You can only fight guys your size, with padded gloves, under a referee’s supervision and a physician’s care, for three minutes at a time before taking a one-minute break and sitting on your own stool in your own corner of a roped-off ring. You’ve got to keep your feet on the judo tatami and tie back your hair, and you can’t lock your fingers together or kick your way out of a grip. Even in the Wild West of Ultimate Fighting, it’s forbidden to bite, spit, curse, claw, pinch, throat-strike, head-butt, flesh-twist, eye-gouge, hair-pull, fishhook, groin-grab, heel-kick a kidney, head-kick a grounded opponent, or fake an injury. You must wear officially sanctioned shorts and “be clean and present a tidy appearance.”
Clean and tidy? We’ve become so civilized over the past hundred years, we’re denying what it was like for the previous two million. Worst of all, we’ve mothballed our deadliest weapon and taken our fascia out of the fight.
Except, as Fairbairn discovered long ago, when the sun went down on a certain Chinese waterfront.
Fairbairn first heard about Wing Chun while recovering from the beating he suffered when he first arrived in Shanghai as a new policeman in 1907. The name means “humming a song in the springtime,” and it nicely captures Wing Chun’s ease and apparent languor. Your stance is barely recognizable as a stance. You don’t put up your dukes to protect your head or clench your hands into tiger claws. Your hands are so loose and open, you could be playing patty-cake. But beneath that effortless appearance is a shrewd insight into the science of elastic energy.
If you’ve heard of Wing Chun, it’s probably thanks to Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr., who credits it with saving his life. Downey was one of the most promising young actors of the 1980s, but by 1996 he’d become a toxic menace. He was arrested for cocaine; for heroin; for crack; for carrying a concealed Magnum pistol; for breaking out of court-ordered rehab. One day he was arraigned on drug charges, then arrested again hours later for stumbling into a neighbor’s home in an apparent heroin stupor and passing out in his underwear in one of the children’s bedrooms. “It’s like I have a loaded gun in my mouth and my finger’s on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal,” Downey said shortly before he was sentenced to a year in prison and led off with his hands shackled to his waist. After he was released, Downey discovered Wing Chun and began training for hours at a time, often five days a week. Something about Wing Chun made him feel balanced and alive. It wasn’t the discipline; it was the sense that his body was finally doing what it was supposed to.
“Wing Chun teaches you what to concentrate on, whether you’re here or out in the world dealing with problems,” the actor explained once when a reporter joined him for a workout. “It’s second nature for me now. I don’t even get to the point where there’s a problem.”
“You don’t want to fight the truck,” Downey’s instructor added. “You want to step out of the way.”
Legend has it that Wing Chun is the only martial art invented by a woman. Ng Mui, it’s said, was studying at the Shaolin Temple when it was attacked by Qing dynasty soldiers. The temple was destroyed and monks were slaughtered, but the Five Elders—including Ng Mui—managed to escape. While Ng Mui was hiding in the forest, she saw a crane being ambushed by a wildcat at the side of a stream. There was no way the crane, with its two awkward legs, could survive the cat’s fangs, razor claws, and four-legged athleticism—yet it did, pivoting and twisting its wings until the cat was defeated by its own ferocity. The parallels to Ng Mui’s own situation were unmistakable, and she began transforming the lesson into a fighting style that would make her as formidable as any man. That meant solving the toughest puzzle of any martial art: surviving inside the “trapping zone.”
Whenever your opponent is close enough to grab you, you’ve entered his trapping zone. Boxers depend on the length of their jab and the quickness of their feet to escape the trapping zone, while karate and tae kwon do teach long, snapping kicks; the goal is to pop your opponent from a distance and keep as far from his hands as possible. The trapping zone rewards bulk and brute force; it neutralizes speed and skill. It’s the big man’s friend and the little guy’s nightmare—yet oddly, it’s where the feminine style of Wing Chun works best.
Wing Chun tells you to step right into the trap and make yourself at home. Don’t bob and weave or even turn sideways to offer a smaller target: just face your attacker, square up your feet, and wait for him to do his worst. But first, make sure to “mark your centerline.” The essence of Wing Chun is the belief that human power is strongest when it spirals up from your feet through the center of your body. You can access that centerline energy by following these four steps:
Slide your feet out to shoulder width.
Sink your thighs into the slightest of squats.
Cross your open hands in front of your crotch.
Then raise them chest high in that most instinctive of defensive positions—an X.
Now you’re ready for Sticky Hands to turn your opponent’s trapping zone into your own.
Sticky Hands is next-level wobble power. It takes your attacker’s force, merges it with your own, and slams the doubled-up energy right back at him. The key is body connection; as soon as he starts throwing punches, you lightly “stick” your hands to his, deflecting the blows rather than blocking them. When he cracks a hard right at your eye, you divert it with your left wrist and use his force to pivot you like a wheel around an axle. Now it’s your turn to hit, using the momentum of his push to power your right arm. He’s belting himself in the face with your fist.
“The hands are swinging doors, built on the fortress of legs,” the great Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man liked to tell his students. “Ip Man did not move a great deal,” one of his followers observed. “When someone punched at him, he moved just enough to avoid it, but when he attacked he went straight for his opponent’s center, either striking him or making him lose his balance.” Ip Man was just as stingy with his feet. The higher your foot, the more compromised your balance, so Ip Man only kicked low; never those big, crowd-pleasing head shots you see in tournaments, only short bug-stompers aimed at your knee, crotch, shin, or ankle. Wing Chun isn’t a spectator sport; it’s a science of crippling force, designed to end fights fast by hitting quickest where it hurts the most.
William Fairbairn was exactly the kind of guy who wasn’t supposed to be learning Wing Chun. China was suspicious of outsiders even when times were good, and the early 1900s were anything but. Chinese fighting secrets were for Chinese only, not to be shared with foreigners who could use the arts against them. But even though he was a blue-eyed Brit who’d been in Shanghai only a few months, Fairbairn had a chip to play. One of the duties of the empress’s security-and-intelligence force was to recover royal antiquities pillaged during the Boxer Rebellion, that disastrous uprising by Chinese militants against foreign influence in 1899. Fairbairn was a great resource for finding lost booty; between his raids on underworld dens, his contacts in the British military, and his relationship with the European nationals he helped protect, he could get leads on lost treasures the empress’s men had no hope of finding. In return, Fairbairn was allowed to train with Cui Jindong, the Wing Chun master who taught the empress dowager’s bodyguards.
Under Cui Jindong’s tutelage, Fairbairn learned something surprising: violence has a pretty thin encyclopedia. Every way you can think of to punch a windpipe or knee a groin, someone else figured it out ten thousand years ago. For self-defense, that was great news: if Fairbairn could master Sticky Hands, he could download every conceivable attack into his fascia memory and turn his body into an Automatic Response System. Like instinctive aim, Sticky Hands takes your higher brain out of the fight and activates your animal self. When an attacker grabs your wrist, up comes your elbow; if he tries to tackle you around the waist, your foot takes out his knee before he gets there. You don’t need to think or even see—just react.