Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World

9. Coffee-Shop Gods: Chinese Martial Arts of the Singapore Diaspora

9 Coffee-Shop Gods Chinese Martial Arts of the Singapore Diaspora D. S. Farrer This chapter outlines the embodied practice of Chinese martial arts, with special reference to kung fu in Singapore.1 Overseas Chinese martial arts exist as a vast reservoir of Chinese cultural capital, and some kung fu masters (sifu) remember over a hundred long sets of movements.2 Consequently a particular question that has underpinned my research is how do the kung fu masters remember so many routines?3 Such feats of social memory are not merely technical questions of interest only to practitioners, but raise issues concerning what special or unique cognitive /bodily powers may be attained through the study of kung fu, and broach questions concerning how such powers are attained, maintained, transmitted, or withheld. By “coffee-shop gods” I do not literally mean any “supernatural” powers attainable through the practice of kung fu, but refer here to the acquisition of embodied skills and cognitive abilities. Specifically, the question of memory and ability in Chinese martial arts is intertwined in the pedagogy, performance, and practice of kung fu. I learned that remembering the routines is intrinsic to the embodiment of particular experiences resulting in enhanced performative ability while studying kung fu systems originally derived from the Chin Woo Athletic Association and Choi Lai Fut in Singapore.4 Whereas informants consider performative abilities generated or demonstrated through the practice or performance of kung fu and lion dance to be profane pursuits rather than demonstrating tangible linkages 203 204 Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge to the gods, such practices and performances are nonetheless enmeshed within a rich cultural milieu suffused with religious idols, sacred symbols, and ritual activity.5 I found a key to understanding this complex tapestry was to practice kung fu myself and then sit and listen to the masters and their students as they talked in the coffee shop, where the simple activities of sitting, eating, drinking, and storytelling would reveal the social bonds, group practices, inherited stories, and the social, political, and religious beliefs of participants who are joined together as fictive kin.6 Many social theories have linked social and individual experience to the body, for example, character armor (Gell 1993; Reich [1945] 1990), embodiment (Csordas 1999, 2001, 2002), hexis (Bourdieu 1977: 87; 2002: 209; Jenkins 1991: 75), natural symbols (Douglas 1970), performance (Turner 1988; Schechner 1988, 1994), play (Caillois [1961] 2001; Huizinga 1950; Turner 1982), practical reason (Bourdieu 1998; Mauss 1979: 101), sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997), somaesthetics (Shusterman 1997, 1999, 2000) and technique du corps (Mauss 1979: 107).7 Nevertheless , building on Connerton’s (1989) groundbreaking work, it may still be asserted with Kleinman and Kleinman (1994) that “the study of the processes that transform the bodily forms of social experience has yet to commence” (1994: 711).8 We need to ask what are the actual processes involved in embodiment, where memories and the act of remembering link social tradition to individual, embodied experience, “because few social theorists have bothered to explore the methods of remembering that underwrite the incorporation of the social body into the physical body, the theoretical cartography that maps the processes that mediate (and transform) the nexus between the collective and the individual is underdeveloped to an alarming degree. The map is almost empty” (Kleinman and Kleinman 1994: 708). Although the “social body” is merely a figure of speech, I accept Kleinman and Kleinman’s (1994) point that the processes of embodied memory have been neglected, and will demonstrate how martial arts enable, externalize, construct, and manifest social being through the individual body of the practitioner. To begin to fill in the contours of their “theoretical cartography,” Kleinman and Kleinman (1994) develop the notion of sociosomatics, through which they locate “domination and resistance” to the “deep memories” of terror and trauma suffered as a consequence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China. Working from trauma-induced bodily symptoms including dizziness, vertigo, exhaustion, fatigue, and devitalization, and general bodily pain, such as backaches, cramps, and 205 Coffee-Shop Gods headaches, Kleinman and Kleinman specify that “bodies transformed by political process not only represent those processes, they experience them as the lived memory of transformed worlds. . . . sedimented in gait, posture [and] movement” (1994: 715–717; Scott 1990). The extension beyond “representation” is crucial, otherwise, from the aforementioned formula it could appear that sociosomatics is merely a reformulation of Reich’s ([1945] 1990) “character armor,” where for...