It is 6:14 in the morning at the southwest corner of Lake Merritt. The air is 49 degrees. The fog is sitting on the water in a thick gray bank that the rising light has not yet reached. Three people are already in the parking lot taking off jackets.
Mr. Wei is 71. He started this group in 2009. He was 54 then. His name in his passport is Wei Ming. Everyone calls him Mr. Wei. He drives in from the Outer Sunset on the AC Transit O bus that leaves the Transbay Terminal at 5:36 a.m. He has been making this trip on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for nearly seventeen years.
The group is twelve regulars. They do a simplified Yang-style form, twenty-four moves, taught to Mr. Wei by his grandfather in Guangzhou in 1962. Three of the regulars are women. Nine are men. The youngest is 58. The oldest is 84.
Mrs. Lee is the teacher. She is 79. She learned tai chi from her father in Guangzhou in 1962, the same year Mr. Wei was learning from his grandfather two streets over. They did not know each other in China. They met in Oakland in 2011 when Mrs. Lee’s daughter, who lives across the street from the lake, mentioned the morning group to her mother. Mrs. Lee came to watch on a Tuesday. By Saturday she had taken over the form correction.
“My father told me, the body remembers what the mind forgets,” Mrs. Lee says. “He was right. Mr. Wei moves a fraction differently from me, because his grandfather was a fraction different from my father. After three years I stopped correcting him on that one move. He was right. I was wrong. The fraction is in his body.”
The group has rules. Three of them. Show up if you said you would. If you cannot show up, text the chain so somebody knows. If you are sick, do not come; you can give us your sickness from across the path.
Marvin walks beside the circle now. He does not skate. He is 68. His wife, Roberta, died of breast cancer in 2022. He had not been to the lake in twenty years before her death. He came on a Tuesday in October that year because Mrs. Lee, who knew Roberta, called him on the Sunday after the funeral and said: come to the lake on Tuesday morning at six. Just walk. You do not have to talk. Marvin has come every Tuesday and Saturday since.
Mr. Wei has a question he asks people who walk beside him. The question is: what are you carrying. He asks it once and then he waits. Some people do not answer. Some people say nothing for three weeks and then they answer on a fourth Tuesday. Marvin has answered every Saturday for three years.
“He asks the question because his grandfather asked his father,” Mrs. Lee says. “His father asked him. He asked his children. His children are grown and they do not live nearby and so he asks Marvin and the brothers and the man in pajama pants and me.”
The man in pajama pants comes most mornings. He has never said his name. He waves at Mr. Wei. He waves at Mrs. Lee. He does the form by himself, ten feet away, on the grass, with his eyes closed.
In March 2020 the group did not meet for six weeks. Then in April Mrs. Lee emailed everyone and said: I think we should go back, but stand far apart. They went back. They stood eight feet apart on the path, all twelve of them in a wider circle than usual. Nobody got sick.
The fires of 2020 closed the lake to outdoor activity twice. The regulars met in Mrs. Lee’s daughter’s backyard on those mornings. There were six of them, masked, doing the form among the houseplants. Mr. Wei brought the speaker.
In 2024 three of the regulars died. Mr. Hu, who had Parkinson’s, in March. Mrs. Kim (no relation to the tofu Mrs. Kim, though they had met once at a Lunar New Year dinner), in June, of a stroke. Mr. Liu, who was 84, in November, of pneumonia after a fall. The group added an empty patch of grass to the formation each time. The patches are still there. They are not empty patches anymore. They are Mr. Hu’s patch, Mrs. Kim’s patch, and Mr. Liu’s patch.
On the Saturday I visited, there were nine people. The fog burned off at 6:43. Two joggers ran past on the path. A red-tailed hawk landed on the cypress at the south corner and watched them for almost six minutes before deciding they were not interesting.
At 6:58 Mr. Wei makes a small bow toward the lake. The form is over. The circle dissolves slowly. Mrs. Lee stays for ten extra minutes to do her own slower form. Marvin walks one more lap with his hands in his pockets. The man in pajamas leaves first, as he always does.
Mr. Wei stays last. He bends down at the edge of the path and picks up a paper coffee cup someone else dropped during the night. He carries it to the trash bin near the parking lot. He has done this every morning for sixteen years. He does not think about it. It is a routine his body decided.
