| Back to the original topic, the decisions seems easier than it was at the time.
The Korean & Japanese styles in my town were pretty much belt factories back when I started in the 80's in high school. I started learning Chenshi taiji from Joseph Chen, who was a teacher at my high school. At the time, nobody had heard of taiji & you always had to explain what it was. After Joseph moved to Edmonton, I started at what I now call one of the better classes of McDojo. The martial arts were not that bad, but the school started moving into the phoney Shaolin lineage direction. It had originally been mostly HK Mantis-derived.
The 90's were arriving, & China was starting to open up, so some of us started going to China to train. Coming back, we were treated with a lot of hostility by the established schools, mostly because we were in a position to call BS on a lot of their stuff. ("That's not a traditional Shaolin form; it's from the Nanjing Wushu Academy children's program.")
So after discovering we'd been lied to for a number of years, it wasn't that hard to change. If something is BS & you have half a brain, it will push you away. |