“You’re too perty to be boxing,” the tall, chiseled, handsome, broad-shouldered white man teased. He spoke his words slowly, almost slurring them — Southern style — past my ear. From the corner of my eye, I sized up the woman he was addressing. She was around 5-foot-five, slender, and curvaceous. Her smooth chocolate skin was complemented by a thick black ponytail that rested in the dip between her shoulder blades. Her outfit was color-coordinated and probably name brand: a double-layered, two-toned pink and green sports bra visible under a sheer T-shirt, and green jogging shorts that stopped just short of her crotch.

The perty woman had expected to be seen in the gym and did not want to disappoint. Nice ass, I thought, but legs way too skinny.

Her powdery smell and nice clothes were quite a contrast to the dank atmosphere of the gym and to the rest of the amateur boxing class of 12 students. We were a motley crew in cutoff denim, faded sweats, soccer shorts, and a variety of “wife beaters.” Until that night — six months into my training — I had been the only female student in the class.

Our coach looked deeply into her eyes and then rolled his gaze over the rest of her body. She smiled and blinked her eyes quickly as she adjusted her awkward fight stance. Maintaining his intense eye contact, he stepped closer to her and moved her gloved hands farther apart. As he did so, I watched his fingertips glide slowly along one of her forearms into the bend of her elbow. There was more blinking and smiling from her, but I thought I saw her shoulders slump as he walked away. It was obviously her first day. Boxing moves feel and look unnatural for the first week or so because you have to unlearn the instinct to strike first with your strongest hand.    

The coach then moved toward me and stood directly in front of my poised, gloved fists. 
 
“Okay, let’s repeat the combination,” he instructed the class. “Jab, cross, and hook on my command.” He was checking each person’s form and speed. “Go!”

I too worked hard not to disappoint.

“Keep your elbows tight on that hook,” he told me before demonstrating. He curled his back slightly and bent his knees for balance and mobility.

“You don’t want to leave your face open when you hit, see?” His eyes peeked over his large bare knuckles for a second before his three punches shot through the air. The muscles in his neck and arm flexed through the thin T-shirt.

“Pshew! Pshew! Pshew!” He forced air through his teeth in loud whispers with each skillful punch.

“Push from the shoulders and curve at the waist. Let your body give you the force, so the arms don’t have to do all the work. Always protect yourself. Go!”

This time I felt the strength of my whole body concentrated in the motion of my arms. I pushed my fists through the nose of my invisible opponent and then finished her with my right hook to the temple. It felt good to be in such powerful control of my body.

He glanced into my eyes, nodded his head, and moved to the next student. I am not too pretty to be a boxer.

I am 5-foot-nine. My shoulders are broad and my arms toned. My dreadlocs are pulled back with a headband. My thigh muscles bear the mark of resistance training. Though I could never be mistaken for a man, I embrace my masculine edge in a way that helps me blend in with the guys in the gym. My form, my precision, my “don’t fuck with me” face as I hit the heavy bag, can be very attractive to people who know what to look for in a fighter. I see the men — other trainers, semipro competitors, as well as some in my class — smiling and leaning their heads together to whisper while they watch me move. One or two of them usually comment to me directly, saying with innuendo: “Take it easy on your (sparring) partner” or “I hope I don’t get too close to you!”

As you can probably tell, I like — even seek — their approval. This desire to be acknowledged by men is a dirty little secret my lesbian feminist sensibilities will only admit to in the context of boxing. I know that the lesbian boxer is oh-so-clichéd, but this is a relatively new passion for me. I only began this training when running became too painful. It was not because Laila Ali or Ann Wolf inspired me, or because I’ve always had a repressed wish to be in the ring. In fact, being a fighter is the opposite of my usually inhibited personality. 

However, my body — tall, broad, black, and inclined to muscularity — can be intimidating for some people, but until recently I’ve never been conscious of that. Now that I’ve been boxing for awhile, I delight in the fluid motion of my swing, the way I feel as I “stick and move” around the heavy bag. This physical confidence spills over into my daily interactions. When I am dissatisfied with customer service, for example, I complain with my arms folded or throw the most piercing look I can summon. People usually react the way I want by either leaving me the hell alone or stammering their apologies.

I never had that kind of relationship with my body as a runner.

This brings me back to the perty girl. The coach continued with his flirtatious compliments throughout the class, and she never returned. I have thought of her often since that day. It occurs to me that she should be celebrated in a sport that can also serve as self-defense because she’s the type of woman many men assume they can victimize or dominate. She should be encouraged to feel comfortable in being seen as strong, athletic, and attractive. Too often we are perceived and treated a particular way based on only one of those characteristics from our early girlhood. Pretty girls do not fight and, as we are told in so many ways, strong girls are not pretty.

Instead of flirting with her, the coach should have instructed her the way he would have any novice male student: with patience, critical feedback, and affirmation of her potential. Yeah, she was attractive. So what? His response to her made her self-conscious and affected her performance in that already very masculine environment. His attitude represents mainstream culture’s view that only certain types of women — those with big muscles, a heavy build, or an unattractive face — are acceptable outside of traditional feminine roles. When is a man ever considered too attractive for any given activity?

And what about my response? Assuming that she believed him, what should I have said or done as a witness to this crushing of her desire to learn? I should have made some witty retort to put him in check for his sexist behavior. I should have shown some female solidarity because I knew better than anyone else what it took for her to have shown up in the first place. It was weeks before I felt completely comfortable there.

But my confession is that I didn’t say anything. The truth is, I reveled in the contrast her perceived weakness created between us. Because she was perty, I was by default a natural. Actually, most of the men, even the skinny ones, hit harder than I do and have better form. This is because, biological considerations aside, boys are generally taught the basic principles of boxing throughout boyhood, in the rough-and-tumble “play fighting” that goes on between male siblings and friends or with uncles and father figures. With few exceptions, girls are taught to expect protection from those same relationships.

I must confess that I failed myself and my classmate in that moment. When we stand idly by and witness that kind of behavior without intervening, we become passive participants in the act. Women have been fighting for centuries for equal treatment and equal opportunity. So if I find myself in that situation again, I’ll have to be faster on my feet. I’ll speak up. I’ll stick and move, bob and weave, “sting like a bee.” I confess I was too busy being one of the guys when I should have been fighting like a girl.
 

Marlon Rachquel Moore

It was fall in Mongolia, and the dusk falling round the State Department Store, the central meeting place in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, made it hard to see anyone’s face — not that I knew what the man I was supposed to meet looked like. I had just arrived for the year to work with writers, and my desire to see the creation of a Mongolian branch of International PEN was shared by Dugar, an Inner Mongolian writer living in New York City.

The two of us had never met. Dugar got my name from the Freedom to Write and international programs director Larry Siems at PEN in New York when Dugar called to ask about the possibility of establishing a Mongolian PEN Center. Larry happened to know I was in Mongolia, trying to make that very idea a reality. Dugar emailed me and asked me to look up an Inner Mongolian writer living in exile from China, in Ulaanbaatar: Mr. Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend. I thought the two were friends, but later I’d find out that Dugar knew of Tumen Ulzii because Tumen Ulzii was a prominent essayist — he wrote about the Chinese government’s actions toward Inner Mongolians — and a leading figure in the People’s Party of Inner Mongolia.

The man I met in front of the State Department Store didn’t look like a refugee, which goes to show how many assumptions I had. Tumen Ulzii has an open, smooth, and youthful face. We wove through the crowds of young people hanging out in front of the State Department Store, and made our way onto Peace Street and into a melee of knockoff sunglasses stands and Korean restaurants. That night at Broadway Pizza, with only the most basic Mongolian words under my belt and about ten English words under his, Tumen Ulzii and I relied almost entirely on pens, paper, an electronic dictionary, beer, and universal gestures for conversation.

Tumen Ulzii is keen and quick. He told me about himself first, then about his move to China, his wife and daughter who are still there, and the books he wrote about race and politics that brought Inner Mongolian fans in from the countryside just to meet him. These same books precipitated a ban on his writing in China and the police raids on his office and home after he left China for Mongolia in 2005. The reason so many Inner Mongolians speak out against the Chinese government — or would like to — is the long history of oppression like that suffered by Tibetans; the effort for cultural preservation, expression, and autonomy among ethnic minorities has often led to clashes with the Chinese government, and Tumen Ulzii’s story is just one of many.

Differences between Inner and Outer Mongolia

The country of Mongolia is the territory once referred to as Outer Mongolia, and the territory of Inner Mongolia lies in China. The size of the difference between Inner and Outer Mongolians depends on who you ask.

Inner Mongolians see themselves as part of a larger Mongolia, but this view is not shared by the Outer Mongolian public, and anyone from any part of China is at risk here due to a sentiment proven by the “fucking Chinese go home” graffiti outside my apartment, and the recently acquired black eye of my young Chinese friend Li, who is here to study. Ulaanbaatar is a small city, and Tumen Ulzii, audibly from a Chinese region, does not feel safe.

Language differences between the two are also apparent; Tumen Ulzii speaks differently from Outer Mongolians. Inner Mongolian dialect has a “j” sound where Outer has a “ts” sound, and the pronouns are a bit different. Inner Mongolians still use the traditional Mongolian vertical script for everything from school notes to street signs. Tumen Ulzii, also fluent in Japanese and Chinese, is confounded by the Cyrillic type used here in (Outer) Mongolia. My Mongolian teacher, Tuya, is the only younger Mongolian I’ve met who knows traditional Mongolian script well. Though the Cyrillic type was instituted here in (Outer) Mongolia only in 1944, it has taken deep hold. The pages of Tumen’s notebook, however, are covered in the rows of lacy black script whose vertical nature, Mongolians say, makes you nod yes to the world as you read instead of shaking your head no.

Refugee situations are not easy

On a much colder and clearer day in January, Tumen Ulzii and I walked the five minutes from my apartment to the Mongolian branch of the United Nations (U.N.). Uniformed men in their early 20s guarded the compound. Even without my passport — I had left it on my dresser to remind myself to get more pages at the American embassy — they let me in. Tumen Ulzii and I crossed an eerily quiet parking lot filled with white vans to a pink, Soviet-style building, where the receptionist asked about my lack of documentation. We walked into the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office, whose walls were home to UNICEF posters and the air smelled of coffee, and I asked one large Mongolian man, Mr. Och, what the holdup was on Tumen Ulzii’s refugee status.

Refugee situations are never easy, and this was no exception. Mongolia does not have an official UNHCR branch, only a liaison office, so the decision to grant Tumen Ulzii refugee status had to come from the nearest branch, which happened to be in … Beijing. Mongolia also has no provisions for asylum seekers in its law, so as long as Tumen Ulzii remained one, he was at risk of deportation and then punishment at the hands of the very government who had its police officers storm his house and strip-search his wife.

Tumen Ulzii has not been the only one. His friend Soyolt, another Inner Mongolian dissident, was arrested on January 7, 2008, upon touchdown in Beijing on a business trip. Soyolt was in the impenetrable world of arbitrary detention without charge or trial somewhere in China for the next six months while his wife and three children remained powerless here in Ulaanbaatar. He was allowed one phone call back in January, and he reported that Chinese officials had told him that if he made a fuss or alerted any foreign media, things would get worse.

The imminent Olympic Games in Beijing seems to be both a blessing and a curse for Chinese dissidents: Attempts by the Chinese government to silence them during the buildup to the Olympics has increased, but for the lucky dissidents who get noticed by the international community — a community currently paying extra-close attention to China and its human rights record — the imminence of the Olympic Games can help their cause.

Mr. Och at UNHCR told me to secure a letter of support for Tumen Ulzii from Freedom to Write at PEN in New York, and that a decision should come in the next week — something he would tell me for three months. Afterward, Tumen Ulzii and I went to get a beer. Tumen loves that I like beer. It was midafternoon, but around here people drink beer at lunch — at least the demographic I work with (read: middle-aged male writers).

“Bayarlalaa, minii okhin,” he says. Thank you, my daughter. “Sain okhin,” he says. Good girl.

Visiting with friends and family

Tumen Ulzii is extremely intelligent, but there are some things he says that boggle me. He can understand lesbianism, but not male homosexuality, and he wants to know why it exists, and how the sex happens. He thinks Hitler’s fine, since he wasn’t as bad as Stalin. He likes President Bush, purely because Bush is the president of the United States.

He does have a few good friends here. Uchida is a gentle Japanese man and a great friend of Tumen Ulzii’s. I met with both men several times at the pub around the corner from where I live. Uchida, who studied in Inner Mongolia, showed me cell phone pictures of his four-month-old baby — the baby and her mother live in Japan. When I wrote up a bio of Tumen Ulzii to forward to PEN’s Freedom to Write program, the men checked it over, with Uchida translating, while I dug into fried meat and rice. Though they are both in their 40s, they looked and sounded like school buddies hunched over a cheat sheet, casual and affectionate. Afterward, I told them I needed to go and clean my floor. They told me they would like me to stay and drink beer with them instead.

“Do tomorrow,” Uchida said.

“What do tomorrow?” I asked, and at the same time, one man mopped with an invisible mop and the other swept with an invisible broom.

Tumen Ulzii had Tuya and me over for a real Inner Mongolian dinner at his modest and bare but immaculately clean apartment, which was on the worst side of town, near the black market. To begin, he gave me a bowl of milky tea with some kind of grain cereal at the bottom. This was suutetsai, a dish nomadic Mongolians have at every meal, which consists of green tea, milk, and salt. He then surprised me by thumbing off pieces of meat from the boiled sheep leg on the table and dropping them one by one into the bowl, something he kept doing throughout the meal. It wasn’t half bad, once I expanded my mindset to one that included garnishing something like crunchy Cream of Wheat with mutton.

The second time I visited Tumen Ulzii at his home, I came by myself during the February holiday of tsagaan sar (“white moon” or “white month”). He had invited me weeks beforehand to be present on the first day of his wife and daughter’s 10-day visit. He and his daughter Ona, a delicate university student speaking very good English, picked me up in a taxi (which in Ulaanbaatar is usually a beat-up stick-shift car driven by a regular guy who could use a thousand or two tugriks). We stopped for groceries; he wanted to get beer for me and he wanted Ona to have one too, like me, something which she does not usually drink and which I tried to stop drinking.

On the way up the stairs, Tumen Ulzii took us one floor too far, then couldn’t figure out why his key didn’t work, and Ona gave him grief for it in universally understandable tones. That night Tumen Ulzii came alive, bickering with Ona, their voices singing in Mongolian and Chinese across the kitchen. Tumen Ulzii is immensely proud of his daughter; she tested into the top 10 percent of university students in China. I took videos of them singing traditional Inner Mongolian songs and smiled at his wife, a quiet geography teacher a few years older than Tumen Ulzii. I felt guilty for knowing what was done to her at the border the last time she visited her husband, trying not to imagine it now that I had seen her tired face.

An official refugee, at last

Spring 2008 … not spring by the standards of my home in California — it snowed last week — but sunny enough for sunglasses as I waited for Tumen Ulzii in front of the State Department Store. He approached in a long black coat and shades that made him look like a spy in a big-budget movie. He smelled my cheeks, the customary Mongolian greeting, and as we walked away from the throngs, he said, “Min! United Nations, okay!” and put his thumb up. I whooped and called Och, who confirmed the news. Tumen Ulzii had become an official refugee, eligible for resettlement. The letter Larry Siems at PEN Freedom to Write in New York sent expressing concern about Tumen Ulzii had been crucial to the decision.

To celebrate, Tumen Ulzii took me to a Korean restaurant. He laid several strips of fatty meat (Mongolian meat always comes this way) on the griddle set up at our table. My Mongolian was better than it was six months ago when we first met, but we still did a fair amount of the gesturing. He raised his beer, pronouncing me an Inner Mongolian daughter.

Resettlement, yes. But where?

Uchida comes and goes from Japan every couple of months, always with new pictures of his child to show Tumen Ulzii. Their friendship thrives despite distance, so when Tumen Ulzii resettles, there is no doubt they’ll remain in touch. Meanwhile, Tumen Ulzii’s keen to know which presidential candidates are leading in my country, and overjoyed that Obama is dark-skinned. He now wonders where I think the best place to resettle would be. America? He mimes an injection into his arm, then, reading from a book, puts his arm high into the air: “Hospitals and university fees are high in America.”

Resettlement can be a long and difficult process. Canada or Europe, we hope. He is very concerned that Ona go to a good university. He loves dogs, but can’t have one here — somewhere he can have a dog. Tumen Ulzii insists that when I visit Hohhot next month I stay with his wife.

“Sain okhin,” he says, kissing the top of my head. Good girl.

In The Fray Contributor