Interview with Sifu Mimi Chan
Psst!
Hey, check this out…
I recently did an interview with the INCREDIBLE Sifu Mimi Chan!
Do you remember the kick-butt classic Disney movie “Mulan”?
Yeah, she was the model and video reference for the main character, Mulan!
Aside from being one of the faces of your childhood, she is also the daughter of famed martial artist, Grandmaster Pui Chan, dominated the kung fu tournament scene, and was named “Woman of the Year” by Inside Kung Fu Magazine.
The Wah Lum temple is promoted as the FIRST kung fu temple in the USA!
Oh yeah, and one other important thing; She is a super awesome and very nice person!
After entering the beautiful kung fu temple, I received the opportunity to watch a class in session. The class had the jovial yet focused energy of martial artists who truly love what they get to do and martial art teachers who truly love what they get to teach.
After a brief chat with the founder of the temple, Grandmaster Pui Chan, I headed out to grab a bite to eat and returned later that evening to conduct the interview.
Without further ado, here are the words of Sifu Mimi Chan and myself!
ME: For starters, I can’t say this enough: Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this.
SIFU MIMI CHAN: Well, I love martial art enthusiasts and you caught me on a very good day.
Perfect! Well, let’s get started. What would you consider the greatest accomplishment in your martial arts career to be?
Wow, that’s a really tough question. *laughs*
Starting off with the heavy hitters, right?
Only because, y’know, being a really traditional martial artist, I don’t feel as accomplished as I would like to be. It’s kind of that endless mountain peak that you’re always trying to reach.
But in terms of accomplishments, I would have to say that I am very proud of the fact that I am able and honored to proliferate the Wah Lum system for Grandmaster Chan who is, of course, my father. Especially as a female in a very male dominated industry / profession / art form.
It is 2018 but there are still a lot of strides to be met for gender equality so in a profession where it is very male dominated, I am very proud of the fact that I have been able to continue his legacy and continue his teachings as traditionally as possible and to the best of how he would want it carried out.
Definitely something to be proud of for sure. That’s excellent. So I was reading on the blog that you have, [by the way] you say you’re not a writer—
*laughs* I’m not a writer.
I say you have some nice stuff though. Anyway, you’ve gone to China and also taken some students on those trips as well, right?
Yes.
How have those trips impacted you and your students?
Well, our earlier trips—in terms of Wah Lum as a whole—started in I think 1982, so obviously there’s an evolution of how the trips have been organized and how they have been run and how the hotels work.
This last trip we just took in October 2018, we just returned from the Zhengzhou Shaolin International Festival. I took a large group of students there from…mostly around the USA but we also had students representing from Germany and Brazil, all under the US flag, under Wah Lum of USA, and so that was a big milestone for us because we had not been to that tournament in several years and we have a long standing relationship with them.
Of course, Grandmaster Chan being a disciple of the Shaolin temple and the current venerable of Shi Yan Xin, he’s Grandmaster Chan’s younger Buddha brother, so it’s always an honor to go there. For me, [with] the last few trips, it has been my primary purpose of bringing the students for a cultural exchange so that they can experience the roots of where kung fu originated. And y’know, every martial artist wants to go to the Shaolin temple, right? *laughs*
The “mystical” Shaolin which has in itself evolved and changed and I did like you said, I do blog about it and I have a podcast and I actually just talked about it on my podcast and how different it has become over the years.
Personally, I still value the experience in terms of every time that you see a martial artist that goes to China for the first time, [somebody] that hasn’t studied for a long amount of time, watching their reaction…it’s like watching kids at Christmas!
Christmas isn’t for me anymore. I don’t have tons of gifts and it’s not like when you are five years old but when you see a martial artists go and follow the roots and delve into the tradition to understand more of the culture and philosophy, that’s always very rewarding.
And in addition to Shaolin, for us particularly, we go back to Shacheng, which is where Grandmaster Chan’s village is, and they welcome us with open arms. It’s just amazing to be able to share how Wah Lum in the USA is coming back to China, where it began.
And for us that’s really the main goal of our trip. It’s to go back to our roots of the Wah Lum system and where our great grandmaster started and [they] started teaching grandmaster Chan in China. So that’s always very rewarding for our students and enriching as well.
Absolutely! So I’m going to switch it over to a teacher talk for a second. As a sifu (teacher), what was the transition from being just solely a student and transforming into the teacher role like for you?
It was probably not traditional in the sense of how my students now go to achieve becoming a sifu. Basically, they go through our traditional curriculum. You essentially start out as an assistant instructor in the school, maybe holding the bags for the little kids, and then you progress and move up through the ranks that way, so to speak.
I guess in some ways I followed that path but I mean, I started teaching since I was twelve because I had already been here since I was two. *laughs*
I was very deeply involved and I do actually try to hone a lot of my students down that path if it is something they are interested in because there is so much value in teaching. You learn so much about yourself and your kung fu.
And so for me, starting to teach at twelve, I really probably took a lot of it for granted to be honest. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I just kind of followed what I was expected to do. But the transition in terms of becoming a sifu was also not as traditional as it is today for the students today that go through [it].
It’s a more systematic process. At that time, probably by the time I was maybe 18 yr, is when I pretty much was starting to show up to the sifu tests that Grandmaster Chan proctors and has every 3 years because we do keep a very strict standard in the Wah Lum System. All of our sifu continuously, not just every three years, every year we have seminars and workshops and gathering and anniversaries and celebrations and shows. We’re always kind of uniting and coming together but for the tests itself, I started to jump into that realm at a very early age I think.
But y’know, everything is a little expedited when you are the grandmaster’s daughter and you decide you’re going to do kung fu. It’s a little different
That’s true. Expanding on that, how do you feel you have evolved as a martial artist over the years?
When I was three, I really probably wasn’t thinking very much that I was some sort of martial artist, y’know? And when I was in my, probably my lower teens, if you watched the documentary Pui Chan: Kung fu Pioneer, I do express that I wasn’t the biggest fan because all of my peers and friends got to play and watch cartoons on Saturdays morning whereas I came to kung fu class. So there was a bit of resentment of that.
But as I grew and matured into a young adult of say sixteen or seventeen, I really realized how impactful my father was to so many people and how he had really enriched and touched people’s lives. By that point on, I took my training that much more seriously and so when I decided and made a conscious effort to actually try, at that I felt that “Wow, I really just wasted sixteen years of not trying very hard” but sometimes that’s your path.
Your path is just to kind of be present and to experience something at whatever point that is. Like if an artist is doing art, I’m sure they look back and go “oh my god, 10 years ago, that painting…” but, I don’t know on a technical sense but from an artistic standpoint, that’s who you were at that point and growth is just growth. Even today, being both a student and teacher, you’re learning everyday.
For sure. There is definitely so much change that happens and not all of that is bad. You’ve gotta go through some different stages.
Looking at this school, it’s beautiful! It is absolutely amazing what your father has done here to start everything off with and you have continued that success very well.
Thank you! I’m trying my best.
What do you attribute the success of the school to?
Well, here at Wah Lum, the students finish up class with our philosophy of hard work. Kung fu, for us we interpret it as hard work and I would just say that we have been lucky that we have been able to follow an example. Grandmaster Chan leads by example.
He is the first one here, still to this day usually. He is usually found cleaning the grounds, up in the trees, fixing the fish, or mopping the floors. He leads by example and that leadership is contagious and that energy is contagious. If he is out there doing all of this physical [stuff] and also just pouring his heart and soul into something, that trickles down to all of leadership. All the sifu in the Wah Lum system emulate that style and hopefully our students try to emulate that. We just want positivity to be contagious and hopefully that’s the case.
Absolutely. Your father is definitely a great example. I got the chance to talk to him for a split second, more so in passing as I left class today. Alright, So I’ve got to go to, of course, the “Mulan Question”.
Of course *laughs*
How did you get involved in the “Mulan” field?
I believe it was in ’84, I may or may not be right, but that is when the China Pavilion at Epcot opened and from then on, we’ve had a long lasting relationship with Disney and Epcot and most of the theme parks in the central Florida area because we really are the Chinese martial art, Chinese traditional lion dance team, dragon dance, etcetera. So we had been doing shows in collaboration with them for years. I mean, right now we’re in December of 2018 and every holiday [season] from November to December we do like six shows a day, seven days a week.
Dang!
Our team is out there right now. And so, we do a lot of work with Disney and when they were doing the Mulan film, we went out to do some taiji seminars with the artists just to give them some inspiration. Disney is very thorough. They like everything to be very authentic. So of course, the artist did also go to China to look at the architecture and to experience everything. Anyway, we were doing a performance in taiji like I said and doing some breathing with them. We were performing and they were still looking for the face of Mulan and somebody to be that inspiration. Mark Henn, who is a fabulous animator and was the lead animator of that character at the time, was there and we met and he just really liked the fact that I was the around the same age *laughs* at that time.
As Mulan, I did kung fu, her father did kung fu, my father did kung fu. Y’know, everything was just so cohesive and I think he just liked the fact that I was a traditional martial artist and had that kind of spirit and…I don’t know, you’d have to ask him since he was the one who made the ultimate decision.
Seems like he made a good choice looking at how it has grown.
He did all the work really. I mean, it was fun. We did the live action video reference so its not how they do things now where they put those fun little dots on you and they do motion capture, it was not like that.
I literally had to jump off of a big box like where she jumps off a roof at the end and then they videoed that and then they rewatched it and rewatched it and then they just…they draw. At that time it was traditional animation so it was very different.
Sounds like “Kung fu” right there; a kind of hard work. Alright, so last question, I know you have to go. Do you have any advice for a martial artist who feels they are too young or too old to begin training?
We don’t like putting limits on things. Especially at Wah Lum, we’re all about breaking boundaries and breaking rules in that sense. We do start them closer to three years old because we do like the kids to be potty trained. There is something developed mentally [as well].
Not just because of the potty thing but there is something developmentally that happens when a child is potty trained. They go through a little bit of a switch and at that time also is a good time for them to get some exposure of being away from their parents and having a little independence, dealing with separation anxiety.
So that’s a good age but not all kids are ready at that age. Really, in terms of how young they should start, I wouldn’t put a number on it. I would really judge it more on case by case in terms of how well the child interacts in a group environment and what they’ve already been exposed to. But generally, three years old.
And I think age is the limit, as Grandmaster Chan shows us every day. I think as long as we are aging well and we are moving while we are aging, then we are going to age well and hopefully maintain healthy lifestyles.
Sounds good to me. Well again, thank you so much for taking the time to do an interview today.
My pleasure.
I had a blast experiencing the amazing culture of the Wah Lum Temple and and talking to Sifu Mimi Chan!
To keep up to date with Sifu Mimi Chan and the Wah Lum Temple, be sure to check out her social media links and online blog/podcast!
Culture Chat with Mimi Chan (Blog/Podcast)
For superb martial art training and a cultural experience, be sure to check out the Wah Lum Temple in Orlando, Florida, as well!
