pot-stickers

In the middle of practice, my teacher asked me how to say 焼き餃子 / yakigyouza (J.) in Chinese. Known as “pot-stickers” or “dumplings” in English, these are the fried kind, as opposed to the boiled kind.

I guessed incorrectly, trying to put the Japanese directly into Chinese. Our resident Chinese language / tong bei quan expert was called over. 锅贴 / guotie, he reminded me, easy as that.

OK, great, how does that connect to the Chen style dao form I was working on? When wrapping around the body in a vertical position, the dao should pass very closely to the back – almost sticking to it, just like pot-stickers stick to the pot.

The dao is a single-edged sword and it is common to reinforce the non-edged side of the blade with the left hand while cutting or slicing. You cannot do this with the jian, because it is double-edged.

Similarly, the user commonly wraps the dao around the body in either direction, and it should be kept extremely close to the back, even scraping along from one side to the other. Obviously, you don’t want to do that very much with a double-bladed weapon.

Anyway it was a great day, over six hours spent on Chen style tai ji dao (with a few other diversions along the way) and jian. The last all-day dao marathon had brought me almost to the end of the form – so close it hurt, in fact.

As of Saturday, that is taken care of – just two more motions and it was finished, and then a lot of re-working the basics. What better way to celebrate afterward than a large pot full of pot-stickers for dinner?