Black and Asians find common ground with martial arts films

Two blocks from the heart of Chinatown and three stories up, the headquarters of the American Fuzhou Three Mountain Martial Arts Federation is almost totally empty, except for a table and chairs. A few spears stand along one wall, flagpoles lean on the opposite wall, and two brightly -colored dragon heads rest on shelves at the back of the room., but the space is more empty than full, and the general effect is spare.

Once a month, the Ffederation’s 100 members - all men, all Chinese, all older than 40, and all practitioners of martial arts - gather here and talk about teaching martial arts to their children.

"In this environment, a lot of kids don’t want to learn," said Yuen Sang Or said through an interpreter. Or, 49, is a businessman and community leader in Chinatown and a member of the Ffederation. "A lot of American-born Chinese don’t like karate or martial arts. They like baseball."

At the same time that Or and his friends are struggling to keep the martial arts they grew up with relevant to Chinese-American youngsterskids, martial arts culture is exploding, just a few miles uptown.

In Harlem, Earnest Hyman’s martial arts classes are full. On any given night, 20-some students will practice kicks and punches and forms, as Hyman, who is black, barks encouragement. Hyman’s approach is an untraditional approach: when the class gets the series of forms down correctly, Hyman cranks up the stereo. "Party People" blares from the speakers, and the class moves to the beat.

It is not the same class you would find in an average Chinese practice room - that martial arts tradition tends to emphasize strict discipline and would find 80s electro-funk frivolous and distracting. Still, Hyman’s school is just one example of the way that black America has embraced martial arts culture and made it its own.

Recently the connection has exploded onto the entertainment mainstream. Martial arts movie star Jet Li’s new movie, "Romeo Must Die," co-stars R&B singer Aaliyah and rapper DMX; Kaine, of the new chart-topping rap duo Tthe Ying-Yang twins, refers to himself as being "blackanese;" and on Lauryn Hill’s 1998 Grammy-award winning album, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," she recalls "Saturday morning cartoons and Kung Fu." Not to mention the Chinese character-tattoos that have turned up in the NBA on Marcus Camby’s arms and Allen Iverson’s neck, and the new album from rapper Sisqo titled Return of the Dragon, a blatant shout-out to Bruce Lee’s kung fu movies.

Locally, the kung fu movie business is alive and well in stores that cater to a black clientele. On Harlem’s 125^th sStreet, little video stalls sell hundreds of martial arts movies. Next door to the Apollo, Bill Mushi runs Films and Games, which stocks more than 2,000 martial arts movie titles, in addition to Blaxploitation movies and Japanimation videos. The 43^rd Chamber, a martial arts movie store at the edge of Times Square, hosts informal bull sessions about the movies attended almost exclusively by black men.

On the surface, this fascination could seem like the latest whimsy of the entertainment and pop culture industry. Dig deeper, however, and the racially -loaded story lines of kung fu movies, mass produced in China beginning in the 1960s, have story lines that speak directly to a common African-American experience.

The movies follow a fairly consistent and formulaic plot line, superficially, the story of one man avenging the death or dishonor of a father, brother or teacher. The subtext, however, often relies on a tension between Chinese people and the Japanese, who are portrayed as oppressors. Kung fu movies were first produced in Shanghai in the 1920s, but production really took off when the industry moved to Hong Kong during World War II. At that time Japanese troops occupied some of China, and the plot lines reflect the racial tension that resulted from the occupation.

For example, in "The Chinese Connection," one of the first martial arts movies to come to American theateres, the story is about a conflict between two martial arts schools, but it is set during the Japanese occupation. In a key sequence, explains Derek Mok, 23, a film student at Columbia University who is originally from Hong Kong, Bruce Lee, the star of the movie, "is standing outside a park next to a sign that says ‘No Chinese, no dogs.’ And Bruce Lee kicks the sign."

Such racial tension was hardly lost on American audiences, even young ones.

"Most of the movies showed you one group being oppressed, which I can understand," said Hugh Dunk, 36, who is black. When he was little, Dunk said, he was attracted to the fast-paced action sequences in the movies, which were shown every Saturday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in New York on Channel 5. At the same time, however, he would listen to his parents complain about racial injustices. "They would be talking, the white man this, the white man that. And then in the movies, it’s something you realize, you see the hidden message."

"He saw a hidden message? There was no hidden message," said Frank Rosado, 36, Puerto Rican and a friend of Dunk’s, overhearing the conversation in Films and Games. "It was just a fighting style that was amazing." But a few seconds later, Rosado said "the black community and the Spanish community can identify more" with the oppressed hero, fighting for justice.

Downtown at 43^rd Chamber, the cinephiles are in agreement. The movies spoke to ghetto audiences, explained Charles Woods, a writer and historian who helped start 43^rd Chamber and whose presence, on Tuesdays and Sundays, draws African-American film buffs from all over New York. Woods remembers going to see Kung Fu flicks at the theaters on 42^nd sStreet, and if a person was feeling oppressed or beaten down in his daily life, he could identify with the Chinese character, struggling against oppression on the big screen, Woods explained.

Although everybody loves a hero, especially an underdog, there was something special about these movies that captured the hearts of inner-city audiences. Although Japanese samurai movies were released in American at the same time, they didn’t catch on in the same way, said C.M. Griffin, 42, an African-American who teaches Chinese and Korean martial arts. The samurai movies, which had better acting and higher production values than the kung fu movies coming out of China, usually featured a group of swordsmen fighting against a rebel or a group of rebels who were out to change the established order.

"They were all about protecting the status quo," said Griffin said. "So you could watch the swordplay and think, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ but you couldn’t really relate."

The notable exceptions were Akira Kurosawa’s movies, which tended to highlight the struggle of a lone protagonist. Still, Griffin added, the samurai movies were embraced by a high-brow, majority-white audience, and elevated to art-house film status. The Chinese kung fu movies which appealed to what Woods called "ghetto audiences" were panned by critics and slapped with the "B movie" label, "or Z movie," Woods said.

None of this would have been possible without one man: Bruce Lee. He first registered on the pop culture radar in the 1960s, in the role of Kato, the sidekick to the title character in the comic-strip-style TV show, "The Green Hornet." His popularity brought Chinese martial arts into the American spotlight. Or, from the Ffederation called Lee a "public relations person to introduce martial arts around the world."

"He did things we had never seen," said Thomas Walters, 43, who is African-American and works part-time at Films and Games. "He was so quick with his hands and feet. I thought it was great."

In popular legend, Lee was also the first martial arts master to open up a school to non-Asian students. That, Griffin said, is a myth. There were some teachers who would teach non-Asians, but they weren’t widely known, because people didn’t have an awareness of martial arts. When Bruce Lee came on the scene, however, many fans sought out teachers.

Griffin remembered watching "Batman" on TV one afternoon, and when "Batman" was over, "The Green Hornet" was on. "And there was this little guy, dressed all in black, kicking" the [expletive] out of everybody," he said. "And I went running upstairs to my mom, ‘I got to do that!’" His mom, he said, wasn’t hearing it, but he started practicing the moves he saw on TV. Eventually, she relented, and he started taking lessons., and tToday Griffin runs his own school in Brooklyn.

Other African-American martial arts teachers tell the same story of being introduced to martial arts by Lee, either on TV or in movies, and seeking to emulate the little warrior who could defeat opponents who were bigger and stronger than himself.

"You didn’t need a lot of equipment, so it was cheap," said Jemal Joseph, an associate professor in the department of film studies at the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University. Jemal, who is African-American, has studied martial arts and recently completed a screenplay of a martial arts movie with an African-American hero set in Harlem. "And the message in the movies was very encouraging: if you trained hard enough, you could do this stuff."

In fact, training is a central factor in most kung fu movies. Before the hero can conquer, he usually has to go through a long and rigorous training period - not unlike the car-waxing and fence-painting scenes in the early-80s American hit, "The Karate Kid."

In kung fu movies, the rigorous and often repetitive training always pays off, because in the end, the good guy always wins. This was enough to motivate quite a few young African-American boys to take up martial arts. For many, it was a fad, but more than a few became masters and teachers, and they frequently set up schools in black communities.

Today, people are more likely to take martial arts classes to learn to defend themselves, said Harold Whitfield II, a 42-year-old African-American who grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and now teaches martial arts in the middle-class African-American neighborhood of Laurelton, Queens.

"They say, ‘The streets are getting bad,’ or ‘I got mugged,’ or ‘My kid got beat up,’" Whitfield said. "The first thing is to learn how to fight to build up your confidence walking down the street."

Up at Films and Games in Harlem, Keino Robinson, a 27-year-old African-American stock trader, offered another reason why martial arts classes and culture continue to be popular among thrive for the young blacks now a generation removed from Bruce Lee and Saturday-afternoon kung fu movies on TV: They are starting to see the resurgence of martial arts culture in entertainment. It seems that, in the black community, enthusiasm for martial arts has come full circle. People who grew up watching Bruce Lee and kung fu movies are now in the position of taste-maker. Drawing on their own likes and experiences, they pass on a love of martial arts movies and culture to young people today.

The cultural transfer has not been so seamless in the Chinese community. Although the Chinese-American community has been marginalized in America like African-Americans, martial arts movies and practice has foundered instead of flourishing in the Chinese community here.

It worries Yuen Sang Or and the other men who make up the American Fuzhou Three Mountain Martial Arts Federation, so they convene for meetings, and are planning to start their own school. They see Chinese martial arts as an important part of Chinese history and as a source of community pride.

It is an uphill battle, said Steven Wong, who runs his own business, Steven Wong’s Language Services, and leads several Chinatown community groups. For childrenkids born in America, there may be a language barrier, if the teacher only speaks only Chinese. Also, he said, traditional-style martial arts schools are very conservative, and students cannot challenge the instructor. In America, this kind of strict discipline does not doesn’t often translate well.

A third obstacle, Wong said, is simply American gun culture. "In this country, it is very easy to use a gun," he said. "You lose the significance of using the empty hand to fight someone."

And of course, there is the problem of children simply growing up with different priorities than their parents, which extends beyond national boundaries. Or’s youngest son is 10 years old, living in Hong Kong, and he has no interest in learning martial arts.

"I tried to teach him, but he doesn’t like it, so I don’t want to push him," Or said. "It’s probably because of the living style in Hong Kong, people always in a hurry."

The members of America Fuzhou Three Mountain Martial Arts Association are in no hurry, however. In spite of their business attire, they are happy to perform different moves and styles for a visitor. In a shirt and tie, Ligen Chen, a doctor of Chinese medicine, shows several different defenses, unhampered by the cell phone, beeper and heavy key ring that hang from his belt.

The pride in the room is palpable as the men take turns showing moves and applauding one anothereach other, but it certainly doesn’t does not look like anything one might see in the movies that have made their mark on black American culture.

"Don’t believe everything the movies tell you," said Wong said. "The movie says only the good guys win. If that’s the case, we don’t need this federation."