About

What I Carry

People walk many paths in the martial arts. Mine led through two teachers who could not have been more different.

I'm John Spak. I've trained in Baguazhang, Taijiquan, and Imperial Longfist for over fifty years. I have trained with many wonderful teachers, but what I carry came mostly through two men: Xu Gongwei (徐公伟, 1916–2003), whose lineage is documented back hundreds of years — and Yang Guotai, the mysterious teacher from Beijing whose lineage nobody could pin down, and who yet, like a hero from an ancient martial arts movie, proved himself through deeds, undeniable, every time.

Master Xu was from Nanjing. He was a master of many arts — Taiji, Baguazhang, Xingyi, Chaquan, and others — and was officially designated by the Chinese government as cultural heritage for his depth of knowledge. He moved to Vancouver in 1988 and passed away in 2003.

The transmission he carried came through two distinct lines, both of which I received:

Taiji and Baguazhang: transmitted to Xu Gongwei by Zhou Yifan, a guard employed inside the Forbidden City. Zhou Yifan learned these arts as a single, undifferentiated practice. The modern habit of sorting Baguazhang into “Yin style” and “Cheng style” did not exist when he was trained. Master Xu rejected that categorization outright — he considered it a corruption of the original transmission and grew angry if I spoke in those terms. The art was one art.

Imperial Longfist (Chaquan): transmitted to Xu Gongwei by Yu Zhensheng (于振声, 1871–1959), who served as a martial arts instructor at the Huangpu Military Academy in the 1930s. Yu Zhensheng learned from Yang Hongxiu (杨鸿修, 1864–1944), the progenitor of the Yang branch of Chaquan, who studied under masters Zhang Jingtan and Ma Laowei. Yang Hongxiu also taught Wang Ziping (1881–1973), one of the most renowned martial artists of modern China — making Master Wang my kungfu uncle within the same transmission.

Yu Zhensheng's own students included Gu Ruzhang (顾汝章), the celebrated Northern Shaolin master, and He Fusheng (何福生), award-winner at the 1928 National Guoshu Exam. One line, and through it names that carry the history of modern Chinese martial arts.

The full record: lineage tables, teaching career, combat accounts, and complete student roster

Master Xu also studied Chen Taiji directly under Chen Zhaokui. I do not teach that. He told me that the Wu style he transmitted to me is the best, and that is what I carry.

I carry this lineage, and what I carried was complete. What I understood of it was not. The forms were whole — every movement, every sequence, preserved exactly. But the tradition I had inherited expresses outwardly an inward body of knowledge, and that layer is not written in the forms themselves.

Years later I trained under a man no one could verify — Beijing, he said, and maybe it was so; his stories shifted with the season. None of that mattered, because Yang Guotai was not a man you could verify. He was a man you could test — and he passed the test every time. He would invite me to strike him. He would resolve the attack, and return one I could not defend — every time. He did this literally hundreds of times, and I had already competed in professional kickboxing and worked as a bouncer in a rough tavern for years. Then he did the thing that made him my teacher: he explained exactly what had happened, in detail, and showed me how to train until I could produce the same result. Not mystery, but method. And why internal matters.

Yang Guotai never asked to be believed. He asked to be tested. What he gave me was the missing half of what I already owned: the internal side of these arts that underlies everything the external form expresses — and how to carry that through every movement, every form, every art in the system. One set of principles, applied everywhere — the substrate that brings everything to life. With it, the inheritance stopped being a collection of complete forms and became something unified.

Lineage on paper tells you where a body has been. It does not tell you what a body can do. I kept what proved itself under contact — and left the stories where they belonged: with the teller.

I later added training in both Yin-style and Cheng-style Baguazhang to deepen my understanding of how the art branched after Dong Haichuan's students began teaching publicly. But the core of what I carry predates those branches. I teach what I was given, as I was given it, because that is how a lineage survives. What I've added through my own study belongs to me, not to the transmission. The distinction matters.

Over decades of practice, I've decoded what I was given — tested it against engineering physics, biomechanics, and the realities of a body under stress. Not to improve on the transmission, but to understand it well enough to transmit the truth of it. Forms preserved without understanding become empty shapes. I won't pass on empty shapes. I pass on what the shapes are for.