My Way of Wing Chun

Wong Shun Leung, Wing Chun Sifu, gives his first U.K. interview to Bey Logan. (Interpreter: Nino Bernardo)

“I once took on ten guys carrying knives!” At these words, the seminar students all lean forward extra attentively. “And they never cut me once!” Twenty-five pairs of ears prick up simultaneously. What feat of kung fu did the teacher use to escape apparently certain death? “How did you do it, Sifu?”, someone asks. Wong Shun Leung mimes the action of running like hell, glancing over his shoulder as he does so! The timing is perfect, and the dry wit typical of a man who plays down the image of the kung fu master (a word he hates) and plays up his role as a Wing Chun teacher (a role he enjoys). “I can’t fight very well and my kung fu’s not very good”, says the man who won a reputation as being one of Hong Kong’s foremost challenge fighters, the man who taught the young Bruce Lee, the man who has just “adopted” a string of over twenty German Wing Chun schools from another organisation, a man who will still teach a small group at a London club with a still growing enthusiasm for his art.

Read more of this post