacher spent time on with his students, it sometimes seemed more like these guys were all hanging with each other.  I’ve never tried tai chi or sword fighting with actual swords, but watching these pupils and their teacher together, regardless of what they were doing, brought about what seemed like a certain familial quality to the screen.