Wing Chun Viewpoint Newsletter

In 1986 Master Wang Kiu asked if I could work with my teacher Dr. G.K. Khoe to produce a Wing Chun newsletter to send around the world that would talk about various aspects of Wing Chun starting with his views on the subject. I was selected by Wang Kiu not because my Wing Chun was better than Wang Kiu’s students in Holland. It wasn’t and could not be because they had constant access to the Master and also they fought all the time against other arts which I did not. However I wrote all kinds of stuff in English and was passionate about Wing Chun and did have 20 years of martial arts background so that’s the reason. Also my teacher Dr. G.K. Khoe could always keep me on track.

A lot of credit for the design of the newsletter also goes to Yvette Wong who was at first my student and later had private teachings from Master Wong Shun Leung and from various other martial arts Masters. She ran the Women’s Wing Chun club in Chinatown and also produced a video just for Wing Chun women since most videos were male dominated ones.

The newsletter was to promote Wing Chun in general by talking about the viewpoints of other Wing Chun Masters and lineages as well. It was also to be instructional for even brand new beginners. We produced just six newsletters that outlined the teaching methods of Dr. G.K. Khoe.

In 1990 we stopped in order to broaden our understanding of Wing Chun regarding the other lineages. So in the 1990’s our Victoria, BC, club tried to host seminars from various Masters in order to broaden our knowledge of our art. We tried to document each seminar that we had for the benefit of the Wing Chun community who maybe did not have the opportunity to meet the Masters that we had the fortune to meet. We made no judgement as to who was or was not good as we were not qualified to do so and that would have been extremely impolite. Al of them were better than us. Our mission was just to make peace among the many factions of Wing Chun.

In 1998 we achieved somewhat of a milestone when various lineages came together in Victoria, BC so that we all could share our different ideas about the art.

Here is one of those newsletters. The others will be available in downloadable PDF format.

Note, in the past 30 years the Wing Chun experience and knowledge around the world has increased dramatically. In my day there was not so much experience of Wing Chun against Western fighting arts but now there is a lot. However the old traditional knowledge is still necessary to learn first but then what has been learned over the past 30 years about fighting has to be taken into account. Even MMA and western boxing cannot keep with ideas from even ten years ago. Each generation should be better than the past.