On a cold October night in 2011, I climbed five flights of stairs in an apartment building in the middle of Nanjing, a large urban metropolis in China. The walls of the stairwell were covered with photos of blonde swimsuit models holding up a run-down building undergoing major renovations. The stairs were dusty and I heard the loud but familiar noise of construction in the background. When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw a group of unfamiliar foreigners sitting on a couch while the manager of the gym tried in vain to communicate in English. Just inside the front door, twenty Chinese women danced in sync to cheesy K-pop music.
At the start of jiujitsu training that fateful night, the coach, a muscular British man of over 6 feet tall, greeted me. Fred had started the club just three months prior with a few puzzle mats, one other member, and a very temporary and tenuous space in a dingy, smelly weightlifting gym on a fifth floor walk-up. By the time I joined in October, word of a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) club had spread in the Nanjing ex-pat and foreign student population. The club had a group of about fifteen members, mostly foreigners, and was growing.
Fred told me that he was thrilled to have me try it out and encouraged me to attend the advanced class that night, even though I didn't yet have a full conception of what jiujitsu was at that point. After the first class, where I fumbled around attempting a kimura sit-up, I was addicted from there on out. Those first few weeks of classes were a blur. Teammates tied me up like a pretzel, choked me out like it was their job, and manipulated my limbs like a rag doll. I was hooked and never looked back.
We trained on a small square of blue, thin puzzle mats in a dusty corner. I was mostly confused and very intrigued by what was described as “human chess,” sweaty people grunting and scrambling around on the ground. Despite the smelly rash guards that seemed to linger on my skin until I had a thorough shower, I was soon obsessed. I religiously went to class four times a week despite a two-hour commute on the subway. I trained in a basic t-shirt and shorts for the first few months. On my 23rd birthday, I put on a gi and a shiny new white belt for the first time.
I couldn’t get enough. My teammates quickly became my new family. We bonded over the fact that we were doing something unacceptable in Chinese martial art culture: ground fighting. Traditional Chinese martial arts are not fought on the ground. Generally, once your opponent is forced to the ground, the fight is over. As a self-defense system, however, BJJ teaches that the fight is far from over when you are brought to the ground.
Outside of the gym, I did not tell many other people that I participated in jiu-jitsu training. The cultural barriers were just too great. I told most of my Chinese friends that I was doing yoga. The Chinese people in the class were not so different. “We don’t usually tell people what we do either. They’d call us a ‘banana,’” one confessed, referring to a derogatory term used frequently in China to refer to someone “yellow on the outside but white on the inside” who imitated Western culture.
The Chinese students eventually embraced the Western-style teaching that Coach Greenall employed. Coach Greenall, who also teaches English in Nanjing, saw teaching jiu-jitsu to Chinese students as a way to expose them to different ways of learning: “I think it’s going to take a longer time for the Chinese students [than their Western counterparts] to realize that they can compete and lose without losing face. In the UK there’s no stigma attached to losing, people just see losing as a learning process…that’s what makes it so different for the Chinese, and that’s what gives it the potential to really take hold and go somewhere amazing.” Despite cultural differences, the personal growth I witnessed in my teammates was phenomenal—we were all being exposed to different cultures and ways of thinking that opened our eyes to the possibilities of innovation and creativity.
As many barriers to training BJJ in China as there were, from assumptions about nationality to the overbearing pollution, doing so was one of the most rewarding experiences I had during my time in Nanjing. It also showed me the diversity of China: I met many Chinese—both men and women—who were willing to break out of the mold to try jiu-jitsu and risk their reputation to participate in a fight sport. This inspired me to continue despite my own self-doubt.
By the time I left China, the club had almost just as many Chinese students as foreigners, and used Chinese interpreters when the classes comprised a majority of Chinese students. Fred’s success in Nanjing was remarkable. He introduced a new sport not only to dozens of foreigners for the first time, but introduced the sport to the city of Nanjing. He helped spread passion for the sport throughout the Chinese community as a whole.
In May 2012, I competed for the first time at the Shanghai Open. “You can easily cut 3 kilos” my coach had assured me. I spent 2 miserable hours in a sauna the night before the comp, spit in a cup the entire subway ride there, and then had to work out in a sweatshirt and sweatpants in front of the weighing station for an hour. I think they felt bad for me because eventually they rolled their eyes and said, “you’re fine” and checked me in. My first match was over in less than 30 seconds. I don’t even know what happened, but suddenly I was flat on my back and in the middle of a front collar choke. I found out later that my opponent was a black belt in judo. I won my second match by triangle, and I thought I was going to explode with pride.
More than anything, it was inspiring to witness the growth that the academy experienced while I was there. My teammates and I went from being barely able to do a sit-up or a push-up, let alone some of the fundamental techniques of BJJ, to winning the national China Open tournament in Shanghai in May 2012, officially becoming the best BJJ academy in China.
