Driving there — in the midst of the year’s first snowstorm, an oppressively-dangerous white that reminded you spring was oh, so far away — was like something out of a James Bond film: the battering, violent snow, howling winds, a tree limb narrowly missing the windshield and the car drifting across the road in a way more appropriate for a Tokyo parking garage than State Street. But I’d made it to Final Round — a local fighting gym in Ann Arbor — to dip my toes into the world of Muay Thai, only to find out that, of course, they weren’t doing classes today, because, goddamn, why would they be? I barely made it here alive, why the fuck would they be open?
Maybe I was expecting a bit of magic for a fighter’s rapier to somehow wave away geological axioms like weather. Maybe I rather craved a bit of magic. There’s been a certain type of carnal exhaustion in my recent life from seeing doors closing in my face and pretending like the windows were just as good as the doors — something I, even if I didn’t want to fully admit it, wanted Final Round to amend, with its halogen white walls and mat-to-shining-mat stretching across the floor. It offered any prospective student the miracle that a well-placed punch brought — a sudden knockout, victory from the jaws of defeat, something real life never seemed to parallel — and the concrete reality of a knuckle ripping through the other person’s jaw. One hits another; the other falls. A punch doesn’t lie to you. I saw the promise of Muay Thai as this; a bit arcane: to smash through closed doors.
Two fists. Two elbows. Two knees and two legs — the art of eight limbs. The vision of knees into the abdomen, elbows smashing through a guard, tibia on tibia, of a pungent, metallic and, can-I-say, strangely attractive bloodlust? Once in a while we just all need to punch something, and I came here to punch things. Well, I’d also be lying if I said there wasn’t some taboo, Goggins-esque desire to become whatever flavor of Greek-alphabet male is in vogue, to have had the slim physique and quiet determination of a fighter: to become more of a man, whatever that meant to my subconscious at the time.
I was still squarely aware I didn’t belong in the “able to punch things” category during my first public class. Here I was, someone with painted-black nails and bleach-blonde hair going into a Muay Thai gym; a room full of fighters in bicep-hugging shirts (for Pete’s sake, I write for a literary magazine), throwing weapons with a grace usually reserved for ballerinas. A man commented his legs didn’t feel “rough enough” and someone took a wooden rod and started beating his shins. I started kicking pads and it felt like I hurt myself more than any potential opponent, but it was a first step. A baptism by fire, I suppose.Regardless, it was time to learn the fundamentals: a fighting stance and the 1-2-3 combo — jab, cross, hook. I did a private session with Thai-Binh Nguyen, a fighter and instructor at the gym, working through the movements: a little bounce in the stance to keep the body fluid, flowing into the punches. A pivot on the left foot while the right hand comes back to block the face — the body working in synchrony. Soon enough, I was rocking with the bag, with Nguyen’s soft repetition of one, two, three, in the background setting a metronomic rhythm to the whole affair — maybe the ballerina comparison was more apt than I thought. “If you want to punch harder,” Thai said, “focus on speed, not power.” It felt more graceful than it did violent.
“I almost look at it like an art,” Nguyen said. “It’s not so much about who can hit the hardest, but the technique.” Many people, me included, initially get this wrong; paradoxically, the new members tend to be the ones who throw the hardest, with punches that teeter wildly off balance. I think there’s a desire to put everything into it — for the fist hitting the pad to wash you of your sins.
This is probably a good time to mention that if one of your friends, especially a man, has a sudden and inexplicably strong desire to start training a striking martial art, it is probably a cry for help to some extent. I have only anecdotal evidence, but a breakup, the implosion of a close friend group, finding out HR only exists to protect the company … it’s a pretty damning record.
It’s not difficult to figure out why violence often domineers emotional release for men. “There are, to my mind, strong roots between (masculinity) and this country’s violent past,” writes Ocean Vuong for the Paris Review. America has always siphoned itself from violence: Look at the Native American genocides, the scarred history of the Transatlantic slave trade, the indentured, Chinese “Coolie labor” that drove Westward expansion and the current exploitation of South American migrants. The flag and its 13 colonies are streaks of blood — a crimson hand dragging itself through land that was never its to own. “Because American life was founded on death, it had to make death a kind of praxis, it had to celebrate it. And because death was considered progress, its metaphors soon became the very measurement of life, of the growth of boys. You fucking killed it,” writes Vuong.
Masculinity, or at least the version the American empire has contaminated, becomes realized through conquest, a celebration of domination — of women and of each other. So fighting, the ultimate display of physical domination, became its fundamental datum. To necessitate that locomotive force was to necessitate manhood as a system of violence instead of a human.
I’m keenly aware of this blood oath, as I’m keenly aware of the fact that American masculinity dreams a dream that does not include me: the racialized, the Queer, the mentally unwell. “To carve out a masculine identity requires whittling away everything that falls outside the norms of boyhood,” writes Sarah Rich for The Atlantic. “At the earliest ages, it’s about external signifiers like favorite colors, TV shows, and clothes. But later, the paring knife cuts away intimate friendships, emotional range, and open communication.” All tangibly grisly, which makes it more grim when I say damned if I don’t want to gouge myself out, to become what it wants, until I am hollow.
I am here at the fighting gym, in Eden, so I can be dreamed of. This was the snake’s promise. I step in, sliding under the ring ropes, and I say to Him, “burn it.”
“Burn it. Burn the wildflowers at Boy Scout camp, burn the nail polish off of my hands, burn those entries out of my journal.” I am at His knees. “Burn the way he looked at the party, sweat bouncing in his sun-curled hair and the little peck he gave on my cheek when he left, not even realizing. Burn the drives in the neighborhood as he stared through the window, as he rested his head on my car’s center console. Burn it all.”
I am looking at myself through the window. I am looking at myself, in some patch of grass in Eden, flying. Where did this boy go? Who took him and what did you do? I want my things back. I want my sharp tongue, I want the bowls of cut fruit, the swagger and sway of it all in the summer heat. I want to hold another man’s hand, calloused, and I don’t need to love him. I don’t need romance. I just want to hold his hand.
And I beg to Him, “If I can’t have it, then burn it all, because I have been cold for so long. Burn it all to just let me feel its warmth.”
***
I am slowly settling into tempo with Final Round’s afternoon classes. The twilight haze rests on my windshield as I’m driving there, to the outskirts of Ann Arbor, away from everything else; always slightly late, rushing in through the door. We warm up, the instructor teaches us something — a clinching technique, some new combo, footwork or blocking — then practice and pad work.
We cycle through training with each other, the gym floor like some complicated gearwheel machination as I’m circling with my partner, holding out combinations for them to strike. A 1-2-kick. Elbow-knee. Watch the rotation on the kick, make sure you’re kicking through me, not up: step outside a bit more. There. Feel that power?
I come to realize that Muay Thai is not a solitary endeavor. “You need someone to help train you, you need people to help work with you, you need support,” Nguyen says. I do rounds with the seasoned fighters of the gym. From the outside, it is largely a man launching a missile of a leg straight at my body, with only a bit of leather and foam to hold me, but there’s no … malice. Straight, perfect kicks, right into the pads, and I don’t worry about being hurt, and can I say it feels intimate? Can I say that, fuck, I forgot his name, but I feel like I know him better than the people I’ve known for years more at this university, through his staggered breathing, through the way his hook meets the pad on my left forearm as I’m holding it for him?
Years of red tape begin to wash away, and I look at myself. I haven’t cried since high school — three years. I’m not sure if this was genuinely the last time I cried, or if I’ve inadvertently shunted any other memory out of shame. I’m not sure which one is worse. “Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief,” bell hooks writes in The Will to Change. I don’t know how much I can hide anymore.
And in the ring there is no impenetrable guard, nothing “too big to fail.” To show up is to slip under the ropes, touch gloves and be, for three to five rounds, nothing but yourself. There is no proxy warfare, no unassailable moxie: even Mike Tyson and Anderson Silva were both unceremoniously dispatched. To fight is to understand that you can — and, if you do it for long enough, will — be knocked on your ass, concussed, any second.
“My main focus was leaving everything in the gym,” Nguyen said. “(Fighting) is something you cannot show up to not ready. If you do, you’re going to get hurt. Like, you lose in other sports, it’s whatever. If you lose a fight, it sucks. You have to commit. You have to go all out.”
To fight is not to become something bigger; it is to be vulnerable. There is no room for anything else under that magic. Only our hands, our eyes.
***
Thai-Binh Nguyen, himself the son of Vietnamese refugees, used to be a tennis player. “I kind of realized, around my junior year of high school, that I wasn’t good enough for D1,” he said. “Then I started with Muay Thai, probably like, 2019, I think? I wish I started earlier.” Empire stretches itself in more ways than one.
“I’m like, oh, the smart thing to do would be like, you know, to continue school, or learn a trade, get a job with insurance,” he said. “But now’s the time to do it.”
“This is something that, like, every day when I wake up, even if I’m tired, I look forward to this. This is something I really need for myself.” And I begin to understand that there were closed doors for all of us, many more vicious than mine.
I spar with him, and he dissects me, striking with body kicks I’m nowhere nimble enough to check. From the outside, it’s largely a beatdown — domination.
But we’re both smiling. With his legs, he plants roses on my body. This is what it means to smash through doors.
Statement Deputy Editor Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu.