Introduction 1

NOTES Introduction 1. One immediately encounters a “term problem” in discussing a phenomenology of race. Terms such as “Chinese” and “white” suddenly become woefully inadequate (as if they were not so already). I try to address this problem in a straightfor- ward way: when I wish to call attention to the term problem within the context of my arguments, I place quotation marks around terms like “Chinese,” “Euro-American,” “foreigner,” “white,” et cetera. When I momentarily ask that the reader accept these categories, for example, in my discussion of Chinese history and Chinese American immigration, I refrain from using quotation marks. 2. Gongfu, commonly written in English as “kung fu,” also refers to “skill,” “work,” or “time.” The “kung fu” that has become part of American vernacular functions in English as a kind of catch-all term for Chinese martial arts, but it is more often used this way in Chinese, for example, when the conversation revolves around foreign practice of martial arts or when the term wushu is avoided. Wushu is the term for “martial arts” in Mandarin Chinese, but it has acquired a complicated association with performance-oriented martial arts that have little or nothing to do with combat training. Practitioners will usually refer to a particular art by its style name or family association. 3. The style is properly referred to as “Wu style taijiquan” (Wu shi taijiquan). When I conflate “Wu” and “Ma” family names, my purpose is to specify the lineage that has developed through the married couple of Ma Yueliang and Wu Yinghua. Wu Yinghua is the daughter of the creator of the Wu style, Wu Jianquan. Other branches of the Wu lineage have established schools in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Toronto, and Rotterdam. 4. This stylistic strategy recalls current and past debates in anthropology on the fictionalization of ethnography. In Works and Lives, for example, Geertz (1988) responds to criticisms of Ruth Benedict’s work by reconfiguring it in terms of liter- ature. See also Gordon (1990), Handler (1986), and Hurston (1970, 1995). 244 Notes 5. Anonymous interview, February 2001, Shanghai. Tape recorded. 6. Practitioners of Chinese martial arts refer to individual movements as “forms,” “postures (styles)” (shi), or “frames” (jia). In English, the words “form” or “posture” are commonly used to refer to individual movements. Each of these individual movements also has a name, for example, “single whip” (dan bian) or “downward posture” (xia shi). See Appendix I for a complete list of the Wu style taijiquan movements in sequence, translations of posture names, and a brief comment on the dif- ficulties associated with translation. 7. On the process and pitfalls of conducting fieldwork, see Powdermaker (1966), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Clifford (1988), and Foley (1995). 8. While the importance of learning about other people by doing what they do (as opposed to simply watching what they do) may seem obvious in regard to a project about martial arts and has numerous precedents, such methods have a somewhat tainted history in anthropology (Frank 2000b). Frank Hamilton Cushing, one of the early pioneers in exploring what Mauss referred to as “techniques of the body” (1973), was faulted by his peers for “going native” (Cushing 1979; Green 1979; Hinsley 1983). Likewise, because many of Carlos Castañeda’s claims to authenticity have not held up under scrutiny, his work continues to be discredited even though it outlines clear and useful methods for conducting phenomenological anthropology (Castañeda 1972; Silverman 1975; Brown 1977; De Mille 1980). More recently, Stoller (1997), Ots (1994), Sklar (1994), Chen (1995), Csordas (1993, 1994), and Kapchan (2003) have written detailed ethnogra- phies and theoretical statements that significantly legitimize phenomenological anthropology. 9. See Handler (1983, 1986, 1990), Clifford (1988), and Geertz (1988) for discussions of the relationship between ethnography and art. 10. Thanks to Neill Hadder at the University of Texas at Austin for ongoing dialogue regarding these connections. 11. Jackson (1996:19–20) notes Alfred Shutz’s comment: “The Life-world is the quintessence of a reality that is lived, experi- enced, and endured. It is, however, also a reality that is mas- tered by action and the reality in which—and on which—our action fails . Everyday life is that province of reality in which we encounter directly, as the condition of our life, natural and social givens as pregiven realities with which we must try to cope.” Notes 245 12. I would suggest that Derrida’s project has much in common with an earlier deconstructionist’s famous dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” 13. I take John Nelson’s A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (1996) as my inspiration for this approach to theory. 14. My best guess is that this term was coined by Peter Leyden (Michalski 2003). 15. For Marxist anthropologists, this implies some form of dialec- tical materialism. For others, it is a more abstract notion, Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis without the political economy, and for still others, the dialectic is the irreconcil- ability of antinomies, a symbol of the limits of reason, thesis and antithesis without synthesis, which, in folklorist Gregory Schrempp’s view of Greek and Maori cosmological dialectics, is essentially the argument that Kant develops in his Critique of Pure Reason (Schrempp 1992:5). Schrempp begins his book with a discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes that is particularly relevant to the discussion of how identity is constantly divided and redivided. “Zeno’s paradoxes,” Schrempp writes, “all revolve around portrayals of some kind of basic mental activity of ‘dividing up’ . As portrayed by Zeno, dividing is some- thing that takes place within, or produces, a consciousness of dividing or an idea dividing” (Schrempp 1992:8). For a rep- resentative application to the construction of identity and phenomenology of race, see Du Bois (1969) on “double consciousness.” 16. The term “transnation” replaces bulkier terms such as “trans- global processes” and “diasporic community.” I conceive the transnation as inclusive of both of these terms but specifically implying the formation of transnational communities that cross not only political borders but racial and ethnic borders as well. In a sense, I am further problematizing the term “diaspora” as well, since this term has come to denote ethnicity rather than practice. In this book, for example, one of the dias- poras that inhabit the transnation is the diaspora of taijiquan players. 17. While my recognition of Stevens’s resonance in regard to this project came independently, it is not surprising that other scholars have made similar links between poetry and phenomenology in their own work. Jackson (1996:41–42) points out the historical attraction of poetry to phenomenologists, citing Bachelard’s comment that “the origins of the poetic image . cannot be determined.” Jackson himself connects William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” with Husserl’s dictum “back to things themselves.” 246 Notes 18. Regarding Derrida’s notion of différance, Coole (2000:77) notes two definitions that echo Stevens: “the temporalization of deferral and spatial distribution of differences.” As Coole phrases it, there is no “coming-to-meaning.” I am arguing here that Stevens’s poetry reflects the technique of decon- struction, but rejects its outcome. 19. Edmund Blair Bolles argues that Einstein’s position on “the real” isolated him from many of his fellow physicists in the midst of the revolution occurring in physics during his time (Bolles 2004). In my view, it is no accident that Stevens and Einstein, coming from obviously very different perspectives, nevertheless shared certain viewpoints. Another near-contem- porary, William James, may also have been an influence on Stevens’s thought. Jackson (1996:4) notes James’s statement that “the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process.” Chapter 1: The Body: Daoism, Qi, and the Making of Social-Sensual Identities 1. By “gongfu brother,” I refer to membership in the same cohort within the Ma/Wu lineage. In this case, Chen began his study with Ma Yueliang several years before Qian did. Nevertheless, as two of the oldest and most skillful members of the JTA, they shared equal status. Chen, however, held the key position of secretary in the official hierarchy of the JTA. See Appendix II. 2. By 2001, the JTA did have association sweatshirts and base- ball-style caps, but members wore them only at occasional tournament or government-sponsored events. On a typical weekend, taijiquan players in Shanghai wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothing (e.g., warm-up suits). Either because they wish to make a statement about status or because they are on their way to work after taijiquan practice (among other rea- sons), some men will occasionally wear a suit and tie and some women will occasionally appear in a dress and high heels. Occasionally, a gongfu uniform makes an appearance, but in Shanghai parks, at least as of 2001, this was rare. 3. Unlike Japanese karate and judo or Korean tae kwon do, most Chinese martial arts eschew belt systems. This results in the double-edged sword of meritocracy existing side by side with unspoken hierarchies of lineage. In the JTA, for example, a skillful “younger brother” might refrain from defeating a less Notes 247 skilled “older brother” simply to avoid bringing any loss of face to the older brother. For some, the fiction might even con- tinue in private practice sessions. Note that in the JTA, members avoided kinship terms. Except in the case of the teacher, whom they referred to as either shifu or laoshi, members gen- erally used names to refer to one another.

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