Harvard's Tai Chi Master
BY DREW C. PENDERGRASS, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
FEBRUARY 15, 2018 KELLY LUO AND KRYSTAL K. PHU
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Master Yon G. Lee, Harvard’s chief instructor of kung fu and tai chi, draws an old sword from a leather hilt. Turning around, he hands me the weapon. Half a dozen other students look on.
Lee, who turns 70 next month, is a short, slender man with thin silver hair. He wears a white crewneck sweatshirt advertising the Harvard Tai Chi Tiger Crane Club, which he has advised for over a decade.
The sword is heavy and sharp. It cuts through a cardboard box like butter. He has me practice a few simple motions, and then asks me to stab him in the throat.
“Excuse me?” I reply.
Lee takes the point of the sword and places the metal on the fleshy area just above his collarbone. I stand frozen, white-knuckling the hilt, not putting an ounce of force into the blade. Lee complains I am not stabbing him hard enough. He calls over Michael R. Showstack, a tough Bostonian who has run a kung fu school for more than a decade. Showstack grabs my arms and shoves down impossibly hard.
Lee’s face narrows in intense concentration. The sword bows downward, buckling under the sudden force of Showstack’s push. Everything happens too fast. Seconds later, Showstack relents. The sword drops away.
Lee is perfectly fine. A deep indentation appears in his neck, but no blood. He explains that he directed his “chi”—energy he believes permeates every living thing—to his neck, which protected him from the blade. Lee moves on as if nothing happened.
I stare at my hands and touch the tip of the sword to assure myself it’s real. My stomach feels wobbly and nauseous. Guilty and exhilarated, I think I understand what it was like for an audience member to saw Harry Houdini in half. And like that volunteer, I have no idea how to explain what’s going on.
Yon Lee demonstrates a diversion against the force from our FM writer's punch. KRYSTAL K. PHU
A few feet away from us, a class of about 30 people listen to a lecture about qigong, a traditional Chinese healing method. We’re in the office of Lee’s acupuncturist (called the Oriental Culture Institute), who allows Lee to use the space on Sundays to practice with his most advanced students. It makes for a strange environment, but Lee’s intense demonstrations barely raise eyebrows.
Lee and his students refer to each other as a kung fu family. They come from radically different walks of life, from Harvard and from Chinatown, from the suburbs and from Southie. While I am baffled by this world where swords glance off skin, they laugh and take it in stride. Lee pulls the strange threads of this family together. His friends include the faculty deans of Adams House and former mayor of Boston Raymond L. Flynn, who worked with Lee to purge criminal gangs from Chinatown in the early nineties.
Some say Lee—tai chi master, Harvard fixture, sword-repeller—can even cure broken bones.
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Timothy J. Lavallee, a student of martial arts who has known Lee for ten years, picked me up around 9:30 a.m. that morning. Lavallee practices with Lee every Sunday and volunteered to drive me from Cambridge to Quincy, Mass., where the Institute is located. He has short white hair and a small stud in his left earlobe. He was listening to Wu-Tang Clan when he picked me up, but turned it off so we could talk. There was an animal jawbone in the backseat of his car, but I didn’t bring it up.
At around 10 a.m., we arrived at a slablike brick office building with a mediocre burger joint on its ground floor. We took a shaky elevator up to the fifth floor, where we were greeted by a view of Quincy’s church steeples and colonial brick.
The Institute comprises a large central room with a few closed doors at the margins. The open space has the unresolved quality of a “Where’s Waldo?” picture. Several ceiling panels are missing. What appear to be small camera lenses are glued to every surface in the area, including on a snowglobe containing the Buddha. “Shhhhh…. Live Guinea Pig Class In Progress,” declare several homemade signs. I see no trace of any guinea pigs.
At the entrance, next to a wooden folding screen, stands a massive yellow M & M character. It’s holding a large tray above its head, filled with smaller statues of M & Ms. In fact, the room is filled with M & M paraphernalia. Paper cups lie throughout the room, filled with M & Ms. One smaller red M & M is dressed like Elvis Presley.
An M&M; statue greets visitors by the door of the Oriental Culture Institute. KRYSTAL K. PHU
Between the unseen-but-oft-alluded-to guinea pigs and the truly unfathomable volume of M & Ms, Lavallee warmed up for the tai chi lesson. As he made the signature smooth, slow movements of the practice, I sat in a leather chair off to the side to wait for Lee. A tall man walked over to me from the qigong lecture on the other end of the room. He wordlessly handed me a large oyster shell with a camera lens and five magnets glued to the swirling mother-of-pearl inside. He motioned for me to put it on my stomach and also placed a heavy board laden with magnets under my foot. Then he walked away. I sat like this for several minutes before I quietly placed the objects back on the table.
Lee arrived 30 minutes late, but nonetheless walked in with an assured air that informed us we were, in fact, early. Yet there wasn’t a drop of arrogance in him. He is like a force of nature in that way—the rain falls when it falls and Lee arrives when he arrives. He moves through the world unlike anyone I have ever met. I would later learn Lee describes most major events in his life as a result of being in “the right place at the right time.”
Lee has no agenda, though he does have things he would like to teach. He apologized to us for the delay, his voice never rising above a whisper.
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