G. Brett Williams #10 – Gunzi, The Ace of Clubs
Gunzi – A quiet and reserved warrior, Gunzi is by far the group’s most formidable fighter. Deadly with a weapon or unarmed, he has mastered many aspects of China’s various martial arts, creating a hybrid fighting style all his own. He is a quiet, introspective man with a great knowledge of history as well as combat. Gunzi was a soldier in the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. Though he followed Chiang Kai-shek, Gunzi more firmly believed in the policies of Chiang’s forbear, Sun Yat-sen. Sun Yat-sen, more versed in Western culture than his successor, espoused an ideology based on three principles; nationalism, democracy and the livelihood of the people. Gunzi was a young man filled with national pride and the willingness to defend his rapidly growing home country when Chiang took over control of the Kuomintang. Allying himself with the Soviet communist party to further his own nationalist ideals, Kai-shek took control of a large portion of China, including Shanghai. His overthrow of Shanghai led to the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 which saw the politically motivated murder of many communists in the city. While he feared the communist ideology, Gunzi certainly didn’t advocate the wholesale slaughter of his neighbors simply because they chose to believe in it. The Shanghai massacre turned his stomach so that he decided to escape the army and flee to England. In England, he took up with various institutions and learned as much as he could about Western culture, making his assimilation into that culture quite easy. Gunzi was an excellent student of history and politics. When he wasn’t practicing his martial skill, you could always find him devouring texts by the leading philosophers of the past and the present. He eventually found a job in the British armed forces, teaching code breaking and Chinese translation to communications officers and hand to hand combat to anyone who would listen. He found that, despite the problems he had with certain aspects of the West, he liked the culture as a whole. He felt comfortable with the relative freedom that Western ideology afforded its people, but part of him yearned for home, yearned to once again get his hands dirty in the fight against tyranny. So when the British government came to him with a proposition about the Aces program, he was more than willing to listen. Gunzi is the group’s oldest and wisest member, the one they always turn to for counsel when things are at their darkest.