How to do Tai Chi - Jimmy O. Yang
- Thread starter Edmond
- Start date
I saw this and of course did not like it. I think this is the culture of celebrated ignorance; when you really don't know anything about a subject but rather than educating yourself, instead you decide to go along with mass-culture misunderstanding and then make jokes about the subject based on what it actually is not. Everyone laughs along with you, and the misunderstanding is then further supported.
It's fine if people don't understand what Taijiquan actually is, or what any particular thing is, but we have a real problem with just mass stupidity in our society. This is just more of the same.
Obviously I am a bit biased but I am just tired. Taijiquan or Tai Chi etc is already a tiny poorly understood niche. It already receives far more jokes based on cultural misconception than it ever deserved and this is kind of what they call "punching down", very much low hanging fruit.
It's fine if people don't understand what Taijiquan actually is, or what any particular thing is, but we have a real problem with just mass stupidity in our society. This is just more of the same.
Obviously I am a bit biased but I am just tired. Taijiquan or Tai Chi etc is already a tiny poorly understood niche. It already receives far more jokes based on cultural misconception than it ever deserved and this is kind of what they call "punching down", very much low hanging fruit.
Robin Wu
Taiji Kitten
A bit off topic, but I sometimes notice that English-speakers treat Chinese and Japanese very differently when it comes to translations.
In Japanese:
In Japanese:
- My father brought up that Samurai is called... Samurai - we don't call it "Japanese Knight"
- Sushi is called.... Sushi - we don't attribute it to an pre-existing English word.
- We seem fine using words like: Katana, Kimono, etc...
- Qilin gets translated to Unicorn.
- My father has passionately argued that "Long" is not Dragon; it's just Long, believing that Dragon is a European thing.
- Taiji becomes "Grand Ultimate".
Thanks for the reminder of the cold bitter truth. We don't know how much Jimmy knows about Taijiquan, but the joke surely doesn't help the already tarnished image of Taijiquan. Likely, it helped promote the tarnished image further.
In that case, it's kind of disgraceful that we have someone putting down their own culture. However, it also seems like this has become a popular format these days with stand-up comedy. There's Russell Peters making fun of East Indians, Dave Chappelle making fun of African Americans, just to name a few.
I guess all of us here know how the tarnished image developed along the lines of mass commercialization and the subsequent "mass stupidity". Yet, there are the odd few of us who still believed there's something amazing in Taijiquan and were driven to search for it. What's the source of that faith?
I honestly don't know how to answer that for myself. I guess I am attracted to the charm of Chen style Taijiquan, and really wanted to find the "truth" of it. When I was looking around right before landing on Marin's page, it was rather bleak though. I wonder how many were lost simply because they just couldn't find it (especially before the Internet age). Would more exposure of the non-commercial Taijiquan help improve the public image?
Curious what fuels the faith in the rest of the members here. Maybe some are just masochistic and like the pain? (power to you)
Robin Wu
Taiji Kitten
Allegedly, there were Chinese martial arts that existed for hundreds of years. Upon seeing the modern state of Chinese martial arts, I see two paths that I could take regarding my beliefs:
- Most portrayal of modern Chinese martial arts are generally useless; therefore it had always been historically useless. This seems to be the most common belief, but I find this very hard to believe. If for hundreds of years, people have staked their lives on useless martial systems, that's actually incredible in its own way.
- There were Chinese martial arts that were, presumably, practical. If most examples of Chinese martial arts are not practical in today's times, are there still any left?
Scenario 2 is giving the benefit of the doubt that the entire population of fighters were sensible people that valued hurting their enemies in efficient and practical ways. And, something must have gone horribly wrong to have resulted in how it's portrayed in today's times.
I decided to adopt Scenario 2 as my belief. The 'faith' is a hypothesis: There currently exist at least one practical Chinese martial art in the midst of all the impractical ones. It's just a matter of trying to find the needle in the haystack.
Adam Liu
I'm Hungry Again
I think I have learned over a few years to associate pain with progress.
As someone who has seen the decline of many many many arts of all kinds in China, at some point I felt it was important to practice something that held cultural value in addition to martial practicability.
I have also stopped trying to explain this practice to people, and just say "martial arts" if they start asking how I spend my Saturdays.
Them: "What kind of martial art?"
Me: "It's kind of hard to explain, you kind of have to feel it."
I don't think anyone has taken the bait yet. I used to think that everyone was an expert and had an opinion on martial arts, but a good number of people I've talked to don't even know much about the obvious differences between striking vs. grappling. Trying to explain why my stuff is different from the public image stuff and how it can apply felt like playing piano to a cow. Brief moments of curiosity followed by slack-eyed confusion and ending in walking away on all fours and mooing.
I cannot speak for others but in my case this is not about fragility. I am not 'offended' in that sense. There are far worse offenses everywhere we look. What I am is just plain tired of the depth of stupidity, and the trend of doubling down on stupidity because it makes money and caters to the stupid and ignorant. It is the culture that abhors education and intelligence. Basically, knowing anything at all about "Tai chi" or the culture, history and idea around it is boring, idiotic and not cool. That is the message- don't learn about it, and while we are deciding not to know anything about it, let's use that as a basis to decide it is ridiculous and then sully it as well with sex.
I get it, everyone is totally beholden to shocking disrespect and a sort of dirty view of absolutely everything. That is just where we are right now. I am just not living at that level myself, I have probably been a bit antiquated since the age of 19. I don't believe it is respectable or particularly fun to try to make cultural arts into porn-comic on stage, especially if they are rather innocuous. At this stage of watching the not so slow slide of western society into ignorance and decline dumpsterfire this kind of thing is just not entertaining to me, and it is just more of the same.
It's actually lame to see this guy denigrate his own culture in this particular way, because this is not a negative aspect of his culture. He does not himself understand it well enough to know, but he has decided this will make him money. It is really nothing other than selling out as far as I am concerned. He is banking off of creating more disrespect towards Asians, that is what I think. This is very much a case of laughing AT a class of people that are already not well understood and creating that profitable laugh by making them even less understood and then smearing at the same time.
That has just never been something I respected. Integrity =/= fragility.
I’ll just add that an important part of this that I did not mention was the aspect of cultural representative. This guy is Chinese and he is basically representing his culture to a western audience that is very likely ignorant about it. He has the option of creating respect or interest but he chose instead to exploit ignorance and disrespect because he knows it already plays with their ignorance.
Such an ignorant audience will more readily accept the disrespectful attitude towards culture if presented by a representative of that culture who is saying, “it’s ok to look down on this culture that you don’t understand, after all I am one of them and I look down on it myself. So in a way it really encourages a form of racism. Sorry- fragile? I don’t know, I have mixed Chinese kids myself so I am motivated to be alert on this.
Such an ignorant audience will more readily accept the disrespectful attitude towards culture if presented by a representative of that culture who is saying, “it’s ok to look down on this culture that you don’t understand, after all I am one of them and I look down on it myself. So in a way it really encourages a form of racism. Sorry- fragile? I don’t know, I have mixed Chinese kids myself so I am motivated to be alert on this.
Bookmarked. This is awesome.