there was one time in high school i remember a roller coaster plane ride through turbulence out to bumfuck champaign illinois. i wasn't touring schools. i was with my mom attending a yan xin qi gong workshop. 4 days of meditation in a windowless conference room basically learning how to breathe in and out while sitting cross legged with two hands suspended in front of my belly, imagining a beam of light streaming in and out of my body, while a lotus flower was opening and closing and a peacock was off to the side choking on a roast beef sandwich.
i called my mom up and asked, "why did we go there?” i remembered going but didn't know the reason. “i was suffering terrible headaches at the time." "who told you about this?" "my older sister." i called up my mom's older sister, O. she stumbled upon qi gong in the early 90's. Of all things, she was in the midst of weight loss effort, and attended a qi gong presentation at a chinese cultural center in chicago. one thing led to another and she told me she went to her first qi gong conference on 10/10/1991. she saw so many amazing things at the event such as people getting out of wheel chairs and walking that when she left, she wondered if qi gong could cure my uncle's hand ailment. O. is very frugal, often buying sale items in extreme bulk quantities... if i needed to hideout as a fugitive, i would go to her house knowing i could comfortably live off her stored goods for about 6 months. but she believed in qi gong so much, she was willing to pay the $700 tuition for her brother to attend classes.
my uncle attended his first qi gong event in new haven. during these events, energy pulsates from yan xin through the room and you can see many people shaking in ‘self-inducted movements'. some of the people in the class who have a higher sense of qi gong pull and hit others. one of her Chicago friends who was in attendance at the new haven conference reported a lot of students beating my uncle and hitting him hard. "what happened?" she asked him, "how did you feel so many people hitting you?" "i felt the bad energy coming out of the body" he replied.
"when your uncle came to chicago, I attended a meeting with him. we were the only chinese people in attendance. the topic of the conference was reincarnation. they talked about alien ancestors who came to earth from pleiades. people who saw visions of aliens were encouraged to raise their hand and discuss their hallucinations. yan xin taught another method of qi gong that had participants lying on stretcher beds. attendees would let their palms hover over the lain and pull at their 2 lao gong xue lines. they practiced making the 2 lines the same length."
it's no wonder my grandfather thought qi gong was some hokie bullshit. at a later conference in new haven my father and him had a great disagreement the day before attending the meeting. i could imagine my parents, my uncle, grandparents and aunt squeezed in a beat up station wagon heading to new haven with my grandfather telling everybody to wake up and prove to him qi gong was real and nothing more than a cultish swindle. when my grandfather got agitated, it was a scary sight behold. imagine a one eyed half-deaf madman riled up in thunderous tantrums. to explain his odd behavior, fortune tellers told my family they believed a ghost inhabited my grandfather's body... meanwhile i just thought he had some douchebag fucker tendencies. whatever the case, yan xin could sense this disturbance in qi, and addressed it in opening the conference. "some of you have been arguing last night and doubting qi gong.... let me tell you. it's real... there's no need to quarrel." 1
had i been in the station wagon myself, i probably would've sided with my grandfather. it's hard to believe in something that can't be seen or involves alien visions. but my aunt was convinced about yan xin's powers. "when i came back from yan xin's conference after learning how to heal people by spinning their chakras, i had some errands to run for the motel we were operating. we ran out of vacuum cleaner bags so i went buy the bags from a vacuum repair shop operated by a mother and son. it was located by holiday inn on the north side of chicago along route 83." O. has a bear trap memory i find humorous in that she can spit out details from 30 years ago like it was yesterday. "the son looked all glum. i said 'what happened your son' she said, 'he just got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis' i told him i would help him. when i raised my foot from the shag carpet, as i was leaving, i fell down and broke my big toe. it turned all black... when i came back to their office a day later with a registration form for yan xin's next conference i got an electric shock from my head to hip. i could not convince the son to attend. there was a malevolent spirit doing harm to him.... it was trying to collect a debt from his soul and blocking me by breaking my toe and electric shocking me."
despite my aunt's supernatural stories, like a lot of other people, i would eventually only start believing in qi gong in a moment of desperation. My aunt went for weight loss, my mom went for migraines, my uncle went after injuring his hand falling from a ladder while cleaning a gutter, I went after teaching J how to ski in an undersized ski boot. he was 5 years old and we enrolled him in a ski camp to learn to ski. he was miserable and was frustrated by the whole experience. i remember watching him line up with all the other 5 years olds looking dejected and playing with snow. it was painful to watch so i took him out, arranged for a private lesson, then went up the lifts with him to teach him myself. it was amazing to see him learn... like watching a bird take its first awkward flight. everytime he fell, i would hoist him up and have him ski down the slopes with me. all this halted activity on the ski slope, cramped right foot in a ski boot, lifting a heavy child up and down, in icy cold temperatures led to injury. at first, i noticed a discomfort in my foot when putting on my ski boot... like my boot was too tight. but when you arrange for a house, ski rental equipment, driving, lift passes, it's hard to stop skiing because of foot pain. By the end of the week, A. was able to go to the top of the mountain with me, i was elated.
i thought nothing of my foot till i got home and tried to reach for a bowl on the top kitchen shelf one night. when i stood on the toes of my right foot i felt an electric shock that made me crumple. my foot had swollen so much, i couldn't fit my sneakers. i figured my foot would recover with rest. but it didn't. in fact, i would feel unsettling electric shocks when i walked. i used to scooter everywhere and run after my kids... now i could barely walk.
at first i tried acupuncture, then herbal remedies, then epsom salt soaks, then physical therapy, then several podiatrists, then waking in an immobilizing boot, then gua sha... nothing could bring my foot back to health. An X-ray showed no fractures or breaks, an MRI revealed inflamed and swollen soft tissue. i lamented the cause of my self-inflicted injury. i remembered my 80 year old acupuncturist telling me that there were 3 tracks in chinese medical school: western medicine, acupuncture, and qi gong. after 2 years of futility, i made an internet search for qi gong healers. i was finally desperate enough for qi gong. I figured I had nothing to lose and made an appointment with qi gong martial artist, chunna.
In a rented yoga studio south of union square, chunna listened very carefully to my description of the pain. She put pressure on various points on my leg and foot. At times she would place a vibrating tuning fork at certain points. then she told me to lay on my stomach. While I came in for pain in my foot, she started treating my lower back. great I thought, I might as well throw more money into the fire.
apparently the qi was not flowing in my body... there was an obstruction at my lower back. my upper body was disconnected to the lower. as she pushed and tugged on my back, her hands felt like a bulldozer clearing out mounds of earth. Since I was just lying down during these sessions with nothing better to do I just started asking questions... “how did you learn qi gong” “my mom was a western doctor in Beijing. We were family friends with mao’s personal qi gong doctor. After I saw him cure a person with terminal cancer, I asked if I could study under him. up till that point I was practicing martial arts...” “you didn’t go to school” “no. in china, qi gong approaches are like martial arts. certain styles are developed by masters and then passed down family lineages.”
at end of the session she told me to ride a stationary bike and do some back stretches to allow the qi to flow to my feet and heal. "life and health is about flow and movement." I was skeptical of her simple diagnoses but at dinner that night I curiously felt my feet warm up hot after eating. I could feel the qi coursing through my body. a month later, she treated me again and my foot was essentially healed. I couldn’t believe that an unlicensed self-taught qi gong practitioner helped me more than any doctor, physical therapist, or licensed acupuncturist ever could. sensing my curiosity she offered, “I teach a Qi gong class every week. If you’re interested in it, come by.”
unlike yan xin’s qi gong which was practiced motionless with eyes closed, chunna taught qi gong linked to physical movements. the first class I stepped into was bagua zhang... a system of qi gong linked to movements developed by ancient monks that incorporated healing as well as deadly self defence methods. each of the major postures from bagua have a hidden meaning, either for the healing benefits or for gaining of power for the fighting system. many miles and eons removed from the founding monks up in the mountain temples of china, I found myself walking in a circle with 10 middle aged white people trying to be serious making funny poses. the space was a 2nd floor acupuncture reception area that smelled like Chinese herbs. breathing was coordinated with certain stances like heaven, water, fire, water, lake, mountain, earth, and thunder... one posture seamlessly melded into the next as we walked in a circle. Each pose necessitated thinking, concentration, and slow coiling from raveled to unraveled forms. throughout the class i didn't think once about polar bears once.
earlier in the day i had read a psychological study based on dostoevksy's account of his travels thorugh western europe in 1863 "winter notes on summer impressions." dostoyevksy dared his readers, "try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." a century later, harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner and harvard professor set up simple experiment to test dostoyevsky's idea: he told participants not to think of a polar bear and then instructed them to speak stream of consciously for five minutes. if a white bear came to mind, he told them to ring a bell. he found the participants on average, rung the bell about once per minute. next, wegner asked the participants to do the same exercise, but this time to try to think of a white bear. in this trial, the participants thought of a white bear even more often than a different group of participants, who had been told from the beginning to think of white bears. the results suggested that suppressing the thought of the white bear for the first five minutes caused particpants to obsess over bears in later rounds. over the next decade, Wegner developed his theory of "ironic processes" to explain why it's so hard to shed unwanted thoughts. he found evidence that when we try not to think of something, one part of our mind does avoid the forbidden thought, but another part "checks in" every so often to make sure the thought is not coming up—therefore, ironically, bringing it to mind. supposedly meditation and mindfulness strengthen mental control, and help people avoid unwanted thoughts.
after reading about the wegner's thought supression experiment, i of course thought about polar bears all day. during chunna's class, instead of polar bears, however, i thought about how the coiling process in bagua zhang captured energy like loading a spring, how da vinci always drew his figures coiled up to capture their dynamic energy, how the bodily movements elucidated by the originating monks reinforced the flow of qi, how the fire pose was masucline and bright while the earth pose was dark and mysterious and feminine, how weird it is that the root chakra sits between the scrotum and the anus, how maintaining a clear straight axis between crown chakra (top of the head) and root chakra is paramount despite any coiling or twisting movements, how the movements were slow and flowing to cultivate accumulation of qi, and most importantly how i was finally ready to explain how my uncle healed his hand through qi gong. apparently engaging in non-directive meditation techniques like bagua zhang allowed my mind to drift and wander away from the polar bear. if you suppress a thought, you think about it more. if you let your mind wander, your brain operates at higher processing and efficiency speeds and is more restful than sleep.
When I asked my aunt O. why yan xin came to america for only a short time in the 1990's, she replied a high master like yan xin was seeking out special students. In hung kuan, yan xin found an artist... one, who if healed, could display the miraculous effects of qi gong for healing and touch many people's lives.
as a master himself, many musicians travel the world to learn from HKC. regarding the issue of fate, HKC recalled "one time, i questioned john, a channeler i used to go to in boston (a channeler is a person who conveys thoughts or energy from a source believed to be outside the person's body or conscious mind specifically one who speaks for nonphysical beings or spirits). "i teach in school and my students play way better than i. i can't move my fingers. i sit there and think "what good am i?" john answered. "don't judge yourself. you have no clue why they come to you. it's their destiny. they made the decison to come to you. not you. you think they only came to learn piano playing." i started reflecting on it. it's true. sometimes i went to learn something from this or that person and i learned something peripheral i didn't expect. after talking to john, i didn't feel as depressed about my hand anymore."
ones assumes a hand injury would be devastating for a concert pianist, but HKC's fateful injury forced him to articulate ideas to teach without playing. in many ways, HKC's story mirrored that of glass artist, dale chihuly. chihuly first learned how to blow glass in teams when he studied in murano workshops in venice on a fulbright scholarship. he brought this process of glass blowing back to the states and pioneered the art. venetian teams are composed of a person that gathers the initial molten glass at the end of the pipe, a person that lays out the color materials to fold into the glass, the glass blower or gaffer, a person that adds colored molten glass to the object at various points in the process, and people to help transfer the glass into an annealer to prevent cracking. in the late 1970’s chihuly suffered a serious car accident requiring 266 stitches. losing sight in his left eye, he could no longer be the gaffer. unable to physically be part of the team, chihuly had to lead his team as a coach. like my uncle, this disconnect from the manual process actually freed his mind, and allowed him to see the process from different angles and test new ideas. he had to articulate his ideas to bring his ideas to fruition. conversation led to dialogue which led to questions, and then innovations.
while he sharpened his conceptual and communication skills, HKC's physical road to recovery wasn't easy or guaranteed. it took nearly 15 years of meditation and channeling to he reprogrammed his brain to play again. my aunt talked about how he practiced clicking buttons on a television remote at first. With practice, he was able to find different ways to use his hand again... like rewiring different nerve pathways to his hands. after 7 years, he was able to recover his distinctive way of playing. i witnessed his comeback concert when he played Messaien's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovMnmIoZh74. it brought tears to my grandather's only eye. once again, his palms distinctively hovered above the keyboard while his fingers effortlessly crawled and extended on the keys below... his form showed complete control, it looked as though he played without touching the keys.
years later, when famed pianist Fu Ts'ong (3rd place finish in chopin competition 1955) declined the chair position at the shanghai conservatory, he recommended my uncle for the job. my uncle consulted the same fortune tellers in taiwan that said my grandfather was possessed by a ghost... they told him to "take the job, your future will be good." at his interview, my uncle met the shanghai leader of yan xin qi gong. HKC recalld feeling yan xin 'jia gong' adding energy remotely on his body to help him get the job. within 10 years, he was offered positions at julliard and yale
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