Louis Swaim lives and practices in Oakland, California. He has also translated an earlier taijiquan manual, Yang Chengfu: The Essence and Applications of Taijiquan (North Atlantic Books, 2005). He received his master’ s degree in Chinese history, Mandarin, and Classical Chinese at U. C. Berkeley, and did additional language study at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies. He has been a taijiquan practitioner for over thirty years.