How long have you been practicing martial arts?

I started when I was 15 years old. Now it's been nearly 50 years. At first I learned Shaolin boxing for health reasons, then I went through the teachings of Xingyi Quan and Bagua Zhang (the two styles are often categorized as internal boxing).

What brought you to Cameroon?

I stayed in Cameroon in 1988 and 1989 at the invitation of a construction company under the Chinese Ministry of Railways. Some Cameroonians [where I was] who were practicing martial arts wanted to learn wushu. But at the time there was only one Chinese cook who knew some martial arts, and he himself admitted that he was an amateur. So they asked me to teach.

How well known were Chinese martial arts there at that time? How did you teach your students?

At that time, Cameroonians only knew about Japanese martial arts: aikido, karate, judo. But after they watched the films of Bruce Lee, they admired Chinese martial arts. In the street when children saw a Chinese person, they would run to him and shout, "Chinese! Kungfu!"

I was the first person to introduce Chinese martial arts to that country. I taught at the club Kamikaze and I decided to divide the course into three classes: Shaolin boxing for children and adolescents, self-defense for adults, and taijiquan for older people. My students were practicing very seriously. They were very good at sports in Cameroon.

Wasn't it difficult to teach people who did not speak your language?

At first there was an interpreter who accompanied me all the time, then I started to learn some French for my classes. But there are also Chinese words that my students eventually learned to understand, and it was not necessary to translate.

For you, how do you understand the teaching of Chinese martial arts?

It's not just sports. Behind the physical practice, there is a system of thought about human beings that is directly inherited from Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. This, the system, is also sometimes a barrier to the teaching, because not everyone studies what is inside [the moves] – not to mention the language barrier.