I Was the Only Girl on My School’s Wrestling Team

What I learned from my matches with the boys.

I joined my high school’s wrestling team on a dare. At a family gathering in October 2002, my cousin Peter, who attended a neighboring school in Long Island, regaled us with stories about his wrestling matches. The new season was approaching, and he was excited to return to the mat. Forget football or soccer — wrestling was the true athlete’s sport. Intense, demanding, a physical brawl without the crutch of equipment or teammates. I scoffed. How hard could it be to stay off your back for two minutes? Peter said I could never last a match. That was enough to get me to approach the wrestling coach at my school the next week. I didn’t care that the team was all boys. I would prove him wrong.

I was 15 years old, impulsive and driven by a need to subvert others’ expectations, and I felt I was losing control. Since starting high school the year before, I had noticed that the boys around me felt entitled to look and grab and comment on my body. It wasn’t uncommon for classmates to flagrantly stare at girls in the cafeteria, to holler for blow jobs as jokes-but-not-jokes. I wasn’t sure how to react — part of me wanted to jut my tits out, as if claiming their attention meant I actually held the power, and part of me felt small and afraid. Worse, as one of the few Asians at my school, I endured sexist and racist comments, with assumptions I was both hypersexual and submissive. “Is it true Asians have sideways pussies?” A boy once asked. I didn’t know. I had only seen my own.

When I approached the wrestling coach with my proposal to join the team, he raised a brow in surprise. He had been my gym teacher in middle school and knew me as a lackluster athlete. “It’s going to be hard,” he said. “You’d be the only girl.” I lifted my chin and stared him in the eyes, drawing all 5 feet 2 inches of me to my fullest height. The next week, he told me I would be allowed to join, so long as I passed a series of tests. I stayed after school one afternoon to run a mile, do push-ups, hang from an overhead bar, and complete a few paltry pull-ups. I didn’t tell my family or friends until it was official: I was a high school wrestler. My parents, overworked immigrants from Korea, accepted without protest. To them, the American education system was infallible; if my teachers allowed me to join, it must be fine. My friends, though, couldn’t comprehend my sudden compulsion. “Why?” they kept asking. “What if you get hurt?” “Why don’t you join our volleyball team instead?” “What if the boys like it?” A friend wagged her finger. “Hot girl in a singlet.”

I shook my head. The teamwork in volleyball didn’t appeal to me. I was tired of playing nice. I couldn’t explain it to them, how I needed to wrest back a sense of control. I wanted to scrap. And I wanted to rage — preferably through sports, which had society’s tacit stamp of approval.

The boys on the team didn’t understand either. When Coach introduced me at the beginning of the winter season a month later, some smirked. Others avoided my gaze, nervous about practicing with a girl. I wore a large shirt and oversized shorts, hiding my form, suddenly unsure of what I had gotten myself into. Once practice started, there wasn’t time for me to feel self-conscious. I had joined without knowing the basics, and with a new world came a new language that required my full concentration to learn: sprawls, takedowns, reversals, escapes, near falls, fireman’s carry, double leg attacks, cradles, duck unders, ankle picks. Three two-minute periods made up a match, and there were two ways to win: accruing more points or pinning your opponent, which ended the match immediately.

In the beginning, I was fueled by a desire to win. At my first match, I stepped onto the mat in a blue and yellow singlet, my long hair coiled under a cap beneath my headgear. I couldn’t stop shaking. All of the moves I had practiced seemed impossible in the face of this wiry boy, hunched and fierce and determined not to lose face, to lose to a girl. I lurched forward and tried to pull his shoulders so I could attempt a high crotch takedown — an arm thrust between the legs, a shoulder shoved into his core — but he was stronger, faster. He brought me to my knees and flipped me like a pancake. I was pinned in the first period. Staring up at the fluorescent lights of the school gymnasium, I thought, My cousin was right.

I was embarrassed. But at the next practice, the boys were encouraging. They showed me how to perfect my lunges, to position myself for a stronger stance. Though I didn’t really interact with the wrestlers during school hours, they cared that I improved. At first I cynically thought they helped because though wrestling is a one-on-one sport, the wins and losses from each match cumulate to the final team score. Eventually, I realized that many of my teammates cared because I had surprised them. I was trying.

I learned that my best bet was to attempt a takedown first by swiping my opponent’s foot, using speed to make up for my lack of strength. Though we were sectioned by weight — I was in the 103 pound class — I was always at a disadvantage because as a girl, I had a higher body fat percentage than the boys. My opponents were compact and muscled. They may be short, their frowns and flexed arms seemed to say as we shook hands at the beginning of a match, but they were tougher than me. There would be no mercy. Often, I would have to wriggle out from underneath them or arch my back to prevent myself from being pinned, losing points for a near fall but continuing to fight for a few seconds longer, at least. I always lost.

Halfway through the season, I gave up. At an away match one day in early January, I stepped on the mat and saw my opponent. He was brawny, and looked like someone who had cut weight to make my class. More importantly, he was livid. I had seen it before: anger at having to waste a match on a girl, fear that he’d lose, embarrassment for the flack he’d get from his teammates either way. I didn’t try to make the first move. When he pushed me down, I let him. I turned soft in his hands, like putty, and lost within seconds. As the referee called the match, my gaze wandered to my teammates, the disappointment on their faces, maybe even disgust at how quickly I had lost them points. But I was too relieved to care. My failure, at least, was swift.

On the ride back on the bus that day, I sat by myself as usual while the boys played a rowdy game, yelling the names of the hottest girls in school. Then we heard Coach calling me to the front. The boys hushed. I was in trouble. I would get kicked off the team for being a terrible wrestler. I slid into the booth beside Coach. He waited for me to look up and then simply asked why. Why wasn’t I trying anymore? I tugged my sweatshirt over my knees. What was the point, if I was going to lose?

I had been thinking about success in a binary — I either won the match or I didn’t. But I was growing as a wrestler if I mastered a new move, Coach told me, no matter how afraid I felt. If I lasted ten seconds longer before being pinned. If I lost by points rather than being pinned at all. There were ways I could not fail, even if I technically lost the match.

After that, I tried. Hard. I still lost most times. But when I felt that desire to slacken, I gathered my resolve. I learned to tune out the screams from the sidelines. I lengthened my spine and twisted, using my flexibility to my advantage, resisting with every muscle in my body.

I joined wrestling to prove a point, but I stayed because I fell in love with it. I liked getting stronger, seeing my biceps in the mirror, feeling the seconds stretch out during wall-sits. I liked how unflattering the suit and headgear were, how they flattened my body into a lean line, shrouding my hair, stripping me of my femininity. Eventually, I learned to relish the fear on my opponent’s face when he realized he’d have to wrestle me. I didn’t want their mercy, and I wouldn’t give them any, either.

Inside the practice room, away from the social pressures of the high school ecosystem, the uneven sexual dynamics fell away. Misogyny’s choke hold dissipated for a few hours. Though I was surrounded by boys in a physically brutal sport, I felt less demeaned. I wasn’t only a girl who could be coerced into sexual submission. I was a wrestler. If a boy tried to bring me to the mat, I wrapped myself around his waist and lifted him skyward. On our knees, I straddled him from behind and wrenched his arms. My opponent was a boy, but he was also flesh and sweat and bone, like me.

Outside the mat, I returned to my femme self — long hair, short skirts — and though my teammates and I maintained a distance, I like to think a code had been established between us. When classmates shouted about tits and asses, my teammates were careful in their language around me. To them, at least, I was no longer looked at as just a body with desirable parts. I no longer saw myself that way either. As my confidence grew on the mat, so it did off the mat too. Slowly, I felt more agency over my body. Now, when a boy tried to cop a feel or push my head toward their lap with a forceful hand, I shoved them away. I was no longer afraid, no longer willing to go along with their desires over mine.

I still carry with me what I learned in those acrid practice rooms. In a publishing landscape that has historically prioritized white, male literary war novels, I wrote one about the Korean War with an uneducated Korean woman at its center. In my second, I examined South Korea’s hidden history of government-sanctioned concentration camps in the 1980s, with a focus on imprisoned women fighting to escape. The stories I write require me to reimagine who or what is worthy of attention.

My time as a high school wrestler came up this past Thanksgiving. I turned to my cousin Peter, recalling the day he had dared me to join the team. He couldn’t remember that decades-ago conversation, but when I brought it up, he laughed. Technically, he had just said I couldn’t wrestle. That wasn’t a dare. I had taken his taunting and twisted it into a challenge — in the end, I had dared myself.