Wing Chun tournaments in the early 1990's in Vancouver

In the early 1990’s Yvette Wong ran an all ladies Wing Chun club which practiced at the Hung Fut club in Chinatown in Victoria BC. The club hosted crash course instructor seminars for martial arts teachers with a one week 10 hour a day crash course to cover the whole Wing Chun curriculum. Also the ladies club would participate in giving demonstrations around Victoria to showcase Wing Chun as a woman’s art. The demonstrations involved doing various forms and weapons, sticking hands and distance fighting.

In early 1990’s there were various all martial arts competitions held in Vancouver. Some of the ladies wanted to enter. One lady Anna Lui entered into the Chi Sau competition and one Catherine Goede entered into the free style fighting competition. The ladies never had any experience in competition against other clubs before and did ok but didn’t win first place which we all expected. I was impressed that they were bold enough to even try.

One of our male students Brian Tong also entered into the tournament competition in the 1980’s against Karate. He asked me what belt level he should fight against? I told him you might as well get beat by a black belt than get beat by a white belt. He had just system moths of Wing Chun training but we covered most of the system and he trained by himself a lot.. Brian reported that he decided to enter the brown belt competition one year and then the black belt competition the next. He reported that he beat four brown belts in the first tournament just by using his fast charging in skills and chain punching. He said that worked pretty good.

The next year he entered into the black belt competition. He said like the year before, he beat four black belts with his charging in and chain punching techniques but the fifth black belt figured him out and saw that he was too focused on just doing chain punching and knocked him to the ground real good with a hook punch.