Kung fu has the best movies of any martial art, and that is the whole problem. Fifty years of cinema promised hands too fast to see, a punch that detonates a man from one inch away, and old masters who knock you over with chi from across the room without leaving their chair. You grew up on that. Then you sign up... and slowly learn that the trailer was the entire film.
Start with wing chun and the sacred centerline. The theory is elegant: occupy the center, and every attack folds around your structure like water around a rock. It is beautiful on the wooden dummy, it does sound nice. Then a guy who has boxed for eight months throws a jab, a straight jab, a direct jab, a simple jab, and the centerline discovers that geometry is not a force field. Turns out a straight line is also the shortest distance for his fist to your nose. Turns out that punching a heavy bag gets you much stronger than punching the air... The diagram never accounted for the other man deciding to hit you anyway...
And the wooden dummy. Mook jong. Years of devotion to a piece of furniture that never feints, never circles, never changes levels, never gets tired, and most importantly never hits back. You can drill the dummy until your forearms are oak, and you will be the undisputed champion of the corner of the room where the dummy lives. The dummy has a perfect record. It is undefeated because it is a chair.
Then the chi demo, the crown jewel. The grandmaster stands in his silk uniform and waves a hand, and six students collapse like he unplugged them. He never touches anyone. The catch is that only his own students fall. A visiting kickboxer is welcome to volunteer, and somehow the energy never reaches him. It reaches the guy whose belt the grandmaster signed. Chi, it turns out, is paid by tuition.
And whenever you ask why none of this gets tested, you get the eternal exemption. "It is for the street, not the ring." A street that is conveniently never available for inspection, that has no footage, that exists only as the place where the techniques work, which is to say nowhere, which is to say the same address as the invisible attackers in everyone else's dojo.
Traditional Chinese martial arts are ancient and were athletically brutal, and breathtaking. Very effective, back in the day. The current forms are closer to dance than to dance is to anything, and the lack of sparring allowed the proliferation of "energy masters" and "power fields" and what not, to the point that Tai Chi, Kung Fu and many others are pretty much forgotten and overshadowed by the mocking imitation that you can find nowadays.