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During the humid Beijing summer of 2005 I managed to catch up with two of the
first people to study Wushu at University in China.
 Andrea
Falk came over to China in 1980 and was the first westerner to take a degree at
the Beijing Sports University (formally Beijing University of Physical
Education) in Wushu.
A few years later, in 1986, Antonio Flores became the first westerner to take
the undergraduate Wushu degree at BSU alongside the Chinese students.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to ask them about some of their experiences
during those early years.
Due to the size of this interview it has been split into two parts:
- Part 1: Why did you come to China, and what do you
remember about your training
- Part 2: Changes in Wushu, the Beijing Wushu Team
VCDs and where Wushu is heading
Antonio: Here we are in Beijing during this
historically humid summer…
Andrea: It’s not usually this humid… this is why I try
not to come to China in the Summer anymore, it’s just too hot… in Shanghai it
would be 37degrees in the morning and it’s difficult to breathe!
Antonio: At least it’s nice and cool in here!
Interviewer: Can I first ask you what it was that made
you want to come over to China to train Wushu?
Andrea: Because Wushu came from China! As soon as I
started training Chinese Martial Arts I knew I was going to train them forever,
so I had to go to China, and I decided I’d get a scholarship to go China. So I
had to get my degree in Chinese and Physical Education. I just never even
considered that I wouldn’t get the scholarship or I wouldn’t get accepted… it
just happened!
Interviewer: Where was the scholarship to?
Andrea: There was (I don’t know if there still is) a
Canadian Scholarship to go to China to learn Literature and History or
something… it never occurred to me that it would be difficult to get into a
sports college! So that’s why I did a degree in Physical Education first, before
I went to Beijing University of Physical Education (BUPE or BSU as it is now
Beijing Sports University?).
I thought I’d be doing a full program, having to take classes and everything,
but when I got there they said Xia Bohua is your teacher and you’re doing Wushu
full time. So I said ‘Oh – okay!’
Interviewer: So what was the training like then?
Andrea: Wushu ji ben gong. Kick kick stance stance –
always do ji ben gong every lesson… and then we learnt the other Wushu bits as
we went along
Interviewer: Did you have a similar experience
Antonio?
Antonio: Well in my case I started training when I was
14 years old in Mexico City. Mexico City had a large Chinese population so there
were already several good Wushu schools… at that time I never imagined I’d end
up a Wushu Instructor.
When I was a kid I was quite weak, but after I started training Wushu I became a
totally different person. So after a few years of practice, when I was 16 years
old, I decided that I wanted to become an instructor. My coaches had always
encouraged me to teach in class and I felt that this was exactly what I wanted
to do.
My mother was a teacher so she told me that I couldn’t call myself a teacher
unless I was professionally trained – a teacher doesn’t just come like that… you
need to be professionally trained. But how do you get qualified as a Wushu
Instructor? So I initially became a Journalist… and in 1985 the Beijing Wushu
Team came over to Mexico City, and I was interviewing Coach Wu Bin and I asked
him where he learned to teach Wushu and he said BUPE. So I immediately started
applying…
I also got a scholarship, well it’s an exchange program
really, where I think it was 26 students from China go to Mexico and 26 from
Mexico go to China.
Interviewer: Do they still run these exchange
programs, and what requirements did they have?
Antonio: I’m not sure if that’s still available. It
was a requirement to be able to speak Chinese or to study it as part of the
course…
Andrea: Canada was the same, it was only 7 students
though, I just assumed I’d be one of the 7. Most people who got the Canadian
scholarship had a degree in Chinese already so it was hard to get in. You had to
have good marks in Chinese and then you were supposed to specialise…
Antonio: Requirements are different for every country.
Now the requirements are posted on every website so you can easily see what you
need. So if a citizen of country X wants to study in China they need to first go
to the Chinese Embassy’s website for their country and see what they need to do.
In my case, at that time, the majority of Mexican students would come to China
to learn Chinese Medicine. I was the first one to say that I wanted to study
Wushu.
Andrea: I didn’t tell them until I left that I wanted
to study Wushu. I wouldn’t have got the scholarship if I was going to study
Wushu. I waited until I got to Beijing and they asked what I wanted to study and
I told them I wanted to go to BUPE.
Antonio: When I applied they wanted me to come up with
a research project, I needed to present a document explaining it. Then the
requirement was that I had to spend one year of intensive Chinese language
training in an appointed school. Then if you passed that program you could go on
to study in the area that you wanted to.
Andrea: That’s the requirement now. If you want to do
a degree in China you have to first do a year of language training at a College.
I already had a degree in Chinese so I didn’t have to do that. The language
training in China at that time wasn’t that good…
Antonio: Now they have the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK)
which is a standardised test to reveal your level of Chinese.
I had to make my application to the Secretary of Education in Mexico, and I
explained that I wanted to research Wushu as I found that as a discipline it
contained the most complete collection of motor skills, and it should be
included in the National Curriculum. I wanted to go to China to see how Chinese
taught and trained Wushu.
Interviewer: Is Wushu part of the National Curriculum
in China?
Andrea: Uh ha. There’s a kid I train with [in Beijing]
who needs to get his level of Wushu up in order to get accepted to the school
that he wants to go to. I was surprised.
Antonio: To become a PE teacher in China, if they want
to be able to teach Wushu, then they have to take the Wushu elective programs.
When I was doing my teaching practice I was teaching one of those courses. They
need to learn Chang Quan, Cudgel and Taiji Quan. Once they get these three
disciplines they are a qualified PE teacher.
So what was it like being a
foreigner in Beijing in the 80’s?
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| People would press their faces at the window to stare at
you... |
...you can try and put your head in your hands to hide... |
...but they’ll just lie on the ground and look up at you! |
Andrea: That’s not much! The system’s changed…
Antonio: That’s right, it’s not much. In the schools
that’s what most teachers would learn. Of course, the schools themselves can
exploit the natural characteristics of their teachers. So, for example, if you
go to Henan, the majority of schools will practice Shaolin Quan, if you go to
Wudan Shan then they will be practicing one of the schools of Wudan.
When I arrived in China, unlike Andrea, I did not have a degree in physical
Education, so I had to do the whole undergraduate degree. I was the only
foreigner in my class.
Interviewer: Which college was that at?
Antonio: BUPE
Andrea: I actually sat a lot of the undergraduate
courses, like physiology and anatomy in Chinese. After a while they said to me
that I didn’t have to – I thought that I had to! When I first got there they
said this is when you do this, this and this, so I was doing all the coursework
and they said I didn’t have to as I was a Jin Xiu
Interviewer: What’s a Jin Xiu?
Andrea: It’s a ‘specialist’ degree. So for those
people that were previously on a team, a professional team, they would go for 2
years – it’s called ‘advanced studies’. They wouldn’t have to do all the
undergraduate stuff. I think I did a full year of all the stuff that I already
knew, but mostly for my Chinese, that’s why I could write so fast… people would
be looking to me for notes!
Antonio: That’s one thing to remember, never arrive
late to your lecture at a Chinese University. The teacher would start writing
from left to write, or from the top down or from right to left… so if you’re
late you ask your classmate if you can see their notes and you see that they’ve
just written something like this right [motions a big scribble in the air]
because they were watching the board as he wrote…
Andrea: The teachers would quite often use old style
characters, and I was the only one who understood them, from learning classical
Chinese. So I’d get people ask ‘what’s that character?’ and I’d say ‘oh that’s a
that’ and they’d say ‘oh, okay’...
Antonio: That’s right, it’s not just being able to
speak Chinese, it’s the reading and writing as well.
Interviewer: When you first came to China then did you
find it hard? What were people’s reactions to you like?
Andrea: When I came it was still like ‘Ooh a
foreigner’ and people would still grab their child, whoah yeah. Even if you
passed on the bus it was like ‘keep away’. It’s changed a lot now.
If you left Beijing you would have at least 50 people at all times surrounding
you, staring at you. If you went and ate at a restaurant, you would literally
have people pressing their faces up against the window, staring at you… watching
you eat.
Antonio: Taking pictures of you too?!
Andrea: No, they didn’t have cameras then! A friend of
mine just couldn’t take it. We were just standing around so he sat down, closed
his eyes with his head in his hands, like ‘I’m just gonna pretend they’re not
here’, but when he opened his eyes there was someone lying on the ground looking
up at him.
If you were on a train people would just sit there like [sits and stares for few
seconds]… for the whole trip.
Interviewer: But you can laugh about it now…
Andrea: Phew yeah, but in Beijing it wasn’t so bad,
but it was always ‘lao wai, lao wai’ [pointing, ‘foreigner, foreigner’]. Always
always always.
Interviewer: Do you miss those days?
Andrea: No no no! Not that part of them.
Interviewer: What year was that then?
Andrea: 1980
Antonio: And I came over in 1986.
Interviewer: So had it got any better by then?
Antonio: Umm… Not particularly! It actually improved
after the Asian Games in 1989. That was the first real open competition which
let people know about the outside world. You would have been impressed. If you
took a taxi, no matter what country you said that you were from, they’d tell you
that the capital is this, and it also has this, blah blah blah, and they would
know.
Interviewer: So the awareness of the outside world
amongst Chinese people literally increased overnight?
Antonio: That’s right, and everybody was really keen
to know about other countries. The natural characteristic of the Chinese people
is to be kind, from the traditional teachings of Confucius, saying that it is an
honour to receive people from far away. Just from that perspective you can’t
imagine how welcoming and how warm most of the Beijing people were at that time.
Andrea: Within the University where I lived everybody
was really nice. They knew I’d left home to do Wushu, they knew I was there…
there were only six foreigners there.
Interviewer: So did you have to live in a specific
area?
Andrea: Oh yeah, we lived in the ‘Xiao bai lou’ [small
white building]… a separate living and eating area… but even there, there were
Chinese room mates and the building staff too. Also, I was the only foreigner
doing wushu, so I was obviously not entirely separated from all the other Wushu
students. On campus, you lived separately but all your friends were Chinese.
Antonio: There would be other foreigners as well,
taking like Gymnastics, Swimming…
Andrea: Ping Pong…
Antonio: And the living conditions were different too.
While the Chinese students used to live 6 to 8 in one bedroom, we would have
maybe 2, or a single room if you really required it – starting from 1990 I think
if you were a foreign student and in your final year you could select to have a
single room. That way nobody else would affect your studies. That probably
wasn’t the case for you…?
Andrea: We could pay more… we could pay for the bed
that would have been our room mate’s, and hence have a room to ourselves. As we
went on a scholarship we didn’t pay for our rooms anyway… at that time all the
students were ‘paid’ to be there… so we could pay for one person and get a room
to ourselves.
Interviewer: A lot of people want to come to China to
train Wushu at University. What would you say to those people?
Antonio: The conditions compared to when we came to
China, when China was so new to foreigners, are very different. The Chinese now
have a system for training foreign students.
Andrea: Its also more of a business now. I mean when I
was here I really felt I was taken seriously as a student and it was very very
strict. Especially as I was paid to come here, I was treated more like a Chinese
person, they told me what to do, they never asked me. I was injured and over
trained most of the time I was here.
Antonio: Six years later when I arrived, the director
at that time saw my project and said that it was an undergraduate program. I’d
already been practicing Wushu for 12 years and he’d seen my technique and said
that I was on a par with the kids here to study Wushu as a career. So he told me
to pass my Chinese language requirements and encouraged me to go on the
undergraduate program. They wanted to train the first undergraduate foreign
Wushu coach.
Andrea: I was the first westerner to go to BUPE. I was
a test, to see if westerners were really as bad as they thought. So they were
very strict – they told me what to do and I had to do it. So they saw that
westerners will train hard and are serious.
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Want to learn more about Lu Yan's Wushu Career? Visit the
Wushu Career pages
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