I met Chan Tai San the first semester I was in college, it was the mid 80's, Chinatown was mostly Cantonese, with the Vietnamese thing happening. We later in time had some trouble with the Vietnamese gangs and that's one reason we left Chinatown, to be done with the BS....

I spent 16 years actually training with him, then the last few years he was semi-retired and I was running my own school.

Sifu Chan never learned to speak English. I guess in retrospect he never needed to, his students all started learning Cantonese to study with him! More than a few teachers over they years asked him (and us) how the heck that happened as they often couldn't even get their students to learn the technique names even.... The reason was sifu Chan, what he offered.

Sifu Chan was a complicated person, in some respects the power of his kung fu knowledge was the counterweight to his difficult personality.

A few months into my learning with Sifu Chan, I closed my school and said I wanted to follow Sifu Chan and become part of his lineage. Since my Chinese was still basicly non-existant at the time, Sifu Chan asked a friend of his, a student of Hung ga teacher Wan Chi Min, to translate. We met at Mandarin Court on Mott Street for tea and the student of Wan Chi Min's translated, as well as warned us...

He asked us (me, Steve ventura, Laurett) if we were really ready for what this was going to take. At the time, it seemed a stupid question, in retrospect, I now know what he meant. He said many people had wanted to learn from Sifu Chan, but following him was not an easy path. I had my share of horror stories training with sifu over the years, and they PALED compared to what he did with other students. He beat a few students in Canada with a stick once. He casually mentioned that he'd KILLED a few of his students in China. The one time he slammed me against the wall and choked me seemed mild in comparison.

When sifu passed this year, we sat with his family. Even they had very little to do with him in his life. For the most part, they found him a bad tempered man who only knew his way, who had not been much of a husband, much of a father, much of a grandfather. His students spent more time with him than his own family. In some respects, we put on blinders, because what we wanted was his kung fu, and his kung fu was ultimately worth whatever it took, really, it was like the X Files. Every year I got that sense more and more...