Shanghai Fight Diaries: Fighting To Learn Footwork (Or, What It’s Like To Get Lost)

The street signs are mainly written in characters I don’t understand with pinyin, China’s system of Romanization, written too small for my eyes to read. General customs and decorum are often completely different from those in the U.S. I speak a minimal amount of Mandarin so I get lost in any conversation deeper than “Hey, how are you?” or “Where’s the bathroom?” This is how even the simplest tasks can turn into an adventure.

For instance, shortly after moving here two winters ago, I bought what I thought was a can of chicken soup. Cold and sick of fried rice, I decided to cook it for lunch one Saturday afternoon. I didn’t have a can opener but, no worry, Chinese cities have these cheap store fronts that sell everything from slippers to Ethernet cords on seemingly every block.

I headed to the store on my street: no luck, on to the next block.

With each stop, not knowing the word for can opener, I employed every non-Chinese speaking foreigner’s favorite communication tool: charades. I did my best to mimic the motion of opening a can only to get a lot of confused looks. On my fifth or sixth try, I got a faint glimmer of recognition as the store clerk retreated to the backroom.

He returned a few minutes later with a small, rusted fishing rod. Impressive inventory but not exactly what I was looking for. I may as well have gone fishing in Suzhou Creek (home of “Toxic Dredgefest 2011”). When I finally got my can of chicken soup open, it turned out to be an unholy mix of chicken stock and bits of bone that smelled to be about 6 months expired. In other words, my entire adventure had been a waste. Fantastic.

Anyway, given my prior experiences trying to navigate Shanghai, I wasn’t surprised when finding my new boxing gym turned into an ordeal unto itself. The gym’s located on the southern bank of the aforementioned Suzhou Creek in one of tens of thousands of large Soviet style buildings that make up the majority of urban Chinese architecture. “Utilitarian” is the kindest adjective you could use.

Think of the way housing projects look, and then imagine them all over the city.

The gym’s floor is 16L; which I eventually found out was the floor between 16 and 17. I finally made it into the gym after wandering around the 16th floor through a few cubicle-lined offices and passing an oddly placed beauty parlor.

Like the rest of China, the gym is pretty cramped, but it has everything we could possibly need to train. The only real oversight is the low ceilings that come from being on half-a-floor. Depending on where you’re working out, the ceilings can make jumping rope a bit tricky.

So, yeah: The set-up has all the character and grunge that Hollywood’s taught me to expect from a boxing gym. Not quite Apollo’s roach infested steam box from Rocky III, but give it a few years.

So far, the training’s been predominately concerned with footwork. As our head trainer put it, “success in boxing comes from putting your feet where you want your hands to go.” I’m still not sure what that means, but it sounds right, and just perfecting footwork has been enough to leave me pretty exhausted after the first few training sessions.

As I alluded to in the first installment of this series, I’m not graceful on my feet. The coaches’ (who have been nothing but awesome and encouraging) most common response to watching me practice is a polite “not quite, but keep trying.” Given my general clumsiness and the small confines, I frequently lose balance and stumble into another boxer while shadow boxing.

They’ve taught us to always lead with the foot closest to the direction I want to go. This sounds easier than it is, and over the first week, trying to keep my feet in order ;eft me feeling clumsier than ever. Like a first-time snowboarder, maybe. The feet don’t always follow the mind’s direction, particularly when the mind is thinking about throwing punches.

Anyway, it took me a few sessions, but I finally mastered the correct stance last night. Then, the coaches pulled us aside and said that it was time to learn a new move for our footwork. And they proceeded to teach us a move on our feet that was pretty much the exact opposite, and now I’m back to square one.

So, the theme of my second week? The training’s been fun and the trainers have been more supportive than advertised, but even the basics of boxing have been tough to master. I haven’t even stepped in the ring yet, and I feel completely lost. At least I’m used to it.