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Tai Chi? Me?

©200 David Boyne

I arrived late for my first ever T'ai Chi class.

I scurried onto the community college basketball court and joined the dozen people facing a middle-aged Vietnamese man. He pointed at me. "You are?"

I told him my name.

He nodded and grinned. "I am Bach Pham. I just telling class how I hate the Communists."

I wondered, Am I in the right class?

Bach Pham addressed the class. "In 1975, my country taken over by the Communists. They arrest me. They say I American spy." He grinned, spreading his arms, palms out. "I speak six language. French, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, English, Spanish." He reeled off a rapid question in Spanish and the Mexican woman beside me giggled. I noticed she was very pregnant.

"But I not spy," Bach Pham said. "Work with American Press. Translate. Drive them around. Not spy!"

The Communists sentenced Bach Pham to a prison camp on the Chinese border.

"Six years there," he said, and I saw his easy grin flicker for a moment. "Very hard there. I meet Chinese prisoner. He learn I speak Russian. He say he will teach the T'ai Chi to me if I teach Russian. I think to myself, What is this T'ai Chi? No deal. But then I think, What else I going do here?"

Bach Pham spreads his arms and smiles. "That is how I learn the T'ai Chi."

T'ai Chi would not require new clothes, lift tickets,
gasoline-powered engines or cash advances on my credit cards.

I discovered T'ai Chi when I noticed that my body was falling apart. The slow collapse of my biological infrastructure had been going on for decades and eventually my body began to resemble the collapsing building in one of those slow motion films demonstrating what a few well-placed charges of dynamite could do to the sturdiest of structures. But most distressingly, while I was basically a happy and productive citizen, the much-ballyhooed inner calm and quiet wisdom that is supposed to counter-balance the creeping decrepitude of aging had eluded me. I remained as restless and agitated, as impulsive and compulsive, as self-absorbed and ignorant, as I had been at age fifteen.

But what could I do?

Go to the library, of course.

I took out three dozen books on various topics like mid-life crisis, exercise, meditation, fasting, green tea enemas, yoga, and mutual funds. This was a strategy that had served me well in other times of stress: I would lose myself in reading until my panic passed, then resume my oblivious lifestyle.

One of the library books was about T'ai Chi. I read how this martial art enhanced flexibility and concentration, giving the practitioner a relaxed, self-aware calm. Hmmm…

I read on, and learned that T'ai Chi was about something called mindfulness, about working the mind as well as the body. It was a meditative exercise that could be done anywhere, and at anytime, and for all of one's life. Hmmm…

T'ai Chi would not require new clothes, lift tickets, gasoline-powered engines or cash advances on my credit cards. In fact, the only equipment required was a body. And I already had one, such as it was.

I closed the book, and went to my mirror. I stared at a below average guy who could not even dance, let alone fight with a sword, or meditate. I asked my reflection, "T'ai Chi? Me?"

"The T'ai Chi Master dance with his spirit."

I am in my second class and Master Bach stands before us. "T'ai Chi salute!" he calls.

We haltingly mirror his graceful movements, slowly raising both arms to eye-level, fingers almost touching, palms inward, as if lifting a big, weightless beach ball. As we flow into a defensive position, balancing on one leg with arms raised and hands ready to strike, Bach Pham tells us to hold the position. "Slowly. Inhale. The T'ai Chi is to do slow." He holds the position, practically motionless. I am teetering, my muscles twitching with the effort to balance. With his body elegantly poised, Bach lectures the class. "Exhale. You must not think. If you think, you make mistake. Just do. Inhale. Your thoughts be empty. T'ai Chi is the contemplation in the movement. It is to be mindful. The T'ai Chi Master dance with his spirit."

Even as I strain to hold my balance, expecting at any moment to make a resounding thud by collapsing on the gym floor, a part of me grins, thinking how much Bach Pham reminds me of a Vietnamese Yoda. Yet another part of me is enjoying the mystic language of this ancient martial art.

I think back to when I lived on Russian Hill in San Francisco and would walk to work in the Financial District early in the morning, passing old Chinese men and women in the parks doing their graceful calisthenics.

"What are they doing?" My East Coast visitors would always ask me.

"T'ai Chi," I would answer smugly.

"Oh. What's T'ai Chi?"

Since I knew nothing about T'ai Chi other than its name, I distracted my guests by pointing to where the sunlight glinted from the Bay Bridge. "Check out that view," I would say.

Were I to pass those old people doing T'ai Chi in the park now, I could say with appreciation, "Ah, that movement is enticing tiger from the mountain...over there, she is grasping sparrow's tail... he is doing white snake hangs out its tongue."

If I knew then what I know now, I could have blown some East Coast minds.

So of course, I asked Master Bach. "What is chi?"

Once, during the break in our two hour class, Master Bach told us some possible history of T'ai Chi. I say "possible" history because according to Master Bach, while most everyone agrees that T'ai Chi originated in China, no one can prove exactly where, or when, or how.

Bach says he believes T'ai Chi developed as a ritualized boxing, and was practiced by ancient Chinese warriors to keep themselves limber when not making real war. Other experts claim that when ancient Chinese royalty became alarmed that lowly peasants were practicing martial arts, the peasants appeased their overlords by performing their movements so slowly that they appeared to be doing a dance, or meditation.

People have described T'ai Chi as meditation in movement, a mindfulness empty of thought, and a dozen other lovely expressions the exact meaning of which I can't grasp.

I have read that 'chi' is the life force each living entity possesses, or the ying and yang of a breathing, living universe, or the magnetic field around all creatures. I have also read that the very concept of chi is beyond translation into Western language, or understanding by Western minds.

So of course, I asked Master Bach, "What is chi?"

He shrugged. "Energy."

"Energy?" I was disappointed by his brief and easily understood answer.

"Keep your back straight!" Bach snapped.

I instantly straightened.

"Maybe that is chi?" he grinned.

As he walked past me to the next student he muttered, "You stop thinking all the time. Do the T'ai Chi. You feel the chi, sooner or later. Why you got to think everything?"

"Can you bust a concrete block with your head yet?"

After a few months of doing T'ai Chi, I realized I felt different. In some ways lighter, in some ways more firm. I couldn't explain it to myself, but realized that I simply enjoyed the exercise. I enjoyed how quiet doing T'ai Chi is. As I workout, I can hear birds chirping in the trees outside my apartment, my dog sighing in his sleep in the other room, a woman's heels on the sidewalk a block away, my breath flowing in and flowing out of my body.

Sometimes my curious friends ask, "Are you still doing T'ai Chi?

"Yes."

"You don't seem the type to do martial arts."

"I agree."

"Can you bust a concrete block with your head yet?"

"T'ai Chi isn't about that stuff."

"What exactly is it about?"

This is a tough question. Sometimes I tell them that T'ai Chi is about focusing one's mind, while doing stylized movements, until one transcends thinking, although that rarely, if ever, actually happens. Sometimes I tell them it's about becoming self-aware of one's own energy among all the energies of the universe. Other times I tell them that it's about achieving a calm, heightened sense of well-being.

And every time they just stare blankly at me.

I could be wrong, but I've learned that when someone asks me what T'ai Chi is about it's best to just shrug, and say, "Beats me."

"So why do you do it?"

I think of the other students I've met in my T'ai Chi classes; the pregnant Mexican woman; the gangly teenage boy; the sixty-something woman, a life-long smoker who must wear heavy braces on both knees because of a car wreck; the fifty-year old computer executive who has done T'ai Chi for more than a decade and now uses a sword while doing her exercises. I can only wonder, Why do they do T'ai Chi? What does each of them get from it?

"It just feels good," I tell my friends. "It makes me appreciate--"

I stop, unable to describe.

My friends impatiently prompt, "Appreciate what?"

"Just... appreciate."