Lately, our club’s classes have been getting a bit lost in the ParkTakes course catalog because another “Kung Fu” class has so many individual levels listed, putting our class at the end of a long list of nearly-identical class names, almost making it look like those other classes are precursors to ours. Some of the club’s members suggested changing the class name to separate it from that list. After coming up with a bunch of names that were a little too long for the ParkTakes system (the most obvious choice being “Chinese-Indonesian Martial Arts“), the class has been changed to “Indonesian Kung Fu.”

Some will undoubtedly think this name is strange, since gungfu is not an Indonesian martial art. Liu Seong Gungfu has its origins in Hokkien (Fukien) White Crane, a southern Chinese gungfu system, but Willem Reeders, from whom the art in its current form comes from, was raised in Indonesia. Growing up in Indonesia, he trained in various Indonesian martial arts (silat and poekoelan systems). Aspects of these systems made their way into his base gungfu system, to the point where the art is about half Chinese and half Indonesian, and depending on who you ask, either seems to be a bit more prominent. The art is no longer purely a gungfu system, nor is it a silat system. It is a gungfu system with a strong Indonesian influence, so the new course name, “Indonesian Kung Fu,” accurately describes the nature of this art, in much the same way that the previous name did.