This Week at the Institute

The 2026 ASJL Sport Jujitsu National Championships run this Saturday, August 29 in Radford, Virginia. If you're competing, spectating, or driving support: here's everything you need.

Divisions: continuous sport jujitsu, gi jujitsu (submission only), kata, kobudo, point sparring and duo self-defense. Kids 11 and under grapple to position.

Questions: Ms. Turner 859-321-3607  ·  Soke Stines 606-261-6637

Kung Fu Was Here Before the Movies

How the art grew in America

It did not arrive with a theme song. Chinese workers brought the body of the work in the 1800s, in the camps and Chinatowns of California. Training was a private job: protect the house, the shop, the people who ate together. One of the earliest records of organized Chinese martial training in this country sits in 1854, in the months before the Weaverville War.

Public schools came later. In the 1930s, Lau Bun opened Hung Sing in San Francisco, widely counted as the first public Chinese martial arts school in America. Ark Yuey Wong and Lau Bun’s students were among the first to open the door to every race. For a long time the art stayed inside the community. Outside interest was a trickle until servicemen came home from the Pacific, then a stream in the late 1950s.

The flood had a name people still use. Bruce Lee’s films, then Enter the Dragon in 1973. ABC’s Kung Fu premiered in 1972; by May 1973 it was drawing 28 million viewers in a week. Storefronts opened on American streets that had never heard the word kwoon. Kids lined up in pajamas. A lot of what they were sold was a movie’s idea of a monk.

The craze thinned. Mixed martial arts in the 1990s asked a blunt question about what actually works under pressure. Some halls closed. The ones that had been here before the credits kept teaching the long way: stance, partner, lineage, the night that writes it into the body.

That is the American story that matters to this school. Wei Family Kung Fu did not wait for Hollywood. It is 38th generation work, trained in Greensboro since 1969, in a private hall. The movie is over. The floor is not.

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