The late Eric Pin-Wee Chew (center of photo, c.1993) was born and trained in taiji for 19 years in Singapore before retiring and moving to the USA in 1985 to live with one of his sons in Seattle. He taught Wu style out of the Five Willows Taiji Association there and would come to Ottawa during the summer to stay with one of his other sons who was living here at the time. We met in 1991 when he came to watch one of my group classes in my home at that time and then did a little demonstration of his solo forms and push-hands afterwards to those in attendance. He did lovely form and surprisingly energetic push-hands since he was in his late 60s at the time and I was in my early 40s.

The following is from the Professional Profile he gave me at our first meeting:

"Prior to emigrating to the U.S. in 1085, Mr. Chew was Assistant Instructor of Tai-Chi at the Jian Chuan Tai-Chi Physical Culture Association, Singapore. H has actively participated in South-East Asian Tai-Chi Chuan Workshops and Cofnerences druing the past fifteen years. Mr Chew originally studied Tai-Chi in Singapore and trained Grand Master Tai-Shin Wu, a grandson of Chian-Chuan Wu, the founder of Tai-Chi Chuan (Wu Style]. He continued his intermediate and advanced training in Singapore with Masters C.H. Leong and T.S. Ow. Mr. Chew completed master classes in Hong Kong conducted by his original teacher, Grand Master Tai-Shin Wu."

The only problem with our regular encounters over the next few years when he came to Ottawa for a few months in the summers was his determination to get me to switch from Yang to Wu style taiji and his polite attempts to convert me to the fundamentalist Christianity to which he adhered.

Anyway, I valued his advice and the training I did with him and he taught me a Wu-style short form that I still remember though I didn't practise it as regularly as I should have for many years, as well as some of the "rolling" arm drills that he was so good at and that are the hallmark of the older versions of Wu-style push-hands training.

He stopped coming to Ottawa in 1994 when his son moved from Ottawa back to Texas but we continued to correspond until his death in 1997. He was a true gentleman and a patient teacher. I hope he went to the AfterLife with the God that he so firmly believed in.