Dear ....,

Oh dear, now I already have to hesitate, as I’m not sure what you are to me. How do I address you? "Si-Jo"? Or perhaps "Si-Gung"? What generation do I belong to? Without knowing that, I can’t really correspond with you properly.
My Si-Fu, the one you knew as "Little Ting", made things easy for himself and avoided the pitfalls of protocol by simply calling you "Man-Kung".
He was originally a student of your first student in Hong Kong, so I should really address you as "Si-Jo". In the 1970s my Si-Fu once explained to me that he was not actually an official To-Dai of his first teacher, as he did not take part in the official ceremony during which the teacher accepts his To-Dais: But maybe I got something wrong.
Anyway the information given to me on video in Hong Kong by one of your very first students, Wang Kiu, is even more important. He told me that he had heard from you personally that you held a ceremony to accept "Little Leung Ting" as your student and "To-Dai"! You even revealed to him how many Hong Kong Dollars were in the red envelope that "Little Ting" presented to you at the time. Master Wang Kiu, who has my greatest respect for his intellect, humanity and ethics, remembered very clearly how he had asked you with some disbelief and even outrage whether the tradition that it is only possible to have one Si-Fu no longer applied. You replied that this was how things were, and that was that.

At any rate you showed "Little Ting" more than you showed his (first?) Si-Fu, or should I say teacher. I have heard nasty whispers that your main intention was to put your first Hong Kong student in his place. Perhaps because he protested all too much when you apparently used your authority as the head of our system to "steal" a number of students he had painstakingly trained, making them your own.
However, it is also said that you yourself were angry because your first student told anybody who wanted to hear it that one could no longer learn anything from you, as you were too old ... and that in any case, your techniques were only so soft because you were no longer young enough to mount a hard defence ...
I can only speculate whether this was a legitimate response to your unfair enticement of his students, or whether you had already heard these nasty rumours and wanted to take vengeance on their originator. But for me this is akin to the original sin in the Bible, i.e. what brought evil into the world of WingTsun. For all the great things you achieved, and all the thanks I owe you – after all, WingTsun has been my life since 1970 – I somehow wish that in this case you had felt more obliged to follow tradition and ethics, and had given us a better example!

At the same time I should celebrate the fact that you showed my Si-Fu so much more than you showed his first teacher, and much more than your direct students, namely the concept! Not to mention prestigious aspects such as the long pole and double knives. Clearly most of them had not even had the privilege of learning all the wooden dummy techniques from you. Apparently you even concealed the existence of the wooden dummy as a training partner from them at first. It was only when they spied on you by looking into your window from the house opposite that your students found out that you were concealing an actual wooden dummy at home, which you only taught your favourite students to use. Up to then, the others had believed that the wooden dummy form is no more than a name, and that like the Chum-Kiu and the other forms, it is performed in the air against an imaginary opponent.
While it is quite true that you hid the dummy in the closet, it is ridiculous to say that the term "closed door student" takes its origin from that.

I would be interested to know what bad experiences you had already had with only a few students, so that you clearly mistrusted them. Obviously you had the impression that a student might become a competitor, making it better not to teach him too much. My own opinion is that you only really master something if you are prepared to share with your students!

Understandably you were less than happy with your students, especially when they all failed miserably at the 1st full-contact kung-fu tournament in Singapore in 1969. As your style was regarded as an unbeatable fighting style in Hong Kong, following countless duels without rules, the expectations were particularly high and the disappointment was correspondingly profound. So profound that the second student of your 1st To-Dai in Hong Kong, as well as a certain "Kong", the student of one of the oldest still living students of yours, each left their respective Si-Fus in disgust.
It was immediately clear to you that the blame for this unprecedented failure lay with your oldest students: they had been too certain of victory, and had not prepared their fighters for the tournament rules and the stamina problems that an unfamiliar contest with heavy bamboo protective helmets and vests would involve. Is it true that at the time you had actually already retired from teaching for age reasons? At any rate you spontaneously returned to teaching from your self-imposed retirement, in a last and unsuccessful attempt to raise the training quality level just four years before you finally left this earth.
I can well imagine how you felt, for just a few years ago, my own anger at the pitiful state of WT at the time gave me the courage and necessary determination to embark on a similar, self-imposed Herculean task. Your own energy was however not sufficient to clean out your Augean stables, and the effort came to nothing within a few months. This was the fateful hour for my Si-Fu, Leung Ting, for it was to him of all people that you gave the coveted position of chief instructor of the Ving Tsun Athletic Association, which you had previously held alone. This more or less made "Little Ting" your successor. Not of course the successor for the whole clan, but at least your successor "as chief instructor" of the then Ving Tsun association if that is not exaggerating its importance, as you did not have that many members at the time.

Have you ever really realised the significance of the simple letter "W" in the western world? I am willing to bet that you did not even notice that was transcribed and entered in the register of clubs and associations as "Ving Tsun Athletic Association" by the English colonial authorities. Whoever made the entry was probably not a native English speaker, otherwise he would have chosen the phonetically correct "W" sound rather than a "V", which does not exist in Chinese. 
And in your Confucian spirit world, has it come to your notice that your "Little Ting" is the one student of yours whose "WingTsun" style (note the "W") is the world‘s most widely disseminated, with a presence in more than 60 countries? I wonder if this pleases you, for according to an old saying, spreading our "secret art" is an "affront to the interests of our forebears". Neither will you be overjoyed that this epidemic-like spread of WingTsun substantially commenced in western Europe, something for which the undersigned is at least in part to blame. Was it not always your wish that your art should provide the Chinese with an invisible weapon for use when the tall "long-noses" from the west get above themselves? Is it not even the case that before leaving Hong Kong, Bruce Lee had to promise you that he would not teach any non-Chinese in the USA? Apparently you were definitely not "amused" when you found out that he had broken this promise in the most flagrant manner very soon after catching sight of the Statue of Liberty.
 
I almost forgot to ask you where your spirit now resides. As a committed Confucian you probably had little time for ideas of the great beyond. Confucius himself is said to have made the refreshingly statement: "Make sacrifices to the gods, but stay away from them", or "We do not understand life, so how are we to understand the nature of death?". His religion was more ethical and pragmatic or moral in nature. It was his misfortune that he was unable to prevent the last Chinese emperor from obliviously declaring him a god.

Something similar could also happen to you in the mind of future generations. Whether you as a man who was modest to a fault - as my Si-Fu likes to describe you – would be happy about this is probably unlikely. Accordingly, and with all the respect due to you, perhaps the sometimes slightly robust and familiar tone I adopt in my well-meant questioning of events may help to spare you this fate.

With a deep bow in appreciation of your achievements in preserving the ingenious teachings of Chan Wah Shun and Leung Bik, I remain
Your German
"White Devil" Keith 

PS: Would it be all right to write to you again when I have something on my mind?