You didn’t know about Muay Thai kickboxing until Nora introduced you. Riding behind her, you feel the motorbike’s pulse as Laotian night descends, haze filtering lavender light, cicadas buzzing. At the gym, you gasp—[from exercise] (but also) from adrenaline pouring from wrapped fists to flushed cheeks as you discover the thrill of violence. The power behind the punch.
You didn’t think you’d encounter Muay Thai again until a stranger on a cruise in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, tells you about the month-long training he’s doing in Northern Thailand. Though you know him less than half a day and don’t really speak with him outside the group, you sign up anyhow—something in your tired traveler bones guiding you, following him.
Three weeks later, Kema picks you up in Pai on the motorbike you’ll soon share. Balancing your big backpacking bag with his chaotic driving, you flee the hippie-filled tourist town for the quiet of the country—fields of infant papaya, fields of dead crop piling, waiting to be burned, wind waving hard.
The cottage you stay in is modest. One room with a bathroom and a mini fridge you never plug in to save money on electricity. But having stayed in shared hostels for the past three months, having your own room feels too luxurious for your dirty self. Though the shower is overrun with ants.
The past three months weren’t easy. Navigating food poisonings, visa complexities, COVID-denying Germans whom you still want to sleep with—whom you still slept with. A paternal cancer diagnosis stateside. Staying in one place would be helpful. Punching would be good.
The gym is open to dry season’s dust. Covered concrete floor, no walls, just a roof with haphazard columns supporting it. Punctuated punching bags disrupt views of green fields—thirsting fields. Flags tied overhead blow in the wind the haze holds. Twenty people gather. Mostly 20–35-year-olds, but there are a few in their 50s. Some come just for a session, some stay a week, some have stayed for five months, never wanting to leave, always extending. Germans, Dutch, British, Canadians, Americans, Greek, a South African, a Frenchman, a Swede. All finding comfort in the violence. Only the trainers are Thai.
You get to the gym when everyone is already warming up: rope jumping for ten minutes. After three minutes, you start questioning for the first time—why are you here, why are you at this gym, why are you in Thailand? You don’t even exercise at home. Your dad’s ill. But you already paid the deposit. Dudee teaches you and Kema the basics.
Mam is the head trainer. At age forty-seven, her energy doesn’t hide behind her graying hair and clouded eyes when she screams at you to swing your arm back when you kick, when she hits your leg with a stick for stepping with the wrong foot forward, when she punches you because you didn’t block. But you don’t mind—you yearn for the guidance, for attention, direction.
You tell them you’re training for a fight. To them, a fight is in the Tai Pei Stadium in Chiang Mai. You make the three-hour journey one-way down the 672 curves twice to support fellow fighters. Entering the stadium, the smell of sweat and concrete doesn’t dizzy you as much as the Western fight songs blasting from stereos. The fighters wear their Mongkhon headbands and dance the Wai Kru traditional dance—bowing on knees, praying to the ring’s corners, swirling their arms to the sky. A ritual. Even the foreigners oblige.
There’s a joke that some Wai Kru dances last longer than the fights. You hope that won’t hold true for any of your fighters, though it did for the Greek who got knocked out in the second round because he didn’t block his opponent’s high kick. He only remembers coming to in a chair outside the ring; his jaw, where the kick landed, bruised for several weeks. And you hope that no one leaves with stitches in their head, like Enrico when he fights in Bangkok. But at that stadium, fighters earn 1,000 THB per stitch regardless of who wins—so it’s almost worth it. Stitches are temporary. (And you hope that no one will leave on a stretcher [though you know that that happens too]).
Your fight will be against Nora next month when you return to Laos.
There are five rounds in a fight. Three minutes for men, two for women. Men enter the ring by climbing over the roped sides; women enter by going under. In between rounds, fighters retreat to their corners, receiving guidance from their trainers, getting rubbed with ice so they won’t feel the hits. Between rounds, Queen’s “We Will Rock You” plays. After five rounds, winners are decided by judges and a point system that always favors the Thai (or the red corner). Or a win is claimed when there is a knockout. There is almost always a knockout. Of the eight fights, only three will have fighters from your gym—the only non-Thai. You win 400 THB betting on an Israeli guy at the gym with one eye too wide.
Nora and you won’t go for a knockout. You won’t use elbows or knees and you’ll wear the shin pads you use for sparring. You don’t want to hurt each other. But there will be a winner. And it will probably be her.
You train every day except Sundays—8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., then 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. During the day, you try to write. Or explore Pai. Or socialize, grab a smoothie, call your dad. But you mostly just lie—tired. Reading under the shade of a tree you can’t name, or cleaning the wound of the stray dog who gets thinner and thinner then disappears. Kema sometimes joins.
In the evenings, your muscles protest. At night, you only muster four hours of sleep before the yawning tension to move—the excess adrenaline pumping—pushes you awake. But this is normal when you first start training, they say. You have matching bruises on your elbows and speckled scabs on your knees. It’s because you’re hitting the bags wrong, they say.
Muay Thai is called the “art of eight limbs” because you use fists, elbows, knees, and legs. Left and right. The origins of Muay Thai are shrouded in the tumult of the past like all things sustained or expired, but it’s at least as old as the sixteenth century. When the Burmese attacked Siam, they took King Nareusan captive and offered him the chance to fight unarmed for his freedom. When he returned, the popularity of this “Siamese-style boxing” soared. Five hundred years of fighting—its legacy so strong, it has become an integral component at festivals and celebrations, even (especially) at temples.
Jab left, cross right, hook left, hook right, uppercut, spinning back punch, superman punch. Elbow cross left, elbow cross right, uppercut elbow left, uppercut elbow right, spinning back elbow, jump elbow chop right at the forehead top—or, as the smiling Thai say, “crack open the coconut.” Swing kick, high kick, push kick/teep (to push the opponent back), low kick, lefts and rights. Left knee, right knee—always to the ribs, mostly when clinching. Clinching: when you wrap your gloves around your opponent’s neck, kneeing them in the ribs, forcing them down.
You learn combinations ready-made to surprise-attack your opponent, though in the heat of action your muscle memory hesitates, and you rely on the tried and true: jab, cross, hook, kick. You don’t use knees or elbows during practice—saving strength for the actual fight, keeping fellow fighters injury-free. For now.
You train barefoot. Your only gear is the boxing gloves you borrowed from Mam’s son when he was young—the smallest pair they have. You wear a mouthguard during the sparring sessions three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday. But on Mondays it’s only punch sparring, so each of you puts one foot in a tire and only uses fists to fight. Other days you punch or kick the hanging bags and the pads held by the trainers who only know English fighting words—the four body parts, the two sides.
And though you’re emitting more aggression in your life than ever before—punching through your mind’s fuzzy focus, pushing past your expectations—you still leave sessions angrier than when you arrive. Kema says for him it’s the opposite. He says he finally feels he has an outlet for his pent-up anger, an emotional release. But he still drinks a lot in the evenings. And you both smoke too many cigarettes. And you still ride on the back of the motorbike when he’s drunk because you’re angry and a part of you still doesn’t love yourself as much as you should.
Kema is a rapper from Oxford. Not the trust-fund-educated Oxford, but the working-class child-of-immigrants Oxford. Half Jamaican, half Indian, with a missing front tooth he won from a fight, you share life’s hardships over green curry and pad thai. He’s going through a breakup, trying to sit with the pain instead of scoping for pills and loose sex. You don’t know if your father’s cancer has spread.
Perhaps it’s the way Top smiled wide when he held your leg up that one time when you couldn’t get your hips to pivot fully for the right sidekick while Nhat filmed and laughed and Mam was conveniently elsewhere. Perhaps it’s that the boys won’t punch you hard. Even when you tell them to. Even when you punch them hard. And you so desperately just want to feel something—anything. But they don’t listen. And so the pain you seek churns to anger in your veins and your brow seems to be always creased lately, and you don’t understand why you want this, and you don’t understand your emotions, and you don’t understand your new body—who bruises in places you don’t feel and who wakes you after only half a night’s sleep. Sometimes you just want to be punched in the face.
Perhaps unleashing rage just magnifies it, enables it, encourages fury rising. Only steam releasing.
But it’s okay. It has to be.
Eventually, you get stronger. Eventually, your technique smooths out, so instead of sparring chaotically, bouncing from foot to firing foot tiring yourself out, you move in rhythm—tapping your front foot to the Sarama fight song playing in everyone’s head. Eventually, you find openings in your opponent’s defenses and strike. But you’re still smaller than everyone else, and so when they step back, you still can’t reach. When you go in, you still have to push past the barrage of hits to land a strike.
Gloves in front to block jabs and crosses. Glove at ear, elbow arrowed ahead to block hooks and high kicks. Glove at ear, elbow greeting same-side raised knee to block sidekicks. Step back to avoid teeps. You never figure out how to block low kicks, though they teach you.
“Why do you have so much aggression—if you don’t mind me asking?” Enrico asks. Your eyebrows expose shock and hesitation. You don’t reply. “Life stuff?” “Yeah, life stuff.” “Yeah, me too. I think most of us here.” You nod at the floor.
What are you punching at? What blows are you blocking? You don’t acknowledge any deeper meaning, just assume that everyone in the gym, in the country, in the world, aims their violence somewhere—shields their vulnerability from something, someone. What changes when you leave the ring? It’s not okay if you’re angry.
Nearby Chiang Mai is one of the more spiritual cities in Thailand. Seekers travel from all over to see the gold-plated peaks of the Doi Suthep temple, or stay in monasteries, or find inner peace. Orange-clad monks wandering is a common sight. Yet you choose violence. Of course you’re angry.
Fighters are discouraged from drinking, smoking, sexing two weeks before their fight—holding on to their health, stamina, testosterone. Is that not spiritual? Do monks not also refrain from these human pleasures? When you dance the Wai Kru, when you temper your reactions, control your aggression, wait for openings—is that not spiritual? You justify your anger. But really you’re justifying your reaction to it.
You’ll never fight Nora. The only opportunity will pass as you both are still coming down from the MDMA you took during the thunderstorm. Pleasure over violence. You’ll return to Mam and the gym a month and a half after you left, when an infected third-degree leg burn grounds you from joining Nora on a nine-day trek in the Himalayas, and you sit in the Bangkok airport crying, not knowing where else to turn but to this small community in a small town in Northern Thailand that let you let out steam.
There, you’ll regain the strength the antibiotics took from you. You still won’t know the fate of your father’s cancer diagnosis. You’ll remember the empowerment of punching someone in the face. You’ll remember the relief of being punched.
Because physical pain is temporary.
