On a summer afternoon at Seven Rays bookstore in Syracuse, NY, I had the pleasure of meeting with Sifu Sharif Bey, the Chief Instructor for the Syracuse Branch of Yee's Hung Ga International Kung Fu Association.  Though he has been teaching for six years and officially accepting closed-door students for over three years, Sifu Bey came to my attention only recently after announcing that his school was officially opening its doors to the public.

Hung Ga is a Southern Chinese Kung Fu style. As such it has certain qualities in common with Wing Chun, a Southern style that I study.  Both styles incorporate the idea of the five animals or five Chinese elements, for example – concepts that incorporate fighting strategies and physical expressions whose qualities directly counter one another.  Characterized by low, stable, powerful stances, with an emphasis on "tiger" techniques and extended postures that bring to mind "long fist" Kung Fu styles, Hung Ga is nothing if not traditional.  While there are many in the martial arts and self-defense community who scoff at the concept of traditional martial arts for self-defense, Sifu Bey is confident that Hung Ga provides mental, emotional, and physical benefits that include practical personal protection.

I met with Sifu Bey and one of his intermediate students, 23-year-old Ireality El.  Ireality has trained with Sifu Bey for three years.  Bey, 36 and a resident of the Syracuse area for the last 13 years, has been training under Sifu Frank Yee since 1987.  Sifu Yee travels from China to the United States four times a year to oversee all testing and the annual Hung Ga tournament, which will be held this year on September 27 at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Teaneck/Hackensack campus.

Sifu Bey (in white shirt, left, with Sifu Frank Yee) now has about a dozen students of his own.  He began his martial arts training with Tae Kwon Do at the age of five.  Later in life he studied Wing Chun Kung Fu before settling on the Hung Ga style.  According to Sifu Bey, Hung Ga (which means, literally, "Hung Family") was the fighting style of a revolutionary fraternal organization that came into notoriety during the Ming and early Ching Dynasties.  There are at least two different lineages of Hung Ga studied in the United States today.  Yee's Hung Ga is the less prevalent of the two, the rarer of the lineages.

So what makes Hung Ga an effective self-defense art?  

"One of the things we emphasize is the total, uninhibited expression of the self-honest expression of the art," Sifu Bey explained.  "Its history, medicine, combat, weapons...  We want our students to learn why you are doing what you are doing."  He went on to point out that Hung Ga, originally, came from a turbulent time in China's history in which the possibility of spies and infiltrators was of great concern.  The art was intended as a close-range means of assassination.

"Could someone wishing to disparage Hung Ga then mischaracterize it as a close-range killing art, a violent murder system?" I countered.

"Wow," Sifu Bey chuckled.  "That's a good question.  All martial arts could be looked at that way, and that's the honest truth.  It's what we do with it that makes the difference.  We don't train killers.  We train good people.  We train martial artists.  Now, we preserve the points of martial society, don't get me wrong.  In a chess club, if you have a dispute, you pull the board out.  In martial society it's done a different way.  So we give honor and respect to that and we also preserve that principle.  And that's what makes the art effective.  Nowadays often you have a separation between the art and what makes the art effective, because it's a business.  Who's going to pay 120 dollars a month to get beat up?  But that's the only way to learn it."

I asked Sifu Bey's student, Ireality, what brought him to Hung Ga and to Sharif Bey.

"I've always been interested in the martial arts in general," he told me.  "I just happened to be privileged to be a friend of Sharif beforehand.  I was in a period of my life when I wanted to start training hardcore... I asked him if he would be my Sifu and he accepted."

"What benefits have you seen from your training?" I asked.

"I think it's great," he said earnestly.  "Emotionally, I'm definitely way more in control.  ...Right now, I'm in a place of calmness where I can make more rational decisions versus jumping on my emotions.  Also physically, of course, the benefit is obvious.  And, mentally, I feel sharper."

One of the things that characterizes Sifu Bey's Kung Fu instruction is the full-contact nature of the training, a gradual conditioning process that builds to fairly impressive force used among the students and their teacher.

"We do a controlled manner of contact," Sifu Bey explained, telling me that new students are not simply beaten and bruised after they walk through the door.  "It's not conducive to the learning experience to just jump in and start contacting.  You can do that without any training.  You can just go throw blows, throw punches and kicks with somebody.  We have a progressive, a very closely observed progression, of skills that we work up to a point before we start doing certain things in the way of contact.  We keep it the old traditional way.  Nowadays, unfortunately, that has become a bad word, because most traditional schools have lost that traditional fighting skill.  As a result they have great looking forms and good explanations, but no usage."

The benefits to his methods, Sifu Bey explained, are immediately apparent.  "I took them to a Karate tournament about a year and a half ago," he says of his pupils.  "I told them, look, I've got to put you guys in Brown Belt division [even though they were beginning and intermediate students].  They cleaned house.  Our standards are a little bit higher.  As far as fighting, they scared the living daylights out of most of the people there.  So it was assumed that not only do we spar hard, but that we hit each other hard.  Nothing could be further from the truth."

What his students do, in fact, is condition their arms and legs by hitting trees and by using each other in performing various drills.  While sparring is indeed a part of their their training, it is the drills on which they count to impart certain elements of combat experience.  The drills are done without distractions and additions that Sifu Bey considers impractical – such as padding.

"You won't experience padding on the street," Sifu Bey laughed.  "It would be nice, but you won't."  He went on to explain one of the basic drills in which his students engage, the Three Star Drill.  He demonstrated the drill with Ireality.  The two men struck the "three star" target points, their forearms and shins slamming into each other.  Sifu Bey explained that once the student gets past the basic conditioning phase, the Three Star Drill allows him or her to experience full contact combat with a live opponent, without pads and without fear of harm.  "It teaches us one big thing you hear a lot of people [in the martial arts] lacking," Sifu Bey said.  "That's the ability to unload.  Contact is not the norm if you are training to pull.  If you're training to pull, no matter how hard you try to hit the guy in real life, you're going to pull.  With this drill, there's no pulling at all.  It's a live body, bone to bone, muscle to muscle."

All students, Sifu Bey told me, are started very gradually.  "If it starts to hurt, we ease up."  His students have experienced very little in the way of injury, though of course there is the usual bruising one would expect from hard training.  "It's the old, traditional way," Sifu Bey reiterated.  "It's very controlled – not because we're scared of people getting hurt, but because you can't progress when you're injured."

I pressed Sifu Bey regarding Hung Ga's application as a practical self-defense art.  He explained that the style's fundamental principles involved the development of explosive power through good foundation.  "Our kicks are our stances and our stances are our kicks,"  he told me, demonstrating another drill in which he and Ireality – in low horse stances – attempted to push and pull one another with their legs, moving from the horse stance to the "bow stance."  The objective for each partner is to collapse the other's structure.   "He has to be able to absorb my power and direct it into the ground so he doesn't lose his structure,"  Sifu Bey explained.  Losing one's foundation, he elaborated, means losing the platform from which strikes are launched.

Hung Ga, as Sifu Bey told me, is characterized by the following:

• Strong foundations and the development of explosive power, both "hard" and "soft"
• The use of various sounds for the generation of certain types of power – low, gutteral sounds for heavy lifting or deep striking, higher sounds for jumping, etc.
• A heavy emphasis on bridging principles

Hung Ga teaches twelve bridging principles, which are principles for closing with an opponent (often with the forearms).  "A bridge is a connection between you and the opponent," Sifu Bey explained.  "A bridge is a method of crossing through your opponent's 'doors' while keeping your own 'doors' closed."  Both "hard bridges" and "soft bridges" are used where appropriate.  The bridging drills in which Hung Ga practitioners engage are similar to Wing Chun's chi sao ("sticky hands") practice, substituting bridging techniques for the touch-reflexes of Wing Chun.

Speaking at greater length on Hung Ga's low stances, Sifu Bey again spoke of the power of the style.  "We are sometimes characterized as a 'slow style,'" he admits, "but our emphasis is on foundation first, then later speed.  Stances are training methods to train methods of movement, but they're done in static postures.  In reality, our kicks are our stances and our stances are our kicks."  He went on to demonstrate a concept shared by several styles – that of "shadow kicking," attacks made with the legs that are not perceived as such until it is too late.

"But how," I asked, "does this translate to self-defense pragmatically?"

"Our system, as opposed to some other systems," Sifu Bey responded, "is more skill oriented as opposed to technique oriented.  We could show a collection of techniques to anyone through the Three Star Drill.  We could show them [the various hand techniques].  We could show that to anyone, but without the skill and the conditioning they are not going to be able to use it as well as someone else who has developed the skill."

"What if the prospective student counters that this is all too stylized and therefore of limited use?" I asked.

"An old traditional saying is that real Kung Fu is always felt, it's never seen," Sifu Bey smiled.  "It's hard to get across to people the 'inch power,' a mainstay with most all the Southern Chinese systems.  It's really a hard thing to get across unless you touch.  Unless they see for themselves, 'Okay, that works.'  ...From the training, from the skill...we're going to have a much different effect."

One manifestation of this involves Hung Ga's use of "tiger" techniques, Sifu Bey elaborated.  "Our emphasis on tiger claw is very important, not just because it's deadly, but because it is versatile, it affords us a lot of options.  ...It will end the conflict and end the conflict in such a way that very few people will know what happened."  He spoke of the development of gripping power and of striking various nerves and pressure points.

The Hung Ga techniques demonstrated for me included a lot of linear, extended arm striking, with both vertical and horizontal fists (emphasizing the appropriate knuckles for each).  The style contains both linear and circular techniques, just as in Wing Chun, and both arts emphasize simultaneous blocking and striking.

Weapons training in Sifu Bey's school involves extensive use of traditional weaponry, such as the broadsword, saber, pole (staff), tiger fork, kwan dao, "mother sun knives" (the butterfly swords known to many Kung Fu practitioners), spears, and iron fan.  The mechanics of these traditional weapons translate to defense and offense with contemporary weapons such as knives, according to Sifu Bey, who told me about an incident in which his teacher swung his coat like a broadsword to whip a pair of would-be muggers.  The weapons training also enhances the Hung Ga practitioner's empty-hand abilities, as one might expect.

Regarding training to defend against knives and firearms, Sifu Bey was realistic.  "We train. above and beyond everything else. the psychological component.  The psychological component in combat for us is that you're going to get hit.  You have to be able to function at the optimum after you've been hit.  The assumption is that you're going to get cut.  We talk about what we will allow to be cut and where we won't take a cut.  ...We don't seek to disillusion students... but we don't train you to think that you won't get cut in a knife fight."

Sifu Bey and Ireality demonstrated for me a typical Hung Ga defense against a choke attack.

Ireality (left) attacks Sifu Bey.

Sifu Bey counters by collapsing Ireality's arm.

Driving forward, Sifu Bey strikes low...

...And then moves higher, collapsing Ireality's stance.

Sifu Bey encourages those interested in Hung Ga to visit the Yee's Hung Ga website.  He can be reached by phone at 315.876.2645.  "Come meet with us, watch a class, take a couple of free classes," he offered. 

More (Unrelated) Hung Ga Photos: 1, 2, 3

"What we do is based on developing the family structure, the family relationship," Sifu Bey told me.  "If I'm accepting a student I'm basically showing them how to kill me.  So you want to develop that bond.  Also, to show real progress in what we do takes a little time.  You want to allow the individual to be able to see the process.

"This is something that everyone can do.  The art has a lot to offer."