Every Sunday in the rec room of the Chinese Christian Alliance Church, Bob Ong can be found teaching kung fu to a small but dedicated group of students.
"This is leopard strike, remember when we did the leopard last class?” he asks.
Ong curls his fingers halfway, not quite into a fist, and then thrusts the leopard claw forward — the strike.
His class, made up of teenagers to retirees, follows his movements carefully — slow, graceful and fluid.
"One thing that I really emphasize is how to be smooth and how to be soft, and how to really adapt your body to the way it moves," said Ong.
Chinese kung fu, he explains, is all about conserving your energy. And when the timing is right, that's when you attack.
Ong is drawing upon more than 60 years of experience. He’s been practicing kung fu nearly his entire life, starting at the age of 6 in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960s.
At the time, a new wave of immigration from China to the U.S. was taking place. It was after the 1943 appeal of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely restricted Chinese immigration for more than half a century. Even then, a quota of 105 people a year continued. But in 1965, those restrictions were lifted, too.
Ong, who was born in the U.S., watched the American landscape shift and grow.
Eventually, his kung fu teacher would arrive in this wave. He was a disciple of Shaolin monks, the originators of one of the oldest and most influential forms of martial arts: Shaolin kung fu.
“I was very fortunate that I was introduced to my shifu — or sifu in Cantonese,” said Ong, referring to the term for “master.”
“It’s about controlling your energy. That's why kung fu is so smooth. You can decide how much you want to fight or how little you want to fight. Same thing in real life — you come at somebody softly, you have more power, you don’t need to argue.”Bob Ong
He says his grandfather told him to start training, and “when your grandfather tells you to do something, you don’t question him,” Ong laughs.
“Nobody knew what I was doing when I was going into this basement, this dingy basement, and spending hours with my sifu, who had really taught me the old-fashioned way, which was a lot of discipline and a lot of pain,” he said.
More than just physicality
Learning kung fu was arduous, but at the same time, Ong said he felt like he was doing something that was “cosmic and very special.”
He learned that kung fu isn’t just about physicality — there’s a philosophy behind the centuries-old practice as well.
“It’s about controlling your energy,” Ong says. “That's why kung fu is so smooth. You can decide how much you want to fight or how little you want to fight. Same thing in real life — you come at somebody softly, you have more power, you don’t need to argue.”
One day, Ong witnessed his sifu put those teachings into action. He and two other students were walking with him down Canal Street, the main drag of Chinatown.
“These three guys approach us, and they start to accost us — they want to have a fight,” said Ong, “Lao sifu (old master) takes us and then pushes us back against a wall ... and all of a sudden, there’s three bodies lying on the ground.”
When people see how “rapid and quick” kung fu really is, Ong says, “they’re flabbergasted by the amount of power that is possessed in what we do and learn.”
For years, Ong traveled between the suburbs of New Jersey — where his parents eventually moved — and Chinatown to hone his craft.
It was kind of like shuffling between two worlds, Ong said. New Jersey didn't have a large Asian community. So, going to the kung fu academy let him reconnect with his culture. His sifu and his classmates all spoke Cantonese.
"I felt that I was always different, but I learned how to embrace being different," Ong said.
Sharing his culture
The rigor of kung fu also helped Ong gain confidence during a time when there wasn’t a lot of respect for male figures in Chinese culture.
“We're talking about the early '70s,” Ong said, “The Chinese image was not very strong. Chinese were always regarded as being book smart and academically smart.”
Asian males were often portrayed as weak or emasculated in pop culture. That’s until Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist and movie star came on the scene, said Ong.
He was one of the first Asian American “male heroes,” who also popularized the discipline of Kung Fu in the West.
It wasn’t until Ong got to college did he realize that the rest of society was growing interested in this world.
It was 1973, the year Lee died, when Ong arrived at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Some classmates found out that he was a kung fu master.
“They wanted me to teach them the things that Bruce Lee did,” Ong said.
So, with permission from the dean, Ong started spreading the word about a kung fu class. He and his friends stapled posters all over the school.
“They said ‘Kung Fu at Amherst, Kung Fu at Amherst!,’” Ong said, “And the first day I opened my doors, I had 84 students.”
He continued teaching like that for four years and went on to open academies at other nearby schools, including Smith College in Northampton.
“I had no idea how popular it was until I started to see the demand coming out of young students,” Ong said.
When Ong returned to New York after graduating, he continued teaching at his former academy, and trained professional athletes and famous actors like Ming-Na Wen, Morgan Fairchild and Russell Wong.
“I was able to share with the society at large that we had a very strong history and heritage in terms of strength and power,” said Ong. “And that was a strong motivating factor for me.”
'Everybody has that innate power'
Today, Ong keeps those teachings alive in the small church rec room in Tampa.
But it’s less about learning how to take down an opponent or looking cool in a fight scene.
“I really want them to have a sense of the control of their body and of the power that they actually have,” he says.
He reminds students to stay soft. You can’t send your opponent any signal that you’re going to attack, he explains.
Ong demonstrates with a partner, pushing away his punches in sweeping, circular blocks. Then in one swift motion, he strikes the back of their neck — a glimpse of those early days in Chinatown.
“It doesn't really matter what gender or even how old they are; everybody has that innate power,” Ong says, “and when people realize that they can unleash it, they realize that they have a gift.”
