Beautiful culture at heart of martial arts academy

If your mother ever told you true beauty comes from within, chances are she wasn't referring to Winnipeg's Ching Wu Athletics Association.

But that's exactly what you get from the martial arts academy located on Pacific Avenue in the heart of the city's Chinatown.

On the outside, the chipped-blue-paint downtown building looks commonplace in an area that's not exactly known for architectural brilliance. Step inside, however, and your eyes will feast on the elegance of an ancient artform that dates back thousands of years. On any given weeknight, instructors and their pupils can be seen wielding various weapons or flying through the air in ninja-like fashion.

The Ching Wu Athletics Association is the brainchild of 53-year-old Sigung David Cliffe, the chief instructor of the martial arts club since he opened the doors back in 1991.

Some of the faces of our Asian community

Philip LeeHe was born in Hong Kong in 1944, and came to Canada in 1962 to attend the University of Manitoba. He became a research chemist, working with the city's water department until 2005 when he retired as the branch head chemist for the city's Industrial Waste Control Program. He helped organize the Chinese community's first Folklorama pavilion and later was vice-president of the Folk Arts Council of Winnipeg. He was appointed a member of the Human Rights Council of Manitoba. He pushed for the construction of the Dynasty Building, Chinese Gate and Garden, and the Mandarin Building. He has been honoured with the city's Community Service Award, the commemorative medal for the 125th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, the Order of Canada, the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal, the Order of Manitoba, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Manitoba. He became the province's 24th Lieutenant Governor in 2009. He has said he took his non-Chinese first name after seeing a photograph of Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip.

Joseph DuHe is a local doctor and a pillar of Winnipeg's Chinese community. He was born in Vietnam and entered medical school in Taiwan in 1954. He later came to Winnipeg to study and then to practise, working as a pediatrician until retiring in 2003. He has served as president of the Winnipeg Chinese Cultural and Community Centre. He was the key person behind the city being loaned a pair of giant pandas for the Assiniboine Park Zoo in 1989. He has been honoured with the Order of the Buffalo Hunt, the Order of Manitoba, and the Order of Canada.

The original ‘Winnie’

She was named for this city long before a certain bear, and later her father's desire not to lose face would nearly cost her her life, but Winifred "Winnie" Paktong has many reasons to celebrate.

In fact, she has 100 reasons.

Paktong, the first Chinese Canadian born in Winnipeg, is celebrating her 100th birthday this year. She was born in the year of the rat, but she is celebrating in the year of the dragon.

Why I protested the Bodies exhibit

Winnipeg is one great city. These words, once on our welcome sign, still hold true today. We can complain about cold winters and mosquitoes, but we have clean air, open farmland and basic freedoms.

My family arrived Canada in 1992, a few years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Both my parents, like millions of Chinese in 1989, believed there was hope for change. But as history unfolded, hope faded. It died when the tanks rolled in.

When I learned all specimens at Bodies: The Exhibition were Chinese, I was stunned. Chinese traditions treat the deceased with great reverence, solemn ceremonies and dignity. There is no concept of body donation. Who were these people? Were they Chinese students like those at Tiananmen 20 years earlier? Or perhaps they were pregnant mothers who refused to give up their spiritual beliefs.

For five years, I have been doing a traditional Chinese self-refinement practice known as Falun Gong or Falun Dafa. Many have seen practitioners doing meditation in parks or heard about the Chinese regime's brutal persecution of practitioners in China. Most people, however, do not understand the practice itself and why, in just seven years, 100 million people picked it up, and why the Chinese regime so aggressively suppresses it.

History on a plate

In Chop Suey on the Prairies, a travelling exhibition organized by the Royal Alberta Museum in 2010, the curators make a careful case study of Ginger Beef.

While the dish is now a staple on many Chinese menus, it is generally agreed to have been invented in Calgary in the mid-1970s. George Wong, the Chinese-born chef at The Silver Inn, had trained in the traditional cuisine of northern China and then moved to London. He adapted a beef and orange peel recipe from Hunan province to the pub food of England, offering a sticky, sweet, slightly spicy concoction that paired well with beer.

Moving to Alberta, Wong hoped to serve traditional northern Chinese specialities. Non-Chinese Calgarians weren't quite ready, however, and kept ordering grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries from the other side of the menu. Enter Ginger Beef, a "Chinese" dish assembled from Chinese origins, tossed with Brit inspiration, and mixed with western Canadian expectations of deep-fried goodness.

That's Canadian history on a plate.

Faith thrives in Chinese community

Though tiny, Winnipeg's Chinatown thrived as a community in the early 1900s. Crowded grocery stores and laundromats displaying colourful red-and-white signs dotted the area around King Street downtown.

By 1920, there were 900 Chinese people in the city running 150 laundries, three restaurants and eight grocery stores, says Paul Yee, author of Chinatown. One Chinese Mission stood alone on Logan Avenue.

The 2006 census lists 12,660 Chinese people living in Winnipeg, many of them highly educated and most preferring to live in the rapidly growing area near the University of Manitoba. Today there are at least six Chinese Christian churches in the city, as well as a number of Buddhist temples.

The largest of the Chinese churches is the Winnipeg Chinese Alliance Church at 261 Colony St.

Composer Ho’s trip to Taiwan shapes musical perspective Heartfelt journey

For Vincent Ho, a musical trip to the Far East turned out to be a journey from the head to the heart.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's composer in residence recently traveled to Taiwan, accompanied by renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, to debut a new arrangement of his percussion concerto The Shaman. And seeing his work re-imagined for the traditional instruments of the Taipei Chinese Orchestra had a profound effect on Ho's creative process.

"It's hard to put it down in words, but it definitely shaped my perspective on how to approach music," says Ho, an Ottawa-born, internationally trained musician who has been the WSO's composer in residence since 2007. "One of the things I had the opportunity to do while I was there was work with the orchestral percussionists, and I learned a lot about their tradition of improvisation and the nature of how they interpret music.

"In a nutshell, their sensibility is about becoming the music and finding your internal rhythm, your internal melody, your internal self, and letting that channel through the notes that you play. It's different from how music was defined for me during my training here, and it was quite interesting to be exposed to that sensibility. And when I came back, I definitely looked at things a bit differently and have tried to approach my composing process more intuitively, trying to tap in to my inner energy by letting the intuitions flow rather than letting the analytical mind take over."

Golf’s fun, but Asia Cup is a serious quest

When it started, it was as much a "social thing" as it was a sports group, but now the Manitoba Chinese Golf Association has become serious about its game.

"In the late '80s, I think 1986, one of the founders -- Dennis Toy, who still plays with us -- helped get the (club) started and then it was a social thing for the whole family," said the MCGA's president, Humphrey Yung.

"There was a tournament at Hecla Island; everybody stayed over on Saturday night. The family, they could play at the pool and the courtyard and the men, they would play golf on Saturday and another round on Sunday. Then there was a big barbecue for the whole group on Saturday night.

"That's how it started."

Top 10 books by Chinese authors

Top 10 books

by Chinese authors

1. Cao Xueqin. Dream of the Red Chamber. Written in the mid-18th century, this is one of China's four great classical novels. It is believed to be semi-biographical and is a sweeping tale of the rise and decay of an elite family and the Qing dynasty.

2. Lu Xun. The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China. The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. Translated by Julia Lovell. (Penguin Classics, 2010). Considered the father of modern Chinese fiction, Lu Xun was a powerful voice for social change whose unflinching criticism of inhumanity in China's past has been central to modern Chinese nationalism.

Schools attract them; opportunities keep them

Winnipeg's Chinese community is getting younger and hipper as post-secondary students from mainland China flock to the Manitoba capital by the hundreds.

The University of Manitoba -- like schools of higher learning around the world -- is seeing an influx of international students from the world's most populous nation. And many of these students plan to set down roots in Winnipeg when they're done their studies.

In 2010, the most recent year in which statistics are available, there were nearly 1,200 international students from China enrolled at the U of M in either undergraduate programs or language training.

Hundreds of Chinese international students are also enrolled at the University of Winnipeg, Brandon University and Red River College. And the International College of Manitoba (located on the U of M campus but not part of the institution) has about 200 language students from China.

In Friendly Manitoba, ‘you fit right in’

When Jerry Jiang arrived in 2008 at Brandon's Maple Leaf Foods, he planned to work hard, live cheap and take a nest egg back to China when his work permit expired in 2010.

"When I'd buy anything, it would be the cheaper one," Jiang recalled.

"'In two years, I will leave Canada and throw (it) in the garbage,' " he'd tell himself.

Passionate ambassadors

Eva Luk has helped bring close to 100 mom-and-pop businesses to life in Manitoba, thanks to her work with Chinese immigrants.

And after years of practising law in Winnipeg specializing in immigration, Luk now concentrates all her professional energies on her business consultancy, Risun Connexions, attempting to match up capital from China with investment opportunities here.

"I still work more than 12 hours a day," she said. "I always have."

Luk arrived in Manitoba in 1989, after graduating with her law degree from Middlesex University in London and then articling in Wales.