The Least She Could Do
The rule had been written on the wall of the Imura Taekwondo Academy for as long as Dara Whitfield could remember, in black paint, in her coach's careful, square, slightly crooked handwriting, on a long strip of plywood that hung above the mirrors at the front of the training floor where every student would see it every time they bowed in.
THE RING IS THE ONLY PLACE.
She had been seven years old the first time she read it. Her grandmother had brought her in on a Saturday morning in February, a skinny, furious, tearful seven-year-old with a split lip and a note from the principal of Hollins Elementary School that used the word altercation three times in four sentences. Dara had not started the altercation. A boy two grades above her named Kevin Marsh had pushed her little cousin Tasha off the top of the slide, and Dara had climbed up after him and pushed him off it too, and then, when he came at her at the bottom with his fists swinging, she had done what her grandmother had always told her to do when someone hit her, which was to hit back harder. She had been suspended for three days. Kevin Marsh had been suspended for two. Her grandmother had not said a word the whole drive home, and Dara had sat in the passenger seat of the old gray car with her lip swelling up like a plum, waiting for the explosion, and it had not come. Instead, the next Saturday, her grandmother had driven her across town to a low brick building between a laundromat and a tax preparer, with a hand-painted sign in the window that said IMURA TKD — ALL AGES — FIRST CLASS FREE, and walked her inside, and introduced her to a small, compact, gray-haired Japanese-American man in a white uniform with a faded black belt tied around his waist.
"This is my granddaughter," Odessa Whitfield had said. "She likes to fight. I'd like you to teach her how to do it properly. And when not to."
Ray Imura had looked down at Dara for a long time, at her split lip and her clenched fists and her eyes, which she knew were still angry, which were always angry in those days. Then he had crouched down so that his face was level with hers and pointed up at the strip of plywood on the wall.
"Can you read that?" he had asked.
She had read it out loud. The ring is the only place.
"Do you know what it means?"
She had shaken her head.
"It means," said Ray Imura, "that I am going to teach you how to hurt people. I am going to teach you to kick so hard you can break a board as thick as my arm. I am going to teach you to move so fast that a grown man won't see your foot until it's already touching his face. And then I am going to teach you the most important thing of all, which is that you only ever, ever do it in there." He pointed across the training floor at a square of blue and red mats marked out with white tape in the center of the room. "In the ring. With a referee. With rules. With someone who has agreed to fight you. Everywhere else, you walk away. Somebody pushes you on the playground, you walk away. Somebody calls you a name, you walk away. Somebody pushes your cousin off a slide, you go and get a teacher, and then you walk away." He had paused. "Can you do that?"
Dara had looked at him. Then at her grandmother. Then at the ring. Then back at him.
"What if I can't walk away?" she had asked.
And Ray Imura had smiled, a slow, crooked, surprised smile, the first of many she would see on his face over the next fifteen years, and said, "That's a very good question. Most people your age don't think to ask it. We'll come back to it when you're older."
They had come back to it many times. It had been the subject, over the years, of perhaps a hundred conversations, on the training floor and in the back office and in the front seat of Coach Imura's dented blue station wagon on the way to tournaments in a dozen states. What if you can't walk away? What if someone has a weapon? What if someone is hurting someone else? What if you're cornered? Coach Imura's answers had changed as she got older and the questions got harder, but the core of them had never changed. You walk away if you can. If you can't, you do the least you need to do, to get yourself and other people safe, and then you walk away. You never fight to win outside the ring. You never fight because you're angry, or because you're proud, or because someone has made you feel small. You fight to stop the danger. And the moment the danger stops, you stop.