Woman. Warrior. Writer. 04-24
Vol. 5 No. 5 04-22-24
Aloha,
May’s WWW feature will be heading to you soon, but while working on my memoir I remembered something…a bonus moment that happens as we remember across time.
When I was at UC Santa Barbara I used to teach women and children Pa Sa Ryu. This is a martial arts form started by Dad’s maternal cousin Kang Rhee. He passed away in 2019 and was probably best known as Elvis Presley’s instructor.
Kang Rhee immigrated from post-war Korea. He told me when he arrived he road a bicycle around Memphis and guzzled an entire carton of milk. Legend had it when he first arrived he said the words “Follow me” and with that, the studio would snap to attention and give a loud and low gi-yup. Back then, it was all men in the studio. He was on the circuit with Bruce Lee in Madison Square Garden and was one of the earliest people to bring martial arts to the US.
I studied with him when I lived in Memphis. What impressed me about his school was that while the South often was socially segregated, at his studio I saw all ages and ethnicities. His teaching was often met with controversy. When he came back from a long stay in Korea and taught Tae-Kuk, similar to Chinese Qi-Gong, apparently a large number of his black belts left the school as they inferred he was trying to brainwash them. Rhee was a Baptist. Moreover, martial arts are linked to Asian philosophy and thought, so anyone studying the arts needs to understand how they are tied on a fundamental level to cultural ideas of enlightenment and thought. Try telling that to people in 1980s Memphis.
Rhee told me to teach Pa Sa Ryu when I got back to California. I started teaching children and added a women’s class. I realized that women would really benefit from martial arts training, but were often at an immediate disadvantage upon entering class because of how they had been conditioned to play and use their bodies as kids. They needed pre-training to give themselves permission to kick—and hard. To punch. To knee. To yell. Once they got going, women were all in. Hip size. Focus. Women can really kick hard. But to start, women often had to shed a lot of ideas about how to engage. So I started to teach women the basics, a pre-class so that they were ready to start their training.
It occurred to me today that this foreshadowed me teaching writing workshops for women. (I began to teach writing in Hong Kong—I’ll write more about that later.) I recognized that sometimes we need spaces that allow us to voice our stories, that do not judge the kind of experiences we have had or that we imagine, and that lessen our charged emotional feelings so that we can write.
I’ll be frank. Craft is taught by many people. But craft IS NOT the biggest challenge for women who write. The greatest obstacle to writing is personal fear and vulnerability. We need to muster up the courage to write the story that everyone told us to shut up about. This is often the story that only we can write and one that makes people feel uncomfortable, but guess what. Good art makes people uncomfortable. It shifts perspective. Good writing provides deliverance. We say YES, that is what it felt like. we say YES, that is what we too imagine. It’s all new, and yet it echoes with familiarity as it is the human experience we can cannect to. I taught Pa Sa Ryu decades ago! So the trajectory of my life, I think, does make sense! So yeah, check out Break: Write Your Divorce Story and Women’s Creative Writing Workshop. For those on-island, I’m doing a live workshop too Master Narratives.
I’m live this month in Honolulu! Authors Jasmin Iolani Hakes who gives awesome writing advice about facing your fear and Elise Hu who gives us the lowdown on K-beauty, technology and feminism are coming to Dashop. I am exited to be in conversation with these women who show us that there is power in standing in our stories.
Questions? Email me @ writer@drstephaniehan.com Hope to see some of you online or live!
Aloha,
Stephanie
P.S. Support scholarships and financial aid for women writers who want to attend by getting some WWW merch from the Bonfire store