Article

The Hand That Feeds 

by Anthony Revill 

 

Someone brought to my attention that Chris of the “Everlasting Wing Chun” (Carroll Street, Dunedin) Facebook page said in a post that he and Steve started my kung fu school with me.

To quote Chris: 

>> “In 2005ish, I joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we started a new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve. However, due to creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with Anthony...”

All of this is a lie. Moreover, the lie is of such rank stupidity that I can refute it in a few minutes by simply accessing my school’s records, which include Chris’s own emails. 

My position is usually live and let live. Chris can promote himself, spin his yarns, talk himself up, and I won’t care or even notice. However, his inclusion of my name and mention of my school in this latest deceit needs to be dealt with. 

I’ll break it down. 

>> “In 2005ish, I joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we started a new school in Dunedin...” 

Chris is lying. I was not living in Dunedin in 2005. In fact, I was nowhere near Dunedin. I started my school in 2010, after a phone conversation with Kevin. 

Furthermore, I have never “joined forces” with Chris to do anything. 

Shortly after I moved to Dunedin – which was about sixteen months before I opened my kung fu school – I received an email from Chris, completely out of the blue. He had found me accidentally on the Old Friends website. I remembered him from when we had trained in the same club many years before. Unfortunately I could not see then what I can see now, that his first email was a harbinger of what was to come. 

In the first part of his email, without preamble, he launched into a diatribe against the leaders of his original kung fu club, MSG. According to him, they had returned to Dunedin to hold a training seminar, which he attended. He explained rather dramatically that at the seminar they kicked him out of MSG. Apparently oblivious as to why, he tried to get answers, but “the more I tryed to find out the worse it got”. His conclusion was: “they just dont like me”. 

He also informed me that he had a kung fu club at the university which he had been running for the past six years. 

In the second part of his email, Chris described his recent catastrophic failure in basic self-defence, involving a “friendly” man who approached him in the street asking for a hamburger. According to Chris, the man kayoed him with a punch he did not see coming. 

I sent him a polite and friendly reply, and this opened the floodgates. Within hours he sent me another message, longer than the first. It was the same bitter complaining about the leaders of MSG, but in much more detail. 

In a ridiculous comment that has relevance to the matter I am addressing here, Chris declared that MSG was actually his club – and, to quote him: “I was kicked out of my own school.” 

I won’t go into the rambling, convoluted logic of how he came to that conclusion, suffice it to say that this type of conceit turned out to be fairly typical of Chris. And as I came to realise, his dramatic complaints and gossip about others (of which I have a multitude of examples) were habitual. 

Another remark from this email that will be relevant later on was: “it was a total shock to get kicked out”. Evidently, he did not have any insight as to the reason. It was all so embarrassing and unfair. 

He was convincing. I bought into his view of himself as an aggrieved victim. I felt sympathy for him. At the time, I believed him, that he had been rejected and ostracised for no good reason. I could not see it at the time, but this was a mistake. I didn’t know it then, but he would eventually start complaining to others about me, behind my back, in a similar way. 

These initial messages also encapsulated the other feature of his relentless emailing, that of promoting internet videos of himself. He wanted me to critique a public YouTube video he had made of himself teaching the Chum Kiu form – “see if I got it right,” he wrote. Naturally enough, I was curious about this. Who taught him this form? Why was that person not critiquing it? And why was he attempting to teach it publicly? 

As I found out, he had filmed himself copying movements from other people’s YouTube videos, then posted his video online as if he were an authority. I soon discovered that this was Chris’s modus operandi. 

Apparently there was a whole library of his material: “got lots of stuff on my youtube chanel,” he told me. 

What’s more, this practice of sending unsolicited videos he had made of himself to instructors at random would eventually land him in hot water. 

Actually, at this time I did not even consider myself an instructor. Kevin had graciously accepted me into his kung fu school, and I spent the next seven years training rather obsessively. After a time, I was teaching those who had something to learn from me, but it was always within the scope of Kevin’s school, and under his auspices. It would have been inconceivable for me to presume to teach others outside of the school. 

My point here is that becoming an independent instructor was never my motivation. In fact, when I was in Kevin’s class, I never even considered it. I trained the way I trained so as to master the method. Mastery was my only goal. Teaching others was secondary, and only then because there was a periodic need for me to do so. 

Chris’s way of learning and teaching, i.e., copying movements from internet videos, then promoting his own videos, was alien to me. 

In the final part of his email, he wrote: “why is all the wing chun on the net crap?” Based on what I was soon to experience with him, the unintentional irony of his question is crushing. 

I was a family man, busy with establishing a life in a new city, so it was several months before I finally popped around to Chris’s place to train with him. 

I was not used to training with someone who talked so much. He was running away with himself, telling me all about what he knew, and demonstrating what he could do. This never really let up. Despite this, I found him to be likeable. I noted his ability to make crude training equipment from the types of things that you would find lying around the average house and garage. But training with him presented a problem to me. 

He said he had been training diligently all these years, while also running his own kung fu class. However, in practice, it didn’t seem to add up to much. For a young man, I found him to be rather flabby physically, with poor stamina. And although he could talk up a storm, his technique lacked depth. His punches, in particular, were downright anaemic. I don’t believe I have ever encountered a martial art exponent with weaker hitting ability. 

Chris, apparently, was the highest ranked Ving Chun Kuen representative based in Dunedin. This was a problem, because it meant that there was no suitable instructor for me to train under, and no suitable school for me to join. Thus, from my first encounter with him, the seed of an idea was sown. 

It took a few months for the idea of opening my own school to germinate and begin to grow. My reasoning was this: the only way I was going to have properly skilled training partners in Dunedin was if I trained them myself. 

Close to the end of that year (2009), I sent Chris an email in response to many of his: “Less time on the Internet and much more time doing hands-on training, Grasshopper.” I don’t suppose it made much of an impression. In any case, my mind was on other things. Life in Dunedin was more established for me now, and the notion of opening my own school was really solidifying in my mind. 

In late January 2010, I wrote an article for Kevin’s website about my early days of training in his school. Shortly after that, on the 29th, I rang him to ask for his permission to open my own kung fu school. He responded with a ringing endorsement, so now it was time to go ahead with my plans. 

Opening a school was a significant step for me, and a deeply personal one. Chris’s latest spasm of bullshitting, i.e., that he and Steve were my partners in this, reaches new levels of absurdity, even for him. He was not involved in any way, shape or form. I had told him of my plans to open a kung fu school, naturally enough, and two days before my first class in February, I sent him the link to my new blog: 

http://southern-wing-chun.blogspot.com/ 

My venue was a beautiful old school hall in Oxford Street. I developed a good working relationship with Janice the principal. She and the school board gave their permission for me to bolt Wooden Man onto one of the interior walls. No doubt Wooden Man was a talking point for the schoolchildren, and I bet they played on it! 

It is relevant to point out that Chris was still running his own club at the university Clubs & Socs building, and he continued to do so, even as my school got up and running and started growing rather rapidly in membership. 

The first person to walk through the door was a personable young American man who had been training with Chris in his Clubs & Socs class. Chris had told him about my school opening, and he came to check it out. He signed on, and trained religiously with me for the remainder of his time in New Zealand. 

In late July, Chris emailed me another rant about being banned from MSG. Also in July, Chris visited my school twice. This was a concession on my part, to have an instructor with his own club come for a visit and join in. About a month later he followed up the two visits with an email, asking, “hows the club going? still 20 people?” 

In September, he received an enquiry from a prospective student who wrote: “I am looking to do Wing Chun classes. Can you please advise. I am based in Dunedin.” 

Chris copied me into his reply. He told the enquirer that “i teach at clubs 'n' socs” and “Anthony has a club in south Dunedin”. 

Also in that year he came to my school twice more as a visitor: once in October and once in November. This is all in the training logbook. (From the very first day I opened my school, every person who was present at a class signed in, that is, wrote their name under the date for that day in the logbook. I still have all of the logbooks. They constitute the record of which people attended on which days, in their own handwriting.) 

Then, the following year (2011), Chris learned through Kevin’s website that Beau was coming to town for a workshop at my school. He wanted to go to the workshop and asked if he could attend. He also commented, “notice ya posted a picture of ya club” and, in a later email, “hay is your school open this monday?” 

I include these little gems from Chris himself – and there are plenty more of them to choose from – to show that my school was never a joint school, and that he had nothing to do with it, either in its formation or its ongoing development. He continued to run his own club. 

He hit a snag when the university reportedly told him he was no longer allowed to use the Clubs & Socs building. So, in July 2011, he re-started his class in a back room of the Cia Café. Chris told me that the guy who ran the café let him have his class there in exchange for lessons. By this time my own school had been operating for about a year and a half.     

>> “we started a new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve.” 

Roping Steve into his bullshitting makes Chris’s lying even more idiotic, if that’s possible. Unfortunately for Chris, although he can lie, the training logbook cannot. Steve walked in for the first time at the end of my second week of operating. I had never seen him nor heard of him before. He asked if he could just sit and watch the class. I said yes, and he did. In my third week he returned and joined in with the others. (One of the people he trained with that evening was Kevin’s sister.) 

Someone is going to have to draw me a wonderfully imaginative flow chart to demonstrate how Steve helped me to start my school.         

>> “However, due to creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with Anthony...” 

This highlights one of the problems of parroting phrases you do not understand. “Creative differences”? I am neither a songwriter nor a movie producer. Furthermore, the only thing Chris ever created in my kung fu school was a nuisance of himself. 

And he didn’t “part ways” with me, whatever that is supposed to mean. I kicked him out and banned him from my school. This is recorded in my training diary and is well-documented in emails at the time. It took a long time to get to that point, and, in looking back, I can see now that it was inevitable. 

Still running his class at Cia Café, he sent me this request: “can you please fwd my email address to some of ya trainers... then i can add them to facebook and if there online in the week end i can ask them round for training.” 

In hindsight, I should have questioned this. Up until this point, Chris had had no involvement or input whatsoever into my school apart from being admitted occasionally as a visitor. If my “trainers” (the senior students of my school) were going to start visiting Chris at his home for training, there would be a blurring of the usual boundaries. But even though Chris had his own club, I had come to see him as a rather needy person, albeit likeable, and I wanted to remain supportive of him. I readily agreed to his request. I didn’t have a problem with it – yet. 

Two or three of my senior students took up his offer to train with him at his home occasionally. Comments started coming back to me, indicating that Chris was attempting to undermine my teaching by introducing as many disparate ideas from his internet obsession that he could cram in. This did not bother me at first. At this stage, I didn’t really believe that Chris could corrupt their practice. 

Chris continued to visit my school sporadically, catching a ride with anyone he could. He also continued to talk too much when in class and allowed his attention to wander. From what I could see of his ability, I thought it best for him to mind his own business, concentrate, and persevere with some proper training. 

Yet, he could not mind his own business: I was routinely reminding him to stop his jabbering and meddling in what others were doing. He sent me emails complaining about this or that person in my classes, based on personality clashes as far as I could tell. And a couple of my senior students reported he was attempting to argue with them when they were instructing others in my absence. 

In response to one of his rambling emails, I wrote to him: ”Anyone else would have been asked to leave for interfering in my class. You I put up with.” 

This persistent behaviour of his was ironic considering that he would send me emails lamenting the fact that my senior students were more skilled than him. By spring of 2013 some of them had been training for three years. If I contrast this with Chris’s roughly 15 years of training up till that point, much of it as an instructor in his own club, his experiences in my school should have been signalling something to him. I still have the emails, e.g., “last week I was training 2 hours every day and on sat every one was better than me”. Comments from him such as this almost read like lightbulb moments, but no, he carried right on interfering in the learning of others by babbling on about what he had seen in videos, half-formed ideas that were all over the map. 

I gave him a metaphor to think about, which I derived from my younger years working on orchards: It is better to prune and thin, and have less fruit of much higher quality, than to have many overgrown branches and overcrowded fruit of much poorer quality. 

He went away to think about this, and emailed me later: “I like your prune the bush saying...” (I had spoken of a “tree,” not a bush, but it was close enough.) He seemed to get it, but would it translate into the practical? 

Despite his problematic behaviour, he was learning a lot from me, my students, and occasionally Kevin, because Chris was invited to come to class whenever my sifu visited. During one visit, Kevin gave everyone a small notebook and a pen. At that particular workshop, Chris took a lot of notes, writing down many things that Kevin said. Afterwards, he emailed the notes to people outside of my school and outside the lineage altogether. I know this because he copied me into one of the emails. What would motivate him to do this, I have no idea, but it was another annoyance that pointed to a lack of integrity on his part. 

To top it off, he later sent me a negatively slanted email about my sifu and sigung. It was one of those familiar, dramatic rants from him that I had to read more than once to make sense of. The gist of it was this: Chris was doubtfully questioning how long my sigung (a student of Ip Man) had been training in Ving Chun Kuen before starting his own school, and he applied the same doubtful measure to my sifu. One of Chris’s conclusions, remarkably, was that he himself had been more qualified than either of them when starting his own club, saying: “the amount of time spent training would make me more qualified”. 

It must have been a slow week for him. I was starting to get the picture, namely, that in my experience of him, he simply could not get by without stirring up some new type of disagreement, disgruntlement, or point of contention. Any subject matter would do, as long as it could be skewed to the dramatic. 

Why he had chosen me to send this latest blather to was puzzling, because my loyalty to Kevin was well known. 

And yet, despite his ongoing nonsense, I continued to support and include him. I still liked him. His café club came to an end, and by 2014 he started attending my evening classes through the week when he could. 

One day Chris informed me that he had started teaching one of my junior students the wooden man form on weekends. The student was a nice enough fellow, but his attendance at my school was unreliable, and his reluctance to do foundational work – especially the Form (Siu Nim Tau) – meant his progress was slow. I considered this poor judgement on Chris’s part. It demonstrated the folly of catering to students who only want to do fun stuff, new stuff, novelty stuff. It reflected the dissipation I saw in Chris’s own training. 

On occasion I have seen the wooden man form performed by people who have clearly copied movements but have no effective depth in the three forms that comprise the exercise. That is not to say that new students cannot be given exercises to play around with on the wooden man. But an instructor who is teaching a junior student a wooden man form he has copied from internet videos and picture books, before the student is ready for such a form, is the blind leading the blind. 

This behaviour is only cheating the student. And some students who take every short-cut they can like this, think they are making quicker progress than everyone else. Hence the instructor involved and the cheating student fall into a ditch together. 

By this time I well knew the futility of trying to explain anything like this to Chris. I shrugged and told Chris that he could now have this man as his own private student, and I handed him on. Less drama for me, more fun for the student. 

Throughout this period, Chris continued to send me videos of himself, which included his taiaha practice, and I remained encouraging. 

Also around this time I gave a three-hour in-depth workshop on the Form which Chris attended on a Sunday. He got a lot out of this, as the class was very small and I would not allow him to waffle on and on in his usual fashion. 

But in the regular weekday classes, he was more of a problem than ever. Rarely could he pay attention without interjecting and talking about several things at once that he thought were vitally important, but which were actually irrelevant. I would set an exercise for him and another student, then a short time later I would look across the hall to see the student standing idly while Chris was talking. Once, he seemed to be demonstrating something quite elaborate, while his partner stood waiting. I went over and discovered that he was acting out a scene from a martial art movie. 

Often he would draw his partner into a debate whereby he would cast doubt on what they were learning, and would start one of his rambling speeches, based on things he had seen on the internet, cutting into his partner’s training time. On these occasions I would set him straight, often just saying, “Get moving,” or “Start training.” But he was persistent in this type of behaviour. 

It was evident to me that Chris loved the sound of his own voice, whether it be in the kwoon or on one of his numerous videos. 

My annoyance with his nonsense in class was growing, particularly as it distracted and confused the people who needed to be knuckling down to their training. There was a big difference between the camaraderie, occasional joking around, and sheer enjoyment that was always a part of the training, and the time-wasting bullshit which irritated and immobilised others, forcing them to neglect their work. 

Chris had also begun making negative remarks about me behind my back. Reports of this trickled in to me. I was philosophical about it. On one occasion I said to one of my senior students, “Let him vent.” I figured that because I now represented some type of authority figure in Chris’s life, and knowing him as I did, I was bound to become a source of resentment. 

The only thing I ever said to him in response to this conduct was, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds, Grasshopper.” Whether or not he understood made no difference, because he carried on complaining as before. It is worth pointing out that this was a man in his mid-30s trying to stir up ill will towards the teacher as if he and the other students were adolescents in junior high school. 

I had a little bit of insight into this when Chris complained to me about Work and Income (WINZ). He had been unemployed on a benefit for some time. He called it his “holiday” and was happy to sleep in and do whatever he felt like doing all day. But now, as he told it to me in an email, WINZ had said he must attend a seminar about how to get a job, and he was afraid they might make him do “annoying stuff”. 

I suppose I was just another person making him do “annoying stuff”. 

Be that as it may, Chris had transitioned into a de facto member of my school. For one thing, he now wore the school T-shirt with my logo. Usually the T-shirt was earned, i.e., someone new had to be a member for a certain amount of time before getting one. I am not sure that Chris had earned it, but it showed that he retained a special place in my consideration. However, like a T-shirt that is wearing thin, this consideration was finally beginning to fray around the edges. 

The fabric finally tore one day when I had set a student some work with Chris during a busy class. After a short while I looked over to see Chris gazing down at his own feet, doing something totally unrelated, while the other person stood watching. I went over and did not have to say a word. Looking somewhat sheepish and confused, Chris said to me, “I was just teaching him some Biu Jee – but the footwork doesn’t seem right.” 

I was almost incredulous. I replied, “That’s because it is not right. Go back to the lesson I set.” 

I now became resigned to the fact that Chris was going to persist in his undermining, disruptive behaviour. He showed no sign of changing. In training with my instructors and me, his skill had improved markedly from when I first met up with him, so his presence in the class wasn’t totally pointless. But, for the most part, he was a nuisance. He contributed very little of use, and his compulsive gasbagging and bullshitting were taking up too much time and distracting students. I had to make a decision about him, and it was not an easy one to make. 

Saturday classes had become more or less invitation only, set aside for my instructors and senior students to work on their own stuff. Saturdays were unstructured and of a different flavour to the weekday classes. I figured that Chris’s negative impact could be mitigated by restricting his attendance. I told Chris that I was confining his training at my school to the Saturday classes, and that he was not allowed to attend the weekday classes anymore. Additionally, there would be a couple of new rules for him. 

He was quite cut up about it. He complained to me in a subsequent email, “My whole life I feel left out or singled out,” which was begging for some self-reflection rather than self-pity. Somehow it escaped his notice that I had gone out of my way to make sure he was always included. 

My patience with him was frazzled, but he retained my goodwill. Naturally, his petulant grumbling behind my back continued. With Chris, this was to be expected. I still thought it harmless. And it couldn’t change anything, because he did not have a choice when it came to the new arrangement. 

However, his cloud had a silver lining. The situation was a catalyst for Chris deciding to re-establish a venue of his own. The next month, December, he had rented the container in Carroll Street. He enjoyed telling me all about it, and I was happy for him. He slowly started setting up his own training space. He showed me through it, and, on Christmas Eve, I made three photographs of him at the container and featured them on my school’s blog. 

In the New Year, Kevin and two of my kung fu brothers from Christchurch paid a visit to my school, and Chris came along. When Kevin was back home, he messaged me. We had a brief conversation about how great the training visit was and the high calibre of the students generally. Still, I felt obliged to account for Chris’s verbal diarrhoea. I wrote: “Chris is still an issue for me, but I am determined to include him.” 

I bought Chris a Kung Fu Panda toy as a mascot for him in his new training space and to celebrate him getting his own club up and running. Always the expert at self-promotion, he had put a lot of posters up around town, calling himself “Sifu Chris”. And, of course, he was still pumping out the videos of himself. I thought it was good for him to have this diversion: in the container club he could alleviate some of his frustration and fully indulge his desire to be the master. 

While this was going on, he continued attending my Saturday classes, training with my instructors and me. I figured that having a club of his own again would give Chris an outlet for his drivel and drama, i.e., release some pressure out of his valve, and settle him down in my senior class. I was mistaken. He persisted in his nonsense, particularly when I was absent due to study and work commitments. Reports of his self-obsessed and undermining behaviour filtered through to me over the next few months. My own observations in class confirmed that his behaviour wasn’t improving, and for the first time I felt my goodwill towards him waning. 

Then his craving for attention and penchant for stirring up drama broke new boundaries. When I heard about his latest stunt, my regard for him finally shifted, and not in a good way. In keeping with his usual habit, he filmed himself doing a sword form that he had copied from an internet video. He then sent the video of himself, unsolicited, to a venerable and highly ranked kung fu teacher in Wellington, asking him to comment. 

The response from the teacher was essentially that Chris should ask for guidance from his own sifu. To this, Chris replied that he had no sifu. 

Now, even someone with only a superficial understanding of Chinese martial art culture, with its intrinsic concepts of lineage, loyalty, and integrity, would appreciate that Chris had put the teacher in a difficult and uncomfortable position. Add to this the instant confusion caused by someone who portrays himself as knowledgeable in kung fu yet has no sifu. The very idea is ridiculous. 

This caused a flurry of communications, involving Chris as the subject of discussion. His craving for attention had been rewarded beyond a simple critique of a video of him imitating a video. His efforts had finally hit pay dirt. Here was his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was a minor matter, so the kerfuffle did not last long. Things were smoothed over, a strip being torn off Chris in the process. However, it had some lasting consequences. The narrative that Chris had been peddling far and wide for years, that he was a hard-done-by lone battler, completely unravelled. It was in tatters. This came about because the communications included a swift and decisive refutation; in other words, a reality check. 

Although I was privy to this reality check, I did not have to contribute a single word. 

It was readily established that Chris was indeed part of a thriving martial art community. Firstly, he had spent considerable time under a teacher at his original club, MSG, before being thrown out. Secondly, he had been popping into my school for years, and latterly had developed some regularity in attending. This meant that he had enjoyed the benefits of training with me and my instructors, all of whom were noticeably superior to him in skill at this time. The mere fact of him wearing the school T-shirt showed that he belonged somewhere. He had a de facto lineage to replace the one he had been ejected from. Thirdly, he had attended workshops presented by Kevin (and Beau), and had ongoing access to my sifu’s technical advice. 

Thus – despite his poor attitude and behaviour – his grasp of the art and his sense of how a martial art class is run had improved merely by spending a lot of time with us. This was possible in large part because I had decided to maintain a friendship with him and include him. He knowingly took advantage of this, which made his disloyalty and lack of acknowledgement all the more jarring.

In addition to all of this, I had fielded two student complaints about Chris’s loose talk, not related to the training. Apparently he thought he was funny, but his subject matter was seen as offensive. Due to my loyalty to him, I managed this in a way that allowed his attendance to continue. 

When I look back on this now, it speaks to the familial nature of kung fu. Special considerations are made that are not possible in the more regimented arts or more formal settings. However, there are limits. At some point an undisciplined troublemaker who persists in his behaviour will be kicked out, something Chris had already experienced elsewhere. 

And now, regrettably, critical mass had been reached. 

It had taken years for Chris to erode my goodwill. Of all the stressors in a busy life, I now saw him as the totally unnecessary one; there was no upside. Finally, he had crossed a line with me. 

I told him plainly that I was fed up with his nonsense. 

He later emailed me this: “I apologize for my behavior I will not attend your school until we have worked things out in person. .I sense I have pulled the final straw with you and feel ashamed..and wish no further disruption...” 

This was the only self-reflective sentiment I ever received from him. But it was too little, too late. 

Consulting my training diary, I am reminded of just how fatigued I was with Chris’s perpetual drama, gossip, and drivel. Indeed, I wrote to Kevin the same month: 

“So many hassles have been created by Chris’s nonsense in Dunedin .... an observation of the attention-vampire style of Chris .... how easy it is to get sucked into his never-ending issues .... I have been very patient, but [my patience] ran out .... Chris will complain about me to other people, as he has done in the past, but I can’t control that, even if I wanted to .... the never-ending disruptive nonsense.” 

I decided to kick Chris out. That is to say, I was going to ban him from training in my school. I asked him to come in on the next Saturday. 

It was rare for me to call a meeting in the kwoon. I called my senior men into a circle with me and Chris. I was open and explicit about Chris’s longstanding behaviour, its persistence and negative effects on the class. Although I doubt they heard anything they didn’t already know, this had never been formally discussed before. It was a calm and firm dressing-down that had been a long time coming. The upshot was that my tolerance was at an end and that I was kicking Chris out. 

I left the floor open for dissent, but there was none. My seniors were all forthright men; there were no shrinking violets. And although my decision to eject Chris might have been challenged (it wasn’t), my descriptions of his conduct could not be. 

Afterwards, I wrote to Kevin to update him and to close the matter: 

“Last Saturday I had a talk with Chris and my regulars at my hall in which I spoke my mind and laid it all out. ... Chris has got away with some pretty underhanded and disruptive behaviour for years, and it was exposed and discussed last Saturday, and he was quite affected emotionally. I didn't enjoy it. I asked for responses from my seniors, including possible disagreement, and they supported me. ... It was tough for Chris.” 

For me, though, it was a relief to have him gone. 

After this, there was only the occasional blip from afar. For example, a long-term student of mine bumped into Chris where he was stacking supermarket shelves, and Chris attempted to relate some gossip about me that was so awful it backfired. My student was angered, and told Chris off. The student was still angry about it the next time I saw them in the kwoon. 

Apart from remote ripples like this, Chris was blessedly out of sight and out of mind. 

A good five years went by before he emailed me again. In those intervening years, had anything changed with regard to his conduct? Unfortunately not. In the email, Chris said he had recently sent a senior kung fu man, well-known to both of us, an unsolicited video. Chris received a negative reaction: apparently the recipient of the video “spazzed out”. Then Chris proceeded to inform me of some gossip he had heard about this man. It was a little extreme, if not malicious. 

The attempt to draw me into it failed, because I immediately disregarded it and did not reply. Thankfully, starving it of attention kept the floodgates closed. I have no idea why he targeted me for garbage like this after so much time had passed. 

It would seem redundant to say so, but I don’t believe a single word he says about other people behind their backs. 

I am not bothered by Chris’s gossiping, but his lying about my school in public (which I am addressing here) is a different matter. I have not been on social media for many years, so I might have remained oblivious. Now that I know about it, I’m obliged to say something. 

To reiterate: as the “founder and head instructor” of a “thriving combat studio,” Chris can talk himself up as much as he likes. The problem with this (for me) is when he includes my name or mention of my school in his everlasting bullshitting.             

>> “In 2005ish, I joined forces with another kung fu brother, Anthony... Together, we started a new school in Dunedin, with the help of my student, Steve. However, due to creative differences and disagreements, I eventually parted ways with Anthony...” 

In order to concoct an absurdity such as this, would it not be better for Chris to wait until the logbooks have been lost, the blog has been erased, the emails have been deleted, and the many people who were involved are all dead? 

As it is, his own emails and the other records clearly show that he had nothing to do with starting my school, nothing to do with its operation, and eventually wore out his welcome due to his appalling behaviour.

© 2025 Anthony Revill