bàng gēn bāng: Martial Arts: A flexability test of body and language skills

Today I had my first martial arts lesson at NYU Shanghai! There are a bunch of cultural classes that you can take, including Chinese painting, traditional Chinese knot tying, and some traditional Chinese musical instruments. I chose martial arts both because I have a Taekwondo background (of sorts) and because I thought it would be a fun and different way to get exercise and meet some new people.

Although I have no idea what this form of martial arts is called, thanks in part to the language barrier and in part to my poor memory, it definitely bares some resemblance to what I remember from Taekwondo. There are forms to learn, kicks to practice, and self defense take-downs to master. And if that didn't sound like a handful, try learning it all in a different language!

I wanted to change into shorts and a t-shirt (I was wearing jeans) and the instructor told me it wouldn't be necessary. I used my own form of judgement and decided to change, and boy was I glad I did! Obviously these guys instructing us are all flexible and are used to doing these things on a daily basis, so maybe for them jeans would haven been ok. But for me outside, in the 80 degree heat, in jeans, practicing kicks definitely would have been a challenge.

We jumped in without any warm-ups or stretches and sank into low stances holding our arms in certain positions. It's mostly a process of trying to imitate and then having them come over to move your limbs for you since it's difficult to translate what exactly is wrong with the form. We held those positions for a considerable amount of time and finally as my muscles were beginning to ache we moved on to kicks. This is where I would have like some stretching beforehand, as my legs flew into the air, kicking up towards the sunny sky, my muscles screaming in agony. Yes, I definitely strained some muscles today.

Eventually we got to my favorite part which are the take-downs. People pretend to strangle you or punch and you practice blocking their advance. I'm not actually good at this part, but I get a great sense of accomplishment from actually managing to land someone on the floor. Of course this means I get thrown to the ground a few times myself.

We ended the lesson learning the proper way to make a fist, and got a little language lesson learning the names of the parts of the fist and the names of some of the stances we learned.

All in all the lesson was interesting and although I couldn't really communicate with the instructors they all seemed nice and we had three instructors to ourselves with a group of 6 so we got a lot of one on one time. It will be interesting to see how the lessons progress through the rest of the semester and I'll be sure to keep you all updated!

I'm posting some pictures that were taken at the interest session that took place last week. I practiced some stances and got taken down by my friend Delrisha White who took the pictures!