At our taekwondo studio, blackbelts, teens, and adults are mixed in the same class. This means I, as a 39-year-old beginner, am in the same class with ten-year-old blackbelts, high school age color belts, and everyone in-between.
There is an ideal placement of your body in taekwondo, ideal angles of your feet and legs, your hips, shoulders, wrists, and fists, before and during each movement. Your power, flexibility, and precision are what is judged in poomsae, or forms. Sparring is more utilitarian. You get points for hits and their difficulty: one point for a punch to the chest guard, two for a kick, four for a turning kick. Three points for a kick to the head, five for a turning kick.
Our master (the title Master is given to a 4th degree blackbelt, Grandmaster to a 6th) was a fighter, winning and medaling at the Junior Olympics and Collegiate Nationals for sparring. He adjusts his advice for each of our weird bodies, our limitations and talents. When he teaches us the correct form for a spinning roundhouse kick, he says, “This is the best-case scenario.” Meaning, when you’re doing it faster, you’ll cheat, or when you’re sparring, you’ll do what you have to in order to stay alive in the fight.
When we get into a kicking line, our master gives us feedback on the way we kick the targets he’s holding.
“Stretching, stretching, stretching,” he tells Colin, who is married to my friend, Jie. Their young son is in my young son’s TKD class.
“Nice ki-op. We love it,” he teases Chelsea, a 13-year-old who won’t shout when making contact with the target.
She says she did shout, and he says, without looking at me next in line, “I’ve got Jane. She’s recording everything.”
I haven’t been here that long, so I don’t know how he knows my brain can’t help but record everything. Sometimes when he turns off the music or the AC and it’s suddenly quiet, he tells us, “Now I can hear your thoughts.”
After class, Eva, a 22-year-old college student, will text me, “I really hope that’s not true.”
When I kick, he says, “I need to find a way to make you mad.” A polite way of saying I’m being too polite. I need to kick harder.
With Ricky, our master’s feedback is more direct. “You missed the first kick. Focus. Your body is everywhere.”
Ricky is a high blue belt, which is mid-range on the spectrum of 16 belt rankings. He’s baby-faced and strong, impossibly pale, with blond ringlets and fallen arches. He’s probably 15-years-old. He low-key talks back to our master, mumbling excuses and arguing over clarity of instruction. Our master asks everyone to count how many body hits they get while we practice sparring. Ricky forgets to count so he says 69 when it’s his time to report. Our master points to the floor next to Ricky and says, “Push-ups.”
***
I first signed my son up for TKD because it had slowly dawned on me that he didn’t hate everything, he just hated soccer. When we stepped into the TKD studio he couldn’t believe it. Or maybe I couldn’t believe it: everyone shouting in unison, punching and kicking, blasting music, obstacle courses. I looked forward to my son’s classes more than he did, sitting rapt on the skinny wooden bench for parents, the only hour each day I had no urge to check my phone. After a couple months, I found myself in the kitchen while everyone was asleep trying to do what I’d seen in my son’s class. Simply asking about the adult class was difficult; the idea of moving my old, bad body around in front of other people seemed like an emergency. But I thought maybe I could stand in the back, invisible, ideally alone.
You can’t be alone and invisible in TKD. You have to shout. You are there to have your body and your motions observed and coached. You’re there to copy your classmates and spar with each other. “Look at him. Copy him,” our master says, his indirect way of giving approval. And you’re there to cheer for each other. The first time I earned a stripe, it was Ricky who gave me a high five as I ran back to my spot. “Good job,” he said, his voice the voice of a 15-year-old boy, happy for a middle-aged stranger.
***
I’ve been doing EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy for trauma related to the birth of my second child. We both almost died at the beginning of her life, and though we’re fine now, fear and aversions can crop back up unexpectedly.
When you start EMDR you choose three cognitions or “I statements” from a menu that match the way you feel when you think about the most troubling images of your traumatic event. I chose “I am weak,” “I am in danger,” and “I can’t trust anyone.” Then you make a list for each cognition of the first time you felt this way, the worst time you felt this way, and the most recent time you felt this way. The result is a network of nine possibly overlapping experiences linked by the way they made you feel. Mapping my experiences and reactions like this, instead of linearly or categorically, created a new picture of myself. I saw myself from a distance, my fear reactions more sympathetic and understandable. EMDR tries to make the immeasurable measurable. You “process” and “finish” a memory. It feels a bit like seeing a picture of yourself as a child, the mental acrobatics you go through to truly understand that person was and is you, how sorry you feel for them, and how happy, for all kids in all pictures, with no idea what is going to happen.
***
The first time I believed “I am in danger” was when I woke up in an ambulance to EMTs sliding cold scissors up my body. I understood they were cutting off my clothes. Something seemed familiar about this emergency. It’s finally happening, I thought, and I don’t know why I thought that. It felt like when you understand while dreaming that this is a dream you’ve had before, part of a whole history of this dream, but the sensation is just part of the dream. The EMTs asked if I knew why I was there.
I had been crossing Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge on foot when someone hit me going 30mph. I went up and over the windshield, landing unconscious behind the vehicle. The unconscious part of the story is the most disturbing to me. What position was my body in? Where were my belongings? Did people think I was dead?
“I’m so lucky,” I told our master when I described my old knee injury.
“Lucky, unlucky,” he said.
I was not dead. I had a concussion and a destroyed knee, which was reconstructed by the best orthopedic surgeon imaginable. My health insurance billed the driver’s insurance. The driver’s insurance sent the bills back to my insurance, which they would not pay, so I got a lawyer, the details of which I don’t remember clearly. I remember dreading calls with the lawyer, a free one who was friends with my friend’s parents. She was very focused on my remembering whether or not I had been in the crosswalk, but I couldn’t remember. I had been talking to my mom on the phone. It was the day Michael Jackson died. I knew my habit was to use the crosswalk and to stray out of it near the end, a short-cut closer to my destination, Harvard Book Store, where I worked. The lawyer said we could appeal for more money, wages lost while I sat for months in a hip-to-toe cast, unable to read or write because I had double vision, that the scar on my knee after surgery was long and I could be paid by the inch because I’m a woman. The money I could get for my scar represents the value lost in my attractiveness.
***
Elise is eight. She’s a high green belt in my son’s class, and sometimes she comes to our class with her mom, Ngoan.
“Do you remember my long hair?” Elise asks our master. Her hair is thick, shiny, and recently shoulder-length.
“Do you miss your long hair?” he asks her back.
“I want to be like Rapunzel except without the tower,” she says.
“If you were in a tower, you could just tie your hair to something and let yourself down,” he says.
“That never occurred to me,” I say.
He shrugs. “It’s like in movies when they tie bedsheets together and commando themselves down the outside of a building.”
I’ve seen those movies, too, but never dreamed a mechanical solution could address the categories we teach our kids to sort people into, the savers and the saved. If your hair is long enough, you could be both.
“When you punch with more power, your fist will go downward,” our master tells Ricky. “And what if the other person does this? Then what do you do? Then what do you do?”
Ricky is tired. His face is red. He’s hurt his ankle and is pretending he hasn’t.
“If you hurt yourself, you shorten your life as an athlete. If you don’t take care of your ankle, you’ll hurt it again,” our master says.
“No, I won’t,” Ricky says.
“Yes, you will,” our master says.
“No, I won’t,” Ricky says.
“When you hurt that ankle again, I want you to think of me,” our master says.
***
Shortly after I started TKD, I hurt my rehabbed knee coming out of a deep lunge stretch. Something shifted and shifted back, the pain brief and arresting. It could bear weight on and had full range of motion, but felt achy and unstable. In class, I thought I was hiding it, or even didn’t need to, since what’s the difference between someone on their third TKD class and someone on their third TKD class with an achy knee? But afterward our master asked if everything was okay.
Maybe it’s from sparring his whole life, watching people so closely and reacting to them, knowing what people will do before they do it, that our master sees everything. He notices hundreds of haircuts. He knows if someone falls down across the room and behind him. He knows if someone needs water and won’t ask, and if someone doesn’t need water but keeps asking. He catches people when they lose their balance. He puts my son on the side of the room opposite the mirror because my son can’t stop looking at himself. My knee hurt for a month, and each time it hurt, our master asked from across the room, “Pain?” I always said, “No.” The first day I noticed it didn’t hurt at all was the first day he didn’t ask.
I read somewhere that aside from surgery and antibiotics, it’s unclear if medical interventions themselves improve outcomes, or if what improves outcomes is the feeling that someone is helping you.
***
In class we’re supposed to knock down this heavy, spinning target with a back kick. I keep spinning off it, or not hitting it at all. I give it two tries and start to head to the end of the line when someone says, “Do it again.” It’s Ricky standing behind the target making a welcoming motion with his arms. I try again and it tips a little and tips back. “Get closer,” Ricky says. When I get closer the hit feels totally different. “Almost! Go again, go again,” Ricky says. Before this moment, outside of childbirth, I don’t think I’d ever had the experience of someone cheering me on. It changes something in you. There’s a welling up of excitement or confidence or emotion. Your goal is the same, but your motivation is different. You’re not just you. In a vacuum I’d be perfectly content to try twice and spend a week thinking about ways I might or might not approach the target again in the future. But with Ricky there, seemingly caring whether or not I knock it down, I knock it down. It’s thrilling.
There’s something slightly ironic in Ricky’s friendliness to me, but the effect is turning out to be the same as if he were totally earnest. We see this phenomenon all the time: 80s power ballads, high-waisted pants, giant glasses, mullets, an ironic relationship with something becomes sincere. I wonder if Ricky is amused that a person who could be his mom is here as his peer. It’s true that an adult taking TKD is weirder than a teen. But a teen taking TKD is weirder than a little kid. The older a TKD student gets the higher the probability that there’s something, for lack of a better phrase, wrong with them. I look at Colin and at Ngoan and think, what’s wrong with them? Why are they here? If Ricky and I were the same age, would be friends? I would be drawn to his foolhardiness. His existence as ongoing proof that you can be careless and still maybe nothing terrible will happen.
***
After the accident and rehab, once I was able-bodied again, I thought I had actually died and no one could tell but me. How strange; everyone continued on like I was there. I could hear them, and they could hear me. But what did “there” mean? I watched my family move around as though I were watching a movie. I could identify the feelings I would normally feel in the situations I was in, but I couldn’t feel them. “I love you, too,” I would say when appropriate, but if I wasn’t real, what did that mean?
“you are dead: someone to whom things that happened will not happen again someone to whom a thing will only happen once;” Diana Khoi Nguyen writes in her book Ghost Of. In it, Nguyen includes family photographs where her brother cut out his image before committing suicide. We see the five family members standing together, arranged in a pose, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, and a crude hole made with scissors where Nguyen’s younger brother’s face would be. A son-shaped, brother-shaped hole in the world, in their family, forever.
I was not a ghost but I couldn’t get my mind to understand that. I saw the hole I made, a self fading and fading. You could see through me to the chair in which I sat, crying to my mom that I didn’t understand what was wrong.
A therapist, who would periodically, and for a reason that never became obvious, raise her arms off the arm rests of her chair to shoulder height and lower them back down, said it was a common phenomenon to believe you’re dead after a traumatic or near-death event. She listened as I told her that on the way from my apartment to her office, I saw strangers on the train stand up and shoot me in the face. I saw air conditioners fall out of windows and crush people on the sidewalk. She asked, if I wasn’t emotionally numb, what would I be feeling? “Scared,” I said.
But fear is also proof of life. “A human is someone who becomes terrified, and having become terrified, craves an end to her fear,” Nguyen writes. Fear, I came to understand, is a feeling only a living person can have. A living person fears everyone they love will die as suddenly and randomly as they did. A living person fears the thing happening again. It is to a dead person a thing can only happen once.
The therapist suggested taking a self-defense class. If I felt stronger and more capable, I would be less afraid.
***
Our dojang is located at the intersection of two busy streets. It shares a three-business cinderblock building with a furniture store and a dance studio. On one side is a small used car lot and a local burrito chain. Across the way, a convenience store and gas station. When you time your arrival just right, after the previous class lets out and a little too close to the start of your own, you can get a spot in front. If not, you park on the other side of one residential house, along a grassy stretch covered in trash.
“Oh no, we have to park in the trash!” my son says, slipping out of his booster seat onto car parts and food wrappers. He takes off running through the half-parking-lot-half-street toward the studio while I call frantically after him, “Cars!”
He’s old enough to know not to run, and I am old enough to know he will run.
In the window of the studio, a wall-sized poster hangs, street-facing, of our master when he was 17 and won the gold medal at the Junior Olympics. If you’re driving by, you’ll see him as a kid, his face unsmiling and unreadable. His fists are held up in kicking stance. Next to the poster, you may see him as he is now, pushing the door open, wedging a block of wood above its hinges so someone can roll their bike through, or coming out to say, “Hi,” to a parent.
Inside the TKD studio, everyone wears the same thing. Only our heads, hands, feet, and the narrow Vs of our chests are exposed by our white uniforms. The scar on my knee is covered. The colors of our belts signify how long we’ve been there, how often we’ve come to class, how much of the curriculum we’ve learned, and how many testing cycles we’ve been through. Our minds are focused on counting, on movement, on reacting correctly to the position in which our master holds the targets, on reacting correctly to someone’s attack. When I’m not punching hard enough or kicking hard enough and our master jokes that he has to find a way to make me mad, I think, but my anger is bigger than punching and kicking targets held by one of few people I’m not mad at. I can’t fight a car, for example, or the fear that we’re all going to spontaneously die.
***
In self-defense, I’ve learned how to defend myself if someone grabs my right wrist with their left hand or my left wrist with their right hand. It does feel kind of powerful, to have some secret strategies even if only for a very, very specific and unlikely set of circumstances. But it’s not the ability to break someone’s wrist as easily as turning a car key, or to elbow someone’s jaw and run away that is making the numbness go away. It’s being in the same room with people working on the same things. It’s knowing what to expect when I attack Colin and how that differs from when I attack Ngoan. Colin kicks hard, grabs hard, twists hard, and drops you hard. Color belts can’t control our strength or distance from each other the way higher belts can. I accidentally hit Ngoan when I misjudge the length of my own arm and when I apologize, she says, “No, that’s good. I can feel that.” Ngoan helps me up after she sweeps my legs out from under me. She compliments me on the grace of my fall. Her hands are dry and cool.
The expressions on Ngoan’s and Colin’s faces when they’re thinking are the same. I call out which self-defense I’m expecting, and they look at my belt in ready stance remembering the movements before they begin. Across the room, we hear our master telling Ricky, “You did your poomsae wrong for an hour because you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re listening and you got it in five minutes.”
“Why is he so hard on Ricky?” I ask my friend Jie. She says Ricky fights at school. Our master is trying to instill discipline and self-control. I think back on some of the things I’ve heard him telling Ricky and realize he talks much more about fighting in real-life scenarios with Ricky than anyone else. Yes, he’s training Ricky not to fight. He’s also training him, should he find himself in a fight, to win.
***
Our master is private.
“What do you do when you’re not here?” one of the little kids asks.
And he says, “Taekwondo.”
One day a teen blackbelt calls across the room, “Sir, how old are you?”
We all turn with shining eyes, wondering if our master will answer.
He hesitates and finally says, “Thirty.”
We know he’s allergic to grass. He travels to a different city to get his hair cut. He eats a lot and likes every kind of food. He is likely the greatest athlete any of us have ever seen in real life.
Sometimes people come in off the street and want to fight our master. What do you do, we want to know. He asks them to sign a waiver, he says with a smile, and they leave.
One day we see him spar for real. His face completely changes, jaw relaxed, expression cocky. His opponent, a former student, a blackbelt who went on to compete in college. He’s strong-looking and in a heavier weight class than our master.
“Why do you keep punching me? It makes no sense,” our master says while his opponent barely dodges a headshot not intended to land.
“Every time you punch it leaves you open,” our master says. “I get twice the points for kicking you.”
The heavyweight is surprisingly flexible. He’s imposing, but tires quickly.
I don’t know enough yet about taekwondo or sparring or competition rules to appreciate our master’s decision-making, but I know what having a human body is like and living inside his must feel like flight. When he leaves the ground, several things happen before he lands again. To have all the strength, speed, and control you’d ever need for anything. I can’t imagine it.
After the fight the two are lying on the ground sweating and arguing.
“You should come to class,” our master says.
“I keep getting hurt,” his opponent says.
“Because you don’t come to class.”
***
Jie and I are both writers and teachers and think a lot about our master’s pedagogy. We watch him teach our young sons and Ngoan’s daughter, Elise. Jie considered writing an ethnography about our dojang, but she said she loves being there too much. Even writing this essay about my own fear and numbness and idolization feels like breaching something holy. Trying to describe the way you feel about a coach or a team with words is like filling a bottle with lake water to try to show someone what it feels like to swim there. I don’t know exactly why I’m here. I don’t know exactly why Ricky, Eva, Colin, or Ngoan are here. But maybe our reasons are similar.
***
After class one night, while I’m waiting to turn left out of the parking lot, Ricky appears on foot waiting to cross, too. I roll down the window and ask if he wants a ride. “Can I call my mom?” he asks, and tells his mom in Portuguese he’s getting a ride home. Ricky politely asks about my kids and my job, and I ask what high school he goes to. He is totally different outside the dojang, hard to describe without using the word sweet. I drop him off at his house. It’s not that close to our dojang. Not close enough to walk, agony-free, in rain or heat. It’s a light blue house I pass every day and never knew was his.
***
In class, color belts are practicing our own poomsae.
“Someday, Chelsea, you’ll count loud enough that I can hear you when I’m standing right next to you,” our master says.
Chelsea continues at the same volume.
“Good, Daniel, except you need to relax your butt,” our master says.
Daniel is tall with black hair and turned-out feet. He’s confident, friendly to a fault. He insists he is not clenching his butt.
“Your butt is clenched so tight I can feel it in my butt,” our master says.
Somehow, it’s revealed that Daniel, Ricky, and Chelsea saw each other at the gym, and no one said hi.
“I said hi!” Daniel says, and we believe him.
Ricky says Chelsea didn’t say hi even after he passed by her three times to ensure she saw him.
“Why would I say hi to you if you passed by me three times without saying hi?” Chelsea says. Chelsea is a couple of years younger than the two boys. She has long braids, dark skin, glasses, and braces. She is usually almost completely silent, and the sound of her voice is a pleasant surprise.
“You circled her like a shark instead of just saying, ‘Hi,’” our master says. “What if, after class, you all exchange numbers.”
The three of them look absolutely terrified at this idea.
“Then you could text each other: Are you going to the gym? I am also going to the gym,” our master continues. He mimes texting. He speaks in a comically simple way to show how simple it could be.
No one will make eye contact with him or anyone else.
“Oh my god, you guys,” he says, “you know each other.”
Class is dismissed and Ricky changes into his street clothes: a polo shirt and track pants.
“Can I make a suggestion?” our master asks. “Shorts.”
It’s 90 degrees out and 70% humidity.
“I’m fine,” Ricky says.
“You’re going to faint,” our master says.
“I’m not going to faint,” Ricky says.
“No one faints willingly.”
We watch out the big glass windows as Ricky leaves, crossing the busy street in front of the dojang, nowhere near the crosswalk.
***
After class, Eva tells me softly about her unrequited love for a boy she works with.
“Eva,” our master yells, frowning with his mouth open. “What is it?”
She knows better than to admit she’s engaging in an unsolvable problem, so she makes something up.
“Why are you lying?” our master says. He’s known Eva since she was nine.
“I’m not,” Eva says. Whatever she made up is also true; it’s just not the main problem.
Our master tells her to move out of her overbearing mother’s house and get a job she likes.
“Jane never talks to me,” he says to Eva.
“Yes, I do,” I say, but he’s right.
What would I say? That I feel weird about how much I like being here? Is this what church is like? Is this why people go to church when they’re scared?
You never talk to us, I think at him.
***
Two blackbelts, one tall, one short, spar at the end of class while the rest of us watch. Our master steps in for the tall one to demonstrate possible kicking combinations. He narrates what he’s doing, and how the shorter blackbelt is spontaneously responding. He starts over with two, three, four different kicks and shows us how the shorter blackbelt did or didn’t respond differently. If you move forward and your opponent moves forward your kick will miss. If you throw a back kick and don’t feel contact, you run. If you throw a back kick and hit, good, but some people can eat a back kick and keep going. He starts over again and again, narrating what he’s doing and how it compares to what the tall blackbelt would have done and what the short blackbelt does or would do. Faster, he spools out real and hypothetical narratives of attacks and counters, following them down branching paths all running clearly and simultaneously in his mind. He’s talking faster than we can follow, faster than he can fully finish the words.
“Again. Hands up, hands up.”
Sparring is chess times infinity. The decisions are instantaneous; your body is all the pieces and their capabilities.
“This time he moved right,” he says. “Now we know he’ll move right when he’s about to step out. Again.”
The next time the blackbelt moves left.
“Good, he’s listening,” our master says. “What do we do if he moves right? What do we do if he moves left? Again.”
This time our master runs straight at him and the blackbelt backs up, laughing, till he’s out of bounds.
“You’re just running at me!” He protests something out of the realm of what he’s prepared for.
*
“He’s in shock,” our master tells us. “That’s the only thing he could have done. Have you ever seen videos of people getting hit by cars? You’re watching like, ‘No! What are you doing? Move!’ but they can’t move.”
I do wonder if I stood still, like people in videos getting hit by cars, and let the car hit me. I can’t remember. I have been ashamed just in case. But here, I’ve practiced believing something can hit me. I don’t have to spend time standing in the street trying to believe it. I can move right or left.
Our classmates have had injuries and serious health problems and come to class to watch while they recover. Our classmates have had profound losses, spouses, parents, and have come to class while they grieve. Our master hugs them. “This will be a happy place,” he says. “Even though I’m yelling at everyone.”
I do know there’s no amount of taekwondo that can keep us all from spontaneously dying. But here, I can give Ricky a ride home, I can listen to Eva, I can fight Ngoan and Colin, I can idolize our master for creating this place whether he ever lets us know him or not. I can practice loving everyone anyway, however briefly.
