"Flesh is yours, bone is mine."

1970's — 1980's

I was born into a community that knew what it meant to be a target. In December 1978, the city of my birth was shaken by days of unprovoked violence against innocent people — organised, brutal, without mercy. People died. Neighbours, friends. Families torn apart overnight. I was too young to understand it fully, but you do not need to understand violence to be shaped by it. It shapes how you see the world, how you respond to intimidation, and what you are and are not willing to accept from other people.

Something had always drawn me toward oriental martial arts — the disciplines of the East, with their combination of physical mastery, mental rigour and philosophical depth. When a Taekwondo school opened in my city in 1983 I was ten years old and knew immediately I needed to be there. My family could not afford the fees, and to that I found a solution — I woke before dawn to sell pastries for a local bakery and shined shoes after school, saving every coin toward a single goal. Impressed with their youngest son's commitment and drive to earn his own way, my parents said yes.

Before I ever stepped onto a mat, martial arts had already taught me its first lesson — that the things genuinely worth having require real sacrifice.

The day my father walked me to my first instructor he said something I have never forgotten — addressing the teacher directly: flesh is yours, bone is mine. It was a complete and sincere transfer of trust, an acknowledgement that a martial arts teacher occupied a role not unlike a second parent. Everything started with respect and carried forth with discipline. Training was demanding in ways that would be unrecognisable to most modern practitioners — classes were disciplined and brutal, pain, blood, sweat and tears an unconditional part of every lesson, with no protective equipment and no concessions to comfort whatsoever. One drill — the circle of pain — placed you in the centre of five opponents in full contact, no pads, no mercy. The discipline had purpose. The purpose was the formation of character as much as technique, and everything I absorbed about composure under pressure I have drawn on many times since.

I was thirteen or fourteen when my family immigrated to London. Difficult years under any circumstances — the age of rapid change, of forming identity, of needing something solid to hold onto. For me the difficulty arrived in layers. A foreign country, a language I could not speak, a culture entirely different from everything I had known. We were housed in East London — Hackney, Dalston, Clapton, Stoke Newington — areas that in those years were melting pots of immigrant communities with their own tensions, hierarchies and unwritten codes. The rules were communicated to me as warnings. Don't take that bus after a certain time, don't walk through certain areas, be careful of this group, be wary of that one. Coming from a community that already knew what it meant to be a target, I understood something about being made to feel insignificant — judged as lesser because of my origin, my lack of language, my failure to fit whatever was expected of me.
What I could not do, by nature, was accept any of it quietly.

HUNGKuen.Net   (-)   SOUTHERN FIST

"The beginings of the internet age.."

Before I made it to Hong Kong, I had already begun doing something that almost nobody else in the martial arts world was doing. In the mid to late nineties I built one of the first websites dedicated to promoting Hung Gar online — HUNG KUEN.NET — and alongside it the Southern Fist Forum, the only dedicated online discussion community for Southern Chinese martial arts in existence at that time. The motivation came entirely from love of the art, never from any desire to promote myself or any particular lineage.

The community grew far and wide, and for a time it served its purpose well. Then the politics arrived — lineage disputes, territorial tensions, personal animosities, and in some cases direct threats. When it became clear that the space built to unite and promote had become a platform for division, I stepped back and brought it to a close. The idea had always been to promote, not to divide. When that was no longer possible, the honest thing was to walk away.

2000 — 2004

I travelled back and forth to Hong Kong repeatedly over the years that followed, each return deepening my connection to the system and to the family. Eventually the visits were not enough. I made the decision to move permanently — to live inside the art rather than simply visit it — and committed myself entirely to Hung Kuen in the place where it lived most fully.

The years I spent living in Hong Kong reshaped me at a fundamental level. I trained every single day without exception. I had access to the school at hours most students never experienced, which gave me an intimacy with the material that cannot be rushed or replicated. Every member of the Lam family contributed to my understanding in their own way, and the relationships I built during those years — with my sigung and  Sifu, with my Sibaks and  my kung fu brothers — remain the most important of my martial arts life and among the most important of my life in any sense.

Sigung's home and school was like a living museum of Lam Family Hung Kuen history. The walls were covered with photographs dating back as far as cameras themselves — generations of practitioners, masters, family members, moments frozen in time across more than a century of the art. The tiled floors were dented and cracked from decades of training, of low stances and rooting footwork pressed into them by generation after generation of dedicated students. The walls and ceiling bore the marks of weapons practice — scraped and scored by poles and blades wielded by hands that had long since passed on. Every corner, every nook and cranny had a story to tell. The place had a character, a warmth and a weight of history that no purpose-built training facility could ever manufacture. It was, in the truest sense, a place where the art lived.

My days had a rhythm I look back on now as one of the most purposeful periods of my existence — early morning solo training in the local park, a few hours of English teaching to cover basic costs, then back to the school to train with Sifu Lam Chun Sing. Senior brothers would arrive in the evenings and we would train late into the night before heading out together for a midnight meal. It was during the quieter hours, largely through the deliberate generosity of Sije — Lam Cho's daughter, Lam Fung Chu — and her husband Wong Tong Ching, that some of my deepest learning happened. They went out of their way to create conditions for me to train and learn more fully, and I understood, even then, that this was not something extended to everyone.

My Sifu, Lam Chun Sing, was like his father in the ways that mattered most — completely hands on, deeply demanding, insistent on perfection in everything. Lower, harder, faster, again — these were the words I heard most from him, and they are embedded in how I teach to this day. He was kind,  but strict in a way that left no room for half measures, and temperamental in the way of someone who cares so deeply about the art that falling short of what it demands is genuinely difficult to witness. Training under him and his father  was the central education of my martial arts life.

Sije and Wong Tong Ching guided me throughout — pulling me aside to offer direction and advice, pointing me toward what I needed to focus on, exposing me to the right things at the right times. They treated me as family then and they treat me as family now.  Lam Chun Fai and Lam Chun Chung sibaks  were also significant presences across those years — both offered direct guidance, advice and corrections that shaped my development, and I remain close to them and grateful to this day.

My elder kung fu brother Chung Wai Hung was beside me throughout — translating, guiding, training alongside me with the loyalty and generosity of a true brother. I would not have navigated those years the same way without him. The wider brotherhood of senior kung fu brothers became family in the truest sense. And present at the school from time to time was an older generation entirely — men who had trained under Sigung for decades, some for the better part of their lives, carrying living memory of how the art had been. Their presence was a window into a past that was otherwise inaccessible, and a reminder of the depth and continuity of what we were all part of. Their generosity in sharing their skill, wisdom and stories helped shape my path and my kung fu in ways I continue to draw on to this day.

To some visitors the school may have appeared quietly understated — a modest space where the pace seemed unhurried and the number of active practitioners small. But beneath that surface, for those who were truly present and truly ready, the tradition was as alive and immediate as it had ever been. Real kung fu was there — undiminished, there for the taking if you genuinely wanted it and were genuinely prepared to earn it.

I also put my existing skills to work for the family during these years. I built and managed websites for Lam Chun Fai and Lam Chun Sing at a time when an online presence was entirely new territory for traditional martial arts schools. The exposure these sites generated brought students from across Europe and beyond to Hong Kong to train — creating an international community around the family's teaching. Together with my brother Chung Wai Hung, we looked after visiting foreign students we slowly built an international network that would later make the European tours possible.

In 2003 I was one of the principal driving forces behind the first ever international Lam Family Hung Kuen seminar held in Hong Kong — a landmark event that brought the family's teaching to a global audience in a formal setting for the first time.

2005

After returning from Hong Kong I began teaching privately to a small and carefully selected group, only after being actively encouraged by Lam Cho Sigung, my Sifu and my seniors. Left to my own instincts I would have continued training indefinitely — not out of any desire to withhold, but out of a genuine reluctance to present myself as a teacher before I felt fully ready. It was they who made clear that holding knowledge back was its own form of selfishness. The art existed to be passed on. I listened, as I always have, and opened the school publicly in 2007.

Building something real in London was not straightforward. It was financially brutal — for a significant period I held three jobs simultaneously to keep things running, because I had never approached the school as a business. People walked in to challenge us, to test whether there was genuine substance behind what we were offering. Some came as students but were instructors from other styles, there to evaluate or undermine. There were threats. There were death threats. I stood by what the school was and what it refused to become, through all of it.

The students who came through the doors over the years represented every walk of life — children and adults, students and professionals, military, police, private security, teachers, parents, people from every background imaginable. Martial arts, when taught with integrity, has a way of attracting people who are genuinely searching for something real. And it has a way of revealing character — in students and in instructors — that nothing else quite replicates.

Over the years I have had the privilege of meeting and training alongside some truly remarkable people — skilled, humble practitioners who embody everything martial arts should be and everything it stands for. They exist, and they are worth seeking out. But I will also say this about the martial arts world, and I say it from forty years of direct experience: the art has a complicated relationship with ego. Genuine training is supposed to tame and discipline the ego — to subordinate it to something larger than oneself, to the lineage, to the values that make the art worth practising. In practice, for many people, it does precisely the opposite. I have watched it throughout my career and I see it more acutely now, in an age where social media has confused platform with knowledge and visibility with ability. People who should not be teaching are teaching, and doing so with authority and audience. Knowledge without skill, without functional practice, without real experience — is useless. People now know everything and understand nothing. That is not a small problem. It is a fundamental corruption of what this art is and what it exists to do.