First, most gangsters, be they Californian or Taiwanese, have no great interest in learning or practicing any kind of martial arts. If gangsters are going to attack someone they rely on:
Surprise
Outnumbering the victim/opponent
Using a club, knife or gun
I can't agree. sorry. still, what street gang doesn't do this?
Gangsters do not rely on some in depth knowledge of martial arts. In fact stabbing or shooting someone to death is quite easy and requires no training whatsoever. It simply requires the willingness to do it and getting the victim by surprise or by superior numbers.
of course not. if they have a gun they will use it. but to say they don't have an interest or rely on some martial knowledge is incorrect. sorry. what happens when you don't have your brothers or a weapon? on the other side of the coin, gangster will choose a martial art to get away from the street gang life.
Gangsters generally like their whiskey and their women and tend not to be the kind of guys who bother with learning martial arts. To the extent they know how to fight that knowledge came from on the job training. And they see no reason for formal martial arts, most gangsters have a fair amount of contempt for organized martial arts.
you are totally missing the point that many gung fu schools are connected to the tongs. the tongs specifically hire gung fu people to train their fighters. These days there's nothing going on so you don't see gangs around chinatown that much anymore. I've never met a chinese gangster that had any kind of contempt for a gung fu school. maybe in taiwan, but not in San Francisco to say the least. But, there are gung fu schools the despise gangsters too.
The upshot being, I doubt seriously if gangsters ever really had much to do with Chinese martial arts. The village arts of southern China were developed either as temple entertainment or for use in village militia (yes, I meant temple entertainment---a type of folk dance performance). In any event they had, at least based on the historical documents I have seen (which are few and far between by the way), nothing to do with gangsters.
The problem you get, and you see it quite a bit in Taiwan, is that there is kind of a gangster chic. Everyone wants to hint or kind of claim that they know some gangster and that that gangster is a dangerous dude who knows some obscure form of martial art. It just does not jibe with the reality of things.
Incorrect again. sorry. But then again, that depends on what you're calling a gangster. still, one of the most notorious SF chinatown gangsters (now reformed) was into both Hung Gar and Choy Lee Fut.
Being a "Militia" school as you termed it means they were training for real combat and not FOLK DANCING. My lineage of gung fu back in china participated in every major revolution in china from 1851 to 1949. They even came to the aid of China during the Japanese Invasion.
Last edited by hskwarrior; 08-18-2011 at 06:39 PM.
Hung Sing Boyz, we gottit on lock down
when he's around quick to ground and pound a clown
Bruh we thought you knew better
when it comes to head huntin, ain't no one can do it better