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life essay: part 4
As soon as we lined up inside, the coach -- that evil, evil man! -- pulled out a flashlight. Using that beam of light, he pointed out thirteen spaces. "You...stand here. Next one...stand over there..." Then he clicked off the light.
"All right -- begin!"
There's something you've got to understand about our training. We all took wushu seriously...but let's just say that there wasn't a single one of us who didn't slack off when he or she had the chance. The coach only had one pair of eyes, after all, and he couldn't monitor everybody at once.
If he was watching you, the pressure was on to perform with extension and power and focus.
When he turned his back, though, arms would soften and stances would wilt.
If he whirled around to face you again--? Kicks would miraculously have snap again, punches flew with power, backs would arch, shoulders would roll back and we were once again the paragons of good wushu form.
Under normal circumstances -- that is to say, if there had been light -- we would have done our usual thing and no one would have been the wiser. In the dark, though, we had no way of knowing when the flashlight would click on again. What if the coach suddenly shone the light on you just as you happened to be taking a little "break"? The punishment would be unimaginable. We were experiencing true fear. In the pitch black gym, where absolutely nobody could see how hard we were working...I trained as I had never trained before.
Until I misstepped. I don't know how it happened, because I couldn't see anything, but I suddenly stepped wrong -- probably on some uneven surface -- and twisted my ankle. The pain was horrible, but I was too afraid of that accursed flashlight to stop practicing. So I kept going, limping with each step.
Practice finally came to an end.
We had regular practice the next morning. My foot hurt.
We had to perform for a tour group that afternoon. My foot still hurt.
We had to go out to perform for another group later that night. The pain just got worse.
By the time I finally went home on Sunday, I could no longer walk. My foot had swelled up like a loaf of steamed bread. I didn't know what was wrong with it, and I didn't dare bring it up.
Why not? Because we had discovered long ago that complaining about an injury would cause the coach to assign you some new hellacious set of exercises that made you wish you'd never spoken up in the first place. Say, for example, a student told him that she'd hurt her arm -- could she take a break from practice?
"Hmm," he would say. "You're right. You shouldn't overwork your arm. Why don't you work on leg exercises instead?"
Two thousand kicks, or maybe Five thousand stances. Whatever reason you came up with to shirk training, the coach was ready with ten alternatives to counter you. He didn't care whether the injury was real or faked. All that mattered was that he would find some exercise involving another part of your body. "Your knee hurts? Okay, you don't have to run. Do a thousand sit-ups instead." The new assignment would leave you in greater pain than actually running on the bad knee. Complaining only made things worse for yourself. You vowed to keep your mouth shut in the future.
On Monday, I returned to the school -- limping badly as I walked. Seeing the state of my leg, the coach set me to practicing upper-body exercises. I just stood there, facing the mirror, punching away dutifully. It just so happened that another instructor was visiting the class that day. He noticed me in the corner and stopped by to ask me why I wasn't training with the others.
"My foot hurts," I said.
"Oh, that's why you're practicing arm exercises. Hey, let me take a look at your leg."
When he saw the big swollen ham hock that was my foot, the other instructor took my coach aside and said, "Maybe you should let this kid go to the hospital. This might be serious."
When the X-rays came back, they showed that the bone had cracked clear through.
I had been practicing on a broken foot for two days -- because I'd been too scared to bring it up to anybody! I guess that would count as my first major injury. Well, at least I can laugh about it now.
I was outfitted with a big plaster cast that pretty much immobilized me from the waist down.
So I finally got my break from wushu, right?
Hardly.
For the next few weeks, an older classmate would carry me on piggyback to the field every day. He would set me down, and I'd stand there practicing arm movements all day. One thousand, two thousand... No one was allowed to leave the training grounds -- that was the rule!
When practice ended, the classmate would hoist me onto his back and carry me back to the dorms. That's how it was for several weeks as my leg healed.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
