There Are No Secrets: Professor Cheng Man-Ch'ing and His TaiI Chi Chuan »

Wolfe Lowenthal was born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, and began his study of t'ai chi chuan in 1967 with Professor Cheng Man-Ch'ing, in New York. Over the years, he has worked as a typesetter, screenwriter, and peace activist. He currently lives, studies and teaches at his school, the Long River Tai Chi Circle in New York City.

"Wolfe Lowenthal's quiet little memoir will with window-opening wisdom reinforce, I think, my view of how Cheng stood on Tai Chi. It tells how a young writer reacted to this strange Chinese man when he appeared in New York City in the mid-1960s and stayed there for a decade before returning to Taiwan to die in 1975. In a nickel town where neurosis is a cardinal virtue, the Tai Chi center established by Cheng soon became an oasis of learning. In my visits there I was invariably approached by a quiet fellow with a ready smile and loads of questions. His form and sensing hands improved but he never lost his kindly ways. This led me once to tell the three seniors that the one person in the club who best exemplified Tai Chi was this junior. That man who has since become a teacher of the art is the author if this book."
-Robert W. Smith, from the Preface