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8 The Oriental Martial Arts as Hybrid Totems, Together with Orientalized Avatars Stephen Chan The absorption of blows is rather easy. It depends more on those delivering the blows than the one receiving them. When I repeated this demonstration ten years later in 1994 at the University of Kent, the students laid in hard with long planks of 6x2 (timber 15 cm wide and 5 cm thick), and got it right. All I had to do was keep a rooted stance, control my breath, and relax my muscles. The point of the demonstration was the lack of tension. The harder the students swung the timber—and they did, revenge for years of hard tuition—the more certain the wood would break across my back. If it broke, it was an elementary law of physics that the shattering wood would absorb most of the impact. This is actually a cheat’s demonstration. Except that it also requires those swinging the timber to connect with the flat width of the plank. In 1984, in Zambia, Raymond came in hard with the edge. And not just the 5-cm-thick edge, but with the very edge where width and thickness met. That hurt, and the skin was cut and bled. It impressed the audience more than anything else. The master bled and did not change his expression! Actually, I was silently thinking of ways to impale Raymond, upward, with what was left of the shattered timber. But this sort of thing, a silly circus trick gone wrong, was the curiously right way to authenticate the oriental master. The oriental became Orientalized. Yes, he really can do some of the things we’ve seen in the movies. 185 186 Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge And not just in Zambia. There, I had performed the flaming tiles demonstration. Now, this is even easier. All you have to do is douse the tiles with gasoline some minutes before they are lit. By the time you come to this part of the demonstration, the gasoline has soaked into the cement. When lit, the flames shoot up dramatically, but there are no flaming droplets of gasoline flying into your face and hair. If you’re fast enough to break tiles without fire, you’re fast enough to break them with fire. It’s just cheating again. But at the University of Kent, Kam failed to douse the tiles in time. I had very long hair then—part of the mystique—and knew there had not been enough time—so I pulled my hair to one side and went through the tiles. But Kam had been assiduous in wanting spectacular flames, and had been liberal with the gasoline. So I came out of the tiles, my hand covered with gasoline and the gasoline covered with flames. I felt like someone out of the Fantastic Four! The audience gasped. He’s on fire and he walks calmly to take his bow. Actually , it’s the gasoline that’s on fire, not the hand. Skin takes a while to ignite so, when the gasoline burned away, there would have been little damage. A suddenly apologetic Kam appeared nonetheless with water. And it all simply added to the show—and this is all that authentication in the minds of onlookers often is; and the “authentic” to which they are referred is often no more than what has been said in a badly researched, starry-eyed book, or seen in a hideously bad Hong Kong kung fu movie. If I had wanted to make my living doing this, rather than being an academic, I would have been a millionaire—but I have students around the world, and I have never charged any of them a fee. This is to introduce the sort of hybrid essay that has marked much of my writing on international relations (e.g., Chan 1985)—the author as participant/observer who expresses his written observation within a scholarly framework. That framework is harder when there is very little writing on African martial arts, which is what this chapter is about, so that the intertextual discursivity of scholarship must yield to greater first-person narrative. I do not apologize for this. It seemed to me that there was a story worth telling here, and there was no other way to tell it. So, since this is a hybrid essay, it had better begin with an account of my own hybridity in the martial arts. I have taught residentially in New...

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