I first came in 2010. My goal was to join a traditional program to study martial arts. It was a 5-year program.
When I first said I wanted to come to China to learn martial arts and in the mountains, nobody believed me. Everybody thought it was just like a daydream. No one really thought that I would stay for a long time. They thought maybe I'd go for a couple weeks or a month.
He is Jake, from Illinois, USA. He has been in Wudang Mountain, Hubei for 13 years and has advanced from a student to a martial arts coach. What is so special about China, especially Hubei that attracted a 20-year-old American boy to study and live in Wudang Mountain all the way from the United States?
Most importantly, it was a chance for me to challenge myself. But I could see how much there was to learn. I could see how much more there was and so that really interested me and it was like something that was like became a passion very quickly.
It was harder for me to leave China than it was to leave America because I felt like I found a new home and I found something that I really, really wanted to learn and I didn't want to give up that chance.
I met my wife here and of course, that's a big change that actually was very, very helpful. Because meeting my wife here, how do you say like there's so much about my time in China because she is here with me, she can understand me.
Now Jake’s daughter is 8 years old, she is good at Tai Chi and Chinese Zither. Jake and his daughter often play together. For nurturing his daughter, Jake wants to make it as open as he can.
I want to give her as much opportunity and chance that we can and that includes learning the traditional culture. Because doing that she learns English and Chinese, but she also learns music, she also learns martial arts, so she will be healthy. She will have art in her life. She will have an idea of what she wants to do, and I hope that will give her a more stable life you know, in all different ways.
Jake hopes that his daughter will learn the best of both Eastern and Western cultures, and he also has some insights on how to integrate the two cultures and complement each other to get the best results.
(For Chinese culture), it’s about the whole community, how we bring everybody up. But then in the west it's more about the individual. And so, we want her to have a little bit of both. So, she has like an idea of how to, you know, stay with her family grow up, use all the opportunity but also, she has her own dream.
We have to have people understand not just the basic level, but they have to understand kind of the background and the context of the culture of the practice. So, like you said, Tai Chi is a really great example.
For example, everyone in the west even when I was little, everyone has the Tai Chi Tu (diagram of the universe) The Yin Yang Symbol, in the west we call Yin Yang Symbol.
They only know Yin Yang and when they talk about Yin Yang, they talk about opposites but actually this is a difference. This is not the right thing because Yin Yang is not opposite. Yin Yang is Tai Chi. Tai Chi is the complimentary transformation of polar opposites.
But I think now, we more than ever we need comprehensive information sharing because a lot of people, they only know a piece and when you only know a piece, it's very easy to take it out of context.
Jake believes that Chinese and western cultures have their own uniqueness and characteristics. As the inheritor of Wudang martial arts, he has a dream.
I like to see more connection. I like to see more interaction between cultures, between countries and I think that's the way that things are developing. We have to have more communication. We have to share each other's history, each other's culture because there's so much that we can learn from each other.
My goal is I really want to have a culture center in the west where I can bring a piece of the mountain home and people can come and experience what I have experienced.
So I'd really like to give that opportunity to more people and my responsibility as a “San Feng” Sect inheritor is to promote this culture to find students and disciples. So, I really want to do my duty and find the next generation of teachers because I think that this culture whilst it's Chinese culture, it's really much world culture and it’s something that we can all benefit from this. This is my dream.
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