"When I was little," says Xiong. "I'd rush here and rush there. It would really worry my family." Hunan's Liuyang was a small place, and in his early years it was occupied by Japanese troops. As a young boy, he witnessed Japanese soldiers raping a girl who lived nearby. Having to suffer such indignities silently made him think constantly of leaving home, and several times he was prevented from doing so by his aged grandfather. What's more, malnutrition was rampant in the countryside, and when he was 13, he contracted typhoid and was bedridden for a year and a half. "My family had already prepared my coffin!"

Leaving home twice

After thus avoiding death, Xiong Wei went to a Taoist temple where he drew a divination lot that read: "What will happen before the end of a life? In spring there will certainly be waves in the rice paddies. Playfully, the water will return to the vast sea. It will not be confined by the narrow bounds of a small river." It seemed to be suggesting that he would encounter many twists and turns of fate in life, but that eventually he would be able to trade his bad luck for good luck and open up a new realm.

At age 16, with just a few silver dollars in his pocket, he left home for the first time. Climbing on top of a crowded train, he went to Changsha, a big city in Hunan Province. "But in my mind I didn't know what I was leaving home to do." Later he saw some soldiers weeding at the side of a road. On a whim he joined the army.

After he enlisted, Xiong Wei received special treatment. Coming from a large family, he had only finished elementary school, but he was fully literate, unlike many of the soldiers. The commanding officer assigned Xiong to the company office, where he performed secretarial duties. The commander was much politer to Xiong than he was to other soldiers. "But two days later, when I swapped my blue student's clothes for a soldier's uniform, his attitude immediately changed." Xiong Wei began to feel that the army wasn't a place where he could remain for long, and he began to think about deserting.

He describes himself as "an expert on taking 'French leave,'" but twice in a row his meticulous plans were foiled. Not only was he unable to return home, but his superiors began to watch him closely. They kept a sharp eye on him wherever he went, and even the letters he sent home were "intercepted."

"Later, I concocted a brilliant plan to get them to put down their guard." When recalling this event of some 60 years past, the face of this old gentleman still reveals a sly smile.

He wrote a letter to himself in which he pretended to be his grandfather, and then he asked someone to mail it to him from off the base. In the letter, his grandfather, apart from proclaiming what a bright future he would have in the army, described in gory detail the exploits of bandits in Liuyang and warned him not to return home lest he meet with personal disaster. The commanding officer brought him the letter as if it were a great treasure, and Xiong pretended to be greatly moved, repeatedly saying that he would never try to run off again.

The company commander was busy leading his troops on military expeditions and never expected the young troublemaker to pull a stunt like that. As soon as the commander let down his guard, Xiong Wei successfully escaped and returned home to Liuyang.

When his mother saw Xiong Wei, from whom she had received no news for many months, she tearfully embraced him, joyful that the family could be reunited. But little did Xiong Wei realize that bandits really were on the rampage in the area, and that his father had offended them. Full of youthful exuberance, Xiong Wei wanted to go and talk it out with the bandits, but his mother forced him to stay home. Seeing how things were turning for the worse and wanting to keep the family line going, his grandfather asked a friend who was a big official in Taiwan to write a letter of introduction so that Xiong Wei could be sent to Taiwan.

Irrepressible youthful exuberance

When he arrived in Taiwan, Xiong Wei still thought from time to time about going AWOL, but he couldn't leave. Under internal and external pressures, his physical condition was getting worse, and he often vomited, had blood in his stool, and suffered muscle spasms and excruciating pain. The doctors discovered a tumor in his thyroid gland. After he had surgery to remove it, one of them said, "This soldier probably isn't going to make it!" Consequently, he went to a military hospital in Douliu to convalesce.

After recuperating for a while in the hospital, his energy returned. Whether he was playing pool or basketball, the wily and tough Xiong Wei was bounding all over the place. The director of the hospital witnessed his antics and had him discharged, but Xiong faked illness to get readmitted. That angered the hospital director no end, but he couldn't prove that Xiong was faking.

At the hospital for more than a year, Xiong Wei would wander over to a sugarcane field and read every day after he ate a meal. Apart from studying some Shakespeare, a few lines of which he can still recite today, he also read Genuine Wudang Tai Chi by Li Shoujian, a famous master of the Yang school. "Use your own energy to cure your own illnesses," the book's cover proclaimed. The line reignited his desire to keep on living and sparked a strong interest in tai chi.

As chance would have it, when he was released from the hospital, Xiong Wei was sent to join the guard detail at the vice president's residence on Taipei's Gongyuan Road. It just so happened that Li Shoujian was teaching tai chi at the New Park nearby. Xiong Wei joined the class.

Apart from studying hard because he felt as if his life depended on it, his free-spirited personality and rule-breaking ways made Xiong Wei not content with being a tai chi teacher who merely imitated the forms of others. Instead Xiong brought together the strong points of several schools, practiced tirelessly, and created a sequence of outstanding forms of his own design. Intentionally or not, his achievements bear witness to the words on that divination lot about a life that "will not be confined by the narrow bounds of a small river"!