Dear martial arts colleague,

Comparing one’s kung-fu with somebody who follows another style is always a thankless task. It is almost like lending money: you lose the friend (because you refuse to lend it) or you lose the money (because you did), or both. In short, one should never do it. But in a moment of weakness – in the Italian sun and after two glasses of wine – you were able to persuade me when asking for my opinion as a colleague.
.

Yesterday – a few days after our encounter – I received your e-mail describing your impressions of it. You had expected me to be soft and pliable like your teacher, but instead you complain that you found me hard and very powerful. So powerful that while your level of sensitivity enabled you to see or feel all my attacks coming – as you say – you were still unable to defend against them, as you also say.
You also added that you are sure you will be able to beat me one day, as softness overcomes strength and you merely lack the practice and experience.

You gave me your impressions of our encounter openly and honestly, though of course my own are quite different. Neither am I annoyed because you hope to beat me with your softness one day, as I do not feel the need to be the best. I do not need to be the best fighter if I have hopes of perhaps remaining in the memory of my students as their best teacher.
I hope you will likewise not be offended if I give you my own subjective impression:
I did not find your movements really soft, but rather in the nature of an overcooked noodle: too limp.
You left the door wide open to my attacks with your arms, hoping that I would fall into this hole. But your body, your head, i.e. my target, was still there and in reach of my attack. Only what is not there cannot be struck.
You have a high degree of flexibility and relaxation. What you lack is coordination and balance.
There was lack of structure, though you often referred to “rooting in the ground“, and I also heard you mention the words “Peng-Ching“ and ”Ying“ against ”Yang“, although I believe neither one nor the other are terms used in your style. In short, I did not find this soft, but weak.
This is why I used what you perceived to be hardness to show you that what you considered to be softness was in fact weakness. Not to show you any superiority, but in an honest effort to help you improve.
Think about it: if I had really been hard, you should have been able to exploit this.
But the mere fact that you felt hardness in the first place clearly shows that you were feeling your own hardness, a shock because something was there which would not cooperate.
As a user of a method that considers itself to be soft, you naturally perceive everything as hard that does not cooperate with you. This is something I also call incestuous thinking in WT.
As a soft method, we are soft and cooperative towards an attacker (!), who can be hard or not so hard, just as he wishes.
During our encounter I played the role of this uncooperative attacker, who does not behave like your student or training partner, in order to test how you would respond.
The soft method was created to overcome hardness, and you should have found it all the more easy to borrow my strength. Instead you felt my pressure was too strong.
If you always practice encountering softness with even more softness during training, you are in for a shock when the other party does not cooperate.
However uncooperative behaviour is the norm rather than the exception in the outside world. If our martial art is to prepare us for a serious encounter, we must already take this into account during training. How we train is also how we fight in the street.
But who am I telling? Many of my WingTsun colleagues around the world do the same thing wrong in their innocence.

Accordingly I am using this letter to you to serve a dual purpose – namely also as a worldwide appeal to my own school and the teachers in the WingTsun system. We too must finally learn to practice two different types of Chi-Sao:
1. “with“ a “partner“ who cooperates and
2. “against“ an “opponent“ who refuses to cooperate, but wants the opposite of what we want.

Type 1
is the most common, and unfortunately the type almost exclusively practiced – and especially by people who only do WingTsun to do WingTsun: each party trying to give way better than the other. A good and indispensable exercise where defending against hard attacks is concerned.

Type 2
is looked down upon as primitive by many, but we need it just as badly or even more – namely against non-WingTsun people.
For example when our attacking chain-punch is knocked upwards by the other person. Then we will be shocked to find that we respond with resistance to this sudden upward pressure. That we do not give way softly as we should, but fall victim to our WT motto of the ”unmoving elbow“, misunderstand it and apply counter-pressure.

Let us be mindful of this: hardness within softness, and softness within hardness. Each in its own time, and when the other party does not expect it!

With collegial best wishes,

Keith R Kernspecht

Dear WT friends,
Now you are dying to know whether this is a genuine letter based on an actual encounter in bella Italia, or a fictitious letter like the one to GGM Yip Man. Sorry, I’m saying nothing of course. And it does not really matter either way, does it?
But what really concerns me, and what I really want to add as a warning, is this:
Do not start making your Chi-Sau training powerful (again), otherwise you will be doing it wrongly in the other direction.
The WT person responds with softness, but the one playing the other role – that of the opponent – should not always cooperate. That is my point.