THE SCHOOL

The Choy Lai Fut Martial Arts Hall is what we would like to think of as a very traditional Chinese kungfu school. It was created in June of 2002, as a result of years of hard work and sweat on the part of the instructors. We were originally happy to simply study with our teacher, Grandmaster Wong Ha, at his school (Wong Ha Athletic Association) on Jackson Street, and assist in teaching all of the other students -- the thought of opening our own school was far from our thoughts, because we had already spent the last decade with him, and of course there is always more to learn from a teacher as wise and experienced as our teacher.

Most find it hard to believe, but in the last decade we have been training with our teacher literally seven days a week with only a few rare exceptions throughout the year. On four of the seven days of the week, we would be teaching and practicing, and then on the other three days when all of the other students rested, we would come down to train in private with our teacher. We worked hard, and HE worked even harder to instill not only the skills of Choy Lai Fut within us, but also the traditions, historical background, and old battle stories.

A couple of years ago, our teacher started hinting that he wanted to see us with our own group of students, as he was thinking about his age (86 this year) and the future of the style. At that point, both of our day jobs were keeping us fairly busy as it was, so we basically adhered to the same training schedule as usual. At the beginning of 2002 however, we got increasingly strong hints from him that he wanted us to continue the lineage with our own branch of students, as soon as possible -- while he was still healthy and could enjoy seeing the progress of new students under our guidance.

And so...here we are.

Then we had the issue of choosing the 'right' name for our school. The English name was easy -- we knew that we were going to dedicate the school entirely to the study of Choy Lai Fut, period.

The Chinese name was a bit more difficult, and of course this was left to the decision of our teacher. He at first was going to name it "Wong Mei Choy Ga Ming Gwoon" which literally says "The Hali Wong Carmen Choy School" -- it is very common to name a martial arts school after the founder(s). However, he gave it some more thought, and decided finally that it would be "Hung Hsing Gung Fu Hok Yuen" which translates to "The Hung Hsing Kungfu Learning Institute". The name "Hung Hsing" sounds the same as the name of the ancestral Choy Lai Fut school in Ging Mui, China, but uses different Chinese characters. It was a good way to remind us and our future generations of our roots in China -- Grandmaster Wong Ha is extremely loyal to his own teacher and his ancestors, and it was important to him and to us that this sense of loyalty was passed down to future descendants of our style.

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