Interview with Jarek Szymanski – Part 1

Jarek Szymanski, apart from being a linguist and professional translator, is a martial arts researcher who has been living in China for over 20 years. In addition to practicing several styles of traditional Chinese Martial Arts (CMA) himself, he has also conducted in-depth field research into the history of many styles of CMA, including Xinyi Liuhe Quan, baguazhang and taijiquan, as well as running the excellent TCMA resource website China from Inside: http://www.chinafrominside.com/ma/.

Jarek’s excellent website, China From Inside

Over the past three months I have been conducting a series of interviews with Jarek to get him to share his experiences of learning and practicing TCMA in China – as Jarek has been in China since the early 1990s he had a chance to meet and film many old masters who have since passed away.

The man himself!

PART 1

Jon: Thanks for agreeing to do this interview Jarek, I know you’re busy with family and stuff. Could you just start off by introducing where you grew up, how you first came into contact with martial arts?

Jarek: Sure. I grew up in a town in the West of Poland called Poznan. I was born in the mid-60s and so was a teenager in the late 70s. At that time in Poland there were almost no martial arts of any kind. I remember karate was the first MA to make an impact in Poland. When I was 13-14, there were programmes on TV where they invited karate masters to demonstrate kicks, brick breaking etc. As you can imagine, to me at that time that was amazing, incredible – if a guy could break a brick with his bare hand just imagine what he could do to an opponent! You know when you’re young, it’s very easy to become obsessed or fascinated by something – with me it was martial arts. At that time I was not so much interested in the history of it. Martial arts movies only came into Poland a few years later – it was Enter The Dragon followed by Shaolin Temple.

Under this influence, I started practicing some judo in around 1979. Then a couple of years later I joined a Kyokushin Karate club in Poznan. I think the instructors there had learnt Kyokushin from other instructors in Poland, who in turn learnt from teachers from the Netherlands. Anyway, I studied there for 3 years. Training at that school was hard on the body and hard on the mind. The instructors were very much of the ‘tough guy’ school, in their mind they were teaching the warrior mentality, teaching us to embrace pain, endure pain. Looking back, I don’t think they were good teachers, in that they didn’t teach students how to avoid injury. Suffering was an intrinsic part of the practice. Because it was Kyokushin, there was regular sparring practice (excluding strikes to the face and groin, obviously). To give you an idea of what the instructors were like, they used to laugh at Shotokan people as soft sissies. There used to be a kind of conditioning training where you assume a Sanchin Dachi stance, tense your muscles while breathing out loud and an assistant instructor kicks you (including the groin), hits you, to practice taking hits. One particularly mean instructor used to wait until you breathed in (for which you have to relax your muscles), then would hit students really hard in the gut. One time he did it so hard that he injured the student’s liver, and the student was taken to hospital and later died!

I switched to another school very soon after that. Later on we learned that the founder of the former was just a worker at the local metal-works plant, probably this was where his strength came from. He made a lot of money from the school and then one day just vanished... Luckily by that time I was training at another karate school. In 1984 I took part in an open full contact kumite (sparring) competition. During the competition, I got kicked in the knee and my knee swelled up to twice the size. I had to go to the local hospital to have the fluid drained from the joint – this effectively put a halt to my competition sparring adventures for quite a while. Shortly afterwards (1984), I started my degree at Poznan Technical University. At around the same time, the first kungfu school opened up in Poznan. I immediately became interested because I knew that Japanese MA derived from Chinese MA. The teacher at the kungfu school had learnt from a Vietnamese teacher, and taught a mish-mash of forms and routines, which I later found out was a mix from several different Chinese styles – we even learnt the 24 taiji form! Most of the training consisted of stretching and forms, with some pair work but no sparring. Several years later I managed to obtain a book about Wushu from the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw – and to my surprise found basically all the forms we had learnt were described there.

You have to remember that at this time there was a very low level of knowledge about CMA in Poland. There were almost no books available in Polish on kungfu at all. I managed to get some translated books on Qigong, Chaquan and simplified Taiji (24 move) from the Chinese embassy in Warsaw. I wasn’t really satisfied with the training at the kungfu school – even at that time I could see that forms training alone would not produce the skills I was dreaming of. It was about this time (1987) that I happened to see a demonstration of Seven Star Praying Mantis kungfu at an exhibition in Warsaw, which I really liked. I got talking to the teacher, who had learnt from a German Praying Mantis master from a branch coming out of Hong Kong, through Luo Guangyu. I really liked the style, it seemed like a much more complete teaching curriculum than what I had been learning before: each routine was accompanied by explanations about the applications, and there was extensive paired application training. Unfortunately that school had many many routines, I think over 100 in total, including 60-70 empty-hand ones!

After learning for one and half years, the teacher in Warsaw allowed me to start teaching people in Poznan. My then girlfriend – now my wife – helped me stick up posters advertising my new kungfu school all around city and on the first day, 170 people turned up wanting to study! You have to remember that there wasn’t much entertainment in those days in Poland. There were only 2 TV channels, and very few people had video games at home. Also, by that time the Kungfu craze had come to Poland in a big way. The main kungfu styles available at that time in Poland were Wing Chun in Warsaw and Choy Lee Fut in Krakow. As the movie Shaolin Temple had made a really big impact on me, those southern styles were not as attractive. I had already decided that I would go to the root of it all – Shaolin, in Henan province. I studied and taught Praying Mantis for the next years, finishing my Technical University studies in 1989.

By coincidence, at that time a Sinology department had just opened up at Poznan university. Because so few people were interested in studying Chinese at the time and the professor responsible for enrolment procedure happened to be away, they just told me to put my name down and then said they would get back to me. Actually I almost did not end up applying, as my then girlfriend (now wife) thought that Chinese on top of kungfu would mean that she would never see me! That’s another story we often talk about – how one’s destiny is not the result of just effort and work but rather something that simply must happen – in spite of all odds.