Tai Chi?

Biking around campus in the early mornings, I saw groups practicing tai chi, the slow, meditative form of martial arts.

“Should I learn tai chi?” I asked my students.

They giggled: “No no no no no, tai chi is for girls!”

“What?” It hadn’t registered on me that the groups I’d seen were all-female.

“Yes, tai chi is too slow for boys.”

“Then what do boys do for exercise in the mornings?”

“Basketball!”

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This entry was posted on February 12, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under Fall, beijing, china, travel. Tagged: , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Tai Chi?”

  1. sifukyle Says:
    February 14, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    I am sorry your freinds think Tai Chi is for girls, but they are simply wrong. Many men have done tai chi and still do, if you look on Jet Li’s official page even he has some experience with Tai Chi. It is a good exercise, and not all Tai Chi is slow, their are fast pace movements as well. The beginning to intermediate level in Yang style is slow, but the 48 posture form has some quick tempo movements.
    Basketball is ok and good exercise, but unlike Tai Chi, it lacks the benifets of longevity and better health, no offense, but I would choose different freinds to seek advice from.

  2. the forester Says:
    February 14, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    I am sorry your freinds think Tai Chi is for girls, but they are simply wrong … no offense, but I would choose different freinds to seek advice from.

    Thank you for commenting, sifukyle. Great information about tai chi above.

    Since you’ve probably popped in midway, you may not realize this piece is part of a longer artistic work intended to convey the often mind-boggling experience of living in another country. At the outset I posted an important disclaimer; I’ll reproduce it here for the record:

    Write what you know, the adage says. Well, I lived in China for a year – I’ll write about that. People seem to enjoy those stories almost as much as I enjoy telling them.

    The funny thing was, while writing I discovered how much I didn’t know. The meaning of that holiday. The names of those fruity candies. How they made thousand year eggs. Holes in my understanding urged me to research more.

    I resisted those urges and left the holes unfilled.

    Why?

    Plenty of books out there provide gobs of facts about China. Honestly, they don’t interest me. I don’t know China from books.

    What I do know is this: I lived in China for a year, and it captivated me, bewildered me, amused and frustrated and utterly challenged me. I struggled to comprehend every single experience. If I wasn’t misinterpreting the language, I was missing cultural cues. Questions rarely helped – as a foreigner I wasn’t privy to complete or straightforward explanations. (The Chinese put their best foot forward.)

    Living in Beijing was, for me, passing hourly from one haze of uncertainty to the next. I arrived with the conviction that all humans are fundamentally the same; I departed utterly baffled by the depth of cultural differences.

    So I do not know the Chinese. All I know is that I spent a year among them. It drove me to think a lot about language and culture, and I flew home with some fun stories. This book is my effort to capture in words, as authentically as possible, what it was like to live in a country so different from my own, lacking the necessary skills to decode it.

    I don’t think my students were doling out poor advice so much as that I had difficulty comprehending their meaning. What I heard them say squared with my impression of morning exercises, and wham! — the impression, for better or worse, was formed. Suffice to say that communication barriers left me with some pretty bizarre conceptions of China.

  3. wujimon Says:
    April 15, 2008 at 7:32 am

    Very interesting.. when I first started taiji, I often got strange looks because I was nearly half the age of most other students in the class. But now, it’s no big deal though there is still a common thought that taiji is for old women in the park to socialize while listening to music.. :)

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