Inkhaven Day 30 - Eat Bitter
Different Meat: Part 2 of 2 // Siping, 2017
I soon noticed that the students who did well at the school weren’t necessarily the most physically competent. Instead, they were the ones who, on being told to do something that seemed impossible—in difficulty or pain or physics—leaned in without deliberation. They repeated—and often failed to land—the same movements, again and again, ad infinitum.
One thing about pain is this: It hurts more when accompanied by boredom. It hurts even more when accompanied by failure.
Brawn wasn’t on my side. The only female student, I weighed considerably less than everyone else. I had no martial arts experience. I was moderately athletic—by non-athlete standards. I could become stronger, but I was never going to outpace a martially-experienced behemoth in brute strength.
That didn’t matter much, though. The thing about hard training is that it’s hard. It’s always hard. Its difficulty inflates to match your ability, without an upper limit. Eventually, and usually much sooner than eventually, determination upstages ability.
Attitude, on the other hand, I could control. I modeled the same equanimity that I observed in Matt and Micha, two American students who had established themselves as Shifu’s darlings.
The first time I saw the guys get down and do knuckle push-ups atop bricks—sharp and porous as pumice stones—I laid two bricks in front of me, silently and without forethought, and followed suit.
Shifu waved a hand at me, “No, no, you girl-person, you never-no have do this. Make your hands so ugly, man won’t like. Can do normal push-up, ’s-okay, no problem.”
I said, “No problem,” and did the knuckle push-ups anyway, which resulted in bruised knuckles and scabs that didn’t have an opportunity to heal until after I left the school. Years later, my knuckles were still visibly knobbier, the backs of my hands peppered with scars.
Shifu watched me for a moment, then laughed. “Me like this type girl-person.”
The boys later guessed it might’ve been a test to gauge the “spirit” of his newest student. Apparently I’d passed.
What Shifu refers to as “spirit” isn’t easy to self-assess, especially when it hasn’t been duly stress-tested.
Oven (that is, Owen), an English twenty-one year old who’d trained off and on with Shifu since he was eighteen, considered himself a former underdog. He invested outsized emotional energy in new students, administering tough love to the wilted in hopes they’d through. Thus, he was doubly disappointed, sometimes to the point of disgust, when they gave up.
The weekend I met him, Oven said, “People look for ‘hardcore’ without knowing what hardcore really looks like. They don’t have a reference for it when they haven’t done anything like this. They think that training a few hours a week back home gives them an idea, but it’s not just about duplicating that experience more times. The long hours means you don’t get recovery time. The isolation means you don’t get distractions or escapes. People see movie montages and don’t grasp just how much a ball-ache it can be. In between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ there’s a lot of repetitive, painful shit. Also, there’s no ‘after’. Not really.”
The school is polarizing. Some students leave unrecognizable, and many of them return. Others show up expecting to train for several months or a year, only to bail within their first week. Oftentimes, it’s not easy to guess who will fit into which category. People surprise you, and themselves. Wet noodles toughen up, happy campers deflate, and so on.
One guy lasted three days. When he told everyone he was leaving, he said, “I didn’t think it’d be this hard.” Eight hours of training a day, he calculated, meant he could spend at least a couple hours of the day studying for law school. Nope.
Another lasted under two days before a panic attack kicked in and he began throwing up, to the point of vomiting blood. Shifu took him to the hospital, and Kyle, a Canadian multidisciplinary martial arts master in his own right, who’d trained under Shifu since Shifu’s pre-English-speaking days, continued our training in his absence.
Upon returning, before his flight out, let’s-call-him-Frederick admitted that he’d spent the last ten years sitting sedentarily at a computer, and that he suffered crippling social anxiety—that puking blood was a stress response he was already all too familiar with, but that he’d been doing better recently.
He almost missed his flight, due to a second panic attack and hospital visit.
Everyone was full of regret that we simply didn’t have the resources to provide the life-changing help this guy so needed.
Everyone but me. Seething with maternal aggravation, all I could do was fixate on how sketchy a venue this was to have a crisis. Cell phone reception and internet access were sparse. The nearest hospital was a half hour away in Siping, a run-down four-million-person city most Chinese people hadn’t heard of. The hospital was not a facility that inspired confidence. The nearest airport was at least two hours away.
“What, did he not think it might be good to do five push-ups or go on one jog around a cul-de-sac before he came here? What did he think he was going to do if he had an episode here? Get the poor deaf farmer down the road to helicopter him to a hospital in Beijing?!”
What I didn’t say, but what at least some of the guys probably picked up on, was that Frederick’s vulnerabilities, his hopes, and his fears reminded me of all my own. And that I found that threatening.
After hearing me out for a while, Boas, a burly French-Swiss student all the other guys had a man-crush on, pushed back. “People come here looking to change themselves, you know? I just feel bad for him.”
Kyle said, “He just needed help that we couldn’t provide. If I could have looked after him, then, sure, why not? Maybe he could’ve stayed, pushed through the difficulty at the beginning, changed his life. But everyone’s plate here is already full.”
I was still prickly. “Yeah, no shit. This just wasn’t the place, bro.”
“Anna, he was just desperate. And hopeful. And he has a disease. It’s not his fault. It’s no one’s fault, really, it’s just a shame.”
“…Goddammit. You’re right. I know.”
It was neither the first nor last occasion at the school where I’d think, the only person in the room exhibiting traces of toxic masculinity right now is…me. Me. The only woman in the room, albeit one with a chip on her shoulder, and perhaps the only person in the room even familiar with “toxic masculinity” as a term.
I wasn’t proud of the way I reacted, but the upswell of empathy I saw in the others—young men who were already tough enough that they didn’t need to prove themselves through macho posturing or alpha-dogging one another—made me proud and grateful to be among them.
Wang Shifu is the only man I’ve met with Resting Harrassed-Trickster Face: like if Loki, or maybe Sun Wukong, was trying to use a self-checkout that wasn’t working.
Over the years, he’s picked English up from various students, creating an incongruous one-man pidgin of “shit”, “bro”, “egg temple” (that is, example), “excess reasons” (exaggeration)…and words like “economize,” which Shifu persists in using, which Kyle in turn persists in assuring him is better replaced with “save”.
“No, me think this ‘economize’, this more long word. More true English.”
An impoverished, fatherless, undereducated child with no other prospects, he went to the Shaolin temple to train. Unearthing a love of combat, he left some years later to specialize in Sanda—Chinese kickboxing—and became a national champion before his back was broken during a match, ending his career as a fighter at twenty.
Outside of training, he was the nicest guy in the world. Good-humored, curious, childlike, and prone to bouts of paternal indignation when, say, he learned a student had been overcharged by a merchant in town.
“Will. This tea, you spend how much?”
“I dunno, like two hundred kuài?”
“REALLY?! Too many expensive! Kyle, you must next time take for him go buy this. This people, he stupid. Two hundred kuài, WOW. Me think this really so expensive…”
Later I heard Shifu mutter to himself again. “Two hundred kuài. Wow.”
During training, he was another person entirely. Being hit with a staff, yelled at, uncharitably imitated, and having-my-limbs-yanked-forcibly-in-directions-they-don’t-bend-as-I-involuntarily-scream-bloody-murder—all that falls far beyond what most consider the limits of “tough love.”
But Shifu’s training methods never felt abusive. Every disciplinary choice was calibrated to the student—their temperament, their body, what would force them to unearth reserves they didn’t know they had. Diamonds under pressure.
Giving in to the authority of a strict master, when that master was someone I deemed worthy of such trust, provided an opportunity to surrender my autonomy in a way that paradoxically gave me more freedom.
After all, autonomy gives me freedom of movement—but also freedom to stagnate, to regress, to make excuses, to self-sabotage, to half-ass, to avoid showing myself what I’m truly made of.
That’s what we take with us when we leave, what will push us to keep pushing ourselves when there isn’t a staff-wielding Shaolin master looming over our heads, what will keep us grounded when we’re lacking structure, and what we can keep even if our bodies fail.
The first time I left the school, I’d only been there a month. Still, I felt different, walking around the airport, allowing myself to take up more space. I was already made of fundamentally different meat.
Since then, I’ve been to dozens of new countries and, as a woman, walk around on my own like a big animal instead of a small one. Not because I’m invincible, because I’m not, and not because I’d win against an assailant, because in many cases I probably wouldn’t. But I have a more congruent relationship with my emotions, my body, my surroundings, and my limits—which is something ten years of yoga, including a couple years of teacher training, couldn’t give me.
Since then, I’ve been getting better at recognizing imposter syndrome in myself, and ignoring it. I went to train Muay Thai in Thailand, where my gym’s head trainer strongly encouraged me to fight. It took me a full week to realize he wasn’t just poking fun at me, and decided to trust him. A month later, I stepped into the ring for my first fight.
Several stints in, I still felt like a complete beginner, and doubted that would change. Although a part of me still clutches a childish notion of being “good enough” to feel like a superhuman, it’s really not about the “after” at the end of the montage. It’s about falling in love with the in-between. The pain and struggle and discouragement and ennui and self-flagellation peppered with elusive moments of triumph and revelation.
It’s about the hardest part: the ball-ache of redundancy, of learning to chīkǔ, or “eat bitter.” That’s where the good stuff is.