Lee and I eat dinner together in Adams House, where he has been an associate since 1997. When he taps through his iPad to show me videos of his students, he does so with the same careful motions he uses in his tai chi. We’re joined by Marilyn M. Goodrich and Jaden Y. Freeze ’19, two regular attendees at Lee’s tai chi sessions. Both were drawn into Lee’s circle by word of mouth and by what they call his magnetic presence.
Goodrich has a soft voice and and short gray hair covered by a knitted cap. She is a retired administrative coordinator in the Anthropology department, and has been coming to Lee’s classes since 2010. She says she had been falling a lot before she began, so friends recommended she pick up tai chi.
“It’s hard to describe it, but it just became a way of life for me with the tai chi, where I just felt stronger as a person,”Goodrich says. “I felt less overwhelmed.”
Goodrich says she doesn’t fall anymore.
“People were regaling me with the different wonderful feats he’s done in the past, which I certainly believe now,” says Freeze, who has been attending Lee’s classes for a semester or so.
Freeze, a Chemistry and Physics concentrator, says he appreciates the way Lee uses science as a metaphor to explain tai chi. When I tell Lee I study physics, he begins to explain chi in terms of resistance and capacitance.
Students from past years also lauded Lee’s teachings. “[Tai chi] helped me improve in my ability to deal with asthma at the time,” recalls Andrew J. Green ’99, who now works at a think tank in Washington, D.C. “It grounds you when you do it in a serious way. It takes you out of the day-to-day things you worry about.” The dozen other students I spoke with shared similar praise for Lee.
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Yon G. Lee demonstrates a series of movements in his Adams House class in early February. KRYSTAL K. PHU
To Lee and many of his followers, the control of chi through kung fu has a deep healing power. The tai chi and qigong they practice means much more than the simple motions that appear on the surface. It’s a mistake to clump the practices under the umbrella of the secular “mindfulness movement.” What Lee does is not corporate yoga, squeegeed of cultural and spiritual significance and sanitized for a skeptical Western audience. This is not just exercise. Tai chi is a religious practice.
Not only does kung fu have spiritual significance, it is supposed to yield tangible results. Showstack, the gruff Bostonian who drove the sword into Lee’s throat, tells me Lee’s qigong treatments helped his 14-year-old son heal from a serious injury. Showstack’s son’s growth plate had fractured in a gruesome car accident, and doctors weren’t sure his leg would grow. Showstack attributes his son’s full recovery to Lee’s intervention.
Lee is constantly doing experiments to test the limits of qigong. Right now he’s interested in storing chi, taking his body’s energy and transferring it into large bins of dried soybeans. He says these beans can be used to heal people, just like his hands can transfer energy to patients. Pulling out his iPad, Lee shows me a video of an inconsolable child who stops crying when plopped into an enormous container of beans.
“It’s an energy that’s completely untapped,” says Bill E. Emmes, one of Lee’s students and collaborators on the bean tests. “It’s a way of life that has existed outside the United States for centuries, and people here scoff at it.”
I have trouble believing these claims. Lee’s practices transgress my comfortable division between religion and science. I like to confine the mystic to one hour on church Sundays, where it won’t interfere with a carefully constructed world of science and observation.
I call Peter M. Wayne, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, to get his opinion. Wayne has practiced qigong and tai chi for over 40 years, learning traditional Chinese medicine while he mastered cutting-edge biochemistry.
“There are people who have accumulated skills through traditional training who have information that’s worth exploring,”Wayne says. “We shouldn’t coo-coo these things. Just because we can’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring.”
Wayne explains how these practices work. Tai chi is effective in preventing older people from falling—not only because it strengthens the legs and increases flexibility, but also because it heightens attention, Wayne says. As people practice tai chi, they become more aware of their body in space and less vulnerable to lapses of control, he adds.
It was less clear to me how the qigong treatments—which resemble normal massages—could work, but they might also have a biological mechanism: biofields. Wayne explains that the human body produces electric and magnetic fields measurable through EEGs and MRIs. Perhaps, Wayne suggests, people could manipulate their fields to change those of others. He is careful to clarify there is no convincing evidence either way at this time.
As for the beans, Wayne links it to the long tradition of homeopathy, but is not dismissive. “I think the jury hasn’t even been assembled, much less being out,” he says.
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Lee never married, but he is a part of a warm kung fu family. His students praise his unusual approach to teaching, which mimics his gentle go-with-the-flow path through life. “He sort of lets things go, until you get to a certain point where you look like you’ve figured it out, and then he’ll offer advice,” Showstack says. “It’s a different way of teaching.”
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Timothy J. Lavallee, student of Yon Lee, goes through a few of his warmup exercises. KRYSTAL K. PHU
“He let me discover [qigong] myself,” says W. Vincent Rocha, a student of Showstack and Lee who has been practicing martial arts for almost 30 years. “You kind of teach yourself by watching how he responds to it.”
“Master Lee is very giving,” says Deb A. Sukeforth, another student at the Sunday session. “He will share, share anything you want, you know. And try to help you understand it.”
People never seem to remember exactly how Lee came into their lives. He simply became visible, like a flower exposed by melting snow. Robert J. Kiely, who served as master of Adams House when Lee first became affiliated with Harvard, says Lee just “appeared” and offered to teach tai chi to Adams House residents.
“He’s a character, the way we are all characters, but he just brings extraordinary depth and breadth to undergraduate houses,” says John G. “Sean” Palfrey ’67, one of the current faculty deans of Adams House. “What we’re trying to build is that diversity of personality and opinion and knowledge.”
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Lee has a unique worldview, which he describes as simultaneously Christian, Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian, all steeped in tai chi. Though he is devout in each of these traditions, Lee does not believe they are in conflict.
“They’re all basic principles of being, helping one another, and being benevolent and compassionate,”Lee says. The “concepts” and “methods” are different, he explains, but they share the same real-world practice.
Lee’s take on these traditions undermines the power structures of the everyday. The meek inherit the earth, the poor barefoot doctor cures the country with only a box of needles, and the nonviolent win the street fight. Is it fantasy to think injustice can be undone by belief? When I’m with Lee, I sense something very real here—a subtle, slow-moving current of good flowing deep below the surface of our world.
He taught me that to defend myself, all I had to do was twist my arms and send the shock of a punch back into the person who threw it. Forces of violence, like a physical strike or the troubles that paralyzed Chinatown for years, could be matched by a small twist. To Lee, affordable housing and kung fu are two sides of the same coin.
His philosophy is a quiet one. He’s not a prophet, and he has no ambitions to change the world. “Now that I’m semi-retired, I just do whatever I want,” he says. “No particular aim.” He spends his time with friends, shaping the world he has into one with a bit more compassion and wonder.
A few days ago, I sent a simple email to Lee, asking about his day-to-day life.
He replied with a short manifesto: “I practice my tai chi and spend my days and nights dreaming and mimicking Nature in infinite ways imaginable.”
