KUNG FU AND THE CULINARY ARTS

Thanksgiving is in a couple of days and I’m sitting here waiting to start a class with a new private student and munching on an Indian pastry that was brought back by a student of mine from his travels. I’m thinking to myself, wow, this cookie’s not too bad. I’m also thinking about the upcoming feast that everyone’s going to have, and everyone’s going to be cooking up a storm. It dawned on me that there is a major difference between the art of cooking and the art of baking, and I started to think about how these two skills translate to the art of Kung Fu. And as I think more about it, Kung Fu is a bit like cooking. But, wait. Not really. It’s actually a lot more like baking, isn’t it? Excuse my festive whimsy. But both cooking and baking as well as Kung Fu are a process, a process of learning, understanding and executing. Properly, I should add. So that’s my quandary. Is Kung Fu more like cooking or baking? Let’s take a look at these two different forms of culinary skill (ha ha… Kung Fu). The term Kung Fu means skill, therefor anyone that has skill in culinary arts can be said to possess Kung Fu. And you’ll know from the first bite if it’s good or not. You’ll know right away, just as in Kung Fu after a move or two you can decipher how good the practitioner really is. You don’t have to see the whole form, per se. The dish isn’t going to get better as you keep eating it. It’s either good from the get-go or not.

So, let’s have a little bit of understanding of the art of cooking. As I understand it – and I am not a cook, I just know how to eat – cooking is very difficult. There are many methods, many different skills that must be mastered in order to create a delicious dish. And the same thing can be said of baking. I think the greatest line of division between the two is that, unlike baking, cooking you can sort of, like, cheat a little bit. You can add a little water, add a little spice. You can augment cooking to a certain degree to the point that a mundane dish can be turned into something not that bad or really, really tasty. I mean, you’ve seen all those cooking contests where the chef/contestants are given a box of stuff and are told to produce something out of it. And many times they come up with a really fancy, amazing dish from some mundane ingredients. This is an example of Kung Fu.

But the big difference between the art of cooking and the art of baking is as with Kung Fu, in my opinion, there’s not much wiggle room as far as what you can add and delete without undermining the integrity of the fundamental technique. Let’s just preface, the concept of Kung Fu originally is to save your own life by being able to protect yourself under adverse circumstances. I don’t dispute the fact that Kung Fu can also be an art of self-expression, but once you start coming away from the basic tenets of that concept of being a fighting art, you lose the essential essence of what Kung Fu is all about. I’ve seen many people posting on their social media what I like to call interpretive dance, martial routines with a high level of acrobatic, theatrical skill. They look awesome, are very impressive, and I personally cannot emulate them, but drift far away from the original foundations of what Chinese Kung Fu is supposed to be about.

So you say, well how does this relate to baking? I am lucky enough to have a high-level chef as a longtime student of mine. He is a cook, but originally apprenticed and was a high-level baker prior to becoming a chef. Baking is all about adhering to specifics, specifics in the sense of weights, measurements, proportions. All must be critically, and I emphasize critically, understood and executed in the proper fashion, and there’s very little room for deviation. Because once you deviate from the correct proportions of baking powder to flour, you end up either with a brick or goop. I don’t know if you’re into eating a solid brick or some glop on a plate, but I’m not. Baking, compared to cooking, is much more specific. It’s a much tighter line that has to be maintained. My student who’s a French chef was brought up in the old school tradition of meeting particular standards. This is the same with Kung Fu; meeting these standards is the thing that clearly defines you as a Kung Fu stylist or practitioner. Coming away from this latest round of seminars in Greece that I did with my teacher Master Tak Wah Eng and Grandmaster Wai Hong of the Fu Jow Pai, only served to reaffirm the concept that your execution has to be specific, accurate, on point. I had used the example the other day in class that doing Kung Fu is like winning the lotto. You could have all of the numbers except one and say, “I missed the lotto by one number.” You still lost. “I almost got a bullseye.” It’s the difference between Kung Fu and something that sort of kind of wants to resemble Kung Fu but isn’t really exactly on point.

When an item is baked the way it should be, even though it’s relatively simple, like bread for example, it’s outstanding and amazing and is impossible to be duplicated by something that’s extruded by Entenmann’s. There’s nothing better than fresh baked homemade bread. And that’s the same thing for Kung Fu. There’s nothing better than a simply well-executed technique that is direct and accurate. It’s profound in its simplicity. It looks easy, but it’s so difficult to execute masterfully. This is how Kung Fu is like baking, and not as much like cooking where you have that room to wiggle and you can tweak it and change it. You may say, I can do that with my Kung Fu, too. Yes, this is true, but there is a certain level that must be adhered to in order to come up with the proper end product. So, if you witness, for the lack of a better term, old school Kung Fu, it’s decisive, straightforward and matter-of-fact, specifically in the southern systems. My Grandmaster always says, “make it clean cut.” That’s the directness. That’s the mental definition that is given to each technique by the practitioner. So, going back to the analogy of the homemade bread, what’s in it? It’s simple. It’s water, flour, salt, yeast. It’s clean cut. It’s direct. It’s straightforward. It’s accurate. It’s everything that you require, simply executed, and produces this product that can sustain you. This is the definition of true Kung Fu.

Some people may argue and say there are baking masters that create confectionary designs that will blow your mind. This is absolutely true, but within that framework of confectionary genius, they do have standards that must be met, lines that cannot be crossed because the end product won’t work. It will be, in the culinary world, inedible, and in the martial art world, unusable, unsustainable, unteachable. The bottom line is practicality, and what I’m seeing now as I’m training more and growing into the system that I’ve been devoted to for my entire life is, the simpler the better. The more direct, the more “clean cut,” the more you can derive from it and the more you can utilize it. I’m not saying that Kung Fu is not like cooking but it’s a lot more like baking.

But now let’s talk about the cooking aspect of Kung Fu. I don’t want to malign cooking because, remember, I like to eat. I think like a lot of you, I’m a connoisseur of eating. Kung Fu is also a lot like cooking, especially Chinese cooking. If you’ve ever gone to a Chinese takeout, you know you can order whatever you want on this menu of a thousand items, and it’ll be ready in 10 minutes or less and it’ll be freshly cooked for you. It wasn’t hanging around under a red heat lamp cooked three days ago waiting for you to come and get it. It’s fresh, clean, fast and efficient. The big question is why? Everything about cooking, especially Chinese cooking, is about preparation. You must be prepared. You must be ready. You must have all your ducks in a row. That means basics, basics, basics. Everything must be in place: physical stamina, flexibility, understanding of the mind and the body, stances, punches, kicks. All those things must be in the mix. All those things must be arrayed in front of you on the table in order for you to cook your Kung Fu. If you ever witness a chef in a Chinese restaurant or any restaurant, they have all their ingredients prepared for them.

When I was a young teenager, I worked in my friend’s father’s local Chinese restaurant as a busboy. And we’d always hang around in the kitchen watching “Uncle John,” the head chef, cooking. And the most time-consuming part of the process was not the actual cooking, but the preparation. The washing, the chopping, the peeling, the mundane, the boring, the arduous things that made the cooking fly. Because when Uncle John cooked, he cooked up a storm, and it was done in a matter of minutes. Dish upon dish appeared at the table. We’d close down the restaurant and all the workers would sit down for dinner. He would whack out the meat dish, the vegetable dish, the tofu dish, as well as a traditional soup to start the meal, and we all would sit down, like a dozen of us, and we’d eat together in less than 10 minutes, and nothing went cold.

In French, they call it, “mise en place,” which literally means, “to put in place.” In Chinese we say, 基本練功, basic training. If you don’t have the same background, you will not get the same result. Your background denotes what you’re going to get as an end product. So, it’s really paramount that the individual’s training in the beginning is really tight and to the letter. That, in the end, will give them the desired result. The martial artist should have at his fingertips all the essential ingredients that they require to perform any particular technique at any point in time. This, in and of itself, requires great preparation that must be done by the individual. It takes years of training to be able to produce that one item. It’s acquiring that skill that is the long period of time of preparation that no one ever sees or gives too much mind to when they see the individual practitioner. Same thing with the dish at the restaurant. You don’t see the preparation; you just see the finished product.

In the end, Kung Fu, as in these two culinary arts, requires great amounts of dedication, focus and learning. So, when you are presented with your turkey and/or an apple pie on Thanksgiving Day by your family or friends, understand all the work that went behind it. It’s easy to criticize and say what’s good and what’s not, but until you actually sit there and try on your own to make that same dish, or go through the same process that they have, you will never really understand, or be thankful for what you have. So… gobble, gobble… Happy Thanksgiving.

Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅