Hun Wu’s Divine Magic and Novelties: Memories of My Mentor

Story from the Road

The place smelled musky and the lights were dim. But looks can be deceiving. 

Behind the counter was a short, asain man with a long white beard, smoking a cigar. 

“Hey, welcome,” he said, “You looking for something?”

I said, “Um, well I met a guy named Eric Jones in a magic shop in New York. He told me I should check this place out.”

“Ah, you know Eric. So you do magic?,” he asked, knowingly, as he bit his cigar.

“Yeah, I’m a magician,” I said, proudly inflating my own self-worth as most magicians do.

He smiled. “Show me a trick.”

I showed him my favorite card trick at the time, one I had learned from studying Michael Vincent.

“Say, that’s pretty good,” he said. “The problem with card tricks, though, is that after one or two people get bored. You know any coin tricks?” 

I’d never heard that before. All I’d ever cared about was card tricks and mentalism. I was never any good with coins. I showed him a one-coin-across and a French drop vanish. He showed me a quick routine with just one coin that fooled the snot of me. 

“You know that?,” he asked.

“No, not at all,” I said, timidly. 

“Same move you just did. I just did it like this here. Just don't miss and don’t flash,” he said. 

Just then, another customer walked in the shop. 

He said: “Practice in that mirror behind you.” And then he went to handle the other customer. 

The shop was strange. I’d never seen anything like it. 

I took a second to let my eyes wander. I realized it was both a magick and a magic shop. One side was magicians’ tricks with sleight of hand and fekes. The other side was candles, incense, and the like. But that was only part of the smell. The other part of the smell must have been the cigars.

I watched myself in the mirror and rehearsed the steal. What an ingenious misdirect! He did the same move I did and fooled me because of the slightest change in handling. 

He came back. “All right, show me now.”

I showed him the move. He said: “Good, now do this here to show both hands empty and make it reappear.”

I’d never learned an acquitment like that before: showing both hands empty with just pure sleight of hand. That sleight took a lot longer to learn. I left the shop an hour or two before closing, thinking about the routine he showed me and trying not to forget anything. 

He told me to come back on Saturday, after 2:00 pm. He said more magicians from the area come around and hang out. After leaving I realized we never asked each other's names. He just taught me magic. He didn’t charge me anything, either. How does he stay in business?

I went back on Saturday.

“Hey guy, you work on that coin trick?,” he asked.

“Yeah, actually I changed it a little bit,” I said. 

“Hold on,” he went to handle another customer. Every store is busier on the weekends, even magick-magic shops with weird smells.

“Hey guy,” he yelled from the counter.

I looked at him as if to say, “Who, me?”

He said: “These people want to see a magic trick,” then he waved a small group of people my way. 

Nervous about the coin trick, I pulled out my cards and did a couple of tricks for them. It went well. I was comfortable with cards. After they left I went to the mirror and practiced my little coin routine. After the place cleared out a bit he came over. 

“Let me see it,” he said. 

I showed him my new coin routine using the move he taught me. 

“Say, that looks good. Show it to them.” 

He left to handle more customers. And now I had to do the coin trick. It went surprisingly well. 

He came back around and we talked for a while. He told me his name was Hun Wu. “But you can just call me Wu so you don’t have to call another man Hun.” We both laughed. 

For a few years I went in and out of that shop. We would talk for long periods of time. 

Always, he’d ask “what’s new” and he’d ask what I was working on in magic. He would always try to push me to make money as a professional magician. Sometimes he’d hand me money and tell me to go get lunch. Sometimes he would just put on a magic instructional video like the The encyclopedia of coin sleights by Michael Rubinstein or Charlie Frye’s Eccentrics. I asked if I could see a set of lecture notes he had on display one time, he just gave them to me. I don’t remember him ever charging me for anything. How does he stay in business?

He became a bit of a mentor to me, always stressing the importance of having a story or something to say that isn’t just the trick. And he was always willing to have the hard conversations. One time I felt slighted by another magician. He said: “Well, I don’t know what race you are, but you’re not white. This is Richmond, VA, and these magicians are old white men. They don’t like you. I had to go through it, Eric had to go through it, too. You’re a better magician than they are anyways, just focus on that eventually they’ll come around.”

Often, if it was near close, he would take me and other magicians to dinner. One time though, he kicked everyone out of the shop before close, except me, and took me to dinner. He looked at me and said, “I’ve had some of the top magicians in the world in my shop. You’re every bit as good as any of them. You need to do something. I don’t know what, I’m too old to tell you what to do. But you got to do something. Too many magicians die broke. You got to make money with this thing.”

After dinner, Wu took a very strange route back to the shop. He stopped by some restaurant and got out of the car and said, “Hold on, I’m going to check on something.” Hopping back in the car, he said, “They’re closed, damn. I want dessert.”

We kept driving towards the shop until he saw a 24-hour diner. Like a kid who just learned to drive, he whipped the car into the parking lot and said, “Come on, coffee and pie.” It was already near 11:00 pm. But neither of us was in any rush. 

That night, in particular, still strikes me hard. I’m no longer in Richmond. I’m doing something; I don’t know what, but it’s something. 

Sometimes the future smells musky and is dim-lit, but looks can be deceiving.  

I often miss those days in that magick-magic shop with Wu.  Creating routines, learning new sleight of hand, I’m always thinking to myself: “How the hell does he stay in business?”