Kang Bok Yin practices Hung Gar in Hong Kong with his wife, who was also a student. Courtesy of SUI PIU/CHINA DAILY
East facing
One day, Gum went to Sydney's Chinatown with a neighbour and was amazed to see so many people practising the same training methods he had learned.
The neighbour told Gam that the martial art was called Hung Ga, a traditional southern Chinese art with hundreds of years of history.
“The Hung family is my destiny. I don't choose the Hung family. The Hung family chose me,” Gam said.
He continued to study with his neighbor and his teacher until his death after ten years of instruction.
The neighbour never asked for money and before he died he told Gam to “continue this habit and pass it on to others.”
In the 1970s, Gum began his career as a Chinese medicine practitioner in Australia – at a time when Chinese medicine was not well known among Westerners – before becoming a computer engineer and moving to the UK where he set up his own successful IT company.
He later sold the business for a substantial profit and decided to start a new phase in his life.
Ngam moved to Hong Kong to study Hung Gar and became a student under Master Ngam, but during training the Master criticized Ngam's Tiger Claw technique and encouraged Ngam to study the actual movements of the big cat.
Three years later he mastered the technique, but more importantly he realised that various kung fu styles such as Northern Mantis, Fujian White Crane and Fang Snake were based on imitating animal movements: these martial arts not only taught the practitioner physical techniques to control animal aggression, but also aimed to imbue him with the animal's spirit.
As Ngam's skills improved, more and more people, mostly Chinese, asked to learn Hung Ga. Ngam founded the Hung Ga Academy Hong Kong in 1996 and has trained hundreds of students over the decades, from children to adults, Chinese and foreign.
But most people quit soon after starting, usually complaining that martial arts training is painful or boring, Gam said.
Traditional martial arts not only impart skills to practitioners and cultivate qualities such as perseverance, resilience and courage, but can also open a gateway to understanding and passing on ancestral wisdom, Mr Ngam said.
The Hung family is known for their 12 bridge techniques, which include hardness, softness, assertiveness, linearity, division, stability, progression, lifting, flowing, feeding, control and placement. Gam believes these bridges are not just techniques, but also symbolize distinct personality types.
Learning martial arts allows one to move between different personalities and use the right one when needed. Knowing when to be kind and when to be strict and adapting accordingly is Chinese kung fu's philosophical approach to going about life, Ngam said.
Martial arts allow people to inherit the wisdom of the past, cultivate virtue and discover their roots, said Ngam, and despite being a foreigner, he is committed to passing on the knowledge of Hong Ga to future generations.
